Amplify: My grandmother’s wartime childhood home, eight decades on

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Irene Galea is a business reporter for The Globe and Mail.

Eighty years ago, my grandmother watched from her backyard as a German fighter plane hurtled down the valley behind her house and plunged toward the English Channel.

“He was so close, we could actually see his face,” she says. We look down the sloping depression in the landscape. A wide road now runs through its base, toward the core of Brighton, England, a coastal city south of London.

This June, my grandparents and I spent a week at the seaside resort city and, for the first time in 60 years, my grandmother returned to the home of her childhood and gazed out at the distant sloping treeline. Possibly, the pilot was on his way back from a dogfight or surveillance mission over London, she said. Likely, he didn’t make it. He was flying too low.

My grandmother, Carol, spent the first two decades of her life in this house, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1940, the pebbled shore was mined and laid with barbed wire for fear of a German seaborne invasion. For the first years of her childhood, V-1 missiles whined overhead.

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When we found the house and explained her connection to it, the current owner welcomed us inside. Once, a table-like Morrison bomb shelter took up a third of the living room. Now, the same space is scattered with toys.

My grandmother paused here and there, a little breathless, as we walked through the house. Out on the deck, she said, is where her aunt sat and sewed. That corner, that’s where her uncle sat listening to the radio. Upstairs, she shared a room with her grandmother.

“I’m happy to think it’s not fundamentally changed,” she said, as we left.

For a century, my relatives lived in that house. They’re still there, in a way.

Seeing Brighton with my grandmother has helped me see that faraway world, and how it shaped her. In postwar council-estate England, she watched as the adults in her life – and especially her aunt – wasted nothing and made do. Visiting Brighton helped me understand the origins of the qualities I have always seen in her: resourcefulness, attention to style and manners, and curiosity about the world.

As my grandparents and I walked the seafront that week, I pictured her whooshing along, roller skates clacking over the pavement, red hair streaming out behind her. By the time she was a teen, the Georgian city had shaken off much of its wartime shadow. Faded fishing boats and holidaymakers returned to the beaches, my grandmother with them. That’s when she developed her great love of swimming and the sea.

But there’s a hazard of going back to places you love. Things change in half a century. Her beloved high school is nearly unrecognizable, its adjoining grassy fields obscured with new buildings and concrete sports pads. The hotels are shabbier, the streets dirtier. Those promenades along the water are cracking, their wrought-iron railings rusting and peeling after years of sea air.

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On several occasions, I saw my grandmother searching for the city that she once knew, not finding it.

But this didn’t mar our precious time together. Under flint-punctuated chalk cliffs, the three of us examined shells and cuttlefish bones, and laughed at eager dogs jumping into the waves. Relatives visited, and we had fish and chips by the sea.

Underneath it all, though, I felt an ache. One day, I’ll come back, and my grandparents won’t be here with me.

At sunset on our last day, my grandmother and I walked down to the water and laid our towels on the beach. We plunged into the Channel and floated out together. The calm blue waves blended seamlessly into the sky, the pier a distant black silhouette. The salt stung my eyes and we held hands, finding our footing on the pebbles.

What else we’re thinking about:

My family enjoys playing board and card games that test our knowledge, memory and problem-solving skills. When we go camping, we always bring the classics – a deck of cards, Scrabble and backgammon – and in recent years we’ve started branching out. Here are a few games we’re enjoying that are fun for a group, inexpensive and transportable:

• Anomia: The deck contains cards stamped with a symbol and a category – for instance, types of cheese, guitarists or acronyms. To begin, the cards are evenly divided between all players and kept face down. Players then take turns flipping over cards from their own deck, and when the symbol of their card matches another player’s upturned card, both have to race to think of a word in their opponent’s category. It requires quick thinking, but the categories are broad enough that everyone can play.
• TriBond: The game comes with a deck of cards, each listing three items. Players must find the common “bond” between all three. Some are simple – “light, milk and dark” are all types of chocolate – and some are more complex: “1835, 1910 and 1986,” are all years that Halley’s Comet passed over the Earth. The game requires lateral thinking and is great for sitting around the campfire.
• Animals: No purchase needed for this game for three or more people. Players write the name of an animal on a piece of paper, then pass it around the circle to another player. That player sticks the paper to their forehead without looking at it. Taking turns, players ask yes-or-no questions to guess their animal. You could play with other categories, but we find that animals are the best category because they can be described by their size, method of locomotion, geographic location and taxonomy. Some fun suggestions: anteater, llama, snail and eel.

Marianne

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