A POST WAR HAUNTING IN WUPPERTAL GERMANY – ECHOES OF WORLD WAR II

I can only promise you the story I am about to relate to you, I firmly believe to be true.  It was told to me with unerring regularity and honesty by both my parents, both together and separately.  Unfortunately both my parents are no longer alive, but I have utter faith that they definitely experienced the following events:

My father enlisted in the army and joined the R.A.M.C  at the age of seventeen just after World War II, having already run away to the Merchant Navy and sailed around the world at the age of fifteen.  He spent the early part of his training at the infamous Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley looking after many casualties from the recently ended conflict.

Netley Hospital, is notoriously haunted.  Dad always felt uneasy working there.  The ‘grey lady’reputedly haunts the hospital grounds and the wards.  Dad told me he hated working the night shifts there and could not wait to cycle away from the grounds, never once looking back at the forboding building.  But, it’s not the ‘grey lady’ of Netley Hospital that I am going to talk about in this blog.  If you want to read more about her here is a good place to start; http://www.southernghostsociety.co.uk/past-ghost-hunts/ghost-hunt-royal-victoria-country-park.html

No the haunting I am going to tell you about happened not long after my father left Netley.

It was whilst my father was stationed in the Southampton area that he met my mother on the legendary floating bridge, which took people across the River Itchen.  They immediately bonded being the only two northerners on that short ferry ride and they married soon after.

My father was soon posted to Germany to help the country get back on it’s feet again and being a married man, my mother was allowed to go out with him.

In those early days after the war, the military were allocated vacant civilian buildings.  The allocation was quite random and a sergeant could end up in a luxurious dwelling.

Dad was sent to Wuppertal and had quickly gained his sergeant’s stripes.  They were given the second floor of a large grand building to live in.  There were three floors in the dwelling so mum and dad had other British army personnel living above and below them.  The big white house was on a road called (as far as I can recall)  Kirschbaum Strasse (Cherry Tree Street.)

Both mum and dad were ecstatic to be given such a lovely apartment and with mum being newly pregnant, they were both very pleased with the size and privacy of the building.

The Germany my parents found after the war was far from a happy place.  I remember mum telling me how defeated and malnourished the German people looked.  There were also those that held a deep resentment for their victors and their spouses.  Mum was spat at in the street, and when she was heavily pregnant nobody would give up their seat for her on the Schwebebahn (the overhead railway system.)  The worst incident she experienced was a man pushing her off the pavement on a crowded street and her narrowly missing a speeding car.

Despite all this, mum embraced her new surroundings.  She made friends with a German woman of the same age who was married to one of the Canadian soldiers and they became the best of friends.  It must have been a daunting but exciting time for a nineteen year old Liverpudlian girl.

There was however, one problem on the horizon.  The apartment, whilst spacious, high ceilinged, well located and almost sumptuous it made my mother feel extremely uneasy.  Mum told me she was soon growing to hate it.  Mum felt that the atmosphere changed as soon as my father went to work.  She actually felt some presence or entity if you like was focusing on her.  Mum would spend as much time as she could during the day out of the apartment.  Shopping, drinking coffee, walking the streets she felt happier with the naked resentment from the Germans rather than the oppressive feeling she had at the apartment.

I remember mum telling me that she couldn’t wait for my father to get home but that when he did come home, he would almost immediately fall asleep and then she would feel even more uneasy.  Dad would tell me he tried everything to stay awake and keep her company but found he was incapable of doing so, almost like he had been drugged.  We are talking about a fit man who was eighteen or nineteen years of age.  Mum started to feel like she was being watched and it was becoming almost intolerable.  There was a part of the room where she felt it even more keenly.  Running her hands over the wallpaper she could see a cupboard or a room division had been papered over.  She forbade my father from investigating this.  Now with hindsight, of course the correct thing to do would have been to have investigated further.  But all damage to buildings was chargeable by the army and also I think mum was just too terrified to find out.

It was getting to be a real problem for my father as mum wasn’t sleeping and a few nights she turned up when he was on guard duty and refused to go back to the apartment.  Dad told me he put her inside the sentry box with a coat over her hoping she would get at least a few hours sleep and praying, for his sake that she would not be discovered.

Up until this point it was my mother who had been experiencing everything that Kirschbaum Strasse had to offer.  But that was all about to change in a chilling turn of events.

One summer’s night my parents were awoken by extremely loud noises from the floor above them.  They both described it as the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor, things being thrown and loud voices shouting in German.   Dad was very annoyed.  He got out of bed and marched out to the landing.  As he approached the door of the apartment above, the noises immediately stopped.  Dad knocked on the door and told them to ‘keep it down.’  As soon as he got back to the bedroom the noises started again, so back up he went.  Sure enough the noises stopped.  This happened a few times until dad was sick of the noises and infuriated that nobody was answering the door.

