Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 3

This Writer’s SELECTED SHORTS Dream Comes True

Ever since I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’ve had one very specific writer’s dream. I wanted one of my short stories to be read by an actor from the stage at Symphony Space in their well-known series, Selected Shorts, created and hosted by the artistic director, Isaiah Sheffer. I was shameless in my pursuit of this aim. Isaiah was a familiar face in the neighborhood. He often ate breakfast at one of our local diners. I would sidle up to him, introduce myself and suggest that he might want to consider having my story, The Golden Darters, included in one of his programs. It had been selected for Best American Short Stories by Robert Stone. Wouldn’t Isaiah like a crack at it?He must have heard many pleas like this, but to his credit, he didn’t flinch or groan or roll his eyes. He suggested I drop off a copy (those were the good old days) at the box office and he would take it under consideration. I did as he asked more than once but heard nothing back. Since the story involves a daughter tying a fly with her fishing father, I even went so far as to suggest in a later note to Isaiah that the program should consider a springtime event based solely on fishing stories. Think Hemingway, Norman McLean, David James Duncan, Jim Harrison, Tim O’Brien. Still no response. I gave up my pursuit and like so many other people, mourned Isaiah’s passing when he left us in 2012. The artistic energy of our beloved Upper West Side seemed to flag a bit with his departure.

Fast forward to pandemic times. Last summer out of the blue, I received an email through my agent from the current artistic director of Selected Shorts asking permission to read The Golden Darters on their virtual program entitled Little Rebellions. Because they were offering this program for free, it would be difficult forSelected Shorts to pay me an honorarium. Money, I thought.  Who cares about money when you can support the local arts organization that is making your lifelong dream come true?

            This proves to be one of the perks of the quixotic life of a writer. You get paid twice a year and if you publish traditionally, you don’t know how large the check will be in the envelope. But in between royalty payment days in October and April, you can receive these random queries, fan mail, publication offers, speaking engagement requests, etc. It helps me keep the faith that there is an audience out there interested in the work that I do all alone in my study with a black crow on my shoulder whispering the funny question attributed to radio comedian, Fred Allen. “Why write a book when you can go around the corner and buy one?”

            Selected Shorts asked the talented actor, Ann Dowd, to read the story and she captured beautifully, first the fear and then the defiance my teenage girl shows in the face of her father’s disapproval. And now, I’m thrilled to announce that the program Little Rebellions will be added to the Selected Shorts podcast options on March 11th with Roxane Gay as host.  

            One of my writer’s dreams has finally come true.

THIS WRITER’S SELECTED SHORTS DREAM COMES TRUE

  Ever since I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’ve had one very specific writer’s dream. I wanted one of my short stories to be read by an actor from the stage at Symphony Space in their well-known series, Selected Shorts, created and hosted by the artistic director, Isaiah Sheffer. I was shameless in my pursuit of this aim. Isaiah was a familiar face in the neighborhood. He often ate breakfast at one of our local diners. I would sidle up to him, introduce myself and suggest that he might want to consider having my story, The Golden Darters, included in one of his programs. It had been selected for Best American Short Stories by Robert Stone. Wouldn’t Isaiah like a crack at it?He must have heard many pleas like this, but to his credit, he didn’t flinch or groan or roll his eyes. He suggested I drop off a copy (those were the good old days) at the box office and he would take it under consideration. I did as he asked more than once but heard nothing back. Since the story involves a daughter tying a fly with her fishing father, I even went so far as to suggest in a later note to Isaiah that the program should consider a springtime event based solely on fishing stories. Think Hemingway, Norman McLean, David James Duncan, Jim Harrison, Tim O’Brien. Still no response. I gave up my pursuit and like so many other people, mourned Isaiah’s passing when he left us in 2012. The artistic energy of our beloved Upper West Side seemed to flag a bit with his departure.

            Fast forward to pandemic times. Last summer out of the blue, I received an email through my agent from the current artistic director of Selected Shorts asking permission to read The Golden Darters on their virtual program entitled Little Rebellions. Because they were offering this program for free, it would be difficult forSelected Shorts to pay me an honorarium. Money, I thought.  Who cares about money when you can support the local arts organization that is making your lifelong dream come true?

