The Princess Who Went Her Own Way

23. October 2020 · Comments Off on The Princess Who Went Her Own Way · Categories: Uncategorized

She wasn’t actually a princess, through it is the usual understanding that the sons and daughters of a ruling monarch are princes and princesses. But they did things differently in Russia; up until the Russian Revolution, the legitimate offspring of the Tsar were grand dukes or grand duchesses, born to the purple and far outranking mere princes and princesses, who seem to have been, in the Russian scheme of things, merely mid-ranked nobility.

This grand duchess was named Olga; the youngest of five children of Tsar Alexander III and his wife, the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, originally Princess Dagmar, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. (Her older sister Alix was married to Albert, Prince of Wales.) Born in June, 1882, the infant Olga was not in the most robust of health. Her father as the Tsar of all Russians, and her mother being a veritable whirlwind when it came to duties social and administrative, Olga and her next-oldest brother Michael were raised day to day by governesses and tutors, as was customary for the upper classes. They had a comfortable, but rather Spartan lifestyle at Gatchina, the country palace of the Romanovs. She and her brother slept on plain cots, ate porridge for breakfast, bathed in cold water, rarely saw other children and had daily lessons – and private time for walks in the nearby woods with their formidable father. Olga excelled at painting and sketching – and in fact, for the remainder of her life, most always had a paintbrush in her hand, and as an adult earned a modest living from her watercolors. (a selection of her watercolors is here)

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The Latest Chapter – In the W-I-P

28. September 2020 · 2 comments · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book

Letter from Peg to Vennie, dated 14 October 1943, Postmarked Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Returned unopened and marked – “Returned to sender, from APO NY” Addressee 1Lt. V. Stoneman, USA Nurse Corps Missing in Action 3 Nov ‘43

Dear Vennie:

I was so happy to hear that you managed to visit your family after successfully completing your special nursing course. I don’t suppose that you can tell me anything more about it, so I will not even ask. I presume that since the front has moved to Sicily and the Italian mainland that you are there, as before. I hope that you are as safe as can be, under the circumstances. This bloody war has been going on for four years now – honestly, dear Cuz, I can just barely remember peace, or what seemed something like peace at the time. Food unrationed, plenty of beef (!) and plenty of petrol, and the only uniforms that one saw commonly, unless one visited Fort Sam Houston were those on policemen and bus drivers! What was it like then, not to hear an air raid siren without your heart in your throat, or having to know where the closest air raid shelter was, or carry a gas mask, or even be afraid to turn on the radio of a morning or open the newspaper … I’ll write about more cheerful news now – about Tom and Olivia. Tom will begin school in January, and Edith and I have been sorting out what he will need to have by way of proper school clothes. Fortunately, she and Stanley have friends whose sons are at “Churchie” in various grades, or forms as they call them here. They have made outgrown school coats and trousers available to us, so all that we need to was to save coupons for white shirts and for shoes and socks. Tom is terribly excited about going to school. He is quite a gregarious little boy, and completely fearless. Any books that you have sent to us for his Christmas prezzy will be gratefully received and devoured … probably even before Christmas dinner is served. Did you realize that our mid-summer in Australia comes during November? Never a chance of a white Christmas here, even less of a chance than there was in the Texas Hill Country. Edith and I are scrimping and saving our food coupons, as she says that we should have a real plum pudding, and if we must sacrifice the oldest of her chickens to the cause of Christmas dinner … well, I am in favor of trading with one of her friends who has geese. It seems quite against the spirit of Christmas to eat one of our chickens, especially since the children have named them all. According to Mr. Charles Dickens, it was goose that was the centerpiece of a rare old English Christmas dinner anyway! I really cannot contemplate the horror of telling Tom and Olivia that we have just eaten Bette, Vivian, Margaret or Hedy! It would ruin Christmas entirely, since the children are so fond of all of our hens; their tears would practically flood the house, even though it is on tall pilings! I’ll try and talk Edith out of this, Perhaps we can procure an enormous Spam loaf and carve it into the shape of a chicken or a goose.

How curious; on the ranch, we all knew that some of the yearlings would be slaughtered for beef. Daddy often gave them names like “Sir Loin” or “Lord Hamburger” or “Baron Roast”, just to keep it all firmly in our minds what they were intended to be. It’s just not the same with Edith’s chickens, I suspect.

Anyway, I have been reading in my wedding-present cookbook, which has practically no milage on it, since Mr. Song was the cook at Longcot Plantation and brooked no interference in his way of doing things, and Edith is the same, regarding her kitchen. It’s almost an exercise in nostalgia – again, for that time which seems nearly out of memory. Whole roasts of beef, pork, chicken and unlimited quantities of butter, sugar, white flour, cream, eggs … it’s an exercise in hunger nostalgia. The thing is that Australia could and would provide all these good things in quantities which would make a horn of plenty look niggardly … it’s just that most of these good things must go off to supply England. There’s a poster which makes much of this; our food production must go marching dutifully off to England. Just as Australian soldiers must do … because obligation to Empire and all that.  Honestly, every time I sit down to a skimpy meal of rationed foodstuffs and think of that poster, my blood fairly boils. Americans fought a revolution over all that; sometimes I wonder if Australians have the nerve to do the same. But not during this war – which everyone and everything reminds me that we ‘are all in this together.’

