Monday, September 23, 2013

The Allure of Ferniehirst, in celebration of the anthology Castles, Customs and Kings


from Humphrey family site

Ferniehirst Castle is my Pemberley, my Manderley, perhaps my House of Usher. It is more than a landmark, but an icon of the Scottish identity. Going there is a secret dream.  And while I may never make it quite that far, I have  made the trip in spirit many times.

My  journey began when I was researching my second novel, The Last Knight and the Queen of Scots, the adventures of Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange. Thomas Ker of Ferniehirst was Kirkcaldy's son-in-law, a ferocious border reiver whose  stronghold  Ferniehirst Castle was located  two miles south of the village of Jedburgh on the banks of the Jed Water in an area of the Scottish Middle March extending so far southward that it nearly reaches England's  Northumberland National Forest.  At the time of Kirkcaldy's exploits in the Douglas Wars and his subsequent execution, Ker, his wife Janet Kirkcaldy and their several children were living in Edinburgh Castle.  The family fortress of Ferniehirst had been destroyed by Elizabeth Tudor for the sins of its owners in giving haven to the rebellious earls Northumberland and Westmoreland and their families.  Thomas Ker had personally rescued the Countess of Northumberland from the Grahams, a ruthless and powerful band of Liddesdale reivers who first offered haven to the fugitive couple but then sold the earl to the Scottish regent Morton who subsequently delivered Northumberland to Elizabeth to gain her favor. Thomas Ker and his wife had hidden the Westmorelands at Ferniehirst until they could arrange the earl's escape to the Spanish Netherlands. In doing do, Ker was not behaving as a Scot: He was behaving as a Border Reiver, adhering to an age old  custom of reivers on both sides of the Border to offer safe haven to political fugitives. 

The behavior of Thomas Ker was but one of many bold acts by lairds of Ferniehirst that brought destruction to the mighty fortress, and yet Ferniehirst stands today, still owned by indirect descendants of D'and Ker's and his brother John.  It is presently occupied  by Lord Ralph Ker, younger brother of the chief of the clan.  The current branch of the family has added modern conveniences, a personal apartment and public amenities. However,  much of its present structure dates back to 1598 to restorations performed by Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst ( Lord Jedburgh, after 1622). Sir Andrew Ker's enterprise figures prominently in my Midwife's Secret trilogy.  Sir Andrew Ker had scarcely repaired the damages done in 1570 by Elizabeth's soldiers when he sided with the Fifth Earl of Bothwell, Wild Frank Stewart in a series of assaults against the king, the most egregious of which caught the king sitting on the royal privy hole at Holyrood Palace. For that transgression, a less than stoic James VI personally supervised the destruction when Scottish artillery leveled Ferniehirst to little more than a rock pile. And yet again, Sir Andrew restored it to its current glory.

and Janet Kirkcaldy {{PD-Art}}
Thomas Ker of Ferniehirst
interior panel in Queen Mary's House, Jedburgh ((PD-Art))

At the time when Thomas Ker and his wife Janet Kirkcaldy lived at Ferniehirst,  its closest link to civilization was the nearby village of Jedburgh where the Kers also owned the legendary manor  later dubbed Queen Mary's House.  Marie Stuart stayed there during the Assizes of 1566 after a suspicious fire damaged her lodgings at the Split Eagle Inn.  While at the Ker house, she nearly died of an illness of undetermined nature. The episode that nearly took her life is sometimes blamed on poison (perhaps the handiwork of Elizabeth's spymaster Walsingham)  and at other times attributed to a chronic illness exacerbated by the misdeeds of her  hated consort Henry Stuart, best known in  history as Lord Darnley.  Others blamed her collapse on her foolhardy madcap round trip ride from Jedburgh to the Hepburn estate called the Hermitage at the adjournment of the Assizes. She and her advisers traveled to meet with her loyal commander Lord James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who was debilitated by injuries received in hand-to-hand combat with the notorious Reiver Jack Elliot, better known as Jock a' the Walk.The taxing 60 mile day trip is often treated by her detractors as if it were a lover tryst, but with a full escort including much of her Privy Council, it was more likely to receive the earl's report of the condition of the Borders in the event he did not survive his wounds.  While the queen likely visited Ferniehirst at some time during her six years of personal rule, there is no record of it, and thus, Queen Mary's House is the architectural standout marking her visit to the Borders on the Middle Marches. 

Map of the Marches. Note the southerly incursion of the Scottish Middle March
When I first encountered Ferniehirst, I could not even spell it without a spell check, let alone place it on the map.  The house in Jedburgh was featured in my debut novel The First Marie and the Queen of Scots, but until I began writing The Other Daughter, I  had overlooked the fortress that Anthony Kerr, author of Ferniehirst Castle, Scotland's Frontier Stronghold, find so significant that he remarks that if Scotland truly is a nation, Ferniehirst Castle deserves  a large portion of the credit. Says  Kerr in his ultimate chapter of his hard to find wonderful book: 
 "If Scotland still exists as a nation in her own right — and there are those who would deny it, though they seldom last very long here — it is largely because of this house and those who lived in it and defended it."  Kerr's remarks seem a bit overdone, but those who study Ferniehirst may find this less an exaggeration than suspected at first reading.  In the mid-15th century the keep on the east bank of the Jed was regarded as Scotland's Gate, the obstacle in the path of English invaders seeking to infiltrate Scotland through the Middle Marches to plunder Edinburgh. Long before the birth of Marie Stuart in 1542, the castle had an illustrious history, defended and lost to the English in 1523 in spite of its champion D'and Ker, and recaptured in 1548 by D'and's son John Ker.  After the Ker victory, the Kers and most other Scots in the neighborhood played a stylized  version of football with severed English heads.  John Ker was the father of Sir Thomas Ker, Queen Marie Stuart's faithful champion, one of the few Midland and Borders  aristocrats who remained loyal to her even at the time of her brother Moray's rebellion known as The Chase About Raids. 
When the direct male line of Ferniehirst Kers died out in the mid-17th century,  title to Ferniehirst passed to John's brother's descendants, the Ancram Kers, several of them who have been Earls of Lothian. Here is what poets had to say about the clan:

Scottish poet James Hogg (1770-1835) wrote, in The Raid of the Kerrs:

But the Kerrs were aye the deadliest foes
That e’er to Englishmen were known
For they were all bred left handed men
And fence [defence] against them there was none

and Walter Laidlaw wrote, in The Reprisal:

So well the Kerrs their left-hands ply
The dead and dying round them lie.

There is a tale that several years after King James VI became King James I of England, he sent an Englishman to Scotland to see how the Scots were doing in his absence. Before he traveled South  after Elizabeth Tudor's death in early1603, he had dubbed Sir Andrew Ker's cousin and rival Robert Ker of Cessford the first baron of Roxburgh and named Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst as Sheriff of Jedburgh. Both had served the king in the administration of the Borders but were also notorious warlords in the own right. It was joked that the Kers were wardens and bailies who rode out to catch themselves the day after they rode as reivers.  Roxburgh had originally traveled to London with the king in 1603, but returned for long periods after his father died in 1606. At any rate, when the Englishman  met with King James after his visit to Scotland , he cautioned the king that his agents Cessford and Ferniehirst were not nice people.  Being a Scot, James had not shared the tender sensibilities of his envoy. Later he made Ker of Ferniehirst Baron of Jedburgh and elevated the rival Roxburgh's barony to an earldom.

Here is a very brief sampling of  enticing facts about Ferniehirst Castle:
  1. The staircase in the keep was designed counter-clockwise so that left-handed (kerry-fisted) defenders had the advantage in a sword fight or when wielding their favored Jethart axe.   There is a similar staircase in the Jedburgh residence known as  'Queen Mary's house.'
  2. The feuding Cessford and Ferniehirst branches of the Ker family often settled their differences through arranged marriages. This did not end the intriguing. For example, when Thomas Ker died while warded in Aberdeen and his son Sir Andrew Ker was still in exile, Lady Cessford sought to claim Ferniehirst to the Cessfords. After all, she had been born there.  Although the lands were reinstated to Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst, Lady Cessford continued plotting.
  3. Unlike Lethington Tower which passed from the Maitlands to descendants of the Lennox Stuarts and renamed Lennoxlove, and much later sold to the Duke of Hamilton,Ferniehirst is one of very few inhabited castles that still maintains a continuity of ownership to the original owners. It still serves as a residence for a clan member: Lord Ralph Kerr lives there part of the year and maintains apartments there. 
  4. Ferniehirst is believed by some to be haunted by an apparition known as The Green Woman, who is said to appear as a jade colored wraith. However, most  reports date to the period of the 20th century when Ferniehirst was a youth hostile and are believed to have their origin in spirits from River Spey and occasional hallucinogens. 


Ferniehirst Castle from South West elevation
(from Anthony Kerr's Ferniehirst Castle, Scotland's Frontier Stronghold)
And thus, in the course of my research, the fortress Ferniehirst emerged from the mists above the Jed Water as the ancestral home of the Ferniehirst branch of the Kers, the left-handed border reivers who had given sanctuary to the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland during the Northern Rebellion and who unlike the Cessford Kers, consistently carried the banner of the beleaguered queen. They were also rather good at bullying and livestock rustling. To make the Kers of Ferniehirst  an example to other reivers on both sides of the border after the Northern Rebellion,  Elizabeth Tudor sent her commander Surrey to level the castle, leaving little but a rocky ruin. Yet, no sooner was it rebuilt when it was leveled again, this time by King James VI.  During this period of the castle's history  Ferniehirst became more than just another architectural landmark in my quest to uncover the nuisances of the life and times of Marie Stuart and her son James VI.  At that point, the fate of the fortress is directly linked to the politics and intrigues of the Kerry-fisted knight Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst and his strange relationship with the king's nemesis Francis Stewart, Fifth Earl of Bothwell, whose mother was Lady Jean Hepburn, herself a Borderer.  Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst appears both as a hero and an erstwhile villain in my novels, and his story is inextricably bound to his castle. Andrew Ker, knighted by the Queen of Scots when he was a wee child, personifies the transformation of a Scotland that was largely medieval into an early modern state and yet, beyond-- a Scotland that has never quite surrendered its national identity, and regardless of the outcome of the pending Referendum, hopefully never will. 
                                                                              ```
I hope that you enjoyed this brief visit to Ferniehirst. It figures prominently in my current work in progress: 1603, the Midwife's Revenge.  But my fascination with Ferniehirst Castle is not likely to end with the final segment of the The Midwife's Secret trilogy. Perhaps I shall venture beyond the Queen of Scots Suite and attempt a time jump novel of mixed genre quite predictably called The Green Woman. In any event I will be posting a blog at the EHFA site this winter regarding the history of Ferniehirst Castle and the left-handed Kers.

BOOK GIVEAWAY:  My own attraction to Ferniehirst Castle developed while I was writing the second novel in the Midwife's Secret trilogy, The Other Daughter, which is also the fourth book in my Queen of Scots Suite.To celebrate the castle's colorful past, I am giving away a copy of that book--The Other Daughter: Midwife's Secret II.  http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Daughter-Midwifes-Secret/dp/148418243X/. A US winner may choose either  a kindle ebook or a trade-paperback. The world-wide offering is in the form of a Kindle book.  To enter, leave a comment at this post with your name, email address and which format you prefer. Winner will be selected at a random drawing on October 1st, announced on this blog site and personally notified by email.

NOTE  This post is part of a Castle Blog Hop in celebration of the second anniversary of the English Historical Fiction Authors blog and Facebook page, and to mark the launch  of the wonderful book: Castles,Customs,and Kings edited by Debra Brown and M.m. Bennets, both of them authors, editors and reviewers.  Ms.Brown hosts the English Historical Fiction Authors Facebook site and blog. Each day there is a fresh post authored by one of many noteworthy talents writing in the genre.  The topic of each post is  selected by the author, making this a comprehensive tool for one who wishes to explore what is being offered by both traditional and independent authors. Its short segments make it ideal for a professional office waiting room or a history teacher's book shelf. I joined the group too late for this year, but hope to make the cut in 2014. The book is available in trade paperback at Amazon.  I am proud to be associated with its contributors and producers.Check out the Goodreads review  at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/699527431and the product page on amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Castles-Customs-Kings-English-Historical/dp/0983671966.
LINK TO NEXT BLOG
 R....


  1. Gillian Bagwell - 

  1. Maria Grace - Castles 101

  1. Susanna Calkins - Winchester Palace

  1. Helena Schrader

  1. Grace Elliot - Carisbrooke Castle

  1. Linda Root

  1. Katherine Pym

  1. Katherine Ashe - Kenilworth Castle

  1. Deborah Swift - Sizergh Castle

  1. Teresa Bohannon - Cardiff and Caerphilly Ancient Welsh Castles

  1. Scott Higginbotham - Rhodes Castle

  1. Maggi Andersen

  1. Lauren Gilbert

  1. J.A. Beard - Porchester Castle

  1. Prue Batten

  1. Sandra Byrd - Hever Castle

  1. Elizabeth Ashworth - Hornby or Pontefract

  1. Debra Brown - Castello di Amorosa

  1. Nancy Bilyeau - Stafford Castle

  1. Peter St. John - Evacuation
http://jennospot.blogspot.fr/

THE WINNER OF THE GIVEAWAY IS SHANNON LEIGH.  
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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

WHEN THE OTHER WOMAN IS A QUEEN: Lady Jean Gordon and the Queen of Scots

Dornoch Cathedral,Sutherland, courtesy of GNU Project, Otter
Lovely Dornoch Cathedral is the resting place of one of 16th Century Scotland's most enigmatic women. Her critics called her cold, and Marie Stuart or whoever else may have written the Casket Sonnets, implied that she was sexually frigid. She was said to have a sharp nose and bulbous eyes, and no one called her beautiful, but many called her bright. She was said to have a 'manly intellect'. She certainly was possessed of goodly doses of robust health and canniness to survive the Queen of Scots by more than forty years and the husband that Marie Stuart stole away from her for more than half a century.  She was Jean Gordon, youngest child of the Catholic Cock o' the North George Gordon,  Earl of Huntley who was considered the wealthiest man in Scotland when Marie Stuart began her six years of personal rule. Two years later he was dead in his saddle at the Battle of Corrichie Burn, as described below. His estates and titles were forfeited.  Nevertheless, when Jean died in 1629, she was very likely Scotland's richest woman, and none of it came easy.

Even the most critical historians who write about Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots, tell us that she was kind, generous and affectionate to her friends.  She was very good at giving gifts.  Even her wills were drawn with careful consideration. What had a particular chamber woman admired? What was Marie Flemyng's favorite color?  Who appreciate books and which of her counselor's wives had admired her needlework?  None of her gift-giving was capricious; no past favor went unrewarded. When she was Queen of France, she  sent lovely salt cellars to English ambassador Sir Nicholas Throckmorton's wife, presumably for keeping her husband in France long after he was due to rotate home.  She took an active interest in the education of her cousin Harry d'Angeloume,  bastard son of her  disgraced aunt and governess Lady Janet Flemying and the French king Henri II.  She sent expensive gifts to her favorite nephew Francis Stewart, son of her deceased half-brother John and her double sister-in-law Jean Hepburn, who was not only the spouse of her favorite brother but sister of the queen's third husband James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. 
But if there  was another side to the Queen of Scots, no one knew that better than Lady Jean. Three times during the six years of her personal rule, Marie Stuart deprived Jean of the men she most loved, and if that was not enough, she took grand slices of the young woman's pride and reputation. If the Casket Sonnets are genuine, the queen stooped to petty jealousy in memorializing Jean's shortcomings in verse, accusing her of being bad in bed and devoid of clothes taste.

Earlier in Marie Stuart's six year period of personal rule, she collaborated with her half brother James Stewart in a military excursion to the north aimed at neutralizing the Gordon House of Huntly, and dispatched Jean's  father and her favorite brother to their deaths. After Jean and her mother reconciled with the queen in order to save the earldom for Jean's oldest brother George,  the queen diverted Jean's first love into the arms of another woman.  She did so,  presumably,  to salvage her lady-in-waiting Marie Beaton's  reputation.  Beaton had been carrying on with Sir Thomas Randolph, the English envoy and her good name needed a cleansing in a hurry. In a bit of self-serving match making,  the queen orchestrated a marriage for Beaton to Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne, Lady Jean's fiance,  and in it's second stroke, she conspired with Jean's brother George to marry his grieving sister to their mutual friend,   the queen's champion James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, who needed Jean's dowry to pay his enormous debts.  It was not the first time that Hepburn solved his financial woes by finding himself an heiress. Previously he had jilted a Norwegian heiress, Anna Trondsen as soon as he spent all her money. \]
It is rumored that Jean Gordon's reason for  wearing black at the time of her marriage to the Earl of Bothwell was not due to the death of her father at the Battle of Corrichie Burn or the subsequent  execution of her brother John and the  posthumous trial and dismemberment of her father's body, but because of Ogilvy's marriage to Marie Beaton.  She was mourning for the loss of the man she loved.

That was not the end of it. Soon Jean settled into the marriage and made the best of it, and appeared to be developing tolerance if not warm feelings for her husband in spite of his flagrant affair with one of Jean's servants Bessie Crawford. But the story was not over. The queen's consort Henry Stuart, father of Prince James, the man known to history as Lord Darnley, was found strangled outside of the curtilage of his temporary lodging which exploded while Darnley was being dispatched.  Bothwell emerged as the queen's new favorite, but the scandal had not peaked.  That waited until late April after he had abducted and raped her under circumstances that hinted of collusion.  Within days she was vacationing with him at Hailes, teaching him to play golf, and telling her subjects to forgive the earl his rudeness.  Next the queen and Bothwell stage-managed his quick divorce from Jean, and a probably already pregnant Marie Stuart married him herself, all within three months of her second husband's murder, most probably at Bothwell's design. The queen's marriage to Bothwell occurred slightly more than a year after the queen had given Jean the cloth of silver for her wedding dress and helped plan her wedding. As for Jean, one thinks of another trite saying: 'with friends like these, who needs enemies?'

Admittedly this is a superficial synopsis, that there is much more to the story than crammed into a paragraph or two, but nevertheless, the story begs the question- Why Jean? Why was she such an easy target?  Probably because she was bullied by her brother and her mother into doing whatever would keep the Huntly estates in the hands of the Gordons, and because she was a good Catholic Scottish girl and had little in the way of choices. The formidable woman who became Countess of Sutherland emerged afterwards.


If the Casket Sonnets are genuine, they are  one of the few examples of Marie Stuart's dark side, but not the only one. When she was an adolescent she had followed the lead of her arrogant Guise uncles and reported scorned Queen Consort Catherine de' Medici, her prospective mother-in-law by referring to her as a ' the Florentine shopkeeper's daughter.'   Catherine also had somewhat bulbous eyes and a less than lovely nose. Youthful Marie had been so vindictive toward the French governess who supervised her suite that she eventually  drove her off in tears, in spite of the fact that she was the personal choice of her grandmother Antoinette de Guise and her Aunt Anne d' Este, the dowager and current duchesses of Guise. She did not hesitate to engage the king in her dispute with Queen Catherine when Marie insisted on defying convention  by wearing a white wedding dress, rightfully guessing that Henri II would side with her against his wife. Even when a prisoner in England, she was not so humbled by her situation that she did abstained from writing to Elizabeth complaining about her treatment by the redoubtable Bess of Hardwick, who for her own part was not about slinging mud herself.  When one looks closely at these examples and the many more contradictory ones  which show the queen's compassion and generosity, a vision of Marie emerges in which she is comfortable in the company of women as long as they are subservient and  not standing in the way of what she wanted.  After all, she was an anointed one, ordained by God. Nevertheless, after the divorce, the reluctant Countess of Bothwell became the victor. We do not know who exactly negotiated the terms of the countess's marriage contract, but whether it was Jean herself who later revealed substantial business talent, or her brother George. While Bothwell got the funds he needed to keep his creditors at bay, Jean acquired rights that were not forfeited when Bothwell and most of his kin were vanquished. When the earl was forfeited, Jeans was not left penniless, and she did not immediately lose Crichton.   The Hepburn estate Crichton Castle is
The ruin at Crichton
shown in the sketch as a ruin, but was one of the most formidable of Scotland's castles, a favorite holding of the Hepburn family. After the divorce, Jean continued to live there.
Jean did not remarry immediately, but when she did, she wed her cousin, Alexander Gordon, 12th Earl of  Sutherland, who was several years her junior. They had seven, possibly eight children. The earl, a handsome young man who had comported himself well during the Douglas wars, was unfortunately in poor health, and in within a few years of their marriage, Jean had taken over the management of their vast estates.  By then she had moved back to the north and was living at the Sutherland ancestral home  Dunrobin Castle, but her enterprises were widespread.  Her talent for entrepreneurship made her one of the most successful salt and coal miners in early modern Britain. Apparently she managed the mining business first hand rather than delegating it. Her husband Sutherland died in 1594. 
Two years later Jean married none other than Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne, the love of her youth. Unfortunately, the rekindled love did not last long and Jean was again a widow who spent the remaining thirty years of her life administering the family enterprises. There is an entire chapter devoted to this amazing woman in Margaret H.B. Sanderson's Mary Stewart's People, and a fictional account is more than I can resist.  Bittersweet: Lady Jean Gordon and the Queen of Scots is planned as my next book in the Queen of Scots Suite if fortune is kind and if God be willing.
Jean Gordon died on May 14, 1629.  The Queen of Scots had been dead for more than forty-two years,

.

