Blitz Memories

This month I set the following exercise for Hove Writers. Write a story as told to you by a 3rd party. Could be a friend, relative, colleague, client etc, but do change the names if necessary.

Here's mine.

When my father was a boy of about eight he had to walk to and from school during the Coventry Blitz.

One day he made his way to Cramper's Field which he had to walk across to reach his street in Coundon.

A burly Air Raid Warden took his arm and escorted him across the Green telling him ‘Keep your eyes on the path son!’ My father took a sneaky peek and saw that rows of air raid victims had been laid out on either side of the Green.  He noticed a familiar sports jacket among the prone figures and realised it belonged to their neighbour, Mr Browett.

When he got home, all the windows had been blown out but half of next door was missing. His mother’s new curtains still hung at the kitchen window. miraculously undamaged.

One day my father was kept off school. He later overheard the grown ups talking and learned this was because a bomb had hit a graveyard near his school and blown bodies up into the air which were hanging from the trees and telegraph wires.

Another time he met his mother at the local Bingo hall after school and they started walking home together. As they turned into their avenue, his mother suddenly grabbed his arm and insisted they walk round the block to enter the avenue by the other end. This was quite a detour and my father remembered feeling annoyed. Within an hour they heard that an unexploded bomb had been found at the other end of their avenue and his mother’s instincts had potentially saved them in the darkness (no streetlights allowed). My father’s street had quite a lot of hits as the German bombers mistook the primary school behind his street for a factory and often dropped bombs there, which would miss their target and hit surrounding houses.

On a lighter note one house in his street had a hit which caused the piano to shoot out into the middle of the street. No one was killed as the occupants were at work, but another neighbour went out into the street after the All Clear and started playing the piano sparking an impromptu neighbourhood knees up.

Then there was the lady who was envious of the fancy new hat her neighbour had just purchased on the black market (new clothes being on ration). During one air raid, the hat was blown clean from her neighbour’s bedroom into hers directly across the road! Sadly it was too bomb-damaged to wear, though she put the remnants of it on anyway and everyone laughed, except the hat's owner, who was apparently furious.

One night my father and his parents, along with thousands of others, walked to Kenilworth, a village about six miles away to take shelter. My father said it was like watching a firework display seeing the city burning in the distance with rockets whistling before they hit, but then his father completed the Anderson Shelter in the garden and he and his parents would go there if the air raid siren sounded. A bank manager and his family across the street tried to fortify their understairs cupboard and were all killed in an air raid.

The Royal Wedding - remembered

'Rubbishing stuff!' condemned my father from the kitchen doorway, bonfire wellies still on. 'Bloody parasites, the lot of them!'
'Oh stop it' retorted my mother 'Go back to your bonfire if you don't want to watch it and take those dirty boots with you!' A gruff harrumph was followed by the back door slamming.
Such was the day punctuated at regular intervals as my little sister, mother and I gathered round the 12 inch black and white TV set, straining to take in every detail of the pageantry that was the Charles and Di wedding.

We particularly marvelled at the Emanuels' ivory puffball wedding dress which drowned Lady Diana's slight figure and almost served as 'packing material' around her in the carriage conveying her to St Paul's, and wondered how on earth she went to the loo.

 My father simply couldn't comprehend the female imperative which made such spectacles compulsory viewing, not least when he had made his views on the Royal Family clear and expected his family to tow his line on this (among other matters).

I briefly wondered what Lady Di was doing marrying such a boring old man, but all the adults seemed to agree the Royal Wedding was a Very Good Thing, the officiators were taking it scarily seriously indeed, and he was a prince after all, and she LOOKED like a princess.  So the grown ups who ruled the world surely knew what they were doing.

Years later I learned that 'loony feminists' had been furiously waving 'Don't Do It Di!' placards just out of camera shot as the carriage wended its doomed way. But the nation demanded its pageant pound of flesh and as Princess Di admitted post-divorce, the T-towels and the tea sets were already printed, so what was a girl to do?

Nevertheless, I still recall it as a marvellous day which brought the nation together, topped by Kiri Te Kanawa's soaring solo in St Paul's and the happy couple did manage to look happy. The sun even managed to shine.

Post Charles and Di, the Royals ultimately learned that it was a bad idea to value virginity and breeding above all other traits in a future daughter-in-law, Consequently Fergie and Sophie enjoyed far happier marriages for being women of the world and age-appropriate to their princely spouses. Whilst Fergie and Andrew didn't last either, at least they managed to part as friends, with no dirty laundry aired in public, and present a united parenting front, enjoying the odd family holiday together to this day.

I do often find myself wondering about a particular wedding present that Charles and Di received though, a set of new goose down feather pillows every year, and wonder how long they were sent for and when they were cancelled by that particular wedding guest. In addition were they ever misused to biff each other over the head with?

As for my father, he is no longer around to approve or disapprove of Royal weddings. However now I am old enough to hold my own views I'd rather live under a monarchy than a presidency, for all its imperfections, and in answer to the mealy-mouthed, I am sure the Royals earn the country at least as much as they cost it in tourism and other revenue. They have even sacrificed the royal yacht and the royal train, for goodness' sake!

Finally latter-day royalty is not without its challenges. I feel sorry for Kate, as having enjoyed national admiration for being a commoner whom William fell in love with and married, she is now chastised for talking with 'a plum in her mouth' and it seems she can no longer put a foot right even though she's tried everything to be the perfect Royal wife and mother, to the point of blandness, for someone who wasn't born to nobility. Sadly for her, she lacks Diana's charisma and luminescence to override every pair of tights being commented on, but maybe she will find her feet in time. Or the cute kiddiwinks will get her through. As long as she doesn't have too many of course in these environmentally-sensitive times.

'Yours ever and getting worse...!'

Last week I spent a day going through a lifetime's correspondence as I needed to streamline my possessions following a recent house move (well at least get the lid to fit back on the box!) and was struck by how many letters I used to both write and receive.
Inevitably I found myself re-reading some of them.
Boys whose hearts I broke. Boys who broke my heart. Friends I have lost touch with. Friends and family who have died.

It was very poignant and at times I hardly recognised the 'Laura King' to whom they were all writing.
Curiously I came upon letters and cards from people I could have sworn never put pen to paper when I knew them, including my late ex Don, who had some hilarious sign-offs in true lovable rogue persona such as  'Yours ever and getting worse...!' But for all his bad boy ways, he was solicitor-strict about pagination and dating each page and card and roundly told me off in one missive for not always numbering and dating each page and making sure I had my address at the top (though his changed more frequently than mine). He had also sent me part of a novel he once started which I had duly edited and returned with some constructive comments. Then there were long email exchanges on philosophy and literature (remember the days when we all used to print our emails out as if we didn't trust them to still be sitting in our inbox when we opened it again...?) with a failed mature student I held a brief unrequited level of fondness for, but who fancied my uninterested feminist friend more (even reading 'The Woman's Room' to impress her), so that I found myself in a triangle unrequited romance. Eventually they allowed him no further extensions to turn in a non-rebellious thesis quoting Jonathan Swift at length and he left Oxford to be packed off overseas by his family where degree passes were less rated as a means of attaining a good career as long as you were well spoken. It worked and he is apparently now back in Blighty earning a decent living not compromising too many principles.

The letters from my late English teacher Mrs C were particularly hard to read as she took early retirement and then almost immediately found herself diagnosed with terminal cancer, just as she and her husband were building their dream home to enjoy in retirement. She died two days after her 53rd birthday. She was pretty well the only adult who could command my respect and really make me sit up and take notice growing up, aside from V, the wonderful woman and artist who was like a second mother to me, a large sheaf of whose letters and cards of distinctive 'dear heart' spiky handwriting I also tidied. Thankfully V is still very much around, albeit having had the most horrendous five years recently owing to a personal trauma.

I seemed to have the largest number of letters from my sister's best friend from school, a lovely girl called M who wrote incredibly long and newsy missives immaculately polite in asking just as many questions of and taking just as much interest in her correspondent as talking about herself and her own doings. Then there were witty postcards and notes from another M - a talented young writer I knew through a writer's group in Coventry whom I eventually fell out with when she started dating a guy who turned out to be a drug addict and I couldn't keep my judgmentalism to myself. Having won a place on the prestigious UEA literature course after Warwick Uni, she then worked for a charity and is now a teacher (and mother) up north, I believe.

One or two people I couldn't even place, so they were easy enough to dispose of. As for my ex-fiance, his cards were so obtuse I couldn't even understand most on re-reading them. But since I discerned an unhealthy pattern of complimenting me in one and putting me down in another and he had also rather insultingly put in the box all the cards I had ever given him, they too made themselves an easy decision to dispose of. Thank goodness we never got as far as marrying...
Christmas cards were filtered down to a favoured few and Good Luck leaving cards from various workplaces retained, if only to remind myself of all the names.

But oh, the thrill of all those letters and cards landing on the doormat - evidence that friends and loved ones had gone to real trouble to contact me. How can email, text and social media ever compete with that?
I am now making a concerted effort to use the postal service again - several times a week - before it disappears completely.