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desperanceIt's Veterans Day*, here in the US; in the UK, it's still Armistice Day. Despite the leaf-blowers, the traffic and the trains, I had my own little moment of silence at eleven o'clock.
Both my grandfathers fought through WW1 (and, necessarily, survived it: my parents were both born in 1920). My mother's father was a career soldier, and still in service with the Scots Guards in WW2. In Singapore, so he lived through the fall and spent the latter half of the war in Changi as a prisoner of the Japanese. He survived that too: tough man, my grandad.
When I was a kid, we always went to the Armistice Day ceremony at St Giles in Oxford. Wreaths laid at the War Memorial, squads from all the armed services (and Americans in shiny helmets) and civic dignitaries marching by in their robes of office, all the councillors (my dad, briefly!) and the aldermen (is it my imagination, or did the aldermen actually wear purple?), cannon fired for the two-minute silence. It's something to hang on to.
I don't actually know what my mum did through WW2, but she was of an age to be called up for war service, so there must have been something. Dad had spent half his childhood in bed with asthma, as well as having eyesight as bad as my own, so he was deemed unfit for military service - so they sent him to do farm work instead, which, yeah. Seems an obvious thing for a young man crippled by asthma. (I believe he was so ill that they relented after a year or so and gave him office work instead, but I may be making that up.)
Now they're both gone, of course, there's no one I can ask about any of this - but actually you couldn't ask either of my parents while they were alive. They separated when I was seven or eight and divorced a couple of years later, when Dad wanted to remarry; my own narrative here says that they'd made each other so unhappy for so long, neither one of them could bear to talk about the past at all.
However that actually went, it leaves me with no real sense of continuity, that notion of family as an unbroken story leading back as well as forward; all I have is shards of story that can't be put together. I'm fairly sure that lack of coherence contributes to my own fractured relationship with my relatives. Family was kinda like school, an isolated period of time that you had to survive before you were allowed to leave it. (As it happens, I am fond of both my sisters, but I think that's incidental; as we know, post hoc, propter hoc is a fallacy.)
*The official form carries no apostrophe; it's attributive, rather than possessive.
Both my grandfathers fought through WW1 (and, necessarily, survived it: my parents were both born in 1920). My mother's father was a career soldier, and still in service with the Scots Guards in WW2. In Singapore, so he lived through the fall and spent the latter half of the war in Changi as a prisoner of the Japanese. He survived that too: tough man, my grandad.
When I was a kid, we always went to the Armistice Day ceremony at St Giles in Oxford. Wreaths laid at the War Memorial, squads from all the armed services (and Americans in shiny helmets) and civic dignitaries marching by in their robes of office, all the councillors (my dad, briefly!) and the aldermen (is it my imagination, or did the aldermen actually wear purple?), cannon fired for the two-minute silence. It's something to hang on to.
I don't actually know what my mum did through WW2, but she was of an age to be called up for war service, so there must have been something. Dad had spent half his childhood in bed with asthma, as well as having eyesight as bad as my own, so he was deemed unfit for military service - so they sent him to do farm work instead, which, yeah. Seems an obvious thing for a young man crippled by asthma. (I believe he was so ill that they relented after a year or so and gave him office work instead, but I may be making that up.)
Now they're both gone, of course, there's no one I can ask about any of this - but actually you couldn't ask either of my parents while they were alive. They separated when I was seven or eight and divorced a couple of years later, when Dad wanted to remarry; my own narrative here says that they'd made each other so unhappy for so long, neither one of them could bear to talk about the past at all.
However that actually went, it leaves me with no real sense of continuity, that notion of family as an unbroken story leading back as well as forward; all I have is shards of story that can't be put together. I'm fairly sure that lack of coherence contributes to my own fractured relationship with my relatives. Family was kinda like school, an isolated period of time that you had to survive before you were allowed to leave it. (As it happens, I am fond of both my sisters, but I think that's incidental; as we know, post hoc, propter hoc is a fallacy.)
*The official form carries no apostrophe; it's attributive, rather than possessive.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-11-11 08:48 pm (UTC)I know my mother was in the Land Army from 1942 and told rosy stories about it for ever after... if we discount the black eyes acquired during the blackout 'walking into lamp-posts' and the minimised sexual attacks by American servicemen (how desperate do you need to be to bite somebody so hard he swerves off the road into a wall heading down a notorious hill near Broadway? or to want to marry an American whose idea of courtship was to plunge you head-first into a barrel full of water? (His sister Palmy in Chicago scuppered the engagement, which may have been a good thing).
We will also pass over the unknown circumstances in which she ended up pregnant in early 1946 (my eldest sister who I will never call half-sister) but was supported to raise her child by her father and paternal grand-parents (who had raised her from age 6 when her mother died while her father supposedly 'served the Crown' -- I have my doubts). But her father and paternal grandparents were all dead by 1951 and the rest of her relatives cut her dead as a sinful woman... So no stories there.
Or my father, who may have been a decent bloke when he was sober and/or not tired from working night-shifts all his life (I'm sure I would remember if he was ever a decent bloke) but 5 daughters were a lot to support. Too young to serve in WW2, but he did National Service and never ever talked about his time in the Eastern Mediterranean just after WW2. His parents wanted sons from him (elder sister divorced with a single daughter, elder son unexpectedly married late and childless) so 5 more granddaughters were not welcome, and when he died aged 42 in 1969 they pretty well cut all links -- and the aunt and uncle are long gone. (Plus at the age of 10 I already knew I was glad to see the back of my father, not least because it cleared the way for me to get educated properly).
So... I have sisters (to whom I talk once every five years, no matter how fond I am of them -- and I'm fond of 2 out of 4 which isn't a bad average) and uncorroborated family stories. And a feeling that family lineages are things that other people have, no matter how much intellectual effort I put into genealogy.
So as you say, " Family was kinda like school, an isolated period of time that you had to survive before you were allowed to leave it."