            This proves to be one of the perks of the quixotic life of a writer. You get paid twice a year and if you publish traditionally, you don’t know how large the check will be in the envelope. But in between royalty payment days in October and April, you can receive these random queries, fan mail, publication offers, speaking engagement requests, etc. It helps me keep the faith that there is an audience out there interested in the work that I do all alone in my study with a black crow on my shoulder whispering the funny question attributed to radio comedian, Fred Allen. “Why write a book when you can go around the corner and buy one?”

            Selected Shorts asked the talented actor, Ann Dowd, to read the story and she captured beautifully, first the fear and then the defiance my teenage girl shows in the face of her father’s disapproval. And now, I’m thrilled to announce that the program Little Rebellions will be added to the Selected Shorts podcast options on March 11th with Roxane Gay as host.  

            One of my writer’s dreams has finally come true.

DAUGHTER OF SPIES: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

After publishing over fifty works of fiction for both adults and children, I decided to tell my mother’s story in the form of a memoir. My father wrote his own memoir (Stay of Execution) and books and plays have been written about him and Joseph Alsop, his famous older brother. But nobody ever asked my mother about her life. A decoding agent in World War II London, this pregnant British war bride crossed the North Atlantic at the age of 18 in a convoy dodging U-boats in December of 1944. To the outside world, she appeared to step easily into the role of dutiful wife and devoted Catholic mother, but in truth, she grew daily more frustrated at the confines of her life in 1950s America. Years later as she slipped away into dementia, I was determined to get her story down while she could tell it. In the drawn-out process of writing Daughter of Spies, I learned that the memories that stuck with me and with her were the ones that helped me best get at the truth of human nature.

Coming Fall of 2022
Regal House Publishing

Our First Catholic President

My First Communion

Since I grew up in Washington, D.C., a number of people have asked me in the last weeks if I remember other inaugurations. For a purely personal reason, I do remember the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, especially because he was our first Catholic president. The prejudice against Catholics was still so strong in those days that people said if we elected Kennedy, the Pope would be running the United States.

My English Catholic mother had made a deal with my agnostic father that she would be allowed to educate all their female offspring while he took care of the boys.  My brothers attended Episcopalian schools in town, but as I was the only girl of six children, I was enrolled in a private convent school run by Sacred Heart nuns an hour away from our house in Bethesda, Maryland.

As many recall, there was a blizzard the night before the Kennedy inauguration that snarled the city. Washington is famous for its inability to deal with snow. The city never had enough plows so the whole town came to a standstill and schools were often canceled minutes after the first snowflake hit the ground. Before JFK could be inaugurated, 1400 cars that ran out of fuel or got stuck in the snow had to be removed from the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue.

My mother was thrilled that her adopted country was finally electing a member of her own faith. Imagine her despair when she heard the afternoon before the Inauguration that all buses were cancelled so that she had to drive out to Bethesda to pick me up. At first, she was hopeful she would get back to town in time to attend the fancy dinner party given by Phil and Katharine Graham, the publishers of the Washington Post. But halfway out to my school, her car slid into a snowbank and she was forced to shelter in a gas station for the night. In later years, it made a good story, but in that moment, she was furious.

Meanwhile, the nuns who’d spent that day wreathed in smiles at the thought of a Catholic in the White House, told me I would be spending the night. The convent school had a few boarders, mostly girls whose parents had sent them north from countries in South America. I’d be sleeping in an extra bed in their dorm room. I borrowed a nightgown, brushed my teeth with my forefinger, splashed water on my face and joined the others in the attic room lined with beds that reminded me of the twelve little girls in two straight lines in Madeline. But docile and holy as my roommates looked while Mother Mahaney offered a good night prayer of safety for our new president, the moment she put out the lights, the girls came alive.  They gathered around, eager to show me their latest trick.  Two of them boosted me up to the top rail of my iron bedstead. They’d discovered a small gap that ran along the top of the wall between the girls’ dorm and the nuns’ dorm. Because I was spending only that one night, I was accorded the prime spot.

