A PIECE OF OLD ENGLAND

Jer and I really aren't world travelers. Although we went to the Caribbean on our honeymoon, the middle-east on a guided tour, and then of course to Turkey when he worked there, the other trip that I can say we really had total control of was our month-long driving tour of England in 1985. Every single choice was ours to make, and that is probably why it stands out as the vacation of my dreams.

We rented a car and drove for three weeks. At the end of that time we turned our car in, took a train to London, and hoofed it for the whole week we were there. This is surely seeing England in the best way possible.

The photo at the top of this column was taken in the Dales after we left the amazing town of York. To be honest with you we haven't seen all there is to see in the U.S., so we may have some scenes that equate with this one, but for us we had never seen such sky, such clouds, such green fields, such stone walls and charming houses, and of course so very many lambs. On this particular day we were hoping to outrun the storm. We didn't want to miss anything, but we sure didn't want to spend our afternoon in a downpour. And we discovered that we just had nothing on which to base our understanding of the weather. Where we live now in California we can judge from the time of year and the condition of the sky what kind of weather is going to happen in the next few hours. In England we couldn't even speculate! It was an odd feeling of being quite handicapped in figuring out what we should do.

On this particular afternoon we managed to make the right choices and by late afternoon we had found a little bed and breakfast house that was available and we booked ourself in. It was called the Brough Castle Farm and it was a real working farm and it sat next to Brough castle -- castle ruins to be exact, but then one doesn't see many "working" castles except maybe like Windsor or Buckingham. Anyway, this castle was good enough for us.



The Beckwith family owned the farm. Mrs. Diane Beckwith was a young mother with the most beautiful red-headed children I'd ever seen. Mr. Beckwith came in from his farmwork in the evening and was out again in his field early in the day. We slept in their extra bedroom and took our meals in their kitchen. We found that many of the bed and breakfast accommodations were almost like an inn - a real commercial operation. Not so many were little operations run by mom and dad. These are the ones, like the Beckwith's, we remember. And of course we remember their red-headed children who now are probably grown up and have families of their own. Things change.

Besides those children I have two very distinct memories of this place. One was that it was so far north that it was still light enough at 2 a.m. to read a newspaper in bed! The other was that out our bedroom window we could see the castle ruins. The castle truly was very close to our room, and it was beautiful to us even in its ruins.

We still have the business card they gave to us. It says "Farmhouse Bed & Breakfast" Brough Castle Farm, Brough, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria. Who knows whether or not it is still operating there as a bed and breakfast. But I'm sure the old castle will still be there, charmings others as it did us.

IT ALL STARTED IN GOOSNARGH!

Sometimes it is just a pretty picture that is the impetus for a blog.

For the last week I've been really busy putting together a booklet on the ancestry of my paternal grandma, Maud McConnell, who married Scott Dobbins. Maud was born in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1874. Both her parents were born there too, and her ancestors all came into Kentucky in the late 1790s. Her great-great grandmother was Miriam Helm -- and the Helm line can be traced back to a tiny town in Lancashire, England named Goosnargh, where some of the Helms had been curates in the church there.

In 1985 Jer and I made a month-long trip to England and of course visiting Goosnargh was one of my priorities. Jerry left the routing to me, so from the airport we rented a car, headed east toward Cambridge, up toward York, across the dales into the Lake District and then headed down the western coast, turning inland once we got to Lancs. Finding Goosnargh took more than one circling on some round-a-bouts, but we finally made it. We headed for the church.


Like all the old churches in England, we found it extremely interesting and very different from any churches we'd ever been to in California. I'm sure some of the early churches along our eastern coast are much more like this one, but since Jer and I both were native Californians we didn't know much about those. Once inside we found a placque on the wall which listed the names and dates of all the curates. The placque was painted a glossy black with gold lettering, and with the camera available to me this was the best shot I could get of it. If you look hard, you can see two "Helme" names and very early dates on them.

It gave me a very strange feeling to be in a place where I knew my ancestors had been many centuries earlier.

But what about the map? After we left Goosnargh we headed on down the coast and eventually stopped in Chester, where we dodged into a nice old shop whose wares displayed in the window were enticing. In our snooping, I came upon a map of Lancashire with a publication date of 1730 and guaranteed by the proprietor, Richard Nicholson, to be over 200 years old. The cartographers were J. Owen and E. Bowen. Luckily for us, that year the exchange rate was about $1.25 to the English pound, making it possible for us to see our way clear to pay L34.00 for the lovely map. Once home, I had it framed.

Every time I worked on my Kentucky lines I always had that wonderful reminder of the roots of at least one of my ancestors. I'll be darned if I can see "Goosnargh" on there now. My eyes are 30 years older than they were when I bought the map and they don't see detail as well. But I know it is there.

Seeing the map makes me happy.

AMERICAN CEMETERY AT MADINGLEY

West of Cambridge and the willow-shaded Cam River is a countryside of orchards and pastures. Here and there you can see a windmill or a church tower, the roofs of an ancient riverside town or the bushy crown of an occasional copse. It is a serene area and except for a visit to Cambridge, it is not exactly a tourist destination.

But a few miles outside of Cambridge in a little town called Madingley there is a stark white, modern chapel sitting in the middle of a vast cemetery of white crosses. This is the American Cemetery and Chapel, a little known burial ground for many of our WWII pilots and crew of the planes that left England in the bombing raids over Germany.

In 1985, Jerry and I took a month-long trip to England, spending three weeks on the road seeing as much as we could and then a fourth week in London where we explored the city. We made up our minds ahead of time that we would confine our visit to England and Wales, hoping that some day in the future we could do Scotland and Ireland the same way. We purchased a book called Touring Guide to Britain, published by the English Automobile Association and plotted our three weeks on the road, using that as our guide. It was in this book that I saw a simple notation for the American Cemetery and decided to include it in our plans when we neared Cambridge.

My Uncle Bert had piloted a B17 on bombing raids headed to Germany from a RAF base in that part of England in 1944, and because he had asked us to see if there was anything left of the old air base when we were in the neighborhood, I was primed to be emotionally involved. My eyes misted over as I looked at all those white crosses, hundreds and hundreds of them. My uncle Bert came home safely; these men weren’t so lucky.

The chapel was long and narrow and was positioned east to west. Just inside the chapel entryway was an area of displays and maps, including a 540 square foot map showing Atlantic sea and air routes used by American forces during World War II. The chapel building was built with floor to ceiling glass panels alternating with marble pillars along each wall. Each panel had on it four or five stained-glass replicas of the official seal of one of the then 48 states, a tribute to the United States whose sons lay buried in the cemetery. The entryway to the altar at the far end was framed with a wooden partition on which were the moving words, “INTO THY HANDS, O LORD”

But it wasn’t until I looked up at the ceiling that I came very close to losing my composure. The entire ceiling was a sky-blue mosaic, with images of every kind of American airplane used in the battles flying toward the east. And interspersed among the airplanes were angels, their hands outstretched ahead of them, their wings behind, accompanying those airplanes. On the ceiling over the altar was a huge gold mosaic sun with rays of gold radiating out of it and toward which the airplanes and angels were flying.

It took me a while before I could compose myself enough to be able to focus my camera. I got what I thought would be a decent shot, and it was then that I saw the inscription that ran along both sides of the mosaic: “To the men of the United States Army Air Force who from these friendly shores flew their final flight.” I was undone.

During the next three weeks Jerry and I saw enough to last us a lifetime, and still we didn’t see all that we wanted to. But now, almost 25 years after our visit to Madingley and the American Cemetery, I remember this time and place as if it were yesterday. And it still has the power to move me.