29th December 1940
My grandfather was a gentle and dapper man who died from cancer at the age of 65. In memory, he is sat in his fireside chair sorting through the stamp collection he had built up over the years, or he is in his garden tending chrysanthemums, or working in his greenhouse, or weeding the rows of vegetables. He was quiet, very softly spoken, it would have been hard to imagine he had ever raised his voice. He would have been uneasy in our current age of nostalgia for he never told stories from his past. Even his years in the National Fire Service in London during the Second World War were never recalled.
The only evidence that the quiet man had seen at firsthand the devastation of the London Blitz was a battered fire helmet that lay in the spare room. Even my grandmother, a more talkative person, recalled only the odd reminiscence, there was a memory that my grandfather had once worn the same clothes for three weeks because the bombing and ensuing fires had meant there was no time to change, and there was a story that once he had gone up a ladder and had gone in through a fourth floor window of a burning building, only for the building to collapse and him to come out of the ground floor door.
Post-traumatic stress disorder was not something talked about in such times. There was an awareness of “shell shock” from the First World War, but after the Second World War there must have been hardly a person in the country who had not been profoundly affected. There was an attitude that one should get up, dust oneself down, and get on with things.
Perhaps just trying to keep going is all one can do, but the memories can still be haunting, troubling, decades later. Tonight marks the eighty-first anniversary of the worst night of the Blitz.
At the time of the fiftieth anniversary of those days, I talked with a man who had been an air raid precaution warden in the city of Belfast at that time. He described the fear and the flames and the disappearance of one of his colleagues after an explosion, “We found his body in the end, it was on the roof of a house – two streets away.” How does one begin to cope with such horrors?
What thoughts went through my grandfather’s mind as he stuck stamps into albums, as he stood in silence and pondered his garden?
Whatever memories there will be of our times, they will be considerably easier than those of this night in 1940.
I wonder if that bombing is England’s trauma akin to the famine for Ireland. A trauma that passes through generations, even for those who haven’t your connection.
It’s certainly something pushed at the moment since Brexit on the telly.
It is interesting to read details of public opinion at the time. Morale was very low, the underground stations were a horrible experience, and there was not a great sense of camaraderie.
Churchill’s skill was in his ability to create a myth, to present a grimly dark time as a triumphant moment.
Johnson is an ass who thinks he can offer similar words of inspiration.
My Grandfather was in a heavy rescue during the London Blitz and after, as well as being on the front line during WW1. He never spoke about any of it. My father says that he remembers his Dad coming home and punching the wall after spending three days at the site of a primary school that had been hit by a V2 during a school day. He never went back, I hope no one ever has to endure what his generation did.
Nothing in the current life of the nation is comparable with those times. I hate the word “heroes” being used of highly-paid sportsmen who do what they are paid to do at no risk to themselves.
I suppose it’s because generally we have had a comfortable life, largely without the stresses and strains of simply surviving, that the word hero has been so downgraded.
I suppose so.
It galls me, though, to hear a Premier League football player described in terms similar to those used of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. (I knew a man who dealt with IEDs in Afghanistan, running around Old Trafford in shirt and shorts is not quite as demanding!)