Growing up, surrounded by vibrant colour and imaginative design, I was fascinated by my family’s pioneering textile story, started in 1950s Donegal. I have teen memories of my textile colourist mother, sometimes working from home:
… kneeling on back garden grass,
heavy textile scissors in her small hands;
intuitive eager eyes scanned
the long sample-blanket ,variant colour mass,
a patchwork palette of tones, multi-tinted,
and Vogue magazines in the sunlight glinted.
I enjoyed visiting Donegal Design, the family-started textile factory in the Dublin suburbs. On visits there I often chatted to Packy, a Donegal weaver, who followed my family down to Dublin. He paused to indulge my many questions. Other weavers sang above the din of fly shuttles banging in wooden buffer boxes; plank-like treadle pedals causing rhythmic tambourine-like rattling of heddles, and the cog-ratcheting of winding on the gathering cloth as it was being woven.
Afterwards, I would wander across the courtyard into the dim stockroom, smelling the wool’s natural sweet lanolin perfume. My fingers would feel the fluffy fabric: hundreds of hats, scarves, stoles, capes and divan rugs. All these textiles dampened the sound ofthe factory machinery, and staff behind a partition, typing and taking orders on telephones.
In the late 70s, thinking I might join my parents business, I almost studied in both a Scottish textile college, and a Dublin fashion design school. In the end, I just worked in Donegal Design for a year. I also made up the swatch catalogues for sales reps. I would climb a ladder into the attic, walk by the many long elephantine rolls of stacked fabric and enter a small room. I’d sit at a table by a small window, cutting fabric samples and apply double-sided tape to them. Then, I’d stick these samples behind cut-out card board panels of the display catalogues.
I realised both my parents had very interesting stories about their weaving adventures in Donegal. Separately, I persuaded them to write their accounts. My mother’s slim emotional memoir, called ‘From Derby to Donegal by Design‘ was a readable memoir. It showed much of the almost-impossible domestic challenges, being a working mother in stark circumstances. My father’s account was more empirical – titled ‘The Friendliness of Total Strangers, a Donegal weaving adventure‘.
Mission accomplished; my parents’ books written, published and sold in shops in Dublin and Donegal, but that wasn’t quite enough… something unspoken, unrealised nagged me. What was that? Then I slowly realised…the “Donegal dream” had dazzled me for decades but why had I never tried my hand at weaving? So, one day I asked Brenda Hewitt, a Donegal weaver, would she give me a crash course in weaving. We agreed a time’ February 2020. mere weeks before the national covid lockdown.
I prepared by doing some background reading, principally using Judith Hoad’s book, ‘This Is Donegal Tweed‘. Next, I asked Dora (my photo-collaborator on many past projects – it she would accompany me. to document my quirky pilgrimage.
On February 13th, 2020, we set off for Donegal in her small VW Golf, packed full of suitcasesand much camera equipment, and a sense of adventure for the weaving week. Slightly late arriving at our destination, we all sat down to soup and sandwiches. The atmosphere in Brenda’s cottage was a blessing, an abundant artistic environment: shuttles on windowsills, baskets of wound perns, bags of scrap thread ends, multiple cones wool. The air was permeated by the scent of wool. On shelves there were tinted tweed hats, scarves and throws, purses, handbags, water bottle covers. What oblects couldn’t be made with tweed?
After some chat, the week-long learning process began. colours needed to be chosen, lift patterns needed deciding. After that, warping and weaving, experimenting with test “throws” and the challenge of weaving a two metre scart. It was all quIte daunting.
Dora wrote: “When Louis asked me to spend a week with him in Donegal to photograph his project about weaving, it didn’t surprise me. He often has brave ideas and puts them into practice. He understands fashion and isn’t afraid of expressing himself through colour and pattern“. She added: “He also likes to travel into his family past in search of significant stories with the help of photos, family keepsakes and letters. was his weaving project another way of looking for connection with his father? Or maybe it was to escape routine and to experience something unknown?“
There were probably a few hundred spools of yarn sitting on the shelves in Brenda’s main Weaving room, all waiting to be woven. Some were vivid yellows, oranges and bright blue; and others muted stone greys, earthen browns, or fern green. Use me, use me, each colour called out. Which colours should I choose? In the end, I let myself be guided in colour choices by Brenda. What lift-plan would look best? Should I try for herringbone or a twill weave? Which would be easy manage for this learner?