“What am I looking at?” I whispered to the two holding my legs.

“Wait. They’ll come in soon. You get to watch them undress.”

Like solemn black birds, the nuns filed in slowly, kissed the crosses around their necks and laid them on bureau tops and bedside tables followed by the wooden rosaries from their bottomless pockets.  With eyes modestly averted from one another, they began to remove layers, moving in what must have been a familiar choreography while studiously avoiding one another. They took off the long black veils and the stiff wimple cradling their faces to reveal shockingly shorn heads. They bent to untie the serviceable leather shoes and placed them side by side under each bed, then rolled down their woolen stockings. Finally, they lifted the long black tunics over their heads to reveal a stiff white chest piece called a guimpe that flattened their breasts. By the time they got to their underwear, I slid back down to my bed. It was too disturbing to see the solemnly garbed women who commandeered the hours of my day reduced to everyday people with shaved heads dropping nightgowns over their voluminous white cotton underpants. Before that night they had always felt sacred and other worldly. They rounded corners silently and floated down the convent hallways as if propelled by a mysterious force. Now they’d become nothing more than ordinary women who slept in narrow beds and changed into night clothes like the rest of us.

The next morning, we were awakened by a bell rung by Mother Sessions at the door to our dorm. She knelt by each child and whispered, “Domine non sum dignus.”

Lord, I am not worthy.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked my nearest neighbor.

“Finish the sentence,” she hissed back.

Luckily, I loved Latin and had memorized this particular sentence. Lord I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under Thy table. Say the word and my soul will be healed. What a terrible way to start the day, I thought years later. You’ve been deemed unworthy before you even lift your head off the pillow.

Meanwhile, I could never shake the image of Mother Sessions’ shaved head especially in the weeks that followed when she ordered me to the board in math class and screamed at me for missing a simple computation. After that night, whenever Mother Mahaney, our basketball coach, leaned over to change into black sneakers and pin up the front of her tunic, I looked away. She’d always been my favorite nun, but suddenly, it felt as if I were watching her undress all over again.

Right after breakfast, my mother made it the last few miles to the convent.  Despite a treacherous trip home, she managed to turn herself around in time to dress for the official Inaugural Ball. I remember her descending the front staircase of our house in a teal blue satin ballgown to meet my father in his dinner jacket (the WASP name for a tuxedo) waiting for her in the hallway.  As I watched them pick their careful way through the snow to the car, my mind flew back to the contrasting picture of the clutch of nuns shedding their clothes in their cramped dormitory room.

How happy my mother and those nuns, now long gone, would feel knowing that when America elected its second Catholic president, his religion was barely mentioned.

A postscript. My uncle Joe, a well-known journalist and friend of the Kennedys, was hosting a spirited post Inaugural ball in his Georgetown house when he heard a commotion outside. The entire block seemed to be out on their stoops in their night clothes, cheering and clapping. When Uncle Joe opened the front door, who should be standing at the top of the circular iron steps but JFK himself?

“Hello, Joe,” said the new president with a grin.  “Jackie gave up and went to bed in the White House.  Mind if I come in?”

Coming from Regal House, Fall 2022:

Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

The art of book covers: Recreating the jacket for IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE

That old saying, “you can’t tell a book by its cover,” hits home especially with authors who have little or no control over the images that the marketing department in a publishing house chooses to sell your book.

When I decided to make In My Mother’s House available as an e-book, I had the opportunity to create a new jacket. The novel spans three generations of women, starting with Lydia, a girl whose own mother dies in childbirth in the middle of the great blizzard of 1888 in New York City. However, most of the book is set in a New England farmhouse.

The original hardcover jacket showed a soft-focus copy of one of my own grandmother’s watercolor paintings of her sun porch.

I think my grandmother would have been amused by the “hijack” of her painting, but I know she would have been furious about the paperback jacket.

In that mass market edition, the publisher used an actual photo of my grandmother as a teenager which I had sent them for background research. Clearly posed by a formal photographer, the young woman leans against a studio backdrop, her dreamy eyes staring at the camera. Her long dark hair is fastened with an extravagant bow at the top of her head and she is holding a rose.

