ABSTRACT
Focusing on the life narratives of one individual female ex-combatant, Chapter 5 explores how the personal and “experiential meaning” of landscape evolves through the individual life course and is furthermore shaped by the changing relationality between body and environment. Importantly, this chapter does not isolate Helena’s landscape memories, but looks at them in relation to the memories of her generation of ex-combatants. It shows how personal life narratives allow us crucial entry points into understanding wider cultural histories of body-landscape relations and especially changes in those relations. The chapter starts by examining the shape and meanings that the prewar childhood landscape assumes in Helena’s memories, then moves to look at how this body-landscape relationship is disrupted and transformed by the war, and, finally, it examines the new set of rhythms that peacetime introduced and how Helena and the other DFs continue to negotiate their own bodily space and adjust their life rhythm to the changing social times.
