War Effort

So cast your mind back.  It’s Hull, sometime in 1940s war time Britain.   Much of the city was tormented by bombs.  More than 1,000 hours were spent under alert during raids across the war period with at least1,200 people killed. So it was normal for the air raid sirens to swear into the night, and families to pour into shelters and hope, against hope, that all would still be standing when they flicked into day time hours.  The air was thick with smoke from the falling masonry and debris. 


Out of this, emerged a man I never met but who has cast a benign shadow over who I am and what I’ve become.  My grandfather.  I have never even seen a picture of him, although I imagine him like my father: tall and willowy with film-star, slicked back hair dark but not black. A sort of Lincolnshire Rhett Butler.  A man with swagger and swash-buckling style (although the reality might have been somewhat different.) I am shaped by his absence because when folk die young they leave a kind of residue, a sort of promise of what they might have done: instead of fading away, or being subject to a shocking reduction as age weighs down even the most brilliant of souls. It seems you become what you’re not anymore unless you’re lucky and you’ve money and even then, even then, you cannot defeat aging’s relentless march - you cannot persuade fragility to bi-pass.   If you die young, you die with what you could have become still open to speculation, as though life continues in some alternative universe. 



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