My Grandmother Josephine
by Pepita Barton - 13
She lived a life no one could have experienced today. The distress of World War two had brought out the most bitter of situations; and at the age of three my Grandma was sent to boarding school; her parents with little time to accommodate her. Kept safe for decades, I watch her take the three log books she has so carefully stored and finger through the thick sheets telling when and where her father had served. Dated to 1946, documentations of all her father’s flight training hours and the myriad missions that he went on, including planes that he flew, Hurricane, Spitfire and Typhoon.
As one of three children, the daughter of a disinterested mother and a father broken by all he had witnessed, she experienced a life where self-sufficiency was imperative. Although born just after the war it had taken its toll on my grandmother Josephine through the huge impact on my great-grandfather. Horrific emotions and memories which countless wished they could just forget lingered in their minds, an untamable beast. Her father, a gentlemanly but strict character, dapper, with strong ethical values, had soon become short tempered, depressed & remote. As a youngster, she didn’t realise he was contending with his own retention of war and injuries. What she understood was distance: ‘When my parents came to school I didn’t even recognise them, they had been gone for so long.’
Despite this, she looks at the books through a lens of fondness and offers them up with pride. Her compassion was born through her understanding of her father’s experiences, which she gained from the looping ink laid out on the flaxen pages. The log books capture the actions that shaped so much of my grandmother’s isolation and melancholy, yet ironically, they provided a pathway for reconciliation and understanding.
by Pepita Barton - 13
She lived a life no one could have experienced today. The distress of World War two had brought out the most bitter of situations; and at the age of three my Grandma was sent to boarding school; her parents with little time to accommodate her. Kept safe for decades, I watch her take the three log books she has so carefully stored and finger through the thick sheets telling when and where her father had served. Dated to 1946, documentations of all her father’s flight training hours and the myriad missions that he went on, including planes that he flew, Hurricane, Spitfire and Typhoon.
As one of three children, the daughter of a disinterested mother and a father broken by all he had witnessed, she experienced a life where self-sufficiency was imperative. Although born just after the war it had taken its toll on my grandmother Josephine through the huge impact on my great-grandfather. Horrific emotions and memories which countless wished they could just forget lingered in their minds, an untamable beast. Her father, a gentlemanly but strict character, dapper, with strong ethical values, had soon become short tempered, depressed & remote. As a youngster, she didn’t realise he was contending with his own retention of war and injuries. What she understood was distance: ‘When my parents came to school I didn’t even recognise them, they had been gone for so long.’
Despite this, she looks at the books through a lens of fondness and offers them up with pride. Her compassion was born through her understanding of her father’s experiences, which she gained from the looping ink laid out on the flaxen pages. The log books capture the actions that shaped so much of my grandmother’s isolation and melancholy, yet ironically, they provided a pathway for reconciliation and understanding.
