Week 9.09

Tendring Topics…….on line

Relative Risks

I was delighted to discover that Magnox Electric, the nuclear power organisation, is to pay a massive £400,000 in a fine and costs, for having allowed there to be a leak of radio-active waste from one of their sumps at the Bradwell Nuclear Power Plant over a period of fourteen years! The leakage was discovered only when a member of their staff, during a tea break, noticed that the level of liquid in the sump was just a little lower than it had been.

A spokesman for Magnox, interviewed on tv, made much of the fact that there had never been any risk to the public from this leakage. He clearly couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was about. If there has been no risk to the public this has obviously been simply due to good luck and was in no way to the credit of Magnox. The evidence produced in this case of negligence and disregard for public safety doesn’t give the public a great deal of confidence in the care that is taken when handling and storing highly dangerous radioactive materials.

Magnox should be getting used to this kind of thing. On 1st June 2001 they were fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £28,000 in costs after pleading guilty to six offences relating to unauthorised discharges of radioactive waste from their nuclear power stations at Bradwell and at Bridgewater in Devon.

Now we are told that there are proposals to reactivate the nuclear power stations at both Bradwell and Sizewell, just a few miles to the north of us on the Suffolk coast. I am astonished that a proposal to construct half a dozen totally innocuous wind turbines almost a mile from residential properties should have produced so much public outrage, and the construction of a potentially highly dangerous (remember Chernolbyl?) nuclear energy plant a few miles to the windward of the Essex holiday Coast and its many residents and visitors, so little.

I suppose that it is a case of out of sight (though across the Colne estuary from Jaywick, Bradwell Power Station is clearly in view) out of mind.

More Power to Local People

I am always pleased, if a little sceptical, when I hear politicians proposing to give ‘local communities’ more power and make them less dependent on instructions from Whitehall. It is, I have observed, the kind of promise that is much more often made by politicians in opposition than by those actually in power.

Perhaps this time the Conservative Party has a whole raft of proposals that will achieve this very desirable aim. I can’t say though that I am deeply impressed with the two proposals that have caught the attention of the news media.

One is that larger authorities at least should, like London, have directly elected mayors with considerable executive power. I don’t quite see how putting more power into the hands of one man can possibly be giving ‘more power to the community’ than giving it to an elected council representing every shade of political opinion in the area. It may well produce a more efficient authority, perhaps (since only one person will need to be persuaded) an authority more compliant with the will of the national government. It will certainly be less democratic though, just as the present administration in London is less democratic than the previous Greater London Council or the old London County Council.

If the government, or the opposition, really wants to put more power into the hands of local people they could try restoring to local authorities some of the powers that they once had and that have been taken away from them. One such measure might be to repeal the ‘right to buy’ legislation* and permit local councils (every bit as democratically elected as members of the House of Commons) to decide whether or not to sell their council houses to sitting tenants. ‘Right to buy’ with its false promise of ‘home ownership for all’, bears at least some responsibility for the feverish rush to get onto the property ladder that triggered the present economic crisis.

The other proposal that has received the attention of the media? That’s the idea that local residents who decide that their council tax demand is too high should be empowered to hold a referendum on the subject, the result of which would, presumably be binding on the local authority.

Goodness me! Don’t we all always think that the Council Tax (not to mention VAT, fuel, alcohol and tobacco duties and income tax) is too high? This idea would lead to a referendum at the beginning of every financial year and to municipal services reducing year by year until they disappeared altogether! Perhaps that is precisely what some national politicians would like.

Mind you, the idea of a referendum on unnecessary or undesirable public spending has its attractions. Could we perhaps have one on whether we really need to spend millions of pounds keeping nuclear powered and nuclear-armed submarines prowling the world’s oceans?

* I am glad to see that Bob Russell, Colchester’s Lib.Dem. MP is currently calling for the repeal of ‘Right to Buy’ legislation and the restoration of local authorities’ right to build houses for letting. I had thought that I was a lone voice crying in a wilderness created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by New Labour.

Custodians of our Money.

