|
a shorter version of this story appeared as: "Brigadoon - A fond remembrance of help from McGill 60 years ago", McGill News Alumni Quarterly, Winter 2001/2, 34-37. |
||
"Brigadoon" is the name of a Musical that I saw in New York in the late forties. Its theme was a forerunner of "Field of Dreams" whose message was: .. "if you build it, they will come". I think that Lerner and Loewe meant to portray the mythical village of Brigadoon as a timeless place of healing that you find when you are truly ready for it. The story is about two young men from New York who get lost in the Scottish Highlands where they have gone hiking to "get away from it all". Although lost, they know roughly where they are on the map, so they are surprised to hear voices from an area that is not marked as being inhabited. They meet the people who invite them to their village, Brigadoon, whose oddity is signaled by a mist that hangs over the place despite clear skies all around elsewhere. The two travelers realize that Brigadoon is a very special place. One of them meets a young woman who takes him on walks on the heather that soon help him overcome his troubles and fears that had caused him to try and "get away" on this trip. Her song said to me that she was there because he was seeking solace: ..."When the mist is on the gloamin’ and all the clouds are holding still, if you’re not there I won’t go roamin’ through the heather on the hill". ... The show left people a little wistful but happy. I have been to such a Brigadoon that appeared when I wanted it really badly, and it changed my life.
1. Getting lost.
This story is about education. Many young people do not want to learn what is offered in school, for various reasons. I dropped out of school in late November ‘38, by which time I was fifteen, because it seemed pointless to continue with a long-term curriculum when long-term existence itself had become questionable. At first, everything seemed fine because I was exploring other skills to get by, or so it seemed.
After arriving in England in January ‘39, I was told within days by my uncle Fritz’s adopted daughter and her husband, who had responded to my mother’s last-ditch appeal to help me get out with a Kindertransport, that they could not afford to send me to school because they already had two children to look after and that I should learn a trade. It took a little while for the meaning of this to sink in.
Ford’s, at Dagenham, gave me an aptitude test which I fortunately failed. I was given a lump of iron and told to file it into as good a cube as I could. At the end of the day I had sore hands and an uneven piece of metal. My report had a poor reception back in Ealing where we lived. First thing I knew, I was taken out to Kent to meet a farming family who had declared themselves willing to take in someone like me. I think it was March. Their front door opened and I remember their looking down to somewhere near my chest, and their looks then traveling upwards until their eyes met mine, showing obvious surprise: they had expected a child! Well, they asked us in anyway, and it was soon settled that I should come to live with them. This was my entry into the Tompsett family, Springfield Farm, Marden, Kent, and a life of new hope.
Harry Tompsett began to train me as best as he could, but there was no way for me to grasp why we were doing the things I was beginning to master. Within short order I was reading his books about agriculture, which I really liked, but they presupposed too much "ordinary" High School knowledge. It was not working. By Spring ‘40 Harry informed me that he was making efforts at getting me enrolled in a School that prepared young men to be "bailiffs", that is, foremen on farms. [That school may have been like an agricultural Community College by our standards].
I was mildly excited about this prospect but all plans were superseded on the morning of my seventeenth birthday when I was picked up by the local Constable who took me off to Tonbridge Police Station. There, all local German nationals were being gathered, no matter what their reasons were for being in Britain. Here I was, speaking German once more, to a bunch of the likes of me. We knew nothing about the immediate peril of an impending German invasion, all I knew is that we were taken away by train to what turned out to be a newly built suburban development at the edge of Liverpool, hurriedly fenced-in to house us securely (Huyton). After some days, with lots more arriving from all over Britain, we were shipped to the Isle of Man where we were quartered in a seaside stretch of fenced-in boarding houses (Douglas).
2. Voices in the Woods.
In Douglas I happened to land in a house largely inhabited by slightly older fellows who had been at Cambridge. They organized a series of lectures on all sorts of topics but, although I heard the voices, I missed the music because it was out of context and too advanced for me. After some boring but anxious weeks (France had fallen) we were shipped to Greenock on the Clyde, near Glasgow, to board a former Polish liner, the Sobieski, that convoyed us to Canada. We settled down in an internment camp that seemed to be in the middle of endless forest, to routines that mostly consisted of roll calls, clean-up duties, meals, and work such as making camouflage nets or, a little better, felling trees in the woods. That camp ("B", see pictures) was actually not far from Fredericton, NB but we did not know where we were since we were not told. Time began to stretch forward without end during our first hot Canadian summer but we felt more secure than we had for a long time. It was 1940 but I had not heard about the Battle of Britain, although Harry Tompsett had written to me about intense air activity over the farm. Even by late fall we still had not heard of the Battle or the RAF victory. In the meantime I had made a tentative start at trying to get back to some sort of learning through some friendly teachers. I recall Dr. Guder who had been a professional teacher, and another, older man who was good at geometry and arithmetic from his days in the Austrian mountain artillery. But lessons like his taught me little because we had no structured curriculum. By summer’s end a bunch of us once more were boarded on a train of ‘colonist’ coaches to another unknown place (camp A, that we later learned was near Farnham, not far from Montreal, PQ). We were still lost in the woods but soon we were going to experience life in Brigadoon.
