The woman on screen is running down the street and dragging a child behind her, the girl's feet flying through the air, freewheeling like a cartoon animal, though it's hard to find anything to laugh at here. Their fear is palpable. They are caught in the crossfire of opposing soldiers and they are eternally running, the same film clip shown over and over on the news bulletins, so we see only this brief moment of their lives, never knowing if they survive to run again. And I yell at the cameraman to get out from behind his bloody lens and help them.
*


I know that fear. It is my feet that fly though the air, pedalling to a standstill, never getting away. I know those bombs, and the waiting without breathing while they are falling, falling. I know those houses reduced to rubble. I know those sirens, their wails corkscrewing straight into my stomach. It is my mother who is running, with me flying behind her, my hand locked in hers, running to the station, to the Underground, through the unlit, blacked out city streets. And there she tries to sleep, with me cradled in her arms, crammed among the snoring, joking, spitting, groaning bodies of hundreds of East Enders, until the All Clear sounds and they struggle to their feet and emerge to inspect the damage. These are the memories that creep into my mind when I am overtired, that edge into the grey fuzz between consciousness and sleep.
*
Russian women queue, babies in their arms, toddlers at their feet, waiting for hours in long, orderly lines for bread, for milk. And those without money try to sell their pathetic trinkets, snow domes and dolls, so they can join the lines, too. Will a snow dome buy a loaf of rye bread for a toothless old babushka?
*
I don't remember her crying when the bombs dropped, when houses crumpled and fires lit the night sky, but one day we queued for bananas, waited for hours for the enticing golden fruit. Before my mother reached the front of the line, they had run out. No more, Missus, sorry. She cried then, sobbed for the injustice of it all, for a world out of control, her own small world out of her control.
*
Soldiers arrive at the airports, tour of duty over, for now. The grinning PM lauds them. Wives, girlfriends and mothers hug them, kiss them and thrust babies they've never seen before into their arms. And some of those babies eye their unknown fathers with suspicion, their small faces crumpling into rage at this stranger. Toddlers hug their daddies' legs.
*
One morning, I woke up and there was a man in the kitchen. Then it was my turn to sob, because the kitchen was for Mum and me, not a man. He shouldn't be there. She laughed at me, she thought my tears were funny. I cried even more.

'This is your Daddy,' she said. 'He's come home for a little while. Have you got a cuddle for him?'

I knew what a Daddy was, from my story books, but this was a stranger in our space and I didn't want him there. I ignored him and thumbed through my books. He lit a pipe and filled the air with smoke. I didn't like the smell.

When it was over, when the war had finished and my father came home for good, I couldn't believe that the planes overhead weren't going to hurt me any more. I was even more terrified of the planes than I was of my father. He took me to an airfield and lifted me to touch the cool, smooth wings. See, they don't hurt you, do they? Nothing to be afraid of, is there? But I couldn't absorb that logic into my heart.
*
I started school, and we stood in line by Mrs Milligan's desk each morning for a spoonful of cod liver oil, which put me off fish for a lifetime, and for malt. Mouth after mouth closed around the same evil spoon, in what seemed even then, a strange notion of keeping us healthy. And on very special days there was a crate of apples from Australia. Huge, round, red apples smelling of sunshine and tasting of sweet, clean nectar. One apple each and yes, you can eat them now. And oh, the joy of juice trickling down my chin, in a time when orange juice was a bitter concentrate in a small glass bottle, when eggs were a yellow powder spooned from a tin, when mandarins were so special they merited an annual appearance in the Christmas stocking.
Australia was a long way away, Mrs Milligan told us. A big country, far away, where apples and pears grew and there was plenty of room for sheep. I thought I'd like to go there.
*
Women in hijabs stoop over the piles of rubble which used to be their houses, sorting through for something, anything, that has survived. They search for family photos, for their mother's rings, for that special teapot with the long spout, for the reassurance that they had lived normal lives, were normal people, before the nightmare took over.
*
On the way to my grandparents' house, we walked through streets of terraced houses with random gaps like missing teeth. The windows and front wall of one house had disappeared, and the abandoned lives lay exposed. Green wallpaper with tiny pink rosebuds, a corner sink with shattered china on the draining board, clothes reduced to rags behind the splintered doors of wardrobes.

