Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 4
November 27, 2015
My Mother’s Crossing, December, 1944
I FOUND IT! The ship my British mother traveled on when she arrived in New York on January 4, 1945. Here’s a picture of the Royal Mail Cargo Ship DARRO. I’ve been looking for it for days and finally, thanks to that great invention, the World Wide Web and to websites like Shipspotting and their dedicated volunteers, I found her!
The Darro
A little back story. My mother and father were married in London on June 20, 1944. Then my father jumped into France to fight with the French Resistance while my mother worked as a decoding agent for MI5, a division of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In November, when my father came back from Paris, my mother announced she was pregnant. They wanted the baby born in America and so, tough as it was in wartime, they managed to get her a berth on a ship crossing the North Atlantic in convoy. My mother thought the ship was called the S.S. Orion, but my research revealed that the Orion never traveled to America. And the ship manifest on Ancestry lists it as the Darro. Not the S.S. Darro which was scrapped in 1933, but this Darro, a much more humble refrigeration ship.
Here’s a little bit of the story of the crossing from my mother. “And the ship casts off and we start to trickle down the Thames River. So at least it didn’t sink. There was no planking on the deck because we had run out of wood at the end of the war so it was iron girded. ..Then the pea soup fog came down. This was in the estuary. The U boats didn’t get up there. The place was mined so you went down a channel. We sat there for ten days. Ten days.”
Meanwhile, all the people she loved, including her new husband, were sitting in London where the V-2s had begun to wreak havoc all over again on England.
I always thought she’d exaggerated, but no indeed, thanks to this website, Arnold Hague’s Convoy Database, I learned that her convoy did sit in fog for ten days. She’d boarded that ship on December 14, 1944 and it did not leave the UK until December 24th. So my eighteen-year-old pregnant mother who’d survived four years of war in England crossed the North Atlantic in a convoy dodging U-boats in the hopes of starting a new life in a new country.
I don’t think I could have done it.
November 19, 2015
Remembrance Sunday in England
Remembrance Sunday is always observed in England and the Commonwealth on the Sunday nearest to November 11th, Armistice Day. The First World War officially ended in 1918 on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
This year we were in the U.K. for that weekend, and when I bought a paper poppy at Paddington Station to clip onto my lapel, I remembered a picture of my grandmother selling poppies from a basket on the streets of London in 1919. She’s the one on the left. 
We decided to attend the Remembrance Sunday services at Christ Church, Kensington, a lovely small stone church directly across the street from our rented flat. 
As I sat in the pew listening to the young female trumpeter playing Reveille, I thought of all the members of my family who had served England in the two world wars. My great uncle, Charles Edward de La Pasture, died at Ypres on October 29, 1914, only six months after he’d married my great aunt.
Another great uncle, Wilfred Mosley, a captain in the 1st Wiltshire Regiment, survived some of the worst battles of the First World War and served in the Home Guard in World War II.
My uncle Ian, my mother’s only sibling, 
was killed on August 31, 1942 in the battle of Alam Halfa in the western desert. He was 20 years old.
He is buried in the British military cemetery at El Alamein.
was rejected by the American Army and enlisted in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He fought in Italy in 1943, then joined the O.S.S. and dropped into France behind enemy lines in the summer of 1944. His brother, John, who also trained in northern England and Scotland, parachuted into France the month before my father to join Nancy Wake’s team working with the French Resistance.
But as the congregation rose to sing GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, I wasn’t thinking about the soldiers who went to war, but about the women in my family. My mother was fourteen years old when she was evacuated from Gibraltar, seventeen when she went to work for MI5 as a decoding agent, eighteen when she married my father and crossed the North Atlantic, pregnant and alone. But it was even worse for my grandmother who lost everybody. 
Her son was killed, her daughter moved to America, and two years later, her husband left her for his secretary with whom he’d been carrying on a secret affair throughout the war. Granny’s only choice was to close down her life in Kent, England and move back to Gibraltar to live with her mother and sister.
War destroys more than the soldiers who are sent to fight on the front lines. It blows whole families apart and sometimes, it takes generations to put them back together again.
November 17, 2015
Sheep Farming
I was in England for a week this month and although, on a previous trip, I’d visited most of the places where my mother lived, I had one more pilgrimage to make. My mother’s cousin, Jane, and her daughter, Bets, live on a sheep farm near Ross on Wye.