They both made the best of a fractured night’s sleep still peppered with noises from the floor above.  The next day dad was still fuming.  After knocking on the door again and getting no answer he went to find the caretaker of the building.

“Who is now living in the floor above?”  Dad asked and then told him about the horrendous noises that had kept him and mum awake for most of the night.  “The soldier who has that apartment is on leave in England at the moment,” dad was informed, and “there is nobody there at present.”  “Well you need to open it up now,” dad replied “as I think it was broken into last night.”

The caretaker and dad made haste to the apartment on the top floor to see what damage had been caused.  They opened the door to one room after another in ‘apple pie’ order.  Not a stitch or a hair out of place.  Army neatness and order throughout the apartment.  My father was thunderstruck.  There was no way after the noises he and mum had heard throughout the night the apartment could have been in any other state but a bad state.

This sealed the deal for my father.  He now realised that mum had been correct in her instincts all along there was something very wrong with the house on Kirschbaum Strasse.  From that day, dad made sure that if he was not in the house mum spent as much time as she could with her German friend and would even stay the night with her rather than spend time alone in that apartment.

The noises were heard again during the night by my parents, on other occasions and the shouting German voices but dad never again ventured out onto the stairs and up to the apartment door.  They would cuddle up and try to ignore the noises.

I myself saw the house years later in the 1970’s when as a child I lived in Holland with my parents.  We went to Wuppertal one Saturday to have a look at some of the places from my parent’s past.  I saw that big white house on Kirschbaum Strasse and as I looked up from the car a child of my own age with a melancholy face looked back at me from one of the second floor windows.

Apparently dad found out that the house had a very sad past during the war it had some form connections to the SS and Von Ribbentrop’s henchmen.  It had been used for some very dark interrogations which would of course explain the noises and voices.

“Come on Peter, I’ve had enough let’s go” mum said on that chilly Saturday afternoon as she pulled her coat to her.    I watched the girl’s face until the house disappeared out of sight.

Homophobia, Sally Morgan’s Husband and The Society We Must Ensure We Cultivate

A close family member of my partner Dawn’s recently told her there was no such thing anymore as homophobia.  He implied she was being paranoid and that it didn’t exist in modern Britain.  I was strangely comforted and actually shocked at the same time.

I found it bewilderingly comforting that if this was the opinion of a straight, white male from middle class, middle England then maybe it was something he didn’t witness anymore.  Sadly I knew then and I know now that homophobia unfortunately does continue to exist.  It has, in the main just morphed into a mostly hidden and barely uttered form.

Some people’s latent perceptions can actually manifest themselves in a charming way.  Dawn and I are widely referred to wherever we go as “the girls.”  Now far from being offended by this I actually find it quite sweet.  I very much doubt though, if a straight married couple of our age would be called the ‘boy and girl.’

We have as a nation travelled such a long way from those dark days in the sixties when male homosexuality was a criminal act and the eighties when I first acknowledged my own sexuality and witnessed prejudice and hatred on a very wide scale.

In those long gone days at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties I would often feel intimidated in certain social situations.  Being perceived to be a lesbian, there were many places that you would not eat or drink for fear of garnering some form of  negative attention.  I have to say I certainly don’t feel like that anymore.  There are very few restaurants or pubs even in the most dubious of areas that I would think twice about entering.

I glory in the way life has changed for both me and my compatriots in such a short time.  I am also not stupid or naïve enough to think that some people’s hatreds and prejudices have not just gone underground.  The human race is nothing if not blessed with a tremendously strong sense of self-preservation.  People adapt to the environments they find themselves in.  Many people, who in days gone by would have openly displayed homophobia now don’t for their own self-preservation and social standing.  This does not unfortunately mean that it can’t and will not eventually find it’s way to the surface.

Television psychic and snake oil peddler Sally Morgan’s and her husbands’s vile homophobic outburst is a classic example of this.  Had this repulsive specimen known he was being filmed there was absolutely no way in hell he would have expressed such prejudiced bile to the gentlemen in the video.  It’s not good ‘business’ these days to be homophobic.  But, and here’s the rub, he IS homophobic and his homophobia is ingrained.   If the environment was more supportive of his views of course they would surface again.

So whenever people say to me throwaway comments along the lines of ‘oh nobody cares anymore’  which they often do, I just smile to myself.  No there are many that DO care and are innately prejudice but the society we have built will not accept or tolerate their behaviour|

So my thoughts;   We must Glory, embrace and then celebrate the freedoms we have won and continue to ensure hatred cannot exist.  But, and it’s a big ‘but’, we must never become complacent.  Whilst we cannot always change what is inside people’s hearts.  We can ensure it stays in their hearts and not on the streets.  Let’s keep building a world where the John Morgans are alienated and despised for their hatred