![]() ![]() ![]() Alan Milburn returned safely but a very changed man. It was not until October that she received a letter from him, a full nine months after she had last spoken to him over the phone. If… if… And so the days go by.’ At the end of July she heard that he was a prisoner of war and hugged her husband ‘for sheer joy at the good news’. One misses the young life everywhere, particularly Alan coming in in the early evening.’ A month later there was still no news of her son: ‘Always one is thinking of him, wondering whether he still lives and if so, whether he is well, where he is, what he does all day, what discomforts he is suffering. There is not much traffic on the roads during the week and the village seems empty in the evenings. A sort of deep stillness comes over everything from time to time. In June she wrote: ‘How curious this life is. Her diary entries over the summer of 1940 make haunting reading. In Jambusters I told the story of diarist Clara Milburn whose son, Alan, was posted as ‘missing’ after Dunkirk. ![]() Miriam refused to believe that David was dead and held onto that hope against all the odds. This was the fate of the Brindsley family in Home Fires. One of the cruellest notifications a family could receive, short of killed, was Missing in Action. Not numbers of killed or wounded but the impact it had on their families. As the second season of Home Fires draws to its dramatic close I thought I would concentrate on a question I have spent a great deal of time working on: the true cost of war The cost of the war in human terms. ![]()
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