I am not ashamed of the fact that since I first started writing Tendring Topics…in print in 1980, I have changed my mind radically on several major issues. Twenty-nine years ago I was a great believer in ‘first-past-the-post’ parliamentary and local elections. They ensured a strong government I thought. Now I’m an enthusiast for proportional representation. It may not produce such a strong government but it does produce one that is more representative of the electorate. Having lived through a couple of strong governments (of different political complexions!) I no longer believe that strength in a government is quite as desirable as I had once imagined?

Similarly, believing as I did then, that the Commonwealth could be welded into some kind of political and economic unit, I was a convinced Euro-sceptic. Now, I have no doubt at all that the United Kingdom’s best future is within a Europe that is closely united, both politically and economically.

Of one thing though I feel even more strongly convinced today than I did nearly three decades ago; that is that imprudent lending and borrowing is a path to both personal and public disaster. I have made this abundantly clear on many occasions in Tendring Topics both on line an in print. Today I have no doubt at all that it was irresponsible borrowing, only made possible by even more irresponsible lending, that has led to the current financial crisis.

The Clacton-on-Sea Branch of HBOS, in the town's Station Road. It was here that Heather and I obtained a mortgage in 1956 to purchase our bungalow in Dudley Road. Thanks to my spare-time freelance writing, it was paid off by 1971, only fifteen years later.

That being so, it came as something of a shock to find that HBOS (Halifax, Bank of Scotland) had been one of the most imprudent of those imprudent lenders. It was from what was then the Halifax Building Society that in 1956 Heather and I obtained a mortgage to purchase our home. I currently hold a few hundred shares in HBOS (my only stock-holding) and it is to an HBOS savings account that my savings ‘against a rainy day’ are entrusted. I therefore have made a tiny contribution to the stupid and irresponsible behaviour that precipitated the circumstances from which we are all suffering today.

HBOS is now, of course, part of the Lloyds TSB Group, the culmination of a series of mergers that make nonsense of the claims of politicians that we have a greater freedom of choice than ever before. Just a few years ago, those seeking a mortgage or a safe investment could choose between the rival claims of The Halifax Building Society, the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and the Trustee Savings Bank; four then-thoroughly-dependable financial institutions. Now they are all just one, and one that is surviving only thanks to Government help!

Practising what I preach!

Another enthusiasm which I have held since the 1980s and to which I have returned again and again in Tendring Topics both in print and on line has been for clean and renewable sources of energy to reduce and ultimately replace our reliance on coal, oil and gas. I don’t think that nuclear energy, with its lethal and indestructible residues, provides a safe and satisfactory answer and have always felt that our salvation lies in wind, wave, tidal and solar power.

The only one of which most of us as individuals can conveniently take advantage is solar power. I have always been heartened when, as in Clacton’s Old Road for instance, I have spotted one or two houses with solar panels on their roofs. These catch the sun’s energy and use it to heat the domestic hot water supply, reducing an otherwise steadily increasing annual expense, and making a small contribution towards ‘saving the planet’. It is, I am convinced, only by millions of such small contributions, as well as the large ones that can only be made regionally or nationally, that our planet can be saved from the effects of global warming.

I have been pleased to see others have solar water heating installations in their homes ……but have never done anything about it myself. ‘It’s still experimental’, I said, and, ‘If I were only twenty years younger, but at my age I could never hope to make sufficient annual saving to repay the cost of installation’.

Now I am taking the plunge. A few decades ago solar was still experimental in this country, but now it has been tried, tested and found effective and economical. It was the financial crisis that really made me change my mind though. It’s true that, at 87, I’ll never recover, from reduced fuel bills, the cost of installation. However, that reduction will certainly amount to more than the pitiful amount that this cost would have currently earned me in interest, and it will, I hope, be adding to the value of my home.

Last Monday morning (16th February) I phoned SunMaster Solar Energy Systems Ltd of Braintree, an Essex firm (that would please Lord Hanningfield!) with branches in Norwich and Kent. That very day their representative called to see me, largely I think to make sure that I was a serious enquirer and not a time-waster. Today (19th February), their surveyor made a thorough inspection and prepared a specification. He confirmed my own opinion (I am, after all, author of several books on domestic plumbing, hot water supply and drainage) that it would be a perfectly straightforward job. Installation will take two days, and I can expect the job to be done to my complete satisfaction some time in the next three or four weeks.

My bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. The right hand slope of the roof faces almost due south. It is there, just below the chimney stacks, that the two solar panel are to be sited.

