64 Years On

I've been pushing ahead quite quickly with my grandmother's diary these last few days, mostly because I was keen to get my father's death out of the way, if I may put it like that. I don't quite know why it is - the slow, sedate rhythm of Gran's diary with what seemed like a predestined and preordained life stretching ahead for all of us? advancing age? - whatever the reason, I find myself moved as I have never been before. For the first time I feel, rather than simply understand, how my mother's life was, in the space of a moment, thrown upside down once and for all. And I suppose the life of all of us, come to think of it. It is only now, sixty-four years on, that I have some inkling of what she must have gone through in those fateful days of July 1945, when I was not even 1 year old.