大象传媒

It's my story of the search for my G.I. father, who I eventually found and met. I wasn't told for 50 years that my father was a G.I.second world war. In the end my sister told me and things fell in place, thata I had felt for most of my life. I have gained American citizenship and a whole new family in Pennsylvania which seems strange for a man in his 50's. My father died after 3 years of meeting him but he left me memories and a legacy of world war II that will stay with me forever. I now feel fully connected now that I know my past.

I was born more or less sixteen weeks before my father left England to return to his home town in Pennsylvania. He departed in August 1945 at the end of the Second World War, but I was not to find this out until fifty years later, on Saturday 28th October 1995. A day I shall never forget for the rest of my life. A day that linked so many things together for me. As a child growing up, I knew that my mother and her sisters were evacuated out of London to live in Parham near Framlingham until the second world war was over and life could get back to normal. My mother Lou and sisters Rita and Violet lived in a small farm labourers cottage in Brick Lane, one of a block of three. To my knowledge, it had one room up an done room down with a scullery on the back, a well in the back garden, and a typical country outside toilet, I suspect surrounded by hollyhocks in the summer. The cottage is still there in Parham, although all three have now been converted into one large cottage. I visit there there from time to time just to look and reflect back and wish that I had known earlier in my life of all the events that happened there. It may or may not have changed the course of my life took, but it would have explained some of the feelings I had deep inside and the way I thought about some things that I couldn't explain.
Parham hasn't really changed that much over the years apart from the odd new house dotted in here and there. It's still a sleepy little place with, I should think, a slow pace of life.

