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VE DAY
After the V1 attack on my father’s study it seemed that the Germans had made a direct attack on the English language itself. Books and manuscripts lay in an untidy mess all over the floor, under piles of plaster. Memories of the book burning of writers and poets by the Nazis in the thirties seemed to linger under the fallen dust of the forties. It has been said that Churchill mobilised the English Language and sent it into battle. It certainly seemed so that Summer July morning in 1944. The written word, however, is not so easily destroyed. The ideas, thoughts and philosophies they contain live on, and the new writing rose phoenix like from the flames. There were the many dramas and histories that the war actually stimulated; a war that launched a thousand books. So it was that on May 8th 1945 I sat on my father’s shoulders to listen to Churchill speak from a balcony in Whitehall, and as my father was a tall man I could just see the Prime Minister above the heads of the crowd. Two great exponents of the English Language, Ernest Raymond and Winston Churchill were there together, the one lifting the people with his words, the other a four year old child to look into the future.

Peter Raymond
May 2005

GAS MASK
I am still in possession of my "Mickey Mouse" gas mask which is currently on display at the Children's War exhibition at the Imperial War Museum until Easter 2008.

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