I suppose that it was all a normal state for many of us, especially if we only had the dimmest of memories of prewar life. Perhaps we were lucky in not having anything to compare that present life with.
I remember asking my elder sister, who was the font of all knowledge and wisdom in my eyes, whether there were still wireless news bulletins in times of peace. "Oh yes" she said, "when ships sink and things like that" - so not so different from wartime bulletins. She also told me told me that on the wireless in peace-time you could hear a man telling you what the weather tomorrow was going to be like. This seemed to me to be as much like an impossible miracle as the appearance of a banana or an orange which I thought I could remember but wasn't quite sure.
I was just six when my older brother went off to war in June 1942. A few months later, after training and embarkation leave, he was shipped off to goodness knows where. Complete silence ensued. It was then that I first saw my mother cry, as she stood in the kitchen - it was six weeks since she had had any news of him. Relief when we learned that he was in Tunisia and for the next two and a half years we knew pretty precisely where he was at any time due to an ingenious coding system in his letters which he had agreed with my father before his departure. North Africa, Sicily and then all the way up the Italian peninsula. I can still see my father decoding one particular letter in the spring of 1944: M-O-N-T-E-C-A-S-S-I-N-O. There was deep worry about him, I could sense that, and this always came to a head when there was a knock on the front door and we saw it was a telegraph boy.. Then a flood of relief when the telegram proved to be something innocuous.
By the time I started to take a close interest in the progress of the war it was all starting to get a bit exciting and encouraging. D-Day and then, a few months later, the papers started to publish, every day, the number of miles we were from Berlin, counting down, 150, 100, 90..... Interrupted for a day or two when some of the camps were liberated and the papers were full of the horrors of Belsen. My parents tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the paper from me on that first day, under an easy chair. But finally the wonderful day when I was in our back garden and saw our neighbour, whose husband had been marooned on Malta for the last four years, holding out the Evening Mail through the fence to my mother and saying "Freda, it's all over..." The image still brings a tear to my eye.
What they went through, our parents, and how they protected us from an appalling world. I only started to appreciate it and think about it when I had children of my own. Our troubles of today are absolutely nothing compared with what they endured when the world, and everything they held dear, had collapsed into chaos and cruelty.
I remember asking my elder sister, who was the font of all knowledge and wisdom in my eyes, whether there were still wireless news bulletins in times of peace. "Oh yes" she said, "when ships sink and things like that" - so not so different from wartime bulletins. She also told me told me that on the wireless in peace-time you could hear a man telling you what the weather tomorrow was going to be like. This seemed to me to be as much like an impossible miracle as the appearance of a banana or an orange which I thought I could remember but wasn't quite sure.
I was just six when my older brother went off to war in June 1942. A few months later, after training and embarkation leave, he was shipped off to goodness knows where. Complete silence ensued. It was then that I first saw my mother cry, as she stood in the kitchen - it was six weeks since she had had any news of him. Relief when we learned that he was in Tunisia and for the next two and a half years we knew pretty precisely where he was at any time due to an ingenious coding system in his letters which he had agreed with my father before his departure. North Africa, Sicily and then all the way up the Italian peninsula. I can still see my father decoding one particular letter in the spring of 1944: M-O-N-T-E-C-A-S-S-I-N-O. There was deep worry about him, I could sense that, and this always came to a head when there was a knock on the front door and we saw it was a telegraph boy.. Then a flood of relief when the telegram proved to be something innocuous.
By the time I started to take a close interest in the progress of the war it was all starting to get a bit exciting and encouraging. D-Day and then, a few months later, the papers started to publish, every day, the number of miles we were from Berlin, counting down, 150, 100, 90..... Interrupted for a day or two when some of the camps were liberated and the papers were full of the horrors of Belsen. My parents tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the paper from me on that first day, under an easy chair. But finally the wonderful day when I was in our back garden and saw our neighbour, whose husband had been marooned on Malta for the last four years, holding out the Evening Mail through the fence to my mother and saying "Freda, it's all over..." The image still brings a tear to my eye.
What they went through, our parents, and how they protected us from an appalling world. I only started to appreciate it and think about it when I had children of my own. Our troubles of today are absolutely nothing compared with what they endured when the world, and everything they held dear, had collapsed into chaos and cruelty.
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