The Dormitory

Sometimes things just come together: One of the retired ladies that come to the house for conversation attends ‘old girl’ events that are held for ex-pupils of the school she attended. This postcard came to my attention recently, taken around 1900 it is the dormitory of a school.

This week I showed her a scan of it when she arrived and she confirmed that it was her old school. Not only that… Last week she attended an old girls lunch and they were discussing the bombing during the war. The school is situated close to a railway line. The dormitory was bombed during WWII and some of the girls and nuns were killed. Someone was at the reunion who was a pupil at the time and she remembers a mother arriving and taking her daughter away from the school just before. The mother told the nuns that she had had a dream about the school being bombed. The old girls discussed this and decided that the mother had probably been warned by resistance members – perhaps!

November 11th

Searching through postcard images on my computer for today 11th November I found plenty: Pictures of soldiers, pictures of ruins, pictures of cannons, pictures of battlefields, pictures of graves… Here are just a few:

Soldiers dream
 I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears;
And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts;
And buckled with a smile all Mausers and Colts;
And rusted every bayonet with His tears.

Wilfred Owen

Helping one another

It’s strange how things tie in together.

I noticed this card from the First World War yesterday and what touched me about it was that two women are helping a German soldier who has probably collapsed. On examining the card with a magnifying glass the soldiers don’t look to be in a good state and aren’t marching very well. They were probably exhausted and even shocked by the mess that the town of Amiens was in because of them.

During the evening, I watched the film ‘The Pianist” on TV which is the story of the Polish pianist; Wladyslaw Szpilman . How he escaped from being sent to the death camps and hid from the Germans during the Second World War. The card and the film both demonstrate for me the compassion of people willing to help one another despite being on ‘different sides’.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

While I was clearing out an album we’d bought, I came across some photos. I bet these two were hot in their fur coats. This one has a postcard back. When I was small my mum had photos taken of my sister, brother and me every year by a ‘mobile’ photographer. A lot of those photos had postcard backs too, and it wasn’t so long ago!

I think the album had been kept by a young lady called Francine. Someone wrote to her at the end of the thirties saying that they hoped she would soon be a bride as she was now old enough and they had heard rumour of a young man. I found some cards from ‘the young man’ who was a soldier. They stopped shortly after the war started. There weren’t any more cards from young men after that. I hope that Francine found someone after the war.