Potatoes and pen pals

In 1951 in postwar London, a young woman was working as a bookkeeper and decided to take a holiday in the fresh air. She and a girlfriend from the office chose to go to a student’s camp in Warehorne, Kent in September, 1951. They travelled by train from Victoria and were picked up by a lorry which took them to the camp. They arrived there on a Saturday morning, and were told that there were a group of German students already there. Indeed, these were the first Germans she had ever seen in real life.

On Monday morning, their group were taken to a farm to help a farmer harvest potatoes. On the field were big weighing machines which had a sack fixed to it. They had to fill the sack to one hundred weight, (CWT), and tie the top up and pull it away, and then put another sack on the hooks. They had two metal baskets to fill and it was hard work. Our young woman, Thelma, took Tuesday and Wednesday off because she had twisted her ankle, but was back at work on Thursday. Everyone--English, German, French, and African--got on well together and had a healthy holiday. 

On the Friday evening before the girls left to go home there was a dance and she danced with a blond, blue eyed young man who she had seen now and again to speak to during the week. He spoke very good English. The next morning the girls were packed and ready to leave, but Thelma wanted to take a photo with her Brown Box Camera of the girls they had met. Just as she took the picture, the blond man came and stood behind them--what we would call a photo bomb today. She then asked him whether he would like a copy of the photo and he said yes please and gave her his name (Alfred) and his home address. 

She had the photos printed and sent them to him. He was so pleased to get a photo which he liked of himself. At that time Alfred was 25 and our young woman, Thelma, was 17. It was nearing Christmas, and she sent Alfred a book of John Milton poems. He sent a parcel as well: his mother had baked German Christmas cookies. When she opened the parcel there were only crumbs but they were delicious. They wrote to one another now and again--both were busy, he at university and she was working long hours, making her own clothes and taking some evening classes.  

But they kept writing to each other. Their friendship deepened, and they managed the odd visit: he came to England and they camped out overnight and waited for the Queen's coronation procession. They continued to write, and their letters took a personal turn. Alfred's family invited her to visit their little village. It was her first trip abroad.

She went to Victoria station by bus, then by train to Dover and boarded a boat from there to Ostend. From there, she took the train to Stuttgart, and her Alfred came to pick her up. She was welcomed in Betra by his mother, father and sister and spent two weeks with them. Alfred took her to go see Lake Constance. They had a lovely day and returned back again in the evening. There were no lights on the walk up the hill back to his home and it was raining, but Alfred had an umbrella with him. However, his father did not know they had an umbrella and thought he would come and bring one. Alfred took the chance to steal a first kiss. Just at that moment Alfred’s father shone a flashlight on them! 

The visit went all too quickly and Thelma had to go home again. By now they realized that they wanted to stay together. It took several years of study and work, many letters, and a few visits, but in the summer of 1958, Alfred came to England, this time to marry Thelma and take her home to Germany. 

Yes, she baked the cake and made the dress herself!

A modest piece of land

 My husband's Auntie Kath started writing up the family history before she was incapacitated by a stroke; these were working people, living through the depression and WWII. But they managed to put money aside and buy a piece of land not too far away from their London council house. Kathleen and her sister Thelma speak of the place with obvious affection:

Before WW2 my father became a carpenter and bought the fencing that was being replaced by iron railings round Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow.  A quarter acre of land had been purchased In Doddinghurst in Essex. I can’t imagine it would have cost much to buy in those days as they didn’t have much money. With the fencing he built a two-roomed bungalow that the family used to go to at weekends and holidays. 

It was called Thelmadene and after the war this was a place in the countryside that I came to love. It was a very carefree place, among farms, with just two shops at different ends of the road. They were both “General Stores” and one included a café. The one we used most was closest to the bus stop at the green. The store smelt of bacon and paraffin and you could buy just about everything there. The bus close by would run a few times a day to the bigger town of Brentwood. I am told that before I was born my father used to bicycle there with my sister in a sidecar.  

I remember it as a place of freedom where you could be out all day adventuring and someone would come looking for you at tea time. But this was later after the war. I remember my mother telling me that they used to go there during the war when I was a baby until the time the army located an anti-aircraft gun on the front of our piece of land and kept firing away all night and no one could get any sleep. 

The bungalow consisted of one living room and one bedroom. There always seemed to me room enough for everyone to sleep no matter how many people stayed. I remember the old iron bedstead that I used to sleep in with Thelma or any other children who stayed. It was all so warm and comfortable. One morning I awoke to a big cow poking its head through the open window sniffing my bedclothes. 

Whenever we would arrive and unlock the door, something would always scurry across the floor out of sight. Rabbits burrowed under the house so sometimes mum would lay a snare at night and we would have rabbit casserole the next day. My mother cooked on a coal range or sometimes outside in a fire built in a hole dug in the ground. We had paraffin lamps for light and in the evening we used to play a lot of card games. We had a fancy carved old chaise longue which would be worth a fortune today, and a huge mirror with a twisted carved oak frame that covered the dividing wall between the two rooms, and came from a tailors. I wonder how they got that there?

