My very first memory is from Caux at the age of three just after this photo was taken! I rolled down the huge grass covered slope and was stung by a bee! This probably stuck in my mind because of the huge bubble of a blister that followed. The doctor lanced the blister holding a kidney shaped enamel metal dish to catch the juice! Strange how certain things stand out in your mind!
Not all the people who came from Norway to live with us were a hit! There was one girl who I am sad to say I couldn’t stand. One evening when my parents went to eat dinner with friends, to my shame I can remember waiting for her behind the bathroom door, standing on the edge of the bathtub. As she came round the door I hit her with the toilet brush and told her so. She never returned.
Those of us whose parents worked on the task-force didn’t have homes of our own. The families we stayed with had a home or center where we were welcomed and became part of their family network for a time. But then when it was time to move on, we would move on to stay with another family in another town or country. If we went places it was for our parents to do a job or to visit team-mates and we usually stayed somewhere that housed lots of us in one place. These experiences are what is known as a third culture and are those that can’t be recreated. We could meet some of those people again, but in another setting and another place. We couldn’t return to our childhood homes or memories because the places or people were no longer ’together’. We stayed with other families when we weren’t travelling and after the car crash on the way to the dentist in California, my parents didn’t own a car until I was in my teens. In fact my parents didn’t have a home of their own home till I was 27 and about to be married.
Despite all these challenges I loved my childhood! I loved going with my father on a photo shoot and picking up the light bulbs that popped with each photo that was taken. Watching my father guage the right moment to catch a special expression or view. Watching him work in the darkroom and seeing how he rubbed a photo as it developed to bring out certain highlights as it lay in the developer and seeing all the photos swirl in a channel of water as they were rinsed. I was intrigued by how he could put his hands into a black bag with arms to take a film out of the roll and thread it into a black round plastic jar used to develop film. And I was later allowed to rinse the jar through a tube in the top and hang up films to dry with clips top and bottom.
I loved seeing how my parents worked on lay-outs to produce magazines or boards of graphic information for an exhibition. They would work as a team together meticulously planning the lay-out on paper. My father would suggest relevant photos and my mother, often sitting on the floor, would finalize the design and headings for texts written by others of their colleagues. And finally it was all packed together and taken to the printers a job I also enjoyed being part of. It must have got into my pores as later in life I had the opportunity to do similar work and even manage a small publishing company. Maybe its just in the genes.
For the first 15 years of my life my parents worked as part of this mobile task force which had started out in America during the war and grew into an international close-knit team. They were often on the move as their tasks took them to different parts of the world. Although I had no blood-siblings the children I grew up with in this team became like my brothers and sisters. I still count these 12 children of my age or thereabouts as my brothers and sisters. They know who they are!
London properties were on sale at premium prices after the war. There were still lots of gaps between the houses as it was only a few years since the war had ended and London was still scarred by bombings. Several houses on Charles Street and Hays Mews were bought, privately or by the Oxford Group (the business entity for MRA) and together they became MRA’s London center. Not all of the original task-force lived on-the-road, like my parents did, many built local teams like the Beldens who made their home at 40 Charles Street. We lived in their Mews at the back, close to Shepherds Market for some years and their children became my siblings!
After the joint experience of caring for children of the mobile force together in Caux in the late 1940’s, a new attempt was made in London to plan for a school and for holiday events.
School was created, complete with small chairs and tables, in the basement of the Knightsbridge home of Roly, Mary and Margaret Wilson. Dot John, a Fröbel teacher, was recruited to teach us for a few years until the time came to apply to local schools at the age of 6 and 7. I used to walk to school from 40 Charles Street with Hilary and David Belden. There were many stops on the way as we negotiated the London smog – known as pea soup fog. In the autumn we played in the fallen leaves of the “porridge trees” as we called Green Park’s plain trees and stopped outside the hotel where the giant goldfish swam.
