Thank You Tom Hanks...by Sheila Claydon

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In Remembering Rose, Book 1 of my Mapleby Trilogy, the heroine, Rachel, learns about the cares and troubles of previous generations as she travels back through time. I did much the same last week and it has made me feel very humble.

On Apple TV at the moment there is a new mini series series being streamed. Based on the non-fiction book by Donald L Miller (always mention the writer!!!) Masters of the Air is based on the true story of America's 8th Air Force's 100th Bomb Group during World War 2.  From 1943 to 1945 these young American soldiers, nicknamed the 'Bloody Hundred' on account of their immense losses, flew more than 8,500 missions over 22 months, losing 757 men, with 900 more becoming prisoners of war. Tom Hanks, who is an executive producer alongside Steven Speilberg and Gary Goetzman, insisted the story be told as it happened, with nothing made up. So every plane blown up, every pilot, gunner and navigator killed is a true account of the horror these men lived through. Of course there are the happier bits too, the friendships made, the acts of unbelievable bravery and loyalty, but despite this I could only watch one episode at a time instead of our normal back-to-back streaming.

The reason I felt like this, however, is not because of the actual story, although that is hard enough to watch, but because these brave airmen were stationed at Bomber Command in East Anglia in the UK, and that is where my parents were, and where they met and married. 

The Americans flew the Boeing B17 Flying Fortress while the Brits flew Lancaster Bombers. My father, who was in his thirties, was a sergeant responsible for loading bombs onto the Lancasters, while my mother, as a young WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) was a driver. Her job was to take the pilots and their crews to the airfield for their bombing raids, and then return to collect them, always wondering how many planes would actually return. This tension is very well portrayed in the series.

What really got me, however, is remembering that my mother was only 19 when she joined the WAAF and learned to drive those unwieldy canvas covered army trucks that were such an ubiquitous sight on British roads when I was a child. She had 2 week's intensive driving instruction and then was out there on her own. Unlike the American's daytime raids portrayed in the series, the British bombers flew at night, so she had to negotiate country lanes with no signposts and tiny pinprick headlights because of the blackout rules. I remember, too, that my Father had a deformed finger where one of the bombs had slipped as it was being loaded.

When I was about 7 years old my parents returned to visit friends in the area and, while we were there, revisited the airfield, which by then was a waste of abandoned Nissen huts with a solitary caretaker. I can still remember walking down the cracked runway with grass sprouting through it so the visit must have made quite an impression. Of course I had no idea what memories it brought back to my parents, how many wasted lives they must have remembered while they were there. 

Watching the series and remembering my life from 19 through to my early 20s, and remembering my children's lives, and the life my 18 and 21 year old granddaughters are enjoying today, I realise how much we owe to those brave young airmen and the ground crews who supported them, and how very, very lucky we are. Unlike so many war films, Masters of the Air is true, and I wish it could be mandatory watching although obviously that is not possible! My parents' reminiscences, including their memories of meeting the American pilots, was little more than a story from my childhood until, thanks to this TV series, I saw what they and countless others actually lived through and came out the other side still smiling. It is truly humbling.

 

A Life Remembered...by Sheila Claydon

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When someone is ninety years old they have lived too much life for their story to be told in a few paragraphs, but often just a few years of that life are a story all on their own. That is the case with Imelda, a longtime neighbour and dear friend, who passed away peacefully in the early hours of this morning.

I saw her often and was frequently amazed by a new story about her life because, after many years of friendship, I thought I'd heard them all. But no, only last week she surprised me anew with a previously untold memory of how she and her husband drove across Africa with their son, then an 8 month old baby, more than 57 years ago. But this tribute to a truly redoubtable lady is not about that journey, it is about her childhood, about the time when she and two of her siblings were evacuated from Liverpool to Southern Ireland at the outbreak of WW2.

The youngest of 10, she was motherless but much loved and indulged by her widowed father and older siblings, and, until the war, roamed free in the streets of Liverpool, playing with friends or trailing her older brothers and sisters. In Ireland, however, she was left in the care of an elderly Victorian Aunt and Uncle who only allowed her and her brother to go for a sedate walk once a day. Fortunately, Barney, her uncle's Irish Water Spaniel, was allowed to go with them, and he made each walk a great deal more exciting.  First her brother had to wrap the leash around his hand and then Imelda had to hang onto his waist for grim death before they dared to open the door, and the story of their helter-skelter journey to the river where Barney dived in while they tried to avoid getting wet and thus into trouble, conjures a wonderful picture of two giggling, windblown children and a large and boisterous dog having the time of their lives.

