Our parents before we knew them - by Sue Purkiss

 By now, my new book, An Ordinary War, should be available on Amazon, and fear not, I'll be writing all about it in a post later this month. It is inspired by my father's experiences as a prisoner of war for five years, after being captured on the way to Dunkirk.

But today, I'm writing not about him, but about my mother.

We've recently had a room refurbished. It's in the oldest part of the house, and dates from several hundred years ago, when this was a one-up one-down cottage or farmhouse. Since we moved in, over forty years ago, this room has had very little done to it. The walls were covered with ancient woodchip, which had been patched up and was now, in places, unattached to the crumbling plaster. The not-so-old chipboard floor was crumbling into large holes in places, so you had to be careful not to turn your ankle - only the carpet was holding it together.

So, finally, its day has come. It's been replastered and refloored, it's got smart new skirting boards and lights - even fancy new sockets with USB points. we've painted it in pretty colours, and once the carpet's down, it'll be ready to go. 

At the moment it's an empty space. But soon, other furniture will go into it, including a carved oak chest from another bedroom. I was explaining this a couple of weeks ago to my daughter and son-in-law, and we went to look at the chest. As we discussed this and various other furniture moves, Katie noticed an old embroidered fire screen which came from my parents' house. We hadn't used it for its original purpose because we had a mesh and wrought iron one from my parents-in-laws' house, which was really more practical.

Katie was admiring the embroidered screen - as you can see, it is very pretty. Then she had a brilliant idea. Why not make it into a picture, she said, and hang it in the 'new' room? So she and Chris took it away, and brought it back a week later, all ready to hang. He'd cut off the legs, and sanded and oiled the frame. And as he'd done so, he'd noticed an inscription, scartched into the frame. It said, CPL L Clarke 1943. This was my mother, Lily Clarke. During the war, she was a nurse with the WAAF, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force: the women's branch of the RAF.

I hadn't been sure who had embroidered the firescreen. I'd rather thought it was Auntie Ada, an old friend of Mum's, who had been a sort of a mother substitute to Mum (whose own mother had been somewhat deficient in the nurturing department), and who I knew to have given Mum lots of embroidered tablecloths and the like. But clearly, Mum had made it herself. And she'd done it during the war. 

Photo by Chris Davies

She was stationed on various bases in Lincolnshire, and she got to know a farmer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Thorpe. I think Mrs Thorpe was another substitute mother figure: she and Frank were very kind to Mum, and they stayed in touch after the war. (In fact oddly, with a nice little touch of circularity, the old carved chest, which we'd gone to look at when Katie spotted the firescreen, was left to Mum by the Thorpes.) Perhaps Mum worked on the firescreen when she was staying with the Thorpes: I couldn't really imagine her doing it in the hurly burly of an airforce base, with constant emergencies and admissions to the hospital.

Dad didn't talk much about his experiences as a POW, and Mum didn't talk much about her experiences in the WAAF. She reminisced occasionally about the different bases she'd been on, and she had a few photos - and she stayed in touch with one of the nurses she'd served with, who in fact was one of my godmothers. But you never got a sense of what day-to-day life was like, what it felt like to be in that situation. Probably, sadly, I just didn't ask the right questions.

But this little detail - her name scratched proudly onto the frame of this picture which she'd embroidered so painstakingly - somehow has drawn her closer to me. Our relationship wasn't always easy. Probably thanks largely to her own mother, she didn't find it easy to show affection. She poured it into the things she made for myself and my sister: dresses she sewed, cardigans she knitted - once, even, beautiful tweed suits that she went on an evening course to learn how to tailor. She loved making things and growing things. 

Now, when I look at the picture, I will imagine her working on it as the war raged and planes circled above the flat Lincolnshire countryside - and it will remind me of her.