“They’ll be back soon.” I tried to fill the silence that had followed David’s monologue. I had been fascinated and moved by the story but it had obviously been difficult for David as he faced up to losing the woman I now understood so much better. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
David sounded very old and tired as he replied “No, Annie, don’t leave me alone. Let me talk. If I talk I cannot think.”
I wondered what we should talk about, perhaps something less personal, perhaps I could learn more about his work.
“You said you knew the Second World War was inevitable?” David half shook his head as if bringing himself back to the present and eventually answering with his voice, once again, strong and confident.
“Before the First War we knew there was conflict coming and the powers in the land prepared for it even though we had no idea what the horrors were to be. Ten years later why didn’t we acknowledge the same signals? Some of us did.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
“It is so easy for your generation, with the benefit of hindsight, to ask that.”
“You saw it coming why didn’t you do anything about it?”
“We did.” David corrected himself. “Some of us did.”
“Wasn’t it in your minds every minute of the day, every day?”
“Some of us did see it coming, some of us were worn down with fear and dread, some of us did have it on our minds every minute of every day. But only a few of us did anything about it.” He sounded very bitter. “You and your generation don’t have to imagine the destruction of that war, you’ve seen the endless television programmes and films,” David looked across at me, and smiled sadly “but at that time we had no idea what it would be like. No idea at all. We knew there would be a war but we imagined a war like the previous one, with men fighting away from home, few dying on home soil, the dead being listed in tight columns in the newspapers, carefully arranged by rank and surname, but life for the vast majority of the population passing more or less normally. We couldn’t have imagined how different this war was going to be.”
“We shouldn’t judge people in history,” I suggested tentatively, continuing when I realised I had David’s attention “because we know what happens?”
“Thank you Annie, thank you for recognising that. We had a saying in our department ‘Do not judge us too harshly for things we could not know.’
“I’ve heard that.” I recognised the phrase. I had a vague recollection of Ted using it and also my father and, since they were both lawyers, I had assumed it was some kind of legal phrase probably translated from Latin.
“Bear that in mind, Annie. Too many people don’t.”
“Did the fear of war hanging over you affect everything in your lives?”
“Certainly for some of my generation the answer would have to be ‘yes’.”
“Did you fear it?”
“Yes indeed I did. From the very end of the Great War there were some of us who recognised what was going to happen. We knew the German people would never accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. They had been dictated by short-sighted politicians seeking re-election and it seemed obvious they would lead directly to another war. The people seemed unaware, believing that those politicians would not lead us into another conflagration. It was our job to prepare as well as we could.”
“Our job?” I interrupted.
“The government, the services.”
“But you weren’t in the government or the forces.”
“No, strictly speaking I wasn’t, but I was in a position to watch and influence. Any information that could have led to fear was suppressed. It was important that young men worked to achieve their ambitions despite the fact that we knew their careers would be truncated. We had to make sure they didn’t know that their world had such a very short time left.”
“So you let people live in a fools’ paradise?”
“There was no alternative. What would have happened if woman had known there was to be a war in 20 years time?” David continued without giving me time to answer. “They would not have had children, they would not have had the next generation of cannon fodder. There were few enough men around to be fathers anyway and there were serious concerns in government that the birth rate would drop so low that there wouldn’t be enough young men to allow us to fight the war when it came.”
“That is awful.” I couldn’t believe a government could be so cynical.
“I’m afraid that was what we were required to do. They wouldn’t rearm, they wouldn’t invest in developing modern techniques of war. In our department we did what we could, quietly and without fuss, but also without any support.”
I was intrigued. I had never thought of the world my mother and grandparents had grown up in.
“What did you do?”
David was about to answer when we both heard voices and David leant forward, put his hand on my knee and spoke quickly. “Annie, you will learn many things in the next years. Some of the knowledge will not be comfortable, you must approach your work with no pre-conceptions. Just because we are your family does not make what we did right. What you learn, and what you do with that knowledge, I leave in your hands.”
What David said just made me want to learn more but I had no chance to ask anything further.
Maureen had arrived home and, judging from the look in her eyes, she did not bring good news.