My mother loved to visit them, and now it was my turn. When Bets invited my husband and me to come stay, she wrote: “I hope you like dogs.” Luckily, we do. Not to mention sheep, horses and a herd of pregnant cows.
In preparation for our visit, I read THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks, a bestseller by a sheep farmer who speaks eloquently about roots and community and a tough, rewarding life in the constant company of animals. Because of the book, I understood a little better the demands and rewards of farming sheep. Mr. Rebanks’ farm, inherited from his grandfather and father before him, is set in the Lake District of England. My cousins’ farm lies near the Welsh border, but their challenges are much the same.
Fall is the season when the ewes are impregnated and so Bets has spread their 140 ewes in different fields where they are “serviced,” one tup (ram) to 30 ewes. The tups’ chests are smeared with raddle, a mixture of red dye and truck oil, (“They recommend olive oil,” Bets says, “but I find machine oil works better”) so that you can tell which ewes have been mounted by the color of their red rear ends. In two weeks, the tup will get a blue dip and in another two weeks, a green dip. This way, it’s easier to know when the lambs will be coming. This is also the season when the lambs born last spring are taken to market. British shepherds are struggling for many reasons, but the major one is that the cost of British lamb has been undercut by the cheap New Zealand lamb that comes over in huge refrigerated ships. Many days, Bets has to sell the lambs to be slaughtered at cost.
Next spring, from February until April, Bets and her mother will not sleep more than two hours at a time as it’s lambing season. There are the babies to be bottle fed because their mother has rejected them or they are too weak to suck. Some ewes must be assisted through a difficult birth while others have to be rounded up and brought in closer to the barn. And besides that, of course, the six horses have to be fed and watered twice a day, not to mention the eleven cows and their calves. When we let the cows out to pasture, Bets explained to me that a few years ago, when some of their cows caught tuberculosis from the badgers, the entire herd had to be culled. Bets is trying to build the herd up again with these eleven. “They’re each carrying 90 pounds of calf,” she called to me proudly as the large ladies lumbered past us on the way to the lower field.
After lambing, the sheep are sheared. As an enthusiastic knitter, I was hoping to hear that the wool would bring in a good profit, but I was wrong. The price they get for the wool basically pays the cost of the shearer. It makes sense. A hundred years ago, everybody wore wool to get through the cold winters. Now so many of our clothes are synthetic. And Bets and her mother raise lambs for meat, not for their wool.
My cousins have worked hard to find alternate ways to make money from the farm. One of these is renting the land out for various purposes such as orienteering exercises and reenactments. The day we were there, a group was running simulated war games for journalists soon to be posted to war torn areas. Bets moved some sheep to a pasture further away so that the noise of fake explosions and shooting wouldn’t disturb them. When a man trotted by the kitchen door, Bets explained that he was one of the actors who was supposed to be wounded. An old jeep had been parked near the barn to be used in the exercises although someone had misplaced the keys so for the moment it was gathering dust.
Although my grandfather was a dairy farmer in Connecticut, I’m a city dweller who takes the subway, doesn’t own a dog, and buys her yarn at a local knitting shop. I do love buying local and am happy that farmers are now bringing their produce to markets on our busy city streets, but I don’t grow my own vegetables or raise sheep. (However when I told Jane that I order my groceries online, she said, “Well, so do I.” The British grocery store chain, Waitrose, undaunted by the muddy track, delivers to the farm.)
Bets and Jane are stalwart and strong, and they need to be. The demands of the farm are relentless. The needs of the animals take precedence. They work in all seasons and all weather. They don’t sleep in or take vacations. Their boots are always muddy, their clothes are often soaked to the skin. They work harder than anybody I’ve ever met. And for the most part, they love what they do.
I sat on the same kitchen bench where my mother sat a decade ago, looked out over the same green hills, slept in the same upper room with the warm eiderdown. In the three years since my mother died, I’ve been retracing her footsteps all over England so for me, this visit had a special resonance. At the same time, while alighting briefly on a piece of my own past, I came away feeling as if I’d slipped over an invisible wall into another “ancient landscape,” a place where the weather and the seasons and the animals determine the rhythm of the day.
Looking For My Father
I’m still working on the history of my parents’ courtship and marriage in the middle of World War II.
