To be a butterfly

By Rosario Davies

It is a sunny October afternoon in Cambourne and I am looking through the window at my garden where a model of a large light blue butterfly is attached to the garage wall facing me, and where in the summer, butterflies and even once in a while at this time of year if the weather remains warm, small butterflies with white wings fly up to the window to greet me. I wish I could be a butterfly like them and travel across years and oceans to be with my brothers and sisters and my mother, to the place where I was born one October almost fifty years ago, the village where I spent the first twelve years of my childhood and the time when I began to grow up, where I remember a sense of above all, calm and simplicity.

Gateway to Angao village in Micholan state

This village or ‘ranch’ as the small villages in this area are known, is called Angao, and is about two hundred and fifty miles to the west of Mexico City in the Mexican state of Michoacán; the climate is tropical and it is warm all year round. The village is surrounded by the sierra or mountains which create a sense of being at the end of the earth, cut off from all of the bustle and haste and comings and goings of the wider world, to this very day. The village is still small, so small that few Mexicans recognise the name of Angao . The name is Purepecha or Tarascan; the language of the native people who have lived in this part of the world since before the Spanish and French invasions and occupations of Mexico. It is a place populated by some seven or eight families and everyone largely knows each other; they certainly did when I was a child. What I remember about this time is that there were no problems in the street, that there was no crime on the ranch, that there was no running water in the houses and we would bathe in the brook which ran through the village, and that there was no electricity either. Everyone would wake up before dawn when the cock crowed, and go to bed shortly after night had fallen.

There were no telephones in any house; there was one in the ‘Puerto’ the village shop, which had a wooden telephone booth for privacy and one line. People from outside the village would have to call first to tell the operator, who would ask them to hang up, wait fifteen minutes and then call again, during which time she would send an emissary out from the shop to track down the person receiving the call at home, walk with them back to the shop where they could take the call at the agreed time. Now many houses have their own phone but this system is still used for those households which do not have one. Others may have cell phones but coverage in the area can be sporadic even now. Before that time the only link to the wider world was the telegraph, and the only link to the next larger village or very small town was a mud track. It took an hour to reach the town of San Lucas and the asphalt road. Journeys were made by taxi, people would wait until four or five could travel together in a group to keep the cost down, or there was one ‘bus’ a day, the back of an open top truck with slats and spaces for ten or so people to sit which used to leave at seven in the morning and return at two or three in the afternoon.

A typical day time scene from my village

A typical day for me at this time would involve getting up, and milking the cows, before going to school, a small building at the edge of the village, which had only a few government-issued textbooks for the whole class. At that time there was no secondary school in the village, rather like Cambourne in its early days. After school, I would go home and help my mother with the chores, making tortillas, killing a chicken and plucking its feathers beforehand, in order to prepare it for the evening meal, and grinding red chillies into a paste to make sauce using a stone pestle and mortar. The farmyard was right behind my house, where the noise of cows, pigs, goats, cockerels and chickens was constant, and I quickly learnt how to make cheese. The clothes would be washed in the river, and left to dry, not a problem under the tropical sun. After the chores were done, I would play with my brothers and sisters who were still at home – I have two brothers and six sisters – and play with classmates and friends in the street in front of my mother’s house. Later on as night fell, I would exchange stories with my friends, the myths and legends which were local to the place, of ‘Nana Colasa’ the bogeywoman who was the devil’s own mother, she was rumoured to snatch naughty and disobedient children and make them disappear, and the ‘Chaneques’ who are little water spirits or goblins. If a child became ill, it was because they were said to have offended them in or near the water of the stream and these spirits would have to be humoured by leaving a small offering of cigarettes and glasses of tequila or beer at the water’s edge in order to pacify them. Then usually the child would get well.

