Remembering over the generations

This isn't my photo, but my son, who took it, and Anna, who's featured in it, both gave me permission to use it. I love it. Years ago, when my mother went into a nursing home and we were emptying her house, I took away my father's RAF uniform which had been in her wardrobe since 1945. My younger son begged it - at the time, he was the only one in the family who fitted into the very slender jacket and the narrow confines of the cap - and took it off with him to his flat in Leith. Only the other day I found myself wondering if he still had it, so I was absolutely delighted to see this pop up in our family chat group. When I was a small child, I used to play in the cap, though the way it wobbled around on my pigtails used to annoy me so that I preferred his forage cap; I don't know what became of that.

The photo on the computer screen is one I scanned today and posted on social media. It shows my father before he went off to the Western Desert with the RAFVR in 1942, when he would have been 34. I was thinking about how it must have felt - this clever man, with his First in English and his gift for teaching, not married for very many years (perhaps 4?), his wife longing for a child but now having to wait on his return: how did it feel to go off to Cairo, to Syria, and then to the battle of el Alamein, at which he was present though not actively involved? He used to tell me stories of how he and two buddies would drink their way along a bar in Cairo and take it in turns to get the drunkest one home to bed, or of life in a tiny bivvy over a scrape in the sand beside his signals truck, or of learning to drive in order to drive his truck in convoy ... but how did they cope, with the three long years of separation, with no home leave at all in that time, with only these tiny photographed letters that I recall seeing when I was small but which perhaps eventually disintegrated?

So here, with this photo symbolising four generations of my family in a snapshot of the oldest and the youngest, I'm thinking of all the civilian soldiers who left their homes and families to take part in a huge effort whose end they couldn't foresee, and I celebrate the safe return of Flight Lieutenant D.H.G.Findlay to start the family of which Anna is currently the youngest member. 

Cheers, Dad!