Slip Sliding Away.
Two years ago, my grandfather died just a few months after his 90th birthday. Born in 1922, he belonged to ‘the wartime generation’, doing his bit for King and Country in London during the Blitz, then in South Africa, and finally in Egypt, where he was captured by Italian troops and sent to a PoW camp in Silesia, East Germany, his home for the last three years of the conflict. When the Soviet Army began its unstoppable encroachment towards Berlin, the camp where my granddad had been incarcerated was abandoned and he and his fellow captives were forced to embark upon an agonising march to the West in the depths of winter – a terrible ordeal that doesn’t exactly square with the adventures of plucky Brits with their reassuring hierarchy of stereotypes familiar from PoW escape movies. Of course, he never spoke of this. Why would he want to recall it? Like the rest of his generation, he returned home in need of a quite life, creating the genteel suburban idyll that proved so stifling to his children, making them especially receptive to the immense social changes sparked by the outbreak of rock ‘n’ roll barely a decade after the end of the conflict they’d been born into. But the long shadow cast by that conflict remained a potent cultural presence.
The launch of IPC’s ‘Battle’ comic, one of many on the newsstands that kept the war fresh in the minds of those born after it, came in 1975, exactly thirty years on from VE Day; but in 1975, that was an anniversary as near to then as the Miners’ Strike is to now. That’s how close it was. In 1975, anyone over, say, thirty-five had a clear memory of the war, whether as front-line troop, land-girl, evacuee or simply crouched in the Anderson Shelter. If you weren’t around in the early-to-mid-70s, it’s hard to emphasise how prescient the Second World War remained. ‘Dad’s Army’ was still being produced then, rather than having attained the reverential status of a classic archive show kept alive via the life support system of repeat screenings; ‘The World at War’, ITV’s landmark documentary series, had only just finished its original run; Sunday afternoons in three-channel TV land were a khaki sanctuary for 50s movies that relived episodes from the war, as were early Saturday evenings; many back gardens in my neighbourhood still had air-raid shelters, most of which had been converted to little sheds; and there even remained the odd empty spaces awaiting houses to be built on them that had been vacant since a bomb had wiped away the previous residence three decades before.
Every little boy of the time, of which I was one, owned at least one set of Airfix model soldiers, each figure cast in a solitary colour (you were supposed to paint them, but I never knew anybody who did); every little boy of the time still played a game called ‘War’, a game that left Britain’s playgrounds echoing with the sound of machine-gun fire, or the best that little boys could approximate; a reprint series of wartime British newspapers launched in the mid-70s saw me purchase the first issue and cut out a ‘wanted’ picture of Hitler in order to stick it on a wall at the end of my street; the street in question was – in the mind of me and my pals – behind enemy lines. I suppose we saw ourselves as the French Resistance. And, even if we were impervious to the glut of British war comics on display at our local paper shop, the eye-catching American intruder into our reading habits, Marvel, also had its own wartime hero in the cigar-chomping Sgt Nick Fury.
The fact that people my age (46) and older still refer to WWII as simply ‘The War’ is slowly becoming a far greater indication of one’s age than any telltale physical signs. A teenager might respond to a reference to ‘The War’ with the question – ‘Which War?’ There’s been quite a few since 1945, after all, some of which teenagers today have lived through, albeit from a safe distance. Their contact with the Second World War is akin to my contact with the Crimean War or the Battle of Waterloo, something that exists only in the pages of history books or in television documentaries, too far back in time to feel as real as Iraq or Afghanistan.
The death of my grandfather severed my last personal physical link with the war; all my grandparents are gone now. My parents were both born in 1943 and have no memory of the turmoil the stork delivered them into, only the relics of its aftermath – the bombsites, the stray bits of shrapnel unearthed on those sites, the medals on the mantelpiece alongside the sepia-tinged photograph of the uncle who never came home. When they are gone, their childhood recollections of battle-scarred urban landscapes go with them. When I am gone, the sense of the war still being within touching distance goes with me. It is already receding into history rather than living memory as all the old soldiers quietly bow out and leave behind the stories that will have to suffice when the untold stories are lost forever.
I do not belong to the 60s generation that mocked the war with satire and fought to liberate themselves from the conformist legacy of short back-and-sides and the demob suit; my generation were that generation’s children, and the rapport we shared with their parents perhaps gave us a different perspective on the war, just as exposure to Jimmy Young spinning old Doris Day records when staying at our grandparents’ homes gave us a different perspective on the recent past altogether. There remains an emotional connection within my generation to the wartime experience that comes from the holiday periods we spent with our grandparents as young children, treated to snippets of anecdotes concerning the exotic locations visited when on active service or tales of the blackout and rationing on the home front. We absorbed these stories and felt their emotions acutely because we loved our grandparents; and that has never left us. The generations that came after us have been denied that and thus the connection that kept the war as virtual present tense is broken.
So, whenever there’s a five in the year and the end of the Second World War is marked with another solemn service in a far-flung foreign field as well as beneath the cenotaph, attended by the diminishing number of servicemen and women who were actually there, my generation shares something special with them, perhaps aware that what we share is slowly slipping away from the present day as inexorably as the generation who engaged in the conflict. We not only mourn those lost during the war – we mourn our own loss. Getting older can sometimes have unforeseen consequences that transcend all the ones we anticipated.