So there was no electricity and no heating was needed in the home. There was no need for boilers or any type of apparatus like that. We had a well in our garden and the water would be cool in the early morning but would always be warm by nine thirty or ten and would remain so for the rest of the day, so you could bathe at any time. Water was abundant and free. If the well ran dry then I would jump on a donkey with a couple of large tin drums and ride to the water’s edge to collect it from the stream and bring it back home so that the vegetables could be cooked and the chicken boiled. There was no television of course, and what I remember about that time was that people whiled away their free time by talking to each other, about the comings and goings in the far off wider world, or the business of the village, and they were happy to shoot the breeze and always had time for one another. Nobody was busy and everyone had time for everyone else. The work would always be there and the chores could be attended to later, the world could wait. Priority was always given to people, over things. Although you might consider this type of childhood to have been one of some deprivation, I was rich in many other ways. We always had enough to eat, beef, chicken, maize, milk and cheese, there was so much that I was to grow bored of this food.

Despite the lack of technology we were reasonably well off materially. My mother sold milk and cheese at home, and operated a billiard hall which opened onto the street. For much of the year, my father worked in the United States, in Miami and in Houston, painting the aeroplanes for Continental Airlines and sending dollars back to help the family in Mexico. He became legalised and naturalized in the US and like many other men from the village, came back to visit us at Easter and Christmas.

My dad died when I was eight years old. He had been travelling back from the United States on one of these trips when he was involved in a car crash just south of Laredo, Texas on the Mexican side. One of my sisters who was eighteen at the time, had to go to the north to arrange everything, and the funeral cortège had to travel the seven hundred or so miles back to the village over the next two days. But according to my mother his spirit lived on and would come to visit her in the night when he would pull her feet to awaken her and to tell her off for something which she had said to the children.

At the age of twelve I went to Huetamo, the nearest town, to go to secondary school. Life there followed a similar routine, of school in the morning, chores for my host family in the afternoons and visits back to the ranch at the weekends and in the school holidays. Life was still simple, and relatively peaceful, although there were cases of things being not as idyllic as I had previously believed. There was a story about a rich American who had a large series of melon orchards which covered hundreds of hectares. He was said to be a millionaire and the story was that one of his sons was kidnapped and that the situation was ongoing, with years of anguish and extortion for money. I never learnt if he ever got his son back. There was another case of a businesswoman who owned a department store in the town who was asked by a friend why she looked so sad and upset. ‘They’re extorting me,’ she said: ‘If I don’t pay them they’ll plant a bomb in my shop.’ I can’t now remember all of the details.

After this I went to high school in the city of Toluca, a city of approximately two million people which is forty miles from Mexico City, where I learnt to ride a bus and take a taxi and generally to solve my own problems and become more independent. I lived first with one sister and then another, both having emigrated from the ranch before me, had jobs and houses there. At this time, I wanted to be a vet but didn’t become one for two reasons, the first was economic. The family did not have enough money to pay for that training, and secondly although I loved and continue to love animals I was put off it as I spoke to a vet, a woman who told me that it was a dangerous profession, that one of her friends had lost her life after being kicked in the head by a horse which was experiencing a seizure. So I enrolled in the teacher training school instead in order to become a Natural Sciences teacher, a course which I would finish at the age of twenty two.

While I was at that school I met a British man who was studying Spanish and was on a year abroad from his course at university in the UK. When he finished his studies he came back to see me in Atizapán, one of the satellite cities which borders Mexico City where I had started my first teaching job, and then we got married and I went back to live in Toluca where he worked as an English teacher and later a Supervisor at a British Cultural Institute. Our daughter was born in Toluca and I had every intention of continuing to live there and lived a happy life with family in town and still not so very far from the ranch where I grew up.

But over years things changed in Mexico and the violence in the country grew exponentially, to the point where Mexico finds itself today, in first place in the world for kidnappings, a high incidence of feminicide (especially in places like Ciudad Juarez and Ecatepec[1]), and general robbery, violence and murder, some of which has had a direct effect on my family in Mexico, and with a young daughter soon to be of school age, and a new job opportunity for my husband we took the painful decision to move out of Mexico and to live in the UK, a decision which since I have lived here has unfortunately proved time and again to be the right one as the violence there has just got worse.

