Do you have memories of real 'history'?

A secondhand memory, but we lived in south London during the V1 and V2 period. My mother described how when you heard one coming, you willed it to keep moving and then when the engine cut out, you just hoped it wasn't above you.

Immediately after the war I can remember being terrified of aeroplanes and the sound of them and would rush into the house and hide under the dining room table whenever I hear one.

Then when I was about 4 there were earthquakes somewhere and people were being evacuated and my mental picture of what an earthquaake was, was thing shaped like oxygen cylinders in big holes in the ground and all these men on grey clothing and tinhats had to dig down to it and do something to it before it exploded.

A classic description of Civil Defence workers dealing with the bomb sites that were everywhere round us. MY grandmother's house was destroyed in the Blitz.

Thank you Norah. He was killed just before I was born so it was a tough time for my mother, less so for me. I think my earliest clear memory was the winter of 1946/7. I can remember the snow piled up either side of a path was way over my head! It was extremely cold as fuel was in short supply and the gas fire in our bedsitting room was kept very low. A lot of food and fuel was diverted to Europe just after the war, especially to the Dutch who were literally starving to death in the streets. Difficult times, but much more so for liberated Europe.

Norah, There used to be a house on the road from Ely to Soham called Flight Path Farm. A few years ago it was demolished and is now an Eco house but for many years I would drive past it imagining the farmer and his family lying wide awake in bed listening to the bombers heading off on a mission and then counting them back in again.

Jaberwok Norah, you saying about Ely Cathedral, reminded me that when my late father went out on Bombing raids from RAF Waddington, they always flew over Lincoln Cathedral and crossed themselves, and did the same coming back.

I'm sorry your father didn't make it back.

I remember complaints about a USA leader who was liked for his administration skills, but had never actually served hands-on in the impacted areas - he wasn't allowed to give opinions on Cathedral triangulation.

Dad worried about the unfair Lavender Scare - same leader.

I am a baby boomer and I can remember (not in strict chronological order):-
Coronation of Elizabeth II
Suez crisis
Hanging of Ruth Ellis
End of Capital Punishment
Profumo scandal
End of conscription
Assassination of JFK
Death of Marilyn Monroe
Korean war
Vietnam war, I protested outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square*
Cold war (protect and survive), I went on several CND marches*
1960s - Beatles, Stones, Hippies, Psychedelia, Mini Skirts etc.

Quite a lot more but that will do.
* These were peaceful demos, no violence against the police, rioting and looting or destruction of property.

Norah, you saying about Ely Cathedral, reminded me that when my late father went out on Bombing raids from RAF Waddington, they always flew over Lincoln Cathedral and crossed themselves, and did the same coming back. Unfortunately my father was killed over Holland on one of these missions so perhaps that time God failed to see their cross?!
I think what upset me most way, way back was the war of the breakaway state of Biafra. I had never seen starving dying children on TV, or anywhere else come to that, heard about them, but not seen live motion pictures. I can remember being completely horrified to the point of tears. I simply couldn't believe what I was seeing. Since then obviously there have been many, many depictions of starving children, but nothing has shocked me as much as that first time, which I've never forgotten.

Mum told us history was all round us - yesterday is history.

I've, of course, heard and seen the same history as most on GN. We did go to Berlin only a year before the wall came down, I remember the wall before and after. Subsequent trips to Berlin always include the gallery.

Mum and dad told us about the war, blackouts, bombings. Dad, his brothers and mum's brothers flew across into France, pilots of fighters and bombers - navigating home, at night, using Ely Cathedral lights (high ground) - triangulating on to descend ?wherever they landed.

Only dad came home alive at end to the war.

Mum and dad were quite excited when America voted for a first Catholic POTUS. Dad saying he'd not win because of anti-Catholic sentiment.

Queen's coronation, Sputnik, MLK, Tiananmen Square.

I remember the death of George V1th. We were told at school, everyone word a black armband, and many people cried. The new Queens coronation, a very wet cold and rather boring day for a 10 year old! In the evening my stepfather took me up to the market place for bun throwing, and queuing for a slice of Ox which had been roasted in the market square. I remember most important events after that, the Suez crisis, the Korean war, the Cuban crisis, the assassination of JFK and so it went on to the present day!

I was very young at the time of the Queen's Coronation but I was fascinated by it.
In my early 20's I was in the US when the astronauts landed on the moon which was amazing.
I was at my desk at work when I saw on the screen part of the 9/11 incident. It was horrendous.
In my late teens I was teased on the bus by a persistent young man who wanted a date but I refused as he was so full of himself and it turned out to be 'Freddie Mercury' - I had no regrets!
When I was at secondary school we had a talk on keeping a stash of food and being told to find a safe place at home because of the possibility of war which was very scary.
I was in digs when we heard about the Aberfan disaster. A colleague of mine much later told me he had been a camera operator there and he'd never forgotten it.
Various ghastly murders and reminders of what had happened to people in the concentration camps still in my memory from newspapers.
Friends of my parents visited us when I was still at home and some had physical scars and loss of limbs from the wars
Then there was the assassination of John F Kennedy..................
Situations I shall never forget.

Reading this back it seems I only really remember a lot of the unpleasant situations rather than the happy events.

Born end of December 1952, mum recalled the early 1953 floods shortly after my birth.
I was 6months old at QE11 coronation.

I remember a smallpox out break might have been 1959/60 and queing for ages for a vaccination.

memories of Aberfan, Moors murders, JFK assassination.

Seeing many polio victims with calipers, and being terrified of being in an iron lung.