Well, some of us are in it more than others.

Your devoted Cuz

Peg

Postcard from Peg to Mr. Charles Stoneman, c/o postmaster Deming New Mexico, dated 10 December 1943, postmarked Brisbane, Queensland.

Dear Uncle Charlie:

My latest latter to Vennie has been returned by the postman, with a notation that she is ‘missing in action.’ What has happened? Have you had that awful telegram delivered from the War Department? Please let me know soonest.

Love, Peggy Becker Morehouse

1942 – The Year That Everything Happened

21. September 2020 · 4 comments · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

Weirdly enough – and this apparently happens to authors at random – I had a dream about the plot of a new book late this past summer and woke up just in time to remember it all. A novel set in WWII, which is at least half a century or more out of my fictional headspace; I like the 19th century. Got all the reference books, the books or art, a grasp of the vocab and the look of the whole 19th century universe and outlook. (The costumes, too; yes – I dress in late Victorian or Edwardian garb to do a book event. No, the corset isn’t that uncomfortable, and yes, how people react to me in this get-up, hat, reticule, gloves and all … it’s amazing. Last time out in all this, I had a guy tip his hat to me and say, ‘Howdy, ma-am’ and that is just freaking amazing!)

But – WWII. For me, it is just enough close in time that I knew a lot of people personally involved, from Great-Aunt Nan, who was one of the first-ever women recruited for the WAACs, to any number of high school teachers (some of whom were more forthcoming about their service than others) to the Gentleman With Whom I Kept Company for about a decade, to a neighbor of Mom and Dad’s who had been a prisoner of war in the Far East and fortunate enough to have survived the experience. In short, the books, the movies, even the TV shows that I watched as a kid and teenager, were all marinated in the memories of the Second World War. I was born a bare decade after it was all over; shows like World at War were in the ‘must watch’ category at our house, as well as any number of now slightly cringe-making series like … never mind. Just take it for granted that WWII was inescapable for a person of my age. I also scribbled some bad and derivative juvenile fiction with a WWII setting. (Which I found in a box in the garage during the most recent turn out … yep, it was bad. Supposedly, one must write a good few millions of words to get the bad out of your system. Just about all of that is in a box in the garage, against which are orders to the Daughter Unit to burn in future.) And I had a self-directed exploration into the 1930s-1940s in college, when I had access to a college library with microfiche scans of a certain newspaper; I read every issue from 1935-1945, which was like seeing a whole decade of history’s first draft narrowly through a key-hole.

Anyway – enough of the throat-clearing. As is my wont when working out the fine details in a plot, I set up an Excel spreadsheet broken out by month and year, marking events in various theaters, all the better to work the travails of my fictional characters against. It struck me all over again that 1942 was the year That Everything Happened. For Americans, it was the first full year of war on two fronts; for Britain and her colonies and the governments-in-exile of her allies, it was the start of a third year of a war formerly limited, more or less, to Europe and North Africa. And then all merry old hell broke out in the Far East. Possessions, colonies, independent small countries began falling like nine-pins to the Japanese war machine. British Malaya and Fortress Singapore, Dutch Indonesia, the Philippines, Guam and Wake Islands, a good chunk of New Guinea and other islands all across the South China Sea – all fell in the first few months of 1942. It would have been a depressing thing, reading any major Western newspaper during those weeks; weeks where Allied confidence in their own ability to fight a balls-to-the-wall war and win took a considerable beating.

The Allies reeled … but in May, the fortunes of War began to smile on the Allies. A naval clash between Japanese, American and Australian naval forces in the Coral Sea checked Japanese attempts to take Rabaul in New Guinea. In the next month, another sea battle – again between dueling aircraft carriers in the defense of Midway Island – blunted further Japanese advances in the Central Pacific. In July and a world away – the Germans were blocked and turned back from Egypt at the first battle at El Alamein, and then again three months later, in the same place. In the month of August, the Americans began landing on Guadalcanal and the Australians began taking back New Guinea. The Axis tide was checked, and slowly began to retreat. In November, the Allies (American and British with Canadian, Australian and the Free Dutch naval backup) opened a second front with the Torch Landings in French-controlled Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco – this not quite a year after Pearl Harbor. In barely a year, the Allies went from disaster and defeat on practically every front, to regroup and to begin effectively striking back. It would take another two years and more to completely defeat the Axis Powers, but it is striking to look at the timeline for 1942 and to see how the war situation turned from humiliating defeat, through resolve, and then to begin the long march back.

Discuss as you wish.    

Another Snippet of the WWII Novel

09. September 2020 · Comments Off on Another Snippet of the WWII Novel · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book

(Which still remains nameless, but is nearly half completed)

Letter from Vennie to Peg, dated 15 December 1942, Postmarked APO NY, headed Arzew, Algiers

Dear Cuz:

Well, here I am, at last with time enough to write you a very long letter! The French in North Africa surrendered a month ago, and the fighting front is over, more or less, having moved on from here to Tunisia. We continue here at Arzew, caring for our patients, but at not such a frantic rate as at first! Matters have calmed down, now that we are supplied and supported, and the hospital here has been fitted out with all that is proper and needful for care of our patients. We nurses are billeted half a mile away in old French barracks, which were so filthy and flea-ridden that they put up tents for us, on the former parade ground. We are conveyed “home” at the end of every shift, and back again by an escort of Rangers from the First Battalion, and then by soldiers from the engineers, whose unit is repairing the harbor facilities. My friend Ruth, who is tall and sturdy of build – has been courted by a Ranger who calls her ‘his little girl!’ He is as tall as Paul Bunyan, without his ax and ox! A head taller than Ruth, who is amused no end. It is the first time in her life that she has been called ‘a little girl!’ At least, since got her full growth at fourteen or so. Me – I’ve always been ‘a little girl.’ I’m done with the charm of that. Why can’t I be as tall as a Becker? Anyway, enough of my lamentations regarding my personal shortcomings.Several of us had the opportunity to visit Oran late in November – sightseeing! Can you imagine? It was so very nice, to be driven in the back of a truck, rather than in a jeep in the dark, with my legs hanging over the back.

Oran is one of the leading cities in Algiers, and I have to say that it looks very neat, beautiful and clean from a distance – all whitewashed walls and red tile roofs, in terraces climbing up and down the hills from the harbor, punctuated by tall steeples, minarets, and stands of palm trees. The outskirts of the city were adorned with groves of orange and olive trees, and there were so many native Algerians in colorful robes and turbans – all so very exotic and romantic … but that was at a distance. Up close, the walls are seen to be dingy and peeling, and the robes are faded, ragged … and the people wearing them have not washed themselves or their clothing for years, to judge by the smell. We visited the old headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-bes-Abbes, where three of the French officers showed us around. There was a little museum in the Legion HQ, with examples of all the uniforms the Legion has worn, back to the days of one of their moldy old princes who established the Legion. They showed us through town as well but explained the reason for so many dark looks cast in our direction, as many of the locals were very pro-Nazi and not at all happy to have the Allies in occupation now. We did not linger there for long. When we came back that evening to Arzew, we had a delivery of mail from home, and I had your latest letter.

What happy news for you, that Tommy is alive and a prisoner of war! Are you able to write to him, and send him comforts, and to tell him that he is the father of a daughter as well as a son? I do hope so. I have had no word from my friend Helen, who was reported to be interned among civilian women in Santo Tomas. It is hard to believe that just a year has passed since the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Manila and Singapore. How so many things have changed for us both in just a single year! If you can write to him, send him my love and best wishes. I was also very happy to hear that the books and the coral bead necklace that I posted to you in England for Olivia and Little Tommy’s Christmas presents have arrived in good time.

They should have a lovely Christmas in Australia – we at the hospital in Arzew are planning to have the same here in Africa! Lt. Worth, our senior nurse, has said that we should make it a most memorable Christmas for our patients here. Among things found by the Rangers in a warehouse near the harbor – and which hadn’t been looted and burned by the locals – were several bolts of red serge fabric. And it is Lt. Worth’s idea that we should sew Christmas stockings of red serge, trimmed with white from hospital sheets, for every patient in this place. We are sewing like mad elves, every moment that we can get – for we will need almost seven hundred. That is – when we are not working in a candy factory! Our supply officer and his sergeant assistants came by quantities of peanuts, milk, sugar and chocolate! (We call him Ali Baba and his 40 Thieves, for no one closely inquires by what miracle they were able to come up with all this because it probably wasn’t strictly regulation!) We turn too, when off-duty and not otherwise occupied with sewing stockings – and make candy! Peanut brittle, fudge, and taffy – a lot of work, but such fun! It almost feels like normal, getting ready for Christmas. Not like last year, when everyone was so worked up over Japan attacking, and everyone looking over their shoulder and wondering what awful defeat would happen next. Now we have the Nazis on the run, and soon the Japs as well.

Got to go do candy duty in the kitchen – I’ll write again when I can.

Your fond Cuz and auntie to your babies,

Vennie

In the Field

08. September 2020 · 2 comments · Categories: Memoir, Random Book and Media Musings

Sometimes, long after first reading a book or watching a movie and enjoying it very much, I have come back to re-reading or watching, and then wondering what I had ever seen in that in the first place. So it was with the original M*A*S*H book and especially with the movie. I originally read the book in college and thought, “Eww, funny but gross and obscene, with their awful practical jokes and nonexistent sexual morals.” Then I re-read after having been in the military myself for a couple of years, and thought, “Yep, my people!”

The movie went through pretty much the same evolution with me, all but one element – and that was when I began honestly wondering why the ostensible heroes had such a hate on for Major Burns and the nurse Major Houlihan. Why did those two deserve such awful, disrespectful treatment? In the movie they seemed competent and agreeable enough initially. In the book it was clear that Major Burns was an incompetent surgeon with delusions of adequacy, and that Major Houlihan was Regular Army; that being the sole reason for the animus. But upon second viewing of the movie, it seemed like Duke Forrest, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre were just bullying assholes selecting a random target for abuse for the amusement of the audience.

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