Snapshot: The reunion with our parents, 1945

This is a photograph of our parents, Richard and Alice, reunited with their children after our evacuation to Canada for nearly five years. My father had written on it: The Reunion.

I left Liverpool, aged seven, with my brothers Bernard, 10, and Laurence, nine, on HMS Hilary in August 1940, zigzagging across the Atlantic Ocean in a convoy. We’d seen suitcases in the hall and asked where we were going. New Brighton, said our mother. I was delighted, thinking this was a resort across the Mersey. Actually, it was a long voyage to what our parents hoped would be safety. Bound for Canada, we felt no fear as neither the crew, nor the monitors and clergymen who looked after us, showed the least concern for the dangers that may have lain ahead.

Six weeks after our voyage began, the City of Benares, another ship, set sail from Liverpool in a convoy with 90 children aboard. The ship was torpedoed mid-Atlantic. All but 13 of the children perished. I still wonder what their futures might have been.

In 1945, my parents were waiting to welcome us on the pierhead at Liverpool. My brother Laurence, on the left, became British ambassador in Prague and witnessed the Velvet revolution. The HMS Hilary went on to take part in the D-Day landings in 1944.

Kate Walton (nee Kathleen O’Keeffe)

Playlist: A great friend of the family

Grease by Frankie Valli

“Grease is the time / is the place / is the motion / Grease is the way we are feeling”

I first met Barbara in the summer of 1971 while visiting New Jersey in the US. I was staying with old family friends – Phil Hewitt had been my father’s best man in 1943. My father was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and Phil was from South Shields – they met when they served on the same Royal Navy vessel during the war and when Phil later moved across the Atlantic to live with his American bride, they kept in regular touch. In turn, my parents’ friendship with the Hewitts led me to forge a lifelong friendship of my own.

On that 1971 visit, we were enjoying a cook-out– or barbecue as we know it – and a girl called Barbara and I hit it off right away. We were the same age and became firm friends; air mail letters, photographs and gifts regularly flew across the Atlantic. I paid a return visit in 1978 and the two of us spent three glorious weeks in the summer sun visiting the beach, shopping and having fun. Barbara was married with a son by this time. One night we went to see the film Grease and came out of the cinema dancing and singing down the steps into the street, not caring who was looking or what they thought. If Olivia Newton-John could do it, so could we.

If only we could relive that moment. By the tender age of 52, Barbara had developed dementia and has been in a care home for several years now. I last saw her in 2010 and the vision of my lovely friend rocking in a chair unable to speak or feed herself won’t go away.

As I talked to her and relived that wonderful day in 1978 when we didn’t have a care in the world, I sang our song and stood her up to dance with me and there was a glimmer of recognition. I only pray that she is, in her own way, in that same happy place and dancing through the streets of her special world.

Pamela Newman

We love to eat: Mum’s rabbit stew (or not)

Ingredients:

Prepared rabbit (or chicken or root veg)
Dripping (or vegetable oil)
2 large carrots – sliced
1 large-ish onion – sliced
2 sticks of celery – chopped
Stock (chicken or vegetable)
Thyme
For the dumplings:
4oz (115g) self-raising flour
4oz (115g) suet
Salt – good pinch
5 tbsp of cold water
Chopped herbs if desired

You will need a casserole dish large enough to contain the ingredients, leaving three to four inches between the stew and the lid. Take the pieces of rabbit (or not – chicken is a good substitute or swede, parsnip and sweet potato) and coat them in seasoned flour.

Melt a good scoop of dripping in a large casserole dish (or use vegetable oil if preferred, but it will be missing flavour) and fry the meat to seal it. Remove from the dish while you chop an onion and fry until soft (but not brown). Put the meat back into the pan and add the sliced carrots and celery.

Add stock to cover the meat and veg. Add a few sprigs of thyme, put the lid on and pop it into the oven at around 160C for about 90 minutes.

While the casserole is simmering, make your dumplings. Take the self-raising flour, add 4oz suet (you can get vegetarian suet too) and season well. Add some chopped thyme if you would like herby dumplings. Add about five tablespoons of cold water and bring the mixture together with your (clean) fingers. It needs to be firm but pliable.

Split the mix into eight and make each piece into a ball. After the casserole has been in the oven for about an hour, add the dumplings and replace the lid so that they cook in the steam as they sit on top of the stew – about 20-30 minutes from when you would like to eat it.

This recipe stirred up a childhood memory of mine. My brother wanted a rabbit. He had made the usual promises to look after it – feed it, clean it out – as children always do, so Gran took him to a local farmer and rabbit breeder to choose one.

He brought home a lovely doe, who was white with brown markings. He named her Mabel and kept his promise to look after her. What he hadn’t known though was that she was pregnant and shortly after her arrival, there was suddenly a writhing nest of fluffiness at the back of her hutch. She produced eight beautiful kittens (yes, baby bunnies are called kittens) and most of them found homes.

One lunchtime, when Dad said all the rabbits had gone and only mother rabbit Mabel was left, Mum made stew for dinner. It smelled delicious and Mum began to serve it with new potatoes and green beans, fresh from the garden. I looked at my plate, and then at Mum and asked what kind of stew it was. “Rabbit stew,” Mum replied, much as I had feared. I said I wasn’t hungry and would just have the vegetables, but my brother declared: “It was my rabbit, so I want the most!”

He’s never been allowed to forget it.

Mabel was thereafter a solitary soul – she never did meet the young buck of her dreams (again) and remained a celibate rabbit for the rest of her life, for which I think she was probably grateful. My brother discovered football so Mabel became mine and lived out her days feasting on dandelions and lettuce.

Karen Ette

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