K J Millard, author of 'Charlie and the Spitfire', released this week on 7th May, talks of her experiences of growing up with her grandparents' memories of the Second World War.
I was born in an era when the tumultuous events of the Second World War were still, very much, living memory. Sunday afternoons would always be shared with my grandparents, sitting around the dining table for lunch, a regular weekly ritual practised by so many of my generation growing up in the 70's and 80's, before the days of Sunday trading and extended pub opening hours.
Usually, lunch was followed by one of the many black and white war films on terrestrial television, (all we had in those days), films which I still love so much, which the whole family would sit and watch together. It was then, in front of the fire, that all the old stories would come out again, lovingly repeated and lovingly listened to by me.
My mother's generation, the 1960's 'baby boomers', born towards the end of or just after the Second World War, were not so interested in their parents' stories, or of reflecting on the dangers and fears of the past. For them, the urge had been to move forward into a bright, exciting future, not to look back on a past they remembered all too well: bombed out buildings; grey, grimy streets; rationing; clothes seeming all of the same hue; rain macs always draped carefully over arms; short-back-and-sides; crystal radio sets; wirelesses and soldering irons. Everything to them had felt so ordinary, so small, so sensible, so unexciting – to them the new world of fashion and art, of music and dance and film beckoned and what their parents had done for them, the sacrifices which they had made, when they themselves were not much more than children, so that the next generation could enjoy this bright new future, was largely lost on the young of the 1960's.
Both my parents, a young, attractive couple of the late 1960's, my father looking very much like Steve McQueen and into fast cars and a racing driver himself, and my mother with her Mary Quant mini-skirts and the legs to match, saw their parents, as many of that generation did, as old and staid, apparently having no connection with their children, who all seemed to like music that was either just a 'racket' or 'that loud racket'.
Old, that wartime generation may have looked, the cares and stresses of six years of war not easy to forget or to heal. For that generation, who had endured endless days and nights not knowing if they would see the light of another day, it was a constant grind of finding the money to pay the rent, of make-do-and-mend, of waste-not-want-not, of mending their own clothes and of getting by in a life, which for many in post-war Britain, was still extremely hard and poverty stricken.
Even today, when clearing out a dearly departed elderly relative's home, you might still find some vestiges of the scars left by years of deprivation and rationing, of not knowing if food was going to make it to these shores, let alone to the table: stock piles of long out of date tins of food, candles, balls of wool and remnants from the long-forgotten days of the wedding-day 'bottom drawer', which later often doubled up as the new baby's cot, a modern-day corollary being the stock-piles of toilet paper still to be found in many a household's cupboard, a throw-back to the days of the 'great toilet roll scarcity', of not many moons ago.
These were the days, which my parents' generation wished to leave behind. The days Keith Richards remembered in an interview, when explaining the genesis of the Rolling Stones hit song, 'Wild Horses', the days of playing on bombed-out sites as children, where an old pony was tethered, the only excitement they had. This was why this generation wished to hark back to something more pastoral, to recreate or recapture a childhood truncated by war, a fantasy childhood of 'The Hobbit', of 'Alice in Wonderland', and 'Wind in the Willows', with its eponymous, most beautiful and evocative chapter, 'Piper and the Gates of Dawn', often sadly, deleted from modern-day editions of the book, which inspired the dreamy and very psychedelic Pink Floyd album of the same name.
By the time I was born in the early 1970's, the world was less drained of colour. The huge, seismic reverberations of the 1960's social revolution was still in full-swing. The great wartime leader, Winston Churchill was dead and man had just landed on the moon. The giant leap for mankind was well underway, ushering an age over the next ten years of cheaper colour televisions, (at a time when many people still rented theirs), an age of music cassettes and later, VHS and Betamax video machines, indoor toilets, burger restaurants with plates and knives and forks, which was all brought to a grinding halt with the 1970's power cuts and the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79.
