Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the “lost children” who feature in the novel – those come from my research.
CHRIS CLEAVEYet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVEHorror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVEAt this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.
CHRIS CLEAVEThis thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVEI know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVEA scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVEI am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVEI think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
CHRIS CLEAVEEveryone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.
CHRIS CLEAVETo be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVEMy paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVEThat is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
CHRIS CLEAVEWWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVE