Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Ah, yes – while skimming my regular feed of interesting Pinterest sites, I ran across a link to this article. Yes, I have an interest in historical costume, since I have an unseemly fondness for getting rigged out in all sorts of late Victorian, Edwardian, and early 20^th century kit as a means of differentiating myself from all the other authors in the room (and possibly in the surrounding county). The Daughter Unit finds this all to be terribly embarrassing – but eh! Not that I am the age I am, I can do as a damn please – and what I please, when I do an author event is to put on a bit of a show. Not only does this attract the eye of the mundane public, it’s a useful conversational lead-in.

“Hi! I write historical fiction, so I like to dress the part!”

As is pointed out after several paragraphs down, the part involves all the interesting and intricate underwear – shift, corset, petticoats – and accessories; jewelry, gloves, reticle and hat, often held on with an authentic foot-long steel hatpin. As it is my good fortune that Mom taught me to sew, and Dad taught me to follow instructions to the most exacting level, constructing of these necessary outfits and accoutrements is pretty much a snap for me. And besides – I love the way that the petticoats swish, the corset elevates the boobage, and gentlemen come over all courtly, when approached by a woman wearing a hat, gloves, and skirt down to her toes. I’ve collected up some nice and reasonably authentic Butterick patterns for outfits, but increasingly am taken by the even more authentic Truly Victorian versions, largely because those TR patterns can be more readily adjusted for fit.

However, I am not all that fanatical about doing them in authentic fabrics; natural wool, silk, linen; mostly because of the expense. Now that home sewing has morphed into a hobby rather than a domestic necessity, the costs have increased exponentially. My outfits are more in the line of stage costumes, rather than a 100% accurate reenactor production. I’m not all that fanatical about using authentic trimmings of lace or fringe, either. I’ll use what I can get for a reasonable price, and if it’s polyester or rayon in the outer layers, I’m not messing around the open flames, and I’ll put up with a degree of discomfort. It’s the overall look of the outfit that matters most, not that it’s absolutely what a lady would have worn in 1880. Or 1912.    

On the strong recommendation of David Foster, the Daughter-Unit and I began to watch: A French Village, that seven-season long miniseries which follows five years of German occupation and a bit of the aftermath as it affects the lives of a handful of characters in a small town in eastern France close to the Swiss border – from the day that the German invaders arrive, to the aftermath of the occupation, in a fractured peace, when all was said and done. (It’s available through Amazon Prime.) A good few of the occupants of that village did not really welcome liberation and had damn good reasons – guilty consciences, mostly, for having collaborated with the Germans with varying degrees of enthusiasm. (A benefit is that this series stars actors of whom we have never heard, in French with English subtitles. Given how the establishment American entertainment media has gone all noisily woke, anti-Trump and abusive towards us conservative residents of Flyoverlandia, this is a darned good thing. Seriously, for years and years I used to only personally boycott Jane Fonda and Cat Stevens, now my list of ‘oh, hell NEVER! actors and personalities is well into the scores.)

By the outbreak of the Second World War, France and Germany had been in a love-hate relationship for a good few decades, if not at least a century. France had the style, the dash, the verve, the command of fashion and culture for decades, while Germany had a lock on scientific and medical talent, military efficiency, and a not inconsiderable sideline in mad musical skilz. In that last, and in elevated artistic and philosophical discourse they were about neck and neck. France and Germany also seem – from the point of view of an American looking backwards at that period – to also have been neck and neck when it comes to virulent anti-Antisemitism. France also contained a notable number of Communists, who were die-hard opponents of Nazism throughout the 1930s, then cynically allied with them through the medium of the Nazi-Soviet Pact … and then the Commies did another U-turn upon the Nazi invasion of Mother Russia, from whence the major support for international Communism had originated, by design and intent. (This series of disconcerting U-turns disillusioned a good few international anti-Fascist sympathizers of a more independent intellectual bent, although American Commie-symps like Lillian Hellman, Howard Zinn and Pete Seeger obediently followed where the Soviet Master Party led, throughout every violent U-turn. No doubt they each came up with a comforting reason for this ‘ally today, enemy tomorrow’ route through the political landscape.)

This whole German occupation of France turned out to be a bit more complicated than contemporary movies, and movies made shortly afterwards had it, although at this late date, anyone or any institution with a reputation to lose over how they conducted themselves during the Occupation has already done damage control or died of old age. There is a bitter joke to the effect that the French Resistance had more members enrolled post-war than during it. Understandable; once the emergency is past, every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or a Resistant. A French citizen who was a Resistant from the moment of occupation by Nazi Germany was a rare creature indeed; likely a social misanthrope with no family or employment to be endangered, a die-hard political hard-liner, or bearing anti-German resentments left over from twenty years previously, when French and German armies had slaughtered each other in job-lots of millions in the trenches of the Western Front. Later, when the hardships imposed by the German Occupation began to bite, apprehensions over just what was happening to the Jews transported east, and it began to look as if the Nazis just might possibly lose – this did wonders for recruiting to various Resistant groups.