During all of these times, the Sunday lunches, the power cuts, when we were far less reliant on electricity than we are now, when pubs could just light a candle, or in some cases, the old wall mounted gas lights, still in existence in one of our local pubs until well into the 80's and continue to pull their pints, when people would just sit a little closer to their fires - most homes still had fires then and in my grandparents' home, when we would sit around the fire, carefully lit every morning by my grandfather, newspaper draped across to 'draw the flame', followed by his silly 'Ministry of Funny Walks', when the backs of his warming trousers grew too hot - it was at these times, in an age before the internet and mobile phones, when all the old stories would come flooding out: stories of bravery, of courage against the odds, of duty and service and honour, of doing right by one's fellow man or woman; stories of great sacrifice and stories of the wonderful, miraculous quirks of fate that seemed like messages from above, that somebody up there was definitely on our side, all of which imbued within me a sense of deep pride and gratitude and a sense of such nostalgia that at times I felt like I had experienced these moments myself, such was the depth of emotion with which my grandparents would pass these stories onto me, stories which maybe they felt that in the cut and thrust of young parent-hood, when the daily struggles with money and small children, they had been lost to the winds and to a more indifferent age. Now to have a young, inquisitive child, keen to hear their memories, I became almost like a time-traveller, bridging the generations, like so many of my generation did, almost as custodians of knowledge to pass on to our children and our children's children.
The true story of Violette Szabo, immortalised in the film, 'Carve her Name with Pride', with the beautiful Virginia McKenna playing the lead role, about the bravery of one young war-widowed woman, who became a secret agent, working for the Special Operations Executive SOE, in France and the first woman ever to be awarded the George Cross, posthumously, stuck in my mind. To see her little daughter going to Buckingham Palace with her grandparents to collect her mother's medal, always struck me, even as a child, as something so sad and so poignant.
I can remember my grandparents telling me, with pride about the Miracle of Dunkirk and how the seas remained calm long enough for more than three-hundred thousand men, almost all of the British soldiery, to be evacuated from the beaches of Northern France, aided by the Little Ships, whose owners answered the call and actually volunteered themselves and not just their boats, to go over to save 'our boys'. Being a Brighton family ourselves, this was particularly significant for us, my grandmother having been fostered by a famous old Brighton fishing family, one of whom took his own Little Ship over to Dunkirk. The films about this, both the old one with that great, ubiquitous war-time actor, Sir John Mills and the more recent, Christopher Nolan one with Tom Hardy, are both well-worth watching.
Closer to home, were the stories of my grandmother narrowly missing being bombed in a cinema one Saturday morning. She had been naughty and was not allowed to go.
Narrowly missing death again, my grandmother's father had bought passage for her and her siblings to be evacuated to Canada, but at the last minute, feeling that it was wrong, he took them off the ship, before it set sail. That ship was torpedoed and sunk, with all children lost.
These stories would be repeated and retold, with sadness and pride. My grandfather, who was in the Navy and served on the Russian Convoys, never told the bad stories, only the funny ones, like the day he mistook a German ME 109 for a Spitfire, flying towards him on Brighton seafront, only to see, when it turned to fly along the beach, that it most definitely was not friendly. Opening fire, it strafed the beach sending everyone diving for cover. No one was hurt and they all saw the funny side, even in such adversity.
That strength of courage and sense of humour is what saw the British Nation through in the darkest days of the war and it was Prime Minister Winston Churchill, supported closely by King George VI, our own late Queen's father, who gave this nation's pride its voice, words of power and wisdom, words which evoked deep feelings coming as if from the land itself.
All these were the stories that swirled around in my young mind – stories, which I will never forget, but stories which are being forgotten as that generation, who did so much for so many, leaves us. This is why it is so important to keep these stories alive, when those they happened to are gone – in education, in schools, in children's books and in ordinary conversations, but here is the rub. In an age where families live increasingly separate lives, meals eaten at different times, family members in different rooms streaming different programmes, with the pull of YouTube and social media, the pressures on family time are increasing. The old films, which used to spark so much conversation, are shown less and less and fewer films about those times are being made.
My grandmother once wrote a poem about her wartime experiences and what the sea meant to her. It closes with the refrain, "Here now, my small effort ends, weak though it seems to be. It whispers of my feelings, whilst I'm sitting by the sea." My grandmother's poem was her own pledge to the next generation to keep those memories alive and my book, 'Charlie and the Spitfire', published on 7th May 2025, just in time for VE Day, is my pledge to my son and his children and his children's children, to keep that memory alive in honour of those, who have gone.
In an age when we live increasingly in the now, when the past is no longer remembered or filtered through a modern-day lens, we have an even greater need of the words from the past – to learn from their lessons and to build on their successes. I hope my book goes some way in ensuring that the memories are never forgotten.
