More Family History, and When the Germans Bombed Harold Gibbs
These stories of my family, so close to those of other families, in other places and times, paralleling them, mirroring them, all fold neatly together, pressed between the pages of time.
---01.24.2000---
I spent the better part of the day with Bryce, Jon, Jory Ross, and Ellen (bless her), excavating an old boat shed that hasn’t been used for about 100 years. It was a long, dry-stone-walled (mortarless), granite structure set into the side of a slope near the quay and built to house the Shah, St. Agnes’ rowing gig. Now, just the hint of a foundation remains. In fact, only the island’s oldest residents even knew it was there, as it had been consumed by grass and growth over the last century.
The gig crew feels that the Shah needs a summer home that’s easier to access than her current winter quarters on the other side of the island. The decision was made to do a restoration on the old shed until a more permanent solution could be thought out. Our work was classified as a “holding repair to an existing building,” which was funny to me because it looked more like archeology.
The work has been physical and also a joy. For example, as an appreciated nod to our all-volunteer effort, people occasionally drop by with trays of hot tea and biscuits.
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It’s late and I’m still writing. Phillip, of course, is up too. The current music selection coming out of his office sounds like a sinister, 1930s-era, film score. Perhaps the evil villain is chasing the heroine around the grand ballroom with a poisoned chalice, or the sailors are fighting bravely (albeit in vain) against pirates clamoring over the gunnels in dozens. Either way, I’m getting up to close my door.
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I was thinking about Jory Ross today. Maybe a month ago, while we were all watching the bracken burn, I wrote that I thought he was in his early twenties. He’s not. He’s seventeen. At this early point in his life, he appears to me much more grounded, directed, and together than many people my age, including me for that matter. I perceive a steady calm in him that I rarely see. I can say the same about his fourteen year old brother, Morgan. Trevor, the youngest of the three, is still ten, in age and attitude, but, I imagine, will grow into the same solidity that seems so firmly rooted in his father and brothers. Jory is a full member of the gig crew and was, therefore, consulted as part of the delicate, island politics pertaining to what might be done about the gig shed. His opinion is valued and it shows. It feels nice to see.
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A very pleasant and unanticipated side effect of this journal has been an opening up of conversations between me and my dad about his past. It seemed like a watershed and has meant a lot to me.
I also learned that I’d gotten some of the details wrong in my earlier account. For example, my father’s biological mother had not died in the winter 1943, but in 1942, when he was three-and-a-half and his sister was not even two. His maternal grandparents lived outside of Cologne, not in Dresden, and died when their town was bombed in the fall of 1944, not 1945.
He told of how he, his sister, and the stepmother he came to know as his own, were evacuated to a farmhouse in Bröckau, a small town about 25 miles southwest of Leipzig, in late 1943; of how the attempted trip to Dresden in February of 1945 was to visit a friend of his new mother’s, not his grandparents; and of how, when Patton’s army reached Bröckau later that spring, the farmer they’d been staying with was shot dead when he parted a curtain to peer at the passing American troops.
He told of how, when they learned in late summer of 1945, after the end of the war, that the Russians would be taking control of eastern Germany in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, they fled, initially on foot, to make their way back to Cologne; of how they towed their belongings on carts, greasing the wooden axles with butter (when even butter was hard to come by); of sleeping on the side of the road; and of himself at six, in the midst of it, feeling like it was all a big adventure.
These stories of my family, so close to those of other families, in other places and times, paralleling them, mirroring them, all fold neatly together, pressed between the pages of time.
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Now I’d like to share an island story, also from the second world war. There is a man living here named Harold Gibbs. I believe he’s now in his seventies. One day, toward the end of the war Harold was rowing through Periglis Cove returning from a fishing trip. Sitting in the boat he would have had his back towards land.
Just then one of the girls on the shore spotted a German plane flying over the island, presumably having just attempted to take out the radio tower on St. Mary’s. She shouted a warning and everyone dove into the nearest ditch as the aircraft roared overhead. Perhaps the pilot had a target in mind. Perhaps he was jettisoning excess weight prior to the flight back to his home airfield. Perhaps both. Regardless, the bombs were released.
The two shells slammed into the cove at precisely the same moment, one to the left, and one to the right of Harold Gibbs. It is thought that, had just one bomb gone off, he wouldn’t survived. As it happened though, the concussive forces of the two bombs seemed to cancel each other out. Still Harold and his boat were launched into the air on a plume of water several meters high.
A couple of men that had been standing on the key dove in and pulled him, unconscious, from the water before he drowned. The girl that spotted the plane still remembers to this day the blanket she was wrapped in while waiting to hear about Harold’s condition. Beautiful pink.
Recalling these stories, it appears to me that war looks the same everywhere.
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