Petunia Winegum
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June 29, 2014 at 8:19 am -
You describe my 70’s childhood in the UK to a ‘t’! Charley’s War, Johnny Red, Darkie, The General Must Die, The Sarge….(former “Battle Action” Readers will know what I mean).
As a teenager I moved to Germany and married a German. She -The Bestes Frau In The Whole Wide World- now lives here with me in the UK again and still every new person we meet, every fresh British acquaintance, of whatever age, feels the need to talk about the WAR with her.
WHY?!?! Why would they (Brits) imagine my wife has any interest or desire to talk about something that happened a generation before her birth? Yet even now in 2014, after the complusory exchanges concerning the weather, the next topic of conversation is THE WAR. I often feel like screaming “FOR FUCKS SAKE GET OVER IT!”. Why would a modern German give a monkey’s about your Granddad being at Dunkirk?The Bestes Frau was born in 1968 and knows of the historical event that was the ‘2.Weltkrieg’ of course- her parents having been ethnically cleansed from Prussia but that is all the war is to her- an event that happened before her time . She is aware of Hitler and his crimes but feels no connection, no personal guilt etc The crimes of her parents and grandparents are not hers.
I recall my wife’s SHOCK as a proud Brit Old Lady once told her that her son was currently in Germany in the RAF! (Initials that mean something totally different to a modern day German.)
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June 29, 2014 at 11:21 am -
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June 29, 2014 at 11:27 am -
FT, we have spoken about this before over on Leg’s blog. The ‘bestes’ is a made up english adjective NOT a german declension! The only german word in ‘The Bestes Frau In The Whole Wide World’ is ‘Frau’-to show that The Bestes Wife is German !
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June 29, 2014 at 11:30 am -
The Blocked Dwarf on November 9, 2013 at 9:22 pm said:
Think we’re talking at cross purposes. My german grammar is ropey but i know the adjective endings, thanks. Like i said “bestes” is a made up english adjective not a wrongly declined german one. Surely you’ve noticed me use it, here and elsewhere, before?
Furor Teutonicus on November 9, 2013 at 9:25 pm said:
Aha. O.K.
Can not say I HAVE noticed it before, but now you have explained the reasoning…
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June 29, 2014 at 4:14 pm -
Nice to see that pedantry still occupies a special nook in a dusty corner of the Raccoon Arms…
For the record ‘bestes’ is a badly declined German adjective and a non-standard English one – so the worst of both – but it doesn’t matter, because it is what you call your beloved, so whose business is it, other than yours?
I am sure she is as fabulous as you evidently feel she is… and don’t worry that a series of British people feel an irresistible urge to discuss ‘The War’ with her – it is their problem.I went to the Cenotaph today, to commemorate Armed Forces Day – as an ex-serviceman and grandson of a WW1 veteran this year is especially poignant. I have my Grandfather’s War Diary. He survived the first day of the Battle of the Somme, Palestine and (if this wasn’t enough) another dose of France. He had an interesting time and was moved to put pen to paper after entering into correspondence with the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy. As a consequence, my Grandfather wrote a detailed account of some of his adventures, which showed a grim determination to survive. Luck was with him – others close to him were less than fortunate.
Every year, I take his medals, his standard WW1 gongs and the Military Medal he won in Palestine to the Cenotaph, they just stay in my pocket – a physical link to the past.
What a pity, by contrast, that the ‘ex-servicemen’ who are currently occupying the rented house opposite our current address are not the stoical types that my Grandfather was. They seek to justify their moronic, drunken, loutish behaviour by being ‘professional victims’ – of course, they cannot work now they have (allegedly) been to a war zone and been shot at, oh no no! We, the taxpayer will be forced to cater for them, keep a roof over their heads, pay them benefits and cause our hard working police to turn up periodically and lock one or two of them up.
Whatever they may (or may not) have done for our country we, the taxpayers are certainly picking up the tab now and suffering from the fall out that seems to follow a certain class of citizen wherever they chance to pitch up.
Disgraceful. We are off!!
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June 29, 2014 at 8:32 am -
A superb piece, all the more poignant for it being the 100th anniversary of the immediate events which triggered the First World War this week. It is a tremendous perspective, and is something with which I can fully understand. I am 51, and my father fought in the Second World War at a very young man indeed, and is still with us. I wrote upon this on this very site here
https://annaraccoon.com/2014/06/06/d-day-reflections/
Indeed, the culture of Airfix models and playing “war” was very much part of growing up for some, maybe most. I became an expert model maker, particularly fond of German machinery of war – Panzer mark IV and Tiger tanks, the complex 88mm anti aircraft gun and half track, or E-boats…they seemed so much more glamourous (maybe wrong word) than the functional Allied machines.
And who remembers comics like The Victor, with endless stories of brave Tommies sticking it to the Jerry, or Killer Kennedy, torpedo boat commander, as well as Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track, who ran to long distance victory on a diet of fish and chips, and not a hint of five a day” in sight?
