Sam Smith - During World War II I lived not only with four siblings but with two English children evacuated from London. My mother would to the end speak of the latter as "my English children" as though everyone had English children. My mother often spoke with the presumption that everyone had what she had.
One of the English children in fact did almost become a sister and called my parents Uncle Sam and Aunt Eleanor. Older than any of us, Ann returned to live with the family for five years after the war. She was, if you were willing to go as far back as 1812, a cousin.
Ann became the family anthropologist, a participant-observer of acute perception, offering discreet, sardonic analyses of our psyches, motivations and behavior:
"Uncle Sam never wanted girls at all."
He would eventually have four of them. Why not?
"Well, of course, his children were meant to be world leaders and you couldn't be a world leader if you were a girl."
Ann was loved by all and free to excuse herself when the going got tough, although you hoped she wouldn't because things always seemed more pleasant when Ann was around.
It hadn't been easy for Ann to get to Georgetown in July of 1940. She wrote me 60 years later:
I set sail in the Duchess of Atholl in convoy. There was a slight skirmish with a submarine. I remember feeling the ship shudder as depth charges were dropped but we were unscathed and pressed on, though I remember seeing icebergs and wondering.
My mother told me we might well be sunk. If I was dragged underwater, not to struggle. I would come to the surface naturally, then not to strike out to England or America but float on my back, as I had learned at school, until I was picked up.
On August 30, 1940, the Volendam set off with a load of British children for America. It was sunk by the Germans in the Irish sea. All were saved.
On September 17, the City of Benares sailed with many of the Volendam survivors. It was sunk in mid-Atlantic and most of the children perished.
No more British children were sent to America after that.
Ann was dry in wit, resolute in determination, and unflappable in crisis. Decades later we were discussing a recently departed relative who had once been on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group. What had happened, I asked, to Lucy Norton's ashes? "Well, I suppose they were thrown out with the rubbish." Ann paused and then added, "I think Lucy would rather have liked that."
The other English child who lived with us, a boy, I remember hardly at all. After the war he never wrote and when my mother eventually found his address decades later, he wrote back that it would be best not to continue the correspondence.
It wasn't until after my mother died, that I found a possible reason why, described on the Gay Social Network:
Among the prominent military personnel accused of sodomy was [the boy's father] Sir Paul Latham, a wealthy Conservative Member of Parliament, who, though exempted from service, joined the army of his own accord. In 1941, he was tried and convicted of "improper behavior" with three gunners and a civilian while serving as an officer in the Royal Artillery. Convicted of ten charges of indecent conduct, he was discharged dishonorably, imprisoned for two years, and forced to resign his seat in Parliament."
And elsewhere this note:
In the Forties, Sir Paul Latham MP was caught writing an indiscreet letter to a man, and tried to kill himself by riding a motorcycle into a tree.
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