I was born a few years after the end of the Second World War, and my parents are both dead now, so I think it is very important to record what I can remember of what they told me about the War, before it is lost forever.
When I was young, there were still many, many men around who had served in the First World War, then suddenly, without my realising it, they were nearly all gone. If only there had been something like this around to enable them and the women who were around then to record their memories.
My mother was three when the First World War started, and she told me that she could remember being in the cellar of their house in North London, and hearing the rumbling buzz of a Zeppelin going over. I have only just remembered that while I was writing this. And my father and his sister and brothers lived on the Isle of Sheppey during the First World War, because his father was a locomotive engineer who worked in Sheerness Dockyard. I've got his dockyard pass which says that he was doing war work and should be treated like a member of the forces. There was an American base on Sheppey then, my father told me.
But this is about the Second World War. I was recently reading a book about how Romans and Romanized Britons lived in Britain during the Second Century AD. Much of it was based on letters written on wooden tablets which Romans wrote to each other in the Second Century and have been found in the remains of forts on Hadrian's Wall. Imagine how interesting personal accounts of WW2 will be to people eighteen hundred years hence, if they survive in some form.
I do a lot of family history research as a hobby, and so realise how invaluable this sort of information will be to future family history researchers. Background information, and discriptions of actual events bring it all to life and tell you something about your ancestors. Much better than just the bald dates of births, deaths and marriages.
I often think how marvelous it would have been if my great grandmother had written down everything she knew about her parents, grandparents and great grandparents, and it had survived. She was born in 1850, so that could have taken me back to 1700!
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