Friday, August 24, 2007
Ignorance is Not Bliss--A Child's Perspective
I was five years old when World War Two started. The only "war" I knew anything about was the "bob war" fence I had to wriggle through to reach the spring where we got our water in the tiny community of Spring Grove, Texas. I couldn't understand why the adults were is such a tizzy.
Soon our family of seven had to walk to the nearby school house and register for books of stamps in order to buy things that were in short supply, such as sugar. Since we didn't have enough money to buy sugar, anyway, we gave most of our stamps away.
The only way Daddy had of earning money at Spring Grove was cutting trees with a crosscut saw and selling the wood to neighbors. When the war effort needed most of the rubber that was available, replacing the worn out tires on his old pickup was impossible, and his income dried up. He hitchhiked back to Flomot and worked for an old friend until he could make enough money to move the family back to home territory.
I heard just enough adult conversation to know the dull green planes that flew overhead had something to do with the war and bombs. Somehow I thought the bombs were carried on top of the wings, and whenever one banked to turn, I started looking for a safe place to hide from the bombs that were sure to fall off. But where do you hide from a bomb?
After we moved back to Flomot and I started to school, somewhere I saw a swastika. Having no idea what it meant, I thought it looked really neat, so I took a piece of chalk and drew a swastika on every board of the old unpainted shack we lived in. Boy! I might as well have printed the cuss words I was learning.
We had no radio or newspaper, so our news had to come by word of mouth. One day I saw Daddy running across the field from the landlord's house, a spectacular sight for an old man in his fifties. He had just got news that the war was over. No more swastikas.
Cora Gail Gunn Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Soon our family of seven had to walk to the nearby school house and register for books of stamps in order to buy things that were in short supply, such as sugar. Since we didn't have enough money to buy sugar, anyway, we gave most of our stamps away.
The only way Daddy had of earning money at Spring Grove was cutting trees with a crosscut saw and selling the wood to neighbors. When the war effort needed most of the rubber that was available, replacing the worn out tires on his old pickup was impossible, and his income dried up. He hitchhiked back to Flomot and worked for an old friend until he could make enough money to move the family back to home territory.
I heard just enough adult conversation to know the dull green planes that flew overhead had something to do with the war and bombs. Somehow I thought the bombs were carried on top of the wings, and whenever one banked to turn, I started looking for a safe place to hide from the bombs that were sure to fall off. But where do you hide from a bomb?
After we moved back to Flomot and I started to school, somewhere I saw a swastika. Having no idea what it meant, I thought it looked really neat, so I took a piece of chalk and drew a swastika on every board of the old unpainted shack we lived in. Boy! I might as well have printed the cuss words I was learning.
We had no radio or newspaper, so our news had to come by word of mouth. One day I saw Daddy running across the field from the landlord's house, a spectacular sight for an old man in his fifties. He had just got news that the war was over. No more swastikas.
Cora Gail Gunn Trent
www.cgtrent.com