I have been very impressed with the speed and efficiency with which SunMaster dealt with my enquiry and the technical survey. I hope that that augurs well for the future. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves. I intend to record progress and results on this blog.

Week 8. 09

Tendring Topics……on line

Primitive Art

My elder son and daughter-in-law, taking a short break in the Caribbean from Britain’s climatic and economic winter have sent me this photo from St. Kitts. It is a centuries old rock drawing by a Carib Indian, one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island most of whom were exterminated between the 16th and 19th centuries by English and/or French settlers in a practical demonstration of the ‘unfettered natural selection’ that I referred to in last week’s blog.

The drawing seems to me to have similarities in style to examples of Australian aboriginal art that I have seen reproduced, and even to that of the 3,000 year old Uffington White Horse, carved into the turf of the Berkshire Downs. Perhaps it is due to my own age that I much prefer it to some of the examples of modern ‘art’ with which we have become familiar.

What does it represent? To me, it suggests a St.Kitts cricket enthusiast who has taken his daughter to a local derby, perhaps between St. Kitts and nearby Nevis. The captain of the home team has just hit the ball for six and completed the first century of the match! Of course I know that it couldn’t possibly have been that ……perhaps some equivalent local contest? I hope that it wasn’t a bloodthirsty one!

Whatever its origins, it is an artwork that has been an object of curiosity, interest and amusement for many generations of passers-by. How many people do you suppose considered Jaywick's £40,000 piece of modern art (now, I believe dismantled) worth even a second glance?

Pictures - above left, rock drawing on St. Kitts.
Right - £40,000 worth of modern art in Jaywick.

Care Homes…..like Prisons? Why not like Hotels?

No-one would accuse Lord Hanningfield, Essex County Council’s leader, of shrinking away from controversy. He thrives on it! There was the ‘Home Rule for Essex’ comment, that we were hastily assured was ‘only joking’. There were the promises to purchase failing post offices (one promise of which I thoroughly approved) and of ‘Essex contracts for Essex firms’. Then there were the ideas of the County Council updating the A12 if the government failed to do so, of financial relief for hard-up pensioners and for service-men and women’s families, and of a County Council Bank to help cash-strapped Essex firms. There was also the assurance that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he knew that a ‘silent majority’ wanted two Colchester schools to be closed and their pupils bussed elsewhere across the town. And, of course, we mustn’t forget the putting out to competitive tender of virtually the whole of the county council’s services.

Now he has ventured into another field, one in which, thanks to the date on my birth certificate, I have rather more experience than he has. Lord Hanningfield knows what old people want and, he says none of us, ‘want to go into a care home … it’s like prison. They want to stay in their own homes. As soon as we abolish care homes the better and people can stay in their own homes with care and support. We are not doing it to save money. It’s more expensive to keep them in their own homes, but it’s what people want. They want to remain in their own home with their own possessions’.

Many of us, probably most of us, certainly do want to stay in our own homes for as long as we can. I certainly do….but then I have a comfortable, relatively modern home, and have no serious financial worries. I have plenty of interests (this blog for instance!), a loving family, good friends and neighbours. My strength and mobility are increasingly limited but I can afford to have others do tasks, in the home and the garden for instance, that are now beyond me. As far as mobility is concerned I can walk but not far and not fast. However, for journeys in and about Clacton I have a mobility scooter. For longer journeys I can use public transport (free or at concessionary rates), hire a taxi or enjoy a lift from a friend or relative. Of course I want and fully intend to stay at home. I hope to end my days here.

November 1957. Heather and I with our two young sons outside our bungalow in Clacton's Dudley Road. We had moved in just over a year earlier and I am still living here. Heather's life ended in this bungalow in July 2006 and I hope that my life will end here too.

It wouldn’t need a very big change in my circumstances though to make me feel differently. Supposing my financial circumstances changed so that meeting regular bills became a constant worry, or my health or sight failed so that I could no longer pursue my interests or get out of the house. I don’t really think that I would then want to stay house-bound in this bungalow, relying on meals-on-wheels, regular visits from carers and occasional visits from neighbours, friends and relatives. The last of these would begin to dry up as, inevitably, I became more and more irritable, impatient and bad-tempered. Then I really would feel imprisoned…..and in solitary confinement!