Meanwhile, there seemed a surfeit of war films on a Sunday afternoon, when Sunday was still a rather dreary day of rest. If I have to watch “Sink the Bismark” again I might be ill…
The real point is that the shock and horror and drama and connection with war, and an ultimate struggle for survival, echoed down into the next generation, and in my case I have no doubt it had a psychological effect in terms of some sort of repressed guilt and lack of ambition for worldly success that I sometimes attribute to my parents wartime experiences which make the cut and thrust of office politics, for example, somehow petty and irrelevant. That echo is gradually fading now. My niece, aged 18, knew little of D-Day; whereas I could construct a German gun emplacement from Airfix in the blink of an afternoon, replete with camouflage with the aid of Umbro paint….
And now the values and ethics of a generation that sacrificed and achieved so much is, as you say, slip sliding away. Some would say even betrayed…
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June 29, 2014 at 8:38 am -
And “Commando” books. “Jerry” always shouted “Achtung” and the poor “Japs” always shouted “Aaaaaiiii” as they died in a hail of Allied bullets. No very PC, I grant you…
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June 29, 2014 at 9:09 am -
You should have been a fly on the wall when The Bestes Frau In The Whole Wide World tried to watch an episode of “‘Allo ‘Allo” with me. I think you would have appreciated the total look of bewilderment and loss of comprehension on my dear Frau’s face. To this day she can’t understand why her Lord and Master (Me!) was laughing hysterically the whole way through and why the phrase ‘it vos very lonely on ze Russian Front’ became a catch phrase in our house…
“and this makes you laugh?!?!” [sic-the Bestes Frau]
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June 29, 2014 at 9:54 am -
Ok, I’m generalising here a bit, but there’s the perception that Germans have no sense of humour. It isn’t they have none, but it’s different, here we have a tradition of farce, with the obligatory “Whoops there go my trousers”. We still have it today only the delivery is a bit more restrained. The Germans (At least to me) seem to be obsessed with farts and shit. I always had this image in my head of if ever there was a severe outbreak of explosive diarrhea, those staffing the wards would be rolling around on the floor with tears in their eyes laughing their socks off.
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June 29, 2014 at 10:55 am -
Its partly,or perhaps largely, a language thing. German may be the ‘language of poets and thinkers’ but it’s fabled precision makes puns and word plays extremely difficult. You can be bitingly satirical in German but it requires, by law I think, a degree in Germanistik or Twainen wordsmithing skills (Heine is still revered for his savage satirical poems even today).
A VERY funny German joke to illustrate: ” Bismarck was once asked by an Foreign diplomat’s wife “why does German have so many words that mean the same thing? For example ‘gewiss’ and ‘sicher’ both mean ‘certain’ or ‘sure’.” Bismarck replied along the lines that each German word has it’s precise unique meaning and to illustrate said “My dear, if a fire were to break out now in this room , it would be my duty as a man to escort you to a ‘sicher’ (safe) place but on no account to a ‘gewiss’ place (ie a ‘certain place’ or the toilet).
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June 29, 2014 at 12:55 pm -
The sum total of my foreign language expertise (besides the examples you provide, Gildas) learnt from the “Commando” books, were: Jerry shouting ‘Donner und Blitzen’ after being attacked; and, the Japanese officer, samurai in hand launching an attack, bellowing ‘Banzai’.
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June 29, 2014 at 1:03 pm -
Yep! Spot on Joe – that’s brought back memories!
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June 29, 2014 at 8:47 am -
A very good article, which applies to many of us rather older than 46 i.e. the generation whose grandparents fought in the First World War, and fathers in the Second; as mine did. No-one of either generation spoke of his experiences, and I only discovered by the chance find of a War Office letter to his mother that my father had been wounded.
I do belong to the 60’s generation, and I can assure you that most of the satire was aimed at the Great War, mostly thanks to Joan Littlewood and a lot of books and articles (such as a whole series in the Sunday Time Colour section, which I still have) published in 1964 on the 50th anniversary.
Those of us who were schoolboys in the rationed 1950’s had a healthy respect for the Second War warriors, because, as I say, they were our reticent parents.
During the 60’s, I may have had rather long hair, but demob clothes were my rig-out of choice. These items of supposedly “cheap and cheerful” clothing i.e. suits, overcoats and shirts, were of a quality, style and durability that today would not be bettered in Savile Row. I still wear Utility shirts made in 1944.
The passage of the two Wars into history and mythology, is, as you point out, also the passage of those of us connected to both into history.
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June 29, 2014 at 9:40 am -
It applies to the women as well. I was brought up by a generation of women who only knew how to make do and mend – hand knitted jumpers that had holes in them were routinely unpicked and re-knitted for a smaller relative; the cheapest cuts of meat were padded out with vegetables and slow cooked to melt in the mouth wonderment. They instilled habits in me that exist to this day. I still use vinegar or cheap bleach as a cleaning material, and gaze in wonder at the racks and racks of ‘specialist’ and expensive cleaning materials on the supermarket shelves. It’s only my low opinion of the print media that has persuaded me to buy loo paper…my bottom has standards, you know.
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June 29, 2014 at 12:04 pm -
I remember sometime around the time of the three day week, that there was a desperate shortage of toilet paper. A rumour had spread around causing panic buying. I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to select pictures of my favourite politicians in the newspapers, and cut them into neat rectangles for use in the toilet. Happy days.
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June 29, 2014 at 12:12 pm -
“I still use vinegar or cheap bleach as a cleaning material, and gaze in wonder at the racks and racks of ‘specialist’ and expensive cleaning materials”-Anna
Only cos you habite dans le South Of France and are used to gallic, ‘douce’, svelte water which nature has lovingly filtered peau a peau through extinct volcanoes. Trust me, if you lived in Norfolk, where the water is harder than The Times crossword or even MWT’s ego, you’d be using SHOUTY BANG like the rest of us!
