Saturday - Monday, May 1 - 3 2010 (diary)

I am in a frenzy reading through volume after volume of Winston Graham's marvelous Poldark Series. The complete series consists of 12 volumes of which the Palmerston Library has seven on their shelves, so I have requested they order the other five to complete the series.
They are historic novels set in Cornwall during the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars (1790-1820). Graham vividly describes English country life of those days and the saga of the Poldark family. Once you start on it you just can't put the books down.
I did read most of the volumes back in the 1980s when studying music in Adelaide, but during my travels lost all the copies I had.

Tuesday, May 4 2010 (diary, WW2)

It is my sister's birthday today. So "Happy Birthday Wivica, I hope you have a nice day." I suspect she will be off with a friend to the Bodensee for the day, perhaps to the flower island of Mainau and have some "Kaffee und Kuchen" there.

To break my marathon read of the Poldark saga I have started on a most unusual history book : Forgotten Voices of the Second World War.
Compiled by author Max Arthur it is a collection of eye witness accounts of soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians recorded over the past 30 years and stored in the Sound Archive of the (British) Imperial War Museum. The stories range from hilarious to surprising to gruesome. To give you a taste of it here are some abbreviated ones of the lighter variety.

Wednesday, May 5 2010 (diary, WW2, Garand rifle)

On the 4th of May the Dutch remember their dead from World War 2 (and presumably now too those soldiers fallen in more recent conflicts). National flags would fly half mast and there would be one minute silence at 6 in the afternoon. I am not sure whether that still is the case.
But on 5 May we celebrate Bevrijdingsdag (the day of liberation in 1945 from the German occupation). On this day both Gorssel's primary schools would march to the Gorssel Town hall, waving orange banners and red white and blue flags, then sing National songs to the Lord Mayor, who stood on the first floor balcony, representing our Queen.

I was a very skinny lad in those days, prone to easy fainting as a result of bloedarmoede (low red blood cell count, due to the long poor wartime diet).
Standing there singing in the Town hall square, closely surrounded by other school children, I, on at least one occasion, fainted and fell over. I fell against a friend in front of me who thought I was joking, so he pushed me back to another child standing behind me. So I was shoved around amongst my friends until I finally fell to the ground. An embarrassing experience to say the least.

Over the years I grew stronger and regained a healthy blood count, but many years later (in 1963-64) when doing my basic training in the army I was still very apprehensive about fainting at parades when we had to stay at attention and "present arms" (holding a heavy Garand rifle) for considerable periods of time. Fortunately I never fainted on any of those occasions.
As recruits we were rather fond of our Garands. I always "slept" with mine during overnight field exercises, keeping it in my sleeping bag, so that it would be dry and clean for the inevitable inspection next morning.
The Garand was quite tricky to load, and it was easy to hurt one's thumb when pushing ammunition into the spring loaded firing chamber, and I did end up with a blue thumb as a result of it, a Garand thumb as it was called. Once at the Artillery Officers School we changed over to the Uzi, a much easier to take apart and clean light machine gun, dead easy to load. I had no problems with that one.