 

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Thursday, August 15, 2013

A Flight from Fact to Fancy: How I Conquer Writer's Block.

Daisy (Marguerite) Kirkcaldy
Should anyone wonder what happened to my plan to write daily posts during the month of July expressing my frustrations with the U.S. sociopolitical climate, the answer is simple. There is no rational answer. I am outnumbered and overwhelmed. After the first two posts, I abandoned the idea and went on to endeavors in which I had some chance of success, such as installing an exercise pool in my garage and cleaning fish tanks.  But having reduced my remaining list of activities to cleaning latrines and cutting the toenails on my giant Alaskan Malamutes, I am back at the cusp of the 16th and17th Centuries with my fantasy friends. I should have known better than to leave them to their own devices so long. 
        The first one to scold me soundly was Daisy.  If you have not met Daisy, you could get to know her quite well in the pages of my most recent novel The Other Daughter:The Midwife's Secret II.  Daisy is the posthumous natural (i.e. bastard) daughter of the controversial knight Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange who was hanged at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh on August 3, 1573, 440 years ago. There is nothing I could do to save Kirkcaldy, since the Scottish Regent dispatched him a long time ago and stuck his head on a pike above the Portcullis at Edinburgh Castle, but Daisy is quite another matter, because while Kirkcaldy did impregnate an adolescent laundress in the months before he climbed the stairs to the gallows, nothing is written about the child, and thus, the Daisy in my novels is entirely made-up, and that makes her my responsibility.
      "Ye wrote me guid enoogh in the first book--bauld an' saucy--but ye gart me superficial!--a silly lassie withit a shred ay gumpshin, but now yoo've gone and written me as a widaw wi' a bairn, waitin' fur Will Hepburn tae come back frae th' deid while ye gang rantin' abit politics an' cleanin' up efter giant woolie animals 'at hae fooled ye intae thinkin' they ur dogs." She stands with her hands on her hips and clicks her tongue against her teeth as if I were one who should be apologizing when she knows how I hate it when she speaks Scots.  
         To appease her, I promised to write her out of her current fix, but I sat at my laptop and nothing happened.  I had developed a major attack of  writer's block..
          'Tis naethin' ay th' sort, ye silly twit. It's coz Ah am nae 'spikin tae ye." Time to show the spunky little wadwife which was us was running the show.  I explained to her that if she wanted her husband Hepburn back in her bed and her toddler to start sleeping through the night, it was time for her to speak up. She smart mouthed me about being stuck in the fancy house in Canongate doing what she always did, and that it was Hepburn who needed the jolt.  I explained that he was not speaking to me either, because I had left him in the middle of a sea battle that raged around him while he was chained in the brig, and I had no idea how to set him free. 
"Simple enaw. Reid some guid history books, fin' yerself a real battle an' write Hepburn  oan th' side 'at wins". Since he was chained in leg irons, that was precisely the wrong answer, but it got me writing.  I wrote him into the  Spanish galley San Luis in the Battle of the Narrow Seas, and I let the Dutch Admiral Van Cant blow holes in the deck and collapsed the lateen sail.  That loosened the bolts that held the leg irons to the floor and allowed Hepburn a chance to attack the next Spaniard to come near down into the brig.  I read the account of the battle in the fine book Elizabeth's Sea Dogs by Hugh Bicheno and was able to get Hepburn onto the dunes at Dunkirk.  Now that I am moving forward, here is an excerpt from the next segment.  The scene is set in Kinghorn, where Daisy is spending the late fall at her cottage on the beach.  She has just learned that Hepburn was alive, but possibly not for long, since at last report he was in the midst of a raging sea battle between the Spanish and combined force of  Dutch and English. Andrew  is Daisy's nephew, the notorious Border Reiver Sir Andrew Ker of Ferniehirst. copyrighted by Linda Root, 2013

In spite of the solid construction of the cottage it was nigh impossible to keep out the draft formed from the remnants of an off-shore gale.  At first Daisy thought she had been stirred from her sleep by the kiss of ocean  air against her cheek. She turned to the side an was about to raise the covers to her chin to protect herself from the draft  when she felt a pressure on her breast that was not caused by an invasion of the elements. She had been foolish to turn her back to whoever was hovering over her. Then she thought of a means of turning folly to advantage.
            It had to have been Andrew. A stranger would have made an attempt to silence her before he struck.   A murderer or rapist would have approached her roughly, not with a gentle hint of a kiss and a soft caress. But this intrusion into her bed chamber was too much. It was time to end it. This  time there would be blood.
              She pretended to be settling back to sleep and let her right hand dangle over the side of her pallet, its movement sheltered by the overhanging covers.   She slowly and deftly surveyed the floor beneath her pallet for her sgian dubh while she endured the weight she felt as something  heavy like a human knee weighted the bed   When her nimble fingers found her little knife, she maneuvered it so that the blade was hidden in her nightdress but the hilt was secure in her fist.  Then she kicked free of the pelts that covered her body and sprang.
            “Damn you, Andy,” she screamed as she lunged.
A strong hand caught her right hand just above the wrist and wrenched the dagger from her grasp.
“Girl, ya sure do know how to put a wee bit of a damper on a husband’s homecoming!” 
Daisy swooned.
Her scream must have awakened Hamilton and Isabeth  When Daisy regained her senses, there were four faces peering down at her, including Hepburn’s.  The fourth belonged to Peter, who was bouncing on Hepburn’s shoulder and giggling.  Hepburn was not smiling.
He handed Peter to Isabeth. "Ah'll just be having me a private converstion wi' ma guidwife," he said, shooing them off.
When they left he sat on the edge of the pallet’
“While I am tickled half silly that you saw fit to greet him with a sgian, Daisy, I really need to know why you mistook me for Andy Ker.”
Daisy’s sigh was so intense that her entire body shuddered.
“It is not what you think, Hepburn.”
“And how would ye know what that might be?”
Daisy started to cry.  None of this was turning out as it should—not at all the reunion she had anticipated
Hepburn remained unusually reticent.  He patiently waited for her to recover.
            “My nephew presumed that your widely reported death changed the nature of our relationship.  I thought I had straightened him out. The last time I used Uncle Melville’s musket, which should have done it, but I have come to realize that  with Andrew one is never entirely certain. That is why I sleep with a dagger by my pallet.”
            Hepburn reached down and stroked Daisy’s cheek.
            “That’s my same old Daisy,” he said. “As to Andrew, seems I have been learning the same lesson about him as you have.”  
Then his tone changed.
            “Good thing, though, that the tyke  has squared off shoulders and my dimpled chin.”
            He was smiling broadly when he said it, so she did not use all of the force at her command when she punched him.
            “Shall we go tell the others that the squall  has passed over our bedroom and we are fine?”
            “I reckon they’re smart enough to figure it out.” 