In such a situation I might well crave to be free of responsibilities, and welcome the company of other people in a good care home. Certainly none of the measures on which the County Council is spending £4 million (which include alarms and health monitors or sensors which would detect a fall, fire or gas) would make me want to stay at home.

Perhaps it is true that more and more of us old people will want to remain in our own homes longer and will be able to do so. Even so, we may well still need at least as many care homes as we have now because, as we are constantly being told, there are more and more of us every year. There will certainly always be a demand for some care homes and these should be a lot less like prisons and much more like good residential hotels. It is toward that end that Lord Hanningfield should be devoting some of his unbounded energy and enthusiasm. Some part at least of that £4 million should be spent on bringing any of the care homes that that the County Council hasn’t yet sold off, up to hotel standard.

Incidentally, I wonder if when they sell off those homes to private enterprise, they mention to the purchasers that they are ‘like prisons’?

Juvenile Precocity!

Even case-hardened tv commentators seemed to have been shocked at the news that a thirteen year old boy and a fifteen year old girl had just become parents; the latest incident in the continuing saga that has already made ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe!

The totally predictable answer to this problem from ‘progressive’ educationalists is even more and even earlier sex-education………..despite the fact that, in the between-the-wars years, when schools offered no sex education whatsoever, a schoolgirl pregnancy was a very, very rare occurrence.

No, I wouldn’t really want to go back to those days. Nor can I pretend that I do know the answer to juvenile pregnancies. I am sure though that it doesn’t lie in more sex education.

‘Ah’, say the educationalists, ‘but we need to teach children about relationships, not just about the anatomy and physiology of sex’. That, I think, is something that just can’t be done. You can teach the practicalities of sex, warn of the dangers and instruct in the techniques of ‘safe sex’ and contraception. Curious and adventurous children will think it all sounds very interesting and exciting. Risky too; but then they have been warned about the dangers and how to avoid them. ‘At school they’re always telling us to find things out for ourselves. Let’s get on with it!’.

So much for the practicalities, but the nature of a loving relationship capable of lasting a lifetime has to be discovered by each individual – and it can only be discovered at the right age. I don’t believe that it can be taught to anyone, least of all to pre-teenage and early-teenage boys and girls. Their minds are most unlikely to have developed to a point at which they are capable of appreciating what it means.

It is, in fact, the kind of appreciation that continues to develop throughout life. A few lines from a pre-war song come to my mind. The first line was, I think; 'At seventeen, he falls in love quite madly, with eyes of the deepest blue' and the last lines, the most important ones, were 'But when he thinks he’s past love, it is then he meets his last love, and he loves her as he never loved before'. The really fortunate ones are those of us whose last love is the same as our first.

That is the kind of relationship of which Shakespeare wrote: 'Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bended sickle’s compass come. Love alters not with his brief hours or weeks, but sticks it out even to the edge of doom’.

I defy anyone to teach that kind of relationship.

As for what to do about teenage pregnancies, I think that we might try rediscovering moral values and stop blurring the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong. Some things that we are very much inclined to do (an earlier generation would have said ‘tempted’ to do) are not just foolish, irresponsible and dangerous but wrong. Among them are precocious sexual activity, promiscuity and what, in our old-fashioned mid-twentieth century way we used to describe as ‘getting a girl into trouble’!

Nowadays many people may contemptuously reject as childish superstition the idea that there is a God 'to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid', to whom we will one day have to answer for all that we have thought, said and done ...........but in an earlier and 'less enlightened' age it was certainly a thought that tended to modify adolescent behaviour!

Week 7 09

Tendring Topics……..on Line

Candlemas…and after!

Last year at this time (yes, I have been writing Tendring Topics….on Line for over a
Year!) I quoted an old rhyme about Candlemas which I have found usually provides a pretty reliable long-range weather forecast:

If Candlemas be clear and bright, winter will have another flight.
If Candlemas be dull with rain, winter has gone and will not come again!

Neither forecast fits this year’s Candlemas (Monday 2nd February) which, you’ll recall, was overcast all day and gave us the heaviest and most severe snowstorms that we had experienced for decades. As usually happens, our Essex coast escaped much more lightly than most. I doubt if Clacton had more than about half an inch of snow. Elsewhere though, the country was brought to a standstill, with closed schools, no bus services whatsoever in London and not much better elsewhere, and rail and air services either cancelled altogether or severely disrupted.

