1. The Wall (c) 2001 SJ Dodgson
I grew up in the shadow of the second world war. The war
was discussed by grownups everywhere at all times, I was astonished
when I was a teenager to discover that the war had ended 6 years before I
was born. When I returned to England when I was 22, 28 years after the war had ended, I heard stories about the war from my relatives. Which still loomed large in their lives.
I know we had rationing in England until I was 3, and my
mother all her life practiced a frugality that meant that the
refrigerator and cupboards were almost empty, and I was given one dress a
year. My parents were both medical doctors, physicians. We behaved like
we were poor, but we never were.
2. Roses for Ruth (c) 2003.
Ruth was the grandmother of my younger 2 German children, step-grandmother of my older 2 American children. Ruth was born near Frankfurt, Germany, to a wealthy
industralist Jewish father and Catholic mother in 1916, in the middle of
the first world war. She died in a hospital in the Black Forest of Germany, far away from anyone she knew.
Before her final illness, Ruth lived in a house her husband
built that was between two fields of roses in Florsheim, Germany.
3.
Tony's Friendly Fire (c) 2001.
The story of my uncle Tony. I call him Anthony in the story. He was highly scornful of anyone pronouncing the h in Anthony. Or pronouncing his middle name Dalziell the way it was spelled. Or pronouncing the g in Dodgson.
He loved acting and he loved films. He started the south England film society, or something with an equivalent name. He was very tall, probably an inch or 2 taller than my father, who was 6'3" tall.
I do know he was
shot by English sentries in France during the second world war, that he
was a paraplegic the rest of his life, that he was first reported dead.
Everything else I made up. I was in Arras in 1977 for several days,
where I found love. I hope Uncle Tony did too.