Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford’s 2021 novel, begins with a V-2 attack upon a department store in London – inspired by the real-life bombing of a Woolworths in 1944. Five young lives are destroyed in an instant, which the author describes in a few short pages: we have seen only the briefest glimpse of spindly-kneed Alec and twins Jo and Val before their deaths.
“What has gone is not just the children’s present existence,” he observes. “It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured … ?” Spufford attempts that greater reckoning by writing the lives they might have lived: in many regards inconsequential, full of hopes and disappointments and failures, petty school cruelties, love, dodgy dealings, violence and mental illness – yet inherently valuable. What might have seemed a literary conceit reminds us, devastatingly, what is lost when a life is cut short.
More than 550 children have died since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year: more than one a day. Hundreds more have been injured. Mourning the dead, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has written not only of the destruction, but of what might have been: “Many of them could have become famous scholars, artists, sports champions, contributing to Ukraine’s history.”
On Tuesday, more names were added to the horrifying tally, with the attack on a pizza restaurant in a busy shopping area in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, in Donetsk. Four of the 10 confirmed deaths were children; at least 56 people were injured, some critically. In Ukraine, Russian forces have not only shown a ruthless disregard for civilians, but frequently appear to have targeted them – as they have in other wars. The UN secretary general’s latest report on children and armed conflict names Russia among the worst violators of rights. The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner over the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, where many have been adopted.
When children are killed, the sense of something being stolen is particularly visceral and compelling. Yet so much has been lost in Ukraine, even as many away from the frontline try to live somewhat as they did before the war, and as Ukrainian culture has flourished in defiance of Russian aggression. A world of possibilities has disappeared: problems are unresearched, matches unplayed, parties unhosted, gardens untended; fish will not spawn in polluted rivers, businesses will not be established, babies never conceived as couples are separated.
Flourishing lives have been struck down or stunted, and those already struggling have lost footholds which might have seen them on to surer ground – an estimated one in four Ukrainians are at risk of severe mental health conditions because of the conflict, according to the World Health Organization. Some of these losses will be felt elsewhere. Farmland strewn with mines lies untilled: the crops that would have been grown might have sustained families far away.
The cost of reconstruction has already been estimated at $411bn. Whenever this war comes to an end, Ukraine will need support for years to come. But it is impossible to calculate what is lost when tens of millions are under assault, and so many must be mourned. How does one account for what could have been?
