Secrets Kept / Secrets Told
A Story of Survival & Healing
Ben Nuttall-Smith
***
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Published by: Libros Libertad on Smashwords
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Names of people and places have been changed. The story is true
Acknowledgements
To my son, who stood by me with support, and encouragement through some very tough periods of this novel, keeping in constant touch, even when thousands of miles away. Without his love and understanding this story might never have been written.
To my story editor, Sylvia Taylor, for recognizing the missing pieces and helping bring them to light.
To my good friend, mentor and companion Margot Thomson for warmth, encouragement and understanding through months of editing, rewriting, and help in the crucial weeding process. Also, for her own editing skills through two thorough and insightful edits.
To David C. Manning, friend, mentor, teacher. I thank him for inspiration, guidance and for hundreds of hours of dedicated help through some of the toughest phase of this work – sorting out feelings.
To Bernice Lever of The Canadian Authors’ Association for editorial fine-tuning and encouragement.
To the many friends who have loved me and supported me throughout my battle with this monstrous task. Special thanks to Anna Baidoun, Nora Sterling, Barbara Schillinger, Ruth Kozak and Margaret Hume for dedicated reading and suggestions.
Thank
you, thank you, thank you, and much love.
Ben Nuttall-Smith
Sylvia Taylor, editor Secrets Kept / Secrets Told
It has been a pleasure to work as editor and literary consultant with this talented and creative writer. First on his intriguing and informative historical novel of the clash of Toltec and European cultures: Blood, Feathers, and Holy Men, then his second novel: Secrets Kept / Secrets Told, a courageous tale of love and innocence, lost and found. Tempering sadness with joy, pain with humour, trauma with transcendence, Ben chronicles a profound personal journey to wholeness that inspires us all to be a force for good in the world.
Contents
2 Parachutes, Spies, and Bogeymen
3 Bombs, Boarding Schools and Deep Dark Secrets
4 Change of Name; Change of Nationality – 1945
6 Bell-Bottom Trousers 1950 – 1953
7 Sparks and Sputters 1953 – 1955
9 Searching For the Fountain 1956 – 1968
10 Hearts and Flowers and Fleurs de Lis 1969 – 1973
12 Broken Promises – Shattered Dreams
13 “Recovery is the process of discovering who we are.”
PRINCE OF TIDES
One Saturday evening, Paddie and his wife treated themselves to dinner and a movie. The Prince of Tides starred Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo, a trauma patient, and Barbara Streisand as his psychiatrist.
When three armed convicts break into the Wingo home, violently rape Tom’s mother and his twin sister, Savannah, and a particularly sadistic con anally rapes young Tom, Paddie suffered such a vivid flashback to being repeatedly raped by an uncle in London during the blitz, that he froze in his seat and cried audibly.
After the movie, when everyone else had left the theatre, Paddie was finally able to pull himself together and join his wife in the lobby. Without a word, the couple walked to the car and, as was customary, Paddie got behind the wheel. Within minutes, he had to pull over because he could no longer see to drive.
“I was the boy in the movie,” Paddie whispered. “I was the boy in the movie.”
Paddie’s Prologue
I‘m a runner although I’m not athletic – never have been. I’m always in a hurry. There’s so much to see, so many things to do: Landscapes to paint, songs to sing, roses to tend and books to write. I have a partner, Jocelyne, whom I love and who loves me. My cup runneth over. A series of incredible miracles, life is on GO.
Today, my daughter is bringing over her two fabulous children. With Jocelyne, we’ll explore the old fire engine by the beach; gather shells, pebbles and leaves, and search for sand crabs along the seashore.
I have another grandson, miles distant in Montreal. I know him and he knows me. We visit back and forth when we can. This afternoon, I’ll call my son and we’ll all gather at the computer screen to see and hear the little cousins giggle across the Ethernet. Then, at the kitchen table, Jocelyne, Grandpa and the kids will trace leaves with crayon on wax paper.
These days I’m running forward, happy and exuberant. For many years I was running away. Running from bullies, running from memories, running from guilt and shame. Running, running, running.
My early childhood in England, before the war and the start of my mad race, was a happy time of songs and stories, tinkers, gypsies and fairy folk, witches and, sometimes, bullies. My father taught my sister and me to read and write our letters before nursery school. A fabulous storyteller, he introduced us to fairies and little people, and read us the Beatrice Potter books at bedtime. Mother played the piano and sang funny songs in English and Danish.
I remember piggyback rides down country lanes, picking mushrooms with Mother among the cow patties. I remember the delicious aroma of pan-fried mushrooms over a wood-fired stove with hot buttered toast grilled at the open hearth. Teatime in the summer often included fresh picked strawberries and thick cream. Christmas morning we awoke to presents on our beds; then scampered downstairs to a colossal pine tree in the living room lit with real wax candles, sparklers, and decked with tinsel saved from packs of Players Navy Cut.
Days and nights were rich with promise except for Adolf, the ugly voice shouting in a language we didn’t understand over the battery-operated wireless, when my sister and I were supposed to be sound asleep. My father threatened to throw the blasted box through the window. He never did. I never saw my dad throw anything except to bowl at cricket and toss our big orange ball at the seaside.
Those happy times comforted me when the nightmares of war came to break up our happy home. My father’s rich imagination influenced me to eventually become a teacher and poet. My mother’s songs and florid vocabulary expanded that goal to the fields of vocal music and theatre.
Near the beginning of my seventy-eighth year, I’m a tiny but significant spark in an amazing universe. A long series of adventures led me here, mostly on the run.
I had to run. A dark shadow hung over me. I felt dirty all the time.
The trouble with running is one eventually has to stop. The issues I’d run from all my life but had not stopped to identify caught up with me in my fifties.
