Two generations, two wars, and two hundred yards

Sylvia, in uniform

Mark and Sylvia live about 200 yards and 60 years apart in Orpington in Kent. But they have one more thing in common.  War.

Sylvia, 88, was in the armed services in World War II.  Mark, 28, a former soldier, served in Afghanistan.

Now they look very different, but their experiences bring them together. 

Mark

Mark joined the Army in 1998 and went on to duty in locations including Afghanistan (Afghan to our forces) and The Falklands.  Mark says that that while the job the Army does is important, "day to day it was the blokes and my own friends that mattered most."  He remembers working in Afghan with the kind of people who, keen to raise money for a colleague who had had an arm and both legs blown off on duty, were sponsored to do 9 marathons in 9 days. He appreciates what the charity Help for Heroes does, but the togetherness of the Army is such that often it helps its own people.

A pop up wall under construction

Mark’s war was in Afghan.  There, aged 23, he worked on a sangar, an Afghan- inspired name for a very small fort, or place for troops to observe and fire from in relative safety. But what if one isn’t safe?  Mark encountered one which lacked a wall to protect soldiers entering and leaving the sangar from a camp.  In fact, sadly a soldier from the Mercian Regiment had just been shot dead for the lack of a wall.  So Mark and his team worked for days to build a wall in full view of the sniping positions that had so recently been used.  Mark is very proud of the achievement:

“Yes, I was nervous, knowing I could be shot at any moment. But I am glad that I have left a legacy which means no more shootings will take place in that spot and soldiers following me to Afghan are safer.”  

“Another time we needed to put in a new heli pad, but extend the base perimeter so the helicopters could land safely. We used a concertina wall – the Hesco Bastian - and after two and a half weeks repetitive slog it was done.  I was the only person in my team that worked on the wall throughout, others being given other duties from time to time.  I knew I’d been working, too.  Every time I returned to camp I had to wring the sweat out of my trousers and socks, and it was a time of shower, sleep, work, repeat.” 

Sylvia

Sylvia was 14 and living in Peckham when she left school to work with her father’s grocery business, which then had a horse and cart for transport, and then a manufacturer of toffee wrappers.  She was 17 when she volunteered for the armed forces in World War II.  She joined the RAF’s Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941, and learned to drive in a British School of Motoring car before getting a licence to drive larger vehicles.

Her service took Sylvia to Yorkshire's Bomber Command bases, including Dalton, Dishforth, and Topcliff, where her job was to bus airmen to and from their accomodation to their airfields and their bomber aircraft. Their aircraft were Wellington and Lancaster bombers.  As Sylvia later learned, the latter were involved in the famous Dambuster raids on Germany. 

Sylvia recalls, “Sometimes they used to limp back on only one engine or two engines and they would land where they could, so we used to have to go and get the them.  Awful memories.  The airmen in the airplanes and they couldn't get out and the planes were smouldering and going up in flames."

"We used to do night duty, take them out, bring them home to their briefing, and home again.  I had a friend who was on night duty and she was killed, a stray plane came over and shot the airfield up, it was most unusual because normally it was very quiet, we didn’t get much in the way of raids.  In fact, when I came home on leave to Peckham I was glad to get back [to Yorkshire] because it was much quieter up there."
 
"We had a Royal Canadian Airforce squadron on our station and quite a lot of the girls married the pilots and went over to America, didn’t know what they were going to really, but it always seems brighter on the other side.”

Sylvia and Mark don’t know each other.  Perhaps they, and other people like them, should.