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Yes, Really!. Kate Turkington
Читать онлайн.Название Yes, Really!
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isbn 9780624083689
Автор произведения Kate Turkington
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Much has been written since on the effects of evacuation on parents and children.
I asked my mother much later in life how she could possibly have given up her children in this callous and heartbreaking way.
‘We’d seen pictures of horrifying bombing raids in China and Spain,’ was her reply. ‘The government dropped leaflets from the sky warning us what could happen to our children if the Nazis came. You were going to be raped and killed. We had no choice.’
The statistics are astonishing. In just four days 4 000 trains transported nearly a million and a half evacuees out of London and it all went like clockwork. Not one casualty or mishap was reported. It was later that both parents and children suffered what became known as post-traumatic stress syndrome.
I have a superb memory. This is not a boast but a fact. Any of my friends, fans or family will attest to it. But of that six months I spent as an evacuee somewhere in the damp fens of East Anglia I have no memory at all. I suppose a shrink would call it classic block-out. All I remember was the noise at the station, the weeping and wailing, the huge railway engine puffing clouds of steam and that I was quite excited to be wearing my Sunday-best coat.
In September 2017 I was travelling in Croatia when I got a WhatsApp from my granddaughter Alice, from school in Johannesburg:
Granny, we’re learning about evacuees in History. Do you know anything about them?
Wow! I thought. I’m history!
But Doris was not one to let ‘that little twerp Hitler’ break up her family or stop her in her tracks. Aided and abetted by my mother, my father Dick found a job as a welder at De Havilland’s Aircraft factory in rural Hertfordshire away from London. A rented house was found nearby, and Doris and Dick soon rescued their children from what Rita later described as ‘Cold Comfort Farm on steroids’ and we were a united family again.
It was a good thing we had got out of London. The following September saw the beginning of the Blitz, Hitler’s attempt to annihilate London by carrying out the most savage bombing campaign the world had ever seen of that and other cities in England. The period of intense bombing continued until the following May, when Hitler finally decided to move his bombers east to get ready for Germany’s invasion of Russia.
On 7 September 1940 and for 57 consecutive days thereafter London was bombed continuously, day or night, and thousands of innocent civilians were killed. On the last night of the Blitz alone, 11 May 1941, over 3 000 people died.
Our small family – Doris, Dick, Grandfather, Rita and I – missed all that.
We lived happily all together in the countryside in a small house with three bedrooms, a dining room, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. The house backed onto a wild wood where brown rabbits, nightingales and hedgehogs lived. In spring it was carpeted with bluebells, and bushes and trees burst forth – crimson rhododendron flowers and fragile white cherry blossom; in autumn we picked blackberries.
My grandfather was a Swede from Götland, an island that sits largely in the sea between the mainland of Sweden and Lithuania, and had once been the centre and pivot of all Baltic trade and queen of the Hanseatic League. At twelve, he had run away from home and become a cabin boy on a sailing ship.
In our teens Rita and I would find the house he had grown up in, in Ronehamn, a small village on Götland’s east coast, and talk to a rheumy-eyed, very old man who as a child had known Johann and helped him run away to sea.
Thereafter Grandfather John Frederick Ahlquist spent most of his life on sailing ships and to his last days was suspicious of any other kind of vessel, because his were the days of ‘wooden ships and iron men’. Not, as he would grunt, like today, ‘of iron ships and wooden men’.
He had sailed around the world many times. He’d deserted ship and trekked across the Canadian wilderness in bitter winter. He had been becalmed in the Sargasso Sea in a vast patch of the Atlantic Ocean named for its free-floating seaweed called Sargassum and stewed his boots for food. He had had his left foot prematurely shortened by a frisky shark, sailed with Joseph Conrad before the mast, and finally had his wanderings cut short by a fall from the ship’s crow’s nest during a storm while in Canada’s Gulf of St Lawrence. He somehow ended up as a patient at the Greenwich Hospital on the bank of the Thames, created in 1692 as the Royal Hospital for Seamen. We never actually did find out how the Swedish captain of a sailing ship ended up there, but it was while he was there that he met, fell in love with and married a nurse named Edith Ashburn, who nursed him back to health. Edith, my grandmother, came from a long line of Yorkshire witches. (You can read all about him, and my mother Doris, in my earlier book Doing It with Doris.)
When Doris and Dick went out dancing or to work ‘dos’ during those war days, Rita and I would be left in Grandad’s care. Problem was that Rita, she of the ever fertile imagination, had convinced me that Grandad was a German spy, irrevocable proof being his slightly foreign accent and a small badge he wore in his lapel. While Grandad sat unsuspectingly by the fire on a winter’s night, puffing on his pipe and dreaming of rascally mates and brutal skippers, alluring South Sea maidens and dainty geisha girls, I, spurred on by Rita, would be creeping up on him to see if he was transmitting secret messages on a hidden radio set in his room. I later found out, rather disappointingly, that the mysterious badge merely announced him a paid-up member of his trade union.
My own wanderlust grew quickly. Our house was often crowded with Grandad’s friends. There was Uncle Christian, my godfather, a snowy-haired Dane married to one of Grandad’s twin sisters, Julia, who ran a Mission for Seamen in London’s Chinatown. He would tell us tales not only of his own adventures but also of his Viking ancestors. It was from him that I learned of the pirate king Olaf Tryggvason, and of the warrior poet Gunnlaug Ormstungu, who, although brave, was always getting into trouble because of his hasty temper and biting tongue.
Uncle Christian told us about the thunder god Thor and his famous hammer, of the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, whose topmost branches penetrate heaven while its roots are deep in hell. And for weeks after first hearing the story of the ship Naglfar, like Uncle Christian’s ancestors Rita and I didn’t dare cut our nails in case they would provide building material for this vessel of doom made of nail parings which comes to help destroy the earth when the Twilight of the Gods is approaching. (I suppose these stories, among other things, prompted me to study Old Norse at university.)
Uncle Oscar, a Norwegian ship’s carpenter, was another regular visitor. He handcrafted the most beautiful sewing-box for Doris of glossy brown cherry wood that sits on my dressing table today. (The four granddaughters are already fighting over who gets it after I go to Valhalla.) Although he didn’t speak much English, Uncle Oscar taught me to play chess. I put the fact that I’m useless at chess down to miscommunication, although I know in my heart I’m much too impatient to be a chess player.
I was, however, in later life, very good at the game of losing chess, where the idea is to lose your pieces as quickly as possible. I used to play it in the common-room of my university with Hamish Macgregor, a young red-headed Scot I fancied quite madly at the time and to whose soft Highland accent and wandering hands I almost succumbed.
One Christmas a bunch of Russian sailors somehow found my grandfather at our little house on Firwood Avenue (where there wasn’t a fir in sight) and I remember that Grandad and they all spoke Russian together, got very drunk, and sang sea shanties well into Boxing Day morning.
Nurtured in an atmosphere of seasoned travellers on the one hand, and would-be but repressed travellers on the other – Doris had not yet started her own journeys that would take her from head-hunters in New Guinea and a sheep farm in New Zealand, to a bar in the Bronx and a harem in Saudi Arabia – it was inevitable that I, too, would want to travel.
My first proposed destination was China. A prolific reader from the age of four, a highly romantic novel about Marco Polo’s adventures had come my way via the local library. I slept and dreamed of far Cathay and the mysteries of the Orient.