How the Occupation affected ordinary people is vividly reflected in A French Village. Most characters are just trying to get by, living an ordinary, unspectacular life; earning a living, running a profitable business, maintaining a professional career arc, taking care of their families, friends, patients and students, having a little fun, and making do. This tracks with what I have read in various histories and memoirs and from what I understand of basic human nature. Damn few of us wake up in the morning and decide to be Joan of Arc, going down (or up) in flames. We have things to do, our ordinary uncinematic life to live … even when the choice presents itself to us, naked and unashamed.

Although in certain situations, many of us do choose the right thing on the spot: to reach out and succor, provide a lifeline of rescue from an inhumanly brutal situation. There was an account and listing of the various Righteous Gentiles who took a part in rescuing Jews from the Nazis across Occupied Europe; a good number acted on an initial decent impulse, upon appeal from friends, neighbors, and sometimes total strangers. Those people took it upon themselves – and they were ordinary, human, perhaps otherwise self-centered people – a risk; of death by work camp, firing squad, or whatever painful fate the local Nazi occupying authority had decreed. This is where, I think, most of the later Resistants came from: something personal tripped their trigger and from that moment on, they were all-in.

There is one more element, and this insight I came to as a result of reading a couple of memoirs and histories. One of them was an account of the life of Anne Frank; after the arrest and internment of her family and friends. Long afterwards a good number of the near neighbors to the House Behind said that basically, yeah, they knew there was something going on; likely Jews hiding in the outbuildings to Otto Frank’s business. They suspected that something was going on but chose to turn a blind eye. Another was an account of a doctor and his wife running a safe house catering to escaping soldiers and shot-down aircrew in the south of France – this in an apartment block which was a base for the doctor’s practice and residence. They took every precaution, laying every imaginable precaution on their guests; walking in stocking feet, no flushing of the toilet, speaking above a whisper during business hours – but still, I am pretty certain that in spite of all that, the neighbors knew very well that something was going on – all those suspiciously fit young men without any knowledge of the French language appearing at all hours, even if briefly?

The final evidence for a conviction that a large element of Resistance success depended on ordinary citizens keeping quiet about local and specific observances came from a talk with a survivor of the B-17 crew, of which my uncle James Menaul had been a member. Uncle Jimmy’s B-17 was shot down over France, upon return from the massive and disastrous attack on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories. My uncle and several of his crew were fatalities in that raid, but six of his comrades survived. One was captured and spent the rest of the war as a POW, but the other five had the good fortune to be collected by French Resistants and smuggled to Switzerland.

That survivor related to me an episode of being on a crowded French train, escorted by an older lady who had papers from the Red Cross attesting to her good citizenship and permission to travel freely, and a teenage boy who was below the age where he could be pressed into forced labor. He and his comrade, another evading aircrew member, were fitted out with French clothing and suitable false papers – but he said that he wasn’t assured that the clothing and papers convinced anyone in the least, save the Germans. (1943, France: young and obviously fit men, with good teeth, innocent of subtle cultural markers? Yeah, they would have stood out, as if marked with fluorescent paint…When I passed through Greece and to Spain in 1985, I could always pick out other Americans in a crowd. Imagine how it would have been forty years and plus earlier.) At some point in the train journey, according to my contact, German authorities entered the passenger car, and began working their way through it, checking everyone’s papers and tickets. At that moment, and almost simultaneously without any apparent advance coordination, every single one of the other passengers in that railway car began doing random, spontaneous stuff… talking loudly, dropping things, getting up out of their seats – doing everything possible to distract attention away from the pair of American airmen. A small thing – but vital. Did it contribute to their eventual escape to Switzerland? No notion, and it’s not a matter that can be tested. But there you have it. My interviewee believed it did, and that it was spontaneous, among a random group of railway travelers in a French train in late 1943.

Sometimes, resistance takes the form of committed actions. And sometimes – that milder form of turning away and deliberately not seeing what you have seen and noted, and keeping your mouth shut about it.

