The Colour of Conflict
To be born in the 1950s and spend one’s childhood in the 60s was to enjoy a good fortune denied to the previous generation. Whilst I wish in many ways that I had witnessed the 1930s and 40s, to be born in a time when the horrors of the Second World War were but a memory felt like a privilege.
Even though the deprivations of the war years were over, the war still exerted a strange presence over our lives.
My parents had both done their bit during the war years and those years had inevitably left a mark on their lives and the way they viewed the world. At some point in the 60s - I forget the exact year - my maternal grandmother passed away. My grandfather was not the type to cope alone so he ended up coming to live with us. A veteran of the trenches in the First War and working in a factory as part of the war effort in the Second, his memories would surface, if not regularly, but sufficiently often, around the dinner table.
Such talk was of course fascinating to young impressionable minds. And this was reinforced by much of the media and literature of the day. Boys’ comics including the Valiant and Hornet as well as the Commando series featured the war in a tableau of black and white illustrations, always portraying the stiff upper lipped English Tommy battling it out with the dastardly square jawed Germans.
And then there were the films, again in black and white, such as Dunkirk (1958) or the Longest Day (1962) which in their gritty use of monochrome sought to mimic the newsreels of the war period.
For me, however, one of the most profound documentary series ever made was the 26 part World at War series screened by ITV between 1973 and 1974. Narrated by Laurence Olivier and using footage from the conflict, it became natural to experience war as something that only happened in black and white. The images were more intense, more depressing, due to the absence of colour.
We do not, however, live in a monochrome world.
In the mid 1990s when my own children were young, there were two memorable experiences where I felt I had glimpsed the war in colour.
The first was during a long weekend away in Dorset. We were staying in a farm house in Kimmeridge on the Purbeck coast one beautiful May weekend. We took a trip to the abandoned village of Tyneham which was evacuated in December 1943 so that the army could train for the D Day landings. The abandoned houses still stand as skeletons of their former selves inhabited only by the ghosts of the former villagers.
From the village we made our way down to Worbarrow Bay and it was here on that sublime May day, with a sky of azure blue criss crossed with the contrails of aircraft flying high above, I felt a profound sense of what wartime England must have felt like. To sit on the limestone cliffs above the secluded bay, it was all but impossible not to imagine a different time - a time described to me so vividly by my parents some 30 years earlier.
The second experience was in 1995, again in May, at a bank holiday weekend when the 50th anniversary of VE day was being remembered.
Back then it was the tradition of a rather eccentric engineer in West Berkshire to open his garden in which he had a scale model railway with steam trains and rolling stock on which visitors would take rides around his garden. This was always a fun event for our children each May until the combined forces of health and safety and sky rocketing insurance premiums brought an end to such an innocent pleasure.
To get to this garden entailed parking in a farmer’s field and getting a lift on the back of a tractor drawn trailer sitting on hay bales. To be sitting on the back of this trailer on a beautiful day was heaven. But to be there at the very moment a Spitfire flew low and fast over us was utterly sublime. To see the underside of the wings with their blue and red roundels and to experience the noise of the Merlin engine was magnificent.
These tiny fragments of memory were a glimpse into a past that was long gone and yet on those beautiful days in May, trying to conjure up what life must have been like for those who actually lived through them, the world was not black and white, either literally or figuratively. The sky was blue - on occasions azure blue - and blood was red - dark red.
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About the Author:
Nicholas Engert is the founder and creative director of Nicholas Engert Interiors, a studio known for its timeless, elegant and understated design philosophy. With decades of experience in interior architecture and design, Nicholas brings a refined eye and a wealth of knowledge to every project, blending form, function and character with a deep understanding of client needs. Every product featured in the studio’s collection is personally selected to meet exacting standards of quality, design, and aesthetic integrity.