            With Daisy's cooperation and a large contribution from King James VI, I should finish this by the end of November.
          

          






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Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Memoirs of My War Years PART II - THE DAY THE WAR WAS OVER AND OTHER REFLECTIONS OF A REFUGEE FROM CLEVELAND by Linda Fetterly Root


THE MURDER THAT SAVED DADDY FROM THE DRAFT: We did not have an automobile until I was almost eight,because there was no gas available during WWII unless you were a doctor, a baseball players or a politician. One of the deans at Western Reverse who lived next door left his house at dawn and rode a bicycle to work. At the time of my parent's wedding in 1934 my father worked for Socony-Vacuum Oil Company at one of the service stations with pumps bearing the logo of the Flying Red Horse called Pegasus. The company was later renamed Mobile Gas and given a new red, white and blue banner, but the old logo can still be found in isolated locations on back roads.  In 1934, the popular service station manager who was my father's boss was convicted of   murder and executed in June 1935, four years before I was born. My father had discovered incriminating press clippings hidden in a crawlspace above the service bays, but he did not call the police immediately. He did what everyone in the family did when they needed advice from someone who knew how the system worked. He called his Aunt Nanny, Edna Jameson. Because she controlled ticket sales and access to season tickets and box seats to Indians games and had a link to the Cleveland Arena, she knew everyone with power in Cleveland and most other cities where the American League had ball clubs. With her encouragement and willingness to walk him through the mine fields of a  major crime investigation, he made a police report. My father was never convinced that the true story of what happened came out at the trial. The defendant was known for his generosity and had extended kindness to our family, but he was equally popular with the men who chauffeured the capos of what Eliot Ness and other law enforcment officers dubbed the Mayfield Heights Mob. My father had been instructed by the prosecutor not to speculate  about any organized crime connections hidden under what was packaged  as a rape-murder, but there were implications that the rape might have been a cover for a mob hit of a household employee who had seen or heard too much, or at least that was the rumor  bantered about years later when my parents thought I had gone to bed. In any case, after his boss was convicted my father  began scouting for a different job, hopefully one that gave him a chance to use his night school degree in accounting and kept him far out of Mayfield Heights.  Aunt Nanny encouraged him to seek work in a defense plant, because by the time he was ready to make his change, a European war seemed inevitable, and America was its principle arms supplier. It was that fortuitous career move that got him his initial deferment. But his status was re-evaluated every six months--often enough to cause terror in me whenever I went to the mailbox on the porch and found a letter from the Draft Board. Long before I knew what the Axis was, I considered the  Draft Board my personal  enemy. When my two uncles enlisted on December 8, 1941, there was tension in the family that I did not fully understand until much later. I bore the brunt of being the only one of the Fetterly grandchildren whose father was not at risk. At the time I simply thought they liked my cousin Marcia  better. Later my Aunt Ruthie explained that I had a father at home and Marcia did not.


A planning meeting of air raid wardens in the US
 BOMBS AND OTHER SCAREY THINGS: Before we moved up into Colonial Heights, an enclave of the City of Cleveland ironically located just east of the City of East Cleveland, we lived in a part of town where every street had an Air Raid Warden who walked past the house during blackouts and did something horrific to any householder whose lights shown at the edge of the blackout curtains. When I was five and we moved to the house in Colonial Heights we still had blackouts, but the Air Raid Warden was less officious and often lingered in the kitchen when tea or coffee was offered. Ours was an inveterate gossip, which is how news traveled from everyone else's house to ours over tea and biscuits. That is how I learned that the children two houses down and across the street were Russian, which at the age of four I considered something disabling but tolerable, akin to us being Protestants in a predominately Irish-Catholic neighborhood.I do not remember much else about the warden other than he made sounds imitating Zeros, Japanese dive bombers like the ones which sunk our ships at Pearl. He for some reason thought they were entertaining.I knew enough of current events to be aware of the attack on Pearl Harbor and to assuage, my fears my father found an old Atlas and showed me how far away it was from Cleveland, which did not seem as far away when the warden made his dive bomber sounds.  

There were all sorts of rumored spottings of Japanese aircraft carriers and submarines off the California coast and unidentified aircraft overflights of Midwestern cities. When I was five father engaged my interest in aircraft identification. We spent our evenings building cardboard model airplanes when other girls in kindergarten were playing with Cut-Out-Dolls. Suffice it to say that by the time I was six I could tell a B-17 from a Messerschmidt 109 and  had no idea what Shirley Temple wore. After school I played war games with the Quandt kids, who had the best toy soldiers. Theirs were metal of a quality impossible to find at the Dime Store. I was not particularly afraid of Germans because there were Germans in our family, but I had never seen a Japanese person other than in the war posters. My mother's friend Dorothy Chapman worked as a teacher in the internment camps in Arizona and my mother, not the most enlightened creature on the planet, refused to answer Dorothy's letters or speak to her on her visits to her family. At first I considered Hitler a very bad man who was bullying the German population into doing his bidding, until I saw the newsreels of the rallies.
 The puzzlement it caused me then is one of the vestiges of that dark page in history. I understand it little better now than I did then.

At the end of the war  when I entered first grade at Euclid Park Elementary, I signed up for a Pen Pal and was paired with an English girl named Ellen. My parents suggested that we send Holiday gifts to Ellen and her siblings and I wrote to ask what they would like. She responded that bedroom slippers were not a good choice for her older brother who only had one leg, but pajamas were ideal because he pinned up one leg at the knee and flannel did not make his stump itch. Her little sister would prefer something she could either smell or hear,but Victrola records would not ship well. I sent her Orange Blossom perfume from Florida, little fake oranges made of the new material called plastic and packed in miniature orange crates. She had lost one eye in the blitz and her vision in the other was impaired. My father brought out the trusty Atlas and showed me  and how far Cleveland was from Japan, but it did not help. I still stayed awake nights listening for Japanese dive bombers and German rockets and Messerschmidts.

 HOMECOMINGS OF THE HEROES: Being liberated by the advancing American and Russian armies did not release prisoners of war from further military service, but it might earn them a trip home. My Uncle Jack, the one who was in the credits of the movie Stalag 17(1956){See Part I} had survived being shot out of the air over France, being sold to the Germans by French farmers in exchange for money to repair a plow, and many months in a POW camp living on weak potato soup, but he barely survived his homecoming. He did not announce to his wife that he was coming home because he wanted to surprise her, and when he appeared in her bedroom in the dead of night, she fired away with her trusty.45. She did not miss him by much, as attested to by the blister in the furnace that was next to the doorway where he was standing.