Perhaps there needs to be a third line of folklore verse. How about?

If Candlemas be snowy day, winter is here……and here to stay!

The photograph on the left shows my back garden early on 2nd February this year with snow lying, but not very deeply. The one on the right is of the road in which my younger son lives in Enfield, taken on the same day and at about the same time……and there were many places that had much more snow than Enfield.

Darwin’s Other Legacy

I am very sorry that Sir David Attenborough should have received hate mail in connection with his exposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the agnosticism that he believes follows naturally from that theory. I am particularly sorry that this hate mail should appear to have come from those who ‘profess and call themselves Christian’.

Surely we who hold the Christian faith should attempt, however imperfectly, to live in the imitation of Christ. Since none of us is perfect we shall certainly fail in this attempt. I hope though that very few would fail so sadly as to imagine that Jesus would or could ever send a message of hate to any of his fellow men or women; certainly not to someone who, whether or not he realizes it, has devoted much of his adult life to revealing the wonder of God’s creation. Whatever are his personal beliefs, few can have done more than Sir David to invoke among the rest of us ‘the fear (or awe) of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom’.

I’m certainly not one of those ‘creationists’ who believe that a ‘ready for instant use’ world was created by God during the course of six days in the late summer of 4004 BC. Does anyone really still believe that? On the other hand, neither do I believe that the universe came into being by blind chance as a result of the accidental juxtaposition of just the right atoms billions of years ago, that life arose as a result of a similarly accidental combination of atoms and natural forces, and that evolutionary theory explains everything that has happened since. That would demand from me an act of faith far greater than that required for acceptance of, for instance, the Nicene Creed.

I am sure that many people believe, as I do, that God is fulfilling his purpose through evolution, as part of a creative process that began in the infinitely distant past, is taking place today, and will continue into the infinitely distant future. As a Quaker Christian I believe that something of God’s essential nature, his ‘inward light’, is the heritage of every single human, whatever his or her race, colour or creed, and that that ‘inward light’ was personified in Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago. It is this instinct within ourselves that urges us towards truth, love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation; all the things that we know instinctively are good. We may stifle it, ignore it or deny its existence but we cannot utterly destroy it. ‘The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it’.

Godless interpretations of Darwinism assume that human life has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. The material world that we can see and touch is, it proclaims, all that there is. What we call ‘love’ is just a bio-chemical reaction in the brain that has evolved to ensure the reproduction of the species and encourage its survival. This is the sole purpose of life, including our own. The hope of eternal life is a delusion that has evolved to prevent our being diverted from our evolutionary purpose by the fear of personal extinction.

Acts that we would describe as being of heroism and self-sacrifice are simply those of individuals whose instinct for the survival of the species has evolved more strongly than the instinct for self-preservation. The work of Shakespeare and Milton, of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, of Archimedes, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Einstein are just the result of evolution having induced fortuitous electro-chemical reactions in their brains.

This kind of Darwinism, reduced to its lowest common denominator of ‘Survival of the Fittest’, justifies the subjugation and genocide of ‘inferior’ humans by those who consider themselves to be ‘superior’. It provided a justification for the Nazi death camps. The Nazis believed that they were fulfilling their evolutionary destiny as a master-race by enslaving and eliminating what they considered to be inferior human stock. Fundamentalist Darwinism has no time for those of us who clearly have no evolutionary purpose …… octogenarians (like myself!) for instance, the mentally or physically disabled, the weak, the drop-outs and the miss-fits. As for the preservation of endangered species and threatened human ethnic groups, extinction is their evolutionary destiny. It would be wrong to interfere.

Would you wish to live in the ‘brave new world’ to which unfettered natural selection points us? I wouldn’t. Fortunately we don’t have to. We have been given (or have evolved) free will. We accept, welcome in fact, the idea of evolution but we do not have to become its helpless puppets. We are free to follow what our Quaker Advices and Queries refer to as ‘the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, and to trust them as the leadings of God’. They will ultimately I believe, bring us toward the fulfilment of part of the universal Christian prayer, ‘Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven.

