This was written the day I returned from Bergen-Belsen from the 70th anniversary commemoration, and the day my father died.



​In May 1945, my mother, not yet 25, entered the gates of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany. She was in the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), the 29th General Hospital, and a qualified nurse. My mother spoke little of this time – I have pieced together things from a couple of conversations and the only two letters we still have. She sent these to her husband of less than a year, my father. One was sent the week before her transport to the camp, one a day or two later.


The hardest thing about these letters from Captain Kathleen Elvidge is that they are in the hand I know so well, from the notes that got me off PE, the letters that lightened days at college when I was homesick, and the birthday cards that I still miss. And here this beloved handwriting talks of brutality and hatred and pain and suffering.

For the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 2015, Tim and I stayed in Celle, a few miles from the camp and a beautiful mediaeval town full of timbered and decorated houses and shops from the 1400s and 1500s. My mother mentioned the town in her letter, and it was a strange feeling that I walked amongst the buildings where she would have walked too. Sitting outside a cafe in the sun, I looked at the older people there and wondered who had been there then, either in the camp, or outside in the 'real' world.

I think what was so shocking at first about the camp was the beauty. The wooded glades, the open grassed area, the birdsong and the sunshine. And then I realised that not a single tree trunk was bigger than a span wide; nothing older than a handful of decades, and the grassed areas, bounded by low walls, were the mass graves. 'Hier ruhen 1000 tote'. 'Hier ruhen 5000 tote'. A total of at least 23,200 dead. I couldn't take much in, that first day, just a feel for the place, the beauty and the horror, and a feeling of disconnect.

The day of the ceremony it rained. As I walked across the camp under a now dark and cloudy sky, I could hear the haunting strains of a Jewish choir, and see the wreaths laid by groups around the area and around the world. At the gathering under the towering obelisk, people spoke in German and in English. In Roma languages. In Hebrew, Hungarian and French. Much of it I didn't understand, but some things just don't need words. I laid a yellow tulip by one of the mass graves, and the disconnect was gone.

The exhibition tells the story of the camp, from its early days as a prisoner of war camp, through the horrors of the time as a concentration camp, where gas chambers weren't needed, because it was enough to let the starvation and the disease do the work, to the liberation and beyond as a displaced person's camp. The stories are captured in words, while they are beyond words – tales of inhumanity and terrible, terrible death, with pictures of twisted and emaciated bodies where it is hard to tell the alive from the dying and the dead. And around this are the elderly people who survived, some alone and subdued, some with families. Some greeting each other with the feel of a school reunion, or of meeting long-lost relatives from family long separated. Sadness and joy. Bitterness and love.

In these awful images, I saw only a fraction of the horror that must have greeted my mother. Despite her arrival at Belsen being around a month after liberation, the camp was still strewn with bodies, and she had to watch the ex-camp warders throwing bodies into mass graves and covering them with earth using bulldozers. The nurses made sure that the dead were at least dignified by a wrapping of clean cloth, and ensured that their passing was marked with a prayer from the padre.

She worked at the emergency hospital established at the military barracks that made up part of the camp, now making up part of a British Army base. The prisoners – dissidents and homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jews and anti-Nazi Christians, Poles, Russians and Hungarians, children and babies – were beyond bone-thin. They had been given only the meagerest of meagre rations, including watery turnip soup and bread, and my mother spoke of how hard it was to hold back food from people who were starving, but whose bodies could not cope with anything other than tiny portions. She also talked of women stealing bread from others, and from the dead, to feed their children, even after food was available. They were scarred physically and emotionally, diseased, lice-ridden and afraid.

While I was there, I mourned my mother's loss all over again, but also feel closer to her than ever before, because I have seen a little of what she saw, and walked a few of the places where she walked. Perhaps I have laid a few ghosts.

And now I'm back, with a feeling that something has irrevocably changed, and so I wonder why the rest of the world is carrying on as normal. It's like coming back from hospital the morning my mother died, and wondering how other people could drink tea with friends, and shop, and call to their children, as if nothing had happened. Because of course for them, nothing had. I just need a little time.​

I couldn't make it through mum's eulogy without choking up, and dad scolded me for it in her service. So, sorry, dad, if I do it this time too.

My strongest memory of dad is the many things he taught me.

He taught me a love for words, poetry, rhythm and meaning. We would go through the 'It pays to increase your word power' column in the Reader's Digest, seeing who could get the most. He would read poetry aloud, and loved to hear us read it too. Despite (or perhaps because of) having left school at 14, he would read the books we all studied at school and discuss them with us. He had a wonderful reading voice – one Christmas he read 'Christmas Carol' to us each evening as a nightly serial. However, when the bell tolled in the book and the phone rang in the hall we all leapt out of our skins.

Dad taught me about narrative and story. When we went to museums, he would tell me stories about the things there, explaining how things worked and what they were for, and if you looked around you would see a circle of people listening in, fascinated. He taught me that everyone has their own story, however humble. He also had a bit of a tendency to make stuff up, often adding 'as true as I'm riding this bike', so I guess that taught me scepticism too.

He taught me a love and respect for engineering, from beam engines to racing cars. I remember helping him service our car, including draining the oil into an old Rover biscuit tin, changing air filters, and resetting spark plugs. One open day he took me to the Leyland works and I remember seeing his bench. I also remember being overawed by the size of the building in which he worked as a toolmaker, and the bulk and noise of the machines that used the tools he made. He would bring home things he had made at work in his lunchtime, like the step stool for the caravan.

He taught me practical skills like planting runner beans, wiring plugs and making bread, and less practical ones like eating chocolate digestive biscuits whole (which I can still do), and doing the Harry Worth trick using a shop window.

He knew just how to embarrass me as a teenager, because every time he saw a stop tap on the pavement he would stop and tap it. As revenge, I could make him dissolve into giggles in church by leaning over at a serious moment, pointing to the vicar, and asking dad why that man was wearing a dress.

Dad also taught me about love – he comforted me when my A level results meant that I couldn't get into the university I wanted, and when my first marriage fell apart. He loved my second husband Tim, with whom he shared a passion for planes and cars. He adored my mother, and held hands with her every day until the day she died.

Just last month, at the end of April, I went on a very emotional trip to Germany. This was for the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where my mother nursed the survivors. I learned a lot about her by seeing just a fraction of what she saw, and I laid a yellow tulip for her at the foot of one of the mass graves. My dad was so proud of my mum, and I am so glad that I got to tell him I was going. He asked me to stand with Tim at Belsen for them, with my little finger hooked in Tim's, a gesture I saw mum and dad do so many times. Just a few hours after I got back from Germany, I got the call from the care home to tell me that dad was gone. And so, only a couple of weeks after the weekend of celebrating and remembering my mum, I am here celebrating and remembering my dad. Somehow, for me, that creates a kind of a completeness.

It seems right to close with the words of one of dad's favourite poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. But again, I'm sorry, dad. I don't think I will be able to keep the poem's promise.

​Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,
   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.
   Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;
   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.