First, the stress of multiple changes in my life at home and at the school where I taught produced an overwhelming sense of anxiety. Three specific instances were to overpower me:
The weight of instilled Catholic guilt became guilt by association when members of the religious order to which I had dedicated thirteen years of my life were convicted for child sexual abuse. Then there was the gun incident when a prankster chose to imitate a college shooting by entering one of my classes with a plastic submachine gun. This brought back horrific memories of living with the London blitz and I began to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder as well as increasing difficulties in my marriage and at school.
When Betty, my wife at the time, and I went to see the film The Prince of Tides, a graphic anal rape scene triggered memories of abuse at the hands of an uncle during the blitz. I began to suffer short-term memory loss, dizzy spells and panic attacks. My family doctor referred me to a psychiatrist.
The healing process begins with recognition. Pulling demons from the shadows and facing them full on is one of the most difficult tasks a survivor ever has to go through.
This is a story of running from guilt. It is also a story of surviving and healing from childhood sexual abuse. It is my story.
Tanganyka. June 1933
When I was born, a hyena laughed. My mother screamed and cursed me for the pain. A black hand slapped my pink bottom and made me cry. Then my mother loved me and passed me to a wet nurse to be fed.
One. Childhood Memories Fairies, Witches, and Birds in the Thatch 1937 – 1940
Beginnings
In 1937, Finchingfield was – in fact, still is – a picture postcard village near Braintree, Essex, fifty-four miles northeast of London. At the centre of the village, a green rises from a duck pond with a footbridge, a motor bridge and a war memorial. Up the hill toward Horsham stands the 14th century church of Saint John the Baptist.
We lived in Willets Cottage, on the Causeway in Duck End. Though our roof was not thatched, many of those surrounding us were. Smoke curled from chimneys adding the scent of wood and coal smoke to the perfume of open fields, farm horses, rabbit pie and Yorkshire pudding. From our bedroom window, my three-year-old sister Jennifer and I, eleven months older, could stand on tiptoe and gaze across the road to pigs, cows and chickens.
We had a privy at the top of the garden. Close behind it stood an ancient wooden windmill. Because we had no fence or hedge to separate our garden from the field, my sister and I could jump in the hay, roll down the hill and play hide-and-seek right up to the top hedges behind the mill.
An old man in a raggedy coat is doing something behind the hedge. Jennifer and I draw close but not too close.
“Hello children. Would you like to see my birdie? ... Don’t be afraid.”
We run home. It isn’t a birdie.
“Don’t be silly children”, Mommy says, “that’s only the farmer walking his dog. He wouldn’t hurt you. He loves children. Now, go back out and play.”
When we heard the birds building nests beneath the eaves, I teased my sister. I told Jennifer the birds were coming to our bedroom to peck out her eyes ‘cause she was “sugar and spice and all things nice”. I’d be safe, “Little boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails”. If my sister cried loud enough, Mommy would spank my bare bottom with the hairbrush.
I got spanked for climbing the apple tree, too. After a spanking and time crying in my room, Mother held me and rocked me until my sobbing subsided. Such moments of love and undivided attention were wonderful, and I looked for them more and more. If pain was the only way to assure undivided love from my mother, then I was willing to make the sacrifice necessary to win her love. At an early age I learned to equate pain with love.
*
Jennifer was born in London. That made her more English than I, born on safari in Tanganyka. Mother said a hyena frightened her while I was being born, so I came into the world laughing. I always got fits of the giggles when being told off, which was most annoying to those doing the scolding. Also, according to Mother, since I was born in Africa, I had to be boiled in a pot for several days just to make me blonde. The fairies delivered Jennifer so she was perfect.
“Never
pet a rat! Rats bite.”
I pet a rat in the garden. Dettol
stings like hot fire. Daddy kills the rat with the garden spade.
Mommy pours Dettol on my finger. I cry. Jennifer screams.
Mommy
scolds. “A rat is not a pussy cat. a rat is a rat. Hold still!”
My father (Mother called him Kieran or Darling) was “so terribly tall” and was forever bumping his head on the beam above the door into the kitchen. He was blonde like my sister and me and quite slim. My mother, Alice May, was fabulously beautiful. Heads turned wherever we went. Both parents smoked Players Navy Cut from a silver cigarette box on the living room table by the fireplace. And they drank Gilby’s Gin with fizzy water squirted from a silver-handled seltzer bottle.
I can’t remember my father working at anything in those early years. Mother had an allowance from Denmark. Since my dad had been a newspaper reporter – according to Mother – perhaps he wrote articles or stories about country life or bunny rabbits or the fairies in our garden. Apart from cricket matches and tennis, I can never remember either of them being away, until the war came to spoil everything. Everything was secure and safe ... for now.
When it was hot, my sister and I took off all our clothes and ran around in the garden naked. Once, when I was very small, I romped farther than the garden and was brought home by a red-faced bobby.
Often we took turns giving each other rides in the wheelbarrow. Another favourite activity was lying on our backs in the hay, looking up at the animal shapes in the clouds. Wherever Jennifer and I went, our Springer spaniel, Buller, came with us. He chased cats and rabbits and rolled in cow pies.
Grass snakes slither; worms wriggle. The big worm in my hand makes me think of that man behind the hedge. I think of chasing my sister with the worm but throw it away instead. Worms aren’t fun any more.
We played “babies” but not when Mommy or Daddy was watching. I could never be the baby. Anyone who ever saw a doll knew only girls could be babies. Boys just turned up in a gooseberry patch. Boys were never given a bottle and were never supposed to cry. Still, I wanted to be cuddled and loved, just like a girl baby. Why couldn’t boys be babies, too?
*
We had neither running water nor electricity at Willets’ Cottage. We went to bed by candlelight. In the morning, my father emptied our chamber pots in a hole behind the privy.
Though I can’t remember how we bathed, I’m sure we were kept clean at the big kitchen sink, where a drainpipe ran out to a deep, dark hole at the back of the house. A barrel caught rainwater that flowed off the roof of the garden shed. My sister and I would stand up on bricks to see all sorts of wiggly creatures, swimming around and up and down, from the barrel’s black bottom to its very top.
When it rained, my dad taught us to read books and write letters, and Mother taught us nursery songs and songs that made us laugh.
Because we loved singing and listening to music, we seldom minded rainy days. We wound up the crank-handled gramophone and listened to Paul Robeson and Noel Coward. Then, after Jennifer and I went to bed, my parents and their friends often sang around the piano. It was wonderful to lie awake, all comfy and cozy, just listening.
Men
with slobbering lips and giant worms chase me through the mud until I
get stuck up to my waist. “Mommy! Daddy!”
Nobody
comes to save me. It is ugly, horrible. I scream awake. The moon
shines through our bedroom window. My pillow is clammy cold.
Gypsies
We seldom went alone into the village. When we did, it was to go to Mrs. Turner’s greengrocer shop with a big woven basket, which Jennifer and I carried between us.
We always dawdled. We stopped to see the pigs, to listen to the humming in the telegraph poles, and on two or three special occasions, to watch Gypsy bands as they travelled through Finchingfield on their way north. Gypsy caravans were brightly painted and pulled by shaggy horses. Buckets, chairs, pots, pans and cooking utensils jangled and clanged as Romany men in colourful shirts and jingly hats drove their loaded wagons past Duck End to their campground near the woods, not far from home. Mothers, grandmothers and Romany children walked behind with dogs and goats. Sometimes the dogs were dressed up and did tricks to entertain the villagers.
During the day, Gypsy men mended villagers’ pots and sharpened knives and scissors. They played concertinas and mandolins and violins and sang and laughed and spoke rapidly in Romany while little dogs barked and mothers called for their children.
Jennifer and I went with our dad to have his axe and garden spade sharpened. Dark-skinned Gypsy children stared at Jennifer and me – fair as lilies. We were never allowed to get as dirty as they seemed to be. Their mothers forever cooked over open fires, and their fathers and grandfathers did magic tricks with colourful flowers and puffs of smoke. Some village people went to the Gypsies to have their fortunes told. But we were warned not to get too close; the Gypsies might steal us away.
When the Gypsies set their bonfires at night, farmers locked up their chickens, goats and pigs. Jennifer and I fell asleep to the hubbub of their happiness, which echoed loudly until late into the evening.
One of the Gypsies sang songs while playing a concertina. Although I couldn’t understand the man’s language, I got caught up in the sheer joy of his music.
I wanted a concertina. My fifth Christmas, 1938, my parents gave me one, and I squeezed out my own happy and not-so-happy melodies. Despite the fact that my raucous noise got so annoying that I had to practice in the field or behind the tool shed, I nevertheless insisted that everyone – my parents and Jennifer – attend my recitals. Our dog, Buller, would run off and hide.
In those days before the war, men other than the gypsies passed through our village. They lived off the land and carried their scant belongings in a large handkerchief slung over the shoulder, just like the North American hobos. They snared rabbits, skinned them, and cooked them over open fires. With branches and grass, they built shelters among the roots of trees. In good weather, they slept in haystacks. They searched for berries, dug up turnips from farmers’ fields, and liberated chickens and eggs from their hen houses. They cooked everything in pots, with nettles and dandelions. The aroma was delicious. One of the men taught me how to blow my nose without benefit of handkerchief. My dad laughed when I demonstrated but Mother didn’t think it was clever at all. “Guttersnipe.”
Other “adventurers” traveled in caravans, sometimes singing as they went. They were the odd-job men with their barrows and carts. Some sharpened knives; others collected rags and bones. Jennifer and I always ran out to greet the knife grinders and the travelling salesmen.
“Rags
and bones. Rags and bones.
Any old rags and bones.”
“Knives
to grind. Knives to grind.
Scissors, axes, knives to grind.”
“Toodle-lumma-luma.
Toodle-lumma-lumma. Toodle-i-ay.
Any um-ber-ellas, any
um-ber-ellas to mend today?”
The Bully
Finchingfield had a bully who loved tormenting smaller boys and girls. When grown’ups weren’t looking, he chased us with stones, horse-droppings, and stinging nettles. When he caught us, he twisted our arms behind our backs and made us repeat bad words.
One day, he caught my sister and told her, “Swear to Jesus, you’re a shit-maid!” When I threw a stone at him, he let my sister go and chased me. Jennifer and I ran home. Luckily for us, it wasn’t far. Our legs were shorter than his but he couldn’t run for beans. He was worn out before he got to our front gate.
*
In the middle of Finchingfield is a pond fed by the River Pant, which is really a stream. Under the footbridge, Jennifer and I fished for “gollywogs” which was our name for tadpoles. Usually, there weren’t any gollywogs in the pond. The swans ate them all. On sunny afternoons, we took a bag of breadcrumbs to feed the swans. If we got too close, hissing swans chased us. Then we dropped our bags of crumbs and ran home.
*
Punch and Judy bashed each other noisily in the puppet show by the pond. All the children came to watch. Punch whacked Judy. Then he threw the baby down on the ground. Everybody laughed and clapped.
Billy
and another bully catch me all alone under the footbridge. Billy
takes my fish net and twists my arm behind my back while the other
boy puts his face right up to mine and growls: “Tell us what
you know about the hairy cock.”
I don’t know the
answer, so Billy pulls my pants down and pushes me in the mud.
Fairies and Little People
One day, crossing the footbridge, I saw an “enormous” fish and ran home to tell my dad. The next morning, the fairies left a packet of fishing hooks in one of their circles in the garden.
My dad helped me dig for worms. Off I went to the bridge, pole and string and baited hook in hand. Before long, a sudden tug pulled the rod from my hand. The enormous fish swam off, line and pole in tow, never to be seen again.
