I look at today's problems and wonder if humanity is prepared or strong enough to handle what their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did in the past. Today we are used to a lot of creature comforts and haven't experienced real hardship. We are used to having what we want and not making do. Wars happen in far flung places and don't make regular headlines......
My parents clearly remembered WWII, Then they lived in the West Midlands in the UK, away from the German bombing of London and other key cities. Even so there were many incidents when lost German planes would drop their bombs in the countryside so they would have enough fuel to get home.
My dad spoke of the bombs, shattered glass and the one occasion of a crashed German plane near home in Walsall Wood.
My Mother, in her later years, wrote about her childhood experiences in nearby Brownhills. here is an extract.
"Growing up during the war years I guess I didn’t realize the seriousness of it all for some families, living in a small coal mining village I didn’t have to go and live somewhere else as a lot of children of my age and be taken in as an evacuee and we used to joke and play around with our gasmasks not realizing what it would be like if we ever need to use it.
The nearest we got to being bombed was one night when we were under the stairs in the pantry with a chamber pot in case of emergencies when we heard an aircraft flying very low and then there was a big bang and all the glass in the windows in our row of houses in the street were shattered. A bomb had been dropped in the field at the back of the houses the only fatality was a horse that used to pull the ice-cream cart. All the children were very upset. After that the owner invested in a motorised van but it didn’t seem the same as the children all patted the horse and gave him a name.
We used to go into a cellar in some unused cottages near us until my mother fell and hurt her ankle carrying my baby sister. I remember one night I was knitting away when two American soldiers came down into the cellar and gave me some chewing gum it was the first chewing gum I had ever had and I thought that it was strange that you had to not swallow it after it started to taste awful.
The nearest City to us to be bombed was Birmingham (edit: and also Coventry) you could hear the planes fly and making a path and see the sky light up from the fires. My dad was in the Home Guard as he was exempt from being called up so our family didn’t realize what it was like to have a father or husband that had gone to war. "
Ann Anslow (Nee Preston).
During the war and until 1954 there was rationing of food in the UK
My mother was expected to look after her two siblings Jane and John as her mother was often unwell. (possibly clinically depressed) She cooked and cleaned along with attending school. With Mums dad, Norman being a butcher, meant a reasonable standard of living, but life still wasn't easy.
My Dad's father passed away when he was 6 years old and as a result life was even tougher for him and his older brother Dennis, living in Walsall Wood near the pit. His mother Annie, supplemented a meagre miners pension by taking in washing, ironing and was the midwife, common in a time where it was standard for childbirth to occur at home. Dennis worked to support the family.
My parents knew hardship was and I do wonder what they would think of today's world where people struggle to comply with some lockdown rules.
We were supermarket shopping when I saw a man in his 20s having a meltdown because his favourite shampoo was unavailable!
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