I was born in 1995 in Picardie, a region located to the north of Paris where many battles of world war 1 were fought, from a British mother and a French father.
My family moved back to Normandy in 2010, back to our french roots essentially.
My grandmother on the French side of the family was a true Norman, and she fled the region when she was 9 years old due to the destruction of her village of Aunay-sur-Odon in the early days of the battle of Normandy. This village was both a major crossroad in the area, and a choke point where many German soldiers gathered when they were heading towards the frontline. Her village ended up being completely and entirely flattened by the British bombers. Deeply traumatised for her whole life, she never came back to Normandy.
When I was a kid myself, we always thought with my siblings that she was an incredibly cowardly woman because she would hide in the toilets everytime a thunderstorm went on outside ! She never explained why she did that, so it took time for us to finally understand on our own why she acted like so. No one talked about the war in my French family, especially since my grandfather; her husband; was himself traumatised from the war he fought in Algeria in the 60’s !
