I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?