Remembrance

One might say, at a stretch, that I am a survivor of WWII, as a piece of shrapnel penetrated our Anderson shelter during an air-raid in the first week of my life and parted my mother’s hair as she held me in her arms. Even though I don’t remember that or anything else that happened to me as a baby during the Second World War, I remember vividly the war’s aftermath. I grew up in the poor part of town, where the rubble of the last war wasn’t fully cleared until I was at university in the early sixties.

For years after the war the police came to school not to tell us about the dangers of going with strangers but to warn us about unexploded bombs. Our playgrounds were the neighbourhood  bomb sites, abandoned war-time Nissen huts and bombed-out buildings. When we dug our underground club houses we never really knew what we would find. My friends and I never found a bomb, although I knew of those who did. Those were the days when people still said things like, ‘He’s a man you would go over the top with,’ meaning a person so dependable that you knew he would look out for you when you were in great danger, or ‘The balloon’s going up,’ meaning that conflict was in the air.

It’s a different world now, and daily reminders of the world wars aren’t with us as they once were. Nowadays, we are again inclined to think that battlegrounds belong overseas, I suppose much as the late Victorians did, with Gordon in China and Kitchener in Omdurman, and nobody thinking that the homeland might ever become a front line.

Armistice Day is important to me because it brings to mind all the losses suffered by people through war — not just the loss of life — and the fact that war can not only happen right next door (our neighbours took a direct hit) but that even when the conflict is far removed its miasma infects nations and households whole continents away. My father returned from his war service in the Italian Campaign a very different man, my mother said. In a sense, although he lived through it, my father was lost in the war, or, at least, the man my mother had married — the man I never got to meet.