Waiting for lunch at Miss Moody's Tea Rooms in Romsey, I took a shot of the table laid with a beautiful embroidered cloth and elegant bone china.
And I suddenly remembered my dad using the phrase 'the table laid', in his diary he kept as a PoW. In December 1942, he and other prisoners had been transported in railway cattle trucks from one prison camp to another in Italy. They travelled all night and alighted the next morning at a small railway station and walked about 3 miles in the snow to P.G. 73 at Carpi.
The welcome was cheerless: Hut No.40 in a brick building, intense cold and he felt extremely hungry. But he was surely overjoyed to meet members of his troop already there. One was a camp policeman in charge of the camp jail. He and a fellow PoW shared food with my dad and his pal, Jack. And later he met two more pals from his troop, Arthur Offord and Arthur Tricker, who invited him and Jack back to their quarters.
My dad writes: "We gladly accepted and went along. We climbed up on their beds and found 'the table laid' so to speak. They gave us an onion, cheese, butter and some tea. We sampled a piece of cake from a Christmas parcel...........
I guess it is the incongruity of his phrase in this situation which has made it stick in my head.
He goes on to describe aspects of life in P.G 73:
standing on the parade ground 4-5 hours for roll calls
playing darts/football/handball
negotiating inches-deep mud en route to the latrines
educational classes held for prisoners by prisoners
trying to get rid of lice in his clothes
constant hunger
staying mostly in bed winter 1943 to try to keep warm
clothing and food parcels from the Red Cross
This is my tribute for Remembrance Day 2022, for my dad who spent 3 years in PoW camps, returning to his wife, May, in Claydon, a sleepy Suffolk village in May 1945. They welcomed me into the family the following year a week before Christmas.
It's been really good to know that so many of my 365 friends have read and appreciated my publication of my dad's diary in 2017:
Till We Meet Again: Gunner Bert Martin 1941 to 1945: Amazon.co.uk: Spencer, Hazel, Martin, Mr Bert: 9781544048703: Books
A lovely tribute. Brought back memories for me too. My Mum always drank her tea from a china teacup, so that made me think of her and David's dad embroidered a tablecloth similar to this one while he was in a sanatorium after the war because he acquired tuberculosis in Africa.
Somehow a blast from a more elegant past Hazel, Pretty hand embroidered tablecloth and pretty China , Mum always served tea in pretty china cups- much more elegant than today's mugs however pretty they are!
Try as I might I could not make the link to my dad's book work in my text but it does so here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Till-We-Meet-Again-Gunner/dp/154404870X
I know the diary very well of course but was surprised when that phrase came to mind!