Post 74: Mother, father, brother

I've had a very quiet day today - a Zoom celebration for my brother's birthday, some reading for my brother's writing task and a little stitching on the bag sampler.


The leaves need to be padded, then satin stitched and outlined. It’s slow but rewarding. It's a lovely rich blue

While I celebrated Mothers' Day for my own mother, I have discouraged it for myself. It seemed, and still seems, like a commercialisation of a priceless value.


I was  delighted to get messages and photos today of Katherine and her family walking part of the Heyson Trail in the Kuitpo Forest.
Way to go.


While there were some scenes of crowds in shopping centres, the activity I observed in the Square was encouragingly responsible.

The quiet day leaves  room for me to post my reflection on my father and VE Day 1945. It's a bit long, so feel free to skip. I was inspired by a FaceBook comment by Phillipa Turnbull that her parents never talked about the War.

Recent social media coverage of the 75th anniversary of VE Day caused me to reflect, not just on WWII but also on our current progress towards recovery from Corona virus. For Britons, and the citizens of many other European countries, VE day 1945 would have been a huge relief and cause for a much-needed celebration. So much had been achieved, at such community cost. Yet the job wasn't done.

I have no wish to be a party-pooper, nor to pour cold water on celebrations of a remarkable feat. I am cautious, however, of allowing celebration to overpower the memory, cost and horror that remained with the participants for the rest of their lives.

My father spent the War in the British navy, on ships in the North Sea and the Mediterranean before HMS Formidable, the aircraft carrier on which he was then serving, was assigned to join the war in the Pacific in 1945. I now know the story fairly well. Not that my father told it. He didn't. Ever. In the final years of his life, my brother and I got him to answer specific questions. His standard reply to being asked about it was "If you'd seen the man next to you blown into pieces no bigger than a threepence, you wouldn't talk about it either".

What we now know is based on searching written records, the book The Formidable Commission (1947),  written by the wardroom officers on the ship and illustrated by the ship's photographer, and the 57 letters my parents wrote to each other between when they met in June 1945 and December 1945 when my father was demobilised in Sydney to marry my mother.

 On 8 May 1945, now VE Day, my father was on the Formidable off the coast of Sakishima Gunto, a Japanese island to the east of Taipei. On 4 May the ship had been hit by a kamikazi delivering a 500lb bomb and machine-gunning the deck. 8 sailors died and 47 were injured. 11 aircraft were destroyed

The boiler room was damaged, and a lot of electrical equipment. As Leading Torpedo Man, my father would have been in the electrical repair crew. Power was restored the next day, and bombing raids continued.


On 9 May the ship was hit by a second kamikazi, this time with a 250lb bomb, killing 1 sailor and  destroying 6 Corsairs.

On 18 May a fire in the hangar damaged and destroyed 30 more planes. The ship went to Manus Island for basic repairs, then on to Sydney for major work.

It was in the three weeks it took to repair the ship in Sydney that my parents met. When the repaired Formidable  went back to conduct bombing raids on Japan they wrote to each other. The letters, of course, have no hint of where the ship was or what it was doing. It was off the coast of Japan when  the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Very late in his life in a rare comment, Dad confessed and expressed regret that he and his fellow sailors had cheered when they were told the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. "We didn't know what it meant", he said sadly.


Formidable was back in Sydney in time to take part in the Victory parade on 18 August 1945. Their contingent is behind the band in this photograph.

The ship was quickly refitted for a trip to Manilla in September to pick up POWs and bring them to Sydney. The refit included a cinema. Dad was the projectionist.  My parents continue to write. This time there were fewer restriction on mentioning places.

My father demobilised in Sydney and married my mother. His father, brother and a sister had all enlisted in WWII. They all survived. A cousin was killed at Dunkirk. It was 22 years before Dad returned to England. He had no regrets about staying in Australia. For him it was a happy ending.

What the story says to me is that war has tentacles well beyond victory ceremonies. We can salvage benefits but damage and loss are irrevocable. 

Stories of crowds of people in shopping centres yesterday signal to me that we need to be cautious in celebration.  It goes hand in hand with remembrance -and eternal vigilance.

Lest we forget.