Photo Albums of the War

February 2000 in a house clearance shop on the Shepherd’s Bush Road an old biscuit tin caught my eye. . A dull wet day good only for such activity and hot tea in steamy local cafe when I came upon a biscuit tin, very large 1940’s sitting on top of two photo albums. In the box was a diary, a crisp notebook with only a dozen pages filled.
I collect tin boxes and this one was particularly lovely. It was placed on top of two photo albums. I soon realised it was connected to the books and that there not just a storey to be told but a riddle. It was at first glance about a young woman during WW II as told by her photo memories and hand written connotations in two albums. So sitting amongst the debris and left over remnants of lives in dusty light I explored the albums. Here was the photo storey of a young middle class girl’s life in the air force and a storey that held such hope, fear and disappointment of that generation.

This personal and parallel record yet at the same time a very public experience in Cornwall during WW II that reflected a larger macrocosm of the times. Hers was a generation born between wars to be cannon fodder for the next. Their coming of age was embedded in the conflict as a larger world history was being played out a personal one paralleled it.
In this photo essay were clues to a story almost lost but by chance found. A mystery, which has been, pieced back together with fragments of a diary of many years later adding a poignant postscript. Her life as a woman had opportunities never before given young women at that age. She left home, mixed with people from other social classes and from all over the Commonwealth, especially young men.
She was stationed in Cornwall at a communication centre where other young men from the Commonwealth were also stationed. Later being re stationed in Berkshire down the road from home. She had a romance with Norm a young Canadian from Ottawa. But they never married even though he continued to keep in touch sending photos after the war of skiing in the Laurentians. What happened to break her heart all those years later? The answers lie between the photos and beyond through clues left in the pictures and unspoken dialogues in between the protagonists. For this is a storey of the hope and verve of youth that no matter what happens
It was not a great storey. Heroic only in her ability to carry and cope with what life threw at her as so many did then. But in its ordinariness was history, not just a personal storey that was being thrown away and that no one wanted any more. The voices of that generation like field flowers having escaped the mower that so many others fell to are now ending their lives and their stories in small albums, notebooks and stories are being thrown way as not important, more junk, no value in our minimalists lives.
As a daughter of two veterans of that conflict I was aware of how much it implanted itself on their lives. Both my mother and father were stationed over seas. My mother in London and my father a D Day dodger in sunny Italy, each in their own way paid a price for their individual war effort. My father every November had his week of nightmares and cries in the night along with lingering malaria outbursts. My mother’s more subtle but equally toxic.
I have found out so far that Phillipa Ward lived in a village in the Hebden valley called Turville. Her friend lived in Fingst. Phillipa sketched the countryside waiting, during the war to become 18 and join up. Finally she could in the Air Force in 1942and somebody; maybe mother gave her a camera, which she used to document her life and her experiences. The second album was partial post war with friend’s marriages taking people all over the Commonwealth as well as other people’s babies. But it suddenly ended. She had become a civil servant.
I have managed to research her birth certificate and her parent’s marriage certificate but my further endeavours stopped for a year while I returned to Canada to sort out my parent’s failing health and illnesses. I know she married not the lovely Norm but someone who broke her heart.
At present I am in the process of trying to find her marriage certificate and will write to the Ottawa Journal to see if anyone knows of Norm. This photo album will not be thrown out. It is for all its personal details a part of all our histories about a conflict that touched a generation so profoundly when they were so young, a conflict that changed the world so much and at such a sacrifice.
My parent’s are still alive but they too cried over the album. They recognised so much of their own hope and youth and disappointment contained within.But the album is important for the future generations to use as a means to understand what the Second World War did to that generation.

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