BackStory Episode 10
Gazelephant. Illustration by Isabel Lattimore Casseres
Episode 10 begins with Marguerite’s news that she is to be sent from Costa Rica back to the United States for her last two years of high school education and a future hope of college.
Astute listeners may have caught that as Marguerite worries at the beginning of her letter if she will ever see her novio again, she refers to him as Luis rather than Alejandro. Curious! Be sure to send me a note if you’d like to know more!
The Quinceañera that Marguerite mentions is a girl’s 15th birthday party, an important celebration in Central and South American countries that marks the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Now that Marguerite is 16, it is indeed strange that marriage has not being discussed by her parents, and likely the reason she is being sent back to the States.
The school Marguerite will attend in Baltimore belongs to Protestant Christian denomination known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members are informally known as Quakers as they were said to “tremble in the way of the Lord”. Quakers were known to refuse to participate in war, refuse to swear oaths, oppose slavery, and practise teetotalism (abstinence from alcohol). Philanthropic efforts included working for the abolition of slavery, prison reform, and social justice projects.
Although a great-grandparent of Marguerite’s was a Congregationalist minister, (Reverend John Rogers Thurston, the father of Marguerite’s Grandmother Frost and after whom Thurston (Tom) Frost, Marguerite’s father, was named), neither Marguerite’s grandparents nor parents on either side, Frost or Lattimore, practiced religion other than, as custom dictated, to attend church. An anecdote about Marguerite’s grandfather, Reverend John Rogers Thurston (who was a believer in the Suffragette movement) was that his daughter, Marguerite’s grandmother, thought him “a saintly man; known to read a little Greek and a little Hebrew before breakfast, and then to carry up full coal-shuttles of coal from the basement ‘to spare the maid from that work’.”
The Quaker Friends’ school was chosen for Marguerite as a stepping stone for her to be able in the future to attend Bryn Mawr College, which had been founded by Quakers.
Marguerite’s portion of Episode 10 ends with her describing poems that her mother Isabel wrote and illustrated, (see the Gazelephant above). Another of her make-believe animals can be found on Instagram (@Fondlyyoursmarguerite) along with a photo of her and her shockingly fashionable (for the 1920s) bobbed haircut.
Episode 10 continues with Maude describing that although the Phoney War continues in England (no bombs falling), it has ended on the Continent with Germany having pushed France to the edge of the English Channel. British soldiers are rescued at Dunkirk. France was to fall in the Battle of France, also called the Fall of France, May 10-June 25, 1940.
The details that Maude describes about the Halls, including Will’s left-handed-ness and poetry, as well as Mrs. Hall’s habit of saving the meagre meat rations for the men are true, as told to the family. The description of Jackie’s convoy experiences is based on research done by my research assistant (husband Brian).
During the war, British merchant ships (so called as they collected for their island nation the products needed for both everyday life as well as wartime necessities) travelled in large convoys encircled by protective warships across the Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The different ships would then split away from each other and head to various ports to pick up cargo (Venezuela, where Jackie’s ship went, was the leading oil producer in the world at the time). The ships then returned to Halifax to join a convoy and then wait for it to be ready for the return journey to Britain. A ship carrying fuel would be in the centre of the convoy. Encircling the merchant ships would be the scarce British destroyers and other armed escort ships. The dates and times when the convoys headed out were kept secret.
Maude’s letter, written near the end of June 1940, ends with one of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches.
Soon to come:
The Battle of Britain (between RAF and Luftwaffe, British and German air forces) would begin on July 10 and end on October 31, 1940, and be absorbed into the Blitz (nighttime bombing) that lasted from Sept 7, 1940- May 11, 1941.