MY grandfather William Thomas Wootton celebrated his 21st birthday behind enemy lines in a Belgian village the British Army was trying to liberate from the Germans.
As a member of the Royal Engineers, he had landed in Normandy on June 12, 1944 — less than a week after D-Day.
The next 11 months of this young lad’s life were filled with unimaginable horrors.
Killing enemy soldiers as a Bren gunner on the back of a jeep became routine as our forces pushed through fierce resistance to arrive in Germany in time for VE Day.
His story was typical of virtually any member of our greatest generation in combat during World War Two.
The boy from Tadworth, Surrey, started the conflict truly terrified and was mortified about seeing dead bodies.
But within days, indescribable atrocities became the norm.
In his later years, he didn’t like to talk about the war, which he said brought out the dark side of men, but opened up to my dad a couple of years before his death from cancer in 1980.
One memory that stuck with Grandpa Bill was the day his unit had been in combat and needed to get away quickly.
They all piled into a truck under fire and sped off. But a fellow young soldier was running to catch up, so they pulled him in and he sat opposite my grandpa, who asked if he was OK.
He replied “yes”, only for his stomach and guts to fall out all over the floor. He was dead within minutes.
Because my grandpa was a professional soldier, he wasn’t demobilised and sent home after the war, but was billeted with the family of a German soldier of equal rank as he became part of the occupation forces in the British-run sector of what would become West Germany.
Just imagine how hard that must have been: Living with someone who a few weeks earlier you were trying to kill.
But my grandpa said: “They were just like us, fighting for their country.”
Without wanting to disparage the generations that have followed — mine included — it’s hard to imagine a member of Generation X or a millennial turning such trauma into a positive way of living.
But, 75 years on, there’s very good reason why our leaders today have regularly invoked the unsurpassed generation who came of age during World War Two throughout the current coronavirus crisis.
It’s no coincidence this group of fine folk includes the Queen, Sir David Attenborough and Captain Tom Moore, who have all provided the nation with so much inspiration at a time when celebrities, experts and politicians have often looked so deeply inadequate.
That gives me some hope that out of our current trauma will come a new great generation of young leaders to shepherd us through the next 100 years.
Maybe I’m naive, but I think the current pain and uncertainty surrounding lockdown could strengthen the character of young people, who have been mollycoddled by teachers and parents for so long.
This is the only time since the last world war where the entire globe is engaged in a conflict that has upended life as we know it.
We are again surrounded by tragedy, uncertainty and genuine fear.
Adults can no longer provide easy assurances or answers to children about when they will be able to return to normal life, be it visiting grandparents, going on holiday, shopping for clothes or attending school.
While this is a situation no one would ever have wished for, I have a growing optimism that we are never going to take any of those seemingly everyday pursuits for granted again.
What’s so striking about the generation who lived through World War Two is their total rejection of unnecessary consumerism. The Queen is a great example of this.
She has all the money and privilege in the world, but feels no need to replace her rotary-dial telephone from 1970 at Windsor Castle or wallpaper that dates back to Queen Victoria at Balmoral.
I guess anyone who worried about surviving the London Blitz or lived in terror over whether relatives and friends would return from the front line understands that hyper- consumerism is largely unimportant.
What’s so striking about the generation who lived through World War Two is their total rejection of unnecessary consumerism.
Grandpa Bill’s future wife, Catherine Taylor, my beloved grandma, was 12 years old and living in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, when World War Two broke out.
My great-grandfather, a World War One veteran and coal miner, had resolved to send her to Canada on the SS Athenia.
Thank God he changed his mind at the last minute; it was the first British ship lost after war was declared.
She was instead evacuated to Cockermouth in the Lake District to live with another family, but returned home just as German bombers started targeting the Tyneside shipyards and suburbs of Newcastle.
My proud Geordie grandma Rua, as I called her, spent night after night in a not-at-all-sturdy brick shelter in their back garden, listening to the bombs drop nearby, on one occasion on her actual street.
It was no life for a teenager. She carried her gas mask everywhere, knitted for airmen, joined bucket lines to put out fires and grieved for the 156 people of Newcastle lost in the bombings.
Then there was the daily fear of the “telegram boy” arriving with messages of relatives killed in combat.
But determined to help the war effort further, she dropped out of school and in 1944 joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service — the women’s branch of the British Army during the war.
This week I listened back to an oral history I recorded with my late grandma in the Nineties where she recounted her experiences of the time in her typically stoic and understated manner.
I noticed that any time I tried to guide her towards talking about the emotional cost of her teenage years being overtaken by tragedy, she batted it away.
“We didn’t talk much about nasty things,” she said softly. “I hated the bombing and I was terrified. Looking back, I think we got through it with lots of prayers.
“The war taught you about tragedy in people’s lives but you just battled on regardless.”
In fact, grandma said the positives included being “united as a nation” and “people caring for one another”.
Was she ever depressed?
“Life was entirely different then. We did sort of lose our teenage years in a way because they weren’t happy go lucky.
“Teenagers in England now have the chance to go on the Continent and travel around at a very small cost.
“We couldn’t do anything like that. You just carried on. You had to.”
The war taught you about tragedy in people’s lives but you just battled on regardless.
Catherine Taylor
There is very little comparison to what we are going through at the moment with the six years of death and destruction in World War Two.
But it’s impossible to deny that the travel, socialising and happy-go- lucky approach to life we had become accustomed to has been stolen from us, for now at least.
Youngsters previously so obsessed with how many people watched their latest dance video on TikTok are starting to think twice about what really matters.
They’re volunteering. They’re cooking for family members. They’re talking on Zoom to isolated elderly relatives.
Millennials who had become turned off and disillusioned with public life during the partisan Brexit wars are starting to re-engage with politics, aware of the real-life impact of decisions made by our leaders.
Ridiculous snowflake battles around identity politics and social issues now feel meaningless.
I hope and pray that when we look back in many decades’ time, we will be talking about how the historic coronavirus pandemic of 2020 helped create a new greatest generation in the same way the end of World War Two did 75 years earlier.
But tomorrow my thoughts will be entirely with all four of my grandparents — Bill, Cath, RAF airman John George Wheeler and London Blitz survivor Sylvia Jean Cook — who put their coming of age aside for the good of the country.
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