10:30 After our Friday shower, Lois and I head out for a walk round the local football field, stopping three quarters of the way round to have a coffee and a strawberry crunchie at the Whiskers Coffee Stand by the Parish Council Offices.
The weekend starts here but we can't start a party, at least only a party for two - we're the only people on the field today apart from the Polish girl serving us haha!
I reserve 2 places on the so-called "Pirie Bench"...
...while Lois gets the coffees and the strawberry crunchies
12:00 We come home and I do a bit of work on the so-called "Sarawakian" branch of my family tree. Recently my sister Gill did a DNA test and we discovered we had a cousin David we didn't know about. David is the illegitimate son of our Aunty Joan and her boss, a hotel manager called Peter - and Peter's family has a weird Sarawakian connection.
our Aunty Joan in the late 1950's
While Peter was going to bed with our Aunty Joan, he was also going to bed with his wife - fair enough, you might say! But, interestingly, his wife was half-Sarawakian, thanks to a liaison between a British mining engineer, posted to Sarawak, and his native mistress, whose name was Poing-Ah-Lian.
Confused? No? Well you will be! Take a look at this family tree, especially the right-hand side.
But there's always something more to find out, we've discovered, and it can be like a drug-habit that's hard to kick.
Peter's daughter Elizabeth married Tom, a local Gloucestershire squire (literally - it's on his headstone!), who, as a teenager, had inherited an enormous but crumbling mansion in the country.
Sadly Tom and Elizabeth's marriage ended within, at most, 5 years: he married again to a woman called Deborah, but sadly again, Tom died suddenly at the relatively early age of 61.
He was very much "lord of the manor", and on his gravestone, which I discovered online today, he's called "the last squire" of the place. On his marriage certificate he listed his occupation as "gentleman". My god !!!!
On the other side of his gravestone there's a very touching farewell to him,
16:00 Lois and I have a cup of tea and a currant bun on the couch. We listen to the radio, this week's edition of "Last Word". We try and catch this programme every week so we can keep up to date with whether anybody's died in the last week or not.
The family went to the theatre one evening and when they came home they found that they didn't have a house any more, because their chauffeur had turned them in. Inge's father was sent to Dachau concentration camp, and, incredibly, Inge decided to visit the camp with the idea of bribing the authorities there to let her father go.
Everybody told her that it was a totally crazy idea - that the camp officials would steal the money from her, rape her, imprison her in the concentration camp, and then kill her. But astoundingly this didn't happen - her plan actually worked, and the officials at the camp agreed to take the money and release Inge's father.
In 1939, Inge's father had embarked on the infamous ship the MS St Louis, packed with Jewish refugees, which crossed the Atlantic but was refused entry at all ports in the western hemisphere. He had to go back to Hamburg but miraculously avoided being arrested again.
Eventually Inge and her first husband managed to escape across the mountains to Switzerland. Then, the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, hired her and her future husband to spy for them. She became an integral part of Operation Sunrise, a mission to negotiate a truce between the Germans in North Italy and the invading Allied forces, a development which turned out to be a huge step towards the ending of the war.
Inge as a young woman
When the war ended, Inge and her husband made their way to Hollywood and became a song-writing duo, writing for stars such as Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney and Dean Martin.
Their marriage quickly foundered, however. The pair were given the lyrics of the song "Que sera, sera", and asked to write the melody, but Inge's husband refused because he wanted to write something "more serious", "preferably a symphony". Inge threatened to divorce him if he didn't write the melody for the lyrics, and when he refused, she divorced him. The song later became a huge hit for Doris Day.
Inge was a very determined person, to put it mildly, and she was always jumping queues in supermarkets - she had no patience whatsoever. She used to say, "If you follow behind too many queues, you'll end up in Auschwitz!" Oh dear! Surely that doesn't happen that often, does it? Not in Cheltenham anyway! [Let's hope not! - Ed]
She had strings of lovers, and she used to give her younger friends advice about sex and how to seduce a man. She used to boast that she always had a lover, but that she also always kept a spare one "up her sleeve", in case the first guy turned out to be "not good enough".
By the time she became a heavy metal singing star, she was already a granny.
Inge as a heavy-metal granny, with The Triton Kings
She tended to scoff at talk of an afterlife. She said her concept of heaven and hell was that if, at the moment of death you realise that your life has been full and good: then that's heaven. And if you're thinking "I should have done this or that", then that's hell. Simples!
Her message through the medium of her heavy metal music was: everybody will die, so we might just as well laugh about it and enjoy it, because death will happen to us anyway, no matter what.
My god, what a woman!!!!
20:00 We settle down on the couch to watch a bit of TV, but Lois is soon asleep. I turn down the volume and watch the first half of the first programme in a new series of "Antiques Roadshow", a show were members of the public bring along their treasures and heirlooms to some stately home or other, and have them discussed and valued by experts in the various fields.
As a young man, Eric was in the Royal Navy doing his 2 years national service, serving on HMS Narvik. In 1956 the ship sailed to Australia, to an island called Montebello, where the crew took part in the testing of two of Britain's atomic bombs - a mission codenamed Operation Mozaic.
Eric was part of the team that built, first of all, the camp that the sailors live in on this island. They spent quite some time on the island before the bombs were tested. They were then made to watch the bombs go off.
When the time came, the men were all told to pull their collars up and turn with their backs to the testing site - my god!!!!
In his diary, Eric wrote "Five, four, three, the tension is electric. Two, one. Will it never happen? What if something is wrong? Zero, a blinding flash. Everything loses colour. The heat is terrific. One, two, three, four, five. OK, chaps you can look now."
Eric didn't suffer any lasting effects from the test, however, and he lived into old age. I'm not sure that was true of all the men who took part, but we don't hear about that tonight.
All I can say is "Yikes !!!!!!"
22:00 Lois wakes up and we go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment