75 years

I couldn't help thinking today of my own family 75 years ago, on VJ day and the days immediately before the end of the War in the East. I'd embarked on some rather strenuous hauling at unwanted grass round the drive-in at the back of our house - it had advanced over the concrete to such an extent that the area in which we park the car was being steadily reduced - but was relieved of further unwise tugging by the arrival of Mr PB with a shovel. I'd have thought a mattock might have been more satisfying, but it might have shattered the concrete underneath ...

Anyway, temporarily unemployed, I'd been reading a piece about VJ day on my phone and was driven upstairs to look out the letters my father had written to my mother at the time. He was by then stationed at an RAF base in Essex, having had two months of repatriation leave over the previous Christmas on his return from the war in the desert and the advance north over the Mediterranean as the fighting moved to Italy. This time at Earls Colne seemed to be a kind of limbo, where the men didn't know if they'd be killed by an errant buzz bomb or sent to join the war against Japan. My father's situation was complicated emotionally by the fact that I was now expected to be born in the September, though his prose in the letters remains as elegant as ever.

The two extracts I've combined in the blip are from letters of this week - one written on the day after the war ended, one just before when people learned of the bomb that had changed the world. He just mentions "this new bomb" as something that looks like bringing about Japan's surrender and therefore his eventual demobilisation; in the second letter he describes the reaction of the men in his station to the news of the armistice and the party that went on all night.

I've actually put all the letters from these nine months online here, as well as publishing them as a book which I gave to my family members. At the time, I posted them on the actual day on which they'd been written; it was an amazing journey with the father who came home, demobbed at last, when I was a few months old. Apparently when he arrived at the door, my mother met him with this wailing baby in her arms. He always told me he'd almost decided to go back to the peace of the desert ...