World War II – Debbie Young's Writing Life

photo of the lane by the side of the cottage where my father lived during the war

The Alternative Staycation: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Debbie Young

In my Young By Name column for this month’s Tetbury Advertiser, I shared the heartwarming experience of taking my father to visit his boyhood haunts near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire. His love of the Cotswolds from his experience as an evacuee during World War II is the reason I grew up wanting to live in the Cotswolds myself. I moved here over 30 years ago.

Here’s one way you can stop foreign travel restrictions spoiling your summer holiday this year: take a trip back in time instead. You don’t even need a time machine, HG Wells style.

image of the original film poster of the 1960 movie, The Time Machine — Original movie poster by Reynold Brown – now in public domain, via Wikipedia.

Instead, take yourself to a place in this country that was important to you in your past. Such trips can spark treasured memories that lurk in the back of our locked-down brains, as well as providing the opportunity to create new ones.

A couple of weeks ago, I did exactly this, albeit by proxy. I took my 88-year-old father for a day trip to the Cotswold village of Todenham, near Moreton-in-Marsh.

Two days after his seventh birthday – and the outbreak of the Second World War – my father, his two sisters and their mother had been evacuated to Todenham from the London suburb of Sidcup, on the edge of Kent. They considered themselves fortunate to be able to lodge as a family with my grandmother’s stepfather and his second wife, rather than being separated and sent to strangers, as so many evacuees were.

This year (2021), on a glorious early summer’s day, together with my sister and my daughter, we toured territory that was still very familiar to my father.

The little village has not changed much in the last eighty years, at least on the outside.

We enjoyed listening to my father’s recollections of his time at the village school, watching the village blacksmith at work, hunting for souvenirs from an enemy plane that crash-landed in a nearby field, and enjoying cosy family evenings playing games, reading and drawing by lamplight around the kitchen table.

photo of the parish church in Todenham — View of the church from where my father’s stepgrandparents now lie at rest

When we knocked on the door of the cottage in which he had lived in those days, the current owner – whom, we were glad to see, was taking excellent care of the house and garden – was hospitable and sympathetic. Although relatively new to the village herself, she was able to share news of many people he remembered from his childhood. His friend Dorothy Duckett had become a primary school teacher, for example, and his younger sister’s friend Valerie Poole had moved away but later returned to retire to the village they all loved.

We strolled around the village, going to visit the village school (now the village hall) and the parish church which as a young evacuee he had attended every Sunday. Inside the church, an elderly lady, one of the churchwardens, was welcoming visitors.

photo inside church of my dad and the churchwarden chatting — Chatting to the churchwarden in the church he’d attended every Sunday as a boy

After a few moments of chatting to her, my father asked in sudden recognition, “Are you Valerie Poole?” Indeed she was, and together they shared memories that had lain dormant for over 80 years.

We returned from our day trip as refreshed, moved and inspired as from any foreign holiday. So if you’re wondering where to go this summer, you could do worse than visit your old haunts, wherever your roots may be.

As L P Hartley said in the famous opening line of his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country”. Best of all, there’s no compulsory quarantine when you return.

Photo of my dad with his his little sister's friend from 80 years ago — My dad with Valerie Poole – eighty years since they were last at the church together

Footnote: We’re now planning a return visit including my father’s younger sister.

Cover of Still Young By Name — The second volume includes 2016-2020

cover of Young by Name — The first volume covered 2010-2015.

My father’s love of the Cotswolds inspired the watercolour painting that I used for the covers of my collections of columns for the Tetbury Advertiser.

HOW TO ORDER

Both collections are available to buy in paperback and ebook.

Order the paperbacks from Amazon via the links below or ask your local bookshop or library to order copies in for you (available from their usual stockists).

Young by Name (2010-2015) paperback

Still Young By Name (2016-2020) paperback

Order the ebooks for the ereader of your choice here:

Young by Name ebook (2010-2015)

Still Young by Name ebook (2016-2020)

Read the whole of the July 2021 issue of the Tetbury Advertiser online here.

Family, Personal life

Back to School

Posted on September 1, 2011July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

As you will have noticed if you have been anywhere near a supermarket since June, this month it’s back to school, and for primary school children like my eight year old daughter Laura, another term means another topic.

When I was that age, a topic was a simple, self-driven task: four sheets of paper to fill on a set subject, the next on the list set by the teacher. I can see now that these topics were time-fillers, to occupy the brighter pupils who had completed all the workcards while the others caught up. I remember vividly picking bits of pebbledash off my suburban semi-detached house to sellotape on to my rather literal interpretation of the topic “My Home”.

These days, it’s not so simple. The modern topic is a whole-class, cross-curricular activity in which a single theme unites the many subjects to be taught throughout the term. Picture the topic a the spider at the heart of its web, the focal point of many subject strands woven cleverly together. The whole is definitely much greater than the sum of the parts. The result is a fun learning experience, leading to a broad, balanced outlook on life that I wish I’d had at Laura’s age (or indeed, now).

Last term, for example, Laura’s topic was on World War II. I was astonished at how dextrously this sombre subject was presented to capture her young imagination. And capture her imagination it certainly did. The class didn’t want the term to end.

