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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

Chris Cleave

We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn’t start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Journey People
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Scar
I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bombs Horse Littles
Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Capes Names Running
WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Events Memories Wwii
We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Behalf Books Movies
The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don’t always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn’t have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I’m interested in the exceptions.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Anger Hate Writing
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ambulance Birmingham Grandmother
And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fool Love Make Thus
To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Firsts Mind Wells
I 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 CLEAVE

Generations Golden Thinking
I write in the novel’s afterword that our recent wars “finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy”.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enemy War Writing
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Armistice Ends War
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Easy Sometimes
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Built Woman Wreckage

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

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