MORNING SERIAL
PERHAPS that fit neatly with the belief she had held for decades that God was about to call her at any moment, and her more recent worry that on Judgement Day, He might take a dim view and send her to “the wrong place”. She’d had her fun, leapt onto the merry-goround of life, throwing caution to the wind, and danced into the arms of men she couldn’t resist – didn’t want to resist. She’d grabbed the best out of life and who could blame her? Expressing my feelings and needs might have exposed what she disliked about women and shone a light onto something she kept hidden and repressed in herself: her vulnerability. I knew not to do that. It was too risky for me.
OVER the decades, Mum had told me stories about her childhood years. She was seven years old when the Second World War broke out. Like all her friends, she carried a gas mask everywhere which made her feel fearful, she said, but it was the horrible siren that terrified her each and every time it went off. ‘But we never grumbled in those years,’ she told me. ‘If anyone moaned about anything they were brought up sharp. It was “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” It just wasn’t done to complain.’
She lived in relatively safe Yorkshire and her mother’s crafty kitchen skills meant there was just about enough to eat. It was a good time, she assured me. It was her parents’ generation who had been traumatised. The Great War had already broken them. It was hard to imagine what effect that catastrophe had had on them as citizens and as parents.
My maternal grandmother was a placid, dependable woman who tended to take the line of least resistance. Mum was slightly disparaging about my gran’s quiet acceptance and had felt frustrated in her youth by what she saw as a lack of spark. However, Mum’s eyes filled with sorrow when she told me that Gran never, ever spoke about her Great War.