He Remembers the War He's Too Young to Know

My son has always been frightened of one specific sound: a low, droning hum, the kind a distant propeller plane or certain machinery makes. Fireworks, thunder, sirens — fine. But that particular drone empties him of colour and sends him looking for somewhere small to hide, and it has done so since before he could explain it, since he was a baby who'd cry at it without knowing why.

When he was five, on an afternoon a light aircraft passed low over the house making exactly that drone, he didn't cry. He went still, and then he explained it to me, calmly, in the flat voice this site has taught me to be afraid of — the voice of a child reporting rather than imagining.

'That's the planes that come at night,' he said. 'When they come you have to turn off all the lights so they can't see you. We go under the stairs, in the cupboard, and we're very quiet. My other mum holds the little one so he doesn't cry, because if the baby cries they hear you. And you count until the drone goes away and then it's morning.'

We have no stairs; we live in a bungalow. He has no siblings; he's an only child. He has never, we are certain, been exposed to war films, wartime documentaries, anything that could seed this — we're careful, and he was five, and this was detailed, lived, procedural. The lights off so they can't see you. The cupboard under the stairs. The baby who mustn't cry. The counting until the drone passes and it's morning. An air raid, described from the inside, by a five-year-old, as a memory, complete with an 'other mum' and a 'little one' who are not his mother and not his brother, delivered to explain why a droning plane frightens him — because, in whatever he was remembering, it was the sound that came before the hiding.

I didn't know what to say, so I said what you say: that we were safe, that the planes don't come here, that he didn't have to hide. He accepted this the way children accept reassurance, and went back to his toys, and the memory, or whatever it was, folded back down into the ordinary frightened-of-a-sound thing it presents as most of the time.

He's older now and the detail has gone; he just doesn't like that drone and can't say why, which is where it started and, I suppose, where it will end. But for a while my only child in his safe bungalow carried the procedure of surviving air raids that ended long before any of his grandparents were born — the lights, the cupboard, the silent baby, the counting — and knew, without being told, that the drone was the sound you learned to be afraid of first, and I have never heard a low plane the same way since.