There were other much darker things waiting for her though. She was sent to an Irish convent where every lesson was taught in Gaelic. As she only spoke English it was sometime before she mastered the language. Until then, she and the paddle (a paddle shaped board used for chastisement) saw a great deal of one another. In her words, school was horrendous, a terrible nightmare. Terrible it might have been, but before she left Ireland at the end of the war she won both a gold and a silver medal for Gaelic speaking, something that amazed the natives.

Better was each summer holiday when she and her brother were sent to another aunt and uncle who owned a farm. Although they went to help with the harvest and had to work hard, she loved it. Loved the outdoor life and the camaraderie, and loved especially the Irish dances that took place every night at the crossroads closest to whichever farm had brought in its harvest that day. All the farms worked together as a cooperative and Imelda had to help prepare food for 40 men every day, cooking in a big black caldron over an open fire. And twice a day she had to carry huge pails of tea for them, blowing a whistle as she went and then listening for an answering blast so she could locate them.

Only Fridays were different because then she and her brother had to harness up the donkey and cart and set off for the nearest town to deliver the butter her aunt had made that week. They were also tasked with bringing back sacks of flour and animal feed for many of the neighbours who lived along the route. Unfortunately, the donkey, who only had this one duty, hated it. He hated it so much that the outward journey was always a long slow plod. As soon as they turned for home, however, it was a different matter. Then, in her words, he went like the clappers and wouldn't stop, so they had to heave the various sacks out of the cart as they flew past farm gates and small holdings, hoping against hope that they had delivered the correct items to each customer.

The mother she couldn't remember was buried in her native Limerick and Imelda would visit her grave most weeks with a gift of wild flowers. The graveyard was next to what, in those days, was called The Asylum for the Insane. I don't know if it was a mental hospital or a prison, or maybe a bit of both, but whatever it was, soon some of the inmates noticed the little girl who visited the graveyard every week and began to call her. Feisty should have been her middle name because she quickly learned to scale the six foot wall using cracks in broken bricks for footholds, and sit atop it while the people below sang and danced for her. Then they would throw pennies over the wall and she would scramble down, collect them, and run across to the pub where she would buy jugs of ale. Using the local vernacular in what was now a thick Irish accent, she would ask for 'beer for the Eejits' and be served straight away. Then she would carefully deliver it back to her incarcerated friends.

What a difference from today's regulated, safety conscious and politically correct world. The only black cooking cauldron 21st Century children know is the one in the Harry Potter stories, and they play games on iPads and cell phones instead of cooking and delivering meals and tea to 40 sweating, hungry labourers.  Nor would they be set loose with a recalcitrant donkey unless they were wearing riding hats and boots and were accompanied by a responsible adult. Not that I'm saying we should go back to those days. Far from it. The language is kinder today, corporal punishment is forbidden in schools, and the exploitation of children is frowned upon...in the West at least. There are still many places across the world where children live a hard and a short life, but Imelda had an advantage. Whereas today children in poor countries are often short of food, if not starving, in neutral Southern Ireland during the war it was a time of plenty. Instead if wartime rationing there was an abundance of food, especially meat, cheese, milk, cream and butter, so despite her six years away from her Father and older siblings, Imelda grew up strong and healthy, fluent in two languages, independent and practical.

Those years stood her in good stead. At 90 she still loved her food, especially milk puddings, ate well and lived well, forever grateful for the benefits of modern life in a way that only those who have experienced something different can be.

In my book Remembering Rose there is a grandmother who is as old as Imelda. She is just as much a character and just as interesting. We must never forget that old people have a back story that is usually worth listening to. Today, as I collected some of Imelda's belongings for her son, and made sure her house was secure, I wasn't thinking about the old lady who had just died, bent and twisted with osteoporosis and arthritis. Instead I thought about the young girl she had been, carefree, sun-kissed, and full of life and laughter. Imelda I salute you for a long life well lived.

20th Century Events by Katherine Pym

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20^th century carried a lot of weight. Prior to the 1920’s when my parents were born, the century suffered from a polio epidemic, the San Francisco Earthquake, WW-1 and the Bolshevik movement. The Czar & his family’s execution.

