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I live near a beautiful park. When the weather permits, I put on my shoes and run up along a path through the trees, and turn left onto the track that winds through the recently planted Foresters’ Memorial Wood. It’s a lovely spot.
The Foresters were people from Commonwealth countries who answered the call during the Second World War to cross an ocean and help Britain and the Allies in the struggle against the Nazis.
Everyone did what they could
We needed them. With so many able-bodied men sent away to fight there was a requirement for labour in the forests to provide essential timber. Reading the information boards reminds me of my father. He was “unfit for service” due to childhood tuberculosis, but he kept himself busy as a Fire Warden, as well as undertaking other activities that involved driving an armoured car, as well as forestry work, leading horses through the woods dragging heavy timbers. He also became a medical student.
My mother joined the WRNS, and travelled south to Lowestoft (according to her). She worked at decoding messages, but whether this was at Bletchley Park or elsewhere we are not quite sure as she died a long time ago, when we were less interested in recording her full story. She experienced the “buzz bombs”, the V1 and V2 rockets launched from France. Afterwards she would huddle downstairs under a blanket during thunderstorms, remembering the noise that heralded sudden death.
They both did what they could to protect us from the Nazis.
War and the aftermath
In my childhood, I remember the empty gaps that lingered about the city; the bombsites, now filled with new buildings looking out of place among the surviving tenements. Later, I learned the history of that terrible time, read books and watched documentaries about the appalling things done in the name of that awful ideology. Books burned, windows smashed, graffiti on walls, incarceration, sterilisation, and mass murder.
So now, when I hear the word “Nazi” shouted in any circumstance, but specifically at women trying to protect their hard-won rights, I shudder.
This surely displays profound ignorance, but perhaps it is simply mental laziness, grabbing a word out of dark clouds and hurling it like a spear, careless of the effect on the target.
Misplaced insults
Even harder to understand is the attack on parents and grandparents who buy an innocent children’s book, designed to make children comfortable with their bodies and comparing this with Nazi propaganda distributed to children to indoctrinate them into the Hitler Youth.
This is unspeakably distasteful. The excuse? The author, a distinguished writer and poet, has expressed “gender-critical” views and been hounded by the publishing elite. The book itself is full of a glorious diversity of children having fun.
A second book celebrates the suffragette flag and what it means to women now and then. Apparently the Big Bad Wolf being held at bay by stripes of Green White and Violet is “Transphobic”.
My father’s mother marched for the right to vote in 1918. Who knew that 100 years on, women would be fighting for fundamental rights all over again?