She is followed down the front of the cover by two what used to be called “bodice ripping” females.  They are generic women: thin faces, long wavy red hair, and troubled expressions. Each is facing away from the other.  Whereas the image of Lydia looks like a real person, the other two appear to be computer generated which makes the cover seem oddly unbalanced.

When I objected to this jacket (it was already in production), I was assured by the marketing division of the publishing house that an image like this would make readers pick up the book. Even though the novel sold well in paperback, I was never convinced the jacket was the reason.  My uncle, when he saw it, said my grandmother must be turning over in her grave and I had to agree with him.

Now that I had full control over the e-book production, what did I want this new jacket to say?

After a sad, motherless childhood in upper class New York, Lydia marries and moves to a farmhouse in Connecticut. Setting often drives my fiction and even though Lydia’s story has nothing to do with my own grandmother, I used the facts and dates of Grandmother’s life as a framework for the story I wanted to tell. For that reason, the farmhouse in the book is modeled after a classic 19th century white clapboard house where I spent many childhood summers.

That type of house, I decided, would be featured on the new cover. The image I chose is from a rural section of upstate New York, which perfectly fits with the book’s theme. The dark trees hanging over the house give a sense of foreboding.

Unknowingly, Lydia carries the wounds of her childhood into her role as a mother and grandmother. I’m happy that at last, the jacket image reflects the secrets and the sadness under this roof.

Lewis Hine’s Children

Read about the work Joe Manning has done to find the descendants of the children in Lewis Hine’s child labor photographs here.

My Uncle’s “Kompromat”

From 1946 to 1958, Joseph Alsop, my uncle,

and his younger brother Stewart, my father,

wrote a syndicated political column for the New York Herald Tribune. At its height, “Matter of Fact” appeared in more than 250 newspapers. Today, decades later, an incident involving Joe Alsop, Russian intelligence, and a so-called “honey trap” in a Moscow hotel seems to have particular relevance. Uncle Joe, a closeted homosexual, was photographed in bed with a young man in a Moscow hotel room in February, 1957. In his subsequent secret confession, Joe described the KGB agent as “an athletic blonde, pleasant faced, pleasant-mannered fellow.” The incriminating photos would dog Uncle Joe for the rest of his life.

With the claims about damaging videos showing President-elect Trump caught in a compromising position in a Moscow hotel room, my uncle’s experience has been noted in a New York Times article on “kompromat” and also in an article by Ed Yoder, the journalist who admired my uncle and first broke the story about his assignation after Joe died in 1989. In the homophobic 1950s, the incident could easily have been a career-destroying indiscretion, but what was interesting was my uncle’s reaction to it… his deep-seated, sometimes stubborn and pig-headed patriotism.

In the days immediately after the KGB caught Joe in bed, Russian agents met with my uncle to encourage him to spy for the Communist government. After some sobering days—when he “played the game out further to see where it would lead”—Joe contacted Charles Bohlen, his old friend and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and another personal friend, Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA. Both encouraged him to write out a full “confession” of the incident in order to take the sting out of any blackmail efforts by the KGB. Uncle Joe did as he was told, admitting to the secret of his homosexuality, information he foolishly believed he’d been able to keep from his family and close friends. That nine-page document wove its way through the upper echelons of the Eisenhower administration, from CIA Director Allen Dulles to Allen’s brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and eventually to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.

Many of these men, furious at Alsop’s constant criticism of Eisenhower and his administration, discussed how they might use his secret confession to force him to soften his criticisms of the president. Hoover made sure that Joe’s written report on the incident reached people at the highest levels of government. At one point, James Hagerty, Ike’s press secretary, threatened to “lift that fag’s press pass” in order to deny him access to  White House briefings.  Eventually they abandoned the idea, as Uncle Joe proved both unrepentant and unwilling to edit what he saw as the truth in order to save his own skin. Two decades later, those same incriminating photographs mysteriously surfaced , this time in the mailboxes of critics of Uncle Joe’s hawkish views on the Vietnam War. In those cases, Joe’s enemies simply mailed the photographs back to my uncle so that they could be destroyed.