I consider my life to have been one of migration or flight like a butterfly from ranch (Angao) to small town, (Huetamo) to large town (Toluca) from large town to city (Mexico), then back to Toluca and finally village (Cambourne) again, although this is a very different type of village. I was able to sleep for the first time in many months after being in Mexico and to feel that I could walk along the street for the first time without the risk of being robbed or attacked and that my daughter would be able to grow up in peace without being disappeared as so many young women are, rather like the childhood and the country which I miss, which has been and is still being taken from me and many Mexicans. I have learnt many things in Cambourne and appreciate many aspects of my life in Britain, but still wish that I could fly away like a butterfly across space and time back to reconnect with my country and the simplicity and innocence which once upon a time I knew. There is a saying in Spanish which goes: ‘No hay mal que dure cien años ni cuerpo que lo resista,’ in other words nothing (good or bad) lasts forever. One day perhaps, I can.

Rosario Davies lives in Cambourne, Cambridge, UK

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[1] Author’s note: Ciudad Juarez is a city in north of Mexico, close to its border with the USA. There had been deliberate killing of women since the 1970s, their numbers increased in the 1990s. Ecatepec which borders Mexico City is where there are highest incidents of feminicide today.

In Search of Spirituality

By Dave Ellis

In October 1976 I and my ex-wife Chrissy went out to India to live the spiritual life. We had gone there two years previously ‘to find our Guru’ as was the case with quite a few westerners at that time. On our return trip after travelling up from Mumbai (known as Bombay at the time), we had some wonderful adventures at the Ajanta caves[1], and in the small hill village of Mandu[2], as well as in Sanchi[3] and Brindavan (where Krishna spent his childhood)[4]. Finally after two months we found a mud hut in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh, which is where the river Ganges emerged from the higher mountains.

Rishikesh is in the area where rishis (holy men) have lived the yogic life for thousands of years and where (we were told), whilst in spiritual/natural union with the universe they heard and extracted the mantras[5] which were then used by themselves and others in deep meditation.

Me in the hills of Rishikesh

At five in the morning, we did breathing exercises and hatha[6] yoga. This was followed by breakfast, having collected milk in a can from a man up the hill who owned a cow. After that, we meditated for an hour, then we repeated the practices in the evening. We would fetch water from a spring five minute’s walk deeper into the forest, and whilst one of us cooked vegetarian food on an open fire, the other sat with a stick to ward off macaque monkeys who would race down to steal even a chappati. On one occasion, I was just round the back when a large male monkey entered our hut looking for food. Chrissy who was inside, shrieked which made the monkey mad. I heard the shriek and came running round and the monkey ran off.

With the forest all around us, we felt clothed in nature, especially with trees full of tasty mangoes. Occasionally we would cross the river in the small ferryboat and along with the pilgrims sing the song "Oh Ganga mai ganga mai ganga mai". In the town of Rishikesh, we would have a treat of Indian sweetmeats like burfi and gulab jamoon.

There were no cars on our side of the river and we got to know all the back paths, and regularly walked the main Lakshman Jhula [7]path which was part of the pilgrimage trail to snowy Badrinath[8].

But the tide turned for us as the rain season came and our hut filled up with 20 centimetres of water. Scorpions got flooded out, so one or two of them tried to make a home in our food bag. We had to move out of our beloved hut, over the river to a secure building. We had lived in that hut for seven months; then we moved on for another eight months staying in Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was said to have received enlightenment)[9], and a lovely mud house in Tiruvannamalai[10] all the way down in south India..But I’ve particularly never forgotten those times in our hut near Rishikesh, and they’ve left me with strong and beautiful memories.

Dave Ellis lives in Cambourne, Cambridge, UK

[1] Ajanta Caves, 30 Buddhist prayer halls, the oldest dating back to the 2^nd and 1^st centuries BCE., are in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, 450 km east of Mumbai. They contain some of the most splendid frescoes and specimens of Buddhist art and architecture. Abandoned by the Buddhist monks in CE 500, they were discovered by John Smith, a young British cavalry officer in 1819.

[2] Mandu or Mandavgad is a beautiful fortress town built on a rocky landscape stretching 100 km in western Madhya Pradesh, a central Indian state. It is famed for its varied architecture drawing upon Hindu, Jain and Muslim traditions.

[3] Sanchi, also in Madhya Pradesh is known for the famous Stupa, or a dome-shaped Buddhist shrine, commissioned by Emperor Ashoka in the 3^rd century BCE. Pillars, temples and monasteries continued to be built till the 12^th century CE, making it a significant centre of Buddhist art and architecture.

