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 Italy confiscating wine and olive…
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 disagreeable. Reading Waugh – and…
“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 world of Narnia was rooted…
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 myths, half-truths, fancies and deceits,…
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. There was also his War…
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, destroy the monarchy and take…
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 are of course fictional characters…
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 1940. –George Orwell P.G.Wodehouse –…
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 in many-coloured clothes to Calvary…
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 know whether Santa received immunization…
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 that: a mother is neither…
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 her a little better has…
While T.S.Eliot was skulking about in green face powder, Gertrude Stein was communing with Cubists and inventing linguistic collage. And – this is amazing – developing the code book for the Special Operations Executive of WW2. Picasso was a frequent visitor to Stein’s salon and they became friends. While Picasso and the other Cubists were cutting and pasting and…
They say the war is over. But water still Comes bloody from the taps. from ‘Redeployment,’ Howard Nemerov In April 1961 the BBC Light program broadcast the first episode of a new radio drama: The Avenue Goes to War. It was based on the R. F. Delderfield novel of the same name. It’s the story of one suburban street in…
My uncle Lawrence Holford was killed by a Bristol Beaufighter. Maybe two. My father worshipped his older brother Laurie, and growing up my brother and I heard the story that he was killed in the Brighton Blitz while serving as a special reserve constable with the Brighton police. I imagined a lone policeman on dark streets, German bombers overhead, searchlights…