In Rememberance (2021)
Drifting with the Current
“I’m not doing that for half a crown! It’s sixpence extra.”
Have you ever watched yourself making love?
Why am I even asking? This is… 2021, is it? You’ve probably filmed yourself with your telephone, and used an internet to let other people watch you. But imagine you’re living in the ’40s. The 1940s, not the 2040s; you don’t want to imagine living in the 2040s. If you make it to the ’40s, remember things will get better. Someone told me 2047 was the turning point. Hang on until then if you can.
Sorry, I wandered. That’s how I live now, wandering from one year to another, one thought to another. I was going to tell you about the war. Things were different. There weren’t any internets, so if you wanted to watch people make love you needed to be a peeping Tom, and to argue with someone in another country you had to actually go there. Some of our young men did that in ’39. They went to the continent, my husband among them. Many of those boys made it back in little boats; Frank wasn’t among them. We had rationing, bombs, poverty, fear, and loneliness. Mostly loneliness for me, with a little poverty and one life-changing bomb.
The bomb fell in 1942, the year the Americans arrived. The Yanks had chocolate, and confidence, and…