In the Farnham camp the idea of completing High School first surfaced when a school was formed, with Charles Cahn as Secretary. Once more, there were good, non-professional, volunteer teachers to instruct us volunteer pupils. William Heckscher, a budding academic, became headmaster in November. We had scheduled classes but I have little memory how it all went until it settled down much more. At first, our lectures were in the crowded Dining Hall, there was little time to study because we had to work during the day, followed by dinner and early ‘lights-out’. Furthermore there were no text books, pencils, note paper or anything else, but most importantly, we still had no realizable curriculum. All the same, I was glad that I had at least helped in wishing a school into existence ever since Fredericton.
A light appeared at the end of the tunnel as Heckscher won the confidence and support of the camp Commandant, Major Eric Kippen, who had been a POW in Germany in the First War. An intelligent man, a Montreal stockbroker between the Wars, he had been made to understand early who we internees were through the intervention and pleading by our most august fellow inmate, Count Lingen, the youngest grandson of the Kaiser. Kippen, who had two sons in school in Montreal, was sympathetic to us all, but particularly to the needs of the camp school. Heckscher and Kippen really got on and respected each other. Kippen later said in a conversation with Bill Heckscher ..."You were the "spark plug" that started the school. Then you got me interested,...very interested". Early in 1941, Kippen assigned a special hut where we had lectures, could study after hours, and where we could all function pretty much without distraction. Heckscher later described him as ..."silent, military, human, and gentlemanly", ... and stressed that ..."it was he who worried about young men who were falling behind, who arranged for a regular "p.t." hour, and who delegated a teacher to do the final invigilating". ...[from Koch: "Deemed Suspect", p.148].
Reference: Eric Koch. "Deemed Suspect - A Wartime Blunder".
available paperback, 1985 Goodread Biographies, Formac Publ. Co. Ltd.5359 Inglis St., Halifax, N.S. B3H 1J4, Canada.
[out of print: original hardcover edition, 1980 Methuen Publications]
3. Brigadoon. (see photo link)
How Bill Heckscher managed to establish the school is well described in Walter Hitschfeld’s presentation of Bill to the 1981 McGill Convocation for his Hon. Doctorate:
How the school acquired the official curriculum and became an extramural matric examination center of McGill University was downright theatrical, although the likes of me knew nothing of this at the time. Like in the Musical Brigadoon it began with a fog, over our camp area. Bill Heckscher described that event [in late November ‘40] thus ...
Col. H. M. Tory had been President of the Khaki University at the end of the First World War, a Judge, President of the National Research Council, President of the University of Alberta, and a faculty member of McGill University. In 1940 this extraordinary 76 yr. old man was still personally distributing books to Army camps, and after the War he would oversee the transformation of Carleton College into Carleton University!
In a conversation in Nov. 1981, at the school reunion on the occasion of Heckscher’s Hon. McGill degree, Kippen allowed that he and Dr. Tory had indeed talked about education after he had told him that he had a school in his camp. Thereupon Heckscher was called into his office to meet Tory and, after that night’s visit he, Kippen, had gone to see T. H. Matthews, the McGill Registrar and had enlisted his help to make us ‘official’. Heckscher said he did not know this until that conversation!
The winter of 1940 was the turning point for us and for the other camps. In 1941, registered McGill matriculation schools also started in Fredericton and in Sherbrooke that, by 1942, graduated about 50 more students. As well, in January and February 1941 the YMCA and the European Student Relief Fund distributed ‘writing gear’ and about 150 copies of books for the exams, which was brought about largely by Dale Brown who visited all camps often and later befriended those of us who landed in Toronto.
The school was wonderful. After all the false starts and futile attempts, I became totally immersed in this heaven-sent opportunity, and for me ‘outside time’ soon held still. I found peace and happiness simply in working to our purpose without giving much thought what it would lead to. Of course I could have never imagined what great things were on their way: release from internment, grade 13, a University education and an academic life! My only personal reward at the time was the deep contentment in the restoration of the main thread of my life that had snapped in November 1938, and also the happiness that this gave to my parents, with whom I could correspond from the camps, and their unbounded joy at the news that I had passed my first exams.
Heckscher recalled the ambiance of the Farnham school thus:
Whenever people said to me: well, there was nothing to distract their minds; no women, no outings, no financial worries, I felt insulted - simply because one doesn’t like one’s tribulations pettified ex post. Experience has taught me that the very fact that everything seems to be adverse to learning makes people study. Their road leads "uphill". But they feel proudly that the aims they achieve are the result of their own fight, their own will power. Each single student who studies in an internment camp is his own master in the first place; his coaches and teachers are the walls against which he flings his mental "squash’ balls.
On a hot summer afternoon I remember I had fallen asleep, when I suddenly awoke, sensing that there must be "something on". I turned round and saw ten boys assembled at the foot end of my bunk, staring at me with sad eyes: I should have given them a lesson on Twelfth Night, and I had overslept my time. It is the dynamic push on the part of the young students which carried along their teachers, and made them the happiest men in internment, because they were made to feel that they had a task to fulfill."... [Koch, p.148]
I suppose the boys at the end of the bunk were ten of the fourteen of us shown in the graduation picture together with about an equal number of teachers. This would be the envy of any school. I have long thought of our Farnham experience as having attended a splendid Private Boys’ School in Brigadoon, a place that was not on any map, where outside time held still, and where people were good to each other, just as in the Musical.
7/18/97 © Vernon Brooks
The sequel was University admission.
Reference: Eric Koch. "Deemed Suspect - A Wartime Blunder".
paperback, 1985 Goodread Biographies, Formac Publ. Co. Ltd. 5359 Inglis St., Halifax, N.S. B3H 1J4, Canada.