Family Life, Trauma and Loss in the Twentieth Century

The Legacy of War

Carol Komaromy, Jenny Hockey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319766010
• eBook ISBN: 9783319766027
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book uses personal memoir to examine links between private trauma and the socio-cultural approach to death and memory developed within Death Studies. The authors, two key Death Studies scholars, tell the stories that constitute their family lives. Each bears witness to the experiences of men who were either killed or traumatised during World War One and World War Two and shows the ongoing implications of these events for those left behind. The book illustrates how the rich oral history and material culture legacy bequeathed by these wars raises issues for everyone alive today. Belonging to a generation who grew up in the shadow of war, Komaromy and Hockey askhow we can best convey unimaginable events to later generations, and what practical, moral and ethical demands this brings.

Family Life, Trauma and Loss in the Twentieth Century will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including Death Studies, Military History, Research Methods, Family History, the Sociology of the Family and Life Writing.

© The Author(s) 2018

Carol Komaromy and Jenny HockeyFamily Life, Trauma and Loss in the Twentieth Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76602-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Recovery, Retrieval and Healing

Carol Komaromy¹ and Jenny Hockey²

(1)

The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

(2)

The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Keywords

RecoveryLegacyDeathTraumaReflexivityLife writing

End Abstract

It all began in 1995. We were excited to be participants at what was only the second of the International Death, Dying and Disposal Conferences .¹ The academic work on death and dying we had each been carrying out in relative isolation now seemed to be acquiring a place in the scheme of things. There, at the University of Sussex, circumstances drew us together for the first time. This book is a piece of collaborative writing that explores the different routes each of us had taken to that conference. It is a memoir, but rather than the story of an individual, it explores our shared background of two world wars and the distinctive ways in which family life, for each of us, was affected. At its heart are six key members of our families: Bert and Arthur Manning, Jenny’s paternal grandfather and his son, both of whom died in military action; Bert’s wife, Ella, and their second son, David, who became Jenny’s father; and James Gilmore, Carol’s father, who participated in the liberation of Belsen, and his wife Nell (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Timeline showing the relationship between individual lives and the two World Wars. Overall, it shows the short duration of time in both world wars compared with peace-time and highlights their enduring impact over the period considered

The project of researching and assembling their lives in this book reflects the spirit of creative partnership that has guided our careers so successfully as women—in an academic world where the heroic (often male), single-authored output retains its currency. The book is therefore made up of passages we have each written in the first person, as well as those which reflect joint authorship. Carol begins with her personal history and how it led her to the 1995 International Death, Dying and Disposal Conference at the University of Sussex.

Carol

I began to study part-time for a degree in 1984, when I was getting frustrated by the lack of intellectual stimulation in my work. I was doing agency nursing and also hospital bank nursing to fit around the needs of my son and daughter’s childcare but felt I needed something more. Over the next seven years, I studied a variety of courses part-time to fit in with paid work and childcare. These included the social sciences, technology, development studies and philosophy. Although I had received high marks and lots of praise during my assessment for nursing studies, I was still haunted by my school experiences and the dread of exams. (I did very well and gained a first class open, honours degree through The Open University.) Of course my thinking was changing and my ideas were being challenged. Alongside taking a module on beliefs and ideologies—having studied feminist ideas—and during the midwifery training I undertook near the end of my health-care career, I became horrified by the medicalization of childbirth and the power imbalance in a system through which this control was achieved. My new awareness was later deepened by my experiences among people nearing the end of their lives. But at this stage, as a trained midwife, my primary concern was with what had happened to women and how wrong it was. Although I could make a difference at an individual level, I felt powerless to challenge the system as a whole. At a psychodynamic level, as I recognised in my personal psychoanalytic analysis, it seems I was trying to uncover what went wrong for my mother and how it could have been prevented. In other words, I was doing my bit to rescue other women who, like my mother, might be damaged by the experience of childbirth, in her case, partly as a result of World War Two. More fundamentally and on reflection through analysis, it seems that I was trying to rescue the damaged infant ‘me’. This is something I discuss further in Chap. 9.

Encouraged by my partner and thinking that the best way to change things was through research and teaching, I went to the University of Warwick to do a full-time Master’s in ‘Sociological Research in Health Care’. Fortunately, my fear of being a mature student in a group of ‘bright young things’ was unfounded, and I spent a very stimulating year luxuriating in full-time study and holding my own intellectually. During my first degree, I had studied a course about social welfare and social problems and been bowled over by the theory of social construction and how ‘things could be otherwise’. I chose to do a dissertation on ‘The perceived risk of HIV infection in a labour ward setting’ where I had noted the contradictions in practising universal precautions when some midwives perceived particular women to pose a higher risk than others and modified their practice as a result.

After gaining an MA, I applied for a fixed-term six-month research contract at The Open University, designing a research survey and analysing the data. It was the first part of a larger, three-stage study of end-of-life care for older people, to be submitted to the Department of Health. During this first phase, the project’s principal investigators were successful in getting Department of Health funding to complete the next two stages of the study. I was recruited as the full-time Research Fellow, and my training as a counsellor and my health-care practice background and interest in palliative care helped me enormously in conducting interviews and with observational fieldwork. Thus began my entry into academia and, in particular, the arena of death and dying. It was agreed that I should do a part-time PhD alongside the fieldwork—and I approached Jenny Hockey and asked her if she would like to collaborate on the project in some way. This was the beginning of what became a strong friendship in which we often wrestled with ideas about ‘what is really going on here’. Jenny for her part arrived in Brighton by a different route.

