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| Season's Greetings and a bit off topic but involving trains. https://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=21966 |
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| Author: | Trainlawyer [ Tue Dec 26, 2006 12:38 am ] |
| Post subject: | Season's Greetings and a bit off topic but involving trains. |
Holiday Greetings, and A Rambling Moment of Reminiscence: (Author’s note: There is another story here which concerns a debutante from Boston running off to be an American Red Cross nurse in the First World War and an ex-patriot Scotsman serving in the 1st New Zealand Light Horse who had the bad fortune to take a hit at Gallipoli and the good fortune to survive, without whose joint efforts none of this could have occurred. But that is a story for anther time…) If I have done the arithmetic properly, this epistle will turn up on the east coast of North America sometime around midnight Christmas night. My significant other has made it clear that my occasional statements that I miss the green Christmases of my early childhood prove that I am somewhat daft and that if I am willing to wait a bit longer global warming will take care of it. I decided that this year instead of having everybody possible to the North Shore of Boston that Susan and I would visit my older brother and sister’s families in New Zealand over the holidays. This has brought back a flood of early memories and reminded me of why my definition of Christmas is what it is. And yes there is some involvement of trains… In 1940 my father was sufficiently disturbed by Japanese military activity in the Far East and the growth of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that he decided to move the family from our home in New Zealand to the United States. After some lengthy correspondence, Mother’s family offered the use of a house in Salem and my maternal grandfather arranged for Father to receive an offer of employment at the Bank of Boston. The result was that in November of that year my father gave a power of attorney to his brother to run the farm, and the family (Father, Mother, brother Donald, and sister Elizabeth, less my oldest brother Angus, who had joined the police, and my older sister Josephine who had succeeded in dragging her young man to the altar before we left) sailed from the port of Wellington to Honolulu, and after a week or so in Hawaii, on to San Francisco. After several days in San Francisco we took the ferry to Oakland and boarded a Southern Pacific train for Chicago where we occupied two compartments. In Chicago after a night at the Palmer House and a visit to the Art Institute we transferred to a Pullman Drawing Room on the Baltimore and Ohio which transported us to Jersey City where a cab waiting on the platform took us to a pier in Manhattan where we boarded a Fall River Line vessel for an overnight ride to an Old Colony train which was met at South Station by my grandfather’s secretary (a gentleman named Stephen) with two cars, one for us and one for the luggage. We were driven from Boston to what I thought of as a city house. Stephen said he would wait while we freshened up and that he and the housekeeper, a very pleasant black woman named Mildred, would take care of anything we needed. If when ever we were ready we would call at the green house two doors up, my grandparents had arranged for a “small family luncheon”. I can now only marvel at the self-control it must have taken for my grandparents and assorted aunts, uncles and other relatives not to all be waiting at South Station. I did not realize at the time that my mother had not seen her family in almost twenty years. That was a time frame that was simply beyond my comprehension. What I knew was that America was big, bleak, brown, snowy, and cold. I am from New Zealand. Christmas is meant to be in mid-Summer when everything is lush and green. This was simply not Christmas time. All of my school chums were gone and I knew I would never see Cherry, the Irish Setter who had been around all of my life, again. Feeling really alone I went wandering through the house and found the kitchen. There was black boy bigger than me, maybe all of eight years old, sitting at the table with what looked liked school books. I looked at him. He looked at me. “You’re George. I’m Jimmy. Mom said not to let you go outside alone. Where’s your coat? I got something to show you.” Ten minutes later having gone out the back and down the service alley, we were in the back yard of the green house two doors up and I was eye to eye with a big friendly Labrador Retriever who was larger than I was. The back door opened and a dignified white-haired gentleman in a dark three piece suit came out on the porch. He started to say something on the order of “Jimmy, what are you doing over here?” but he stopped in mid-sentence and just stared at me. I thought I was in real trouble. My grandfather came bounding off of the porch, lifted me up onto his shoulders and with Jimmy following carried me back into the house. The house was full of people. It smelled of roast beef and cakes and peppermint. Somebody took my coat. Cups of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies were produced. There were so many people saying my name that I just could not take it all in. Everybody had a really strange accent. Somehow through the commotion I finally heard the old man regain his voice. “So much for the formal introductions… Rose, you might as well just walk over and tell your sister we’ve collared a runaway.” A few minutes later my parents, and siblings and Stephen (who it turned out, to use the quaint phrase of the era, was “keeping company” with Aunt