Dear Editor
All this focus in Parliament on ‘child safety’ issues reminds me that the generation before mine had some very real dangers, both physical and psychological, to face.
When I was art director/studio manager at a publishing company, around the turn of the millennium, one of the more high-profile members of staff was a woman we’ll call Mrs K. Opinions of her varied widely. Some felt she was bossy and over-assertive, while others conceded that this was the only way to keep on top of a demanding job.
I always got on well with her, and one afternoon she shared an anecdote with me which really hit home.
She was about fifteen years older than me and would therefore have been no more than six when the war broke out. At the time, she was a Jewish girl living in the East End of London and was, along with about 100,000 other children, evacuated to the surrounding countryside. In her case, to an Essex farm.
I asked her how this had been for her. She told me that her hosts were very kind, but nothing they did or said could stop her worrying about her parents, who were still in West Ham.
She told me very movingly how, on some nights, if the bombing on London was particularly heavy, she and her best friend would sneak out of the house in their pyjamas and despite being not very tall, climb a tree at the farm. From this vantage point they would stare back towards the city and watch with a morbid compulsion the sinister, pulsating orange glow which filled the horizon as the London which had been her home, burned. All the time praying that in the morning she would not receive the news that her parents had been killed in that very raid.
‘If it was a really big one, I would worry all night,’ she recalled.
For someone like myself, born and brought up in the relative paradise which was post-war Britain, this was a very moving account of what the generation of children before me had been expected to cope with.
Immediately, I felt grateful to her, since this had been a very personal anecdote for her. Not least, because here was a woman with a formidable reputation for brashness and toughness, sharing with me in a quiet moment a childhood experience of separation from her parents which, in her wistful reminiscence, still brought a lump to her throat, if not actually quite reduced her to tears.
Brian Meredith
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