Fine spirit in darkest days

Along with younger folk, they also recall the shock of hearing Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash.

But for an earlier generation, the memorable moment was 70 years ago this week when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced in sepulchral tones that Britain was at war with Germany.

There was no doubt about where people heard the news.

They were crowded around the radio sets in their parlours, lounges or front rooms.

It was only 20 years since the war to end wars had finished, with millions of troops dead or maimed on the battlefields of Europe.

There was no reason to think the death toll would be any lower this time.

Even more people were killed during the Second World War than in the first because the conflict spread far wider.

But the difference for Britain was that far fewer men died in the trenches.

You have only to look at war memorials in any Sussex village to see that.

Chocolate Instead the conflict involved nearly every household in the country through bombing raids which caused loss of life and devastation.

I was born during the middle of that war.

My only memory of it is sitting on the Thames Embankment near Victoria in 1945 and being offered chocolate by an American soldier walking by.

Many other youngsters were not so lucky.

Thousands were evacuated to Sussex from the streets of London for their safety.

Then, when the bombs fell on Brighton, Hastings and Eastbourne, they had to be moved again.

Bombs did not discriminate about where they fell and who they killed.

One fell on the Odeon cinema in Kemp Town, causing widespread casualties during a children’s cinema show.

The loss of life was particularly acute in the Sussex coastal towns because enemy planes tended to jettison their unused bombs on their way back from London to Germany.

Although Brighton and Hove suffered severely, Eastbourne, being nearer the main flight paths, was even more badly affected.

Wartime censorship meant people did not always know what had happened, although word of mouth could be effective.

Papers such as The Argus had to tell their readers that bombs had been dropped on a South Coast town instead of naming Hove or Hastings.

It was small wonder that after the war one of the most popular local publications was a map showing exactly where the bombs had fallen in Brighton and Hove.

Much has been made of the wartime spirit shown during those dark days with people pulling together despite immense privation.

It was partly because in 1939 Hitler appeared to be a real enemy whereas in 1914 the Kaiser, a grandson of Queen Victoria, hardy fitted the bill.

It was also because in Winston Churchill Britain had a brave leader who could appeal to the people directly, using the modern medium of radio on which Chamberlain had sounded so stilted.

Radio was also the means by which Vera Lynn appealed to millions of people through her patriotic songs, although she earned the sobriquet of the Forces’ Sweetheart by travelling widely, amid great danger, to sing to them.

Now 92 and a dame, she lives quietly in Ditchling and is one of the few celebrities about whom no one ever says a bad word.

People were used to privation after the First World War, the General Strike of 1926, and the Depression of the early 1930s.

You have only to read any book about Brighton between the wars to realise how prevalent and gruelling poverty was for many people.

There were huge tracts of slum housing and one of the few benefits of the bombing was that it knocked down some homes that did not deserve to exist.

Life was much cheaper than it is today.

Many people died in their 50s or 60s whereas many more make the age of 80 now.

Even though there were only about a million cars on the roads during the war, 10,000 people a year died in traffic accidents, more than three times the figure today.

After the war had ended in 1945, most people wanted to forget it.

They voted in Clement Attlee and his Socialist government despite all the wonderful words and heroic, if flawed, leadership by Churchill.

Men who rambled on about their wartime exploits were regarded as bores and blabbermouths, no matter how heroic they had been.

Much more typical were people like the chief reporter of a weekly paper I served on in West London who had seen some terrible sights during his war service but never wanted to say a word about it.

Despite travelling around large tracts of the world on active service, he returned to the modest job he had started before the war and stayed there for the rest of his working life.

Interest By the 1960s, attendances at Remembrance Day services were so small I thought they would be as dead as those commemorated by them within a few years.

Now you have to be well over 80 to have served in the Second World War and 70 to have been conscripted for National Service.

Yet interest in the conflict, largely among people far too young to recall anything of it, is greater than ever.

It is partly because tales of the little fishing boats going out from Sussex ports to rescue servicemen stranded at Dunkirk in 1940 are great stories.

It is also because ordinary men and women in poor Sussex families performed unimaginable feats of bravery when the time arrived.

No one should imagine that everyone was a hero during those dreadful years.

There were many who feigned illness to avoid being conscripted and mostly they survived into their old age while many of their braver brothers perished.

There were strikes in crucial industries, some caused by greedy trade unionists who put their own well-being above their national good.

Equally there were rapacious bosses who screwed the workers while they could get away with it.

Racketeers and spivs sold stolen goods on the black market.

Drunkenness was widespread, for drink was still cheap.

Yet there was a spirit of optimism that kept the country going through the worst times and survived even years afterwards when rationing grew worse rather than better.

Suicide rates actually fell during the war, rather than rising as might have been expected.

I was convinced as a child that within another 20 years there would be a third world war with even more catastrophic damage and loss of life.

Luckily that did not happen for complicated and diverse reasons.

But there are still wars being fought all over the globe and during this decade British troops have been active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The publicity given to the 210 British deaths in Afghanistan can be contrasted with the huge toll during the Second World War.

Would Britain be prepared to countenance so many deaths if another Hitler emerged to threaten our freedoms and our way of life? I very much doubt it and that is a sobering thought as we think about the start 70 years ago of the worst war, so far, in history.