[4] In the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Brindavan is an important pilgrim site for the Vaishnavs, a Hindu sect that worships Krishna. It is 12 km from Mathura where Krishna is believed to have been born.

[5] Hindu hymns.

[6] A form of physical exercise and breathing control practice, often done before meditation

[7] Jhula means bridge. Here, it refers to a 450 feet long suspension bridge over the river Ganges in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. This bridge was opened to public use in 1930.

[8] Badrinath Temple in the hill town of Badrinath, overlooking the river Alakananda and built on the Garhwal hills at an elevation of 3, 133 metres above sea level, also in Uttarakhand. It is among the most revered sites of Hindu pilgrimage.

[9] In Bihar, an eastern Indian state, Gautam Budhha was believed to have attained ‘supreme’ Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

[10] Tiruvannamalai is in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a town built at the foothills of Annamalai Hills and around the temple of Annamalaiyer. 

Evacuation from Ferozepur

By Animesh Basu

It was August 1965. My family lived in the army cantonment of Ferozepur, Punjab, in northern India. I was 10 years old when the war between India and Pakistan began.[1] The 2^nd Mountain Brigade based in Ferozepur was deployed to the Khem Karan sector, north east of Ferozepur.[2] My father, an army major, was serving as a company commander in the Corps of Signals. He was ordered to move to the front with his regiment while my mother, my younger brother and I with the rest of the families, stayed on in the cantonment. We saw the army convoys moving and infantry marching out. We could hear boots crunching on the road outside our house as soldiers marched late into the night.

The school that my brother and I attended had to be shut down when a bomb fell in its compound, dug a big hole but did not explode. I remember getting a quick glance of the bomb site.  

The army cantonment was just 5 miles from the border and the front lines were perilously close. Artillery fire and anti-aircraft guns were heard continuously and well into the night. Always used to sleeping separately, my brother and I now huddled up to my mother in her bed. The pounding of the shells nearby and the fighter jets criss-crossing in the skies above were very scary. The cantonment had turned very quiet with almost all men gone to the front. My father’s new home was a front-line trench. We were allotted a stay-in home guard. He was a slight man and did not do much to assuage our fears but he was around and did his best.

As the artillery fire and the pounding of shells intensified, my mother and other ladies, fearing for our safety began contemplating evacuation to a safer place. One morning, a gun-mounted Jeep arrived at our gate. We could see it had come from the war front. The driver handed a letter that my father sent to my mother. While he did that, my brother and I out of curiosity, went to the other side of vehicle and found an officer half lying in the front seat with his eyes closed. To our horror we recognised him as our family friend Lieutenant Hunt, our favourite Hunt uncle as we called him. He was a tall handsome man and served under my father as the platoon commander. He had taken a few bullets and was being rushed in my father’s Jeep to the hospital. The driver had stopped on the way to give the letter. We were shocked and numbed with fright. It was our first hand experience of war!

Early one morning around 5 a.m., we woke up to loud banging and screaming at our front door. It was our next door neighbour with her baby held close. She was hysterical and had come running in her night clothes. She could not stand the pounding of the shells any more. My mother decided instantly that it was time to move. We had friends working at the Nestle factory in Moga, a town which was a further 30 miles away from the border. Although it was still in the vulnerable zone, it was further from the border and safer. The officials of Nestle had offered to help with the evacuation. My mother called them and two days later a pick up truck arrived. Five families put their immediate belongings into it and arrangements were made to form a convoy and leave.

My mother was driving very nervously as the roads were very dangerous. There were three other cars with wives and children and so our convoy of four cars and the small truck with some belongings set off for Moga.  The road was very narrow and the surface extremely bumpy. We were given instructions about what to do if we encountered army trucks or saw fighter planes overhead. We had barely driven 5 miles, when we heard two enemy bomber jets approaching from behind. My mother immediately swerved the car off the road. A little faster and it would have overturned. We jumped out of the cars and lay down flat on the ground to avoid shrapnel if a bomb was dropped. What was an hour’s trip took us almost three hours as we had to stop and dive several more times.

The bombers, US made F-104 Sabre jets that the Pakistani Air Force used, circled above us in a dog fight before being driven back by the Indian Air Force Gnat fighters. The danger was that Pakistani pilots often dropped bombs wherever they could, ignoring civilian areas, to complete their sortie. Full precautions, therefore, had to be taken.