A mathematical head is required for all this process. As I don’t possess such numeracy skills, again, I leant on Brenda for best choices. Next, warping on a frame had to be done; then feeding yarn through multiple heddles; pedal sequences to remember: weave tensions to mandle correctly. it was quite a challenge. With so much technical information input I tired early most atternoons. Progress was slower than I expected. Had I bitten off more than I could chew?
With much encouragement from Brenda and Dora, ended up with three small experimental weave examples and a long tweed scarf. All this creative activity happened a few miles from where my parents started their unusual weaving life. seventy years before.
A photograph of the photographer, Dora Kazmierak
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Unfortunately, time and wintry weather did not allow a visit to that family shrine, the iconic cottage at Croveigh, in the mountains above Loch Anure. I will do that another time.
Soon after my weaving week I paid a visit to my 94-year-old. muddle-minded dad, at his Welsh nursing home. I tried to convey what I had done in his honour, but it was difficult penetrating through the fog of his dementia. A hoped-for, meaningful exchange about weaving never happened. That would have been an apt closing of our very broken circle.
However, shortly after that visit, much to mv surprise. received a communication through his carers: he now wanted detail of my weaving week in Donegal. And, of course, I obliged sending him a short video. I recalled something prescient that Brenda said following one of my frequent ‘throw’ mistakes: “weaving is very forgiving:there is no fault that cannot get fixed…“
Thinking of the recent rage-drunk, unjustifiable barrage of Iranian missiles against Israel over the weekend of April 13th, 2024, perhaps today’s Jews will recall King David’s Psalm 2.
Why the big noise, nations?
Why the mean plots, peoples?
Earth-leaders push for position,
Demagogues and delegates meet for summit talks.
There are some few journalists, commentators, influencers and authors who dare to defend Israel’s right to political self-determination. Christians and Jews who read scripture know and believe that God himself made the personal promise in Genesis 12:1-3:
The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
Who is prepared to unapologetically defend God’s plans for this much-derided, maligned and misrepresented country? And, are there any brave Christian creatives who compose nuanced songs and poems, or create paintings based on that biblical belief?
In recent years, I have become much more attuned to the painful plight and prophetic place of the Jewish nation. This Middle-Eastern education of mine has come about through reading, and also partly through listening to the empathetic songs of Adrian Snell, a friend of Israel and Anglican composer, who trained in The Leeds Conservatory in the 1970s.
For decades he has used Psalms, Ezekiel, Jewish prayers and children’s Holocaust poems – as lyrics for his classic-rock, piano-centric melodies in his biblical and holocaust-centric recordings, such as:
Song of an Exile
City of Peace
The Cry – a Requiem for the Lost Child
How did an English Christian composer come to embrace Jewish biblical and Holocaust history with deep biblical, humane empathy?
In the mid 80s, Snell composed some poignant music in response to his visit to Bergen-Belsen. Soon after that visceral visual education in antisemitism, he visited Israel and Yad Vashem. In the Art of the Holocaust section, he saw hundreds of Jewish childrens drawings, depicted their hopes while trapped in the ghettos and concentration camps of WW2.
Those juvenile illustrations depict lost family lives, colourful gardens in sunshine and other positive metaphors. They also depict harsher realities: Nazi soldiers, barbed wire, tanks and other symbols of war.
When Adrian read some of the hundreds of children’s poems from Terezin Ghetto Camp, song ideas slowly gestated in his heart, mind and soul. In particular, one poem caught his attention. It was written by Eva Pickova, 12 years old and a relative of the late Rabbi and author, Hugo Gryn of London.
Pickova was murdered in Auschwitz a year after writing this mature realisation of how she was forced to grow up before her rightful time:
I was once a little child,
Three years ago.
That child who longed for other worlds.
But now I am no more a child
For I have learned to hate.
I am a grown-up person now,
I have known fear.
Adrian’s visit to Prague a while later revealed another child’s poem, this one by Hans Hachenburg, who died in Auschwitz at 15. His poignant poem became a second part of Adrian’s Song of an Exile. As well as childrens poems, there were the lyrical reflections by adults as well.
Shir Golah, by Menahem Dolitzki, became the first poem on Adrian’s composition, Lament For Jerusalem. Then God’s Beloved by an unknown Yemeni Jewish author of the 15th Century. Snell’s suite ends with If I Were Here by 16th century poet, Israel Najara. That exprresses a profound expression of trust between God and his People.
The Song of an Exile recording got launched in 1989 at the West London Synagogue, UK. At that event he stated that his Christian faith was completely rooted in Judaism. Some time later, on his 40th birthday, August 1994, he and his music team, plus modern interpretative dancer Richard Frieden, were honoured to be allowed to perform those songs in The Valley of Communities, at Yad Vashem.
City of Peace was his next heartfelt homage to all things Israel, a double album recorded in 1994. The work explores the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, drawing on poems written by Jewish authors spanning from six thousand years ago to the present day. The accompanying book linked the texts and music with much background information, and offer a series of meditations while reflecting on the songs.
The recording closes with a Yiddish poem by Aaron Zeitlin, Holocaust survivor who sought to reconcile his faith to the horrors of the Holocaust:
If I become a storm
Or if I blaze in rebellion against Him
Is He not still the one bleeding in my wounds?
My cries still praise, my cries still praise…
Perhaps some of Adrian Snell’s thoughtful music might be biblical balm to troubled hearts and minds in that very tested and cosntantly contested Middle Eastern landscape…
Pilecki volunteered to allow himself to be captured by the occupying Germans to smuggle himself into the Auschwitz concentration camp to draw up reports detailing Nazi atrocities at the camp and establishan underground resistance movement.
“Root of Jesse” is a metaphor found in Isaiah 11: 10
“In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.” The term ‘root of Jesse’ figuratively stands for Mashiach.
“All my folks have gone before me, all my friends and all my kin; But I’ll meet with them up yonder, when the saints go marching in”.
When the Saints Go Marching In
I never imagined that one day I would be an unelected ambassador and principal agent in helping weave time-frayed genealogical loose ends. I thought that my immigrant family was just like others on the street. In 1965, at the age of eight, I discovered that this was not true.
My brothers and I went to a small, local Church of Ireland national school. It and the nearby church we attended were both called ‘All Saints’. The cold, grey stone ecclesiastical building had only a few families in regular attendance. The colourful stained glass biblical scenes caught my imagination, in contrast to the bald, buck toothed, middle-aged vicar’s boring sermons.
After the service, Father played funky tunes on the Bechstein upright piano in our sitting room. His rocking overweight frame put the squeaking stool joints in some danger. As an ambitious teenager, he had made a 78 blues recording accompanied by a friend on washboard percussion.
My mother rang a mariner’s bell in the kitchen at one o’clock. A roast beef joint with vegetables and baked was served. For pudding, a tacky hot butterscotch sauce poured over ice cream. It was a challenge to talk with half-hardened toffee sticking to teeth. She pulled out all of the maternal, domestic stops at weekends. During her working week her role was as a clothes designer.
Our Sunday dining time was always back dropped by the BBC Home Service. The humorous Navy Lark was followed by the more reflective Desert Island Discs. Its trademark tune of a Hawaiian-sounding orchestral melody, accompanied by lonesome herring gull-cry and the sound of crashing waves. Each weekly guest had to choose eight records, a book and a luxury item for the programme format. On top of the thirty minutes of probing questions, the host asked each invitee why they chose their favourite recordings.
A Sobering Denouement
During one family Sunday meal, a piece of music on Desert Island Discs affected my father. He unexpectedly burst into tears. I’d never seen such naked emotion from this idolised, patriarchal male. It shocked me. Up till then, I saw him as infallible and Samson-strong.
