Posted by Hannah
As a child, I was endlessly curious with a big fruit box of old photographs that sat in the study at my Nanna and Grandpa’s house.
Countless times I would beg Nanna to pull out the box and to go through each photograph one by one. She would tell me stories of the people and the history captured in each image. They were stories of my great and great, great grandparents, and my uncles and aunts from England, many of whom had died before I was born, and all but one I’d never met. They were stories of life before television and the internet when communities came up with their own creative and imaginative entertainment, of first boyfriends, of local dances and of rebellion and determination. They were often stories set against the backdrop of World War II.
My Grandpa was as sensitive as he was huge and strong. When he met Audrey, he was a member of the No 3 Commandos and soon to be one of the allied forces who landed on the beaches of France on D Day in 1944. He didn’t say too much to her or us about his experiences of war. And while we hung on every word when he did speak of this incredible, devastating time, we didn't ask too much because it seemed too painful to talk about.
Over the span of a few years, I was lucky enough to have the precious experience of writing a book with Nanna – her ‘memoirs’ as she called them – in which we stitched together the stories and photographs. In researching and talking with her, I discovered that she had little knowledge of where Grandpa was at different times during the war. In fact, she had no idea he had returned to Europe after they were married to take part in further operations until I tried to piece together a timeline of events which didn't quite make sense.
It’s incredible Nanna managed to keep all those photographs and records intact through a world war, a migration across the world from England to Adelaide and then many moves later, across the continent to settle in New South Wales. I am now entrusted with the box of history and I can still imagine myself into those photographs and those stories and feel like somehow I was there watching through time.
And so with my mother and my aunt, I have begun an expedition to the ‘old country’ to visit Worthing – the town in which Nanna grew up, in which my grandparents met and married, and in which my Mum and Aunt spent their early years. We will visit the National Archives in Kew where the war diaries for D Day and the subsequent operations Grandpa took part in are held. I wonder what we will find......