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June 29, 2014 at 1:40 pm -
Exercising the old memory cells I don’t think the water we got from our well was very hard. It might have been because of our proximity to the broads and the fact I left there as a young man over 50 years ago well before the ‘damn water company’ got in on the act and said wells were bad especially private ones.
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June 29, 2014 at 3:39 pm
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June 29, 2014 at 9:54 am -
“Like the rest of his generation, he returned home in need of a quite life, creating the genteel suburban idyll that proved so stifling to his children, making them especially receptive to the immense social changes sparked by the outbreak of rock ‘n’ roll barely a decade after the end of the conflict they’d been born into. But the long shadow cast by that conflict remained a potent cultural presence.”
Very well put
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June 29, 2014 at 2:19 pm -
Thanks. I always think the war was the midwife to the Swinging 60s.
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June 29, 2014 at 11:16 am -
Wonderfully evocative to me Petunia, thanks. I have living memories of the war, spending it as I did in East Anglia on the Great Ouse banks where I was able to watch the war first hand through the wondering eyes of a child. Born in 1936 I was 9 years old at the finish of the European war in 1945. My earliest memory was of MTB’s at Harwich where my father was installing diesel generating plant, after that we was based near King’s Lynn. So daily in the playground I and my pals would crane our necks back to stare at the assortment of aircraft droning ever so slowly into the East. I realise now that each new aircraft resulted from technical progress. Whitney and Stirling bombers were replaced by Halifax’s then Lancaster’s , Liberators, and Flying Fortress’s . We had no information other than the tales from the older girls and women who got to know these things via local dances about types and names, also from members of the R.A.F. home on leave. We became so astute that we could name an aircraft by the engine note. Rolls Royce merlin Spitfire, Rolls Royce Griffin Typhoon, Multiple merlin’s Halifax or Lancaster, Double Merlin Mosquito ( how we loved that sound at low level) P45 Mustang ( merlin) Lockheed Lightning twin boom twin engine , Thunderbolt ( radial pratt and whitney I think) Dakota, maid of all work ,radials again droning across the sky day and night.
Then one day, all day it seemed the sky was one vast airial armada of planes. Medium to large, many towing gliders ( a glider pilot and I became pals many years late) many towing two gliders incredibly. This event had been preceded a few days before by a military convoy of mostly small vehicles such as jeeps, bren gun carriers and others , which all of us waved and cheered at, clearly this preparation was for operation Market Garden on which years later the film “A bridge too far” was made, the allied invasion of Holland.
One event clearly etched on my childish brain was that one evening, after my Mother and I had been listening on the accumulator radio to Alvar Liddell , who was introduced by the bomp, bomp,bomp bomb ( is it the morse key note for V )signalling one of the messages sent to CEO operatives in occupied Europe , we heard a sound unlike any we had heard before. It was dark outside, we had the blackout blinds installed, so Mum turned off the lights and we went out of the house. This harsh staccato growl increased in intensity and we saw its source by reason of a blue glow. it was a small aircraft, the growl was its pulse jet, the blue glow the jet emission. It cleared our house by about 50 feet and growled onward to crash and explode we were told, near the March marshalling years. That event really frightened my Mother, to me it was an exciting change from listening to Alvar Liddell’s sepulchral tones.
So when I want to relive those moments, as I do occasionally, I am lucky to have a copy of the film “Hope and Glory” which invokes my childhood pretty exactly.
I was spared to do National Service and have lived a cheerful life, but nothing again will ever have those uniquely British moments , the essence of which was captured in such TV as Dad’s Army and others. But then Dad’s Army was scripted by one of the combatants I believe.-
June 29, 2014 at 3:49 pm -
I don’t want to carp, jonseer (being of 1939 vintage) but Spitfires could be powered by either Rolls Royce Merlin OR Griffon, the Typhoon had the Napier Sabre, the Mustang was the P-51, the Lightning the P-38. The P-47 Thunderbolt did indeed have the Pratt and Whitney R-2800 radial. What a nerd you will think and you’ll be right but my enthusiasm for aviation history remains – even after a full career flying.
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June 29, 2014 at 7:02 pm -
My thanks for sharing your expertise Ancient+Tattered Airman. One of the old or bold ,but not old and bold of whom there are few I understand.
I feel quite lonely with my recollections, it is a breath of fresh air blowing into my dusty mind to have someone with knowledge to put the correct numbers to my childish recollections, thanks. Another episode was one sunny afternoon we were leaving our school and happened to hear an engine cough and falter. Looking up we saw a parachute with a figure dangling, below which was a Thunderbolt diving. The plane crashed into an orchard near the school. There was no explosion nor a fire. Hindsight and reading Chester Wilmot’s struggle for Europe caused me to think ,as it was a long range bomber escort fighter, that it had simply run out of gas. A Dad’s Army guard was assembled to guard the wreckage . This did not prevent some of the local lovelies showing off some weeks later rings fashioned out of the canopy perspex created by the local Italian P.O.W.s who worked in the fields.-
June 29, 2014 at 7:24 pm -
One elderly lady with dementia that I was called to visit (because the social worker had complained that she had vermin hanging up above her ‘ancient cooker’) (she had a nice plump pheasant waiting til it was ready to eat above her Aga…..!) told me how she came to live in this isolated spot.