Were his tears provoked by the winsome baroque melody from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which his parents once sung in a choir? Its majestic melodic sweep and orchestral injection of harmonic hope would be enough to convince the hardest of hearts to submit.
Erkenne mich, mein Hüter…
Know me, my keeper,
My shepherd, take me in!
From you, source of all goodness,
Much good has come to me.
I pressed my father to explain the cause of his pent-up pathos. He didn’t shut down my naïve questions, as he would, later in life. His family’s war-time tragedy got tearfully told, punctuated by gasps for air. Did someone switch off the radio while he recounted the heartbreaking Hemmings history?
My dad, aged 16, loved to cycle. He’d energetically pedal through the Derbyshire countryside. Most likely, he daydreamed about the girls who worked alongside him at the Co-Op. On returning from his bank holiday rural bike ride, a nightmare confronted him. His eight-year-old brother, Ronald, died at the hand of his father. Later on that night, his dad’s dead body got hauled from the canal. Such a narrative must have been traumatic to live with.
My grandmother told the investigators that she spotted an ominous note in her husband’s handwriting. It stated: ‘Do not enter. Call the police.’ In contrast to the timeline facts, my father maintained it was he who first found the note, then his dead young brother. Could there have been a possible overlap between these two witnesses?
My dead young uncle got taken to Derbyshire Royal Infirmary hospital. The coroner examined his body and discovered red marks imprinted on his throat. Ronald’s Death Registration, dated April 6th, 1942, states:
Cause of Death: Asphyxia due to Strangulation (Wilful murder by Frank Hemmings who then took his own life) p.m.
At midnight, on that same day, a police sergeant’s torch spotlit Frank’s prized and fashionable trilby. That marker for his mortality floated on the canal at Harvey Road Bridge, in Allenton, Derby. Having tied a flat-iron around his neck using twine, he jumped off the canal overpass into the stagnant, shallow water. His retrieved body got taken to the same morgue where Ronald lay.
I suppose both their bodies might have lain side by side in the same cold mortuary. If they could have spoken, what words would they then have exchanged? Such domestic dystopian detail shocked us children into silence. We lost our appetites. Our roast beef dinner went cold. I averted my gaze from Father’s face to the empty, bamboo napkin rings shaped like serpents, complete with spooky ruby red eyes.
A few days after the murder /suicide, the father / son joint funeral took place at Pear Tree Baptist Church, Derby. It must have been tough for my granny and teenage dad to have passed through the throngs of curious onlookers lining the street outside. The pastor, Rev. C. S. Hall, rebuked the 300 strong crowd that came to point and stare as the cortège left. He stated that “I hope that in the future, mourners may be spared being made a spectacle. In the present instance, everybody had been most considerate and kind, except for idlers”. One woman remarked: “Not much of a show. I thought there would have been more flowers.” A close friend of the family retorted in reply: “There are many ways of showing sympathy. Not least of these is keeping morbid curiosity within limits…”
Had my grand father no friends to confide in? I presume his wife, Doris, was cognisant about his troubles? He escaped prosecution and jail but left so many questions behind.
Cause of death:
‘Killed himself by drowning whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed p.m.‘
Did Frank catastrophise his seven week health-related absence from work possibly leading to money worries? Added to that, might his younger son’s incurable Bright’s Disease depress him?
My father repeatedly told us an apocryphal story. Apparently a railway works manager had asked my grandfather to spy on the powerful railways trade union. As told, Frank steadfastly refused to do this. Because of such a refusal, my father maintained that he got barred from working in the tidy draughtsman’s office. There is no evidence of any union membership forms among family papers. On Frank’s marriage certificate and death certificate his occupation is stated as Blacksmith
What were my grandparents like? How much interaction did my father have with them? What about his eight-year separated junior? Did my dad talk to, play with, fight or argue with his sibling? I just don’t know.