This last weekend was the start of the fall book market season; I spent three days in Giddings, Texas, as one of the local authors invited to participate in the yearly Word Wrangler Book Festival – which is sponsored by the local library, and supported by practically every civic institution in Giddings, including the local elementary and high schools. Last Thursday, the first day of Word Wrangler, certain of us authors volunteered to go and visit schools for readings, or to just talk about writing. This year, I visited three middle-school classes, to talk to sixth graders about writing, the stories that they liked, and what they could write about. I like doing this with fifth and sixth grade students, by the way – they are old enough to read pretty well, but not so old as to be jaded by the whole ‘visiting writer/storyteller’ thing. The kids were lively and responsive; it helps that they were being taught about plotting, about the narrative voice, and how to create a story. In each class of about twenty or thirty kids, I would guess that two or three are terrifically keen on creative writing, another eight or ten are interested, and the remainder are not completely indifferent. I went around and asked each student what they liked to read the most; adventure stories seemed to be most popular, followed by mysteries. Two boys in separate classes were enthralled by World War II stories. Horror and fantasy seemed to be about equally popular; and there was one girl with quite gruesome taste in exotic forms of murder. Well, it takes all kinds, and I am not her analyst; she’ll most likely grow out of it, once puberty really takes hold …

Then I went around again, asking each one what they would write about; what story would they want to sit down and write. For those who couldn’t think of one, I gave them a character and a situation, and encouraged them to go to town. And one more thing I told them – it is perfectly OK for a writer starting out to venture into scribbling fanfiction. You like a certain movie, book, TV series, videogame, are interested in that world and those characters? Take the characters you really like or identify with and write them a new set of adventures in that fictional world. Saves the time and trouble of building a whole new world from scratch … and isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Go and do it; practically every writer I know did the same. I certainly did; and the reams of juvenilia is something to eventually be consigned to the shredder by my literary executor. Just be careful when unleashing revised fanfiction into the world – chose the venue carefully and file off all the identifying serial numbers. Otherwise, it’s excellent practice, I told the kids; the literary equivalent of training wheels when learning to ride a bicycle.

I’ve been publishing independently since 2007; the first big wave of independent writers, although there were a small number of specialists in the decades before that. There were always writers publishing their works in a small way, mostly through arranging a print run with a local printer and bookbinder, but that method usually cost more money than was available to those of us in that big wave in the mid ‘Oughts’. The development of publish on demand, the ability of printers to do small print runs at a reasonable cost, the rise of Amazon, the popularity of eReaders, and the disinclination of the establishment publishing houses to continue backing midlist authors while pursuing only huge blockbusters … that all left the field wide open to indy writers like the ones I spent last weekend with. It astounded me all over again how very good, and professional the books at Word Wrangler looked. The covers of most books – and they covered the range of kids’ books through adult fiction; adventure, mystery, western, historical – all looked as good as anything produced by mainstream publishers. There is such a wealth of good reading available, through independent and small publishers, and readers in places like Giddings know it very, very well,  

From Luna City 3.1 – 9-11+15

“I know that it’s been fifteen years as of last Sunday,” Coach Garrett mused thoughtfully, hardly taking note of the beer in front of him. “But sometimes it’s as clear to me as if it was yesterday.”

It was a perfect, autumn afternoon – a Friday afternoon in mid-September, just beginning to turn cool. The VFW had visitors’ night on Fridays, and now Richard sat outside with Joe Vaughn and Coach Garrett, at the splintery picnic table under the massive sycamore tree that shaded the back of the VFW.

 “You were there in New York, weren’t you, Coach?” Joe drank deep from his own beer. “You saw the Towers go down, up close and personal. Man … it was bad enough watching on TV in real time.”

“Another life,” Dwight Garrett shrugged, but something in the look of that otherwise undistinguished, middle-aged countenance warned Richard to embrace tact and circumspection in his further comment.

“It was a splendid day for me,” Richard ventured, reminiscent for the world of just a little ago, but gone as distant now as the Austro-Hungarian empire. “I know … the irony of it all. An evening in Paris – it was mid-evening. I had just won my first cooking contest, and signed with a talent agency. Some of my old Charterhouse pals and I popped over to Paris to celebrate my excellent prospects. We were drinking in a bar in the Rue d Belleville, and wondering why they had a telly on, and tuned to some high-rise disaster movie. It didn’t seem all that big a thing, not at first. The penny didn’t drop until we saw the headlines in the newspapers the next day. In my defense, we were all enormously pissed that evening.”

“I’ll bet your hangover was epic,” Joe said, not without sympathy. “I was at Fort Lewis. First assignment to the Second Battalion … just driving into work, when it came over the radio. Airplane crashed into the World Trade Center tower. Swear to god, everyone thought it must be one of those little private airplanes, ya know – like a Piper Cub or something. The top sergeant said, ‘Oh, man, they must have gotten hella lost!’ And then someone turned on the breakroom TV, and there was this big ol’ gash in the side of the tower and the smoke just pouring out… Top said he remembered hearing about a WWII bomber hitting the Empire State Building, but that was in a fog. Two big honking silver buildings – we just couldn’t understand at first how it could happen by accident.”