My mother's tragedy-driven cousin Guy Patterson (see Part I) had come home earlier to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan and a stint with the Air Ferry Command at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, but not long afterward he was assigned to the Naval Air Ferry Command in Texas , flying new Lockheed and Grumman aircraft delivered to Naval Air Station -Corpus Christi, Texas to the Pacific and returning to repeat the deliveries again and again.  It sounds like a milk run but it was a very dangerous assignment and required him to fly a variety of airplanes, some of which were barely out of the flight test phase.

The heroics of my Uncle Ralph Fetterly were not disclosed until years later when crew members of the Destroyer USS Longshaw shared their war stories with my grandmother. Ralph was a tall, lean easy-going man who did like to talk about himself very much. Apparently Uncle Ralph had spent many hours in the water rescuing injured crew mates until he nearly died of hypothermia and we would not have known about it had it not been for my Grandma Dick's open door policy to any young man who had served with her sons and looked as if he could use a good home-cooked meal. Grandma Dick cooked the best pork roast on the planet.  86 crew members including the ship's newly promoted commanding officer COMMANDER BECKER were killed when the Longshaw went down, and 85 more were wounded, many of them seriously.  The ship had run aground close to Japanese shore batteries that blew the superstructure off the ship. There was nothing left to salvage, so other USN ships shelled it until it sank.   Uncle Ralph was not listed as wounded initially because of some sort of glitch in identification,  but later he was airlifted back to the states to be evaluated and was hospitalized at Crile Hospital for therapy.  He was shown on the roles as an unwounded  survivor because at the time they had no idea how to deal with such a thing as  PTS.  While he was recuperating, he began corresponding with a nurse.  She became my Aunt Anne Fetterly on Uncle Ralph's first weekend of shore leave.  I remember what she wore-- a slim black shirt and a white eyelet top with a peplum and a huge black picture hat. It may have gone against tradition, but it highlighted her incredible sense of style.  I found this today in my web trawling: CREW USS LONGSHAW (DD-559) May 18, 1987 THIS IS A RECORD OF THE CREW OF THE DESTROYER USS LONGSHAW (DD-559) COVERING THE PERIOD FROM THE COMMISSIONING (December 4, 1943) TO THE SINKING (May 18, 1945) BY JAPANESE SHORE BATTERY NEAR OKINAWA DURING WORLD WAR II. THIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN PREPARED FROM NATIONAL ARCHIVES RECORDS BY LEO E. SCOTT, REUNION SECRETARY....And then came a very long list, including
The USS Longshaw in better days.
.FETTERLY, Ralph Francis 550-51-24 MoMM1c S. The little 's' at the end of the entry meant that he had survived.

My charismatic Uncle Jack's first marriage t my aunt Thais did not survive the War, but even that story had its happy ending. My Aunt (by marriage) Thais found a less flamboyant second husband who was my adopted Uncle John who I loved fiercely, and Uncle Jack found a saint for a second wife. Those two second marriages produced a batch of my favorite cousins, some related by blood and others like my cousin Sue by love. Aunt Thais still lives independently at the age of 97 close by my cousins Marcia and Sue.  She is the last member of my parent's 1934 wedding party. 

 MORE THAN ONE KIND OF SHORTAGE AND MORE THAN ONE KIND OF SURPLUS: My father was skipped over by the draft board, but he did not avoid being recruited by the scores of female co-workers whose husbands were oversees. Today's modern woman would find it hard to believe how many of their predecessors did not know how to turn off the water when the toilet overflowed, how to balance a check book, how to change a fuse or how to replace a light bulb, and were no doubt the inspiration for the slogan "Real Girls Don't Pump Gas". They rang the house with emergencies even on the weekend which is probably why I remember the names Marie  and Connie They did not want my admittedly handsome father as a replacement for their GI husbands, but they certainly wanted a plumber and a carpenter. My mother was livid when he leaped into the breech so frequently. Often when he went off to save a cat caught in a tree or fix a leaky faucet, I went  with him. I think he felt safer with me along. We still did not have an automobile so we took the streetcar. It was on those rides that I saw how very many boys not much older than my Aunt Ruthie boyfriends (she's 84 and has a fine one now) had come back missing arms and legs. The ones who did not come back at all were far less visible, but everyone had a neighbor or a friend with a wreath draped in black ribbon hanging on their front door.  Some houses posted War Department telegrams in the window. 

V-E Day (Victory in Europe)came first, on May 8, 1945, a month before the sinking of the Longshaw. The last stages of the war in Europe constituted  a race between the Allies powers to see who would be first to reach Berlin, and which army would net the most German scientists. I would not have understood the story, but there was a movie made about it.  I was still a first grader, but by then their was no dissuading me from listening to war news on my father's crystal set.  When we went to movies, few children other than me enthusiastically watched RKO-Pathe, but I could recognize Churchill's voice and I had a sense of who he was. I knew that my Pen Pal Ellen had a king, but it seemed that she also had Churchill, who was something like our president. Whether Uncle Joe was friend or foe was already more difficult to define but I marveled at his mustache. There were no movies on V-E Day. That evening my parents took me on the long walk from our house to Nela Park, the home of General Electric. GE usually saved its light display for the huge fir trees at Christmas, but it was aglow that night. The sky was criss-crossed with competing searchlights. My father stopped to light a cigarette for a red-headed boy with his arm in a sling. Even the wounded who could make it out to the streets were celebrating that night. Many of them were singing.  Not all of the songs were bawdy.  Some of the more sober boys were singing God Bless America. But the saga wasn't over yet.  My grandmother  received a sombre message from the war department concerning Uncle Ralph that was soon followed by a retraction.  There had been some sort of glitch in Ralph's identification when he was first pulled from the sea.  But Grandma Dick trusted her WeegeeBoard (See part I) and knew that both of her sons had survived.

 I thought that President Harry Truman seemed like a nice man who share my passion for the piano, but both my staunchly Democratic Patterson  grandparents and mother  and my stalwartly Republican Grandma Dick and most of the Fetterlys thought that he was probably an excellent haberdasher, but as a President of the United States was likely over-employed.  Then the Japanese did some more sabre rattling, and Give 'em Hell Harry decided to end it. He sent an airplane named the Enola Gay on a mission that changed the world. 

Not everyone agrees on the date when WWII was over.  If you lived in Hiroshima, it was probably on August 6.  In Nagasaki it was August 9.  But the informal capitulation of the Japanese Empire took place on August 17th.  However, the date that sticks with me and is recorded in most history books is September 2, 1945, the day of the formal Japanese surrender that ended the war.  In Cleveland, school did not start until after Labor Day.  All of us were home.  There had been reports of an important  radio address.  My incredible grandfather had somehow acquired rolls of crepe paper streamers in red white and blue and distributed it among the elementary school age children.  We had our bicycles all lined up in ranks and had woven the colored paper through the spokes.  I still rode a tricycle, a beautiful Schwinn in a burgundy, still a favored  color of mine.  Those of us who had horns on our handlebars could hardly wait.  Others wore whistles or brought pots and pans.  Even in the suburbs above the lake, there were myriad sources of din.  My father came home from work early. The plant had excused its non-essential employees and sent the rest home. Someone gave Daddy a ride.  Then sirens sounded and horns honked and people came into the street and shouted. My grandfather came outside."It's over, Honey," he said.   We  paraded along the street in front of our house on Hillsboro Road, and many adults joined in.  That night our family and our upstairs  tenants the Bekkadahls all crowded into Beck's car.  He had a small produce farm outside of the city which entitled him to gasoline coupons so he had a car complete with gas.. We rode down Euclid Avenue into downtown Cleveland.There was confette coming off the rooftops like snow flurries in a winter storm. People were dancing in the streets. Men in uniform were everywhere.  Even the boy on crutches were dancing.  It took hours to make the ride as far as the river and back, fording a sea of unmitigated joy and limitless pride.