I had written what I thought to be a speculative poem about the sad family saga and showed it to my father. I hoped that it would provoke a bit of philosophical sharing between us. That attempt spectacularly failed and angered him. He gave the impression that he “owned” the “copyright” on his family’s tragedy. I begged to differ. My grandfather’s rash actions also cascaded into my life, prompting many questions and few answers. The result of that fateful day in 1942 rippled on for decades to follow. In relation to such devastating circumstances, counselling would have been redemptive for him.
Family Roots Reconnected
In 2009, I bought a history of Pear Tree Baptist Church. That church was built close to where many Midland Railway workers lived. Some of my relatives attended it. In the text, I noted our surname mentioned a few times. For instance, there was John Henry Hemmings, killed in combat during WW1. Also, there were mentions of Frank, my grandfather. He stood in a group photo of Sunday School teachers, as did some other of my father’s extended family.
Heartened by these intriguing discoveries, I emailed the author. He was the Pear Tree Baptist Church minister. In his helpful reply, he enclosed a few photocopied pages from the church registers showing my grandparents membership dates. Besides that, he forwarded my letter to a cousin of my father’s, Barry Cotton. Barry replied soon after. This was my first contact with any Hemmings’ relatives in decades. However, that letter got filed away and forgotten for about ten years.
For the next decade, my wife and I were busy raising our two boys and looking after her elderly mother. Then Liz rediscovered my cousin’s correspondence while sorting through papers. She re-started the contact, this time with my cousin’s wife. Soon, both wives got very excited and proposed meeting up. Phone calls gave way to emails. The Hemmings and Cotton blood cousins were more reserved… however, this culminated in a day-visit to Derby in February 2010 by my wife and I. People on my father’s side began to take a firm root in my consciousness.
Visiting the Family Grave
Most headstones in Normanton cemetery were the typical type of marble slabs. In contrast, the Hemmings family plot only contained a small, cubed stone marker. Inscribed on one side was: Frank Hemmings died aged 42, and on the other side, Ronald Hemmings died 6th April 1942. Underneath that was stated: “Jesus has him in a better place”. I don’t have any such certainty about this murderer being in heaven after his cruel and unjustified deed. Such unbiblical wording obfuscated the horrific events of that day. Who decided on such presumptive, blasphemous wording? And why no hopeful words under the murder victim’s name? I learned that my grandmother, Doris, was also buried in the same grave, but her name was absent from the modest gravestone.
Doris had remarried in 1948, left the Baptists and joined the Church of England parish. Her new husband, Thomas Dyke was a widower. His profession, stated on their marriage registration certificate was ‘Locomotive Fitter (Railway Works)’ – the same factory my grandfather had worked in.
Doris could not shake off deep, latent depression. From time to time, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In 1957, a few months after my birth, she died by her own hand. Her death certificate stated:
‘Heart Failure due to Barbitone poisoning (Suicide whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed).‘
Reflections on My Return from Derby.
The problematic phrase, on top of misleading dating, and the absence of any mention of my grandmother, needed correcting. The memorial that stood there for decades had been a misleading travesty. I suggested to my father that we should replace the 1942 gravestone and said that I would pay for it. Derby Council sent me a form for transferring rights of the grave ownership to me. When such permission was given, I could then commission, order, and erect a new headstone.
There had to be mutual agreement between my father and I on appropriate wording to use. I suggested some Bible I had inscribed on my stillborn daughter’s grave:
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Revelation 21:4.
My father’s biblical knowledge was incomplete and based on half-remembered Sunday School lessons from seventy years ago. In the end, he agreed to my proposal. In the new grave design process, I made sure that Ronald got prominent placing. I placed his inscription details at the “front” of the stone and those of both his troubled parents on either side. Now they could metaphorically, embrace their child once again.
The Missing Cousin Found
During our day visit to the Cotton family, we learned about four “missing” paternal cousins, two of whom were “whereabouts unknown”. One was Gordon, six months younger than my father and my father’s favoured cousin. In their childhoods, they lived around the corner from each other. Gordon was a Grammar school scholarship boy and later he became a bursary collegian. Fellowships were the key to better lives for working class lads.
