Submitted by Carole Chapman, Portsdown u3a
For more years than I care to remember, History has been my passion, my subject of study and, ultimately, my career.
Now, in retirement, I belong to the Imperial War Museum’s War and Conflict Subject Specialist Network. Memory and commemoration are very much part of its brief: hence my 2020 u3a initiative on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.
Since we have now reached 2022, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From my point of view, this is a bit different. It is not something that happened before I was born and, unlike some of the earlier subjects of note, I was not an adult. I was ten years old in 1962.
When I thought about this, I realised that it is very difficult to peel away the layers of knowledge of something that one has taught to students and come up with what it was like at the time and at that young age.
What is clear is the fact that, at the time, I understood it mainly in personal terms. I certainly knew a bit about the United States but was less aware of the Soviet Union. I am not sure that I knew where Cuba was, at least at the start of the crisis. In the end, it was about Khrushchev and Kennedy and who blinked first. That it was Khrushchev was obviously a source of great relief in that tense month of October 1962.
This was because I do remember a sense that these events could have a direct impact on our families. Most of us in the top year of my primary school had fathers who had gone through service in World War Two. My own father had joined the Navy in 1938 as a fifteen-year-old boy and had served until 1949. One of my most vivid memories is of a playground conversation about whether the men would be called up again and who would have to go. I had obviously picked up the phrase “reserved occupation” as I believed that my father’s current occupation in an aircraft factory would keep him at home this time. I suppose that I had heard the adults talking. It was certainly expected that Britain would line up with the United States, but I do not remember any formal discussion of the situation at school.
I do not think that I am imagining how we felt at the time, although it is certainly difficult to be sure. We had been born after the Second World War, but that massive event seemed to colour our parents’ understanding of new events like the Cuban Missile Crisis and, more generally, of what we came to understand as the Cold War. It was almost as if they had survived but could never quite believe it and never take it for granted.
Much later in my life, I discovered the American author William Faulkner and his wise words from Requiem for a Nun:
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
I know that it is so.