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A week ago, my beautiful Nan, Florence Letti Knight (Smith), turned 100 years old. 🩵
Born in the UK, she watched her younger brother, my great uncle Jim, lie about his age to join the war at just 16. The last time she spoke to him he explained why he was doing it and said
“I’m not going to let my friends fight and die on their own.”
Jim was later killed in action. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Nan finally learned how he had died and where he had been buried in Italy, after my cousin Melinda managed to track down his unmarked grave — although there is much more to that story.
During the war, Nan survived the Birmingham Blitz, repeatedly dodging bombs as Hitler’s Luftwaffe devastated her home city between 1940 and 1943.
Then, in 1945, she met my Australian grandfather, Marcus Knight.
My Pop had been released from a German POW camp when the Germans surrendered. During the war, he had escaped from two separate POW camps and is heavily featured in the book Escape to Live, written by RAF pilot Edward Howell. At one point, Pop and a group of escaped Allied prisoners were hiding in the mountains of Greece.
He was eventually recaptured again alongside Edward’s best friend and would spend the final four years of World War II as a German prisoner of war.
When the war ended, Pop was sent to the UK for rehabilitation before returning to Australia.
And that’s where Nan came into his life.
She was a nurse and helped nurse him back to health. They fell in love and married in the UK before Pop was sent home to Australia. Two months later, Nan followed him across the other side of the world to begin their life together.
But life wasn’t finished testing her resilience.
Years later, she watched her son — my Uncle Quenton — be conscripted to fight in Vietnam. Like so many Vietnam veterans, he returned home only to face horrific treatment and abuse from the very society he had been sent to serve.
He eventually volunteered to return to Vietnam.
Years later, Nan would bury him (her only boy) too. She still now calls him "My Quenton"
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A week ago, my beautiful Nan, Flore
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