Sensing Health and Wellbeing Through Oral Histories: The ‘Tip and Run’ Air Attacks on a British Coastal Town 1939–1944

This chapter explores how the immediacy and feeling of past times and places, and how they are important to health and wellbeing, might be conveyed through the humanities tradition of oral history. It reports on 17 oral history interviews conducted between 2005 and 2012 with senior residents of the town of Teignmouth, Devon, UK, who experienced the World War II coastal homefront first-hand, and in particular the numerous ‘tip and run’ air attacks that took place. The chapter focuses on how respondents recollect events as sensory encounters. It argues that these encounters are important experiences on their own right, involving their own level and form of knowing time and place, but also in terms of how they interplay with meanings consciously attributed to them. Whilst encounters can re-emerge like ‘hauntings’ from the past in the process of respondents recalling and conveying, they might equally act like pre-emptive affective facts, helping researchers feel, empathise with and ultimately reanimate what it felt like to be there.