# News of the Old ## Posts - [Introduction](https://newsoftheold.com/introduction/): I never met my great aunt Margery but she has been a presence in my life from almost the moment she died in the summer of 1965. I was 9. She was 77 and had been living in the Soviet Union since 1922. In the twilight of her life she showed signs of wanting to come home. My father, then Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, went to investigate, having convinced his editors that his father’s eccentric sister, though way off his beat, would interest readers. He came back with a memorable story but meant to do it fuller... - [III. Surplus Woman](https://newsoftheold.com/surplus-woman/): The Land of Promise, a play by Somerset Maugham, opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End on February 26, 1914. Irene Vanbrugh starred as a paid companion who seeks a new life in Manitoba after her employer dies and leaves her penniless. The subject was topical. “Half the “gentle” families you can meet have a daughter on the prairie”, the Observer’s reviewer observed with only mild hyperbole. Ella C. Sykes, redoubtable author of Through Persia on a Side-Saddle, was out with a new book, A Home Help in Canada. She had gone undercover to see how... - [Birth on the Nile](https://newsoftheold.com/birth-on-the-nile/): Stephen Barber came into the world with a hole in his heart. On the eve of World War II, he was home in Egypt, not long out of Bembridge, an English boarding school on the Isle of Wight, eager to enlist. They put a stethoscope to his chest and declared him unfit to serve. He would go to war as a reporter. In 1941, he landed a job with the Associated Press in Cairo. He was 19. Over the next 39 years, he would witness a lot of history and meet a lot of the people who made it. Then,... - [Forgotten Sacrifice](https://newsoftheold.com/forgotten-sacrifice/): Here is the beach at Marina di Campo on the Italian island of Elba as it looks now. This evening the popular summer resort hosts White Night, a music festival. L’auspicio è quello di vedere il nostro paese invaso da persone in festa, say the organisers. We look forward to seeing our town invaded by party-goers. Eighty years ago last Monday, the beach looked very different. It was littered with invaders of another kind — dead and dying Senegalese conscripts fighting on behalf of their French colonial masters to liberate the island from the Nazis.  Their sacrifice is very likely going unremarked... - [The Turkish Girl](https://newsoftheold.com/the-turkish-girl/): I often wonder what became of the girl we ran over on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 8, 1967, somewhere between Troy and our tent by the Hellespont. She would be about 70 now. Does she have grandchildren? Has she told them how she got that dent on her forehead? I recently found a photograph — a Kodachrome slide — which must have been taken shortly after it happened. Blotched and faded, it has a dreamlike quality. We are on a rough road in the middle of nowhere. On the left is a shelter, a sort of yurt woven from... - [The boss don't like swindle, make it robbery](https://newsoftheold.com/the-boss-dont-like-swindle-make-it-robbery/): The National Enquirer is a shadow of its former self. I worked there for a month in 1981 when it was owned and edited by Generoso Pope. I was no fan of his then but in retrospect I can’t imagine him catching and killing for Donald Trump. His guys would have caught and published, the way they did with Presidential aspirants Gary Hart and John Edwards. They would have ripped the lid off Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels in real time, not years after the fact. The Apprentice would have been riddled with moles on the Enquirer payroll. We would... - [Funeral of a friend](https://newsoftheold.com/burying-my-father/): I am just back from a couple of days of thrarrghing around the hills and hollows of southern and West Virginia with my friend Roland, he on his Harley, I on a BMW whose early years were spent under the bum of a New Mexico Highway Patrolman but which remains remarkably lively, nonetheless. In the course of our rundfahrt, we visited my parents. They are buried on a wooded ridge above the headwaters of the James River, he in a traditional casket, she, or more precisely her ashes, in a bottle of Roederer, her favorite champagne. How she came there is a story... - [Chicago Rashomon 1968](https://newsoftheold.com/chicago-rashomon-1968/): I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether to use his night-stick on the photographer, Michael Boyer of the Associated Press. Behind him, moving right to left, similarly accoutered colleagues are chasing people down the sidewalk outside the Conrad Hilton. That’s where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, is headquartered along... - [V. Doña Quixota](https://newsoftheold.com/dona-qixota/): April 1915-March 1916 The Serbs sent the Berry unit to Vrnjača Banja,  a spa town in the highlands 80 miles south of Belgrade. For their HQ and hospital, the Berry’s had chosen the Terapia, a grand sanatorium gone somewhat to seed but where water and a generator could be made to run with the aid of Austrian POW’s. Of these there was an ample supply, Serbia having routed the initial Hapsburg invasion.  Conscripted from all walks of life, the prisoners came with a wide array of skills; deloused, they made excellent helpers, only too happy to be out of a... - [I. Among the Khirghiz](https://newsoftheold.com/among-the-khirghiz/): Margarita Robertovna, as she is known locally, is writing to her mother, who knows her as Margery. She is squeezing words onto a small sheet of coarse squared paper. First the date. November 14, 1931. Then, carefully printed, her address. Урал Каз Край Рыбак Союз, Цалкарский Промысел, Анкотуиского Район⁠.  Copied correctly, this will direct her mother’s reply forty unpaved miles across the steppe from Uralsk in the northwest corner of what has lately become the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.  Her own letter is bound for 6a, The Leas, Folkestone, Kent, a clifftop Georgian row house with an occasional view... - [II. The blood in her veins](https://newsoftheold.com/the-blood-in-her-veins/): On July 11, 1913, Margery Barber shipped out for Quebec aboard the Empress of Ireland. The passenger manifest listed Canada as her “country of intended future permanent residence”. The socialite wife of her uncle Benjamin had remarked that “when an unmarried young woman gets to 25, I’ve often noticed she begins to call old maids bachelor girls.” Margery was 25 and showed no sign of settling down to breed. If her family’s prayers were answered, she would soon be making herself useful and finding happiness, perhaps even a suitable husband, in the colonies. “She had a noble, arresting and charming... - [IV. Passage to Serbia](https://newsoftheold.com/passage-to-serbia/): By April the following year, the rector’s mad daughter was at sea again, off to nurse in the Balkans, surplus no more. She owed the adventure to her brother Clement and the scarlet fever he brought home from the army. She caught it caring for him and landed herself in the Ipswich Fever Hospital. There she spent her month of quarantine making herself useful in the wards and gaining enough experience to qualify as a VAD — Voluntary Aid Detachment — orderly. Austria-Hungary had invaded Serbia the previous August to avenge the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, pulling the trigger... ## Pages - [About](https://newsoftheold.com/about/): I’m Simon Barber. Here you will find stories from my attic, literal and figurative. I used to write about politics but am recovering. You will encounter no paywalls, just a presumptuous busker’s hat at the bottom of each post. Feel free to ignore it. If you’d like the latest installment of whatever it is I’m scribbling added to the clutter in your mailbox, please consider signing up for a weekly or so Newsletter of the Old. I live west of Washington DC between the Antietam battlefield and the Potomac River. The other day I turned 70. Here’s a form if... 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