12/8/2023 0 Comments Half life echoes![]() I remember Anderson air-raid shelters squeezed into back gardens, and I played with the big bolts that fixed the Morrison shelters, which were steel tables designed for families to cower beneath. ![]() In fact the war did not really touch me as a boy until the late '40s and '50s, when it came in lurid and paradoxically shadowy forms: simultaneously trivial, exciting and disturbing.ĤI remember ration books, because we used to play with those now finally redundant food stamps. The war was beginning to turn, but it was far from over.ģI am, in a sense, a war baby, but can make no claim to the suffering and the trauma of so many thousands of babies and children who, even though they were lucky enough to survive the war, had to grow up in the ruins of Europe, Russia, Africa, Japan and the Middle East. In Germany the RAF “Dam busters” attacked the Mohne and Eder dams, while the Allies were bombing Sardinia in the Mediterranean, as a feint for the invasion of Italy-actually planned for Sicily. In Warsaw the ghetto uprising was savagely crushed and thousands of Jews were killed or sent to the camps. This was “Black May”, when U boats were being sunk in the battle of the Atlantic, and the surrender of the Afrika Corps brought the Desert Campaign to an end. ![]() ![]() I will also offer some critical reflections on the part played by these acts of communal remembering and forgetting in the construction of modern British identity.ĢI was born in Aberdeen on the North-East coast of Scotland on. I am also speaking for the shared experience of a particular generation of boys and men (the masculine bias is relevant) who grew up in the years after 1945 subject to the reinterpretations and distortions of a popular culture that glorified war. 1This essay is a personal reflection on how reverberations from the Second World War have marked my childhood, and my own creative writing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |