AT HOME AND AWAY

This story was gathered, written and submitted to the BBC Peoples War by Stephen O'Hagan

Edward may have seen a lot of places he had never wanted to see when he was stationed in the army’s educational corps; the unbearable north of Africa, Mussolini’s Italy or the charred shell of a recently liberated Vienna straight from ‘The Third Man.’ But, at least, he got out of the war without being shot, blasted or fearing for his life.
At home though, his wife, Kathleen and their first son, Stephen, had taken refuge in Scarborough with her parents-in-law. This deep into the countryside, they thought, they would be completely beyond the interest of the Luftwaffe. The armed forces had barely a presence in the area; no military installations bar a single wireless station only half a mile from the house in which they were staying.
The station was positioned at the top of a hill and was circled by wired fencing and a small security group; a security group Kathleen knew from wheeling her son around the station’s perimeter each day. Every night could be heard the intense, almost comical, humming of German homing missiles swarming over the country. “But it’s when the humming stops that your number is up,” Kathleen knew. Sometimes you could only sleep at night if the insistent noise was buzzing in your ear.
In an upstairs room, with a two-year-old dozing by her side, Kathleen studied the ‘doodlebugs’ as they whizzed by; guessing at their destinations, hoping they’d miss.
The sound was constant, as one passed it was replaced by another, until silence. In the middle of the night… it could only mean that your number was up.
She held her breath, sweated, trembled in her bed. Then there was a blast and a blaze swept across the window. Kathleen lay motionless for a minute. There was nothing. She got out of bed and went to the window. Not half a mile from where she was watching, the aftermath of the strike raged on. It had hit just below the wireless station, scorching the moors over which she had so often struggled with a child-bearing pram. Downstairs, her parents-in-law remained asleep.
That moment when Kathleen thought her number was up didn’t stay with her. It doesn’t haunt her every day. Outside the moment itself, her confrontation with the war has had little lasting effect. Edward, on the other hand, in the educational corps, never being wounded and never seeing his life flash before his eyes, wears the deeper scars of war. The beating sun of his North African tour has left him with solar keratosis; a skin abrasion, which, without regular treatment and appropriate dressing can become cancerous.

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