My mother’s health continued to be problematic and she had hospital visits, operations and time away recuperating. This was a continuation of her challenges as a child and growing up. But because of our large extended family I had close friends and usually one of my parents close by. I felt well cared for and happy, loving all the fun times with my friends.
One of the more memorable summers was at a house close to the coast at Bexhill where we swam in the sea – until I got severely stung by a Portuguese man of war jellyfish. I had to lie in a dark room for 2 days, bathed in calamine lotion! Another summer we spent at a wonderful old farmhouse in Dedisham where King??? Was supposed to have hidden down a well! Yet another summer at a farmhouse in Liss with Geoff and Mary Lean – a memorable place where we picnicked, explored fields, bluebell woods and rode in hayricks. There was one sticky moment when the adults were shopping and we kids were left in the car a little too long and I remember taking a bite out of Geoff in the fight that ensued in the back of the car! Then there was Primrose Hill the place we learnt to ride bikes and where we had a summer fete on my 6th birthday.
Signe and I spent some summer weeks together with the Dow family in Dulwich. They spent their summers on Arran in Scotland. It was so quiet and the road was empty at 5 am when they packed their “woody” and got ready to drive off that they all lay down like sardines on the road – just because they could! They were a fun family to be around and we stayed there with Sue Thornhill and her family. Sue had hayfever and snuffled through the summer in their overgrown garden where we all romped and had a wonderful time.
As a child I loved playing with animals and also had pets of my own. Minnie was a long-suffering little black kitten. I would give it chocolate milk in a doll’s bottle, made from a piece of chocolate dissolved in water! I dressed it up in my doll’s red and white gingham pyjamas, and fastened it in a little harness to my doll’s wicker pram so I could roll it around or take it to the park in a zipper bag so that Minnie could feel grass under it’s feet.
I also had a series of yellow canaries, all called Tweety. I had brought my current Tweety with me for a stay with the Dow family. Tweety lived a relatively free life in their large upstairs bathroom. She laid eggs but they never hatched and we used to make scrambled eggs in my dolls frying pan! Tweety loved all the hairbrushes and used the hair she collected to pad out my doll’s colander which we placed up on a curtain rail so she had somewhere to lay her eggs until Tweety came to a sorry end taking a drink in the loo at the wrong moment. The toilet was flushed and Tweety drowned!
One spring we spent some weeks at Aston Bury, a stately home where we all created a dorm under the eaves on the top floor! Minnie was no more and I had brought my latest Tweety with me. This tweety also layed eggs in my little doll-sized colander lined with fabric. She sat and sat but the eggs never hatched so Signe suggested that we remove one of the many sparrows’ eggs in a hedgerow and give it to Tweety to sit on. Sure enough it hatched! Lots of dropperfuls of milk later the sparrow had grown so big that we needed to find it a better home and we placed the sparrow back in its own nest. We kept an eye on the nest, afraid that the mother would turf it out, but happily it survived and became the biggest of the baby sparrows.
A favourite pastime at Aston Bury was collecting white snails with huge houses that came home with me to London in a shoebox. I hid the shoebox in a drawer but some days later when I looked in the box the snails had vanished – hopefully taken care of by my mother though I never asked.
When I was five my parents left with a task force to visit Africa. I was to stay in London with Birgit and Auntie Vi and would be sharing homes with my friends. As I waved goodbye to my parents when they left I was chipper though Signe said she dissolved in tears as they drove off to the airport. Right through the journey she wrote illustrated letters telling me about all they did. I proudly showed all the other children in our little school the pen and ink drawings and we all followed their journey in Africa. I still have our correspondence book.