Neither cousin had taken time to search national phone books. They seemed not to be exercised to resolve their disconnect. Cotton relatives told me that Gordon once lived in Crawley, England. No one knew where he resided now. How would I set about finding this relative, “whereabouts unknown”? Would he still be alive? Would he even want to respond? It was all a step of faith and prayer.
Searching for Relatives Online.
My father suggested Gordon had been a headmaster. Such fallacious information caused problems with my online searches. Then I decided to tweak the criteria a little. I typed schoolteacher + Hemmings + south of England into the search engine. After two days of non-stop searching, I almost gave up my quest. Then bingo!
On the third day, I stumbled on one lead that seemed promising. An old scholars association webpage posted a speech by a retired English teacher with my surname. Just like a genealogical detective, my wife studied the photos of that event seeking genetic facial resemblances. Yes, she thought, there were distinct possibilities. I wasn’t so sure.
I emailed that website, asking about the man who had given that talk. I also suggested he might be a long-lost relative. Within a day, a reply came, confirming that this man was indeed our “missing” cousin. He provided a phone number for Gordon. I finally had struck gold!
Gordon’s place of residence added an extra miracle: Winchester, England. Lawrence, my elder son, lived on a college campus nearby. Some weeks prior to finding Gordon, I’d booked car ferry tickets to bring my student lad all his belongings. All that unscripted synchronicity was overwhelming.
Next I had to contact this once-missing cousin. I dialled his phone number and waited. As the dial tones sounded, I wondered what I would say to this relative? What might he reply? In the light of the horrible history, would I be welcomed or spurned?
I was relieved that I only had an answer phone to deal with. I mumbled a few words and replaced the receiver with a sigh of relief. Slight doubts were taking root in my mind. However, Liz, my wife, possessed the relentlessness of a hunting terrier. She just would not let go! Her excitement was in contrast to my hesitancy. For the first time, she had information to fill many gaps in my family tree.
I let a day or two pass until phoning again. This time I got through to Gordon. His welcoming voice asked if was I the person who’d previously phoned. Bona-fides were established, Liz suggested I should ask about names and dates of any offspring. How many children did he and his wife have? Had he any grandchildren? Gordon obliged in answering Liz’s questions but then said: “we mustn’t be too long on the phone. I have a Shakespearian reading in a few minutes.”
We phoned again a few days later, covering a little more ground, saving the detail until we visited him a few weeks later. He lived in The Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty. That foundation provided accommodation 25 elderly men “of noble poverty”. The brothers had to be single, widowed or divorced and aged over 60 years. They had to wear distinctive robes and large floppy hats. Attendance at daily morning prayers was encouraged.
Road trip to Relatives
A few weeks later, we travelled to Winchester. On arriving at St. Cross, we walked through the old arched, castellated gateway, passing beneath the tower. Next we came to the Inner Quadrangle, around which were a series of red-bricked, two-storied lodgings near a cloister and a large ancient church. Each pair of houses hosted a wooden bench outside. Rose bushes climbed and spanned the walls.
Gordon waited just inside his half-opened front door. He smiled as he greeted us, shook our hands firmly and noted this Hemmings-historic event. Our effort in tracking him down had cheered him. Anything shown from his briefcase archive got photocopied twice on the printer that we brought; one set for my father and another for Liz, expanding the family tree.
Our two day stay was spent reading documents, talking and eating at his favourite pub, the Bell Inn, a restored 18th Century former coaching inn. We also introduced Lawrence our elder student son to Gordon. Then we drove back to the Welsh coast for the ferry. Our route took us close to Rosebush, Dyfed, a hamlet where my father lived with Jane, his third wife.
He welcomed the pile of family papers. Soon Gordon and my dad had their first conversation on the phone since the early 1940s. I wonder what their exchanged halting words were? Over many months, they exchanged catch-up letters and cards, relishing in their re-established relationship.
