TriniTea: John, Fellow

The wonders of technology are enabling us to stay in touch with family and loved ones in the midst of lockdown. The anniversary of VE day makes me reflect on the very different way that families were separated and reunited in May 1945.

In September 1944 my grandfather sent me to a boarding Preparatory School in the Sussex Weald. I was just seven years old. Earlier that year, before D Day, I had returned to England on an aircraft carrier after four years in the USA, sent there as a refugee by grandparents who thought me too great a responsibility, my mother being dead and my father taken prisoner by the Germans in May 1940.

Looking back, it must have been the night of Monday 7^th May 1945. My dormitory of half a dozen seven-year olds was having a pillow fight, pushing around the floor in wicker laundry-baskets. Hearing matron’s minatory footsteps in the corridor we tumbled back into our beds. She opened the door: “Lonsdale, you’re wanted in the headmaster’s study.” “Why only me?” was my obvious thought. We went downstairs.  Standing next to the headmaster was a man who said he was my father. I think we shook hands. He had been liberated a day or two earlier in north Germany. I have no idea how we spent the next day, VE day. I suppose my father had gone off to see his own father, my grandfather, who had fought in the Ashanti Relief Expedition in West Africa, in 1896.

8th May 2020