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Acton, acton. Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me James Holland and today

I'm talking to you, Ficky Unwit. And we started to get quite interested on the podcast

in family stories and you know this idea that it's, yes of course it's Churchill and

Hitler and Roosevelt and Patton and Monty and all the big names and stuff. But actually

what makes the Second World War so incredibly unique is the enormity of ordinary people

getting caught up in extraordinary affairs. And the amount of people that asked me about

how they traced their relatives, above it's a great uncle or father or grandfather or

whoever and how you go about it. Well, Ficky's done that twice over because both her parents

had remarkable wartime experiences and Ficky you started off with your mother didn't

do. So how did that all come about? I mean what prompted you to kind of start delving

into your mother's wartime past? Well actually it did really start with my father but we'll

rewind that because I started researching him out of interest of discovering that he was

Jewish when I was in my late 30s. But then you know life happens and I forgot all about

that or it went on the back burner because I had kids and a job and all that sort of stuff.

And then my mother died in 2009 very suddenly actually and when I was clearing out her house

I found these huge bin bags, black bin bags just stuffed full of envelopes and they had

you know 1938, 1939, 1940 and all these envelopes were letters. And in a bin liner so that

could have easily been chucked. Yeah well I knew my mother was a hoarder you know because she

was of that wartime generation who washed up clean film and saved yoga pots and all that

kind of stuff. And lick the plate clean almost. Well yes yes if the cat didn't. And so I knew

that she was intending to write her memoirs, she'd already written one book about something

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