Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 15
Dunkirk in June 1940 when my father was woken at five in the
morning and arrested as an enemy alien. He was taken to Hyton
racecourse in Liverpool, shipped to the desert in Australia, enduring
‘57 days of Hell’. He was held there for about 18 months. 2 Thinking
he had found a safe place in the UK, it was this internment experience
he could never talk about. Part of the deal for his release was the
opportunity to return to England to join the British Army Pioneer
Corps, which he did a few days before his 21 st birthday.
At the time, my mother was working for the Ministry of Food
and evacuated to North Wales. It was wartime and my parents,
wanting to be together, married. My mother and father were from
different worlds. They had little conscious idea what they were taking
on, which ensured their hidden anguish would never see the light of
day, never to be shared, never to be soothed and never to be talked
through with their children.
My mother immediately became pregnant with me and
moved in with her parents in the Surrey countryside. My father
meanwhile was moved around the UK to various postings and
eventually joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was sent to work
in a military hospital in the Gold Coast, now Ghana. I was born nine
months later into my grandparents’ household. Watching her parents’
adoration of their first grandchild activated my mother’s own difficult
entrance into the world. In her mind, I became her parents’ favoured
younger daughter, her envied sister.
For the second time in her life my mother felt
unacknowledged. So, 21 months later, we moved away to London
despite the doodlebugs and V2 rockets still landing on nearby
Primrose Hill. We lived alone for the next 2 years until my father
returned from West Africa. Of course, this external move did not
relieve her of her mixed feelings. When my father was demobbed
from the army, my parents lived together as a married couple for the
first time. My mother had long dreamed of this time and I think found
sharing it with me very difficult. Yet again she felt unacknowledged
as a loveable person and upstaged by me. This set the scene for what
was to follow much later.
My parents had four daughters. My three younger sisters
were born at home. With my father present, these births were quite
different experiences for my mother. No longer alone and living with
2
http://judeninthemar.org/the-voyage/. 57 Days of Hell — The
Voyage of HMT Dunera, 1940.