1944 to 2014 in what seems like the blink of an eye.

At 7:30am UTC on November 8th, 1944 in the antenatal ward of Hampstead Heath General Hospital,  North-West London, yours truly took his first lung-full of air.

It would be impossible to list all the memorable things that have happened in these last seventy years and, anyway, it would bore your pants off!

So all I want to reflect upon were those first six months, despite me not remembering any moment of them.

For on May 8th, 1945 World War II ended.

Here’s the historic announcement by Sir Winston Churchill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq-zjE1yfDM

The Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of the defeated Third Reich on May 8, 1945. This brought an end to the Second World War in Europe after 2074 days.

My mother, still very much alive at the age of 94, recalls that on hearing that announcement from Churchill she looked down at me and knew her young baby boy wasn’t going to be killed by a German bomb.

By no means was this a theoretical concern of hers. For in much of the preceding months the Germans had been hammering London with their V-1 “Buzz Bombs”. As this historic photograph shows.

 

This bomb landed on a side road off Drury Lane blasted several buildings, including the office of the Daily Herald. Known as the Flying bomb, Buzz bomb or Doodlebug, V-1 was the first modern guided missile used in wartime and the forerunner of today’s cruise missile. The V-1 (and later V-2 ) added a new terror to an already terrible war – robot missiles. Once launched, these weapons flew without human intervention to strike distant targets.

Circumstances meant that my mother was living in North-West London when I was born and that’s where I was brought up for the first two years of my life.  Still remember the address: 17 Burnside Crescent, Alperton, North-West London.

Burnside Crescent was close to factories that were being targeted by the Germans.  That meant that at night my mother and I slept in what was called a Morrison shelter.

As if to underscore the hazards of early-1945 London, the photograph below is of a young boy, Toni Frisell, the sole family survivor from a V-1 bombing in 1945.

So here I am still a living being and still loving my life.

How to close?

By coming all the way forward to modern times and the incredible technology that enables so much. Not just the world of blogging but such things as NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio from where this compelling video was taken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T66tLRR9drY

I wrote about my first six months that were not remembered one jot!

This quote, therefore, seems an apt statement for the end of today’s post.

“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.”

Quote from the author William Gibson