Jason MoorePalma21/04/2020 17:27
TW
2

A 100-year-old man has become an unlikely hero of the battle against the coronavirus in Britain. Vera Lynn´s war-time classic We´ll Meet Again was top of the charts for a while last weekend and the country is taking inspiration from a monarch who turned 94 yesterday. I might be missing something here but it does appear that the older generation are putting their younger cohorts to shame.

Isn´t there anyone of my generation who is standing up and showing the country the light and the way forward? Is the generation which lived through the Second World War stronger and more determined than the generations which followed? Well, it certainly appears to be so. My mother would recount that as a schoolgirl in war-time Kent she would cycle home from school dodging V1 flying bombs which came hurtling across the channel from Nazi occupied France. But despite the risks, which were many - V1 bombs killed more than 6,000 civilians - she still went to school everyday.

My grandfather, who came from an even earlier generation, would travel across London at the height of the Blitz to go towork and go home again in the evening. After dinner he would be on look-out for German bombers on the roof-top of a nearby apartment complex. He prided himself that he was never late for work. He had also endured the horrors of the First World War. Is it a question of they don´t make them like they use to?