Week 28.09

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Magic has gone!

Someone has turned on the tap! Clacton’s controversial water feature is in full operation…….though with a temporary barrier round it to prevent its being a danger to the public health. I still cannot understand why our water feature should be a health risk while others, apparently identical, are OK. Surely it can’t be that our Council having spent tens of thousands of pounds on the installation decided to save a few thousand by skimping on the purification plant!

I don’t like the barrier and was glad to learn that it is temporary and that ways are being explored to permit it to be removed. In my picture even the seagull is looking away from it!

Like so many things in this ‘brave new world’ of the third millennium (New-Labour, New theology, Politically correct New-Speak, Expurgated lists of MPs’ expenses) the restored water feature resembles the original but has had all the magic painlessly extracted

The Right to Choose?

I don’t think that one needs to be either a devout Roman Catholic or a Fundamentalist Evangelical, or indeed to have any religious faith, to be profoundly shocked by the recently revealed fact that 5,438 pregnancies in Essex were terminated surgically (aborted) in 2008. 645 of them were of girls under the age of eighteen and of these, 110 were under sixteen. We in the Tendring District may take some comfort from the fact that there were many more abortions in south Essex (Southend-on-Sea, the Rochford area, Basildon, Thurrock and Brentwood) than here in the north of the county.

Leaving aside questions of morality, abortion is the very least cost-effective means of birth control, and diverts time, skills and resources from saving life, which should surely be the prime purpose of the NHS, to destroying it. Abortion is a surgical procedure and is not without its risks.
Even those loudest in their demand that women should have the right to choose, in effect that there should be ‘abortion on demand’, view with concern the steadily growing number of terminations. Their preferred remedy is earlier and more comprehensive sex education. I am quite sure that that is part of the problem rather than its solution.

I recently watched on tv a very moving documentary about a young girl living in a pleasant south coast holiday resort who was pregnant at 13 and had her baby at 14. She, to her credit, opted to keep her baby and with the help of supportive parents was managing to do so. She was one of a number of teenage mums from the same school, a modern one that had been commended for the comprehensive nature of its sex education and, in particular, for its drop-in centre where school children could find the answer to all their sexual and relationship problems, details of means of contraception and, naturally, facilities for terminating unwanted pregnancies.

I am a little hesitant about recounting any of my own experience in this context. However, I can say that when, at eighteen, I was first called up into the army in September 1939 I found myself in the company of single young men from 18 to about 23 from every walk of life, but all coming from Ipswich and the nearby towns and villages. Conversation among what Kipling described as ‘single men in barracks’ was, as you may imagine, fairly uninhibited. Romantic experiences tended be exaggerated rather than played down. Yet I am quite sure that at least three quarters of those young single men had had no more than peripheral sexual experience and were, in fact, virgins.

Leslie Thomas, in his Virgin Soldiers novels, set in the conscript army during and immediately after World War II says much the same thing. Many of his young soldiers were terrified that they’d be killed, or worse still mutilated, without ever losing their virginity. Well yes, now and again that thought did pass through my mind! Today, I suspect, we would all have been regarded as freaks!

Was anyone the worse for the fact that in those between-the-wars days the overwhelming majority of children left school without sexual experience and that, in many cases and for both sexes, this remained the case until they were married or, at the very least, engaged to be married?

I don’t think so. I don’t recall there being more cases of sexual assault, rape and child molestation in the immediate post-war years than there are today. The ‘baby boom’ of those years certainly doesn’t suggest that our libido was affected by years of abstinence. Nor were post-war marriages more fragile than those today. My own endured for sixty years and ended only with my wife's sad death. Our marriage was by no means ‘roses all the way’ but there isn’t one of those sixty years that I wouldn’t gladly relive if only that were possible. We were by no means unique.

I would hate to see a return to the days when a girl who ‘got herself into trouble’ was treated as a pariah and her ‘illegitimate’ child as a second-class citizen. Yet we do need to foster a climate of opinion in which casual promiscuity and juvenile sexual activity are at the very least considered irresponsible and antisocial……….just as drink-driving is now considered to be. Something that is a serious criminal offence if one of those involved is under and one over the age of sixteen surely doesn’t become perfectly all right if both individuals are juveniles. If I were to say that it is just plain wrong I’m sure that I’d be accused of being judgmental and antediluvian!