At the neighbouring house, a woman, her hair wrapped turban-style in a red spotted head scarf, scrubbed at the front step. She sang out to the world in a husky, smoky voice, about bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
*
When the bomb sites were cleared, they opened up the sky and presented us with miniature patches of wilderness. Orange marigolds, pink willow herbs, tall golden rod, all bringing colour to the grey streets of childhood.
*
After the war was over, I was given my first real present, a doll's pram. In it lay a doll covered in blankets. The pram was navy blue with white curly patterns. It had a hood that went up and down, and silver wheels. My doll had blue, staring eyes that were always open and thin black eyelashes drawn around them. Her hair was painted yellow on sculpted curls. Her dress was white.

I wheeled her down the long, dark corridor of my grandmother's house to the scullery, where my mother and her sisters gossiped while they cooked, their voices rising, one over the other, laughter spilling out, pans clattering. They admired the doll and returned to their conversation.

I pushed her into the dining room and showed her my favourite handles - shiny and smooth, on the big wooden dresser. There were twelve of them. I lifted each and let it fall and rattle, like a door knocker. Grandma yelled at me to leave them alone, I was driving her mad, she said.

I wheeled my doll into the dusty backyard to show her the hens. We didn't stay long. I was wary of those pointed beaks and toes, the small watchful eyes, the scratching and groaning. Aunt Sophie was at a wooden bench, cutting open a dead chicken, getting it ready to put in the pot. I didn't make the connection between the belligerent, pecking birds and this small body you could open up and see inside. She showed me the cluster of eggs in a cavity; round, soft, yellow balls. Grandma's hens laid real eggs, with smooth brown shells and slimy stuff inside them. I told her I preferred the yellow powder.

Aunt Sophie asked me if I'd ever eaten chicken feet. Just like butter, she said, but I didn't fancy the idea much. The skin of the chicken after she had pulled the feathers out of its leg was pale pink with small bumps on it, and little white tufts. A bit like an old man's neck, I thought, and why would I eat an old man's neck?

I wheeled my pram to show the men in the front room, my father, my grandfather, and my uncles. Their talk was low and slow and the air was filled with pipe smoke. I was tucking the blankets around my doll when disaster happened. First, there was a loud cracking noise and then the ceiling fell down. White chunks, white flakes, white powder, fell on me, on my sleek navy pram, in my doll's eyes and my eyes. The whiteness covered the floor, the furniture and the people. I coughed as the dust filled my nose and throat.

'It's a bomb,' I screamed. I threw myself under the table.
'It's all right,' my father said. 'It's not a bomb. The bombs have stopped now. The bombs that fell in the war made the ceiling weak and that's why it fell down. The war's over now.' I loved my father, I was used to him by this time, but I didn't always believe what he told me.
*
Across the road from my grandparents' house was the hospital. I watched from the window in fascination as sick people were carried on stretchers from the back of ambulances through the hospital's door. They were always covered in red blankets.

The blankets are red so you don't see the blood, Mrs Milligan later assured me. I retreated to the Wendy House in the corner of the classroom, and the safe world of story books. Of Orlando, the Marmalade Cat. Orlando on a camping holiday. Orlando buying a farm. Camping holidays and farms seemed pleasant and remote from bloody red hospital blankets, and houses without front walls, and rooms with collapsing ceilings.
*
A man sat opposite us on the trolley bus. He had no nose. I could see directly into the scrolls and hollows that are secret in the rest of us.

'Don't stare,' Mum said. 'He was injured in the war.' He wore a greatcoat, its left sleeve empty and pinned at the shoulder.

There were men on crutches, one leg missing, or half a leg gone, and men in wheelchairs, with blankets covering where their legs should have been, and men with patches over unseeing eyes.

I started to read books on plastic surgery, instead of marmalade cats going on holiday, or toads driving sports cars.
*
I thought I was over the fear when I travelled to Germany for the first time. Germany on a Lambretta. At Easter. In the snow. Frozen-fingered, we tumbled, my friend Kay and I, off the scooter into a gasthaus, and thawed out against the tiles of a huge wood stove. We were led by a stout woman who smiled through gaps in her teeth and whose breath was scented with cinnamon and cloves, through a large room to a narrow flight of wooden stairs. I slowed behind her, to stare. The room was filled with men in uniform. Big men, seated on rows of chairs, their uniform dark, black, maybe, or navy. Theirs was the acrid smell of damp wool drying, and of sweat. A man in the front addressed them and pointed a stick at a large diagram on a blackboard. It was the plan of a vehicle. Large rectangles, small circles.

