Dunkirk Spirit

THURSDAY 28th MAY 2020

This is an e-mail I have sent to my local MP.

Will you please add my name to your list of people within the constituency who say they have lost all faith in Boris Johnson to lead our nation through the current crisis and are calling for both himself and Dominic Cummings to resign.

I hope I do not receive a reply, I know it will make me angry.

NOW TO IMPORTANT THINGS: We have recently celebrated seventy-five years since D Day. We are coming up to eighty years since Dunkirk.  I was born in 1950 so have no memories of wartime Britain. However my parents and grandparents had memories, memories and memories. My grandmother took her daughters, my Mum and her sister, to welcome the troops coming back in to London from Dunkirk.

As a child I was fascinated by wartime memories, not so much the stories and memories my family shared but the spirit of national unity which came through it all. As a teenager I was not respectful of those who had fought and died for their country, no teenager was. At school we were never told what the roll of honour in the assembly hall was, we thought it was something to do with winning prizes but did not understand why it stopped at 1945. Leaving school and becoming a management trainee in a vast department store I did not think it right that the passenger lifts were operated by men with bits of their arms and legs missing. I thought it did not meet the store's standards of dress and deportment. Bits of arms and legs lost by teenagers in both world wars.

Today's generation is far better than we were. Far more respectful.

How many decades have I got left in my life ?  A couple, a few years more but that is all.  I think that I should write down the memories I have of the stories people told me: Memories of Wartime Memories.

Personally I have no recollection of Te Korean War (25 Jun 1950 – 27 Jul 1953) but know my mother feared my father being called up to fight.  I have vivid memories of The Vietnam War although Britain kept out of that one. The Cold War dominated my early life and much of my early adult life. The Falklands War, The Gulf War - both of them, I have my memories.

I am currently working on a writing project telling through my memories how a vast area of North Buckinghamshire was developed into a new city, the New City of Milton Keynes but it never was awarded city status. My writing project is titled MILTON DREAMS THE CITY THAT NEVER WAS. Yesterday I wrote two chapters in 1,572 words. As soon as I have finished this blog I will write chapter three which is bursting to come out of my head.

This will be a lot of fun for me and a follow up to a book I published in 1993, Not The Concrete Cows (A Kaleidoscope through the New City of Milton Keynes). I think I may even make a few quid from it but more importantly, far more important in every way will be MEMORIES OF WARTIME MEMORIES. I will get started on this immediately I have finished my current project.