For You, the Tour is Over
Jun. 20th, 2011 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmThis is a bit late for Father's Day, but still.
August 1939 was not, perhaps, the best month to pick for a solo bicycle tour of central Europe. But my father, who was 20 years old at the time, had been working with the Quaker committee for Jewish refugees in London as well as the British Esperanto Association, and he knew people here and there. And he did love his cycling.
His Youth Hostel card gives an impression of his travels, which took in Troyes, Nuremberg (not a great YHA experience in the era of the Hitler Youth, he reported), Vienna, Basle and Lucerne, amongst other places. Meeting a contingent of French troops on its way to the Maginot Line he was invited to join them and, his pacifism doing feeble battle with his Francophilia, almost agreed; but felt he ought to go and see his parents back in Kingston-on-Thames first. A few days before war was declared he arrived at the German/Austrian-Swiss border at Martinsbruck and was challenged because his papers weren’t in order. “Let him through,” cried the senior Swiss guard: “We’re all in this together, now.” He spent the first night of the war in Lonay, Switzerland.
These were the days when passport photographs could be taken in your garden with a background of bushes:
I have all the postcards he sent his parents, but this is certainly the most striking, posted in Vienna and chosen with an eye to the censor – “a lovely photo of Hitler when he was younger”:
Shortly after he returned to England he enrolled for a course of study at Woodbrooke, the Quaker college in Birmingham, and it was there he was to spend the first few months of 1940. But that's another story...
August 1939 was not, perhaps, the best month to pick for a solo bicycle tour of central Europe. But my father, who was 20 years old at the time, had been working with the Quaker committee for Jewish refugees in London as well as the British Esperanto Association, and he knew people here and there. And he did love his cycling.
His Youth Hostel card gives an impression of his travels, which took in Troyes, Nuremberg (not a great YHA experience in the era of the Hitler Youth, he reported), Vienna, Basle and Lucerne, amongst other places. Meeting a contingent of French troops on its way to the Maginot Line he was invited to join them and, his pacifism doing feeble battle with his Francophilia, almost agreed; but felt he ought to go and see his parents back in Kingston-on-Thames first. A few days before war was declared he arrived at the German/Austrian-Swiss border at Martinsbruck and was challenged because his papers weren’t in order. “Let him through,” cried the senior Swiss guard: “We’re all in this together, now.” He spent the first night of the war in Lonay, Switzerland.
These were the days when passport photographs could be taken in your garden with a background of bushes:
I have all the postcards he sent his parents, but this is certainly the most striking, posted in Vienna and chosen with an eye to the censor – “a lovely photo of Hitler when he was younger”:
Shortly after he returned to England he enrolled for a course of study at Woodbrooke, the Quaker college in Birmingham, and it was there he was to spend the first few months of 1940. But that's another story...
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 09:33 am (UTC)I have to laugh (admiringly) at the image of your dad cycling for Switzerland as war broke out around him. I am reminded of Steve McQueen on his motorbike in the Great Escape.
Your dad obviously had terrific pluck.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 09:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 10:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 11:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 11:45 am (UTC)Sadly, I'm estranged from my own father which always makes fathers' day a little dificult to cope with.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 06:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 12:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 07:19 pm (UTC)Please tell me you are going to write an actual biography of your family someday; it's so much easier to quote delightedly at people when you can pull the book down off the shelf than when you have to navigate Livejournal tags. (At least, I think so.)
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Date: 2011-06-20 09:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-06-21 09:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-06-23 09:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-20 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-20 09:50 pm (UTC)