The little people were elves, gnomes and leprechauns who sometimes played tricks like hiding Daddy’s watch or Mommy’s lipstick. When they came to play with us in our bedroom under the eaves, our parents sometimes caught us out of bed. I’m not sure about my dad, but Mother didn’t believe us when we told her about the fairies. She couldn’t see them, of course, and whacked our bottoms really hard for lying. When my sister and I came down with German measles, Mother hired a nurse to look after us. Nurse kept the fairies away. I still looked for them when we went for walks in the woods. I looked for them at the bottom of the garden. But they never came back.
I can still picture the elves. They were smaller than my sister and I. Though they didn’t look like the pictures of fairies with wings we’d seen in books, we knew they were fairies. They seemed older than we were: Much older. Their clothing was ragged and colourful. They all wore tiny cloth shoes with pointed toes and hats with small feathers.
The fairies laughed and chatted in happy, bright voices. They sang nonsense songs in a strange language. We tried to join in and ended up falling down in fits of giggles.
Their laughter was high pitched, like Christmas bells. Sometimes, they flew to the window to see if grownups were coming. When they danced around Jennifer and me, we danced with them. Then they would spin in a circle and disappear in a puff of sparkles. Sometimes, they got really small and slipped through the crack under the door.
*
Childhood was an adventure in all kinds of weather. On winter mornings when we woke up to snow, we went on long walks and got buried in enormous drifts. Then the snow melted and we got stuck in the mud. In summer, we went with our parents to pick mushrooms in the cow fields. Or we picked blackberries and wild gooseberries. Then on a most exciting day, Dad hitched the caravan to the family car for our trip to the seaside.
Oh, how I remember my first view of the ocean. When we reached the top of a hill I felt such wonder at the beauty of the blue sea, and miles and miles of long, sandy beaches. With spades and buckets, we dug in the sand. Our dad helped us build gigantic castles. We got sunburns that blistered and peeled and Mom had to rub our backs and legs with Vaseline.
The fairies left money in a wishing well in Wales. Jennifer and I bought ice cream and licorice all-sorts with it, and Dad bought petrol for the drive home. I sensed, even then, that it was bad luck to take pennies from a wishing well. Our lives would change because of it. Of course, Jennifer and I never did tell.
But things did begin to change.
The Witch of Finchingfield
Across the road from Willets’ Cottage, where Jennifer and I peered over the garden fence to an exciting world of beggars, gypsies, milkmaids, umbrella menders, shepherds, horseback riders, and urchins with runny noses, there lived a spinster who, in our childish eyes, was truly a witch with a big, black cat named Satan. She was stooped over and very, very old. Her lips sucked into her mouth so that her nose and chin looked Punch-like. Her nose had a wart at one side, and her hair hung in stringy white strands halfway down her skinny body. She walked with a knobby cane and smelled of incense, sweat and pipe tobacco.
The witch lived in a wee house all alone. If ever she caught us, we knew she would eat us. It was a known fact among the children in the village that she had a big pot in her kitchen where she boiled all the little ones she could catch. Holding a basket of apples or a jar of licorice all-sorts, she sometimes called to my sister and me. We ran shrieking into the back garden and hid behind the tool shed.
Our parents never asked us why we hid. Jennifer and I never spoke of the old woman, even when she held out an empty bucket to my dad on his daily trip to and from the village water-pump. Dad would bring a whole bucket for her, then return for more for us.
*
Jennifer and I picked mushrooms only when we were with our mother. She knew which ones were good and which ones were poisonous. The best ones grew in the cow pasture where the red-eyed bull stood guard. With permission, we could go by ourselves to pick blackberries along the edge of the cow field.
One lovely day, with three buckets full of juicy blackberries, our faces and fingers stained purple, we were suddenly interrupted by the thumping and wheezing of the red-eyed bull as he charged across the field. We tried to help each other over the stile. I went first.
Before I helped her up and over, I told my little sister to hand me the buckets of berries. I hadn’t yet learned “ladies first”. Besides, it was my red cardigan that attracted the bull. By this time, Jennifer was crying. As I climbed back up to urge her on, she climbed up too with two of the buckets. The bull stopped quite close. His eyes blazed and his nostrils bellowed steam as he stood his ground, stomping and snorting, preparing to charge.
Jennifer had just passed me the first full bucket when a rough voice from behind me bellowed, “Oi! W’at you two doin’ stealing moi berries? ‘and ‘em over.”
The bully!
Quickly, I put down the bucket of berries. Jennifer stopped crying and picked up the other two buckets. “You can’t have them.” Just like the bull, she stood her ground. Then, as carefully as she could, she passed me the two buckets.
Suddenly, I felt stinging nettles on the backs of my legs. I dropped both buckets and turned around.
The bully was on top of me, stinging me all over my bare arms and legs. Jennifer climbed over the stile, screaming, “Leave my brother alone!” So the bully chased her down the path with his nettles.
At that moment, the witch appeared, shouting and waving her stick in the middle of the path. My sister ran back to me. We were in a terrible state. We burned from the nettles. Our buckets lay on their sides beneath the stile. All the berries had fallen into the mud. But the bully was gone, running across the field, as fast as his chubby legs would take him.
By the time we gathered our senses, the witch was upon us. “That guttersnipe! I’ll be paying Mrs. Bates a visit, just you see. She’ll give that Billy what for.” My sister and I wanted to run, but we couldn’t.
“Here, let’s rub some of this on those wee legs of yours and on your arms.”The witch took dock leaves growing by the stile, and rubbed my sister’s legs with them. I took some, too and soon the sting went away. “You’d better get home now before your mother finds out you’re lost.”
We took more dock leaves and continued rubbing while we ran home as fast as we could. Mother stripped us, washed us, and put us to bed.
The next morning, we found three buckets on our front door stoop, brimming with fresh blackberries.
My dad said, “The fairies picked them”.I wasn’t so sure.