I was beginning to get the family genealogy bug. I tried to locate the coroner’s report for my deceased family members. On enquiry with Derby Council an officer told me that many reports from the war period had been dumped a few decades previously. I couldn’t believe it. I had been hoping to get hold of those documents to provide concrete detail. At least I had a news article on the coroner’s report that gave a glimpse of the momentous circumstances.
DERBY BYGONES, a local history forum published by The Derby Evening Telegraph came to the rescue. The site administrator permitted publication of my appeal for any who might have Hemmings family information. I thought someone might recall details from that drama almost 70 years ago. Vain thoughts perhaps, but worth trying.
A Modern Good Samaritan Responds
The following weekend an email arrived from a man living in Derby. He wrote to me, stating that his family had been next-door neighbours of my father. On reading my appeal for information this man’s mother convened a meeting with her siblings and wrote a brief account of their combined memories.
Doris would daily drop in to chat with his grandmother most evenings, and return home with the previous day’s newspaper. On April 6th 1942, she came as usual. After her departure she soon reappeared in great agitation, explaining that sh’d found a note from her husband. It stated: Do not go into Ronald’s room. Call the police. My grandfather thought it best to take her round to her sister, who lived nearby.
What Does a Person say After Sixty-Eight Years?
In June 2010 I accompanied my octogenarian father on a visit to Gordon. The two Hemmings cousins met for the first time in almost seven decades. How would these men take to each other?
Though many cheered me on, I found this reunion project daunting. I had wrapped this ambitious, ambivalent pilgrimage with much prayer. My father and I got to Gordon’s residence at St. Cross. We saw him at a distance, sheltering from the rain, just inside his ecclesiastical-looking porch door. Pebbles crunched under our feet as we walked through the quadrangle. A sudden shower soaked us. Gordon waved at our approach. After seven decades of silence, these cousins gripped each others hands. Both nervously laughed….
A hearty pub dinner and a few glasses of wine soon loosened up any tongue-tied, tentative awkwardness. There was much catching-up to be accomplished in under forty-eight hours.
The following day, I left them to walk along the water meadows of the Itchen River, talking as they went. Both men wore cloth caps and carried wooden walking sticks. They walked towards Winchester cathedral, where Gordon had long associations with its choir. They quickly discovered their destination was over-ambitious. Instead, they sat in a cafe drinking tea and eating cake and getting reacquainted.
These “greybeard cousins” came close to each other over those two days. On the morning of our departure, we three Hemmings stood in a circle, holding hands and giving thanks to God in our different ways. The two old men prayed from the Anglican liturgy and I read a passage from the Good News Testament. It spoke of Jesus being both fully human and yet fully God.
In that brief, private pilgrimage and long-overdue reunion, both men were much blessed. At their ripe age, they realised that they may not repeat such a meeting. Gordon then died nine months afterwards, mere weeks away from the first ever Hemmings family reunion.
Gordon’s two daughters declined my proposed meeting with them prior to the funeral. Ironically, both families ate lunch in the same local pub, just apart, in different rooms. It was awkward bumping into younger male relatives… in the gents toilet!
Frank Haslam, my first point of contact with Gordon, gave the main eulogy at the service. During the “afters” of tea and scones in a hall, a few attempted to connect with our small Irish group. Frank also approached us and in conversation stated that he was a semi-regular visitor to his cousins in Ireland. When asked where they lived it turned out that there was a surname in common with Liz’s.
Some weeks later, he emailed me with some pertinent genealogical information relevant to my wife, which connected her to five unknown “missing” paternal cousins! These were Irish relatives Liz never knew she had! It was incredible that these people got discovered through the funeral of my father’s cousin in England. What are the odds of that happening? That is Liz’s story to sometime tell.
A New Narrative gets Written
In 2017, a close family member suggested I go to counselling. They wondered if my constant harking back might need putting to rest. My inquisitive mind was constantly trying to unlock many unanswered questions. After several therapy sessions, my counsellor asked a challenging question. How was I going to deal with my father’s unwillingness to talk about Ronald’s personality? I was at a loss as to knowing what was best to do. Then an interesting solution came to me; I would write a story about the momentous event … from my perspective.