Rose) and Mildred the housekeeper were there. It simply degenerated into hugs, kisses, laughter, crying, and eating… The result of all this was that in the middle of the afternoon on December 23, 1940 a thoroughly awed six-year old with a new home and new friends and a new dog, was standing in front of a huge colorfully decorated evergreen tree in a drawing room in suburban Boston watching at least four Ives standard gage trains circle beneath it. The Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor in less than a year. Father would disappear from our lives for over two years and then in the fall of 1945 suddenly walk in the front door of the house wearing the uniform of an officer of United States Marines. My brother Angus would lose part of his right leg in North Africa, and return to the New Zealand Police. Uncle Stephen would be lost over the refineries at Ploesti. A little girl in Cape May, New Jersey would find out that her father was never coming home from Guadalcanal and twenty-some years later that would be the subject of a great deal of discussion between us and one of the reasons for the decision to leave active service and commence legal studies. Before that happened I would spend three of our first six years of marriage in an outer suburb of Hell called Viet Nam. In May of 1959 on the steps of a church in New Jersey my father would throw protocol and class distinction out the window and turn to Jimmy and bark “Sergeant, take the detail!” and a black Marine Staff Sergeant in dress blues would give the command to “Present Arms” and a group of white Ivy League officers would form an arch of cavalry sabres as the no longer little girl from Cape May and I emerged from the church as husband and wife. Forty years to the day from that first meeting in the kitchen in Salem, my son, less than a year out of high school and a newly minted Private First Class in the United States Marine Corps, would use most a day of Christmas leave to meet a train from Boston when Jimmy and his wife brought Mildred to Princeton for my daughter Patty’s wedding. A decade after, that as Jimmy and I approached Baghdad from different directions, Jimmy’s driver (unbeknownst to me) was a Marine Reserve Gunny by the name of Edwards. Sixty-two years later an Army Reserve Second Lieutenant in her first year of law school would be sitting in my study crying as she tried to explain her fear that her boyfriend might not be coming back from the Iraqi dessert. In June of 2005, not quite a week after said boyfriend finally did come back for the second time, Jimmy, in high neck whites, would be heard (and preserved for posterity on the video tape of my granddaughter Meghan’s wedding) saying to my son, also in high neck whites “For Christ sake Edwards, This is your niece’s wedding. We’ve done this often enough. Now I’m stuck with this damn walker and I can’t reach high enough without letting go of it but by now you ought to be able to get eight swords in the air without castrating anybody!” All of that was in future and none of it mattered that day because it was Christmas and I was home. That tree and those trains are as clear to me as if it were today. What is really more important and remains equally clear, though associated forever with that tree and those trains, is the feeling of families and friends and the revitalization or restoration of those bonds. Every culture has some holiday or ceremony of this type and while the historical and liturgical details differ the social function is the same. It gives us the opportunity to forget our differences, at least for a little while, and move toward overcoming them. Think of the changes which have occurred to our ability to travel in just my lifetime. My first trip to America using the cutting edge of technology involved railroads of four different gages, a train ferry, three steamships, a ferry boat, several automobiles, and a month of travel time. In the United States alone it involved the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Chicago and Northwestern, Parmalee Transfer, Baltimore and Ohio, Reading Company, Delaware and Bound Brook, Central of New Jersey, and the New Haven, and almost a week to cross the country. If one was to stretch a point or two you could include the Oahu, San Francisco Municipal Railway, Market Street Railway, The Key System, the California Bridge Railway, and the North Pacific Coast. Then of course there had been the train from Christchurch to Wellington. Father’s first trip to America was partially on a sailing ship and took even longer. The trip with us was his second. His third trip, when he walked back in the door in 1945 was partially in a B-29 and took five days. Now I can check the Quantas flights from my desk, take a cab to Logan Airport, and it is an overnight trip (and please do not quibble about the International Date Line) to Christchurch. Matthew and Meghan were able to spend part of their honeymoon at Cottersfeld with that branch of the family. It was Meghan’s second visit to New Zealand and I doubt it will be her last. Julie and I could not even dream of making the trip as casually as Matt and Megy did and I was able to take her to Cottersfeld for the first time only by taking my out-of-country leave from Viet Nam there and having her travel on dependent leave orders. That was the first time since 1940 that I had seen my brother and sister or met their children. Twenty years ago Meghan’s parents had to plan the trip out several months in advance. Maybe we can start remembering that people half a world away are not only our neighbors but are in fact part of our extended family. Merry Christmas. GME |
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