Spanish Flu Hospital

My grandfather had the Spanish flu that killed so many. With the hospital full, they found a pallet and wedged him in a corner, hoping he would survive. He did. 😊

In the 1920’s women threw their corsets in the bin. Shedding inhibitions, men and women drank bathtub gin and danced the charleston. My dad remembered when homemade brews exploded in the basement. 

Silent films morphed into talkies and the world paused at the harsh realities of the 

Great Depression.  Dad lived in the city and experienced long soup lines, issued clothing that my grandmother dyed, trying to disguise the humiliation of government handouts. My mom lived in the farmland and had more food at her disposal. Her aunties fashioned underwear out of printed flour sacks, and very comfortable they were too, or so she said.

Soup Kitchen

My parents witnessed the build-up of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the jitter-bug, Hollywood’s greatest days, the biggest war ever, and the atomic bomb. 

Women painted their legs to simulate silk-stockings because none were available. Dad said his Navy whites were always stained orange after a night of dancing, which did not put the men in good stead with their superior officers.

After the war, Hollywood introduced black noir movies, where the scenes always seemed to take place at night, the streets wet as if it had rained. Women’s hats got 

smaller, their hair shorter. 

Into the 2^nd half of the century, we saw the rise of Communism and as a reaction to that, McCarthyism. Remarkable scientific marvels catapulted the world from a sleepy planet to OMG, don’t press that button.

WW-2

The Korean War marched around the periphery of our cynical thoughts. Eisenhower was president. Elvis Presley had women screaming, “Kiss me. Kiss me.” Hollywood put out incredible grade B movies where couples ‘necked’ the entire film.

Everyone swing-danced; later we did the ‘twist’, causing women’s waistlines to shrink. Dr Salk found the cure for polio and mom dragged us to the school where we were first in line to eat a sugar cube saturated with the vaccine. 

The Cuban Crisis. Fathers came home early from work and informed their families we only had hours to live. The planet went silent with fear as a shaky hand hovered over the Red Button of Doom. From then on, we ducked and covered under our school desk, breathing in dirt from the playground. 

Nuclear Fallout Map

The Beatles & Rolling Stones. A bevy of unfortunate killings: JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcomb X & Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. 

The Berlin Wall.

Race for the moon. In the Apollo Program, panels 32 & 16 on the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) were my dad’s responsibility. He was proud of his work and once asked my grandmother what she thought of his part in it. She asked, “What do you mean?” Dad huffed a breath. “My part in men going to the moon and walking on it.”  My grandmother replied it was a hoax. No one could ever fly to the moon, much less stand on it. The whole thing had been filmed on a movie set. My dad stared at her in disbelief.

The best music came during the 60’s & 70’s, mostly connected with the Vietnam War. 

Two Cold Hippies

Hippies ran amok across the country but they were especially filled with love in San Francisco. Smoking weed, downing mushrooms and peyote buttons. LSD. Dancing naked in the streets with flowers in their hair. 

Going to dances were no longer popular. Stoned to the bone, everyone sat lotus-style on the floor or the grass (Woodstock-the world’s greatest example of sex, drugs, & rock’n roll) and listened to mind-bending music.  

I suppose I should mention Nixon’s Watergate; the assassination attempt on George Wallace. Hollywood advanced into the computer era with the green screens and the amazing special effects of Star Wars. Jimmy Carter’s Iran humiliation. 

Woodstock

The Berlin Wall

President Reagan’s attempted assassination, big hair and large shoulder pads. The movie Superman. Lady Diana’s wedding. 

The Shuttle exploded over Cape Canaveral, shutting down the program for a few years until the reason was documented and nailed in cement. Michael Jackson’s breakthrough that every musician wanted to copy, the Thriller video. 

In the 90’s, our world changed with the fall of Communism, the Berlin Wall sledgehammered into chunks of concrete. 

Our planet became smaller with the advent of the computers on the business and personal level. The internet came about with primitive chatrooms and emails. At the airport, a loved one could still accompany you to the gate, and you could carry on board a bottle of wine you wanted to give Auntie at the family reunion.  

Challenger Exploding

People live longer these days. Both in their 90’s when they left, my mom and dad saw so much. What do you suppose they’ll say about the baby boomers in the 21^st century (other than we ruined the world, which we considered our own parents to have done)? 

Hopefully, they’ll say: a lot.   

