Page Title

Joan Zilva

AT AN AWKWARD AGE

A TEENAGER’S TRANSATLANTIC WARTIME SAGA

Chapter Five Part 1 :The Bartletts. The first six months of 1941

Text Box: Fancy telling me that! I was miserable and felt guilty enough without this. Obviously no one thought of the real underlying reasons. I think that nowadays someone would cotton on to possible child abuse. It seemed that I could never do anything right and destroyed any self-confidence I had. My father’s attitude throughout my childhood and this experience meant that I retreated into myself and have always found it difficult to express my deeper feelings.

Text Box: There was no holiday in England on New Year’s Day until several decades later. A nice thought.

Text Box: A sign of inflation! 5/- (five shillings = 25p ) is less than the inland letter rate now!

Text Box: This is the door that opened automatically with a light beam that I had asked about in my letter of November 11th . Stella Davies again - the one who was tutored with me at the start of the war.

Text Box: John, Stella’s brother, became an astronomer who worked with Bernard Lovell in the early days of the Jodrell Bank observatory. Her father was a geologist and Lecturer at Birkbeck College

Text Box: This horror about Latin is because, in the first year that we did it in England I got 95% and Stella narrowly beat me with 97%.

Text Box: I’m not sure if they did receive all these, or whether the photos I have are my copies.

Text Box: Prof Hirst was well-known (Haworth and Hirst), for postulating the ring structure of carbohydrates. He was a friend of my father and a favourite of mine

Text Box: I don’t understand all this toing and froing of people and cats between Shortlands (The Mount) and Sanderstead. Why should the cat have been sent alone?

Text Box: Climate fluctuations are not new. Now we would say it was global warming, but so far as I know nobody had heard of that then.

Text Box: It most certainly was. I remember doing the lino cuts when everyone was out and gouging my thumb with the tool. Before I could stop the flow of blood it was all over the house and I had to clear it up. I carried the scar for years. I certainly did “rather wish”. It was the sort of embarrassing thing my father was inclined to do. As ever - even now - I was unpredictable in my academic performance. Wolfe was born in Westerham, a few miles from home, and I knew the statue of him well. Whenever Canadian friends came to visit after the war they were subjected to being taken to see it.

Text Box: Dave, Mr. Bartlett, Rosemary, Mrs. Whittington, Mrs. Bartlett,Mr. Whittington. The Whittingtons were Mrs. Bartlett’s parents, first generation immigrants from the Isle of Wight, with an English garden. (not the best of photos). They lived in a bungalow in Willowdale, then a few miles outside Toronto, but now submerged in Toronto.

Text Box: Thank-you letter to Great Aunt, written on Rosemary’s Christmas present. Unfortunately she died before it arrived.

Text Box: Auntie Anna (Mary) was the great-aunt who bequeathed the bracelet shown in Ch 1 to my mother. She was my mother’s maternal great-aunt (a Vevers). She was my favourite of that generation and I was very sorry to hear of her death (See letter of April 13th).

Chapter 1: Background

Chapter 2: The journey Ch2 p2

Chapter 3: The Hays Ch3 p2 Ch3 p3

Chapter 4: The Bartletts at last Ch4 p2

Chapter 5: Bartletts 1941 Ch5 p2 Ch5 p3

Chapter 6: Summer holidays 1941

Chapter 7: Toronto Ch7 p2 Ch7 p3 Ch7p4

Chapter 8: 1942 And still there Ch8p2

Chapter 9: Fruit picking 1942 Ch9p2

Chapter 10: Waiting with impatience 1942

Chapter 11: 1943 Suspense & frustration

Chapter 12: Travelling home—May 1943

Chapter 13: Britain again in war and peace

Chapter 14: What became of us?

Please click here to go to next chapter