remembering why I'm writing this novel.
August, 1944 - Scottsbluff, Nebraska - Barbara Neeley Journal EntryThe twenty-one year old, small town girl, with the gleaming smile of a movie star, and the dark smokey eyes of a pin-up girl, author of this journal entry, was my Grandmother. She was just a few short years away from meeting my grandfather and and was working for the quartermaster at the Camp Scottsbluff Prisoner of War Camp in Western Nebraska. According to the sixty-four letters received from various soldiers (none of which were my grandfather), and released German prisoners, she was also quite the flirtatious pen-pal. Maybe she started writing to provide a morale boost to herself as much as others. Maybe she was just bored in the tiny town she, and I, grew up in. Maybe she knew that all of these men were in love with her and she was simply playing the odds to see if one of them would come home to her undamaged or even if one would just live through the brutality of war. She was twenty-three when the war ended. I was twenty-three when she lost her mind to the ravages of dementia. Of all the things I wish I could do, I wish I could go back and ask her questions about her other life. I also wish that I could say with certainty that she would have answered those questions.
Someday years from now I will probably reread these pages and wonder why, in my youth, I thought I could write and attempted to put my thoughts and reactions into words. First, I assure myself very emphatically that I definitely have no talent along literary lines, and also that my extreme frankness sometimes could be described as almost brutal.
These few pages do not develop into any particular story, except perhaps my own. Nor it is an autobiography (God forbid - I’m not that interesting). Shall we say it’s a “Collection of Recollections”. Frankly, one of the main reasons I want to write this is because I don’t want to entirely forget some of the interesting personalities whom I will describe later and I know I shall as the years pass.
This little epistle started over three years ago. It starts then because that is when “yours truly” started to lead a double life. By this I mean that at times (evenings and weekends mainly) I was a sweet, young girl who lived in a nice community all of her life, who ran with only the best people (according to their own personal opinions), who had everything that two very dear parents could give her, and, in general, led an exemplary life of refinement and culture.
My other self - which is perhaps the most interesting - and somewhat harder to understand - developed in a rather hard-bitten, cynical sort of a way when I became a “Government Girl.” Frankly, I never had the slightest intention of ever working for a Federal or State agency because in my innocence I always imagined them to be easy money and ones where all the girls had to do was look pretty. However, at the time I was “ripe” for a job and also I wanted to prove to myself that I could hold down a good job and really find out whether I had any ability. There are two kinds of Government jobs - one where you do sit and look pretty and play up to the right people. The other, the kind where you work hard and find out you’re not as smart as you wish you were. I had the latter.
Before I started working at the Prisoner of War Camp everything was still fairly new and wonderful to me.
Here is what I do know about her - she said was forced to withdraw from college because she was “having too much fun”. She had great disdain for most things German. She loved books. She was a brilliantly beautiful woman with hair always perfectly done even when she rolled out of bed. I knew her as a woman who always wore wrap skirts and heels, who changed out her purses to match her shoes, who I was always surprised to see wearing pajama pants when I got to spend the night. She was always perfunctory in her affection but I never felt anything but warm care from her. She was my favorite grandparent.
To know my Grandpa Bill is to be surprised by that statement. He is an absolutely wonderful man. Warm, funny, kind, patient, a lover of stories and animals, a great grandfather and an even better great-grandfather. A World War II fighter pilot who never saw action, a veteran, and later, a veterinarian. He is the man all men should aspire to be. Not perfect, but he lives in such awe of his good fortune that, at 95 years old, he’s still someone that people want to spend time around. A wicked pool shark and cribbage player, he only recently lost his ability to drive (and still gripes about it) and is quite the candy addict. He is still of sound mind, though his body is failing, as a 95 year old body is wont to do. He does not, to my understanding, know about the sixty-four letters. I am cautious to share them, as he adored my grandmother and I don’t want anything to change that opinion as he creeps ever closer to his final days. He often says that he “doesn’t know why she picked him.”
Grandmother (never grandma) was an otherworldly woman. I knew that if I wanted to talk about a book, a homework assignment, or just needed a davenport (the sophisticated-class word for couch) to lie upon while I was home from school sick, that her house was where I wanted to be; watching “I Love Lucy” reruns and eating applesauce and toast made from white bread, a delicacy I never got at home. She was not a creative or exceptionally talented cook. Brownies on the fourth of July were the only thing she made from scratch that I can remember, and she somehow managed to get the frosting to taste like fudge, a talent that I have yet to master. I keep trying though.
We seemed to live through traumas together. She and I watched the Challenger explosion happen on live television. I was home sick and distraught at the idea of not getting to watch the launch with my friends at school. We watched the entire build up, the news reports, the commentary. I had read every article in the newspaper and our weekly readers at school in preparation. My father, a space nerd and journalist, had fed my obsession with pride. Feverish, curled up near her giant stainless steel “just in case” bowl, I was filled with anticipation. T-15, she shushed me because I was becoming a bit of a chatterbox with facts about the mission. We had lift off, Challenger had cleared the tower and I had been able to see it, uninterrupted by my fifth grade classmates inane commentary. I’d never been so thankful for the stomach flu. And then, 73 seconds later, it was over in a Y-shaped burst of smoke. She sat, silently chain smoking, while we watched the video of the disaster over, and over, and over. Neither of us cried. She, for better or worse, taught me in that moment how to be stoic. I told her at that moment that “I no longer believed in God, because how could God let something like that happen.” She agreed with me. Maybe she’d given up on God long before that day.
