Refugees

 With refugees much in our minds at present, I realise that I have, in my long life, been both the receiver and provider of aid in adversity.

With Russia now intent on overrunning and subjugating the Ukraine, the fear of invasion from hostile forces was as much in the minds of the British people concerning the Nazis in 1940. Hitler's henchmen were then on the rampage, just as Putin's army is today.

In 1940, with my elder brother and sister in occupations that could contribute to the war effort, and my mother working for WVS (Women's Voluntary Service) in London. I, at 15 years old would, she hoped, be one member of the family to survive the probable invasion if I was in a safer country.

An American family from Connecticut in America's East Coast, contacted WVS to ask for an English refugee boy. I was consulted at school, agreed to go, and prepared to leave for a safer land.

With a small suitcase of belongings, I took a train in London to board The Duchess of Richmond liner in Liverpool, thence to sail across the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean to disembark in Montreal, Canada.

It was the start of a lonely life in foreign parts, lasting until I was old enough to return to England in 1942 to join the Royal Air Force. 

As a refugee, people in America did their generous best to keep me happy, and certainly safe from Nazi bombs.

Compared with whole families uprooted and with their homes destroyed in the Ukraine, my life as a refugee was one of minor consequence.

That, briefly, was my life as a refugee.

Fast forward through my life in the wartime RAF (written about in my blogs and painted in pictures), TB, the war's end, recuperation (no cure then), medical student (TB again), and on to when I rebuilt a bombed-out house in Fulham, London, to become a landscape painter. 

For painting these landcapes of river and lake scenes, I bought a small pram dinghy and designed and had built a body of a flat-back VW truck in which to house the boat and myself when painting in the countryside. The results were popular.

Fast forward again to 1955 when the Russians invaded Hungary. Refugees, a little like I had been in the war, were pouring into Austria for safety.

With Anne de Goguel, who was well-connected in well-heeled society, we decided to aid these Hungarian refugees.

So, consulting all who might help, we filled my VW "boathouse" van with warm clothes and blankets (mostly new) and set off across Europe, crossing customs borders, and aiming for Vienna.

There we contacted the Red Cross and were told to take our cargo to their warehouse. 

We had not come all that way to do that. So we bought a newspaper to learn that many of those fleeing the Russians were crossing the border at a town called Eisenstadt.

Off we continued, to find a farmyard at the border with many Hungarian refugees trying to keep warm in straw.

Backing the VW into the farmyard we distributed the clothes and blankets directly to those really needing them (there's a moral there). On our way home we took a couple of refugees from the border to Vienna.

So I happen to have experienced both of life as a refugee and, in turn, helped others in much the same situation.

The movement of people throughout the world for economic or oppressed reasons will, sadly, continue for ever. There will always be those who help or are helped - sometimes both. 

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