Writing In the Shade of Trees, Where it all Began
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On a trip to England in 2010, I began to research, and also sought to see and experience, certain aspects of my mom and her family’s life in London before and during WWII. During my time in London that year, I was staying in Brentford in the west part of London with Lucienne, a classmate of my mom since the mid-30s, and her best friend. In September 1939, when they were thirteen, when it became apparent that war was soon to be upon England, the schoolchildren were told they were all going to be evacuated out of London to the countryside together as a school, and my mom and Lucienne decided they would stay together when evacuated. When my mom married my dad, an American soldier with chocolate candy, who she met in wartime London after she finished school and returned to London to work, Lucienne was also my mom’s maid of honor.
So during that stay in London, I would get up in the morning, Lucienne would make me a wonderful breakfast of eggs fried in butter placed on toasted bread with cheese, with a little salt & pepper, which I gobbled up, then off I would go walking the two blocks of rowhouses to the main road to catch a bus which took me to Kew Gardens which was then a short walk to the British National Archives. I spent days researching and photographing documents from government cabinet level files – files, yes, bound by red tape!
Since my mom’s father in England – my grandfather – was Italian, born in Italy, when Italy eventually declared war on England, the entire family was classified as enemy aliens, and I researched the arrest and interment of Italians during World War II trying to determine why my grandfather was not interned as were about 4000 other Italians. I also researched the planning, procedures, and schedule of the evacuation of children from London to the countryside, the wartime restrictions placed on the family as enemy aliens at the beginning of the war, and why they did not seem to apply to my mom who at 15 finished school in the countryside and returned to London, and other issues affecting the family during the war.
I also researched at other venues. At Gunnersbury Park –just a two-block easy walk from where my mom had lived in Acton, London with her family – at the Museum, I found a gem – an aerial view of the antiaircraft guns placed in Gunnersbury Park during the Blitz – the guns my mom said made such a racket when they shot off, that she always tried to fall asleep before the air raid sirens went off and the antiaircraft guns began to blast. The curator at the museum was at first reluctant to let me make a copy of the aerial photo as she thought it still might be a government classified photo, then realized that it of course was not classified as the guns were no longer there and the war had been over for more than fifty years. We both smiled on that one.
After my visit to the museum, I decided to stroll through the park and explore it a little more. On all my previous trips to London, I had only walked through the park a few times and that was always on my way to someplace else. But on this trip, since I was visiting and lingering more at places connected with my mom’s life before she left England in 1946, I decided to make the park one of the places I lingered and breathed in more deeply. I walked along the paths and after a while, I came to an expanse of lawn, perhaps a common area or a small sports playfield, not the huge playing fields a little farther on, but a smaller more secluded area, its irregular shape lined by trees. I crossed the lawn area, empty of all activity, and on the other side, I paused, then stopped, took off my backpack, then sat down in the shade of the trees, to rest, to observe, to still my mind and just take in and observe and meditate upon the moment and all I observed.
No one else was in this expanse of the park, no one else entered or lingered, or paused along the way, and within this space bordered and sheltered by all the trees, I was alone, except for the birds and their soft twitter and songs, and the clouds that at times, silent and beautiful and full – as it seems the clouds of England always are – moved across the peaceful London sky. In that moment of stillness – a time unusual for me when I was in London, as normally I was always rushing somewhere to do or see something else – but in this interlude of quiet, my mind and soul came to a rest with no expectations, no deadlines, nothing to do, but just a time within to lose myself – a time that seemed to pause everything around me, that stopped all, and I rested, and I paused, and I stopped…
And after a time of just gazing out towards the lawn and trees, I took my camera out of my backpack and laid back upon the grass, my backpack then a convenient pillow. And above me, as a wonder, as a deep, quiet, gentle benediction, I beheld the leaves of the trees high above me, all moving, all aquiver, all playing coyly with the sunlight. And the sunlight filtering through the leafy boughs, streamed down like glittering gems upon me, into my eyes, and into my soul – and this, not the beginning of my life in the shade of trees, but the birth of the first stirrings to participate in and celebrate and write of the light descending through the trees above, animating with living shimmering light the shade above and the shade all around me in which I rested, and the twin birth of the first desires to write under and in the shade of trees, the photo of this posting, one of the photos I took that day, gazing up into the breathing shade of the sheltering trees above me.
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I really enjoyed this one. Loved all the descriptive words. You should have been a college professor teaching writing. You should have all these writingsx bound and preserved for your grandkids. You have a rich heritage.