That afternoon, he took a blackberry pie across the road. As for us, at teatime we ate big slices of blackberry pie, slathered with fresh, thick cream.
Two. Parachutes, Spies, and Bogeymen
The Ack-Ack Emplacement
One day, our dad came home in soldier’s uniform. He had volunteered for the Home Guard. He looked smashing in khaki. I was so proud of him.
Once in a while, our Finchingfield constable, “the bobby”, rode his bicycle through the village and up our way blowing his whistle. That told my father to throw on his uniform and get to the village on the double, where he caught a lift to his post at the antiaircraft battery on the hill.
Sometimes an airplane flew over low enough for us to see the red, white, and blue circles on the wings. When we saw the pilot, we waved. Sometimes the pilot waved back. Some airplanes had double wings and sputtered and banged.
When planes buzzed low over us, we had a lot of fun. The older soldiers shook their fists in the air and patted each other on the back and laughed. In those days, no one thought of shooting at anyone. Dad said, “This is a silly war. It’ll be over in a few weeks.”
After a while, Dad went to the battery more often. He had to watch and listen for enemy planes. The lookout post had a big chart, showing the shapes of the different types of aircraft. My father spent hours studying the chart and keeping a lookout with his binoculars.
Since 1938, Jennifer and I had been attending the Montessori Class at St. Christopher’s Preparatory School in nearby Braintree. Whenever we weren’t in school, Dad took us to his post on the hill. He even let us sit up behind the double gun called an “ack-ack”. The place was exciting, with its trenches and sandbags to climb around and jump from. Some of the older men didn’t want us there, because our dad told them to watch their language.
One day, when Jennifer and I were having fun chasing around the sandbagged gun emplacement, an airplane flew over low. Amidst the usual shouting and scurry of activity, we heard a whistling sound, then, a loud “Whoomph!” Sand and rocks rained down on us. The ack-ack pounded out its “Pom! Pom! Pom!” Dad shouted, “Children, get down in the trench. Now!”
That time it wasn’t a game. From then on, whenever the policeman came riding his bike and blowing his whistle through the village and up past Willets’ Cottage, our dad went to his post alone. My sister and I stayed home.
Father Goes To War
We almost never went for walks with our parents any more. Instead, while Jennifer and I spent time in our room under the gable, they played tennis or shouted at each other downstairs.
One night, we heard a crash, and my mother screaming, “There won’t be any more money from Denmark. Get a job or join the bloody army”.
He shouted back, “You know the army won’t take me with my bad feet.”
Another plate smashed against the wall. “Damn you. The least you can do is try.” The front door slammed.
Jennifer and I sat at the top of the stairs, shivering. “Get back to bed, you two”, Mother screamed at us, “before I come up there with the hairbrush”.
Silently, we cried ourselves to sleep.
Next day, Daddy was gone.
He was gone for a very long time.
*
Weeks later, when we saw my dad, he was wearing a different uniform. As we ran to meet him, he got down on one knee, put down his packsack, and lifted both of us into his arms.
Mom and Dad hugged and kissed, right there in the middle of the road. I tried to pick up my father’s pack. I could barely move it. Yet he picked it up and slung it over his shoulder as easy as could be. My father was the strongest man in the world.
Soon Mom said, “Why don’t you children go to Mrs. Turner’s for me? I’ll write out a list.” I really wanted to stay and visit with my dad, but I also knew that he and Mom wanted time alone. So, with the shopping bag between us, off we went to Mrs. Turner’s greengrocer shop.
This time we didn’t dawdle. We ran through the village up to Mrs. Turner’s. Out of breath, we told her the good news that our dad was home. Mrs. Turner gave us a big glass of sweet lemonade, reminding us to drink slowly or we’d be sick. The walk home with a heavy basket took a long time, even though it was mostly downhill.
The next few days were like old times. We went for long walks. Dad took us up to visit his old buddies at the ack-ack station. He managed to buy some petrol and took us for a ride in “Bessie”, our 1928 Morris Oxford. But this time, we had to stop at roadblocks and show papers. The next day, we left the car at a horse and carriage stable in the village.
Months later, when we next looked at Bessie, she was up on blocks in the buggy stall at Swan House, covered in cobwebs and straw. Her tires were gone as well as half her motor.
My father’s visit was all too short. Just a few days later, in the morning, a soldier came to the door. A lorry waited outside. Jennifer and I ran out to see. Dad squatted down in front of us with his pack, “You children look after Mommy. I must go away for a while,” He stood and hugged Mother extra long, then someone offered him a hand to jump into the back of the lorry.
Everyone waved goodbye. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” one of the soldiers called out,”your soldier boy’ll be back in no time.” Then off they drove in a cloud of dust. My dad was gone.
Later, Mother told us that Dad had gone to fight in the war in Africa. Almost overnight, we were too old for “Mommy and Daddy”. They were both gone and we had “Mother”, and a father who no longer came when we called in the night.
I didn’t think of deserts and tanks. I saw only jungles, savannas and giraffes like those I’d seen in my baby pictures from Tanganyka.
I wanted to go with my dad.
Brave English Soldiers
In the weeks to come, hundreds of evacuees, fleeing bombing and Nazi occupation, passed through Finchingfield, on the way north. They traveled in busses and in the backs of open lorries. They lined up to use our privy, then sat in the hayfield next to our house and ate bag lunches.
Mom – almost “Mommy” but warmer for now than “Mother” – took charge of the local first aid post as part of civil defense. She busied herself with Red Cross nurses, changed bandages, and talked to evacuees, especially those from France and Denmark. Often she spoke in languages we couldn’t understand.
For the most part, the evacuees were mothers with small children, and elderly men and women. We heard one lady tell Mom that the Germans were coming.
