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This not so much a story as a snap shot of life in London during WW2. What follows is my best recollection of a reply given to me by my mother upon the question of why she still felt animosity towards Germans. This question was posed sometime in the early eighties.

The reply:

Well she said if I were to answer with just one of many reasons, one that springs immediately to mind, we lived in a poor area of London (Bethnal Green, I think) in the middle of a row of terrace houses. For every two houses there was a shared pathway up to their front doors. She explained that every morning she, her mother and many, if not all the women would wait hovering around the front door to watch the telegram boy come up the street. She said the second he turned into the street everyone would be on their nerves until the telegram boy had passed their path, thus no bad news for them today. But sadly three times during those years the telegram boy turned down their path. She explained that the time that it took the telegram boy to do maybe 15 steps would take forever, with your mind racing to let it be for her, O please let him say her name an not ours and in fact it was — all three times the telegram of killed in action was delivered to the neighbour. A brief moment of extreme relief would be taken over by the realisation of what you had just wished on your neighbour and long-term, if not life-long friend. The neighbour, already a widow when the war started lost all of her sons, she had no daughters. Although my mum’s family was big, thankfully no one was more that slightly injured. They all lived long lives, and most are still alive today.

She made me realise that having visited this ordeal everyday for the length of the war, however it turns out for ones own family leaves mental scars that can probably never be forgotten and maybe never forgiven either. It is very easy for us to say that they should forgive and forget, but I wonder what we would do, if we were to have had the same experience.

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