Auntie Vi and I spent several months with Hannon and Marjorie Foss and their 3 children in Wimbledon. Hannon was a film maker and on Saturday mornings he would get all us kids into their bed and draw cartoons! They had a baby blue MG convertible and drew brilliant cartoons where the MG and other cars played the starring roles. Somehow the huge blocks that Signe had had made for me in California joined me there! One memory from that time was how I climbed a pile of logs outside their garage. The logs fell down and I cracked a bone in my foot, known as a green-stick fracture. I didn’t get a cast and wasn’t allowed to walk on it and I got to spend time sitting in the back of the MG as Hannon’s wife Marjorie carried out her errands!
The Foss Children used to go to church. Other than my baptism I had no memories of church until then. When I was with the Fosses I went to their church and discovered the church community that was a part of the Fosses culture but was new to me. My parents had a deep Christian faith but you could say it was an everyday Christianity. It was more like experiencing church every day – but I was a little jealous of their stamp books. Every time they went to Sunday School they heard a bible story and each week they got a new stamp that illustrated that week’s bible story. This was duly licked and put into a little Sunday School story book that they brought home. I didn’t have one. I clearly remember Palm Sunday when we all got palm fronds and Mothering Sunday as Mother’s day was called in those days – when they handed out daffodils. These were handed to me too and I gave mine to my Auntie Vi.
While my parents were on this mission in Africa, they visited Zimbabwe or Southern Rhodesia as it was called in those days. There they stayed with Arthurs mother, brother and 3 sisters who lived there. While they were away they even considered moving to be near Arthur’s family. When they came back I had grown up a lot and felt shy with them for a while but it soon wore off! They talked to me about the idea of moving to Africa and said how uncertain they were. I remember they suggested that we have a ‘quiet time’ together to see if we could get more clarity. I remember how clearly I felt that this was not where God wanted us to be and I said so! This confirmed their own thoughts and so we stayed in London where they started applying for me to go to local schools. Thinking back, I am impressed that they trusted that God could show a child what to do, just as clearly as an adult.
That summer I received a Brownie Box camera for my birthday. As a photographer’s daughter I was so proud and started to take pictures and collect my negatives. I still have my first picture. It was of their Nigerian friend Mbu who came to visit. It is entitled “Mbu in the roses”.
We were invited to come for interviews to different schools, but every time we had an interview, I got sick. Eventually I told my parents, “God doesn’t want me to go to school in London!” and they must have agreed. They investigated correspondence schools and found the Parent National Education Union – PNEU, which provided correspondence courses for children who were enrolled in the school. But as I was not enrolled in the school the first step was to enroll me at the PNEU school in Lancaster Gate. Friends of theirs who were away on business happened to live just around the corner from the school and we moved into their apartment.
You could say that the PNEU school had a broad education for a seven-year old. In my geography class I learnt how the dutch made and transported their red round Edam cheeses. We were taught about the stars, norse gods and greek mythology. We were taught art appreciation and I still have the bound folders of art prints done by the artists that we learnt about. We had exams. At my age we were allowed to dictate our exams. One history question I had was to tell about Good Queen Bess. As I had never heard of Elizabeth I and no grasp of English history, I made up a story about Good Queen Bess that the teachers must have had a good laugh at! The teacher taking dictation never let on either!
The parties that I was invited to were like nothing I had experienced before. My friends lived in huge homes, inside enclosures, where we were served luscious cakes served by servants. One time we were entertained by a wizard. One of my classmates was Miranda Quarry who eventually became one of Peter Sellers’ wives.
The children that played in the nearby park at Lancaster Gate came to the local pond with their beautiful yachts. We didn’t have a yacht, but I wanted to float my boat too so I built a Kontiki raft with sticks I found in the park á la Thor Heyerdahl from Norway. I sailed that Kontiki with pride beside all their yachts!
After a term at the PNEU school we left for Caux. For some years Sue, Cathi and I were home schooled together at Caux. My mother was with me all the time in Caux while my father was travelling with MRA in Africa, particularly the Congo.