She lived her entire life in the same home, the home that her grandfather built for his son, her father. I know she revered her father and that he died just weeks before my dad was born. She went into preterm labor from the shock. When she shared that story with me while I was pregnant with my first born I was surprised to hear her say she even felt grief. This was a woman who I couldn’t imagine having intense feelings. I know that after her father’s death she, and her young family, moved back into her childhood home with her mother. Very little is ever spoken of her mother. I know my great-grandmother was not well, potentially depressed, potentially suffering from a more involved mental illness, maybe just abusive. Grandmother never spoke of her mother with love.
This is to not say that she didn’t love. She did. She fiercely loved her sons. As an extension of her sons, I know she loved her grandchildren. Her boys, my father and his brother Mike, had coffee every single morning with their mom. Every. Single. Morning. Her boys only lived a few blocks from her, my uncle on the same street. It was how she wanted it to be, and so it was. As a mom of grown children I cannot imagine my kids doing that. Nor can I imagine how I would tolerate that of my husband. I’m not sure how my mother or my aunt did (or if they even knew), but Barb was not a force to be reckoned with and so coffee, every day, happened.
It’s likely that coffee happened every day up until the 8th of August, 1998 when her youngest son, my uncle, my father’s only sibling, died. By chance, I was in town that day. The universe wanted us to share another trauma. I had walked down to her house with my daughter and husband. We passed by my uncle’s and I remember saying that we’d stop by and see him on the way back to my parent’s house. Grandmother had begun to be a little scattered, a little forgetful. It was hard to see this perfectly coiffed woman start to slip and I wanted more than anything for her to get to know her great-granddaughter and see me as a mom. Her days were spent just sitting in her chair in the corner, smoking her Pall-Mall cigarettes (those red and white packages still call to me at the grocery store), watching the birds outside and the goings-on of the neighbors.
That day still hurts, even twenty plus years later. We were sitting on the davenport watching my eight-month old daughter crawl around on the floor. As the first great-grandchild my grandparents seemed to marvel at her every move, and at the fact that they couldn’t believe they were old enough to be great-grandparents. As a first-time mom I was worried about what the smokey air would do to my daughter. As a granddaughter, I was surprised to see that the floor was dirty. Her floor was never dirty. And then the sirens started. I stood up and without even looking outside said “They’re going to Mike’s.” To this day, I can’t say for certain why I knew. Mike was only forty-five (an age I’m rapidly approaching). The ambulance flew up the street and I took off running, my seventy-five year old Grandpa somehow beating me up the street.
My husband walked up with Grandmother and our daughter. When they wheeled my uncle out of his house, already blue-grey from the massive heart attack that killed him instantly, her statement of “Damnit, Mike” was followed by a strange, guttural, moan that I now recognize as the sound of a heart breaking and something snapping in, not just her heart, but her mind. It’s hard to know how to mourn someone who dies so young, leaving my cousins without a dad at sixteen and nineteen. Though parents should never bury their children and crying is expected, I never saw her cry. She didn’t outwardly grieve beyond that horrible moan. Her remaining days at home were spent in a never ending cycle of chain-smoking and reading, and rereading, hundreds of sympathy cards until they were worn out and falling apart from all of the handling.
Even though I was with her during one of the darkest moments of her life, and as the oldest grandchild I had more time with her than my brother or cousins, I’m discovering that I didn’t really know her. I’m not sure anyone really did. I think she really did lead a “double life”, and that one half of that life ended when World War II ended in 1945 and she went back to being that girl that came from “good people” and settled down.
I have vague recollections of her telling me that she was engaged before Grandpa Bill. She said she called it off when she realized that she liked her fiancé’s mother more than she liked him. And, in her true frank, stoic, oh-so-private fashion “that was that” and there were no more stories. For years I’ve worn two of her diamond rings for years knowing that they did not come from Grandpa Bill, and wondering if they came from that fiancé.
I don't remember her telling me that she worked at a Prisoner of War camp for Germans captured during World War II. Located just outside our small Nebraska hometown were 5000+ young Germans, some Nazis, many just conscripted soldiers who were happy to be taken prisoner by the US instead of Russia. I wish I’d asked her more questions. The self-centered nature of youth prevented me from recognizing that there would be a void in my adulthood created by this lack of knowledge. Her closed off nature likely wouldn’t have provided me with much information.
And now, when I was looking for something to write after a year that involved recovering from my current husband’s battle with addiction and the transition to an empty nest household, I discovered a stack of letters to her and a scrapbook kept by her during World War II. Letters from five different men: four US soldiers and one German prisoner of war. None of these men were my Grandpa, who she married shortly after the war. Along with her POW badge, I have two journal entries, and a scrapbook filled with photos from her time “Behind the Wire”. Also saved, but not explained, are a dozen hand-carved wooden dogs that were carved for her by a German prisoner of war that, along with those soldiers, loved this stoic beauty, with a movie star smile, enviably thick hair, piercing eyes, and a wickedly dark sense of humor.
I’m struggling to determine which of the men she really loved, if any. It wasn’t her whiny, unmotivated finacé whose mother she loved more than him. His letters were painfully bland. I think it might be the playboy All-American football player she went to high school and college with, who was an Army Paratrooper and part of the division that liberated Dachau. His letters were the most entertaining. Or, it could be the Marine Battalion Surgeon who helped treat thousands of men in Okinawa during the bloodiest battle of the war. His letters were the most poetic. Maybe, though, it was the sharply handsome older man, the Army Captain that helped run the POW camp in Nebraska. Tall, dark, and damaged, he featured most prominently in her scrapbooks. It could have been the young German soldier that hand carved a dozen wooden dog figurines for her and surprised her with them when she was at work. I’ve fallen in love with each of them as I’ve worked on this project. Living her her pre-Grandpa life I feel a bit like I’m cheating on him, even though he was not a part of her narrative until January of 1946 when her “other life” came to an end.
I am writing the story inspired by her other life.
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