Jenny

In 1965 I abandoned Art College and took ‘shelf-stacking’ jobs in libraries at the University of Cambridge. Ten years later, when my children started school, I began an undergraduate degree in social anthropology . It involved a dissertation based on data we had gathered ourselves. The deaths of my mother and grandfather led me to traditional anthropological accounts of non-western societies which often give considerable space to descriptions and interpretations of ritual practices around the time of death. They are likely to be the most elaborate of any enacted at times of change and transition. Yet the deaths in my family were surrounded by silences and absences that stood out in marked contrast to the apparently extravagant behaviours of many traditional peoples. Those family deaths provided me with ‘data’, a point of comparison.

What became known as ‘anthropology at home’—the study of one’s own society—inspired me to begin investigating the taken-for-granted world of my everyday life and its brushes with death. I started with an undergraduate dissertation in 1977 and at first concluded that earlier forms of knowledge and ways of behaving had been forgotten, that death and the dead had become disgracefully neglected. I collected data by asking people around me for their ‘death histories’, accounts that often began with the first deaths they could remember, perhaps a grandparent, maybe the cat. I was interested in what appeared to make self-evident sense in my own society, the kind of knowledge often thought of as ‘common’ sense. It could, I believed, reveal fascinating systems of meaning if I interrogated it with enough care. Core to what busied me between 1977 and 2002 was therefore the sequestration or sidelining of death, the way its occurrence and aftermath were absent from everyday experience. But I was also curious to understand what these avoidances were about. In other words, I was trying to explain something that was not happening, particularly the relationships that living people might (not) have with the dead. Certainly I had considerable experience of silences and avoidance, and my relationships with dead family members were almost non-existent. I had sidestepped the end of my mother’s life, and even my initial anthropological fieldwork in a care home for elderly people and a hospice introduced me to only a tiny number of corpses.

When I wrote up that fieldwork in the form of a PhD and later a book ,² I prefaced it with childhood memories of the night my grandfather died: ‘Suffering from heart trouble, he remained in hospital for more than a week. Though I sent in cards and presents for him, as a nine-year old child I was excluded from visiting. Within ten days of his admission, while lying awake, I overheard my father answering the front door. His “Oh Lor!” and my mother’s unusually firm squeeze as they left the house evoked no conscious suspicion on my part – but I remember them still.’

Though exclusion seems to characterise this event, a set of practices were still being brought into play. Once my grandfather was dead, visiting his body in hospital was an immediate priority for my parents. For me, as a child, this visit and indeed the news that he had died were something I had to be protected from. Yet other people in other places do these things differently. Even in the UK, 50 years later, parents are unlikely to leave a nine-year-old child in the house alone. The absences and exclusions of my 1950s’ Cambridge childhood are the outcome of particular beliefs and practices; they are not simply failures or voids.

These two examples illustrate this point.

In the residential home for elderly people where I began research in 1980, the apparent invisibility of death was the outcome of procedures that served to divide the living and dead people who shared the confines of the institution. I described these as follows:

Though properly managed deaths take place in the sickbay, ambiguities are still encountered in that the corpse must then pass through the space of the living on its journey to the mortuary. An impromptu transformation of this space is effected through the deliberate closure of lounge and bedroom doors en route, and the strategic positioning of staff members between the ‘frail’ who doze in the open alcove and the passing corpse.³

Carol described similar practices after a death in the hospital where she worked as a nurse in the 1960s. ‘The screens were pulled around the beds of living patients, side rooms were closed and all ambulant non-medical people were stopped and placed out of sight of the departing corpse .’⁴ What she is saying is that for a death to be non-apparent, things have to be done. From her direct observations following death in the care home setting, Carol noted that the removal of the corpse was concealed, often with difficulty:

Fieldnotes: Leaving the home at 6.15 pm, shortly after being called, the undertakers arrived at Regis House to remove Alice’s body. Matron and I went with them and on the way through the lounge to the bedroom, matron closed the curtains in the dining room, so that the residents would not see the hearse. I helped matron to move furniture around so that they could access the French doors. The room was very small and making room for the mortuary trolley was difficult. At one point the commode that was in the room toppled over onto the dressing table and made a loud crash. I wondered how much of this noise the surviving residents were able to hear and what they thought we were doing. The undertakers took Alice’s body out in a body bag on a trolley through the French doors of her bedroom unseen by other residents, who were still having tea as part of the normal routine.

Our very different routes to the University of Sussex conference had converged within care homes for older adults and the ways in which institutions managed death ‘on the premises’. As we go on to describe, we brought different histories and questions to this environment of ageing and deterioration. Both of us had entered university as mature students with particular life experiences behind us. Alongside our personal trajectories, a wider world had begun to question the ways in which western societies were dealing with death. The academic insights we contributed to Death Studies derive from a period of profound change and diversification within the human encounter with mortality. Bereavement counselling; hospice care; the provision of niche funerals, for example for the members of minority ethnic groups; the removal of ashes from crematoria for personal disposal; the introduction of natural burial; the growth of DIY funerals and informal memorialisation at grave sites; the radical revision of theories of grief—these are all late twentieth-century innovations. They have evolved against the background of what the historian Jay Winter , writing about the World War One in 1995, called ‘the cataclysmic record of European history ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Recovery, Retrieval and Healing
• 2. Missing Persons
• 3. Changing Perspectives on Death, Dying and Loss
• 4. World War One and its Transformations
• 5. Family Life Between the Wars: 1918–1931
• 6. War in Prospect, 1930–1939
• 7. At Home and Abroad
• 8. Experiencing the Horror of World War Two
• 9. Growing Up Post-War: All Over Now?
• 10. Endings and Beginnings
• Back Matter