THIS is the last Roamer page till next Friday, when another Christmas will have passed and gone.
I hope many happy memories will linger on, into and beyond the New Year. Thank you everyone who sent me Christmas wishes, and I’d love to display your beautiful seasonal cards for all to see. This is everybody’s page, and your yuletide greetings belong to all of the News Letter’s readers and contributors. I particularly enjoyed an unusual and amusing card showing a beleaguered Chelsea Pensioner being marched through snow into the Tower of London, sent to me by a reader who has connections with the Welsh Guards. With reference to, and reverence of, our disease-stricken Ash trees, I’ve recently been revisiting some of the many stories about trees that have been recounted here down the years, and instead of Christmas cards today there’s a picture of a chestnut tree!
In the season of peace and goodwill, except perhaps for the poor old Chelsea Pensioner, this chestnut tree has very poignant roots. I found it in Co Tyrone two years ago, where it was planted on the day WWII ended on May 8 1945. Two young twin brothers, wartime evacuees from Belfast, rooted the tiny chestnut sapling outside their adopted home near Clogher on the day that peace dawned over Europe.
Then they returned to Belfast. The tree flourished, but locally, memories of the two boys faded.
“Most days I go for a walk up there,” Mrs Sigrid Owens told me when I visited her home at the beginning of January 2010, a few hundred yards from the tree “and occasionally I gather some chestnuts.”
Sigrid, originally from Berlin, wanted to trace the twins, or someone who knew something about them, to put together a story that was for her profoundly close to home in more ways than one. When she was a little girl, Sigrid Zweig (her maiden name) often visited her grandfather, an estate caretaker near Berlin “and I used to gather chestnuts.”
In 1943 she was evacuated from the German capitol to escape some of the terrors of war, but only some. She told me about living in fear, returning home “with the Russians on our heels invading Germany,” and hiding in a cellar, terrified, until the Allies relieved her plight. The enormous chestnut tree near her Clogher home was a magnificent memorial to peace and goodwill, and a wonderful legacy left by two wartime evacuees. Coincidentally, before Sigrid came to Ireland in 1956 and married, her family name was Zweig - the German word for the branch of a tree!