Even looking back through a childhood’s eyes, I can easily work out that my grandmother had PTSD from the war. Her stories, framed around semi heroic running through the streets as the bombs fell or lifting a horsehair sofa over my mother and uncle as the windows were blown in by an Ariel torpedo were the stuff of legend in our house. But there was a darker side to grandmother, masked by humour and love, and that was a pathological fear of thunderstorms.
As soon as there was a rumble of thunder she would disappear into the airing cupboard of her bungalow, face buried into scented towels and sheets and pillowcases.
We grandchildren would shriek with laughter, and she would try to join in, but the fear was there, palpable and horrific.
She never had any help with those fears expect the cathartic sharing of the tales themselves but even as a ten year old , I remember feeling proud as a button when she told me the story where she bravely reentered her bombed home , hand in hand with the ARP man, to collect, her children’s clothes and the cat!
My grandfather was a volunteer fireman in Liverpool during the war. His stories were brief and sobering.and scared us as children. The dead left where they lay, entombed by the bombing. An Alsatian dog running through the streets with a terrified cat on its back.
An old lady found dead with her arms around her grandchildren
He , like million of others just got on with things after the war
Strangely for both of them, wartime was the biggest part of their lives.
It excited them as well as horrified them
And there was my mother.
A teenage girl when she left Liverpool. A girl who worked in an ammunition factory and who was once shot at by the rear gunners of the bombers as they turned for home over Everton Church.
She lost her grandfather in the May Blitz but found a handsome Welsh RAF navigator when they came to Wales.
A new life that brought forward, four children, three grand children and four great grandchildren to date
Oh and this blog too……..
