Friday - March 19, 2010

Some history wherein …. I found myself kind of up close and personal

I only have minutes to put this together as I have to go out for an appointment and then the post office.

For more then a year and in bits and drabs, we have been unloading things that are mostly dead memories and or junk that was rat packed by the late mil.
The woman kept every little item she ever acquired including her own school report card at the age of 12. 

Many of the things she got her claws into really were nothing but junk.  Hundreds of empty bottles stored in plastic bags in the badly rotted garage.  A box of coal on top of which sat an old decayed and rotted wardrobe.  Which completely fell apart when the guys we called to haul things away tried to lift it after it was emptied. I can not even begin to describe the things here inside the house from clothes to cheap pottery. When we arrived in April of 2004 we had a heck of a time making room for ourselves and had to fight to toss out old and decayed junk, much of it along with the mouse droppings and whatever other varmints were using the upstairs as a hotel.  She ( the mil) worried that we were getting rid of treasure. Sure. Like a double size mattress completely folded in half in a large plastic bag in the attic. The plastic and the mattress having been gnawed most thoroughly by her unseen guests. See, when she bought the new one, she kept the old one too.

Well, among the many things squirreled away, there were a few (very few) items of interest.  A WW1 bayonet for one. Old letters from the war including the notice that her fiancé was lost in the RAF on a mission. In fact, neither the plane or the crew were ever found.  It makes for some sad reading going over all these very old letters of his that she saved through all these years.
He writes of his worry for her as he was aware of the serious bombing of Southampton, and says he won’t sleep until he hears that she and family are okay.

The letters are written on small size stationary and a small cramped hand in many places, so it isn’t easy to read everything. I have never been good at making out other people’s handwriting.  Anyway, it’s interesting reading and gives one a sense of things back then.  While I remember clearly the concern of our family for uncles away at war, one a navigator on a Liberator bomber and the other in the Navy, my uncles didn’t have to worry when the next air raid would occur in the USA. 

(There’s even a short note she wrote to him in 1938. How it came to be in her possession I’ve no idea. Surely it was sent and read by him, as also she had the original envelope franked and all.)

Well, there’s still talk of a strike over Easter by the union against Brit Airways and now as I read the letters from another time the radio of today is informing us that the union representing the Railroad wants to vote a strike too.  But at the front in August of 41 and writing from an RAF base somewhere, a Sgt. Bill Rogers is writing to my wife’s future mom, a letter of condolence to a young lady named Peggy, who Roy “constantly talked about.” Sgt. Rogers assures the young lady that having spent some many months together, he and Roy’s friends got to know him well.  There were apparently some crew photos taken (? not sure and hard to read here) which he promises to forward.  Must be photos. This was August and Peggy replies to him.
But in a letter dated 4th Sept. 1941 from Wing Commander (can not make out the name) No. 78 Squadron, he writes as follows.

“ It is with deep regret that I have to inform you that Sgt. Rogers was reported missing on 25 August 1941, this being the reason for the return of your letter.”

How that must have hurt, and how many times that feeling was duplicated over the course of the war.  It wasn’t until I held letters like these in my own hands and read them that the war finally came home to me, as much as it could given time and generations. It was vastly different from reading the diaries and memories of that generation in a magazine or newspaper.  Reading those is reading history to be certain. But it isn’t near as personal.

Who knows what else we may find in some cubbyhole or under a rafter somewhere in the attic.

Stay Tuned.

Posted by peiper     on 03/19/2010 at 07:16 AM   
Filed Under: • Blog Stuff • History • Personal •  
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