Friday the Thirteenth

This coming Friday has a deep, and sad, significance for me. Not because it is the allegedly unlucky ‘Friday the thirteenth’ but because it marks the 64th anniversary of an event that, for the first time in my life, made me feel ashamed to be British.

It was February 1945. I was twenty-three years old and had been taken prisoner at Tobruk in North Africa on 21st June 1942. Since September 1943 I had been a member of a small Arbeitskommando (work camp) of British prisoners of war in Zittau, a small town in eastern Germany. Our main work was loading and unloading railway wagons but we also undertook any other manual task for which we might be needed.

The winter of 1944/’45 was a bitterly cold one in eastern Europe. There was deep snow and for weeks we endured subzero temperatures, day and night. However, any discomfort that this may have caused us was tempered by the conviction that our time of captivity was coming to an end.

Allied armies, after a temporary set-back with ‘the Battle of the Bulge’ at Christmas, were making steady progress on the western and southern fronts.

Meanwhile in Zittau, what had begun as a barely audible murmur from the east had grown louder and louder, and by February, had become a continuous rumble of gunfire as the Soviet Armies advanced through Poland and into Germany. Throughout that bitter winter a steadily swelling stream of refugees from the rapidly approaching Eastern Front had made its way westward through the town. There were old men (all the young ones had been called up), women and children……a few in broken down motor vehicles powered by Holzgas, a fuel produced from smouldering wood chippings, some with all their worldly goods loaded onto ox wagons (the army had seized all the horses). Many trudging through the snow pulling small and heavily laden hand-carts. They were not all German. Among them were allied prisoners of war from Stalags in Poland, Russian and Ukrainian ‘slave workers, and defeated fragments of the armies of Nazi Germany’s allies, Bulgarians, Romanians, volunteers from neutral but Fascist Spain and renegade Cossacks. People from Zittau, people we had known and worked with, had begun to join that westward flow.

Before and during World War II this building was the Zittau headquarters of Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocer. For several weeks, early in 1945, another POW and I worked here, pulling a large hand-cart and, with an elderly German civilian, delivering goods to retail grocers in the town. One day we returned after a delivery to find that one of the refugees, a young woman, had decided that her life was no longer worth living. She had climbed to the top-most storey and thrown herself down onto the cobbles below.


Neither they, nor we, nor our guards, nor the Germans with whom we worked had any doubt that the war would end within months, if not weeks. Few thought any longer of ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’. We all just wanted an end to the misery and carnage.

The refugees were heading for Dresden, some sixty miles west of Zittau, where they would be sorted out and distributed to those parts of Germany that were still considered to be relatively safe. By 13th February Dresden was crowded with refugees, as well as with its own population of German civilians, allied POWs and slave workers from allied countries.

That was the night on which the RAF struck. The American Air Force continued the attack on the following day. We British prisoners in Zittau, only some 60 miles from the target, spent the night in the cellar of the building in which we were housed. In Dresden itself 13 square miles of the beautiful and historic city were destroyed. Estimates of the, mostly civilian, dead vary widely but the true figure is generally accepted as being somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000, the majority burnt alive in the fire-storms produced by the raids. Bad news travels fast and we in Zittau learnt of the destruction and loss of life on the following morning, as the second onslaught by the American Air Force was in progress. It was the only time that I personally experienced hostility from German civilians

These raids, carried out just twelve weeks before the German surrender, were not, of course, comparable with the mass slaughter of the Holocaust. They do however put outrages like ‘nine-eleven’ and for instance, the shelling of Sarajevo by the Serbs during the Yugoslav civil war (reckoned to be a war crime) into perspective.

They changed my attitude to modern warfare and, just two or three years later, were a major factor in my wife Heather and I deciding to join the peaceful, and peace-making Quakers.
Within a few days of the bombing of Dresden it was decided to move 'treasures' from Zittau Town Museum to a place of safety. A party of us POWs had the task of loading a lorry with heavy cases, going with it to Mount Oybin, the spectacular mountain above, a few miles from the town, and unloading them into a ruined monastery at its summit. It is only during the last few years that I have learned that among these treasures was the seven centuries old Zittauer Fastentuch, an enormous piece of linen having painted on it 90 pictures illustrating events recorded in the Old and New Testaments. This ensured me a little local celebrity on recent visits to Zittau.