Wartime/Peacetime - A world-view in itself!
I was born in 1952. I had an older sister, born 1945, one of the big first wave of the post-war baby boom. I was part of the second wave. At school me and most of my class had older siblings.
As a small child growing up in the 50s I spent, seemingly, interminable hours in smoke-filled living rooms, packed to the gunnels with old, grey aunties and uncles. My dad was born in 1922, the youngest of six, with ten years separating him from number five - definitely a 'mistake', as my gran once confided to my mum, absolutely not an afterthought!! For such a big family the six offspring were surprisingly un-prolific, producing only three kids in total - me, my big sister, and one even older cousin. So family gatherings on Boxing Days, Easter, etc consisted primarily of 'old' people, a couple of teenagers maybe, and little me scampering around rooms filled with sedentary human forms, periodically being told mum to calm down.
So, you get the picture. Virtually everyone present at these family gatherings had lived through WWII as an adult. This piece isn't so much about WHAT they were talking about - I was just a kid getting bored and fidgety, neither understanding nor much noticing what the grown-ups were saying. It's more an overarching impression of the way that wartime generation talked - HOW they viewed life.
Many reminiscences sprang directly from the war, but even when they didn't, the war still formed a backdrop to conversation, contextualising what was being said. Typically some auntie or uncle might be talking about the local bus service or the beef they'd got from the butchers last week. Invariably the collective discussion would conclude that however unsatisfactory it is now in peacetime, it's definitely worse in wartime. And here the tense they used was important. Although the war had ended more than ten years previous, it was still broadly referred to in the present tense, as if war always lurked as a possibility - In peacetime 'this' is how things are. In wartime 'that' is how things ARE (not 'were').
Any of us, today, might wake up and look out of the window. In the course of our lives we will be greeted with cold, dark, wet mornings. Also we will see warm, bright, sunny mornings. Similarly for them, some days dawned in wartime, and there'd be peacetime sunrises too. Even the very expressions 'peacetime' and 'wartime' implied a sense of 'now', or perhaps tomorrow.
We can't be too surprised at this world-view. My parent's generation was born in peace, had gone to war, and now there was peace again. The same had been true of their parents' generation with the Great War. So the previous fifty years had been a dichotomy, a toggle switch, a binary condition - Peace/War/Peace/War. It must have felt like that was the natural, alternating state of things. And as they viewed little me, careering around the painstakingly prepared tea, set out on the table, they probably wondered where and when I would be called upon to 'do my bit', as they'd been required to do in WWII.
If those long-departed grown-ups ever feared for my future, they needn't have worried. I've now reached age 71 without having to do my (or anyone else's) 'bit'! There have been wars, vicious wars, and they continue today. The smug, the complacent, and the frankly don't-give-a-s**ts may comfort themselves, thinking that wars today are largely contested between far-away peoples who neither look nor sound like 'us'. And perhaps we now view life through the lens of different dichotomies - pre-lockdown/post-lockdown, pre-Brexit/post-Brexit, prosperity/insecurity, housed/homeless(?).
Today the expressions 'peacetime' and 'wartime' have fallen into disuse, understandably for a nation that in the last eighty years has known only 'peace', for want of a better term. We don't take credit for that, and neither should we. We've just been lucky.
I don't mourn the disappearance of a peacetime/wartime world-view. It was born out of bad, uncertain circumstances. I simply record its existence and its passing.