Every day, information seems to be falling out of the sky on me. I’d reached the point in the book when I had my father’s feet sticking through the hole in the bottom of a Lancaster over German Occupied France in mid-August 1944, I stopped writing to research. Now I can’t stop researching… or at least accepting the gifts that come my way.
This month alone I’ve been in contact with the 88-year-old radio operator who jumped with my father as well as the son of the French army officer who was the third member of the team, code name Alexander.
I’ve made contact with a British historian who sent me my father’s personal file for with the time he was with the Jedburghs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburghs a group formed by the O.S.S., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_o….
I just located a man in France who has written on Team Alexander. He sent me a picture of my father standing behind the wife of the French Resistance Officer in the Maquis,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(…, a man named Rac who my father revered and wrote about years later in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
All of these people seem so touched and honored that I’ve found them, that we are connecting. My father died 37 years ago, but we knew him at different times in his life. They knew him before I was born. I knew him long after they had lost touch. We are putting together the jigsaw puzzle of one man’s life: the soldier in World War II and the journalist during the years of the Cold War.
I feel oddly consoled to have found these fellow travelers as I try to retrace his footsteps winding back from this century to the middle of the last.
April 18, 2015
A Virtual Meeting
in a officer’s training unit in York, England, he had scribbled a note to his mother describing some of his fellow soldiers.It reads in part: Dear Ma, I thought these pictures would amuse you. This one is the platoon in which I live and move and have my being. George Thomson’s [on] my right. Immediately above me is Hon. Trenchard (?)...we all thought he was a ghastly little snob at first, but he turns out O.K. Second on his left is Sir Oswald Moseley’s [sic] son- very shy, extremely nice. Almost all of them are Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, etc. The Mosley name caught my eye as only a few days after my father mailed this photograph home to Connecticut, he was to meet my mother for the first time in a baronial castle near York. Unbeknownst to him of course, his future wife was a Mosley. It turns out that even though they spell their name the same way, my mother and my father’s fellow soldier are not related, but I did learn with a few Google searches that Nicholas Mosley is a well known British writer of fiction and memoir. The son of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, Nicholas fought in the Italian campaign during the war. He is 91 years old and still very engaged in life. When, thanks to the Internet, I contacted him through his publisher, he graciously responded that he was thrilled to see the photograph along with the caption on the back, and that he remembered my father very well.
“I do remember your father, because he and the other Americans were some six years older than the rest of us, who were still like schoolboys. We looked on the Americans with great respect for volunteering in our army. And Stewart seemed to be their leader because we turned to him for information or advice when needed. I remember him as being a friend and steadfast presence.”
In the photograph, my father is the third from the left in the front row and in the second row above him, Nicholas Mosley is the sixth from the left.
Nicholas sent me a copy of his book TIME AT WAR in which he describes his experiences in Italy. Although they were in different battalions by then, he and my father both left England on the SS Volendam, bound for North Africa and eventually Italy.
So there are days when I thank the Internet gods because without the search engine and the swift connection to information about Nicholas Mosley that is available with a few keystrokes, I would never have “met” the man who remembers my father as “a steadfast presence.”
February 14, 2015
Lucy and Henry Are Twins
Illustrated by Jane Massey,
Two Lions, 2015
A day of fun with Lucy and Henry. Delightful illustrations and simple, rhythmic text combine to make a wonderful first book about twins.
Pre-order the book now:
October 23, 2014
The Man Who Parachuted into France with my father
A couple of weeks ago I went to Florida to meet Dick Franklin,
one of the two men who parachuted into France with my father in 1944.
He and I had knew of each other through a mutual friend, Colin Beavan who’d written a book about the Jedburghs, the clandestine operatives who parachuted into France to connect with the Maquis, the French Resistance. My father and my uncle both “jumped” in the summer of 1944. Dick Franklin was the radio operator for Team Alexander, the group of three which included my father, Stewart Alsop, and Rene de la Tousche, a graduate of St. Cyr, the French military academy. I’ve written about this before and will again, I’m sure.
It was a thrill for me to be able to shake Dick’s hand, to know that he sat next to my father with their legs dangling in the air 2000 feet above occupied France, sixty-eight years ago. He told me stories I never would have known otherwise. The book I’m writing about that time will be all the much richer for his insights, his memories and his willingness to share them with me.
I am grateful to have met him and delighted we found so much to talk about. I think my father would be pleased.