Mother, daughter and cousins having tea with a half-built Thelmadene in the background

Coming together

If my travels have taught me one thing, it's that asking for directions is a sport. If I help a stranger in need of directions in an American city, I will give them the way with a number of blocks, and right and/or left turns. The first time I asked for directions to the post office in the French town I had landed in, I was told to "Go up the main street a few meters--it's on the left." Never mind that I was a bit unsure of exactly how far "a few" meters was, I wasn't clear which way was "up." Was it north, like a map? We got back in the car and drove one way--and then the other. It wasn't until later, when I was on foot when I realized which way was up--turns out there was a slight incline uphill to the post office.

In Ireland, we were flummoxed by maps that seemed at times to be purely fictional, and directions garnered from publicans and their customers: there were too many twists and turns, which led us to believe that those Celtic scroll designs were early maps. Signage was no help: one kind soul suggested that the wind had been blowing hard and moving the signs; another woman simply told us to ignore them, as, "the lads had been up there last Saturday evening."

But in Germany, maps and signs were accurate, so we rarely needed to ask the way. Except in the little town of Betra. The marriages in and between places are a clear indication that a few kilometers between villages was nothing to these folks used to walking. What is hard for the "foreigner" to grasp, however, are the directions. Someone was kind enough to draw a map, with the correct prepositions between the villages.

I'd love to provide a glossary, but most of them are Swabian dialectical variations on "up" "down" "to" and "over."

On a limb

A friend of mine of color recently posted a list of things that should not be posted by non-POC people during Black History Month. She finished with, "If you are not throwing a hissy fit, and making everyone around you uncomfortable, you are not being anti-racist." She has more skin in the game, and I am still learning how to navigate the conversation around race. 

My 3GGF was an itinerant Methodist minister. As a young man, he lost his right hand to a farming accident, which limited his career options to working with his head and heart rather than his hands. We are fortunate to have his journal, which just happens to include the period of the Civil War. 

The family narrative is that great-great-great-Grandpa was a peaceable "freedom fighter." He was what was then called an abolitionist, because he believed slavery was wrong and should not be permitted. 

And he acted. In 1852, his home in Galena, Illinois (where he lived with his toddler son and pregnant wife) was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was not alone; his accomplices included a Justice of the Peace, a German housemaid, and an unnamed man with a team who would take an escaped slave to Canada. 

"My wife prepared a bed for her in our garret, and she was beyond the reach of her pursuers. Nobody had suspected me of being an abolitionist, nobody crept around under our windows to eavesdrop, and the police never came to search our house, though many houses were searched. The whole police force were on the lookout for our guest. We asked no questions that night. We only knew she was a human being panting for freedom." 

In 1860, he journals that he proudly cast his vote for Abraham Lincoln. 

But he did more. He volunteered as a minister during the Civil War because he believed slavery was wrong, and his education and faith meant he understood this was the fight to right that wrong. With a wife and young kids at home, he was sent off to Tennessee to report on troop morale. Early fighting was brutal, and in spite of heavy losses, he was moved by slaves crossing battle lines to join the Union army. He signed on as the white minister to the 7th U.S. Colored Artillery Regiment. 

Noting that the wives of black soldiers were not considered wives because their plantation marriages had no force of law, he set about marrying as many black soldiers as possible to prevent their placement in a refugee camp. This action also insured their future veteran's (and widow's) benefits. 

In the years after the war he realized that his efforts were only the beginning of the struggle for equality. He saw education as a key to changing the oppressive systems. With another pastor, he opened a small school in 1876 in a wooden building in Dallas. Two months after opening, the school was torched by the KKK. They rebuilt it in an act of defiance. 

Eventually the school moved to Austin, where it became a liberal arts college for African Americans, called Samuel Huston College. The college exists today as Houston-Tillotson University. He lived long enough to see the college prosper at the dawn of the twentieth-century, and to see two of his children take up the cause of his life among the ex-slaves. 

Did his actions make others uncomfortable? The stories of his journal make it clear that others' reactions were most certainly motivated by fear and discomfort. But the tone of his words in his journal is never hissy-fit angry; rather, he was moved to overcome fear and comforted in his righteousness by his deep faith. 

But I realize that I am spitting angry: even though George spent most of his life doing these things, none of them—not hiding an escaped slave, voting for Lincoln, ministering for dying soldiers, marrying families to preserve their freedom, even founding and teaching at the college—none of these moved the needle on the racism at the heart of the problem. Yes, it made a difference to those individuals whose lives he touched, but it barely moved the needle. So, yes, I’m angry, but mostly frustrated that we still have so far to go, both individually and collectively.