In Our Flag Stays Red (1948) Phil Piratin – the Communist Party MP for Mile End – wrote an account of the 1940 occupation of the Savoy Hotel. This is just one of the many stories I came across in the research for the Marienbad – my post about Fritz Stingl and his escape from … Read more
Every Christmas growing up my family received a greeting card from the Stingl family. I knew that my grandmother, mother, and aunt had known Fritz Stingl in the 1930s. He was Czech and he had arrived at Croydon airport as a refugee and been turned back even though they were at the barrier waiting to … Read more
The Year Begins in October Armistead Maupin based his vignettes of gay life in 1970s San Francisco – Tales of the City – on Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939). They first appeared in a long-running serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Instinctively I wanted to write a gay male Mrs Miniver, the minutiae of gay … Read more
Hands down, this is the best book I’ve read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It’s the bitter winter of 1945. An odd assortment of people lives in the Georgenhof – a small neglected estate in East Prussia. Eberhard von Globig is a Sonderführer, a special officer in the German army away in … Read more
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp. Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most … Read more
“What are you doing in the wardrobe?” “Narnia business” C.S.”Jack” Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where he and his brother immersed themselves in myths and legends. They spent wet afternoons sitting inside an old and cavernous wardrobe where they told each other tales of a magical kingdom of talking animals. The … Read more
All our stories begin before we are born. Not Just the blue eyes or flat feet we inherit, but the stories we hear from uncles and aunts, from grandmothers and grandfathers. Even if oral history is no more reliable than the party game of Chinese whispers, everyone bringing to it their own subjective lumber of … Read more
My father did not bring much back from his six years of war. He would have had his demob suit of course, and I remember a leather jerkin that he wore into the 1960s. Then, in common with millions of other military personnel and civilians, there was the case of what we now call PTSD. … Read more
This post is in answer to the question “Operation Pied Piper: What were they thinking?” At least in terms of the evacuation scheme. The choice of code-name remains ambiguous. It begins with a little history. Napoleon In the first years of the 19th century, Napoleon made no secret of his intention to invade Britain, … Read more
P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin … Read more
Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in … Read more
In Hamelin in Lower Saxony. there’s an inscription on a wooden beam on the side of the Rattenfangerhaus (rat catcher’s house). An English translation on the plaque reads: In the year 1284 on the Day of John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper dressed … Read more
As is ever the case, I found these images on the IWM site while actually looking for something else. They just seemed to have a little relevance today given the frothing of the anti-vaxxer minority. Apparently, Dr. Fauci has claimed he went to the North Pole personally to vaccinate Santa Claus against COVID-19. I don’t … Read more
It was Donald Winnicott, of course, who coined the phrase good-enough in connection with parenting. He first introduced the term in 1953 although he had worked on the concept for years and the idea is there in his advice to parents in his wartime radio broadcasts. Basically, it recognizes the need for children to learn … Read more
As of last week, the only thing I knew about Agnes Smedley was that The Feminist Press had reissued her most famous book and that the poet Robert Lowell had objected that she – a known communist sympathizer – was allowed to stay at Yaddo – the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. Getting to know … Read more