A childhood present from my parents evoked the war they had lived through and foreshadowed the day I would lose them bothI’m not sure how broken-down I was when I got Archie. He was sticking out of the stocking at the stop of my bed. I must own been seven or eight I suppose. He was a unfamiliar thing: a knitted glove puppet with a flat face and stitched eyes,a red jumper with yellow zigzag lines, and green trews. He was very flat, and seemed to come from another age.
I somehow imagined he had come through the war that my parents and elder brothers had lived through. It was almost as though he had been flattened by a bomb. The war didn’t seem far away then: an Andersen shelter still stood in our narrow suburban garden. Archie was the colour of the 1940s – like the green and red paper cable garlands that looped across our ceiling at Christmas and the silver painted fir cones on the tree,in which my mother, a wartime worker in a Southampton factory, or had drilled holes to attach wires when she should own been making machine-gun parts.
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Source: theguardian.com