MY BOYHOOD IN HISTORY

I don’t remember exactly when my love affair with history began. Perhaps it was because I was a growing boy when the world was changing; when Hitler was rising; when chaos was looming. I don’t know. I do know that when I was nine or ten years old I was “up" on current events. I remember the Spanish Civil War. I remember an Italian family who lived on Brunswick Avenue when I was a seven year old. They seemed to cheer for Mussolini and his venture into Ethiopia. I remember Chamberlain going to Munich and returning full of futile hope. I remember Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of Sudetenland, followed by the complete occupation of Czechoslovakia. I remember being a “lefty” when the Soviet Union seemed to be the only country that took sides with the “Loyalists” in the Spanish War and the only country ready to fight on behalf of the Czechs. I was shocked when they signed a non-aggression treaty with the Nazis. I knew even then that it was a defensive ploy, and that the Nazis and the Reds shared no common ground except mutual hatred.

Even today I find myself attracted to documentary film that appears on the Military Channel and retells the stories of the “Great” War and the misery in the trenches and of the rise of Hitler.

I was, as were millions of others, swept along by the Lanny Budd series by Upton Sinclair, a panoramic view of Europe from the beginning of the 20th century. I read with sadness and incredulity this item in Wickipedea: “The series covers in sequence much of the political history of the Western world, particularly Europe and America, in the first half of the twentieth century. Out of print and almost totally forgotten today, the novels were all bestsellers upon publication and were published in 21 countries. The third book in the series, Dragon's Teeth, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

I was carried along with Lanny Budd who seemed to be present at every critical point in history. I started to lose interest with Sinclair became tangled up in spiritualism to the extent that communication with the “other side” was part of his last books.

But Sinclair put me there when Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson were waging their battle of futility against the entrenched anger of Clemenceau. He was brilliant with the invention of the classic “Beauty Budd” – Lanny’s mother, who seemed always to be the socialite who hobnobbed with everyone.

Now the pleasure of re-visiting that history has been renewed. I have just finished “Fall of Giants” the first in a trilogy by Ken Follett. It is difficult not to enjoy Follett’s painstaking look at history, woven, as Upton Sinclair did, into the lives of fictitious characters who were always present when the world was changing.

Missing were Sinclair characters like Basil Zaharoff, the international arms dealer who Sinclair inserted into all the historic intrigue of the period between the two wars. But Follett gave me a coal-mining town in Wales and the brother and sister team of Billy and Ethel Williams pitted against the Tory Lord Earl Fitzhugh. He gave me a German I could love and the Junker mentality that underlay the rise of Pan-Germanism. He gave me two brothers growing up in Russia and the most dramatic replay of the 1905 massacre in St, Petersburg.

The first book ends tantalizingly as Ethel Williams confronts Lord Fitzhugh. It is the twenties and Ramsay MacDonald is the Labour Prime Minister in a coalition with the Liberals.

Please Mr. Follett – more of the same. I have been there many times, but each time I take the trip is better than the last.