While the main task force was active in other parts of the world in the early 1950’s, Signe sometimes experienced that the previously stimulating and scintillating atmosphere in Caux sometimes sunk to another level. Some people resorted to navel gazing, using MRA’s 4 principles of honesty, purity, love and unselfishness as a right to chastise rather than inspire. And although the little old ladies, as we kids used to call them, were no doubt doing a great job maintaining the conference center, they often took us to task. Signe was chastised for coddling me and they suggested that we had a lesbian relationship! To my mind these years represented the organization at its worst.
The amazing free spirit my parents had been inspired by could easily become a controlling cult with a grilling at the hand of a colleague or two who made use of thoughts from their ‘quiet time’. Thoughts that were recorded in their ‘little black book’ could be interpreted as guidance from God but felt more like condemnation at the hands of fellow team mates and when you were invited to a meal at one of Caux’s ‘little round tables’ of 4 you could guess that you were in for it!
As an independent thinker my mother would take truths to heart and could also let the criticism fall like water from a duck’s back as necessary.
Signe taught us art, Elisabeth sewing, Barbara taught us cooking and Dot John, who had been our teacher in London, joined the team of 3 parents, to teach us what was known as the three R’s: Reading, Riting, Rithmatic! We roamed the mountains and valleys and knew all the small paths up and down the mountain. We learnt the names of the birds, trees and we pressed flowers. Every season was special. We were taught skiing by Bethli and Jacqui, an officer in the Swiss army. We learnt to sing Swiss folk songs in parts and rounds. We picked narcissi and sent them to friends in other parts of the world. It was truly ildyllic for me.
We started out living in the Maria, a large house with many beds where we all had our little apartment or set of rooms. One memory I have of that time was when we got the Asian flu. My fever went up to 105 C and I must have been unconscious because I can remember seeing lots of small stick-men running all over my covers as I lay there in bed! Thankfully I was recovering when the boiler broke and we had to move to the Patinoir – another of the many houses that were part of the Caux conference center, close to the skating rink for which in had its name.
I was wary of playing with the French Children who lived in the Patinoir as I couldn’t understand what they said. Sylvie’s father was the Caux Postmaster and they lived on the floor below us. One day I went out to play and didn’t come back for a long time. When I eventually returned my mother asked me where I’d been. I told her that I’d been playing with Sylvie. When she commented that Sylvie only speaks French I replied “Yes, but we laugh in the same language!” We still do as we became friends for life!
I experienced my mother’s creativity on many levels. On Saturday nights she got out her beautiful Charles Martin guitar and sang all the songs she had grown up with. Many of them were Swedish folk songs and Bellman’s classic Gluntarna that became the underpinning of my Scandinavian background. Others were the beautiful German songs she learnt as a student in Germany. She taught me how to sing alto and soprano and how to sing a round. We would drink a Seven-Up between us and eat some nuts to celebrate our Saturday evening.
I remember when I was about to turn 10. Signe and I were in Caux. Arthur was by now in the US. My friends had been sent moccasins by their parents who were also in America and I badly wanted moccasins too. Signe had planned to get me oil paints for my birthday as I loved to draw and was developing artistically. As my birthday approached, she knew that I wouldn’t be getting moccasins and was worried that my birthday would become a disaster. Then one night I woke up in tears having had a ‘bad dream’. In the dream I had been given a parcel but when I opened it all that was inside turned to sand. I took this to mean that I would not get moccasins when the dream repeated itself. I was devastated and in floods of tears and Signe was very apprehensive but after my birthday she asked me if I was happy with my birthday, and my response was that I had got all I hoped for and more. No tears!
As the task forces returned to Caux after a world tour with a musical called The Vanishing Island, other families saw that our mothers had a good thing going and arranged for their children to join us. These children didn’t have either of their parents with them and the experience was sometimes far from idyllic as without their parents, the school turned into more of a typical Swiss boarding school where children were left with ‘carers’ so that their parents could continue their lives elsewhere – albeit in this case to follow their calling to ‘remake the world’.
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