My father  in front of a captured tank

We were housed first in the Nestle factory guest house in Moga. It was quite nice and for us kids (six of us about the same age), it was time of great excitement. After two days we were moved into a large mansion that had been lying vacant further inside the town. The factory was a bombing target so it was unsafe to stay there. Pakistani infiltrators pointed their powerful flash lights on the targets during night bombing raids. Almost every night we saw these lights flashed on the factory.

The kids were put to work to dig a deep trench in the house compound. It took us almost three days to get it ready. Air raid sirens would go off night and day and we would have to run into the trench and cover our heads. Some of the ladies could not reach the trench before the planes arrived and had to fall flat wherever they were. We saw fire flashes in the distance where bombs fell or planes were brought down. Some times, at breakfast which we had in the garden we ignored the sirens and watched the planes circling above while eating bread and condensed milk. At night, there was curfew and blackout all around. Candles were allowed but only for short periods. Every evening, the ladies would sing bhajans (Indian hymns) for the safety of their husbands.

We did get intermittent visits from our dads from the front. Once, my father had come for a few hours on a big gun-mounted jeep. He had a scratch on his forehead. When asked what that was, he said a bullet had grazed past. As we worried, the chants of scriptures and singing of hymns grew louder in the evening candlelight, despite the curfew!

Animesh Basu lives in Cambourne, Cambridge, UK

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[1][1] The 1965 war was the second between the two nations since their independence from colonial governance in 1947. The friction was over the status of the disputed region, Jammu and Kashmir that both lay claims on. The first was fought in 1947-48.

[2] Pakistani forces struck at the post at Khem Kharan. What followed was known as the Battle of Assal Uttar, regarded by many among the most intense encounters of tanks. The Indian army found 25 tanks abandoned by the retreating Pakistani forces, with their engines running and wireless sets on.

Wartime Summer

By Janet Glasser

The farmer peered out of his kitchen window at the hanging heads of corn, ripe and ready for the swift guillotine of the binder. He was waiting for the army lorry to deliver four German prisoners-of-war from the nearby camp who had volunteered to help get in the harvest, to substitute for all the village men now away at war.[1]

The farmer’s wife was baking apple pies, apples from the orchard, lard from their pig butchered each year, and flour bartered from the trousered, blonde neighbor who never cooked but who needed the lard for her chips.

That was the way the war-time world went round.

At 12 o’clock, as always, she packed her husband’s sandwich and cold tea together with the still-warm, fragrant pies, and trudged through the summer-dusty lane to the harvest field. As if they had been waiting for her - the clanking of the tractor and binder stopped and the workers eagerly crossed the stubble to meet her.

She handed out the pies to the young Germans and quickly left to avoid the guilt she felt at the sight of the tears making furrows down one fresh hairless dusty cheek.

As she reached the lane her neighbour fell into step. She berated the farmer’s wife for feeding the enemy. “Enemy or not,” said the farmer’s wife, “They are someone’s boys.”

That was the way the war-time world went round.

Janet Glasser lives in Cambourne, Cambridge, UK

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[1] Between 1939 and 1948, close to 400,000 soldiers from Germany, Italy Ukraine among others, became Britain’s prisoners of war. There were 600 camps spread all over the country. Treatment of POWs was governed by the Geneva Convention, a document formulated in 1929 and signed by all major Western powers including Britain, Italy, Germany and the USA. Armies were instructed to treat POWs in line with the convention.

According to Sarah Paterson, the first major influx was of Italian prisoners of war captured in the Middle East and brought to Britain. Following the surrender of Italy in 1943, 100,000 Italians captured, volunteered to work as ‘co-operators,’ thereby helping to solve shortage of labour particularly in agriculture. German prisoners arrived in large numbers after the D-day landing in France in the summer of 1944. By March 1945, there were close to 70,000 German prisoners of war ‘co-operating’ in Britain particularly helping farmers during harvests. From the end of 1946, Germans were allowed to visit British homes and develop friendships. 25,000 Germans chose to stay back after the end of the war.

http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-short-history-of-german-and-italian-pows-in-britain