We used to go down to Paignton on a steam train, glorious! All my friends had some sort of wartime souvenir in the garage or garden from live ammo to gas masks, no one seem to get too hung up about it. Granny had her Anderson shelter in the veg patch. Grandfather served in the trenches in WW1 while later served in Lancs in the second. Oh, and I remember the cars and vans which seemed such luxury to us then but were in fact such basic things in reality, all through the eyes of a child.
We lived in the country so we didn't see any of the devastion wrought on the cities but I did get to see some of the shattered men, I remember a cousin getting married and the vicar holding the good book in a steel claw and reading it in braille with the other, apparently someone had chucked a grenade into a slit trench and he had flung himself on it to save the others. The odd thing about it all was I never ever heard any war stories, the men were all a bit reticent to talk about it, to us kids anyway.
The main thing was that things were quieter, we had no TV, we had to go to town to get the accumulater charged up, there was no traffic and the pace of life was softer, gentler somehow and for some reason summers were longer and the sky bluer!
--------------------
Gammon. And proud!
|