She had married the son of the local squire, and because he was only given three days off from (I think it was the army)in which to marry there had been no honeymoon; his parents, not approving of the marriage to a ‘village girl’ had made for an unpleasant atmosphere in the house so they had gone off for a walk over his land and were about two miles from the house making for a small empty cottage when they saw a plane diving to the ground. Realising that it was crashing they ran like the wind and arrived as it started to go up in flames – her ‘one day’ husband ran to pull the pilot out – and was shot dead for his trouble. The German plane burst into flames consuming the pilot a few minutes later.
His parents had given her the cottage they were heading for to live in, and she had neither accepted, nor wanted, anything else. Not a thing had changed in that cottage, not a thing, it was a complete time warp (which had naturally totally shocked the 20 something social worker) and when the estate was broken up and sold, the fields surrounding the cottage were put in trust for perpetuity, since she would neither buy them (didn’t have the money) nor accept them as a gift (didn’t want their charity) but his parents were sensitive enough to ensure that her view remained unchanged – and there she had lived, with an occasional visit from game-keepers who did her shopping, for ever more.
Extraordinary story. Extraordinary lady. And an extraordinary fight to keep social services off her back until she died about four years later – aged 90 something. A new postman had reported her apparently.-
June 30, 2014 at 1:00 pm -
To really upset any of the Health and welfare officials who might have a peek at Anna’s blog I can relate a tale to indispose those of a nervous disposition, although there are no flashing images.
There was a tale told by one gnarled old boy to us lads, when the subject of game came up which in those days did not necessarily concern Man United, that his Dad would hang pheasants in the woodshed after plucking until they had maggots, he would then cook them & claimed the maggots made great gravy, reasoning they were after all part of the pheasant. And with a hare or rabbit, only when he could pull clumps of fur off the carcase was it ready for the pot, and I guess after skinning cooked in a likewise fashion.
Indigestion pills were a rarity back then.
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June 29, 2014 at 8:27 pm -
I can see where you’re coming from re ‘Hope and Glory’ – that true story is very much like a scene in the movie, from what I remember.
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June 29, 2014 at 8:33 pm -
Sorry, Anna – that comment was meant as a response to jonseer!
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June 29, 2014 at 1:05 pm -
Thanks Pet.
As a ’43 vintage, playing in the ’40’s in air raid shelters and pill boxes and smashing open gas mask canisters was our life.
Apparently we had austerity, too, but we didn’t know any different as kids. If you’ve never had something, there’s no deprivation.
This may explain our lack of empathy with those victims of society ‘suffering’ todays so called austerity.
Applies to the NHS, too, we didn’t have one.
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June 29, 2014 at 1:11 pm -
Very evocative, many thanks.
Those born just in the UK just after WWII have, in many ways, lived a fortunate life that our parents & grandparents could only envy.
Many males born at the end of the 19C had to fight in both world wars; nearly all those born in the late 1940s early ’50s escaped fighting in any conflict.
[One puzzling aspect though Pertunia: http://www.sheknows.com/baby-names/name/petunia states “The name Petunia is a baby girl name.”; whilst your article states “Every little boy of the time, of which I was one …..” ]
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June 29, 2014 at 1:37 pm -
Petunia Winegum was the nickname Peter ‘Jason King’ Wyngarde was known by in theatrical circles back in the day. I just liked the vaguely seedy flamboyance of it!
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June 29, 2014 at 3:46 pm -
Department S! Jason King! The Persuaders!
Where is my cravat!!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l357Ia7UUk
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June 29, 2014 at 2:26 pm -
Very interesting article. Here in the US any reference to “Remember the war!” would elicit blank looks as the US is perpetually at war with someone, and yet has not had a war on its own territory since the Civil War, the outcomes of which still massively affect US politics.
My own parents were born in the 1920’s and WWII was the defining event of their youth and young adulthood, which shaped every aspect of their lives. As a child (born 1951) I certainly remember playing in bomb shelters, and even as a student living in digs where there was a large crack in the wall from the bomb that had destroyed the house next door, a night that some neighbours could still describe as if it was yesterday, even though this was 1970. When I was a child there was STILL food rationing in the early 1950’s and somewhere I still have my old ration book. Children today are infinitely better nourished when they were when I was young when apples, bananas, and oranges were the only fruits we ever saw apart from seasonal strawberries and blackberries. Although it seemed normal at the time, the children of the 1950s tended to be rather weedy, as evidenced by photos from the time.
However the British experience of World War II and its after effects lasting for generations does make one wonder whether this is a universal phenomenon that affects the culture of many countries. For example Bosnians and Serbs may take several generations to work through the effects of their civil wars, and a whole generation of Haitians may one day remember growing up in tent villages as the norm, in the aftermath of the earthquake in 2010 that killed over 200, ooo people including many of their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.
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June 29, 2014 at 3:32 pm -
How interesting to see the war from a 40 something’s perspective. As a child in the 50’s and 60’s the remnants of war were all around us – the air raid siren that was used to summon the fire brigade, the grassy hollows in fields from mishits and most memorably a grey line of ageing warships in the Lynher estuary near Plymouth, almost forgotten, but not quite discarded. And whenever my relations would meet on uneasy social occasions such as Christmas, there was a neverending stream of stories of a lifetime – my aunt and mother in London during the blitz and hearing the eerie fearful silence of the doodlebugs, my uncle in conveys in North Africa and my father having a right old time in the fleshpots of Mombassa and Bombay repairing stricken ships. Never did I hear a word about suffering, death or injury – or fear. The war was alien to my life. It could have been centuries ago, despite the omnipresence of its ghost. It was common for children in school to be stationed with their families in Malta, Gib or the Far East. This seemed exotic, but I did note that they seemed a bit handicapped in schoolwork.
My generation was thoroughly sick of the war and all it entailed – though we doubted we would be able or willing to emulate the Douglas Baders in courage and unswerving subservience to duty. In fact ‘duty’ became the bogey word – though somehow or other its stigmata on conscience remained. The Airfix and toy soldiers were of course a given, but I think the romanticising – or is it the sentimentalising?era(in the extremities) must have begun in the 70s . I had no idea of the Russian sacrifice until seeing the World at War – prior to that, because of the Cold War, the Russians were barely mentioned. I did know of the Holocaust because I read Rudolf Vrba’s memoir I cannot Forgive in the 60s – and there was the Diary of Ann Frank – but Holocaust veneration only really began when the various drama docs and films were released in the 80s. I now think there is an unhealthy obsession with the annual D-Day remembrance fests and the whole thing has somehow become more morbidly fetishistic (along with the glamourization of Nazi kitsch).
Studying in Germany in the 70s amid the heat of student radical politics there was a very different atmosphere – that was about the counterparts of my parents generation failing to take responsibility for fascism. The students of the Baader Meinhof generation were fanatically opposed to the state and capitalism but at the same time enjoyed a level of material comfort from the post-war boom far in excess of visiting Brits. Reading the bittersweet short stories of Heinrich Boell on what it was like in the devastation of post-war Germany gave me a real insight into the day to day realities of loss, shame and real hardship. It made me ashamed of the continual backward looking triumphalism and stereotyping that Brits still gorged on – the new generations that is, not the ones who had suffered.
And really, that insufferable ignorant self-satisfied sense of innate moral superiority remains – and in fact has got worse, if anything. Sorry to mention it, but I just cannot imagine the grotesque spectacle of ‘Savilisation’ taking root in Germany today, because lessons were learnt there – the hard way.
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June 29, 2014 at 3:54 pm -
Yes, I was surprised when I first went to Germany in 1968 at the age of 17 to perfect my German just how much better the average standard of living seemed to be than in the UK. In fact the home I stayed in (in a suburban street in Gottingen) was probably nicer than the average home in the US today, almost 50 years later.
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June 29, 2014 at 4:26 pm -
Yes – the beneficiaries of post war Germany seemed to live in a consumerist bubble – edged with neurosis as if sensing an underlying void – wanting to blame their forefathers for the Nazi apocalypse – but not wanting to own up to their human connection. When I visited East Germany briefly in the late 70s I actually found people much more relaxed and companionable. It was as if they had inherited the legacy through being burdened with communism and somehow were in a process of realtime expiation and penance which enlivened the spirit. Thus I’ve always been slightly puzzled by the accusations that the Ossies had never come to terms with the war because they had been ‘brainwashed’ to blame it on capitalism. It seemed to me to be the reverse of the truth – but I guess the media message was dominated by the West Germans who feared for their own standard of living once -re-unification had taken place – and indeed they did suffer years of downgrading for one reason or another. It’s so long since I’ve been to Germany that I have no real conception of the zeitgeist now .
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June 29, 2014 at 6:16 pm -
“It made me ashamed of the continual backward looking triumphalism and stereotyping that Brits still gorged on – the new generations that is, not the ones who had suffered”
It did and does me too! I compare the attitude of the REMEMBER COVENTRY whiners with the attitude of my Prussian Father-in-Law, who recounts dismantling allied incendiary bombs for the petrol. His dad was active in the anti-nazi resistance and one of his early memories is of people turning up at their house in Koenigsberg at night in socks (to avoid the sound of leather soles hitting the pavement). Father-in-law fled from the Russians,the Kettenhunde (German Military Police) and the Gestapo all of whom would have hung him or forced him to become a Werewolf.
Anyways he recounts that during the allied bombings he and most other people in the shelters were mentally cheering on the bombers! Far from viewing the Fire Bombings as the war crime they would now be classed as, far from speaking of ‘genocide’ when talking about the thousand-the tens if not hundreds of thousands- of women and kids blown apart by Butcher Harris’ Jolly Boys, he talks of the bombings being their liberation. When I question the horrific price of that liberation, he sadly says ‘ we bombed English cities too’ -which is true but how many died in Coventry -700? 800? That number of deaths would have counted as ‘getting off very lightly’ on any given night in any of the German cities razed to the ground by the allied bombers.
Father in Law doesn’t even bare a grudge against the allied fighter pilots who strafed him and his fellow refugees! His opinion on his own suffering and that of his nation “it had to be. The allies had to do it.” and he is eternally grateful for them having done it. I have found that to be a very common attitude among the Germans of his generation, those who can actually remember what life under Hitler was like.
