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Living In An Alien World
The past of my parents
I‘ve been reading a manuscript from my writing group that is a short biography of the immediate post war years.
The 40s and 50s are a bygone world. We are increasingly separated from a society with a more rigidly defined social strata. A world of deference and fawning towards ‘your betters,‘ including how journalists behaved towards politicians.
My parents were part of this world. And now we have only a few left. The last who bore witness to the bombs falling over London and then the V1 and V2 rockets. My mother would tell me what it was like to crouch in the family cellar each night as the bombs rained down on them. It seems inconceivable, unimaginable to us now. Although perhaps less so from this year, with all that is happening in Ukraine. Next morning you’d be up from the cellar and on your way to work. Each day the landscape would be different, changed, with more bombed out homes, shops and office blocks. Picking your route to work may have altered each day as you found a new way through the blasted and ruined cityscape.
This was no film reel or page from a history book. This was their daily life. They had no way of knowing how it would all end. We approach this time from the privlieged perspective of history. It is narrative with an ending. The final all clear siren will sound and…