The next week we went back to school.  I do not recall whether it was during the first week or the next,  but early in the semester, Mrs. Dutton announced one morning that we were having a new exercise.  Then a man in a uniform and appeared and smiled.

"We have a simple exercise, but pay attention because it is important.  All you have to do is remember that as soon as you hear the bell, you get down on the floor and bury your face in one arm and cover the back of your beck with the other."

Visit this site for my next blog post, another Memoir of the Refugee from Cleveland.  Thanks for tuning in.


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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Memoirs of My War Years from a Refugee from Cleveland. PART I



FDR circa 1933, Wikimedea Commons
I was born in 1939. There is a biography floating around that says I was born at a Franklin Delano Roosevelt fundraiser, but actually,that is not entirely accurate. My mother's water broke at the fundraiser, leaving just enough time for her to make it to University Hospital in Cleveland without stopping to get a handshake from FDR. I have a weird memory for details, and I recall that the doctor's name was May McKinley and the maternity wing was called of all things, MacDonald
House.  I, of course, have no independent recollection of the event but soon acquired a strong awareness that I had somehow robbed my mother of her shining moment. 





THE THREE WITCHES FROM SHAKER HEIGHTS:  For some strange reason, my first clear memory was entering a cemetery with my mother's two hated cousins Rachel and Charlotte. I have no clue as to whose grave we were visiting, perhaps President Garfield's.

By Greg via Wikimedia Commons
I also had no idea what I was doing with Rachel and Charlotte whom I hated worse than the bugs that crawled out of the drain pipe.  Feeding me horseradish on a teaspoon was their idea of  fun. Maybe we were at the cemetery visiting Charlotte's dead husband whose name was George. Rachel's husband Jimmy had left her after her mother locked him in a closet for three days simply for being Irish and for suggesting that he and Rachel get an apartment of their own. They all hated my grandfather who was also Irish, and if Aunt Liz Bussler had her way, my Grandma Julia would have locked him in a closet, too.  My mother swore that when the day came for her to bury her mother, she would tolerate Liz and her daughters during the wake in deference to the other guests, but when she walked them to the door she intended to tell them to never come back and planned to slam the door behind them. When I was eleven and my Grandma Julia died, that is exactly what my mother did. Even into her eighties, when she perceived that I had crossed her,  she would look me in the eye and declare,    "Remember what happened with Aunt Liz Bussler and my two hateful cousins."

MY MOTHER'S WAR HERO:
I was two and a half years old when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Then life became a series of strange events none of which meant much to a two-year-old.  Hardly anyone drove automobiles, and we sold ours, since there was no gasoline.  All of a sudden, toys were made of paper and we spread grease on our toast and called it butter after we squeezed orange -colored food coloring into it to turn it yellow. When I was a little older, coloring the Oleo was my job.  In my family, the war had not begun on December 7, 1941.  It began just after I was born, when my Godmother Helen Cooper Patterson died.  When I was older I realized that she was part of the kind of bittersweet love story that F.Scott Fitzgerald should have written. I still have her photograph.  She was a tall, regal blond heiress from Chicago, the daughter of a man who owned a chain of theaters in the Midwest, and that was how she met my mother's cousin Guy Algae Patterson, who played base fiddle in George Duffy's Band.  Right out of the script of the Eddie Duchin Story (Tyrone Power and Kim Novak, 1956) came lovely Helen to listen to him play every night in every city, except during the season when she had to check into the sanitarium. Unfortunately, lovely Helen had what my mother called T.B.  Her doctors told her she could come to see me when I was born and could participate in my Christening, but she could only kiss me by brushing her lips on the back of my neck.  Towards the end, my parents would drive Helen's Stutz Bearcat from Cleveland down to Saint Louis and carry her inside the ballroom so she could watch G.A. perform.
Photo GeorgeDuffyBand , G.A. Patterson  in car at right.
Wikimedea Commons
After she died, he nearly killed himself doing daredevil stunts in his glider and probably would have succeeded if it hadn't been for Hitler and the Blitz. Grieving Guy Patterson defied the edict of his government, packed his bags and went to Canada to join the RCAF, presuming that he would end of crashing into the Channel.  His parents were our 'rich relatives' and Guy was their only child.  They were heartbroken when he left, and so was my mother, another only child.  She though G.A. was a God, and now others were calling him a traitor for seeking to embroil America in a foreign war. That's when my parents started wheeling me in my baby buggy to the movies to watch the newsreels. By the time I was three, I could sit through a double-feature, and long before December 1941, I had a vague idea of what war was. By the time I was three, I knew that the man named Hitler who shouted in the newsreels was a very bad man. And I also knew that G. A. Patterson was now an all American hero. When the United States entered the war, all of the boys who went across the pond to fight the Hun were given amnesty,and suddenly G.A. Patterson was a Captain in the United States Navy and the commander of an Air Wing.  True to the tone of the story, he married a showgirl named Muriel Twelvetrees, widow of stage actor Clark Twelvetrees whose first wife was the screen star Helen Twelvetrees, to whom she bore a strong resemblance.   Muriel always sent  me expensive presents from Sax Fifth Avenue and called me "Doll Girl." Later when they descended into their Wine and Roses Phase, she bought the gifts at JCP and replaced them with labels from Sax. For a while Guy and Muriel were movers in the Coronado, California social set, but they never quite got off the cocktail circuit until they were living above a garage with a liquor bill at the North Island Officer's Club that equaled my father's salary as a mid-level executive with General Dynamics. In spite of their flaws, I loved them dearly. By then I had read Gatsby and Theodore Dressler, and I knew a tragic love story when I saw it.  Even when he was dying, G.A. always was my mother's hero, whether or not he deserved to be. Her fawning over him often embarrassed me when I was growing up, because he always outshone my Dad, who quite coincidentally had grown up as Guy's next door neighbor, the family of poor kids with the divorced mother.  Ironically, when G.A.'s mother died, she left all of her personal property to my Dad, the oldest of the Fetterly Boys.  Now as I reflect upon his life, I see how much Guy Patterson was a creature of the times.  He and Muriel joined the ranks of the post war Beautiful People with no new worlds to conquer.  The lounge in the Officer's Club was his last battlefield.

