One of my very earliest memories was watching footage of the Vietnam war in black and white broadcast by the BBC, I don't know what year it was or even if it was reporting on a war that was already over but I remember the noise of the guns from tanks and my mother sitting beside me refusing to move or look at me or answer my question, 'why are they killing each other mummy?' I think I must have been just three or four years old, so probably it was a war still being fought.
I can still remember the room where I was sitting in the apartment we were living in. It was my first experience of war. If only it could have been the last too...
Ah, then you're just a little younger than I am. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news, giving the numbers of casualties night after night. My grandmother watched with no expression. I didn't know enough to even ask, or maybe it (like most things) wasn't something you discussed in my family.
Maybe they just didn't know what to say at the horror unfolding. How do you explain it to a small child?
I don’t think its possible to explain the vagaries of war to a child without instilling fear, it is a subject I veer away from at all times with my young students, although with so much, often unmonitored information, at their fingertips they usually have an idea of what is happening in the world… I know I knew nothing at all, and my parents didn’t enlighten me, at such an impressionable age.
One of my very earliest memories was watching footage of the Vietnam war in black and white broadcast by the BBC, I don't know what year it was or even if it was reporting on a war that was already over but I remember the noise of the guns from tanks and my mother sitting beside me refusing to move or look at me or answer my question, 'why are they killing each other mummy?' I think I must have been just three or four years old, so probably it was a war still being fought.
I can still remember the room where I was sitting in the apartment we were living in. It was my first experience of war. If only it could have been the last too...
With love Louise xx
Ah, then you're just a little younger than I am. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news, giving the numbers of casualties night after night. My grandmother watched with no expression. I didn't know enough to even ask, or maybe it (like most things) wasn't something you discussed in my family.
Maybe they just didn't know what to say at the horror unfolding. How do you explain it to a small child?
xx to you, too, Susie.
I don’t think its possible to explain the vagaries of war to a child without instilling fear, it is a subject I veer away from at all times with my young students, although with so much, often unmonitored information, at their fingertips they usually have an idea of what is happening in the world… I know I knew nothing at all, and my parents didn’t enlighten me, at such an impressionable age.