Both my parents were in the military during the Second World War. My mother joined the US navy in and became a gunnery instructor. My father was British, conscripted in for the duration. He was in the Royal Air Force for six years, becoming a flight sergeant and pilot.
They met when my father was on a training mission on a US navy airbase in Pensacola, Florida, and were married wearing their dress uniforms in New York in They were 22 years old. My father was subsequently transferred back to the European theatre, and then, after the war, to India. He was gone for eighteen months. Before he left, my mother got pregnant with me. During their separation, my parents wrote letters back and forth almost every day.
Neither of them ever mentioned where he was. Her letters were filled with enthusiasm and buck-up cheer, as in the ads she may have seen in Life magazine at that time. I was born in October He was, if not shell-shocked, certainly numbed and slightly crazy from the war. By the time he got to the San Fernando Valley, I was a wilful toddler. When my grandmother put me in his arms, he took hold of me awkwardly, reluctantly, as I shrieked, squirmed and shat. Then he handed me back. My grandmother never forgave him.
Pretty soon, she kicked all three of us out of her house β the pilot, my mother and me. Poor child-mother and child-father and their demanding, wiggly baby-child, alone in orange grove, dirt-road Reseda. All they had, my parents, aside from me, were their military uniforms and arm patches, citizen soldiers now, both of them. My point in telling this story is to register another form of mental stress and potentially deep psychological damage done to some Second World War vets who returned, physically well but emotionally damaged, and sadly distant from babies they had never had a chance to bond with.
I call it secondary familial PTSD. I observed it as I grew up, as did many of my friends. Mary Carter Placitas, New Mexico. Fischer and Dr E. Dubois, published by Francis Aldor, also in Chris Moore Winfrith Newburgh, Dorset.
