My Mother's Wars

My father, Eric Florey, landed in Normandy several days after D-Day. What follows is largely my mother's story, both in terms of detail and experience.
My father was a dispatch rider and was missing for several days in Normandy. What he went through I can only poorly imagine. He returned to England and was taken to a makeshift psychiatric hospital in Southport, several hundred miles away from his home in Gillingham, Kent.
This , in a sense, is where my mother's war began. Although she experienced the heavy bombings of Chatham and Gillingham, which were situated on the bombing run from Germany to London, in addition to Chatham Dockyard as a target, her own personal struggle really began after after my father's return.
Her visit to the hospital in Southport was traumatic. It was overcrowded with many men in various states of psychological and emotional breakdown. She had one young child and was pregnant with my second sister.
My father worked occasionally during the late 1940's and early 1950's, but the majority of his life was spent as a voluntary, or sometimes certified patient, in what were then termed mental hospitals.
My mother had four children to bring up. We lived in a new council house built in 1953 on a new and pleasant estate in Gillingham. The Red Cross were supportive during the immediate post-war years, but there was little help from any other source.
My mother received National Assistance which was insufficient, so she supplemented her income with a variety of cleaning jobs. Her greatest and real fear was that she would be caught for earning more than the small amount allowed each week before reduction of National assistance income.
She supported my father for 35 years between 1944 and 1979 when he died in Oakwood hospital in Maidstone, Kent aged 65. She had visited him regularly in several hospitals which cost money and exacted an emotional price. Her love and loyalty never fundamentally wavered. She briefly considered divorce, but couldn't bring herself to do it.
So my mother's war,in a way, still continues. She is now 86. Her life was changed,as was my father's, irredeemably. Her strength, loyaly and determination has seen her through.
It is important to remember, accept and support those who don't die in war, as well as those who do, and to remember that psychological damage is a legitimate injury, and that for some of those who didn't actually fight, the war never ended in 1945.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.