My Parents Didn’t Remember Their First Meeting.
I believe this story had its beginning in 1916, during the First World War. My father, then about ten years old, was with a young friend when an air raid began.
Although those were not a ferocious as the Second World War raids, they could still pose a threat to civilians not in any shelter. A passing policeman guided my dad and his pal into a doorway of a yard that had a roof over the entrance. This, he hoped, would provide some shelter from any falling bombs.
Apart from the police officer and the two boys, there were three other people under that doorway. A young mother with two children, both girls, one was aged eight and another, in a push chair aged four. My dad remembers that the young woman was understandably distressed and scared of the safety of her young girls.
The air raid passed without any harm to anyone, and all the occupants of that doorway went their separate ways.
We now fast forward twenty-three years or so. There is much talk of air raids as the Second World War had begun. My dad told his mother-in-law of the story of his air raid experience in the earlier war, and the place where they had taken shelter.
When my grandmother checked the dates and location of his story, it transpired that the young woman with the two children was her, and the older of the two girls was my mother.
My parents had actually met when they were young children. But they didn’t know it at the time.
The reason the conversation had turned to air-raids was my grandmother had a morbid fear of them.
Of course, this could have been the result of her experience of the raid years before.
But it could have been a premonition.
In September 1940, she was killed in an air raid on London.
She died with her twelve-year-old son, and dozens of other women and children, in an air raid shelter in Essex Road Islington.
This happened years before I was born, and obviously I never knew my grandmother.
I have an early photograph of her, and I can see echoes of her face in my oldest daughter.
My grandmother was famous for her fiery temper. So is her great granddaughter.
