I thought I would post this, seeing as the horrific ex-boyfriend* who wanted me to write something for his history blog is clearly never going to.
*he's alright really.
These are pieces from an old biscuit box that my Dad has had
in a cupboard for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I thought it was stuff which
belonged to my Grandad during the war. I never met my Grandad – he died when I
was about eight, and he didn’t have much contact with my Dad. Around the time
he died I was shown a photo of him taken in 1944, in his army gear, feeding the
pigeons in Trafalgar Square. So I always thought of him as a soldier, and I
probably assumed the box had been his because it was from the war, and because
I only ever (and only still) listen to and put together the bits of stories
which I like or which grab my attention, and this usually leads to me
accidentally making up a lot of stuff without realising.
When I persuaded my Dad to take the box down again and let me take pictures for
this blog, it became obvious that this wasn’t my Grandad’s box. It turned out
that it belonged to a guy called Robert William Sumpton, who was a boyfriend of
my Gran’s. I was a bit pissed off about that to be honest, because it meant a
bit of what I thought I’d known about my Grandad was gone, and that I only had
the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Then I started looking through it.