“It was such a beautiful morning,” Dwight Garrett nodded. “Cool, crisp … not a cloud in the sky. I had played a concert at the Alice Tully the night before, so I slept in. Gwen … my wife didn’t wake me up when she left for work. She left a note for me … that we should meet for supper at Morton’s on Washington Street, just around the corner, when she was done with work that evening.”

“Didn’t know you were a married man, Coach,” Joe said, and Dwight Garrett sighed.

“Oh, yes – I left it late, sorry to say. Gwen and I were married for six years and three months. A dedicated career woman, and a divorcee with two sons she raised herself. We met at one of those musical soirees associated with a Mozart festival. Gwen was in finance. Did you ever notice that maths and music are deeply intertwined in some people? Anyway, we had a nice little condo in Tribeca, a stone-throw from where she worked.”

“And?” Richard prodded. He had visited New York often enough during the high-flying years of his career as a globe-trotting celebrity chef, and had only the vaguest notion of where Tribeca might me. It was not his favorite city on the American continent; that would be Vancouver, or perhaps Miami. New York was too crowded, too … vertical for his taste.

“She worked at Cantor-Fitzgerald – in the North Tower,” Dwight Garrett replied in perfectly level, dispassionate tones. Joe drew in his breath sharply, but said nothing, and Coach Garrett continued. “Even asleep, I heard the sirens – but so ordinary a sound in the city, I just went back to sleep. Until Gwen’s son Jeff called from White Plains. ‘Where’s Mom?’ he said, ‘Did she go into work, today? Turn on the TV – there’s a plane that hit the building she works in, all the top floors are on fire, and she’s not answering her cellphone.’ I told him to calm down. I’d walk over to the WTC and find her, make sure she was safe, and that everything would be all right …” He took a long draw of his own beer, calm and meditative, as if he were telling a story of another persons’ experience. “The sidewalks along Vesey Street were full of people looking up towards the towers – both of them just gushing smoke. Like water coming out of a fire hydrant. I started walking as fast as I could. I could see nothing moving on the street, but fire engines, lined up as far as I could see, once I got close. I kept trying to call Gwen. I thought sure that they would let me through the barricades once I explained. The South Tower fell before I got to the end of the block. It was … like a tidal wave of black smoke, dust, soot. A policeman yelled at us to run like hell. A bunch of us on the sidewalk ran into the nearest place – a coffee shop on Vesey, to escape it.” Coach Garrett shook his head, slowly. “Outside that window it turned as black as you could imagine. And the lights went out. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face for about five, ten minutes. That policeman was in there, too – he had a flashlight, but it didn’t help. When we came out everything was grey, covered with thick grey dust. We were all covered in it, too. Needless to say, they wouldn’t let me come anywhere near the North Tower. There were too many people. And I think they were already afraid that the North Tower was going to fall as well.”

“Did you find your wife?” Richard ventured. Coach Garrett shook his head.

“No. Not that day, or afterward. Nothing left – everything and most everyone on the floors just above the impact site were essentially vaporized. I accepted right away that she was gone forever, nothing to be done. No good going to the morgue or hanging around as they excavated the pile afterwards. It was almost as if our marriage had been a wonderful, fleeting dream, and she had never been …  except for the boys, of course. And her clothes and things in the condo. It was just so … curious, how it happened out of the clear blue in the blink of an eye, on so ordinary day.”

“Sorry, man,” Joe said, after a long moment. “I never knew about your wife, and all of that. That why you left New York and came home to Texas?”

Coach Garrett nodded. “I couldn’t stay. Not without Gwen. The pile of rubble burned for months. The whole place smelled of smoke and death. I packed a suitcase and took the express to White Plains a few days later. I signed the condo over to Jeff and his brother, rented a car and drove back to Texas. I meant to go back to Kingsville … but heard about a job teaching music here. It seemed like a good way to start fresh.”

“You do what you gotta do,” Joe agreed. “Another, Coach? My treat.”

“Sure thing, Joe,” the older man finished off his beer and looked into the distance; the blue, blue sky and the leaf canopy of the sycamores just beginning to turn gold and brown. “There’s one thing I do regret about Gwen. I wish that I hadn’t slept in – that I had fixed her breakfast, kissed her, said that I hoped she would have a good day, and that I loved her. I never for a single moment thought that she would suddenly just not be there. Love shouldn’t end that way, on the flip of a coin.”

“Nope,” Joe agreed, and to Richard, it looked as if Joe had suddenly made up his mind about something. “You want another, Rich?”

“Only if you’re buying.” Richard replied.

“Cheap limey bastard,” Joe grumbled.