Memories of a time long forgotten

HMS Hood

There are occasion's when a newspaper article triggers a Proustian response, transporting the reader backwards through time to another place. Reading today that the last survivor from the sinking of HMS Hood by the German battleship Bismarck took me back over thirty years, to the smell of humbrol paints, the voice of Brian Inglis presenting All Our Yesterdays and the sensation of figures glued together being prised apart with an emery board.

Like many children who grew up in post war, pre Satellite TV-Playstation Britain, the years of my pre-adolescence made me familar with the contents of the Airfix and Hornby catalogues. The smell, the pictures, the cost that meant you couldn't actually own one but had to flick through them at the local toy/model shop. We were big in our house when it came to models, we had a whole battlefield in the garage constructed from paper mache and chipboard, friends would come round and re-enact the Battle of The Bulge - without the harsh winters, or the sinking of the Scharnhorst, Tirpitz or Bismarck. My Dad bought me a Triang-Hornby railway for a present in 1967 complete with working catenary. Sunday mornings would be spent in the garage moving hundreds of tiny Airfix soldiers up and down hills and across rivers, the allies were green and the Germans a blue-grey colour - they were never going to win the war with that combination as camouflage. From World War Two we moved on to building the Saturn rockets that took Americans to the moon, to models of Concorde or the giant Hercules planes of the British army.

The arrival of the Concorde model coincided with me developing an interest in girls and associated different sensations, it was time to move on and leave that part of childhood behind.

My Dad continued with his on/off interest in model railways until about ten years ago when the lack of space meant that even an N Gauge model railway was out of the question. In one of life's great ironies he stored his model of Venice in our garage, in a particularly heavy winters storm the roof of our garage was blown off and 'Venice' was destroyed.

This November it will be ninety years since the Armistice and we will be remembering a time when men gave the ultimate sacrifice so that we, as kids, could build models of the enemy fleet and beat them over and over again. Whilst we still have parents or other relatives who were alive during one of the World Wars there is still that tangible connection with those sacrifices, those stories handed down from parent to child and then onto grandchildren, there will however be a time reached one day when the cumulative sense of respect and thanks will no longer be that tangible, very few of us know somebody who is fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, there won't be veterans of two World Wars at the War Memorials in our towns and an age that we grew up in will be truly past. The resonance of those far off days and the battlefields will be over if we don't make our children aware of what happened.