Aftermath of the War

PEGGY:
It wasn’t that people forgot those people that weren’t coming back. Because there was a wee girl sitting on her bed and she was sobbing her heart out. And we were saying, “But it’s a happy time”. And I’d forgotten. And she said, “Yes, but my brother’s not coming back”. And that brought that back. My dad wasn’t coming back, and he was the best, best man. I saw him off at the station, and I’ll never forget. I was crying, and he said “Don’t worry, kitten. If the ship goes down, I’ll come up on the bloody funnel”. And I always remember that, you know? Little things like that, and that was 60 yrs ago. More than that.

We kept in touch with a lot of the people. Friends. We wanted to see what had happened to them.

Those that were very close to you, you kept in touch with until ... Unfortunately some of them are gone now. And some of them are like ourselves, old pensioners. But they went back to Royal Arthur, which was Butlins Holiday camp in Skegness. A lot of people remember that, because that’s where they joined the Navy. And they said that they wish they hadn’t gone back. They went back for memories that were gone.

GEORGE:
I was lucky, in that after the war, you don’t regain normality immediately, but I went back to college. And there was a lot of ex-service personnel there, and we related to one another. It was a great time to roll down slowly and get back to normality, even though you were absolutely mad. And there were people there who had been in the services who were absolutely mad. We got an allowance. And one man I remember well, he got an allowance and went down the town. He’d get paralytic drunk and lie in the gutter until all his money was gone. Then he would come back. He was a great piano player, and when he was sober he was fantastic. Even when he was drunk he was a great player, but you had to hold him, put your hands on his back, to keep him from falling off. He was a gifted, gifted man. But the war had turned him, he never ever finished the course. It’s a pity. There were lots of people who I met that never ever came back.

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