Using the case of ex-servicemen who hid their experiences in the First World War from their families, Tony Walker explains this coping mechanism and some of its consequences:
This set up a pattern in families in which stress by women as well as by men, is coped with by not talking about it. . . . Children in the inter-war period typically had parents who chose to remain silent about wartime experience and who bore the depression of the 1930s with quiet stoicism; these children were then required to fight in the Second World War, confirming the necessity of courageous silence. They brought up their own children, my generation, with little reference to the past and with few stories of deceased family members, least of all stories of those who died traumatically.
(Quoted from page 40 of On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief, by Tony Walter. Open University Press, 1999.)
For a brief biography of Tony Walter, click here. For images of or relating to Tony Walter, click here.
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