When we'd found where we were to sleep, we perched on the edge of our beds, round-eyed.

'What do you think?' I said, putting my fear into words. 'Were they Nazis?' My mind filled with images from the war films that had proliferated recently. Images of imprisonment, of torture, of unspeakable inhuman acts. I admitted to myself that my mother's reluctance to let me travel there was justified. My confidence had quickly vanished.

'That picture on the blackboard.' Kay knotted and twisted her handkerchief between nervous fingers. 'Had to be a tank, didn't it?'

'Six wheels, or maybe eight wheels? Things sticking out at the sides like guns. Had to be a tank.'

We locked the door and pushed a chair underneath the handle, just to feel safe, but I lay awake all night, listening for intruders. Waiting for bombs and bullets and men shouting Sieg Heil. In the morning we asked the woman what the meeting had been about last night. Turned out it was the fire brigade.

The men in uniform were fire fighters. The tank in the diagram was a fire engine with hoses sticking out at the sides. We smiled at each other, feeling stupid. War colours your outlook on life.
*
Years later, my family travelled Ireland in a small car with a large Australian flag in the rear window - just to be sure. The whistle-playing post mistress, the health inspector, bowing his fiddle, the mechanic on the bodhron, all welcomed our attempts at playing their music, and took us to small, thatched cottages that masqueraded as inns, where reels and six-eight jigs flew from the arthritic fingers of ancient players. 'Would you like a drop of the Irish?' they'd say.

At festivals, under acres of canvas on muddy fields, Canadians and Germans, Dutch and Americans, English and Irish, joined in on the more familiar tunes, sang the old choruses. In unison, in harmony, and in peace. Torches and candles waved in the darkness, swaying from side to side when the lights went out.

We crossed the border, passing burnt out cars and buses, bumping over humps that were probably meant to set off any bombs we might be carrying. An English soldier stopped us and prodded his rifle through the car window towards my son. Feelings of bonhomie, of goodwill to all, evaporated in an instant.

'What have you got in that case, sonny?'
'A mandolin.' His voice was small and croaky.

'Open it.' The black snout of his gun intruded further.
Inside, the timber of the old Gibson gleamed gold, nestled against the blue velvet lining of its case.

'Just take it out and let me see underneath it.'

I hated to see fear in my boy's eyes. He was concerned mainly for the welfare of his instrument, I knew that. He gently lifted it out and the soldier felt around in the case.

'Okay, son. You can put it back.' He turned his attention to the adults.

'So, where have you been?'

'Sligo, …'

'Sligo? What were you doing there?'

'Playing music.'

'I'll need to look in the boot.'

Why? We didn't ask. He didn't find what he was looking for. He waved us through, but we didn't relax again until we were on the ferry.
It was later that day we bought a newspaper. Lord Mountbatten had been blown up in a boat off Sligo.
* Passenger planes fly through tall buildings, smoke and dust billowing in a familiar cloud. Flames burst out of the windows. Men, women and children run through the streets towards the cameras, away from the now falling buildings, and their clothes and faces are coated in white dust, their eyes staring out in horror. Spectators cry out in disbelief.
* Sorry, Dad, you were wrong and I could have told you that at the time. The bombs are still falling and planes can still kill, however cold and smooth their wings might be.
* In my nightmares I still walk and walk down those never ending tiled corridors of the London Underground and I never find my way out. The signs make no sense to me. There's no one to ask for help. I spent my childhood sheltering there, but there's no sense of safety or familiarity.
* Londoners stagger past the cameras, the same figures emerging from the Underground, over and over again, faces masked in white dust or white cotton, bloodied, burned and bandaged. Ambulance crews lift stretchers and roll them into hospital doorways. These patients are wrapped in silver space-age blankets, but I doubt they show the blood. A double-decker bus lies peeled open and everted like a mango prepared for eating, the seats exposed to the world. A man sobs, revealing his sorrow to the global population for this terrible day he has witnessed.
* Children are blown up in market places, tourists die in cafés and bars, lines of evacuees are bombed from the air, recruits die outside police stations. They are all on camera. Mobile phone camera, video camera, television camera. It's all there for our daily entertainment and my daily reminder of the past.
So, the bombs are still exploding, Dad. They're on the news every night at seven. And that little girl, her legs free-wheeling through the air, will live with her war forever.

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