"War, Peace and Reconciliation"

Meet Mr L, who is one of our friends in the village. I called at his house to pass on a message to his wife. We had a great chat about our families. I was just leaving, when I mentioned the "War, Peace and Reconciliation" walk we are having in our Spring Walking Festival. It's a walk to the site of a POW camp at Featherstone Castle where German officers were held until after the war. In a social experiment to remove Nazi sympathies, the camp was run as a democracy with its own choir, orchestra and newspaper etc. It was a great success.

Mrs L, was born in Holland to a Dutch father (in the Resistance) and an English mother who, during the War, dared not speak any English. She wrote letters in English to her absent husband and hid these until he could read them when he returned home at the end of the War. Mrs L has written a lovely book based on these. It's called "Written by Candlight" by Liesbeth Langford and published by Ergo Press.

So I thought the Mr and Mrs L might be interested in our Festival event and the accompanying exhibition. Mr L then told me that his father was an English officer at the camp! He has a portrait of himself as a boy, painted by a German prisoner from a photograph. In my image he is holding a photograph of his father and a caricature drawn by an Italian at the Wooler camp where his father had also worked. (In this you see the darts and pipe in his hand. Money is popping out of the wallet on his belt - he was the camp treasurer!)

It was an otherwise grey day, enlivened by this encounter.