Barry Nutley

Reach Back and Touch Barry Nutley

I discovered at the age of fifteen that I had been adopted when I was just six weeks old. My adoptive parents were working class people, servants in fact, with my father a gardener and my mother working in the "big house" either as a housekeeper or cook. We therefore always lived in tied houses, and whilst the existence was modest, it was an extremely happy time. I have nothing but fond memories of those years, and now fully appreciate the sacrifices they made to bring a baby boy into their lives and give him one of his own. From the age of ten, I held a fascination for motorcycles, and pushed many wrecks home. Mostly, they ended up being thrashed around fields behind the house. That fascination and involvement still exists today, and gave me a full sporting life, followed by a career. Fifty years later, long after my adoptive parents had passed, I embarked on a search for my natural mother, which proved both successful and satisfying. We knew each other for ten happy years, with many uncanny similarities and coincidences along the way. The identity of my biological father at first appeared to be clear-cut, but nothing was what it seemed. It appeared the authorities at the time had their own reasons for disguising the truth around that statistic. This story tells of some those events but is mainly dedicated to the memory of my mother, and the many thousands of young men and women like her, who forsook a comfortable home life to play their parts in the Second World War. It is her very personal story, at a time in her life when events moved so quickly in every direction. In this modern day and age, most of us can have no understanding of what they went through, or how it felt to live in the shadow of invasion and the constant threat of domination by a powerful enemy. Ordinary people did extraordinary things, and thankfully, history records many of them for us. The contrast between an idyllic existence and the awful reality of war, cannot be starker, and my mother experienced both. Her story is told, based largely on events as she described them to me. Gaps in her memory have been filled with my imagination, and some creativity. It cannot, therefore, be described as a totally true account, but nonetheless is based on fact and actual events. However, the picture that emerges is one of an extremely adventurous, capable and brave young woman who like so many others, threw caution to the wind in every aspect of life. All named characters are fictitious but based on reality, with any references to actual persons alive or dead unintentional and accidental. The story has been years in the telling, but the satisfaction on completion, only goes to further increase my appreciation and respect, for those countless servicemen and women who gave their lives, so that we might live ours.