Whenever we fell and scraped ourselves, Mom used Dettol to kill “Germans”. Jennifer and I had been sick with German measles. We really didn’t understand what kind of “Germans” could be coming to make people so afraid. I imagined giant ugly creatures with green arms and long spiky fingers. For all the geography Dad had taught us, I didn’t know Germans were people.
Most days, someone’s mother or older sister bussed Jennifer and me and several other children to another school in Braintree. We no longer attended St. Christopher’s Preparatory School and Montessori class. We also attended what the English would now call a “state school”. In North America, this would be “public school.”
Private or public, the teachers were often bad-tempered. The bigger children got caned on their hands, and the little ones got paddled on their bottoms. In adjoining classrooms, divided by a big, windowed partition, we all stood to sing “God Save the King” and recite the “Our Father – Thy kingdumcum, thy wilby-dun, ... deliver us from eagles. Amen”.
Sometimes we sang a hymn such as “Onward Christian Soldiers” or “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”
And we prayed for the brave English soldiers, who got killed for us every day. We also knitted for the soldiers. I produced a khaki scarf for a midget.
The German Pilot
The day finally came when Mom picked us up at the school bus and, instead of taking us home, she took us to Swan House, a small farm on the other side of the village pond where all our things had been moved. The house had its own well with a water pump. It had an indoor toilet, but its bucket had to be emptied every day by the gardener.
Floss Halls was a cleaning lady from the village who came to ‘do’ for my mother by cleaning and washing. She told funny stories about people and animals that made Jennifer and me laugh. Sometime around that move, my birthday came. Finally I was big enough to get a red scooter. Now I could ride to and from Mrs. Turner’s greengrocer shop and glide most of the way home with a basket hanging from the handlebar. Coming down that steep hill, I rode the brake. There were very few cars on the road.
Best of all were the barn and the two horses. Joyce was Mom’s mare; Nellie the pony was Jennifer’s and mine. Now and then, the gardener hitched up the little surrey and Mom, Jennifer, and I went riding down country lanes. We fed our pony green apples from the big apple tree in the orchard, juicy carrots from the garden, and sugar lumps from the kitchen – which we took when Mom wasn’t watching.
Late one afternoon, while we rode our horses, Joyce threw Mom. Because her leg was badly hurt, Mom rode Nellie, and led Joyce by her halter all the way home. Jennifer and I walked.
A doctor bandaged Mom’s leg and a nurse had to come look after all of us. She wasn’t the nice young nurse we had when we were sick in bed at Willets’ Cottage. This one was much older and grouchy. My sister and I spent a lot of time in the barn, playing in the hay and brushing Nellie. When the gardener came around to empty the toilet bucket and clean out the horse stalls, we let him brush Joyce. When the nurse called us, we often hid in the hayloft and pretended not to hear.
One sunny afternoon, I climbed up the apple tree and tried to reach a big green apple that had grown just far out enough that I couldn’t quite grasp it. Jennifer called my attention to airplanes buzzing at each other in the sky. A German bomber and an RAF Spitfire were coming down with smoke trailing behind them. From my niche in the apple tree, I watched everything. As soon as white puffs appeared in the sky, I climbed down. Close by, I could see one of the parachutes. Beneath its strands, a man slowly dropped, swinging back and forth. Before he landed, Jennifer and I ran into the house to tell Mom. But she was already on her way to the village green.
Nurse ordered us to stay in the house. Then she ran off to call the Home Guard, screaming, “The invasion! The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!” People had been talking about a German invasion for weeks. Maybe this was the start of the invasion.
As soon as she disappeared, my sister and I ran out to have a closer look at all the fuss. While the parachutist clenched his injured arm to his chest, Mom had a look at his leg. He must have smashed into the war memorial when he landed. He was very close to it; in fact, his parachute was tangled on the monument.
Mom said something to one of the other ladies. Next thing, we were all going home for tea. The pilot came along, supported between two men. Mom offered him a chair at the kitchen table.
“These little blonde angels must be yours,” he said to Mom as he ruffled my hair. “ For a moment, I thought I’d landed in heaven.” While Mom busied herself with cotton wool, Dettol, and bandages, villagers gathered in our kitchen. They must have been surprised to hear the visitor speaking such good English.
The stranger smiled at my sister and me. “I say, I haven’t had a proper cup of tea in ages.”
“I’ll put the kettle on”, Mom replied. She limped over to the sink pump and filled the kettle.
“What the devil happened to your leg?” the man asked.
“Ach! Herunterfallen.” I fell. Mom’s answer surprised everyone.
“Sie sprechen Deutch?”
“Da ich ein Kind war.” Since I was a child.
Smiling, the parachutist returned to English. “I read at Cambridge before joining the Luftwaffe.”
Just then the nurse returned, followed by a rather out-of-breath policeman. “We’re just about to have some tea. Would you care to join us? It won’t take long.” Mom invited the bobby and nurse to sit down.
“Oh, I’d love a cup”, replied the constable.
The nurse just stood and glared at my mother. “I’d rather not.” She turned and walked out. A moment later, she came back, only to say, “I’ll be back for my wages, if you don’t mind, when he’s not here.”
With that, she was gone.
After the German left with the bobby and a couple of the Home Guard, we all went off to the First Aid Post in Spring Mead. Then Mom spoke to the other three Germans. One of them had bitten off part of his tongue and couldn’t reply.
Spies and Nasty Bits
Shortly after the parachute incident, many villagers snubbed us. When we went out for walks – which was not often any more – people moved to the other side of the road or turned away and whispered in small groups.
Part of a German airplane crashed in a field just behind our home. When the curious villagers came to see, one of the children walked over to Jennifer and me and said, “Your mother’s a bloody German spy.” Angrily, her mother told her, “I told you to stay away from them”.
I asked Mom. “What’s a spy? Are you a German spy?”
“Of course not. Sometimes we sing little songs I’ve taught you in Danish or German or French. Or that little African song we used to sing. Some people don’t like what they can’t understand or anyone who is different. Never mind them. They’re just guttesnipes.”
