I had a very mild-mannered and quiet uncle. Everything about him was understated and self-effacing. While his wife sat and pontificated at family gatherings he would be in the kitchen, bringing out tea and generally deferring to her opinions and instructions. I have some very happy memories of time spent with them. I can’t remember when or why we were discussing VE Day, but it could have been 30 years ago. In one of his most sustained monologues all of three sentences long, quietly uttered as a background and hardly meant to be heard, he mentioned that on VE Day he was fighting the Japanese in the Burmese Jungle. I recall being stunned at hearing this. He related how they were walking through the jungle hunting Japanese soldiers and came across a clearing. In the clearing someone had placed a blackboard and chalked on it the news that the war was over in Europe. His third and final sentence was, “ We thought, ‘So what!’.” The War wasn’t over for them.
On the 75th Anniversary of VE Day, I’m thinking of this gentle uncle in the heat of a disease-ridden Burmese jungle, with bush hat, khaki shorts and fixed bayonet unaware and indifferent to the bunting and street-parties of Europe. Much is being made today of the fact that we are in exceptional circumstance celebrating exceptional circumstances. There is of course the danger of comparing VE Day with the lifting of the lockdown, the former a clear victory and a cessation of fighting an enemy, the latter a tentative move towards living alongside an active embedded enemy, more like a terrorist.
In this house we’ve been so removed from the pulses of life that until earlier this week we hadn’t really been aware of the impending VE Day celebrations. We’d noticed a few flags along with the rainbows in the windows and someone had mentioned Friday as a bank holiday, a statement we had dismissed because that someone is often wrong about things. Then we saw the decorations up around the Black Swan and realised something was really afoot. Normally there would have been all sorts of street parties and events in Crich around the pubs, Glebe and Comrades Club and the fact that everything is so muted is so untypical of our village. The main thing for me was would the bins be emptied on Friday, the bins as always being the main benchmark for registering public occasions. I checked the annual schedule distributed by Amber Valley Council every year and was surprised that this VE Day bank holiday was indeed marked and had been there as a sort of under-tow all the time. Now I find all sorts of celebrations are planned locally and in the media – and we hadn’t noticed. This is a mark of how locked down in mind as well as in body we are. Anyway, we found a couple of limp Union Jacks left over from some previous Royal occasion and stuck them in the fence. It’s the only time I’ve ever flown a Union Jack but felt this was somehow a recognition of our life span – born into rationing, austerity and constraint and now, 70 years later, again in rationing, austerity and restraint, though in a far more comfortable regime. Shortages at the moment seem to comprise hair-clippers and elastic.
I now remember that Crich Standard was going to feature VE Day and I had an article in mind, so here it is. If you take the path through the parish graveyard that leads from the lane to Clay’s Barn, on your right a little lower is a Commonwealth War Grave for Dorothy Travis Walker of the RAF, killed 27th May 1945. I was quite shaken when I first saw that inscription – two intriguing facts: a woman in the RAF and her death just 19 days after VE Day. I’m grateful to Peter Patilla, out archivist on tap, for filling in the details. They can all be found on the Crich Parish website http://www.crichparish.co.uk/newwebpages/walkerdorothytravis.html . In brief, she was killed in a car crash and the driver of the car in which she was travelling was convicted of dangerous driving. By her appearance in her photographs she was an attractive, lively and fun loving young woman and it's those pictures that have informed the poem I wrote about her. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that her father,
Percy Travis Walker, the Crich postmaster, had been a prisoner of war in WW1 and had been reported missing. As if this family hadn’t gone through enough already because of war. There is a lovely picture of him, his wife and little Dorothy under his name on the website. The Ripley and Heanor News for November 11th 1949 reported a set of bookshelves dedicated to her memory being presented to St.Mary’s Church. In my role of Church Warden, standing ready to hand out hymn books in a moment when there were no takers, my eye landed on that dedication. For years I had been handing out hymn books from those very bookshelves and never noticed it. I’ve often wondered about that story – her life in the RAF, that outing in the car, the effect on her family. It reminds us of all the collateral griefs that spin off these dreadful historical events that are not recorded in the annals of war.
LEADING AIRCRAFT WOMAN DOROTHY TRAVIS WALKER
You surprised me by being here, A tuft of grass drawn up against the morning And cold sunlight on your headstone.
Not that you dead should surprise us On this slope of tussocks and tumbling monuments Leaning towards the sky:
Dorothy Travis Walker of the RAF, Leading Aircraft Woman surprised by death Two weeks after the end of the War.
So what are you doing here lying with the men Who dug themselves into the earth Or fell flaming from the skies?
Your story wrapped in the mounds of time But, in elegant Commonwealth War Dead Portland Stone, Is equal to the thinly moustached, dash of the Spitfire dead.
Like the chap on whose knee you sit in the picture, Your arm across his shoulder, grinning, Your hair piled up and carefree.
And laughing you probably were too When Eric White distracted drove you into that lorry And killed you as the light faded that May night in Oulton.
Your father, Percy, on leave, posed and fixed Proud with Edith and you on her knee, Was more used to the flash and puff as the camera fired.
Edith, Postmistress in Crich, dispensing countless messages of misery; Then Percy missing, prisoner of war. Family used to bad news But not that midnight knocking on the door.
In St.Mary's a little brass plaque on the bookshelves Dedicated to you at the back of the church, Percy, Edith and sister Joan sadly remembering your smile.
The years have been drawn across your laugh Muted and dulled by time and forgetfulness
Where the old prayer books gather dust in the shadows.
Now your name is a query on a gravestone With the green algae creeping upward Over ‘Sleep on Brave Heart.’
Sorry to have disturbed you.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Once again, through and under all the current circumstances, the community has been driving on remembering and celebrating and being a community.
I’ve been watching the old newsreels of VE Day on TV and wondering how my parents might have celebrated. It wouldn’t have been together, for Dad was somewhere in Italy. My parents were married in December 1939, then they had to put their lives on lockdown hold for 6 years. For four of those years they didn’t see each other at all – a story repeated thousands of times over. Goodness knows what the end of a 6 year suspension of life was like, how long it took to reach a ‘new normality’, how easy was it to celebrate surviving when neighbouring families had lost loved ones?
It’s a very salutary lesson for us.