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Many thanks to Wikicommons Public Domain

Hedy Lamarr, A Beauty & A Great Mind by Katherine Pym

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Hedy Lamarr-a beautiful brainiac.

I noticed Netflix has a series or documentary on Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler), so I thought to share my post of her.

Hedy as born 1914 (some say 1913) in Vienna Austria to Jewish parents, both considered practicing Christians. Doors opened for her when she performed in a risqué Czech movie. In 1933, she married Fritz Mandl, a wealthy armaments merchant and munitions manufacturer who was in cahoots with the Nazis and sold armaments to Mussolini.

Fritz was not happy with Hedy’s acting career. To keep her occupied and away from the studio, he hosted lavish parties where Hitler and Mussolini were in attendance. He’d take Hedy to business meetings where she listened to wealthy manufacturers and their discussions on how to jam an enemy’s radio frequencies, to locate and destroy their weapons.

Not stupid, Hedy may have looked like a flower to be admired but not acknowledged. At those meetings, Hedy learned applied sciences.

Fritz was a controlling man, very jealous. In her autobiography, Hedy stated he kept her prisoner in their palatial mansion most of the time.

By 1937 as Hitler’s strength extended throughout Germany and Austria, as he prepared to spread his rancor throughout Europe, Hedy disappeared to Paris disguised as a maid. She took most of Mandl’s jewels with her. While in Paris, she met Louis B. Mayer, and the rest as they say is history.

Or maybe not...

Even as she was beautiful, Hedy possessed a brilliant mind. She was an inventor and a scientist. She created several items and obtained patents for them. She remembered those meetings Fritz had dragged her to and she loathed the Nazis. She did everything in her power to try and stop them.

By 1940, Hedy had moved to Hollywood. During a dinner party, she met George Antheil, a man of like mind. He was an avant-garde composer. They enjoyed each other’s company and talked of Hedy’s ideas. When the evening ended, Hedy wrote her phone number with lipstick on George’s windshield: Call me.

By this time, WW2 was in full swing. The loss of men at sea each day counted to the several thousands. Allied ships were being sunk by torpedoes from German U-boats. 

Hedy and George realized most of the weaponry during WW2 was radio controlled. They got together and invented a “Secret Communications System” (US Patent No. 2,292,387) what today is known as a “Spread Spectrum Transmission”. If their signals jammed German frequencies, the weaponry would be sent off course, their munitions rendered useless.

Hedy and George worked out a radio frequency called “frequency-hopping” that could not be deciphered or jammed. They set up a sequencer “that would rapidly jump both the control signal and its receiver through 88 random frequencies” similar to the 88 keys on a piano.

For explanation purposes on the patent material, they compared frequency-hopping to a player-piano where the dots on paper are interspersed at irregular intervals. If someone is trying to listen to you, the message will be jumbled, undecipherable as if you hop around indiscriminately rather than walk in a straight line. The sender and receiver know what these hopping intervals are and can communicate. Someone who does not know this system would not be able to understand.

Their idea bloomed into an actual process, then ‘Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil’ sent their designs to the patent office. Their patent was accepted but the Navy never embraced it. One obtuse fellow considered it impractical to stick a player-piano into a torpedo. Their idea was shelved.

But not forgotten...

In his 1945 autobiography, George Antheil gave Hedy Lamarr full credit for the idea. In the 1950’s private companies dug the patent out of the archives and began to use its science. A wireless technology called CDMA was developed (today’s WIFI & Bluetooth). In the 1960’s the Navy used frequency-hopping during the Cuba Missile Crisis.  In the late 1990’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy an award for her contribution to wireless communications.

Without Hedy Lamarr’s experiences with her first husband, her unbending dislike of the Nazi’s and her embracement of the Allied war effort, we would not have wireless communications. Oh, I know what you are thinking. Someone somewhere would have figured it out, but I say Hedy’s the girl, the one who spearheaded what we have, today.

Many thanks to:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi435.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/celebrity-invention-hedy-lamarrs-secret-communications-system/62377/

http://www.women-inventors.com/Hedy-Lammar.asp

http://www.biography.com/people/hedy-lamarr-9542252#secret-communications-system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr05/cdma/cdma.htm

Chocolate and Oranges...by Sheila Claydon

No, I'm not talking about Christmas, although I certainly hope to enjoy my fair share of chocolate plus an orange or two over the festive season. Instead I am following through on  last month's blog A letter to remind us, which is about WW2 and how much we owe to everyone who lived through it.