It's hard to imagine the impact three thousand American G.I.'s would have had on the place fifty years ago with their different approach to life. Roaring around the village on their bikes and in their jeeps, the B17's taking off on their missions to bomb Germany, filling the skies to form their formations. I remember my mother and sisters saying they used to count how many took off and how many returned. All those young lives lost, so far away from home.
I think I was about eighteen months old when the whole family moved back to Ilford in Essex, to start life afresh. They were all alive, the war was over, and it was time, I suspect, for everybody to look to the future.
As I was so young, I remember nothing of my short time in Parham. My earliest memories are of Ilford, and on our return we lived for a short time over a greengrocers shop which belonged to Bert Cosben, a very good friend of Charlie Ellis. Charlie, the man who for the next fifty years I would firmly believe was my father. Dear Charlie, looking back on things, knowing what I know now, he really was the kindest man I ever knew. I wasn't his responsibility and he knew of the wartime affair, and yet he treated me well. There was nothing in his attitude or actions to give me cause to doubt him, right up to his dying day. I have patchy memories of living over the shop. I can remember two or three steps up to a back room, the sacks of vegetables all around, Bert Cosben joking and shouting. People said he was the luckiest man alive, Everything he touched turned to gold. As a family we never stayed there long and eventually moved to Stanley Road in Ilford whree we stayed unitl I was around seven years old.
My memories of Standley Road are sketchy, but pleasant ones. Saturday morning picture show at the local cinema, playing simple games in the street with no traffic to care about in those days. Buying sweets at the corner shop and reading Roy Rogers comics. Roy Rogers was the man of the day and in all the kids eye's he was a hero. He had a wonderful looking horse in Trigger, Bullet the dog and Dale Evans was his wife. He could sing cowboy songs, successfully shoot the bad guys and fist fight without his white hat ever falling off. I looked at pictures of him in fancy boots and fringed shirts, riding into the sunset and conjured up pictures in my mind of America. Even then I remember looking at the scenery in those comics and annuals and thinking bout how I would like to be there. Rita used to buy me all the comics and annuals regularly and when I read them I put them away and hated anyone to touch them. I loved to keep them clean and unmarked and for nostalgic reasons I wish I still had them now. But like most things when you're young, they slipped through my fingers.
My sister Rita was courting Rudolph, and they eventually married. I remember stories he would tell me. I would go in our front room in the evening times and listen to them. They were far fetched, but I believed everyone of them. Rudolph was the best family friend I ever had, and left a lasting impression on me. My sister Violets bedroom walls were covered with photos's of Freddie Mills. I remember she liked Freddie Mills and listening to the radio on a Sunday at around midday. Charlie would be at the pub and mum would tell him off, when he got home late and his dinner was spoilt. I picture her now in an apron and smock, complete with shoulder pads, working away in the kitchen. There always seemed to be plenty of washing blowing on the line, lupins in the garden that seemed as big as trees to me, and the big rocking horse on the lawn that Charlie bought me. I would dress in my cowboy clothes, get on that horse and dream I was riding across America.
I often wonder, as I'm sure many of us do, what happened to the childhood friends that I knew then. The Lucas brothers, Alan Cooper and a lad that had a wooden leg. The rest of us boys used to break our palm toffee in half on that leg. It was lovely tasting stuff but those bars where pretty tough to break in bits sometimes!
Sometime around 1952, we moved to Elliott Street in Ipswich, on of the many moves I was to make in my school life. In those days, moving from the outskirts of London to a town in Suffolk was like going to the end of the earth, and it seems strange now that about an hour connects both places. We stayed at Elliott Street I stared at two schools. That meant I had attended three schools before I was seven. I remember I always found it hard as a new boy at a new school although I made friends easily and picked up fresh teaching methods quickly. I sensed I was slightly different, not much, but there was a little something in my make up that I couldn't put my finger. Having no knowledge of what happened at Parham iin the war I just shrugged these feelings off and carried on with my childhood, carefree and innocent to the world. Life carried on at Elliott Street, typical of the time of the decade. Most people had a bicycle to go to work on and life was fairly simple. The street had its corner shop which us kids rushed over to with our threepence or sixpence and bought as much as we could. On a Sunday a man would come around on a tradebike he would be ringing a bell and calling out to sell either shrimps or toffee apples which he would have piled up in a basket on the front of the bike.
Now it was my siters Violet's turn to get married. She met and married Joe who had come back from Australia, and they moved back to London for a short while. Rita had decided to stay in Ilford with Rudolph and it was there that they started their married life together. This left my mother Lou, Charlie and I at home, and I rmember that, although still furnished, the spare rooms seemed so large and empty now that both my sisters had gone. Rita and Rudolph came to see us at times but London seemed so far away then, that visits were few and far between. Once again for resona I am not sure of my partents sold up and moved again. This time to Henniker road in Ipswich, the house my mother was to stay in for the next forty years. I sstared a new school, settled in well and made a new friendship that was to last a lifetime. A friendship that grew into a bond as the years went by and has now been strengthened further by recent events. I remember the day we moved inot Henniker Road. The removal van pulled away and sped off almost in a flurry of dust. At that time the road was unadopted and had no solid surface, just stones and dirt. As the dust stared to settle I began the process of lookiing around at my new surroundings. The faces of the small band of children who had gathered to watch us arrive would eventually become my new friends. We soon got our belongings unpacked and sorted out and settled in to our new home. The house had a Dutch Mansard roof and I remember how stange I thought the shape of the bedrooms were but Henniker Road had its own atmosphere and I liked it better than Elliot Street. I quickly made some new friends and the day finally came around when I would have to start a new scholl. That first day of turning up as the boy and having to settle in all over again. I was around nine or ten years old and this was to be my fourth school.
At this time it was the mid 1950's a time of change and Rock and Roll slowly came to the surface.
Monday morning arrived and I turned up at the little wrought iron gate of a small brick and flint school at Bramford near Ipswich. I crossed the threshold and presented mystelf to the teacher. After a brief interview he told me to find a seat and sit down. My eyes scanned the other pupils as they sat at their desks. There was one or two empty places and my eyes came to rest on a boy and I seemed to be drawn to the seat next to him. The desks were set out in pairs and I went over to sit beside him. We took a glance at each other and that wea the start of a lifelong friendship. At the time we were both ignorant of the fact that we had in common. That was the strangest thing we had in common and we had so much in other ways. For the next ten to twelve years we hardly spent a year apart until we eventually started courting our future wives. His name was Sam Langford and he was to be the only true friend I would ever have. We could have almost have been brothers. It almost seems now, in a strange way, as if we where thrown together to help and protect each other.
Eventually, on that first day at school, playtime came round. Sam and I got together in a corner of the playground and started to talk about our interests. We had a lot of interest in America and the American style of things. We talked about the West and Western films and although it was the era of the Western and cowboys were the heros of the day, to us it was a lot more than just that. We would be interested in the location of the film, notice small items in the back ground, discuss in great depth the dialogue and learn more about he actors. We liked the whole set up, right down to the finest of details. Although countless Western films stuck out in our minds, one in particular was "The Searchers" with the great man of the day, John Wayne. Little did we know, that forty years later we would drive through "Monument Valley" in Utah, the location where the film was made, on a holiday in our beloved America.
Our school days together where very happy. At his home at that time, Sam had the biggest garden any one could wish for. We used to pick our areas of it and liken it to a part of a film then pretend that we were in America and the Old West. During our school days we liked our own company and considered anybody else as an intruder in our world. We both sensed that we wer a little different but we hadn't a clue at that time what it was. Looking back now our school days flashed by and we soon started our working lives. It was now the "Swingin Sixties" and the whole world seemed to be changing. America seemed even more glamorous to us as we wished more and more of the films of that time. American towns with their style of buildings and their mail boxes outside their houses, the layout of the streets and of course the fantastic cars of the day. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jnr., it was the hay day of all these people and we couldn't seem to get enough of all these things.
I started to learn to drive and passed my driving test in 1962. It was shortly after this that I saved up and bought myself an old van and Charlie did something that reflects what sort of a man he was. He had a Hillman Minx and for the time of the day it was a fairly good car. He took me outside and said "I only need a vehicle for the short trip to work and going to the pub on a Sunday dinner time. I'll take the van and you can have the car, if will be of more use to you than me. If only I could thank him for the gesture now, I had no idea at the time what he knew and how good he was towards me. Now with a car at our disposal a whole new world opened up to Sammy and I. Not many people had cars then and it seemed like we could do anything we wanted. We started to experience all the fruits of teenage life and although we had other mates that we met up with from time to time we still kept very much to ourselves in our own little world.
Sam had confronted his parents from time to time about his colour and was told that in generations past there had been a coloured gypsy in his family and that it had skipped a generation to be thrown back at him. As this was straight from his parents Sammy never disbelieved the story even though it never sat completely comfortable in his mind. I however just looked straight through his colour as if it wasn't there. We had so much in common, to me he was just Sam, and as I mentioned earlier we could have almost have been brothers. In away I feel that we really are and I know he thinks the same way.
It was by now edging towards the mid sixties and a host of changes were happening and a lot of historic events had taken place. Events that would be etched into our memories until this very day. That ill fated day in Dallas when the cavalcade of cards drove past the book depository and Kennedy took a bullet (to two) that took his life in a split second and changed the course of American history. Martin Luther King walked out onto a balcony in Memphis and once a shot rang out and another man lost his life to an assassins bullet. In recent years I have been to Memphis and Dallas but when these terrible events took place I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would visit these places. In those days America was like another planet and to have the chance of going there seemed out of the question.
Part II of this story is saved under the same story title but Part II.

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