“I think this is probably the best topic I’ll ever do in my life, Mummy,” she declared at half term.

Digging for victory in the school’s new vegetable garden and comparing the effectiveness of different materials for black-out ticked the science box. Writing speeches for Churchill, composing propaganda slogans and drafting newspaper reports covered literacy. Calculating the best use of their sweet ration was about as compelling a numeracy task as you can get. Swing dance was a popular PE session and learning catchy war-time songs went down well for music. One of Laura’s friends spent most of a playdate at our house singing “We’ll be hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line” at the top of her voice, with as much enthusiasm as any pop song.

I’m not sure what part of the National Curriculum was served by sitting under their desks for half hour for a mock air raid, but it’s certainly a lesson they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Ever the dutiful parent, I conscripted my parents to visit Laura’s class to talk about their experiences as evacuees from London, my father having been helpfully sent to the Cotswolds. Indeed his wartime love affair with the area (and one Dorothy Duckett) is what led me to live here myself. He brought his own children back for summer holidays and I vividly remember deciding when I was about Laura’s age that this was where I would live when I grew up.

To give some airtime to all sides, I also invited an elderly German friend, contemporary with my parents, to write the class a letter about her own experiences of evaculation to the German countryside. Many of her neighbours were killed in British air raids and she has suffered from claustrophobia ever since her numerous trips to the air raid shelter. An old Dutch school friend of mine recounted his mother’s experience of Nazi occupied Holland. Her greatest trauma was losing her mother and her home to an American (yes, an American) bomb. Friendly fire: it happened then too.

But just when I think the World War II topic has drawn to a close, and I’m packing for our summer holidays, I’m taken aback by Laura’s request to divert the itinerary. She thinks our leisurely tour of France in our camper van should now wander east: she wants us to annex Germany. I’d be less keen to change our plans, had I not overheard a game that she was playing with friends one afternoon towards the end of term. The trampoline had become a Nazi concentration camp, in which Laura and two of her friends were imprisoned. A fourth friend was playing the role of a German soldier. Fetching some glasses of squash from the kitchen, she shouted at them “Here, drink this slime, prisoners!” In the interests of international relations, I think I’d better take her there to make some German friends. But while we’re there, I don’t think I’ll mention the war.

(This post was originally written for the Tetbury Advertiser, September 2011)

Travel

Reliving History in Northern France

Posted on August 27, 2011March 9, 2013 by Debbie Young

La Coupole, the war museum near St Omer, France (Image by Charles D P Miller via Flickr)

Pottering southwards from Dunkerque on our French odyssey this summer, we take the opportunity to revisit a memorable tourist attraction near St Omer.

La Couple is a remarkable structure: a domed, semi-underground cavern that would serve well as a film set for the lair for a James Bond villain. But it was the real life setting of a far greater horror. It’s a Nazi military bunker, built to house and launch the revolutionary V2 bombs on London.

The museum has a particular significance for me. The London suburb in which I spent my childhood was a target for V2 bombs. I remember my grandma telling me that the most frightening thing about them was when they went silent: that meant they were about to hit the ground.

My eight year old daughter Laura has just finished a school topic about World War II. She and her classmates enjoyed it so much that they did not want the term to end. We’re hoping the museum will complement her topic nicely, but I quickly realise that its displays are more horrific than I had remembered.

Fortunately some of the significance goes over Laura’s head. She laughs at the spectacle of a slide show projected on a pocked and pitted rough brick wall, thinking it makes a funny cinema screen. It’s actually a reconstruction of a squad’s wall against which many French citizens met their death. She looks askance at a coarse stripey suit in a glass case: it offends her developing sense of fashion. I don’t want to explain that someone may have died in this suit: it’s the uniform of a concentration camp prisoner.

Watching films of French refugees heading south on foot, pushing sparse possessions in handcarts and wheelbarrows, I wonder what it would have been like if we’d been part of that procession. What would Laura have wanted to take with her? She’s not good at travelling light. Seven cuddly toys have somehow stowed away in the camper van this holiday, although I’d told her to bring only two.

Then I remember an assignment she did at school. Her class had to plan what they’d have taken in their suitcases,had they been evacuees. No doubt many of them will have included modern luxuries such as ipods and XBoxes. Not so Laura. She thoughtfully showed her favourite cuddly toy (so she’d have something to comfort her at night), a notebook and pen (in case she got bored), and her diabetes test kit. She drew a neat and accurate illustration of the lancets, test strips and a blood glucose monitor that we use many times a day to manage her Type 1 diabetes.

I realise with a start that to be among those French refugees would almost certainly have sentenced Laura to death, not from Nazi atrocities, but from her diabetes. Her complex medical needs, such as refrigeration for her insulin, and supplies for her high-tech insulin pump, could never have been met on such a journey.

Suddenly Gordon and I find ourselves making excuses to leave the museum before she is ready to go. As we march across the car park back to the safety of our camper van, I hug my daughter a little tighter, patting the test kit in my handbag for reassurance. La Coupole is indeed an extraordinary monument, but as it recedes into the shadows behind us, I do not for a moment glance back.