The blitz spirit that has been forgotten

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/12/blitz-spirit-that-has-been-forgotten

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The emphasis being currently placed on the “war generation” (VE Day remembered, in joy and sorrow, 8 May) rightly documents the work of largely unsung adult workers and volunteers on the home front, and it is assumed that all survivors are at least in their 90s. I do feel, though, the need to speak up for those of us who were children during the second world war. Research by Berry Mayall and Virginia Morrow of the UCL Institute of Education has done much to remind us that children were active participants in the defence of the nation, and should not be judged solely by images of bewildered evacuees. Their book, You Can Help Your Country: English Children’s Work During the Second World War (IOE 2011), tells us that.

In 1943, for example, the children of 20 schools in the Fylde district of Lancashire picked 2,000 tons of potatoes. Many children knitted garments for the navy, collected salvage door to door, acted as fire watchers during bombing raids, made components for armaments in school workshops – and, we are told, 250,000 children, in 1943 and 1944, went to harvest camps. Older boys served in the Home Guard.

And what did I do in the war? Not a lot, because I was really quite young, but I did help my mother as she worked with her group of miners’ wives making camouflage netting and winding the handle of a bandage-rolling machine.

The real story, though, is of a culture change – working-class children became visible to, and respected by, those in authority and the rest of the nation in a way that, over subsequent decades, was gradually lost. Gerald Haigh @geraldhaigh1Bedworth

• Among all the tributes paid to the generation that endured, fought and won the second world war, one is conspicuously absent. This was also the generation that voted out Churchill and his Conservatives and gave us the Labour landslide of 1945. Attlee’s government remains unique in carrying out what it had promised – the NHS, free education for all up to university level, nationalisation of the railways, the coal and steel industries etc.

The present electorate of the UK has now given the Tories the opportunity they have long desired – to complete the dismantling of the welfare state. Shame on us!Olive Townsley (Evacuee, London blitz survivor and landgirl), Bridgend, south Wales

• Following the many letters about the election, I want to add the voice of someone born in 1927. I can only see a bizarre irony that VE celebrations came at the same time as the Conservative election victory, not only because in 1945 Labour won, but because of the diametric difference in values. In 1945, yes we were “aspirational”. But we aspired to keep faith with those who fought to make a better world for all. For the country, we aspired to overcome poverty and inequality, in line with the Atlantic Charter and the Beveridge report. For ourselves, we aspired to careers of service to others.

Now I have only one personal aspiration: to manage to live long enough to see once again a government in power which believes in values beyond the individualistic and that a country’s wealth is founded on people – and which isn’t afraid to act on those beliefs.Lalage BownShrewsbury