September 23, 2014
A Roosevelt Relation
Like so many others in the last week, I’ve been watching the Ken Burns 7 part series on the Roosevelts. I’m familiar with most of this material on one hand, because I’ve read a number of books about my esteemed ancestors, but also because I’ve heard many of the stories from my father, my uncle and my grandmother.
My great-grandmother was Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 
TR’s younger sister. Anna Roosevelt, TR’s older sister or Auntie Bye, as she was always called in the family, introduced my grandfather, Joseph Wright Alsop IV to her niece, Corinne Robinson. 
They married in 1909 and lived in Avon, Connecticut near Auntie Bye. In the summers when I stayed with my grandmother in Avon and later when I attended a nearby boarding school, I was in and out of the house in Farmington which was then owned by Auntie Bye’s son and his wife, Sheff and Bobby Cowles.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., I had a weekly tea date with TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 
who we always called Mrs. L or Cousin Alice. Her granddaughter Joanna, and I attended the same Catholic school, and Thursday was my day to ride home with Joanna and Mrs. L in the ancient black Cadillac driven by Turner who we used to say, “drove by ear.”
“Turner,” Mrs. L would remark, leaning forward from her corner of the back seat. “I believe you hit something back there.”
Turner would nod, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Yes Ma’am,” he’d say. “I believe I did.” But he didn’t turn around to investigate.
On we would sail at a stately pace down Massachusetts Avenue, weaving slightly from side to side, and leaving behind us a small trail of bent rear view mirrors or dented bumpers.
Mrs. L really did have a pillow on her couch that said, “If you have something nasty to say about someone, come sit by me.” I was a budding writer and a gossip, so over the tea tray, I’d pass on guest lists from my parents’ dinner parties or tidbits I’d overheard while passing the hors d’oeuvres in my robe and pajamas.
As a fiction writer who’s finally attempting to tell her own story of growing up in cold war Washington, it’s a strange thing to have so many writers get there first. My journalist father wrote a memoir of dying, called STAY OF EXECUTION. My uncle Joe and my aunt Susan Mary, were writers and memoirists. The family is awash in writers, starting with TR himself who wrote 35 books. And now playwrights and historians and biographers are looking back and interpreting the past. Authors like Linda Donn, David Auburn, Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert Merry, Gregg Herken and many more have focused on one or more aspects of this large and tangled family. I’m not saying they haven’t gotten it right. In many cases, when these writers have contacted me, I’ve been happy to help. But I’m a slow writer myself so naturally, I’m getting worried that by the time my small piece of the story finally gets published, readers will roll their eyes and moan,”Oh, please, not one more word about those people!”
Never mind. God is in the details and in every family, rich or poor, famous or obscure, there are a million stories. All I can do is what I’ve always done. Ass to chair. Sit down every day, turn on the computer and keep writing.
September 22, 2014
A Virtual Meeting
in a officer’s training unit in York, England, he had scribbled a note to his mother describing some of his fellow soldiers.It reads in part: Dear Ma, I thought these pictures would amuse you. This one is the platoon in which I live and move and have my being. George Thomson’s [on] my right. Immediately above me is Hon. Trenchard (?)...we all thought he was a ghastly little snob at first, but he turns out O.K. Second on his left is Sir Oswald Moseley’s [sic] son- very shy, extremely nice. Almost all of them are Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, etc. The Mosley name caught my eye as only a few days after my father mailed this photograph home to Connecticut, he was to meet my mother for the first time in a baronial castle near York. Unbeknownst to him of course, his future wife was a Mosley. It turns out that even though they spell their name the same way, my mother and my father’s fellow soldier are not related, but I did learn with a few Google searches that Nicholas Mosley is a well known British writer of fiction and memoir. The son of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, Nicholas fought in the Italian campaign during the war. He is 91 years old and still very engaged in life. When, thanks to the Internet, I contacted him through his publisher, he graciously responded that he was thrilled to see the photograph along with the caption on the back, and that he remembered my father very well.
“I do remember your father, because he and the other Americans were some six years older than the rest of us, who were still like schoolboys. We looked on the Americans with great respect for volunteering in our army. And Stewart seemed to be their leader because we turned to him for information or advice when needed. I remember him as being a friend and steadfast presence.”
In the photograph, my father is the third from the left in the front row and in the second row above him, Nicholas Mosley is the sixth from the left.
