The British Myths of War

As a boy growing up in the Britain of the 1960s, I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. It was everywhere, or so it seemed. Sunday afternoon TV seems, in blurred memory, as if it was an endless run of war movies, usually featuring chaps with that accent now lost to us, bearing the stiff upper lips we would no longer recognise. We had the profound misfortune to have to watch Look East and, in the absence of any other news than yet another strike at the Perkins diesel engine factory in Peterborough, they constantly filled with a seemingly endless stream of features on wartime airfields, returning Yanks and Lancaster bombers. Both of my parents were children in the war. My father lived near North Weald aerodrome and used to thrill to the sight of the Lancasters or, strange as it might sound, to the fires…