Part 43
How many British 10-year-olds, having experienced the rigors and often terrors of World War II, were then propelled into over a year of travelling and, best of all, no school?
In 1946, my parents decided that there would be better opportunities available in a country like South Africa, than in the aftermath of war-ravaged Britain. I’m sure that my mother who was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of an Irish mother and Ukrainian father, could not wait to return to Africa. My Dad, whom I called Pop, was impatient to get there and decided to simply set off, even though the only booking we had confirmed was a ship from Marseilles to Alexandria in Egypt, with no idea when it would leave. Transport was chaotic immediately after the war; so, Pop had decided that we would somehow find our way across Europe and down Africa.
We took a ferry to France and a train to Paris, staying at the fabulous George V hotel for a few days. Pop, it seemed, had little idea how to live frugally, even though we were embarking on a five-thousand-mile journey into the virtual unknown. Another train journey brought us to Switzerland where my mother, whom I called Mop (to rhyme with Pop), connected up with her mother, who had brought her younger daughter Diana to attend a “finishing school” in Lausanne, a city near Geneva on the shores of Lac Léman (also known as Lac de Genève). British citizens in 1946 were only allowed to take £100 a year per person. Thankfully, I was considered a “person” at 10 years old.
My Grandmother, whom I called Granny Atkins (my Grandfather’s Ukrainian name was clearly unpronounceable, so the South African customs officers changed it to Atkins) kindly helped my parents with some funds, but even so Pop had to finally learn how to conserve our finances. Even in those early days, Switzerland was expensive.
After spending a few weeks in a little village right on the lake called Poulie and, with no sign of our ship leaving for Alexandria, we boarded another of the fabulous Swiss trains and travelled up into the Engadine Valley to another little village called Bever, some fourteen miles from St. Moritz. At the time the population of the village was 124 which we pumped up to 127 when we stayed at Chesa Zamboni regarded as the grand house of the village at the time. Frau Zamboni was our landlady and was one of the sweetest, kindest people I’ve ever met. Today, her house has been turned into a heritage site.
Notwithstanding our comfortable and beautifully furnished new “home,” finances were becoming a real problem. Pop had many faults but he was incredibly innovative. He was already a good trout fisherman and he announced that, until we left for the ship in Marseilles, our diet was to consist of trout, mushrooms and spaghetti. Virtually every day he and I would walk to the nearby river inn, where Pop would start fishing. Switzerland had a unique law about fishing. The hooks could not have a barb! This meant that the fisherman had to be exceptionally skilled to land a fish. It was incredibly easy for the fish to slip off the hook without a barb. However, to compensate for that, they allowed live bait instead of flies. So, my job was to forage for worms and caterpillars on the steep hillsides and keep Pop supplied with bait.
In addition to that, Switzerland is rich in fungi with many of the approximately 127 species of mushrooms available in the stunningly beautiful Engadine Valley, surrounded by high Alpine peaks, some covered with snow for most of the year. Pop bought a book on fungi and made sure that he understood the characteristics of the five poisonous species before we went mushrooming. The Amanita is the deadliest of the five and, unfortunately, as they age, they lose the telltale spots on their caps and, except for the red-capped ones, so popular in children’s story books, the older Amanita look very much like Champignon, the good old field mushrooms that most of us eat.
Anyway, Pop favored the Boletus family, such as the huge Steinpilz whose gills run downwards instead of radiating out sideways like both the Amanita and Champignon, creating a sponge-like appearance. So, we survived our inexpensive but seemingly opulent diet for the remaining eight months before we were told that our ship was finally preparing to leave. We had one drama but it was more of a fishy kind. At the back of each house in the village a water trough ran from the nearby river into the village fountain. As Pop caught more and more trout he put wire mesh in the trough on either side of the Zamboni property to prevent the trout from escaping. Murphy’s law also extends to Switzerland, it seems. One day, irate villagers found about a dozen trout in the village fountain! An embarrassed Pop agreed to make other arrangements.
It was an idyllic time for me as a child, fetching wood for the winter from the mountainside for Frau Zamboni, helping the villagers harvest the hay and drinking sweet harvest wine, hiking with youths in their teens from the city staying at the village hostel and, quite honestly, looking back, learning more about life than any schooling could have ever taught me!
We spent our last few weeks in the Engadine on the outskirts of St. Moritz, which was slowly coming back to life again after the war, in a pension which included as a tenant a world-famous violinist (I forget this name).
We took a bus down the spectacular Majola Pass into Italian Switzerland, a ferry across Lake Como, where somehow Mop and Pop befriended an Italian Prince who owned a mansion on an island on the neighboring lake of Maggiore. We spent another couple of days “slumming it” in style before setting off again to Genoa, where a couple of sunken ships in the harbor, a reminder of the recent war, stuck their funnels and masts out of the water.
From there, we took a bus along the coast into France, stopping for a night in Nice. Mop and Pop wanted to go to a nightclub but had nowhere to leave me while they enjoyed a rare night out. Pop’s solution: he took me along with them. The French were not fazed by a 10-year-old in the club, but the 10-year-old was a little fazed when a belly dancer thought it amusing to gyrate her belly right in front of the smallest person in the house!
Finally, we arrived in Marseilles which, rather like Genoa, showed many signs of the aftermath of war. The streets were dirty. Many buildings had been bombed and the rubble still lay there. After the months of incredible peace and tranquillity, it was a depressing farewell to Europe. Our so-called liner, the Corinthian, wasn’t much better. It was old and worn and had until recently been a troop ship. We were to discover later that the ship carried about 500 passengers but only had four lifeboats. Totally inadequate. None of the bulkheads would close any more and the ship had a distinct list to port.
Somehow we set sail, a couple of days later than advertised and, apart from an overnight stay in Athens, we were on our way to Africa at last.
When I consider how far technology has come since the 1940s, it’s unbelievable how much of it has happened since that time. Apart from the early Enigma code-breaking efforts by Alan Turing, computing simply did not exist in 1946. Now, in 2020, we are poised to make another quantum leap forward as we move closer and closer to the launch of ExoBrain and its revolutionary expansion of pure computing.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.