My grandmother was in MI6 during the war, her number was 0071. She spent some of it in Sweden. What she did there nobody in the family knows because, being the dutiful woman she was, she never spoke of it and the files are permanently embargoed. It is hardly uncommon in families with relatives that saw active service in the War that their service was not discussed, even with closest relatives, either because they weren't permitted to or because what they saw was so dreadful that a veil necessarily had to be drawn.
We are very shortly going to pass beyond living recall of WWII which, from a British perspective, means that a national experience of conflict, battle and death is going to evaporate. That sense of things so collectively and personally painful that they just couldn't be shared with those that had not perceived them will have disappeared. Sadly, of course, there remain many parts of the world where that doesn't merely remain a lived experience but a living experience too.
What has that got to do with parenting you might well ask? Well, just as some British people have an unhealthily partial understanding of British history so too do many of us have an unhelpful awareness of the lives of our parents and our parents' parents, and so on.
It is perhaps in the nature of things that it is hard to imagine the world before our arrival and harder yet to imagine it after our departure. And yet existed it did and so too did our parents unencumbered by cooking pasta and tomato sauce (again), wrestling with child seats, nagging about the state of bedrooms and pursing lips at first tattoos.
Unless people are orphans, adopted or have some peculiarly remote relationship with their parents they are likely to know the parental CV. Where and when born, education, chronology of employment, interests and hobbies. But as anyone who has ever had a hand in recruitment will tell you, judging someone by their CV is like thinking you understand what it's like to experience the Taj Mahal because you've read about it in a guidebook.
Most of us, of course, do get to experience our parents as well as knowing the key facts about them. But not all of us really get to know our parents. That may be because they're not telling but it's just as likely because we're not asking. In one key respect we can never actually know our parents and that is them without us. However the fact that it is literally impossible to experience that state isn't to say that journeying in that direction is time and energy wasted.
I sometimes think the best parents are those that are able to remain truest to their ultimate sense of self notwithstanding the arrival of a newborn (assuming, obviously, that their truest sense of self isn't a feckless drug taking dissolute). It's hardly a revelation that parenting entails self-sacrifice but if that sacrifice actually entails destruction of the self you will not teach your child how to be their own person. What is essential is having the courage and to show and share your real self with your children.
Most people, unless they're incurably incurious, reach a stage in life when they wonder why they are the way they are, some get there at 5, some at 50. In answering that enquiry it is almost always necessary to find out why your parents are the way they are. Maybe you're lucky and they've thought hard about that question and they're prepared to let you in on the secret. Maybe you're less lucky and their interior life is as secret as a clam's insides.
But just as history is public so too is it personal and knowing your parents' emotional timeline means you can progress from the who's who version of them to the why's who. Assuming they're still around, and even if they're not, it's never too late to start the treasure hunt: just don't expect them to give you the clues.
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