The last couple of weeks have seen lots of references in our media to the seventieth anniversary this year of the Battle of Britain in World War II. The battle took place in August / September 1940.
Tonight the film of that name was on TV: everyone who was famous at the time was in it and excellent details can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain_%28film%29-
Every Spitfire in the country was used in the film and Spain loaned its Stukas. Given that the film was made before CGI I am impressed.
Although the Second World War was before my time, I was told a great deal about it by my parents who lived in London at the time. They literally thought each night would be their last alive during the bombing raids. Their worst fears were from the doodlebugs. They said that when the engines stopped overhead you knew that the bomb was dropping, you just did not know exactly where. They slept on the floor in the kitchen under the table as being the strongest piece of furniture to protect them if the house came down. When I think of that kind of stress each night and then getting up in the morning, perhaps no water or electricity, getting ready for work, perhaps no transport, or roads wrecked by bombs, queuing for what little food there was, walking everywhere, working all day, struggling home at night, no road signs, no street lights, little heating, and this going on day after day, I am amazed. They never complained about it to me: they took me as a very little girl to see documentary films of the release of Belsen, telling me that this must never be forgotten and I was to remember what I saw all my life: they said any sacrifice had been worth it to stop the horror of the concentration camps. I shall never forget the nightmare of seeing those newsreels of the starving and dead inmates of those camps.
My earliest childhood was in London and even in the 1950s we passed wrecked buildings and bomb sites that had not been reclaimed because the country was too poor to rebuild fast.
This country faced the reality of invasion at the time and at one stage was two weeks from starvation. I get quite choked when I realise the hardship that generation went through and the sacrifices so many people made for our future. We know an old man in his late 80s who was the last man rescued from Dunkirk: he is a charming old gentleman, so brave, so polite, you would never know what a hero he had been in his youth or what sights he had seen. Reading about historical events is one thing, but being told about them from people who were there brings it home to one and it feels frighteningly real. When my mother died I found her letters to my father and her diaries of the time: trying to do something each day to make the day special as it might be their last. Interestingly, although she was not keen on music, the one thing they both needed was music: many famous musicians gave free lunchtime concerts in London to the workers to keep up morale, and my parents went to every one they could get to. In the evenings if the bombs came while a concert was in progress, the players kept on playing and the audience remained, somehow the music was too important and meant too much, for them to leave. (There is a moral for our present- day educators in there somewhere.)
However, without the contribution made from our friends and allies overseas, many of whom came over here to fly with the RAF, the Battle of Britain could not have been won. One of my friends from California was a very young Jewish man at the time who came over to this country when he was 17 years old desperate to join the RAF and fight for his fellows.
I hate the concept of war but I really do believe that Hitler had to be stopped and am in awe of the bravery of people who faced terrible deaths in the fight to stop him. At the same time I agonise over the deaths of ordinary people both in and out of the German Army and in Japan. I am eternally grateful that, so far, I have never had to face anything like this in my own lifetime.
stopping by woods 