Despite what Mother had said, I promised myself I’d never speak any language but English.
At school in Braintree, we learned Scottish dancing and sang “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia”. We learned that the world belonged to the English, who had “civilized the savage nations.” Also we heard stories about good King John and Oliver Cromwell and found out that Napoleon was a madman, just like Hitler and Mussolini and that Japanese bloke.
Some of the older children dressed up and sang songs by Sir Arthur Sullivan. I was six or seven when I first was exposed to “For He Is an Englishman” from HMS Pinafore and to The Mikado, where everyone had silly names.
We were fortunate indeed we had “chosen” to be English.
*
Swan House had a cellar containing a large coal box and several old wooden tea crates. The cellar was full of cobwebs. Jennifer and I were terrified of that place. One night I woke up screaming. I had walked into the dreaded cellar. German spies, little men with sharp teeth, reached out at me from the coal box.
Frequently, we saw Mom crying. Both Jennifer and I said, “If only Daddy were here.” Finally, Mom grew exasperated when we asked, for the umpteenth time, “When’s Daddy coming home?” She replied, “Your father’s dead.” Her tone was so cold we didn’t ask again.
Jennifer and I walked to the far end of the orchard and cried. Mom came out to find us. She hugged us both and we all cried.
The next day, the gardener made a hutch. Soon we each had a rabbit to look after. We fed our bunnies dandelions and grass and watched them get fat. Sometimes we took them out and let them run around on the grass. One morning when we went to feed our bunnies, the hutch was empty. We called all over – until the gardener walked out of the barn with two freshly skinned rabbits and brought them to Mom at the kitchen door.
We had often seen skinned rabbits hanging outside the butcher shop, but we hadn’t expected to see our own bunnies dead like that. The gardener had been our friend. Now we stayed out of his way and hid when we saw him coming. Mom’s involvement in the killing made me less trustful of her, too.
I don’t remember eating rabbit pie or rabbit stew. Then again, Mom may not have told us what we were eating.
One night an incendiary bomb dropped on the barn. The horses screamed. When Mom ran outside, the air raid warden sent her back into the house. Flames shot up everywhere. One of the horses was killed outright; the other was taken by the Home Guard.
Next day, some village children ran past our house and sang, “Serves you right. Your horse is dead.” I hated the other children for their jealousy. Worst of all, everything I loved was being taken from me and Mother was no longer there to comfort Jennifer or me.
I climbed as high as I could into the apple tree. When Jennifer called me, I pretended I couldn’t hear her. I wanted to be caught and spanked and loved. But Mother didn’t bother with me at all.
Indeed, I wished I were dead. I even fantasized my own funeral although I’d never attended a funeral nor known anyone who had died. Perhaps I remembered the funeral in Little Women and how sad that scene made me feel when we saw the film and our own world was falling apart. Sometimes I’d hum the theme music and cry myself to sleep.
Fantasizing my own funeral would be like this: The day would be rainy and cold as they lowered my coffin into the deep earth. Mother would cry and cry. But there would be nobody to hold her and comfort her. Then she would know how lonely I had been and how much I wanted her to love me. No one would be able to stop her constant sobbing. She would beg me to come back. But I wouldn’t. I would go off to be with my dad and the angels. Mother would be alone, and it would serve her right.
Eventually, Mom came and called me down. I knew I was in for a good spanking. Instead, she just hugged both of us – for a long time.
Not long after that, while we played in the schoolyard, at recess or lunchtime, an airplane came out of the clouds and dove at us. Everyone screamed; there was a lot of noise. Somebody knocked me down. My leg hurt. Cars and ambulances arrived and Mom came to pick us up. A bullet from a Nazi strafe plane had grazed my knee. I was lucky I hadn’t been killed.
I had to get stitches in my knee. The doctor said I was a brave, wounded soldier. I felt very proud to be a wounded English soldier. Jennifer and I didn’t go back to school for weeks after that.
After staying home for my knee to mend, we were sent to the two-room school in Finchingfield. Though a glass partition divided the classes, we all assembled for singing and Highland dancing – jig and reel – point-toe-heel-skip-turn. Arms flung high. I loved Highland dancing.
Three. Bombs, Boarding Schools and Deep Dark Secrets
The Headmaster’s Parrot
Soon after the incendiary bomb, Mom got a job in a sausage works, then in a munitions factory. The other workers called our mother “Mrs. Lah-de-Dah”. She, who had been brought up with everything fine – with maids and a gardener and cleaning women and a trust account from Denmark to pay for it all – now had to work with the class of people she so often despised.
Jennifer and I were sent off to an old English mansion that had been turned into a Catholic boarding school run by teachers who hadn’t had the good fortune to be called into the army or to serve as officers in His Majesty’s Royal Navy or be shot from the sky in flaming Spitfires. The men and women who taught at Saint Whatsername were a miserable collection of rejects. Every one of them hated children.
From the smallest to the oldest boarder, we were given castor oil regularly, whether we needed it or not. This gave me bad stomachaches and sometimes the runs.
*
We had regular bath nights, but more than five inches of water was unpatriotic. We younger children lined up for our three-minute bath in the same water that ten before us had used. The water was usually cold and filthy. One matron washed our necks and ears; another rubbed us vigorously with a soggy towel, inspecting our bums to make sure we had rid ourselves of all newsprint ink. (Toilet paper was a luxury I only discovered when we came to Canada.) One word of complaint and we got whacked on our bare bums by a matron with a bamboo cane. Even babies got whacked. Being naked invited whacks. Nakedness was badness. If you talked while naked, you must have said something bad, something dirty.
Mother wasn’t happy when she came to see us. Jennifer and I received terrible school reports. We were homesick. We weren’t making friends. Often we lined up to get caned on our hands for all sorts of things we did wrong or didn’t do at all. Despite our age difference, my sister and I were placed in the same form; as a result, we were way ahead for some subjects and behind in others.
