History, Near and Far

It's a great benefit, and also an indispensible necessity, of a life on the road to listen to radio programmes - either directly or by podcast.  Yesterday morning, for example, I enjoyed the first of Sue MacGregor's new series of The Reunion on BBC-Radio4, which featured a number of people who had been involved in the Berlin Airlift.  Following the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, all the needs of a city of 2.2 million people had to be supplied by air.  The blockade lasted from June 1948 until May 1949, but the flights continued until September, finishing only a few months before I was born.  At its peak a cargo plane was landing in Berlin every minute, round the clock!

Like many today, I had known little about these dramatic events before the programme, and drove happily along, learning something new every minute. At one point a piece of contemporary music was played, and my mind zoomed straight back to schooldays or beyond.  For some reason I remembered in particular times when I was ill and confined to bed, the monotonous hours being filled with countless loaned copies of comics and other magazines, like Reveille and Weekend.

In my spare time over the last couple of weeks, I've been compiling an annotated transcript of a diary that I kept about fifteen years ago.  As the words were copied from handwritten page to computer screen, the events that they narrated needed little prompting to seem quite real in my mind.  As I listened to this radio programme, and remembered my childhood, I began to think about the general adult conversation that would have been going on around me in those days.  If my vivid memories of fifteen years ago are any guide, it's quite likely that some of the events of at least that time-span would have figured in those childhood echoes - fifteen years, for example would have gone back at least to the war years.  I wrote here only a few weeks ago, for example, about how I 'grew up in the knowledge that my mother's brother had been a victim of the war': he had died on the Burma Railway in 1943. What I don't remember is any specific instance of being told that fact.  Like the language itself, I learned it by hearing conversation.

At the other extreme of the historical continuum, let me give you just a smattering of this working week.  It caught my eye as I recorded the details this morning - and it has to be a first, because I'm sure I would have spotted it, had it not been so - that in a week of five days, there were fifteen jobs: one on Monday, two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday ... you get the idea; and the aggregate daily income forecast was also in line in the same way.  On Thursday evening, I finished with a delivery at Rolls Royce in Derby.  It's one that I've done many times now, and every time - except the first, of course! - I've derived great satisfaction that, on such a vast and complex site, I know exactly where to go, and can find it first time without a lot of hunting around for the right access point.

The aspect of the job that fits in with this week's historical theme, however, came on the journey home.  I was listening to a programme about trials at the Old Bailey, presented by Prof. Amanda Vickery, and realised that this was a repeat of what I had heard only twelve-and-a half hours before.  As the programme advanced, I found I could remember almost tree by tree where I had been driving on the former occasion.

I'm fascinated to note how history, in so many different ways, is all around us.