| Unhappy homecoming |
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| Written by Julie Summers, 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Past passionFor Amy Clifford the war had a very different effect on her life. Married in 1941 to a man she described as being so infatuated by her that she couldn't shake him off, she had two children in quick succession before he was sent out to Italy. "William had been all over Italy, in that country full of treasures, but he never wrote about them to me.He never wrote to say he loved me and complained in his few letters that he had nothing to tell me. I used to tell him all about the girls and their goings-on. My husband seemed to be a different man when he came home. "Where was the love?" I asked myself. Whatever he had felt for me when we first met, he had got over by the time he came home five years later." Amy was not daunted by this apparent lack of love. She was a cheerful person, she said, always had been, so she determined to rebuild their lives and found a pre-fabricated house through the St Pancras housing office where she, William and the girls lived for nine years from 1946. William had been working for Shell before the war and his job had been held open for him. He used to earn £7.00 a week, Amy remembered, and one week he was late giving her money for the rent on the pre-fab. When she asked him about it he accused her of nagging him. "Well, when he came home I hit him over the head with a frying pan. He never made me wait for my rental money again!" In the end Amy and William were married for half a century and the war became merely an episode in their long marriage, but it was nevertheless a disturbing one and it had upset the balance of their relationship, which seems to have been cured by, amongst other things, Amy's enthusiasm for life and her cast iron frying pan. Today there is much more help available for returning men and their womenfolk back home. Lessons have been learned and issues of reconciliation and readjustment are discussed far more openly than ever they were in the late 1940s. Still the homecoming is not always easy. Many feel ignored and abandoned by the general public. They are returning from conflicts that have been high-profile in the media but of which a section of the public does not approve. Their problems are different but the readjustment to family life is just as important. From this little-studied but vital era in our recent history we have a lot to learn, both in order to understand the past and to prepare for the future. Julie Summers is a biographer and historian living in Oxford. The author of several previous books including Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2000); Remembered, A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (Merrell, 2007) and The Colonel of Tamarkan, Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai (Simon & Schuster 2005), she also gives regular talks to the WI in Oxfordshire. More details at www.juliesummers.co.uk. Stranger in the House will be published by Simon & Schuster on 1 September 2008. |