Moorgate train disaster, fire at paddington station.

Terrified of nuclear war during the cuba crisis, profumo scandal, the big freeze of 1963.

Memories are crowding in now of all the events I have lived through, personal as well as public.

Lovely thread thankyou

I remember us being told that Concorde would be doing a trial flight over our town, didn’t see the plane but heard the sonic boom, it made our windows shake.

Applegran I was a child. I was there between the ages of 8 and 10, during the Korean War as my father was in the army, logistics, and the main R&R and stores base was Hong Kong.

It was thought possible that the Chinese could invade Hong Kong. I remember the beggars on the streets - plus the hotweather and the swimming pool and learning to swim.

We then were sent to Singapore during the Malayan Emergency and I knew and understand what was happening there. We were in Malaya itself later and were present for the big procession through Kuala Lumpur that marked the end of the Emergency, again an education. I wrote an article on it fo my school magazine when I got back home to my boarding school.

MOnica this is something I knew nothing about - or if I did, I have forgotten. What a terrible bit of history and somehow it feels good that you remember, even though it is such an awful memory - because those people should not be forgotten.

I lived in Hong Kong during the years following the communist take over of China. The purges that followed led to 2 million people to flee as refugees to Hong Kong, coming in at the rate of about 10,000 a month.

I can also remember the daily train from Beijing to Hong Kong. Often full of foreign people who had lived in China and been arrested, tortured, starved and brain washed and then released on the edge of death.

There were stories about them in the papers almost daily. Comminist infiltrators used to come in with the refugees and set fire to the huge refugee camps that spread everywhere. I can rememeber sitting in my bedroom able to read at night without a light because the light from the fires was so bright.

Our parents shielded us from the news and my father never ever talked about the war so I was a young teenager before I knew what was happening beyond our four walls.
As we lived abroad I didn’t know there was a king before the new queen was crowned. The first awful news I saw on television was the Aberafon disaster.

Yes, Apartheid- a dreadful system largely supported by the West, which only ended in the 90s- so so recently.

History I remember, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II coronation, state funeral of Winston Churchill, the Cuban crisis, the launch of Telstar the first. Communication satellite, assassination of Kennedy, man landing on the moon, so many historic events and of course more recently the death of Queen Elizabeth and coronation on Charles II.

But hasn't it always been so? My grandmother could remember the death of Queen Victoria. My great grandmother was part of the great Irish diaspora that was caused by the irish famine of the 1840s she was a babe in arms when her parents brought her and her siblings to London.

She started life in abject poverty in London. When she died she was living with her daughter in a typical interwars semi in a Kent suburb of London. A house with electric lighting, a bathroom with running water, flush loo and a boiler that provided constant hotwater.

Her daughter lived through that house being destroyed in the blitz - and rebuilt after the war -. Her daughters were both married with jobs and careers of their own, both households owned cars and both travelled abroad for holidays and so it goes on - and probably always will.

Callistemon213

henetha my MIL told me of the time she was going into Plymouth to the dentist; she couldn't go into the city because it had been flattened. FIL was coming home on leave and saw the glow in the sky from Haldon Hill.

My Dad was in the Fire Service and was stationed in Plymouth at the beginning of the war, and he used to say that when there was nothing left standing there, the FS sent him home to the Midlands - in November 1940 - just in time for the huge raids on Coventry and Birmingham..! 😮

Applegran that is so fascinating - and yes you should write your memoirs or a book :-) A friend of my Father's did that and it was so fascinating - about his escape in France after being captured.

My Grandfather apparently said he remembered Queen Victoria's funeral. Which was in 1901. He was born in 1900 and would have been under a year old!

Things I remember are decimalisation - how a bag of chips went up from 6d to 4 new pence. Which was actually slightly more than 6d so everything ended up costing more.

Bobby Kennedy being shot and the TV footage (in black and white).

Some not so nice things - like how awful childrens homes for the disabled children were (we did voluntary work in them from school - it was awful - these severely mentally and physically disabled children in institutions). And that was only in the 1970s. Thank goodness attitudes have changed rather than people just "sending them to a home".

And trivial things like "Fairies" in the brownies becoming "Sprites" - why ban the fairies?!! Early political correctness maybe?

When I was at music college, we had a concert given to us by a band of Indian musicians. Later that evening, we heard the terrible news that Mrs Indira Ghandi had been assassinated.

Concorde frequently flew over my childhood home on test flights. It was an amazing collaboration.
In the 1980s in a pub in London the atmosphere suddenly changed and we were told to "get out now and run", on exiting there was a policeman at one end of the street barring us from running that way, he just stood and shouted "run" repeatedly. There wasn't an IRA bomb, or maybe they'd defused it. It was absolutely chilling.

We were walking along Princes Street in Edinburgh with two Australia guests when we hear a grreat roar . When we all looked up there was Concord a sight we will never see again.

Yes, Apartheid- very recent. And with disatrous effects for my OH's family. So so recent. And Mandela, Tata Madiba, of course.

I remember the twin towers event. As a theatre nurse I was at work. I was drawn to the staff room where colleagues were gathering. The television was on and we all stood there watching the events unfold.

One colleague became very panicky and would not stay at work, she insisted she needed to collect her children from school and take them home. It was no use persuading her otherwise and she was allowed to go.

Obviously the surgeons, anaesthetists and the staff allocated to assist them had already started their lists and would be unaware of what was happening. So as not to compromise patient safety and allow them to concentrate fully on what they where doing we were advised not to say anything until they came out of theatre of their own accord.