Memories....History

I’m 66 years old. That’s significant. Why? Because it means I’m of the very last generation to have direct personal memories of events during the Second World War – and that’s a big responsibility. When I and all my contemporaries have gone, taking the unrecorded memories with us, the questions won’t get answered, the emotions will fade and it will all come down to so many words in so many books – History…

My memories are fleeting snapshots. Brief to the point of being almost subliminal – like the hazy recollection of a dream, difficult to pursue, to bring into the light, or to examine.

For years I contemplated just such a dream – until, when well into my adulthood, my Mother enlightened me.

I told her once, just before she died, of my recurring dream wherein I saw many soldiers, but they were not marching proudly off to war nor were they were marching proudly and triumphantly back. They were sitting down – or even lying down; they were unshaven, dirty. Some were blood stained, some appeared to be sleeping. They were in the streets. Why?

“That’s not a dream,” my Mother said, “That happened. It was the aftermath of Dunkirk, and you saw it”

As the defeated army was brought back, the troops were placed on trains and sent inland. Where the trains came to rest, so did they. Then officers visited houses in the area to check on available accommodation, and they were billeted until the chaos subsided. That’s what my Mother told me.

Dunkirk happened in May 1940; I was born in April 1938.

Images, dreams, odours, a touch, a sound…

Like the sound of a siren and the goose bumps that immediately appear over my body, even now, whenever I hear it… the odours of the air raid shelter; the sound of community singing; the smack of the ack-ack guns; the distant hollow thump of bombs; the swaying beams of the searchlights, raking Jerry out of the dark sky.

The deadly drone of a doodlebug - will it pass over? Will the engine stop? “Please God, don’t let the engine stop!”

The rubbery smell and touch of the Mickey Mouse gas mask fitting snugly over my head, and the squeaky sound of my breath passing through the round filter on the front of it – curiously comforting – and a lot of fun!

The glow in the sky as London burned – fifty miles away to the South.

Spitfires doing victory rolls over the school playground: everybody’s cheering, waving, dancing.

The East Anglian Sky suddenly full – really full - of the dark shapes of hundreds of planes: the deafening roar. What are they doing? Where are they going? (I think it was Market Garden, but I can’t be sure).

Then one night the most terrifying sound of all – the flash and fury of a thunderstorm! “Please make the storm go away, God. I want to hear the friendly sound of the guns and the bombs and the planes!”

One day, just before Christmas, a soldier walked into the house and crept up behind my mother, who was busy with the washing. He wrapped his arms around her, causing her to let out a startled cry. It was Dad – home on a 48-hour pass, with a huge Christmas tree he’d stolen from Thetford Forest. He’d walked all the way home to Cambridge with it on his shoulder.

“You daft bugger,” Mum said, “We’ve got nothing to put on it!”

Then, at last, it was over. We had gone to war when I was a plump baby, playing in the sand of a Norfolk beach. Now I was seven years old, and in bed with measles, and it was over.

But … not quite: I was seven and had never tasted a banana – had never enjoyed an ice cream. Those simple joys, and many more, were still hidden in the uncertain future as we faced the years of hardship as a bankrupt, broken nation, and the sinister advent of the Cold War… but that’s another (hi)story….

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