Is saying sorry ever easy?

Not for my son, for whom learning to say this word in the right way, and at the right time, sometimes seems to be his life’s work.

Felix is admirable in so many ways. He is an honourable young man. He is true to his word. He is clever, intuitive, thoughtful and reflective. Most important, he is kind.

He is also young and brash, and full of that assured arrogance which comes of having lived just seven years without notable experience of failure.

At least five times a day, Sorry becomes a regrettable necessity.

About six months ago, I walked into the sitting room for tidy up time. I surveyed the room, and pronounced to both Maddie and Felix that their playthings must be cleared.

Maddie, wisely, jumped to it. She immediately set about putting Barbies in the Barbie box and posting dolls house furniture into its corresponding room.

Conversely, Felix’s face crumpled like a prune, and he protested in a whining monotone that he was tired, it was the end of the day, life was hard.

I selected my Julie Andrews matronly nanny expression. And then I began.

“Felix”, I said. “Mummy works hard all day, every day from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’lock at night, looking after you, making sure you have everything for school, cooking your dinner, reading you stories. Whose job is it to tidy up this room?”

Felix didn’t even pause for thought. He simply exploded, the next rumble in an ongoing thunderstorm: “Yours!”

A sharp intake of breath from Maddie, and, yes, I would swear the dog also. These were near-suicidal tactics that Felix was adopting. His style of combat was bold, but totally unconsidered.

However, all was not lost. I am nothing if not fair.

“Felix, I want you to think extremely carefully about what you say next. Whose job is it to tidy up this room?”

His eyes rose to look at the ceiling as he riffled through the filing cabinets of his mind. He gave the best enactment of Giving This Matter Due Consideration that I have seen in a long time. Kennedy did not give more thought to sending men to the moon than my son gave to my query.

And then his  eyes returned to mine. It is always good to double check, his firmness of glance informed me, and he said: “No-I’m quite sure: it’s yours.”

If you have ever been a child who had a mother, you will know the seismic activity that can result from such a proclamation.

And it did. Time-shift, if you will,  to two minutes later, when a tearful boy, sufficiently humbled, was regretting his former certainty.

Reparation was inevitable. Maddie was dispatched upstairs to relax and watch television, while Felix finished the arduous tidying-up process himself, being frogmarched from task to task with boot-camp severity.

The Sorry came, of course, and whenever it does, it is so genuine that it breaks my heart. Because, while its root does include regret for his actions, Felix is really just very eager to be friends again.

When he was a little boy, Phil hated conflict. Telling him off was occasionally a necessity, and he was devastated when it happened. So his mother would draw a line underneath: she would say: “We’ll forget about it now.”

And before long, a little Phil would take this closure upon himself. He would pipe up, at the end of a reprimand: “Shall we forget about it now?”

Which they always, duly, did.

It has become an important phrase for our family. After sorry, after a little reparation, it’s important to put an end to it, to know that whatever happened is behind us now, and we look forward.

Today marks the end of a long and dramatic twentieth century story of looking backwards: of reparation.

Because on this day the last payment in a monstrous debt, odious to both debtor and collector, was paid.

Most of us have read of it in the news today: but let’s just peer down the 20th century, across one world war, to the inglorious end of another.

1919: and Germany had lost the War To End All Wars. An exhausted, shell-shocked world was reeling at the extent of the devastation it had caused. And someone must pay.

Winner took all, as usual. The winners in this case were France, Britain, the United States,  Italy and Japan. Italy’s Vittorio Orlando took himself out of the Paris talks over a territorial dispute: and Japan left to make matters simpler.

The remaining heads of state devised a treaty which stated Germany carried the guilt for causing this cataclysmic war.

That old Weimar Republic was stripped of 13 per cent of its land, and ordered to pay 269 billion gold marks.

Such crippling, uncompromising reparation is thought to have fuelled the rise of Adolf Hitler.

A twist of historical fate at the close of the second world war put the debt on hold. How can Germany say sorry, the argument went, if there are two Germanys?

Neither East nor West Germany could be expected to foot the bill on its own.

And so, like so much in that most chilly of wars, the debt froze, waiting for the Sleeping Beauty to awake.

No-one thought the wall would ever come down. They thought they had waved goodbye, once and for all, to a unified Germany: and reparation was just a piece of historical trivia used to amuse and entertain.

Where were you when the sleeping beauty woke? I watched the television on November 9th 1989, incredulous but jubilant. We were in changing times, we thought, and crowds cheered as the Berlin Wall crashed down.

It had been a cruel instrument of division.

This was an apology of the most graphic kind. It was not an apology of words. It did not need them. It was a powerful symbol of retraction. We don’t believe in this any more, it said. Let’s vanquish it.

And as Beauty awoke, her debts arose to greet her. The payments began once more.

Today, the final installment of £60 million was paid.  France and her allies of the time have been repaid, and France has long since been rebuilt.

Forgetting about it should never be an option, when so much beloved young life was lost, and for what?

But a line has been drawn. Time to look to the future.