As a nine-year-old in Washington, although I certainly knew nothing of the details of my uncle’s secret life, I picked up the tension. Whether the adults in our family ever discussed their suspicions about Joe’s sexual orientation, it certainly wasn’t a subject they shared with us children, but the weekly political arguments my father and Joe had in front of our living room fireplace grew louder and more violent than usual. Our family used intellectual debates as a way to vent anger or disappointment with one another. As my father’s job and financial future were tied to the fate of his older brother, he quietly began to look for ways to extricate himself from the column. In 1958, the brothers dissolved their partnership, and my father took a job as Washington Editor of the Saturday Evening Post. Uncle Joe felt abandoned by his younger brother.  Although it took the two of them some time to patch up their differences, my life with Uncle Joe continued as before. Whenever he was reporting from Washington, my brothers and I had Thursday dinners with him in the elegant dining room of his Georgetown house, while he corrected both our grammar and our table manners with equal enthusiasm. He scrutinized our report cards, and happily paid the bill for all the books we ordered at Francis Scott Key, the neighboring Georgetown bookshop. We accepted him without question as the third parent in our lives.

Uncle Joe did not agree to become a stool pigeon for the Russians. Although he never visited Russia again, he remained a vocal and unapologetic anti-Communist throughout the subsequent years and in his weekly columns. Right or wrong, whenever he felt that President Eisenhower was failing in his duty to protect America from Soviet expansionism, he wrote about that, too, despite the knowledge that those who held his “secret confession” in their vaults, could expose and ruin him at any time.

My uncle, like all of us, was a flawed individual, someone who often saw politics through the fractured lens of his own firmly held beliefs and the connections of his close friends in government. But he was a patriot, a lover of both America and of democracy, who risked his own personal career to always tell what he saw as the truth. In these fractious times, newspaper reporters are pressured to avoid litigation and media commentators to improve their ratings, issues that Uncle Joe, for the most part, didn’t face.  But as the press is again under personal attack from those who would silence them, Uncle Joe feels more and more like a hero.

With thanks to Gregg Herken, professor emeritus of modern American diplomatic history at the University of California and author of a number of works of history, including THE GEORGETOWN SET and BROTHERHOOD OF THE BOMB.

 

 

I’ve found my inner rabble-rouser…

I’ve never been a confrontational person., but suddenly I can’t stand it anymore. I grew up in Washington, D.C. surrounded by politicians and newsmakers, but fled the city the moment I came of age because I wanted to write fiction. Inside the Beltway, truth is more often stranger than fiction so I felt I could find my subjects and my settings more easily in other places.

But I can’t stand what’s happening to the country I love and so I’ve started making phone calls, marching, shouting, and demanding, something I never even did in the 60s. I marched then, but meekly at the back of the line. I went along because I didn’t want to be singled out if I didn’t. Perhaps it’s age or more likely, a deep-seated fear that I’m going to see the democracy I love dismantled by a demagogue.  So today I wrote this letter to Senator Mitch McConnell about his venal efforts to rush the nominees for the Cabinet through the Senate without proper vetting.

 

January 9, 2017

The Honorable Mitch McConnell

Majority Leader

United States Senate

317 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 201510

Dear Senator McConnell,

I note that you insisted to Harry Reid on Feb. 12, 2009 (two weeks after President Obama’s inauguration) that the Presidential nominees had to submit to an “appropriate review…consistent with the long standing and best practices of committees, regardless of which political party is in the majority. These best practices serve the Senate well, and we will insist on their fair and consistent application.”

I therefore demand that, rather than rushing nominees through the confirmation process as you have proposed to do, you apply these exact same requirements to the nominees that Donald Trump has put forward. In case you have forgotten what they are, I include a copy of the 8 requirements herewith. Again, sir, please note that these are your words.

The American people join with you when you say, “WE EXPECT THE FOLLOWING STANDARDS WILL BE MET.”

The FBI background check is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a hearing being noticed.


The Office of Government Ethics letter is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing.


Financial disclosure statements (and tax returns for applicable committees) are complete and submitted to the committee for review prior to a hearing being noticed.


