Sherry Chandler

D-Day

Here is what I was reading last night:

…Judy and I watched a long “special” on Churchill…It’s hard to realize that for most young people the Battle of Britain, the Normandy beaches, the desert rats—all these things people of my age experienced so deeply—are simply history like the War of the Roses. The best thing the film did was to quote some of Churchill’s orders to his ministers—amazing sense of detail and warmth of imagination about what people were going through. For instance, a recommendation to the Minister of Food that they try to cut down on the bureaucracy about rationing. Moving, too, to see him painting under a big umbrella. And terrifying to see once more how ill Roosevelt looked at Yalta, a ghost of himself.

— entry for Friday, November 29, 1974 in May Sarton’s The House by the Sea (Norton, 1981)

I was little more than conceived on D-Day (June 6, 1944), still considered a fibroid tumor by my mother’s doctor. That fact is significant of nothing except my orienting myself in history. Once upon a time there were leaders with imagination and compassion, and I had been conceived for birth into a different world altogether. I was pretty much born with the bomb.

One of my first memories is of seeing a huge headline on the Courier-Journal’s front page: “H-Bomb” is the only word I remember from the headline but I remember that in something like 300 point type.

I don’t remember any of the duck-and-cover exercises that so profoundly marked many members of the Baby Boom Generation. Maybe I’ve completely repressed them. Or maybe the Cold War hadn’t heated up enough yet. But more likely teachers in my small-town school didn’t think we’d be likely to be subject to a direct hit. Radiation would drift to us from the big city centers.

But I remember being frightened by that headline.

So I wouldn’t say that D-Day was quite as far away for me as the War of the Roses because the WWII experiences had such a profound effect on my family. Most of my childhood was colored by it.

I found the May Sarton book at Good Will while looking for junk books to cut up for a workshop project on altered books. Students enjoyed that, by the way, even though they were adult. Everybody likes playing with crayons.

Possibly related posts:

The Age of Terror

Cat with snow and poet

Want of Imagination

Poetry Everywhere

May Sarton

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