WHEN EUROPE MEANT HOPE
ONE OF my earliest memories is standing, aged three, holding my mother’s hand, as we looked out of the bay window of my grandmother’s bedroom. “It was here,” she whispered, “that I watched the Germans bombing Sheffield in the war.
“The sky was all red and I could see the flames as the city burned. And some of the bombs dropped not far from here.
‘The Germans were off-loading what they had left on their way back to Germany. Mary Midgley had laid her wedding dress out on the spare bed, ready for getting married the next day. Their house was hit. Thankfully the family was in the Anderson shelter in their garden. The dress was blown to bits.’
For a baby boomer, born in 1950, the bitter wars that devastated Europe were only too real and ‘the Jerries’ were the baddies who featured in all our games in the street. My grandmother spoke of how the siblings in her family had been reduced from 12 children to eight. Four brothers had died 12 in 1916 in the war to end all wars.
When I sneakily read my mother’s teenage wartime diary, I found the details of several boyfriends whose names were crossed out. I didn’t ask then, I shouldn’t have been reading the diary, but I guessed what had been their fate. Years later she told me how many of her friends and ‘beaux’ had been lost in action in the Second World War. Dozens.
So, to my generation, the prospect of peace in Europe and an entente which would bring us together in a most cordial manner didn’t seem to be about trade and economics, but a way to break down barriers and end the ‘little England’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ mentality which encouraged the Brit to consider him or herself superior to ‘Johnny Foreigner’.
I was 21 when Britain went decimal – the first move towards parity with Europe. It wasn’t easy. I first encountered the new currency when I returned from a year in France, required as part of my degree.
The first thing I wanted to eat was fish and chips. I ordered and was puzzled when the bill was 50p rather than 10 bob. I passed over a handful of cash like a newly arrived stranger from a distant land. All rather odd, but a step in the right direction – towards a unified Europe.
It finally happened on January 1 1973, not long before my 23rd birthday.
wrote: “We’re in... and a date which will be entered in the history books as long as histories are written, was taken by most people as a matter of course.”
Two years later a referendum confirmed the majority of Britons wanted us to remain a member of European Community. There would be lots of ‘jaw jaw’ in Brussels and Strasbourg and no more ‘war war’.
I could not have been more delighted. Future generations would not be blighted as our parents and grandparents had been. I had become a confirmed Francophile at school, thanks to the inspiring brilliance of Mme Short, my French teacher.
She was a Frenchwoman who’d married an Englishman, looked like Juliette Gréco and swept into the classroom with the powerful scent of Worth’s Je Reviens swirling around her. She taught us to see lessons in speaking another language as a means of communication rather than the tedium of rote learning. I was deeply shocked to learn recently that her family had been known as ‘the Froggies’. Not everyone in Barnsley was as keen on integration as I was.
I became a proud European, spending a great deal of time in France and Germany, adding German to my list of languages and cheering as the European Union grew and took on vitally important issues such as human, part-time and maternity rights and equal pay for work of equal value, changing UK law for the better, despite the frequent reluctance of national governments.
My most vivid memory of feeling thankful for being European came about during a visit to the theatre with some friends. I must have been in my early 30s and my companions were David, now my husband, Nancy, a friend from New York who was living in London and Uwe, her German banker boyfriend.
The play we saw was Bertolt Brecht’s subtitled and written in 1941. It charts the rise of Hitler through the satirical story of an ambitious, fictional Chicago gangster who learns to speak effectively in public, goose step and make the notorious ‘Heil Hitler’ raised arm salute from a famous actor.
He needs no training in how to use his ‘boys’ to bully his constituents into submission. The play ends with Ui on a high platform proclaiming his power to his public. The ‘Actor’ enters the stage to deliver the epilogue and speaks the chilling words: ‘The bitch that bore him is in heat again.’
After the play, the four of us went to a pub for a drink. These two young men looked at each other and said what we’d watched must be seen in a strictly historical context. Yes, some 40 years ago, they, an Englishman and a German, would have been trying to kill each other.
“But now,” they agreed, “it simply couldn’t happen. We’re all Europeans now.” “No more war, Tommy,” said Uwe with a smile. “No more war, Jerry,” said David. And they hugged as if to underline the point.
I hadn’t thought about that incident for a long time and, as the years have passed, we’ve gone our separate ways – Nancy to America and Uwe to Germany and David and I have raised two sons. They were both brought up as Europeans. They’ve travelled freely throughout Europe, learned the languages, enjoyed the reciprocal free healthcare and neither has so much as a hint of racism or xenophobia. It was primarily for them that I wept when the result of the referendum was announced on June 23, 2016 and Brexit became the mot du jour.
At the age of 67, I have enjoyed the best of the European Union already, but my sons are young with their lives ahead of them. That line “the bitch that bore him is in heat again” keeps ringing in my ears as immigrants are demonised and “make Great Britain great again” becomes a familiar mantra.
The times feel frightening to anyone with a sense of history. I pray that Brecht’s prediction was misguided, for the sake of the generations to come who deserve peace in Europe.