All committee questionnaires are complete and have been returned to the committee. A reasonable opportunity for follow-up questions has been afforded committee members, and nominees have answered, with sufficient time for review prior to a committee vote.


The nominee is willing to have committee staff interviews, where that has been the practice.


The nominee has had a hearing.


The nominee agrees to courtesy visits with members when requested.


The nominee has committed to cooperate with the Ranking Member on requests for information and transparency.

These common sense standards and long standing practices will ensure that the Senate has had the opportunity to fairly review a nominee’s record and to make an informed decision prior to a vote.”

Senator McConnell, as a voting American citizen who continues to believe in democracy, I demand that you apply the same standards to Republican nominees “regardless of which political party is in the majority.”

If not, sir, then I cannot believe that you are upholding the will of the people and the rule of law that governs our great country.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Elizabeth Winthrop

 

Familiarity Breeds Acceptance

Waiting to Vote on Election Day

This week more than any other time since 9/11, I’m so grateful that I live in New York where I am forced to rub up against people who are not like me. On the subway, I sit next to people of all ages and skin colors and shapes. In the streets, I see people in wheelchairs, joyful children, panhandlers down on their luck, women in heels I couldn’t wear for half a block, and gray haired women on bikes weaving their way in and out of traffic. I say hello to the homeless man and meet his eye even though I don’t always drop money into his paper cup. I offer my subway seat to a father with a baby strapped to his front, and he declines with a grin.  With my foot, I hold the elevator door for an older woman using a cane and in return, with an eye on my packages, she pushes the button for my floor.

While I wear a wide-brimmed straw hat in summer and earmuffs in the winter, they sport yarmulkes and fezzes and bike helmets and hijabs and their hair might be dyed all colors of the rainbow or they may have shaved it all or just half of it off. When I am wearing four layers against the cold, I can admire the younger generation’s bare tattooed skin or their muscular legs protruding from tight leggings or baggy shorts.

Do I know these people personally? No. Do they make me angry? Yes, when I’m groped in the subway or someone cuts in front of me in a line or steals my wallet when I’m not watching my purse. Do they scare me? Sometimes…when a person breaks into an angry harangue against the world in the middle of the sidewalk or rattles me with her disconnected stare in my subway car. Do they make me smile? Often, when they are dressed in wild costumes or carry a parrot on their shoulder or push a dog in a baby stroller. Do they make me curious? Yes, when I can’t see what book they’re reading or when they are speaking a foreign language I don’t recognize or when they stop me on the street to ask me to contribute to a cause.

But, like these people or not, I can’t separate myself from them by getting in a car or staying in my neighborhood. Every time, I step on the bus or stride down the sidewalk to do an errand, I am in community with a slice of the whole world, and for that experience, I am deeply grateful.

Following in My Mother’s Footsteps: A Trip to England

As many of my readers know, I’ve been researching my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and England for a number of years. While she was still alive I traveled to Gib, as she always called it, to see firsthand what it was like to grow up on the Rock on the edge of the Mediterranean where you lunched across the border in Spain and spent the afternoon watching polo in Tangiers. The Barbary apes loped down to town to snatch the laundry off the rooftops, oranges grew on trees and the breezes blew balmy and tasted of salt. I returned with lots of stories and a book of pictures that my mother pored over every day as her memory faded and her youthful existence felt more immediate than the visitor who’d just dropped in for tea.

I promised her that I would visit the places in England where she spent her childhood holidays and the years of the war, but as she grew increasingly frail and disoriented, I didn’t feel comfortable taking an extended trip out of the country.  Now that she’s gone, I’m ready to keep that promise.

My fiction writing has always been enriched by an intimate knowledge of the place where I’ve chosen to set my books. Whether it’s my grandmother’s house in Connecticut or an island off the New England coast or the mill town in Vermont where Lewis Hine took some of his best known child labor photographs, an intimate acquaintance of setting enriches and expands my understanding of the characters in my fiction.

