Simple Heroism

Crikey me, what ever is occurring? I haven't blogged since Thursday.
Oh well.
Britain is getting the snow she so richly deserves, would have been nice to be there for that, even Pompey has had a few flakes I gather. The grandkids have been able to taste snowflakes and have been unduly influenced by me in other ways. Not radical acts of feminism as you were probably thinking, but Teddy is now picking up things with his toes and they describe food as 'yummers'.

My current reading material is filling a few gaps in my education - the real education from school days. In history, we learnt about everything up until the Cold War, except that I'm now finding we didn't learn too much detail. Well, I s'pose that's fair enough, there's an incredible amount of British History and a startling number of sea battles.

Andrew Marr's book 'A History of Modern Britain', explains a few things to me, things which perhaps should have been glaringly obvious, and yet weren't. The Second World War pretty much bankrupted Britain. I think we just take for granted the extraordinary war effort from our parents' and grandparents' generations. We know how resources were scarce and everything was thrown in to stopping Nazi German from taking over Europe.

At the same time, Britain was still responsible for and administering various parts of the Empire, and this too was a tremendous drain. But the shortages didn't stop as soon as the war was over, in fact it got worse.
In 1947 even bread was rationed - something that apparently had not happened even during the war - and you could only turn your heaters on at certain times of the day. Severe weather came in from Siberia (as it is doing right now), bringing exceptionally low temperatures and deep snow. The country almost came to a standstill. The mines could not be worked, nor coal moved, workers could not get to London, Scotland was totally cut off from the rest of Britain and even television, admittedly in its infancy and not available to all anyway, was suspended.

Having lived through not only the war, but this sort of deprivation, it was no wonder that our parents would not tolerate pickiness over food and that habits of thrift, recycling and conservation never really died within the country.

We were brought up on stories of heroism, but what it would take many more years to understand was that heroism did not mean just the achievements of Florence Nightingale and Biggles, but of every woman, man and child who lived honourably through those years.

Makes me proud. Proud to have come from such an extraordinary nation.
And it makes me ashamed. Ashamed that I never realised quite how extraordinary those people, the ordinary people, my parents and relatives and my friends' parents and relatives were.