My visit to Germany

I am just back from my brief visit to Germany to attend the tenth anniversary of the restoration of the Great Zittau Fastentuch (Lenten Veil) and its installation in the Museum Church of the Holy Cross in that small German town.

I enjoyed every minute of it. I was seen onto Eurostar at St. Pancras international station by my son and daughter-in-law and travelled on my own to Brussels where I was met by grandson Nick. After spending the night in Nick’s flat we caught the 7.30 am train to Dresden the next day, changing trains only once at Frankfurt. Nick, who is an expert on economic trans-European travel, had booked our journey well in advance on specific trains, As a result we travelled First Class at Second Class prices! It really was a comfortable journey and I can’t speak too highly of the German rail transport system.

Our seats were recliners and had comfortable head and foot rests. A pull-down table had a rest in which a cup of coffee, or a glass of beer, could safely be put down while the train was at speed. There was a mini tv screen in front of each seat and there were facilities for my grandson to access the internet on his laptop! Passengers were supplied with a printed plan of the journey. The time, place and duration of all stops on the journey were clearly shown and the connections that could be made from each indicated. What was more the plan had the time and platform of departure of each connecting train. In Liverpool Street passengers never know the platform they have to go to until about ten minutes before departure!

Every station through which our train passed was neat, clean and appeared to have been recently refurbished. There was no peeling paintwork, no litter and no graffiti.

This, I think, clearly demonstrates the merits of a state owned and centrally controlled railway system compared with a privatised one in which the tracks are owned and run by one private firm and the rolling stock by half a dozen or more others, all concerned more for the bank balances of their shareholders than the comfort and convenience of their passengers.

Nick picked up without trouble the hired car, from a depot just a couple of hundred yards from Dresden’s main railway station. We were soon speeding along the motorway the sixty or so miles to the Haus am See Hotel just outside Zittau. On our arrival we found, to our total astonishment, that some of our German friends (Frau Ingrid Kulke, her son Andreas, daughter-in-law Kornelia, and their little two-year old daughter Maja. Frau Kulke's daughter Ingrid, an email friend of mine for several years was to join us the next day) were already there to welcome us and had booked a table for us all in the hotel dining room.

The hotel offered us every comfort and convenience. As its name indicates, the hotel, which was also a health spa offering sauna and various fitness treatments, was on the shores of a lake with low mountains in the distance (the picture shows the view from my bedroom window!) Our rooms had en suite bathrooms and were equipped with tv and radio.

The celebration of the Fastentuch was on Saturday. Friday was free. Nick drove me to Mount Oybin, five or six miles away, to the summit of which I had, in February 1945, helped transport the cases believed to have contained the Fastentuch.

On two previous occasions I had tried to climb to the top but had succeeded only in getting as far as the gift shop, still a hundred or more (mostly vertical!) yards from the summit. This time I took a rest at the gift shop, carried on, and got there! I was able to see the actual gothic style doorway of the ancient monastery, through which we had taken those cases and deposited them for safety. Standing there I felt like Hilary on the summit of Everest in 1953!

The View from the summit of Oybin. In the far distance- swathed in mist – is the town of Zittau

The following day we went to the celebration in the Church of the Holy Cross and to the reception in the Town Hall afterwards, and I had another very pleasant surprise. My long article, ‘Return to Zittau’, about my return as a free man over sixty years after I had been a POW there, had been translated into German and published with local photos and photos from my life, as ‘Rueckkehr nach Zittau’ as a glossy and well-produced booklet. It is to be stocked by local gift and souvenir shops and any profits will go towards the upkeep of the Fastentuch.

I was delighted. It was a fitting climax to my third and – I think most likely – last visit to the town in which I spent the final 18 months of World War II and where I now feel ‘at home’ and have made firm and lasting friendships.