While our form prepared for First Holy Communion, Jennifer and I were not to participate. The school didn’t have our baptismal certificates. Grandpa, a priest in the Church of England, had Christened us while we were still babies. But that didn’t count. While the other children attended catechism, Jennifer and I were sent to scrub pots and sweep and dust and set tables.
I wanted to learn what the other children were being taught. So I borrowed the little Catholic Truth Society booklets from the back of the church, where we went regularly for Mass and Benediction. I read the booklets sitting on the toilet and faithfully returned each one when I finished reading it. I read all about purgatory and popes and Protestants and the English Catholic martyrs and how God loved me.
One day we were taken on a field trip to visit one of the old mansions, where Jesuits hid from Queen Elizabeth’s soldiers, in their secret “priest’s holes” behind hidden doors and under carpets. This made me think I could be a martyr some day. Everyone would love me, then, and say nice things about me.
In the middle of a daydream, I was called from class to go to the headmaster’s study. Those of us who had never before entered the headmaster’s “sanctum sanctorum” Holy of Holies regarded the place with awe and dread.
As I approached the door, I heard an awful fuss. I knocked, my knees shaking; I could barely stand.
“Come.”
I opened the door a crack. There, in a huge cage, a macaw climbed about, beak and claw, screaming obscenities at a large orange cat which sat grinning like Alice’s Cheshire on the back of a green chesterfield.
From behind a huge desk, the headmaster scowled. He was thin as a string. His face, blanched like a plant grown in deep shade. He had bushy white eyebrows. Mutton chop sideburns flared out beneath a mop of unruly white hair.
His voice sounded hoarse, like he had cobwebs in his throat. “Milne, empty your pockets.” Wondering why, I obeyed – and surrendered a couple of Catholic Truth Society booklets.
Whatever else I possessed didn’t matter. The headmaster called in one of the teachers, a miserable old woman with teeth like tumbling tombstones. Her hair was all wrapped up in a tight bun and stuck through with huge knitting needles. While she glared at me, her hands pinched at one another like quarrelsome crayfish.
The headmaster pulled a light bamboo cane from the umbrella stand behind the door and swished it a couple of times through the air. He seemed to enjoy my terror. The woman sniffed loudly. At a signal from her boss, she grabbed me by the hair, pulled my pants down, and forced me, struggling, over the arm of the chesterfield.
“The more you struggle, the worse it’s going to be, Master Milne,” she hissed. The moment of stark terror while I waited for the caning to begin seemed like forever.
Then it began. I screamed.
My scream nearly drowned out the parrot’s screech.
Others who had been “whacked” had warned me not to make a sound. That meant more licks. But I wasn’t able to follow that advice. Nor was I able to sit down for a long time. Jennifer was also implicated. She got caned too, along with a couple of others. But I was considered the ringleader of this band of thieves. So I stood for my meals at a table by myself, hating that cursed parrot.
The headmaster said we had stolen many books, at great loss to Holy Mother Church. The school had been so good to us heathens, and we’d dishonoured its trust. I was a thief. I’d end up in the fires of hell. This was a foretaste. “As your backside burns, think of hell.”
Uncle Sigvard
Whether we were expelled or Mother pulled us out, that school was no longer suitable. And because of the war, Mother could no longer look after us, nor could she afford to send us to any more boarding schools. Jennifer and I went to live with our Uncle Sigvard at Ealing, in the heart of West London.
*
Uncle Sigvard was Mother’s half-brother. Sometimes, he lived like a millionaire, despite the war; other times, he was church-mouse poor. At one time before the war, he had headed his own film studio in Hollywood, California. Apart from working on a variety of inventions to do with film and x-rays, he was a cameraman for Ealing Studios. My uncle was pudgy but not fat. He had very wavy hair and a cigarette forever dangling from moist lips, which had bubbles of spittle at the corners. His sky blue eyes could see right through me, and his hands forever pulled me to his smoky tweed jacket. The pockets contained sweets he slipped to me one at a time with a wink.
Mother asked her brother to get her a job in film. She was sure she could be a movie star. But, despite many promises, Uncle Sigvard didn’t get her what she wanted.
When we first moved to London, we were sent to a local school, even rougher than the last boarding school. I thought I was fitting in quite well, but Mother complained we were starting to sound like the London guttersnipes. Boys played warplane “dog fights” in the schoolyard. We were all Spitfires; no one wanted to be a Messerschmitt. Aiaooow! Pta! Pta! Pta! Pta! When that school was bombed, we were glad. We borrowed books from the mobile library and stayed home.
Living with my uncle was a whole new adventure. Not only did he take me with him to shoot film, he put me into some movie “co-op spots”. I once got to sit on a barrel eating a banana made of a sugary paste. There weren’t any real bananas during the war. Uncle Sigvard also took me to movies and bought me sweets to eat during the film while he smoked his cigarettes. Jennifer usually stayed at home with a sitter.
While living with my uncle, I got to be in Cubs. Uncle Sigvard knew Lord Baden-Powell and had been a Scout leader. At that time, Boy Scouts acted as air raid wardens and as organizers for recycling drives. We Cubs collected newspapers, string, and foil from cigarette packages for the war effort. I remember a Cub outing where we camped overnight in a farmer’s barn and played parachutes, jumping in the hay. My uncle was one of the overnight leaders but we had nothing more to do with cubs or campouts after that one outing.
*
My Uncle Sigvard was one of the few people anywhere who still owned a car. Driving for pleasure was not allowed. One day, he had to make one of those “necessary” trips – to film for the War Department, or something like that. He returned home by bus. The government had labeled his car “unnecessary”, put it up on blocks, and removed the tires and rotor arm. If the Germans had invaded at that time, they would have had a hard time finding ground transportation.
*