75 Years

My daughter laughs at me because I iron everything, even socks.  Usually I time it to coincide with the repeat of an old fashioned series like Inspector Morse so that I can watch and iron at the same time. But over the post Christmas period there has been such rubbish on that I’ve been reduced to watching WWII documentaries.

And I fell to thinking about my French mother and her family.  Two older brothers were killed in the first war and her younger brother in the second.  My older twin sisters were killed in a bombing raid when they were only three.

Her cousin Yvonne and her husband kept a little estaminet near Gravelines. They had a son named Emil who had what was called ‘creeping paralysis’ probably MS.  He lived in a self contained flat in the basement and was obsessed by radios which he built himself.  

His parents were ostracised by the local community because from the time of the occupation they served German soldiers and were thought to be far too friendly with them.   In 1944 Yvonne, Jean-Pierre and Emil were all shot dead by German soldiers.  They were members of the Maquis.   It emerged that Emil had been broadcasting the information obtained by his parents from the German soldiers in the estaminet.  Someone had betrayed them.  They were never discovered.  

In 1947 my parents were asked by our parish priest, who was himself half German half Dutch, and had fled to Quarr Abbey in 1939, to accept for Christmas a German POW. Fr Putmann was the only German speaking priest in the diocese and had therefore been instructed by the Bishop to act as their chaplain.

My mother was torn.  On the one hand she was moved by the stories of these young lads who had been conscripted with no idea what would happen to them, and on the other, given her family history she had no love for the Germans.  

Anyway, they agreed and I’m able to remember Michael arriving. He was a thin blond lad and had brought a present for me of a bag of wooden bricks which he had carved himself from pieces of timber he had found in Colwick Woods where the camp was situated.  I remember him playing with me, and us all sitting round the table singing French, German and English carols.  He continued to visit when he was allowed and when he was repatriated my father sent him home with this letter.

He was the son of a butcher in Kleiner Graben,  had married at twenty and had a wife and two little girls - he was captured early in the war.  The privations in Germany were even worse than ours.  

There is also a later letter which explains that the gifts had to wait to be sent to Germany until it was allowed. 

This was over seventy years ago, just a simple story of two working class families caught up in the horrors of war.  And how it’s possible to stop hating.