Cultureshock

You need Adobe Flash installed to watch this movie.
Get Adobe Flash

Video transcript

My beautiful , long awaited for daughter Juliet is 10 years old now and growing up very quickly.

She loves the idea of family and is intrigued by my mother , Winifred Hazel Charlton who died 22 years ago , 12 years before Juliet was born.

Juliet keeps a photograph of Winifred by her bed in a gold frame. She calls her my Grandma and when asking about her she always says,

"Tell me all about it, Tell me everything ." And so I try...

My mum was in the WAF during the second world war. She was from Sunderland but  at the age of 17 she was stationed at Mildenhall Air Base in Suffolk.

As a child my head was full of stories of World War 2 as she related them to me endlessly.

She was on the team of cooks at the air base and she became a corporal. She told me how one particular airman admirer of hers would sing , "Hey good looking , what you got cooking..."

Once she heard from the control room at the air base that someone she was dating had been shot down in a plane over Germany .

She was flown in a Lancaster Bomber over Germany to see the devastation caused by the famous Barnes Wallis bomb drops.

She would go out in the evening to village dance halls and get the last train back to blacked out stations .

I would always remind her about this when I was a teenager and she was worried about me venturing into town late at night!

My father was a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy and in the 60's he would be away at sea for 18 months at a time , so mum was the main parent.

Whenever I was off school ill she would tell me family history stories about her mother Eliza Hedley who had died before I was born.

I was fascinated by tales of her grandmother Suzannah who was originally from Brittany , then settled in Cornwall near Bodmin Moor and thence the family moved to the North East.

My mum remembers her grandmother wearing Victorian clothing and never losing her Cornish accent.