Page 51 - My Story (final)

when we had guests. I think I still have some of those blankets. They were both drivers, chauffeurs to
Generals and hoped they would not be sent to Viet Nam. Some of the soldiers were getting pretty
desperate about Viet Nam. I remember Peter arriving home looking shaken one night. He reported that
an American soldier had thrown himself across his hood while he was driving. Nobody was hurt but you’ve
got to be serious to do something like that.

Gwenda eventually married her John. They had the first part of the wedding reception in our back
garden and seven-year-old Hilary took wonderful photographs with a one mark camera which we had
bought at Quelle, a mail order company. John’s stint in the army was up and they moved to Connecticut
and had two daughters. They now live in Rhode Island and we are in touch.

Soon after their departure Siggy retired and he, Marion and Ida went back to Ireland. Peter had
a new boss.

By now we had been in Wehrheim two years. The three girls were at school and Toby in
Kindergarten. When he wasn’t in Kindergarten, he was playing on the street with Wolfram Diesner. The
two of them would tear up and down on their bikes. Toby had inherited a very solid old tricycle from his
sisters who I believe had inherited it from the Carters. Anyway, that tricycle was good for a hundred years.
Toby also inherited the most awful local accent. The German spoken in Hesse is not pretty and neither is
it grammatical, which suited me! Susan learned a poem called, “Daheim ist daheim” which was all in local
dialect and would entertain all of our Hochdeutsch speaking friends with it. When Elisabeth came to visit,
she laughed in particular when she heard someone refer to her elbow, Elbogen, as Elliboje!

Helen and Susan were picked out to give recitations and speeches in their perfect German.
Indeed, in Kleve they had been the children chosen for the consecration of the war memorial chapel and
only we saw the irony in that!

Helen, Susan, Hilary & Toby in 1969

With Toby’s arrival I had become the proud owner of a brand-new Fiat Panorama in white that
was slightly larger than the old one. I seemed to be the only woman in the village with her own transport,
unless it was a tractor. Frau Eichorn (squirrel) was often to be seen progressing down the village street
driving her tractor and wearing her husband’s socks. I was occasionally called on to do a hospital run and
one of the women approached me one day and said if I would drive, she could take me to a farm where
we could purchase wonderful fruit for canning and jam making. Oh yes, so off we went, and it was cherry
season. We came back with kilos and kilos of both sweet and sour cherries. For the next two days I stoned
and boiled and canned and had a couple of dozen jars of jam and bottled cherries to show for it. The
children ate cherries galore and nobody got sick. I would have been too busy to notice, anyway! Several
of the neighbours grew strawberries and we were always being invited to pick as many as we wanted, so
we had strawberry jam, as well. The other Diesner grandmother was a shriveled old lady, dressed entirely
in black as befits a widow and she was always to be seen bent double, tending her vegetable garden. She

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