Today’s entry deserves a little bit of background explanation.

One of the things I’m doing at the moment is something we’ve called “The Lifetime Memories Project”. Around October last year we managed to secure funding for this project from a trust that specifically funds things benefiting OAPs. The aim of the project is to record the personal histories of OAPs in our area by interviewing them and producing a DVD with edited footage of the interview, and digital copies of any pictures/documents they have pertaining to significant moments in their lives. The idea is that we will be able to preserve pieces of living history, and provide these OAPs with a lasting record of their lives that can be passed on to their loved ones in order that it might outlive them.

The idea was born out of something I did with my Dad about a year before he died – we sat down with a minidisc recorder and I interviewed him for a couple of hours – that night I found out so many things about my Dad that I never knew, and when he died a year later it became a priceless record of the man he was. I’ve cherished it ever since.

Anyway, today I was interviewing one particular pensioner with a colleague of mine. I’ve only done one other interview like this so far, so my experience of it is relatively limited, but something particular has struck me about the stories of each of the elderly people I’ve interviewed so far – my own father included- for each of them the defining event of their lives has been The War.

For everyone who lived through it the war has had an overwhelmingly significant effect on their lives it seems. For the old lady I interviewed today, it changed the entire course of her life – she had been a farmgirl on her parent’s farm in a remote northern village when war broke out, and ran away from home with her best friend to join the RAF. There she met and married an airman, went on to have five children, and has lived most of her life in London. Without the war, she would have remained in her remote northern village, married a farmer, and lived her life out as a farmer’s wife milking cows.

But the effects of the war on the lives of those who lived through it did not end in 1945, neither did it end with rationing, or the cold war, or the fall of the berlin wall.

A friend of mine has a theory. In fact, he is writing a book about it, and one day I hope to pick up a copy in Waterstones for the snatches he has read to me are truly excellent, but his theory is that for these wartime survivors the war is still going on.

This was certainly true for my father. Every night that I can remember when he was alive, no matter whether we were at home or on holiday, he would meticulously switch off every electrical appliance in the house at the mains, and unplug them all. It drove my mother (postwar generation) absolutley potty, althought I find it somewhat touching now, when visiting her, that she has taken on this night-time ritual for herself – probably as a means of remembering him. My father also hated wasting food, and saved all manner of unlikely objects “in case they might be useful”. When he died and my mother decided to move house, she had to pay the local handyman for a full day’s work cleaning out our garage of all these “potentially useful” items dating back decades. The poor fellow spent all day loading up his van, driving to the tip, coming back, loading up, rinsing and repeating, before the accumulated detritus of my father’s habit had been disposed of.

For my father, the scrimp save and scavenge mentality had been born out of teenage years spent living through the blitz (he was never evacuated, unlike his siblings) and he never shook it off. For him, subconciously at least, Hitler’s panzers were perpetually at the channel – the need for vigilance over his own wastefulness never fully disappeared.

For the lady I interviewed today, I recognised similar signs – the unplugged electrical appliances, and useful items readily to hand in case of an unexpected blackout.

How will we cope, I wonder, when we come to the end of our lives and, disappointed by our meagre pensions and living on the poverty line we struggle to make ends meet? Will a lifetime of wastefulness catch up to haunt us? Will we finally learn the lessons of our fathers? Will the panzers of poverty make it across the channel or will a resurgence of the spirit of the blitz repel them?

Time will tell.