Thanks to an conversation I had earlier today, I unexpectedly found myself thinking about my very early childhood. I was born in Southampton, England, at the very end of the war. It was, and still is, a very busy Port which, during the 1940s, was a starting point for troop ships, supply convoys and destroyers. Consequently it was regularly bombed throughout the war, and although the devastation of people's ruined lives had been cleared away long before I was old enough to be conscious of it, I can clearly remember the gaps, like missing teeth, in row upon row of houses. I remember, too, the 'wreck', a large grassy field with a huge dip in its centre that my friends and I used to slip and side down, shrieking with laughter and covering ourselves with a reddish dust, never for a moment realising our playground was the result of an exploded bomb, and that there had once been houses on our 'field.'

I didn't know either, that the wood yard opposite my grandmother's house was a yard only because a bomb had flattened all the houses that had once stood there, at the same time it had blown all the windows our of my grandmother's house. I even thought the dark cupboard under her stairs was exciting and liked to crawl inside, never knowing until much later that she and my mother, then a teenager, had spent many terrifying nights sleeping there when all the men of the house were away fighting.

I guess it is understandable that a war torn generation doesn't want to remember the horrors they have been through or talk about them to their children. Instead they need to create new memories and look forward, so my early childhood memories are mostly good ones, and among them are some real treasures. One of the best involves chocolate and oranges...which is where we came in!

Although my maternal grandfather had a terrible war sailing backwards and forwards across the Atlantic in supply convoys until his ship was eventually torpedoed, to me, as a little girl, he was neither a hero nor someone with dreadful memories. Instead he was a smiley, white-haired granddad, who put on a smart uniform every Thursday morning and went to the Port to help organize a ship's turnaround. I loved trying on his peaked cap and looking at his shiny medals, but by far the most important part of the day was when he came home. On Thursdays, instead of using his key he always knocked the door, and it was my job to open it. (I'm sure he must have unlocked it and clicked it open before he knocked because at only three or four years old I was far too small to do it by myself). Then, before he stepped into the house, I had to choose which of his pockets held a surprise. I never got it wrong...a small bar of chocolate, an orange, a banana.  The excitement is with me still and of course I was too young to realise that every pocket was a winner! Nor did I know how lucky I was to have a grandfather whose semi-retired job meant he was able to bring home such treats. I didn't know that chocolate and those oranges had travelled thousands of miles across the sea or that few other children would taste them for several more years.  

There are other memories too. One is of being sent to the shop next door to buy a bag of broken biscuits. This was much better than choosing one particular sort. Instead there was the joy of dipping into the bag and never being sure what would come out. Half a custard cream, a chipped ginger snap, or, if I was lucky, something with chocolate on it. The cakes were delicious too, despite rations being short. My grandmother always cooked from scratch and there was never enough sugar for icing, but even so I've never again tasted a Victoria sponge as good as hers.

I didn't know shelling peas was a chore either, or picking gooseberries, or pulling carrots. I thought they were just things  I did because I loved how my mother cooked them, the same as I thought going to the library every week was because I liked to read, not because there was no spare money to buy books except at Christmas or birthday.

So that's another debt I owe to my parents and grandparents, and I am sure there are many others who feel the same. I was allowed to grow up without any of their memories of those terrible years of war shadowing my childhood. To me, until I was much older, all I learned were the popular songs they had sung and the strange nicknames of the people they had once lived and worked with. And my favorite dress for a very long time was an Royal Airforce blue pinafore embroidered around the bib with bright pink chain stitch. To me it wasn't a remake of my mother's WRAF uniform skirt, it was a lovely dress, a Christmas present lovingly made...cut out by my father and sewn by my mother.

The ice-cream and the bread might have been rubbish in those early years after the war, and for years to come, but I barely noticed because I had the chocolate and the oranges as well as a whole lot of other things besides. So thank you Mum and Dad, and thank you all those other adults who made sure I and my friends had a shadow-free childhood. It's taken me until now to really understand.

Mending Jodie's Heart (pictured above) is the first book of my When Paths Meet trilogy and as well as a romance it is a story of the sacrifice and love that is needed to raise a child. Books 2 and 3 continue this theme although none of the heroines were as lucky as me. You can find them at:

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