The BBC at its nation-unifying best |
Children of the Blitz began with the surprising news – to me anyway – that while 800,000 British children in places likely to be bombed were evacuated during the war, two million weren’t. The evacuees’ stories have long been a TV staple, but this riveting documentary was the first programme of any kind I can remember about those who stayed at home. The experience was recalled with extraordinary vividness by people mainly in their nineties or beyond, all of whom gave the type of revelatory interview that programme-makers don’t get merely by pointing the camera and asking questions, but through the careful building of wholly justified trust.
The first we saw was 101-year-old Dorothea who, after some film of her in impressive yoga action, explained that ‘one doesn’t talk about it’, as it ‘opens too many doors to the horrors of one’s earlier life’. She had, however, decided to talk now, since ‘we’re all popping our clogs’ and this was the last chance for the survivors to be heard.
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What made their interviews particularly revelatory was their perspective on how the war felt as a child: both not quite understanding and sort of understanding only too........