I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVEWWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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 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 CLEAVEIs it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
CHRIS CLEAVEAnd thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe 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 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 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 CLEAVEEven for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
CHRIS CLEAVEI’m really interested in people’s decisions.
CHRIS CLEAVEIf I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVEThis is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
CHRIS CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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 CLEAVE