When There Was A War On

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

I was just past my first birthday when the war ended.

When I was a kid dad would sometimes show me his scars, tell me stories about how he got them. The long thin one on his thigh was from a rusty nail on a blighted battlefield, or from falling out of a bomber plane at a dizzying height, or from being tortured for information in a POW camp. And those speckly ones on his arm, they were from shotgun shrapnel, or scattered fire in a life-threatening explosion. One day finally my mother told me he fell out of a tree when he was twelve and I wasn't to listen to his silliness any more. He was only away at the war for a few months, she said. He didn't even finish his training.

As a child I lived under the shadow of that war. Everyone did. It wasn't our war, us who hadn't even been born till it was over, but we grew up with it looming behind us, ever-present. I was nine by the time they finally started loosening the rationing restrictions. For my parents it was just a final return to normality after the blight of the forties, but for me and my schoolfriends it was a whole new world of freedom. I'd never seen so many sweets before. I don't think I thought there were so many in the whole world. Over the year that followed the restrictions gave more and more – first sweets and confectionery, then eggs and milk and dairy, finally meat and the relinquishing of the little brown books that had ruled my childhood up till then. 1954. The year of parties.

When I was a teenager I wished I'd been around when the war had been on. The women of the fifties and sixties didn't get the opportunities that the women of the forties did: the world was trying to get back to normal, fighting through a cloud of mass grief. If only I'd been eighteen in nineteen forty I could have done it, I could have lived the dream, trained as a mechanic, flown an aeroplane, broken out and set myself free. As it was, what was there left for me? I was to take a job as a typist for a little while, marry a civil servant, settle down and cook and clean and have babies.

Try as I might, I can't make myself regret the fact that that wasn't what happened.

I don't know how old I was on my sixty-sixth birthday. But my grandfather came to see me, the grandfather I'd never known, with his scars that he doesn't tell the stories of and his little ways that make me feel as though I'm healing. He lives under the shadow of a war, too: one that started long before mine and didn't end for a long time afterwards. But his Bright One casts light into the darkness and dispels that shadow for him, and I think now I can see the way out too.

Comments

[elizathemekhet.livejournal.com]

That is just lovely.