THE FETTERLY BOYS:

On December 8,both of my father's younger brothers enlisted, one in the Navy and the other in the Army Air Force.  My father had been born in 1909, already a little old for a buck private. And he was working in what was called a 'war plant', a company that made valves for aircraft engines.  I of course had no idea what a valve was, but it seemed that knowing how to price them was keeping my accountant Daddy from the war. But I was aware that the draft could change all that and  I was convinced that if he left, I would die. Even as a four year old child, I knew my mother did not like children all that much.  In all fairness, there were reasons. She was afraid of us, and she was jealous.  Her firstborn, my brother Robert, was a SIDS death. Mother later told me that she was certain than if she had stayed up all night and watched him sleep, she could have saved him.  But there was more to it than that.  While my mother had been an only child, Dad was one of five, and there was a large spread in ages. When  my father's father Thomas left Grandma Dick (another story there) for another woman, he left my nineteen-year-old father to serve as surrogate father to his unborn child, her toddler sister, and my father's two younger brothers.  Dad  put off marrying my mother until he was 25 and she was out of patience. Even after I was born, when my aunts Edna Mary and Ruthie needed him, he was there  for them. There was a lot of jealousy and resentment in that situation.  Mother also envied my father's competence in child-rearing. He was the one with  hands on experience with measles, mumps and chicken-pox , and I benefited from his experience in raising his sisters. It was Daddy who diagnosed my Whooping Cough when May McKinley was treating me for Scarlet Fever. And he was the one who took me to his mother's house and let me raid the candy store that had been there when he was a boy. That's is where I developed my life long love of licorice, although I soon outgrew the Horehounds.  If Mom had known he let me eat French fries when he took me to his bowling league meets, she would have collapsed.  I was terrified that he would be drafted.
FDR signs Selective Service Act of 1940, aka The Draft
I became so preoccupied with it that when I was five, my father took me see the  team doctor for the Cleveland Indians who in private practice was a pediatric orthopedist or something of that ilk.  He talked to me for a few minutes and declared I had an overactive mind and nothing to keep me occupied. Since I was three weeks too young for kindergarten, he suggested  art lessons at the children's program at the Museum of Art at Wade Park.  Or at least that is what my father told my mother.  I suspect it had less to do with my art talent than the excuse it gave to my father to visit his beloved Aunt Nanny, Miss Edna Jameson, who lived in a penthouse apartment in an upscale building across from Wade Park and knew absolutely everyone who mattered, including Eliot Ness, Bob Hope and Kate Smith.  She controlled ticket sales for the Indians, and ball games were one of life's few pleasures during the war years.  She was considered the First Lady of Baseball, the first woman to have a night game dedicated to her honor. When most of my family slept under likenesses of the Christ, Aunt Nanny slept below autographed glossies of Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Tris Speaker, all of whom knew her well. When I was about seven, Lou Boudreau taught me to play Gin Rummy at a time when Mother thought I was painting landscapes at the Art Museum.  When I was older, we played Canasta.
Jack Fetterly, courtesy of Dean Fetterly
Those were the good times, but there were some that we not so good.  My Grandma Dick received two telegrams from the War Department, one for Ralph, missing in action in the Pacific, and another for the youngest, Jack, shot down over German occupied France.  When my cousin Marcia's Daddy suddenly became a war statistic, it all became very real to me, even though my redoubtable Grandma Dick kept consulting her Weegee Board and announced that both of her sons were alive.
 Letters that came to our house in the mail from the draftboard were colored coded.  I've forgotten what the color scheme was, but I know that I was barely tall enough to reach the mailbox on my tiptoes, and I recognized the letters from the draft board immediately, because they were written on the cheapest paper imaginable, and they were produced on an Addressograph.  The Addressograph-Multigraph Company was down the hill near the railroad yard  that I could see from my upstairs window. Someone told me that as long as both of my father's brothers were classified as Missing-in-Action, Presumed Dead, that Dad could not be drafted by Presidential Proclamation.  Finally my Uncle Ralph came out of a coma and was shipped to Crile Hospital in Ohio, and  Uncle Jack appeared on the list of prisoners in one of the Stalags.  Ralph learned to make little wooden toys during his rehab and he sent one to me.  We received letters from Jack, censured by the Germans who cut out the words they thought might reveals locations or plans.  We were allowed to purchase pre-packed packages to send to him through the Red Cross.  I remember him telling us later that on the day his stalag was liberated the International Red Cross set up a canteen and actually charged for the donuts, although the coffee was free.  After months in a hospital he too returned to the states. By then Ralph was out of Crile and had married a nurse from Cleveland to whom he had been writing.  I have a wonderful picture of the five Fetterly kids all lined up, Ralph and Jack in uniforms, there sisters grown up young women. Now only Ruthie is left.  She is 85 and sends me off color jokes regularly.  She has a wonderful boyfriend.

THE DENT IN THE PIANO AND OTHER  WAR WOUNDS: I remember the day that FDR died.  The Spangs Bakery Man brought the news to my mother and he was elated.  She threw a loaf of bread at him, and that was the end of our bakery delivery.  If he had been the milkman, he would have been concussed.
FDR Funeral at Hyde Park, NewYork.-Wikimeda Commons

 The injuries to the piano occurred three years  before when one of my grandmother Julia's friends whose name I do not recall since it soon became anathema in our house, informed my mother that between Mom's Steinbacher bloodline and my father's Fetterly surname, she could approach  friends of hers  to help my parents smuggle me into the Third Reich to be among my people before it was too late. She had forgotten, apparently,that my mother's temper was pure Patterson Irish and her politics were one hundred percent American. We never saw that woman again, but the dent was in the piano where the tines of the meat fork missed the fat lady's leg.  Mother would not permit anyone to polish over it as a reminder of where my mother's loyalties were. And to boot, the Fetterlys were from Nancy and like many Lorrainers, my father considered himself more French than German.  His grandparents had bilingual arguments when he was a boy.  If he had been home and thrown the fork, it would not have missed the far lady and hit the piano. 


THE SOLDIER AND THE PIN UP GIRL:  Other than her brief venture into politics in 1939, my mother was never comfortable in crowds.  She was quiet and withdrawn when she ventured outside of the house, which she ruled with a velvet fist. Even as a child of six, I found it amazing that one of Cleveland's best known glamor girls, Miss Ann Swanson, was her closet  friend. Ann was a natural blond, a Swedish beauty who always had two romantic interests, one who was way too old and way too rich and another who was younger than she was, usually dirt poor, and better looking than Errol Flynn. Not surprisingly, the most handsome soldier in Cleveland was in love with Ann, and a frequent visitor at our house on the evenings when Ann was dining with whoever was heaping her with luxuries that only the wartime Black Market could yield.  Of course, I fell madly in love with Sergeant Pruitt and had no idea what he saw in Ann.
Levdr1lostpassword (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
On the night when Bud went off to war, my parents and I met him and Ann at the Terminal Tower Building, which was, of course, a railway terminal, and I watched sadly as he presented her with an engagement ring.  I remember him hanging out of the train as it departed, frenetically blowing kisses a few of which  I swore  he sent to me.  I also remember  that as soon as he was out of sight, she took the ring from her finger and put it in her handbag.  It was the autumn of 1944.On the way out of the terminal I noticed young men on crutches, missing legs.

Wikimedea Commons





NEXT SEGMENT - THE DAY THE WAR WAS OVER

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