Giving myself permission to create a short piece of fiction released me from my father’s grip on such unfortunate family events. I felt tipsily transgressive in my considered challenge. Creating fictive circumstances around the time of Ronald’s potential murder was liberating. I’d have loved to show my more positive mise en scène to my dad, but I didn’t wish to experience further slap-downs.
Who knows, it could have helped him a bit to at least try talking around the painful subject seven decades later… After all, we had that long lasting bond starting from my boyish, naïve questioning long ago.
“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten: God promised to restore what was taken away. When the locusts did their work, it looked complete and final, but God promised that He could even restore the years that the swarming locusts has eaten.” – Joel 2: 25.
Have you heard of the surprising and critical role that a Christian Zionist played in the earliest stages of Herzl’s modern Zionism, namely Reverend William Henry Hechler?
For decades the grave of this unsung hero of Israel’s rebirth, lay forgotten in Northern London.
Hechler was bi-lingual and bi-cultural: equally at home in German and English. (Theodore Herzl, the great father of modern Zionism wrote his seminal work “The Jewish State” in German as Der Judenstaat.)
Hechler was a Christian who cherished a deep love for the Jewish people. He “happened” to find and read the new book and recognized the prophetic moment. He went on to meet Herzl and become his key connection point both to the German Kaiser and to English Christian Zionism.
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Rev. Hechler’s Discovery of Der Judenstaat, 1896. ______________________________________________
The big-bearded, frock-coated Anglican clergyman, Rev Hechler, stood mesmerised before a bookshop window, incredulous, his heart almost stopped, seeing Herzl’s cri-de-cour – Der Judenstaat – the pivotal pamphlet spotlit by sunlight. That journalist insisted there must be a Jewish State, assimilation proven impossible by *Dreyfus’ drubbing.
That anxious, obsessive, Moses-messianic author vainly willed an open-minded, expectant audience – Judaic cohort belief in his audacious epiphany: the re-establishment of the biblical-named nation. Instead, vilification, stonewalling and mockery.
Hechler, in his book-bulging study, long-searched significant scripture texts, anticipating Israel’s eventual return, his belief provoked by Ezekiel’s promise: “I will take you out of many nations, gather you from all countries and bring you back to your land.”
Christian Zionist and secular political prophet; one doggedly calculated God’s divine time line, the other used oratory to challenge cultural prejudice, urged refugee reclamation of ancient cradle land.
Before long, colonial overlords acceded Herzl’s plan: Yisraʾel – open harbour, holy haven, safe shelter, protection from persecution and pogrom. The twelve tribes returned, many kibbutzim made “water gush in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”
Herzl, sanctified spiritual father of that nation state, civically esteemed for his relentless, Zionist zealotry; wife and family unvalued, disparaged, depressed: a sacrificial lamb on the abstract altar of ideology.
Hechler’s death didn’t prompt newspaper notice, his overgrown grave discovered after decades. Not named on plaque or city street, no national eulogy celebrates his kind-minded faithfulness but Yahweh handpicked him to rewrite world history.
Dreyfus* – Jewish French army captain falsely accused of treason 1904.
Herzl – founder of World Zionist Congress. Der Judenstaat laid rhetorical foundations for the need of a state of Israel. The Dreyfus scandal sparked Herzl’s philosophy.
Rev. Hechler – Anglican clergyman, biblical prophecy proponent and right hand man to Herzl.
Kibbutz – a community where people voluntarily live and work together on a noncompetitive basis. The first kibbutzim were organized by idealistic young Zionists in the beginning of the 20th century.
This attack took place on October 6 — the Jewish holiday of Sukkot in which Jews give thanks and commemorate the 40-year exodus of oppressed Jewish people from Egypt.
A supernova explosion, is a cataclysmic event for a star, one that essentially ends its active lifetime. The Supernova event was meant to be a “safe envelope” for finding inner calm, peace, harmony”, taking place at Re’im, just three miles from the Gaza border.
* Mark 4: 39 “And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”
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