Perspective

Sometimes your perspective changes, snaps into a different view leaving you wondering why you hadn't seen things that way before.
It happened to me a few days ago when my youngest brother, Adrian, found some pictures in the Imperial War Museum archive of my home village, Orford on the Suffolk coast, in 1941. In a series called 'Invasion Village' they reflected life when Britain expected to be invaded by Hitler at any time and, because Orford was on an east coast estuary it would have been a prime landing site.
In fact, I recalled my mother explaining that the whole village spent the war under military control, with the coast for several miles inland playing host to our front-line defensive forces.
The pictures featured some of the people I had known as a child, but - as I was only born eight years after they were taken - I recall them as old, sometimes elderly, individuals.
Yet there they were on the front line of a genuine national effort to survive the Nazi threat - not some ersatz crisis with a PR catchphrase like "We're all in it together" which most recognise to be simply untrue.
My father would have been training as an RAF dispatch rider elsewhere, my mother a teenage girl soon to join the Land Army. One grandfather was in the Home Guard and another the village milkman.
All were in a way on the front line - genuinely expecting a landing just a few hundred yards from their village homes. Those pictures showed the District Nurse I later knew as a stern old lady on the village Invasion Committee, along with the old policeman who failed to catch us scrumping apples and plums from one of the big houses.
With all the arrogance of youth these were the people I regarded as boring old farts while growing up and had thought little about since.
Oh, I loved my family and was proud of my Dad doing his bit as a Despatch Rider in Europe after D-Day, even if I only learned about that many years later from his diaries, but all those old village inhabitants were boring, rural and unappreciative of the needs of my generation.
In a way, I became older and wiser but I moved away and my memories of the older Orford people I knew as a child became preserved in aspic, as did my attitude towards them.
Then I looked at those black and white pictures capturing those same people, 20 years younger, and facing the stark realities and choices of a country at war, currently losingthat war and under threat of invasion.
Theirs was not some fake, political, 'war on terror' but a genuine threat to their homes and lives. They dealt with it by co-operating with each other, volunteering to do what was needed and attempting to preserve as much of their own lives as possible.
And they saw it through to victory. Suddenly boring old farts have to be seen as something more, as ordinary heroes, working class and middle class people willing to go beyond their own concerns, stand up and be counted.
It was a salutary experience to have to rethink attitudes born 50 years ago, and very worthwhile.Thanks Adrian for finding that glimpse of Orford in 1941.