There was a lot on the news yesterday about us having to carry vaccination passports if we want to travel or even go into music venues and pubs. It looks as if it may be on an NHS app on our phone that is updated when we have the vaccination. When the first lockdown started last March Tom was given a piece of paper saying he was a bus driver and had to travel to work so it was necessary for him to be outside. He was told he would have to show it if he was stopped by the police on public transport. Youngest son, who is very interested in civil liberties, was horrified and read the whole thing out to us in a Russian accent! How quickly things have changed in a year though, it is all accepted and we are so desperate to get back to normality I think we would agree to almost anything. Although I do worry about how these things are happening I try to remind myself that in other times of national emergency we have had to endure much worse loss of our rights and things returned to normal when the crisis was over. My Dad tells me that during the second world war they all had to carry a National Identity Card and you wouldn't have dared leave home without it.
However there is another story I have come across recently that really upset me. Eldest son asked me if I would look into the history of his house in Hastings as he is so interested in finding out more about the people who lived there. On the 1939 register in his house I found a couple with their 25 year daughter living there. The wife Dorothy was a local Hastings woman but her husband Charles, or Carl his birth name, had been born in Saxony. They married in 1911 a 17 year old girl and and a young German waiter. Their daughter was born early in 1914. How could they have imagined how badly it would all go wrong. I have seen photos during the First World War of German shops being fire bombed and even dachsunds having stones thrown at them in the street. At some point the couple changed their names to an Anclicised version of their German name and who could blame them. When I saw the husband's nationality on the 1939 register I remembered an epsisode of Foyles War, which is set in Hastings, about German nationals being put in prison and that is exactly what happened to Charles. He was arrested shortly after the outbreak of war and sent to Onchan on the Isle of Mann. Thirty years living and working in this country and he was taken from his home and family to the other end of the country just for being German, it is hard to imagine.
He was released two years later in 1941 "without any restrictions" but it must have taken such a toll on the family. I found a reunited Dorothy and Charles in 1965 on an electoral register living in Bromley in Kent, still using their English surname all those years after the war ended. I was so pleased to find their daughter Irene on electoral registers in London, throughout the war and into the 1950s, when she got married, still proudly using her German surname. I will never be able to visit my eldest son and stand looking out at that view to the sea, without thinking of this little family and what they went through. I will try not to complain about the restrictions we have to contend with now.
We had a really nice long walk with Scarlett yesterday and she loves the novelty of Tom walking with us. I'm not quite sure we will be able to go for such a nice walk with the dogs today as the weather is looking rather cold, wet and windy. We are going to Lidl this morning and I have a new mobile phone being delivered later so it feels a bit like Christmas, although no doubt it will take me about two weeks to work it all out! I hope everyone has a lovely day and the weather is not all bad. xx
