VE Day – Reflections on my Mother’s War…

Born in 1920, my mother was 19 when she joined the army for World War 2. Yet she had already had two phases in her life, growing up as one of six with a gamekeeper father who was bitter about lost opportunities following the First World War. His brother had emigrated to America before the war but couldn’t take my grandfather with him because he was under 16 and the family was put out at losing one potential bread-winner, let alone two. The brother said my Grandfather should enlist and that he would send money so that my Grandfather could join him after the war – which he did send the money, but the family spent it and my Grandfather had to become a gamekeeper instead of a teacher – his first choice, since with so many men killed and women having to support their parents, teaching became reserved for young women. This made my Grandfather bitter and he wouldn’t allow his children to do homework and advance themselves – instead, saying that they would go into domestic service at 14 – and that is what happened. It is sad that whatever social mobility and reduction in entitlement was brought about by WW 1, passed my Grandfather by in his disillusionment. Meanwhile, his brother in America put his upbringing on a farm to a different use, becoming a teacher at an agricultural college and marrying a Southern belle and setting his family on an upwardly mobile trajectory.

So before the Second World War, my mother had had five years of domestic service, first as a maid and then after being taken at 16, to Morocco (or maybe Tunisia, she wasn’t sure) to assist in looking after a baby during a family holiday, she became a children’s nanny. My Mother had many stories about her time in domestic service but they are not for “the day that’s in it” VE Day – suffice to say that domestic service was hard to leave and the war offered the one way which could not be frowned upon and so she joined up.

My mother quite quickly rose to be a Sergeant in the signaling corps, which for women, meant manning telephone switchboards and after working at a number of bases, she went to live and work on the island of Portland near Weymouth, where, in vast underground bunkers, the invasion was being planned. Living on Portland was as near to the front line as most women got, the island was a target for bombers and even fighters, given its strategic role and its nearness to German-occupied France. My mother told tales of having to grab her landladies children and dive for cover when a German fighter strafed the back gardens of their street and how a German bomber crashed in the High Street. The last time I took my mother to Weymouth before she died, on a beautiful sunny day with the beach thronged with holidaymakers, she pointed out a hotel where a German bomber, fleeing home after unsuccessfully reaching its mission target, loosed its bombs killing an entire wedding party that had just arrived at the station for the wedding feast. I grew up seeing my mother in tears on Remembrance Sunday, thinking of the six men, any one of whom she might have married, as well as all the others who never returned from other front lines, yet the poignancy of all that loss, and the realization of just how recent the war was, only a few years before I was born, was never stronger for me than on that sunny day in Weymouth.

There were other stories from my mother’s war, the bullying Sergeants that she took on, the girls she had to protect from untoward attention, and the spy that she prevented from stealing secrets and who was caught and shot a few weeks later. Latterly, my mother decided not to repeat these stories about the war anymore. In the run-up to VE Day, I have heard other veterans say the opposite, they had never talked about it until recently but now felt that “it doesn’t matter anymore” and so have told their tales. Everybody had their own way of dealing with their memories in the aftermath of this traumatic but highly stimulating time. I often thought that our generation, the baby-boomers, had nothing remotely to compare with the traumas of that war – until now, when once again, literally the whole world has been turned upside down. Yet still, it is nothing like WW 2, unless you are on the front-line in a hospital, for most of us, this momentous time is about “staying at home”. 

It would be immoral to envy my parent’s generation for their experience of the war and yet the choices were clear for them, to literally fight a great evil – the warlike references to fighting the Covid 19 virus are a mere shadow of such events – yet the choices we face are far more complex – too complex for many people, including many of the politicians who are supposed to steer our ships. Many people just want it all to be over and things to get back to the “old” normal. I hope, in a positive way, that there is no return to rampant consumerism, unchecked, unconsidered planet-destroying growth. I hope it is the death of capitalism as we have known it – and I am very afraid that there is the possibility of the opposite happening – of those on the right using the crisis to entrench their power and mismanagement ever more firmly. So let us today, remember the sacrifices made in that other war, and the joy of it’s ending but let us not forget the long road to recovery that followed, not always fairly, and not shy away from the difficult choices that face us in our testing times.