I remember my mother’s tale of going up ’the street’ in her Lancashire hometown as a thirteen-year-old girl in June 1944. Half a mile along the way she hears on someone’s radio set that the Normandy invasion had commenced. She realised that this wasn’t just your average piece of daily news, even for war time. So, she turned around and made her way quickly back home to impart this information to her large family. On the way, she was probably imagining all the kudos that the telling of the invasion would bring her. I imagine her getting held up several times, as she stops to excitedly convey the information to those who she passes. Most of them she knows. Others may have been complete strangers. What I do know, is that on arriving back home and spluttering out the news, no one believed that she had got it right. After all, what would a thirteen-year old girl know?
And now, in the last few days, aged ninety she has quite nonchalantly related another story to me from five years before Normandy. Another ’war walk’ along the same stretch of road. It is 3rd September 1939. Her family has got wind of gossip that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is about to make a historic speech. The household does have in its possession a wireless radio set but is unable to tune in, as they cannot afford batteries. Instead, my eight-year-old mother gets despatched to go bang on her Auntie Nellie’s door. Auntie Nellie, who does indeed have a radio set, and batteries to boot.
I imagine her skipping her way back with this monumental piece of information, maybe repeating over and over in her head parts of Chamberlain’s speech, wondering, as she did, if parts of it had now taken on a different emphasis in her mind.
Well, I don’t know if she took a notebook, but I imagine the pressure to get it right must have been considerable.
Oh, the questions there must have been on her returning before she could even have a moment to get her breath back and contemplate.
‘But what did the Prime Minister say?’
‘Well just give me a moment, while I try to remember.’
‘Did he mention this or that?’
‘But no one asked me to listen out for those things!’
‘Ok. But most importantly, has war been declared, or hasn’t it?’
‘Let me think. It was his accent you see. I think there is going to be a war, almost certainly, but sometimes, I just couldn’t understand what all those words meant.’
Maybe between 1939 and 1944, there were several other ‘war walks’ she made, gathering and dispatching intelligence. I will have to ask her.
My, if she had set out one morning along her long street and heard on a distant wireless set, news of the German surrender. And what might the adults who she met on the way back have said? There may have been a few who had family members missing in action, and for whom this news gave a modicum of hope.
And a few months later, perhaps, on another morning she hears about the dropping of a giant bomb on Japan. There may have been people who she spoke to who had relatives in captivity in the Far-East, who were quite positive about the discovery of nuclear fusion.
And then she gets home …..
‘Yes, but Sis, what’s so special about this bomb?’
‘Well, they said it was very big and did a lot of damage.’
‘Yes, but aren’t they all big and meant to do a lot of damage? So, is the news no different then?’
Damian Rainford, 2022
Featured image: Massimiliano Clari
