My nan lived with us and looked after me while my mother worked. In the holidays she'd sit in her chair for a smoke and I'd sit on the floor, and she'd tell me of her experiences in the East End in WW11, and those of her brothers and father (all naval men).
The most sobering story she told me was of when they were hop picking and her little brother (much younger and the only one who didn't go to war) got separated and left in the fields. A German war plane spotted him and flew low, the gunner was firing at him and Pat ran for a shed of some kind and threw himself on the floor of it. My nan said the bullet holes ran the length of the building. He wasn't even ten at the time.
She died twenty five years ago now; all her brothers have died too, as has her sister. I grew up with the war a living memory, first hand stories from those who had been fished out of the sea when their boat sank, who pulled bodies out of rubble and who watched the little boats leave for Dunkirk. My nan was twenty-two when the war ended; she'd be ninety-three now. And this is what sobers me - soon WW2 won't be a living memory at all.