Now that I’ve come to the end of the first draft of my family history, A FRAGMENT OF WHAT YOU FELT, Searching for My Mother, I’m ready to see where she lived in the years between her exile from Gibraltar as a young teenager and her transatlantic crossing as an eighteen-year-old pregnant bride.  If I walk through the rooms of her convent school, stand in her grandmother’s Cotswold garden and wander the hallways of the Yorkshire castle where she met my father, then surely, I’ll understand better the determined young British colonial who left her job as a decoding agent for MI5 so she could marry an American parachutist twelve years her senior who she barely knew.

When I began to plan this journey, I discovered to my amazement that all the important places in my mother’s life are open to the public. Her convent school is a hotel. Her grandmother’s house is a bed and breakfast. Her best friend’s home is a Gothic Revival castle, now open for tours.

Will I know her better if I walk in her footsteps? The only way to find out is to go.

May 8-10:  We’ll be staying at the Hanbury Marriott in Hertfordshire.  This building used to be Poles Convent, the school my mother attended from the age of 13 to 17. I’ve asked that we be put in the Manor House, the main hall, which means we might actually be sleeping in what was once my mother’s dormitory room.

Driving from Ware to Bourton, we will stop in Oxford on Saturday May 10th for lunch with Margaret and John Barnard Hankey, my mother’s second cousins who I have never met. We will also connect with them again at Fetcham Park later in the trip.

May 10-13th: We’ll be staying at Whiteshoots Bed and Breakfast in Bourton on the Water up in the Cotswolds. This was my great-grandmother’s last house.  She was Ellen Gertrude Moon, the mother of Arthur Hankey, my paternal grandfather. My mother often visited her so we’ll most probably be sleeping in the one of the rooms where my mother stayed.

While in the Cotswolds, we’ll be visiting Stanway House in Broadway.

This is the home of the Earls of Wemyss.  I’ve been in touch with the present Earl of  Wemyss (pronounced Weems) who has kindly agreed to have us drop by for a private tour.  Stanway is where my mother (and her good friend, Bee Mowbray) lived and went to secretarial school from August 1942-March 1943 when at the age of 17, my mother was taken on at MI5 as a decoding agent.

May 13-15: We’ll be staying with Edward and Nell Stourton, in the stable house at Allerton Park in Knaresborough, Yorkshire.   In the summer of 1942, my parents met at Allerton Park as my father had enlisted in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, training in nearby York, and my mother was visiting her best friend, Bee Mowbray. Bee’s father, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, was the Premier Baron of England and the owner of Allerton.  On August 31, 1942, the night before the Royal Canadian Airforce requisitioned Allerton to use as a barracks, Lord and Lady Mowbray gave a farewell party and invited the “Yanks” from the regiment which was training nearby in York. My father (age 28) sat next to my mother (age 16), and the rest is history. The castle itself has been purchased by an American named Gerald Rolphe, but Edward Stourton and his wife, Nell, kept the stables and have kindly invited us to stay. We’ll join the public tour on May 14th, and the tour guide has promised to take us upstairs to see parts of the house not open to the public.

While in Yorkshire, I will also be visiting Ampleforth, which is the Catholic equivalent of Eton. This is where my uncle Ian, my mother’s only brother, went to school from the age of 9 to 18. He joined the Kings Royal Rifle Corps in May, 1940, soon after the family was evacuated from Gibraltar, and was killed in the western desert at the battle of Alma Halfa, on August 31, 1942, the same day my parents met in Yorkshire. He was 21 years old.

May 15-23: We’ll be in London for the last week meeting more cousins through the Gibraltar side who contacted me through the Internet. I’ve planned two day trips, the first to Winchester to visit my father and uncle’s regimental museum. The Kings Royal Rifle Corps were also known as the Green Jackets.  The regimental historian, Christopher Wallace, who has been very helpful with my research over the last four years, will be giving us a tour.

The next day we’ll travel down to Fetcham Park in Surrey where my grandfather, Arthur Hankey, lived until he married my grandmother, Cecilia Mosley.  The people at Fetcham are thrilled about our visit and are arranging a lunch for me to talk to the historian of the house as well as Hankey cousins. They will give us a tour of the house and the graveyard where many Hankeys are buried.

Stay posted. I’ll be writing more here about this very personal journey.

Next entry.