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June 29, 2014 at 4:41 pm -
I think it is underappreciated what effects World War II has had on the British character. (Of course we quickly forget that without late-entry military aid from the US, Britain would not have won the war at all, never mind the part played by the Russkis, even if Churchill kept his reputation as a winning manager.)
This comes to mind at the time of the World Cup in Brazil. England, of course, won the World Cup rather flukily in 1966 in a replay of England vs Germany Normandy 1944, thanks to home town refereeing and cooking and the exploits of straight-shooting Sir Bobby Charlton and the aerial skills of his brother Jack.
Ever since, Britons have felt a sense of entitlement and that if only given fair play and an objective referee, they could pull off the same feat again under a tropical sun overseas. In the current World Cup, it is almost impossible for English journalists and fans to accept the fact that they finished bottom of their group because they were, in fact, the worst team in the group. Yet, having lived away from England for many, may years, and having been immersed in Hispanic culture for several years, this was absolutely no surprise to me at all, because I know that Brits, like ripe bananas, tend not to travel well, especially in bunches and especially in hot weather they go rotten, and that dagos are a cunning bunch of tricksters who never went to public schools that are private.
This sense of triumphalism following success in 1918, 1944, and 1966 has given the nation a false sense of invulnerability, and now that the Nazis are actually winning with hardly any opposition, we seem to be right back to Dunkerque.
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June 29, 2014 at 5:46 pm -
Well said Jonathan – the Brits are blind to the fact there’s more than one type of fascism – even as it envelops us all.
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June 30, 2014 at 10:29 am -
Jonathan, you conflate an English football victory with an alleged British sense of entitlement, the converse of the way in which Andy Murray magically becomes British when winning at tennis, but Scottish when he loses. The Scots notice this lazy interchangability of nationalities… and they dinnae like it (Disclosure: born in Scotland to English parents.)
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June 29, 2014 at 4:58 pm -
Thank you for this. It is evocative indeed. I was an evacuated 12 year-old schoolboy when WWII started and a soldier a month after it ended in August 1945. Two of my older childhood friends were killed, one in Normandy three weeks after the invasion and the other (the only child of his aged parents) on his first operational flight over Germany. My boss in the London insurance company I joined at age 16 was herself killed by a flying bomb and I narrowly escaped death myself from another one which fell in Cannon Street opposite the station during the morning rush hour (the moments immediately after the engine of a V1 cut out were quite tense if you could not see it and judge roughly where it was going to fall).
I recall the sense of togetherness and patriotism which we felt at that time, exemplified I think in Dad’s Army. We schoolboys used to volunteer to work on small Devon farms during the summer holidays, helping to bring in the harvest, and at 16 I was a firewatcher for my company in London (which meant spending nights and weekends on company premises ready to tackle incendiary bombs if necessary). Despite all the social and economic advances that we enjoy now compared with those years, I do not feel the same way about today’s society.
Reading about the isolation in which Mr Cameron now finds himself makes me so sad when I remember how rapturously our troops were received when they liberated Brussels.
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June 29, 2014 at 5:58 pm -
re your last paragraph, Griffin, some respect for the sacrifices of American and Empire troops wouldn’t go amiss in some quarters.
No matter how long ago it was.
Funny thing that, Empire.
I recall marching around the school playground with banners to celebrate Empire Day in the ’40’s.-
June 30, 2014 at 6:15 am -
No indeed!
Nor would it go amiss if Hollywood and the Septics generally were to remember that we had been fighting for three years before they turned up – late as usual, nor that they were actually outnumbered by us on D-Day. I could go on about this, but I was born in 1952 so it’s really just history isn’t it.
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June 29, 2014 at 6:13 pm -
Having my 4-9 years of childhood during the war , my most vivid war memories are of bombers thrumming overhead to bomb Liverpool docks. The searchlights probing the sky to try to find them and the ack ack guns on The Mersey Marshes banging away to try to shoot them down. We sheltered under the table with a metal plate on top and caged sides. I don’ t remember feeling frightened. I was in wonder at the Milky Way on clear nights due to the pitch blackness of the blackout. Mum kept chickens as even eggs were on ration. When they stopped laying they were boiled with lots of barley and onions…delicious, plus thick chicken soup. Cod liver oil and malt each morning before school. The worst memories were having lessons interrupted by air raid warnings and having to cram into underground shelters that smelled of creosote and earthy damp. Many of us got primary TB in these close conditions but it went no further in most cases.
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June 29, 2014 at 8:52 pm -
It’s a generation thing. As the last of the WWII fighters start to leave the stage and the last of the civilians who experienced it for real prepare to follow, they leave their own offspring as the closest custodians of their experiences, albeit second-hand and much abbreviated.
As the only son of one such fighter, and enveloped in the playground war-games of the 1950s and 60s, I was given some feeling by him of what it was like to be there, but a heavily-edited version, so my ability to pass on those reports is already compromised by that process. The next generation still is so much more distant, relying on re-processed reports on something which is treated as ‘history’ in their age-group, often not even knowing the original fighter himself. The event itself is not a part of their lives, so questions about it rarely surface. But ’twas ever thus.Those returning from the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean, the Boer and the Somme will all have faced the same situation. Within a couple of generations, the link was lost, the event slipped out of relevance, while the world moved on to the next crisis. That does not diminish the service given by those brave souls but it’s a simple fact of life – memory only lasts for the human lifespan, everything else is reportage and when life moves as quickly as it does today, then who can or will take the time to look backward ?
