Читать книгу Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary - Joan Rice - Страница 6

When Mother asked if we thought it would be a good thing to type out her war diary for the family to read, we politely said yes. We assumed there would be no real heroics in there, but we did not really know what Mother had done in the war (apart from get married in Cairo – oops! I've given away the ending) so we did not quite know what to expect. And even though we knew that Mother was a good writer, we did not expect anything like this.

For those of us lucky enough to be born after the end of what proved to be the last World War of the twentieth century, 1939 is beyond our imagination. L.P. Hartley's description of the past as ‘a foreign country’ is not powerful enough: for those of us who have been civilians all our lives, those war years are a different world. We grew up in the shadow of war, maybe, but it never became a reality. We never had it so good, as Harold Macmillan never said.

My parents were among those unlucky ones who were of a generation who had to fight. But, to read their diaries, we might feel that in many ways they were the lucky ones. As my mother's diary makes very clear, she enjoyed the war most of the time, ‘Never in my life have my days been so round and so snug,’ she writes in 1940, ‘and this is a war, a clash of civilization. It is odd.’ For my brothers and me, my parents' war experiences were crucial, because without the upheaval that Hitler caused, my father and mother would never have met, and we – my brothers, our children and our grandchildren – would not be here. We are not unique, of course: there are millions of us all over Europe, America and elsewhere who owe their existence to Hitler's decision to invade Poland in September 1939. No wonder Europe was entirely reshaped by the war, and not just in terms of national borders traced on maps. Hitler's pursuit of his belief in the ideal of a Master Race proved to be an Orwellian reality, probably resulting in a greater mongrelization of Europe than any other single event in history. I am proud to be one of those mongrels.

It is a very strange sensation to read the diary of your mother, especially when it deals with the time before you existed. In many ways, the person revealed in this diary is a stranger, a woman who happens to have the same name as my mother. If I didn't know it was Mother who had written it, I would never have guessed. When we were growing up, I never noticed the determination and ambition that are revealed in the diary, never thought of Mother as a person who had ever scored three goals in a hockey match, or who actually enjoyed gardening, or who ever smoked. Yet here it is, a true picture of the young woman who, within seven years of finishing her diary, would be mistress of a vast crumbling farmhouse with three sons rushing around her feet. I never remember her remarking, as she does in the diary, ‘Housework is nothing like as soul-destroying as typing.’ But I am still worried about the entry for 31 March 1941. She was in hospital, sharing a ward with ‘thirty bawling brats’, an experience which, she writes, ‘has soured me as a confirmed child hater.’ Not the person I know.

Mother's ambition to be a writer was the one thing that never flagged. I remember throughout our childhood hearing the clatter of the typewriter as Mother somehow found time between school runs, dog walking and keeping Popefield Farm in some sort of order, to write another short story, or a piece for Woman's Hour or Punch. It seemed to us quite natural that a person could earn money from writing and broadcasting, because Mother did. She never had time to write that epic novel, for which the three of us must be largely to blame, but she was a good and regularly published writer. We all, to a greater or lesser extent, have followed her example.

Neither of my parents were ever remotely military people. They never spoke about their war experiences, except to tell us of their wedding day or self-deprecatory anecdotes about why Father never won the M.C. or about his German measles in the invasion of Sicily. We found it odd (as did Father) that his tailor persisted in addressing him as Major Rice over a decade after the war had ended and he had been demobbed, and it has only really occurred to me now, on re-reading the diaries, that none of my parents' wartime colleagues became friends after the war. I do not think I ever met any of the people mentioned in the diary, apart from those that Mother knew from before the war and with whom she remained friends for years, in one case to this day. The war was a break in existence, and it was clearly one they were both eager to put behind them as soon as it was all over.

I also have to keep reminding myself how young Mother was when the war began. It was only a fortnight or so after her 20^th birthday. I was at university on my 20^th birthday, the extent of my worries being which pub to celebrate in. When she went to view the Blitz damage in Kilburn, she noted one shop, ‘where I used to buy my school hats’, which hadn't a window left. She would have been buying her school hats there only three or four years earlier. It must have been terrifying to be part of ‘a generation without a tomorrow, alive and beautiful in our lovely today.’

On board a ship to Egypt, aged 22 and a half, she gets into a deep discussion about the state of the world, and notes, ‘it's a dreadful and depressing thing if the men with ideals and intelligence are already so disillusioned that they will not even fight for the future. And then Diana came over, and Roger, and we played a game of deck quoits.’ The answer to everything when you are 22, a game of deck quoits.

Jonathan Rice January 2006