The Cost of War
One Boxing Day, Mr & Mrs Woolf received a telegram. During the war this was always a dreaded moment and indeed when they opened it, the RAF said that their son Stan was missing. He had joined the RAF as soon as he was able and became a flight engineer. He had trained in the UK and served in the Gold Coast prior to joining bomber command. He flew in Lancaster bombers which were like the more popular Wellington bombers except that the Lancaster had a twin tail plane. Aunty Woolf who was then 44 went grey very rapidly and this was attributed to the shock and stress of the news.
Families hoped their loved ones would be rescued from the sea, or picked up by the Resistance. No one knew where Stan's aircraft was lost. As time passed there is a hope the Red Cross would eventually discover the crew were prisoners of war. If nothing happens for a year you received the next telegram. In the case of Stan this simply said, “Missing for a year and now presumed dead”. By post the contents of his locker were returned which included personal possessions. Some while after this, medals were awarded posthumously and sent to his parents.
This, of course, is what happened to many thousands of others but it had a devastating effect upon Mr & Mrs Woolf. One could almost say she never recovered and she harboured a bitterness than never diminished. For example, St. Augustine's church in Rumney erected a Memorial to the fallen, but his parents did not want his name appended; in fact his name was included but his parents took no part in any Memorial service and would accept no help or consolation from the many people and organisations who in those years were comforting bereaved families.
In the first world war, his father, Vic Woolf had suffered severely in the trenches and almost lost a leg to gunshot wounds and gangrene. He survived, but after repeated surgery ended up with a shorten leg and always wore a surgical boot to correct this. That generation were doubly damaged by the consequence of wars, and you can understand their reluctance to forgive and forget. Both father and son's medals remained together in the same small brown cardboard box and were treasured, privately, until Aunty Woolf's death four decades later.
During the second world war my father and Uncle from next door were too old for military service, but served in the ARP. Another lesser known fact is that women were directed to work by the Ministry. My mother was exempt because she had a child under school age, but “Aunty” next door became secretary to her husband and did the administration work of his territory, instead of the head office in London doing that. This was at a period when women, with a few exceptions, gave up work on marrying as that was the custom. It shows the strain of those days when you remember Aunty next door did not want to work, but had no exemption as she no longer had a son.
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I knew none of this, nor of the constraints and restrictions of wartime regulations. As a child you don't know what you've missed whereas my parents thought I was deprived by having a limited diet. After the war bananas, cream and chips were a disappointment to me, as they'd been over-hyped. Real cream was not as sweet as evaporated or condensed milk, and chips were simply filled with potato.
You don't hear of powdered egg nowadays, but it was available during the war when eggs were very scarce. Cakes made with margarine and powdered eggs were the norm and I knew no different. Sweets were rationed, and again we knew no different, so an occasional bar of plain milk chocolate was highly prized and obesity was never a problem with the under-fives.
Children were less affected by the second world war than adults. We understood nothing of those troubles that affected adults, like food rationing, restricted travel, lack of information, traumatic news of deaths and the very real likelihood that we would lose and be defeated and subjugated by the enemy.
My childhood was no less happy than those who were ten years younger or ten years older than me.
Very soon after victory was declared, my sister arrived home. She was a 16-year-old and I hardly knew her. As I was just eight, to my eyes she was an adult, yet as time passed we were drawn together again. She returned to South Africa to marry in 1953 and remained there for the rest of hr life. I wonder how many other brides wedded across continents as the population readjusted after the war.