We are fortunate now to have many forms of technology to capture and retain the first-hand experiences of those present at major events, and increasingly of the event itself, which will make future research both easier and more comprehensive. But that’s only if anyone feels the need to research it – I have never felt the urge to research the Crimean or Boer wars, so what’s to say that 22nd or 23rd century folk will want to do that for WWII ?
World War II happened, it had consequences with which we shall all live for many generations, but those later generations may never know, or seek to know, how or why it happened, what it was like or how it has affected their lives – they are where they are, that’s what matters now.
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June 30, 2014 at 4:37 am -
“the genteel suburban idyll ” – post war is not what is would be now.
There was austerity ( remember Utility clothes), bread and other food was rationed , war was still available in malaya etc etc, progress and inovation was stifled by the unions and such like – remember ealy closing day. Most ‘progress’ was for women – ie ‘labour saving ‘devices – washing machines and the like, better health care. Men still rode bicycles and handed over their wage packet.. And so forth.
Our school had bits of roof missing (incendiaries) . It was about 1958 -60 or so when things were perking up.-
June 30, 2014 at 5:39 am -
You mean they don’t have early closing day and everything shut on Sundays anymore? Early closing was quite humane, because it meant that shop assistants or small business owners got a half day off in exchange for working on Saturday mornings. Of course it was also a way of not paying them overtime if they were employees.
In An English Journey J.B. Priestley moaned about the traditional English Sunday and the lack of entertainment. I don’t have the book now, but I seem to remember mention of a Sunday evening tea of cold tongue, bread and butter, and of course tea. Yummy! The book is well worth a read.
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June 30, 2014 at 12:53 pm -
Oh, yes – the winter of 1947 was perhaps the lowest ebb of the austerity era, pushing the country and the government to the brink of collapse. But the point I was trying to make was that the genteel suburban idyll was the dream of many returning troops, and, as you say, that eventually came into being for real during the MacMillan era, by which time the children of the wartime generation were ready for rock ‘n’ roll.
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June 30, 2014 at 8:41 am -
In my childhood we had a hot midday meal and a cold meal nearly always in the evening. We all came home for dinner. Housewives ran the home and that was it. They did not charge off to school if some teacher threw the chalk board duster at their little darling. I never heard the F word till Tynan used it on TV. If you were mouthy to teacher you were caned across the front of your hand. Only sailors had tattoos. Mum and dad could have nooky while the children were at Sunday School. The secret reason you were packed off there! No parents in our circle went to sunday services but the kids had to be at Sunday school. All young boys wore short pants and socks with a flash on then. Those belts with an S fasten and flannel shirts in winter with a mum knitted pullover. The housewife’s hands were rarely idol. Knitting gloves, socks scarfs, crochet, plain sewing. Making cushion covers out of old coats or creating rag rugs. Cutting down old sheets into pillow cases. Jam making or preserving fruits. Cleaning the grate and setting the fire. Polishing the lino and hands and knees or stoning the front doorstep or cardinal polishing the bricks under the front window. The ones who didn’t make this public worship of housework were counted sluts in our street. Glad I was just a bit too late for stoning and blackleading and cardinal polishing!
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June 30, 2014 at 8:24 pm -
Yes, I remember nearly all of what you are describing and had reached the same conclusion about Sunday school. I remember one day when Sunday school was cancelled for some reason I forget and my sister and I returned home early. My father seemed rather annoyed, although my mother didn’t seem at all bothered and sent Dad and we children (the word “kids” was never used then) for a walk where we gathered some conkers and sweet chestnuts, so it must have been autumn.
Jam making indeed! Here in Florida I make the best breakfast marmalade you have ever had out of red ruby grapefruit and people think I am crazy, but it is good and sets me up for the day. Must make some today.
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June 30, 2014 at 9:29 am -
I haven’t been so vividly reminded of the post war world I was born to since I arrived in Aachen in 1999. I couldn’t understand why on earth the place was so evocative for me until I realised that for most of my adult life I had only lived in two neutral countries and the faint, fading scars of war, like the odd gaps in the city, hastily filled in in the 50s, were a kind of inverse homecoming.
Whenever kids played, somebody always had to be “Jerry” in my childhood. My family were considered a little avant garde for buying a Volkswagen Variant – a Japanese car would have been considered an abomination. People really thought that way.
Funny, I actually have no memory of an England that does “not” have an Anderson shelter for a shed in the back garden…they say “the past is another country, they do things differently there” and it is true.
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August 5, 2014 at 2:12 am -
Yes. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to me but it did: lots of young people today don’t know sh*t about WW2 or WW1, or the cold war.
The things I grew up believing and loving mean little to my nephews neices and children. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.
Mostly it is the lessons we learnt about things like freedom. We saw a very stark contrast between one kind of world, where you could say what you thought – and another kind, dominated by secret police forces listening to people’s phone conversations because someone had denounced them – someone who had been offended or hurt in some way and decided to get revenge by talking to the KGB/stasi etc
We knew how important our freedoms were, how precious our way of life was. Now we have a generation who take it for granted and take teenagerish pleasure in knocking it down. And for some reason we’re letting them do it
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