大象传媒

My story is set in America because that's where I lived as a child. And that's where I was fortunate enough to keep my Daddy at home with me and my mother because he had a job vital to the nation's defense. And, obviously this story only began after December 7, 1941. Until then, at five years old, I had no notion of what was happening across the pond in England where I live today.

However, I had five uncles in the war and my Daddy hung a world map on the wall and kept five different colored drawing pins on it. As soon as we knew where one of them was, the pin for that uncle moved. It was his link with those two brothers and my mother's three brothers. The map helped me to "see" my precious uncles as still somewhere out there, in danger, albeit, but not vanished off the face of my five year old world.

Riding on the school bus home during the week, my friends and I watched gold and silver stars going up in many windows in our small town. They were so pretty and shiny and I kept wondering why we had no gold and silver stars in our windows at home. One house even had four of those gold stars! I simply couldn't understand why we had none and so one day, I asked my Mama. I still remember her sad smile and the look in those beautiful, tear-filled black eyes. And that night, she and my Daddy sat in rocking chairs on the front porch, me in my Daddy's lap, and explained why we really didn't want any of the gold and silver stars in our windows! Throughout the war, we children watched the stars going up in the windows of the houses of our little hometown. There were so many, and, in one window, framed by the snow on the cedars around it, one silver star turned to gold. And my parents again explained to me how that could happen. A silver one, you see, was for Missing In Action, a gold one denoted Killed In Action.

The stars came down some time on after the war was over, but the sadness lingered for a lifetime and the loss never ended. Some of the boys they represented came home, in boxes, some never came home at all, but lay somewhere in foreign soil, or worse still, were never heard from again, without any closure at all.

But, Americans were still the lucky ones in that war; even though we sent our sons, husbands, dads, and my five uncles, to the war, we were not required to see our cities bombed and live in fear of our lives on the home front.

I am in awe of the British spirit and the courage that was so evident. I only wish the same spirit could "come alive" again, in this lovely country.

PS: I was so fortunate, all of those five uncles returned; we never received any gold or silver stars! However, we received one uncle back who was tragically never, ever the same again and took his own life some years later. That one flew 43 missions in the South Pacific, but that's another story, for another time.

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