Stars & Stripes

[rhythmaning]

I have finally been getting around to tiding up my boxroom. I used to use it as a darkroom, since it has no windows (though it also has no plumbing, so it is less than perfect), sometimes it has been used as a study, but mostly it is where we keep books. And other things – in fact, as often happens to people’s boxrooms, it is where I dumped anything.

Unfortunately, eighteen months or so ago, I dumped so much on my shelves that a whole section collapsed. Though I got around to putting up the shelves again after a few months, there were still piles of files and books (I have nearly run out of bookshelves; the only reason I would consider moving would be to have a spare room which could be devoted to books; a library might sound a bit pretentious, but that is what it would be). So I decided I would start to sort it all out.

I moved a whole variety of things around to make some more space on the shelves. Well, I moved some things and started to read through them: collections of old letters, old newspapers (obituaries of family members, mostly, plus papers from a couple of more contemporary events) – bringing back lots of memories. Whilst I through some stuff out – mostly some of crap that one just seems to accumulate (I seem to get sent whole forests of junk mail every day; and then add in all the bank statements, credit cards bills, pension bumpf and all… Piles and piles of the stuff, accumulating) – I didn’t through out anything personal; indeed, I read through old letters, scribbled notes. (I found a packet of Dicksonia spores – tree-fern spores – from our trip to New Zealand. Tree-ferns produce green spores, so at five years old, these were well past their sell-by date; so I chucked them, too. I have often wanted to grow a tree-fern, but they grow very big – six feet or more across – so it wouldn’t really be very practical.)

The oldest thing I found was a copy of the Stars & Stripes, the US forces newspaper; it was dated 27th March, 1947. I wasn’t surprised to see it – I think my father must have given it to me many years ago, and lurking at the back of my mind was the memory of it – but I cannot for the life of me remember why we had it in the first place. Unfortunately, it was too delicate to open – the paper had grown flaky, and it tore when I tried to open it, so I stopped quickly.

27th March, 1947: fifty nine years ago. My father would have been fifteen at the time (there was no direct connection to the paper; he was never in the US forces, though he was conscripted and served in the British army in Germany in the mid fifties). According to Wikipedia, nothing happened on 27th March, 1947 – no-one was born, no-one died; there was no news. Although clearly, there was a newspaper.

I can only think that somewhere in the 27th March, 1947 edition of the Stars & Stripes, there is an article about a family friend; a guy who stayed with us for a while, whilst he was rebuilding his house (although he never finished rebuilding his house – his long-suffering wife finally got some builders in, after they had lived in the unfinished husk of a house for twenty years or so). He claimed to have worked for the CIA – he claimed a lot things, actually. The favourite story he told – or maybe my father told me about him – was how he ran an unofficial business for a while within the UN Building in New York: he had been to meet someone there, and he noticed that there was a shortage of chairs in the meeting rooms. So he rounded up all the chairs, and rented them out to people having meetings.

It probably isn’t true; but it is a great story.