Nicholas sent me a copy of his book TIME AT WAR in which he describes his experiences in Italy. Although they were in different battalions by then, he and my father both left England on the SS Volendam, bound for North Africa and eventually Italy.
So there are days when I thank the Internet gods because without the search engine and the swift connection to information about Nicholas Mosley that is available with a few keystrokes, I would never have “met” the man who remembers my father as “a steadfast presence.”
June 2, 2014
Decoding my mother: A Final Post from England
Our nineteen-day trip to England was all I wished it to be. We made remarkable connections, identified mysterious photographs, 
met cousins we’d “known” only through family lore and the Internet,
and corroborated so many details of my mother’s story. She had a remarkable memory.
I’ve toured the castle in Yorkshire where my parents met,
viewed the dining room table where they sat next to one another,
and gazed down at the garden where they first kissed.
I’ve seen the view from her childhood bedroom in her grandmother’s house in the Cotswolds,
sat in the convent school chapel in Ware, Hertfordshire where she attended morning prayers, 
peered at the lichen covered gravestones of her ancestors in Surrey,
and listened to the Benedictine monks at Ampleforth chant the same Compline service that my uncle heard just weeks before he went to war.
A few days before I left, a fellow writer asked me what I expected to discover from making this personal pilgrimage to England. I told him that I honestly didn’t know, but at the very least, it would enrich the descriptions of the settings in the book I’ve been writing about my mother’s childhood. And remarkably, the settings were all preserved in one way or another. She was there seventy years ago, but she would have recognized every wall, room, view, statue, church spire.
But I came away with more. I understood better my mother’s expectations of a certain kind of upper class life. Every single place we’ve visited from Allerton Castle to Ampleforth Abbey to the Green Jackets Museum to Stanway to Poles Convent School to Fetcham Park are open to the public. At Ampleforth, you can take tea and hear the Benedictine Monks’ Singing the Daily Office. Three of the sites are stately homes, two of them available as wedding venues, while another is a Marriott Hotel and Golf Spa. Although when my mother was there, the buildings were often grim, unheated and somewhat decrepit, (and have now all been rescued and restored), she was accustomed to people waiting on her. When I once pointed out to her that the Rector’s house at Fetcham had considerably more staff than family members, she asked me to read her the list from the 1891 census. “One butler, three housemaids, a laundress, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a footman, an underfootman and a groom all employed to take care of four people ‘upstairs.’”
“Well,” she said with a shrug, “in those days servants were family. One passed the job on to another, to a younger sister or brother. It meant they were housed and clothed and fed. Better than being in the poorhouse.” No wonder I often felt my mother was separated from me by more than one generation. No wonder I called this MY OWN DOWNTON ABBEY TOUR.
But I also sensed her need to flee it all… grim, wartime England, the expectations placed on her for a suitable marriage and, as the only remaining child, the role she would have to assume as comforter to her bereaved parents. The war had blown this family apart, and in the post-war years, the losses would deepen.
My mother was a rebel at heart, the one who led her friend, Bee, past the snorting bull at Allerton, who ordered the keg of hard cider delivered to their secretarial school at Stanway, and who danced the night away in the basement nightclubs during the air raids. And the one who at sixteen, fell in love with a 28-year-old American infantryman. When my father threw her a lifeline, she grabbed it and held on, even when it meant that, as an 18-year-old pregnant bride, she had to leave her new husband and her family behind in London to cross the North Atlantic in a convoy dodging U-boats. 
You can see the worry in her eyes in this passport photo, taken days before she boarded the RMS Darro for what turned out to be a harrowing transatlantic voyage to start her new life in America, a country where she did not know one single soul. She spent Christmas of 1944 and the first day of 1945 on that ship.
This is my final post on our pilgrimage. There are so many more stories to tell, but I’m saving them for the book. The title is A FRAGMENT OF WHAT YOU FELT, Decoding My Mother. In the months to come I’ll be revising, and I hope, one day soon, to put up a post telling you how and when the book will be published.
Thanks to all the generous people who welcomed us in England, and thanks to my readers for joining me on this journey.
The biggest thanks goes to Jason, my stalwart companion, driver, camera man and unfailing support. He never lost his sense of humor and what’s even more miraculous, one day, in honor of my ancestors, he even put on a tie.
