A Journey and a Packing Case

Journeys and a Packing Case

My mom left England when she was four on a great big passenger ship, Avila Star. German submarines sunk her on her return voyage only months later. But the Avila and her crew would give safe passage this one last time, escape from war for this family of five.

My mom, at four years old, already had two younger siblings. It wouldn’t be a pleasure cruise, but the Germans were dropping bombs within ear shot of their home, shaking the timber and ravaging their farm fields. The shrieking sirens, wailing the children awake at night, had sent the panicking mothers with crying bundles to the underground bunker way too many times.  

So when the chance to escape arose, the young parents jumped at the prospect. The escape was uncertain--a handful of proffered tickets—tickets for a journey rife with danger, over a torpedo-infested ocean to a destination neither parent was sure of. They had to consult an atlas to find the obscure country-- Paraguay, the only country with an open border during war.

Only married five years and three young children--it wasn’t the first time they had moved or fled and started over-- being German and all. Maybe packing and uprooting, trying over, again and again, was genetic, like curiosity and innovation.

My mom grew up in the jungles of Paraguay. It was all she knew: Climbing trees and harvesting wild oranges, corralling horses, and riding to a one-room schoolhouse several miles away along a sandy track. Catching a wild armadillo by the tail as it burrowed its way down its hole, its magnificent claws flailing. Adopting a stray wild dog which became a loyal companion.  It once saved her life by pouncing on a poisonous snake, moments before my mom would have stepped on it. The dog was bitten instead and died shortly after. A grave was dug, and the children mourned the loss.

Several more kids were added to the family during and after those war years. They lived in a house my mom’s father had built on the Pampas-- dirt floor, with the only running water being the water “they had to run for,” she used to tell with a smile. My mom was an avid learner and in turn, storyteller.

Her craving for mental stimulation, pulled at her heart and mind like pain. With little access to books, she hungered for knowledge like others hunger for food. Her only refuge from this want, she found at night, when her father would open his precious volumes of the classics, classics that had journeyed with him thousands of miles, through flood, waves, and storm, boat and ox cart. Her dad, a well-read translator with a vast knowledge of literature, read aloud from their family’s crude, wood loft every night—for hours. Candlelight, kerosene lantern, it didn’t matter. The stories wove threads of mystery through the long dark evenings as plot merged with the night jungle noises of monkeys, puma, and the occasional jaguar. My mom’s imagination traveled with the words, magical words that stretched and condensed the elasticity of brain neurons and the muscles of creativity.

By middle school, my mom was tri-lingual—Spanish, English, German. By seventeen, she was proficient in childcare, with no amenities; laundering-- stoking the boiling cauldrons of sheets and cloths for disinfecting at the nearby clinic; gardening and farm work; basic sewing, craftwork, and most importantly--survival. She had witnessed primitive surgeries, births and deaths. She had helped to bury a younger sister at the fragile age of eleven months. Dead after a three-day fight with dysentery.

She had also had bundles of adventure--tamed a pet monkey, camped at the river, trapped a porcupine, and cemented friendships that lasted a lifetime.  When she would tell her escapades to me and my seven siblings a generation later, we would sigh and wonder why our lives were so boring.

But at seventeen the opportunities outside of menial labor seemed dim. It was then that my mom made the momentous decision to board a ship once more-- alone. The war was over. Her parents seemed settled now in South America and were ready to stay. But my mom’s youthful mind and heart needed to move on.

She didn’t have a suitcase—just a cardboard packing case. What amounted to a suitcase would have to be enough to contain a life, her whole life. This box with straps would carry her from the only world she had known, a world of monkeys and jungle, disease and snakes, to the world of England—cars, buses, streets, radio, neat hedge rows, tame country towns, and cities with their fleeting fashions and factories.  

My mom’s brave heart pounded. She started folding her homespun dresses neatly. She remembered the days when her mom would save the cotton packing sacks from the flour, unpick them, and use them to sew clothing for her and her siblings. Or the time she had to stay in bed under the sheet while her mother mended her only dress. 

She laid in the wooden shoes her father had chiseled. Her brush, a few simple toiletries, and a handful of black and white photographs a visitor had taken—these would have to do. These would be all that she would have to remember her family by. She placed in an old notebook from school, a cherished remnant and memory of a teacher she cherished. Paper was so scarce, then. The pages with diagrams and drawings were used to the last corners and edges. Lastly, she laid her first Bible between the clothes and a thin, home-spun towel. It was black, leather-bound, inscribed inside by her father and given as a gift, a gift that would last her lifetime. It was in English, and I still have it today.

The packing case was far from full. But she closed it anyway. What else was there? They were poor, outwardly primitive. Backward? Probably.

That’s my entire life, she thought.

It appeared so.

Her father took her to the river boat landing in an ox cart. A few of her brothers came along to see her off. Her mother stayed home with the babies. There had been enough tears. But also tears of pride. Pride that their oldest daughter was leaving for London, for university, and an education as a secondary English teacher.

From river boat to Rosario, to ship, to ocean crossing. The packing case rolled and scooted in the hold. My mom spent most of the six-week crossing on deck, craning her eyes to the distant horizon, watching and wondering about her life—behind, but mostly ahead.

Did she have what she needed between the cardboard sides of the packing case? It seemed so inadequate as she observed her fellow travelers…

She was confident by nature—her upbringing had made her flexible and adaptive in mind and spirit. A reader of human nature, outgoing and fun-loving. While her packing case was half empty, mostly with things that would quickly be discarded in her new life, her mind and heart were not. Curiosity was a well inside her that was never still.

She stepped onto English soil with confidence. With her ninth grade, jungle education, she miraculously passed her university entrance exam. She was in!

Her upbringing had made her flexible and adaptive in mind and spirit. A reader of human nature, outgoing and fun-loving. Traits which later created a natural-born teacher.

As she became herself a mom and grandma, she would tell what it felt like having her first car ride. “I thought I was riding on a cloud.”

“School, to me, was like the world opened, an answer to a craving heart.”

Had she packed her whole life in that suitcase? Yes and No. Her whole life was inside her, though, in a place thoroughly secure, a place with no straps or zipper, buckles, locks or key.  No limits at all. She owned a surfeit of love and learning, curiosity and wonder, enough to instill in a lifetime of students, a family of eight, thirty-two grandchildren, and five great grandchildren.

A brave girl with her cardboard packing case—more than adequate and at once integral-- a strong link in the chain of generations and humankind itself.