A Tale from the Trail

On my walk yesterday I was stopped by a man. I'm used to a cursory greeting when passing by other walkers so it felt quite unusual to take a break to talk with a stranger. I had gone as far as Limantour Road, along the Fire Road at the end of Sunnyside Road and on my way back this fellow appeared at the gate to the fire road. He stopped me with an engaging smile and said.

"Hello. Do you live in that nice house on top of the hill?"

"In that monstrosity? No, fortunately I don't."

Undeterred he persisted with friendly chatter, asking if I was a local, how long had I lived here, where was I from. Quite inquisitive. When I mentioned South Africa he wanted to know if I was a 'burr.'

"You mean a Boer?" I was immediately in defense mode. Is my English that guttural? Do I sound like an Afrikaner? I tried to explain the complex ethnic diversity and many accents in my home country. Of course that led to more questions from him about how come I was born there and now I am here and what did my ancestors do. Where did they come from? It doesn't take much to get me to talk about my great grandfather and my research but I dragged myself away from that topic. He was very friendly but it was his turn to give answers. 

Born in Germany to parents who were both surgeons, both from the USA, and both, coincidentally, had studied undergraduate degrees at Oxford University before continuing with medicine. His mother was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sister.

In 1933 his parents had chosen to live and practice medicine in Dresden. FDR asked them to report to him on Hitler's activities in those early pre-war years. Which they did. But soon they were caught up in Nazism. His mother was anti-Semitic and his father anti-Slav and they fell under Hitler's spell.

He was five when the family left Germany after WWII but he remembers being taught to fire a pistol, to salute Hitler, to be a good Nazi German citizen while his parents worked on the frontlines attending the wounded and dying soldiers. Of course I asked what they thought of the decimation of the Jewish people, husbands, wives, children, entire families. How could they support Hitler knowing what was happening? 

"It was dreadful but it wasn't Jewish people who were being gassed. It was Russian prisoners of war. The Nazi's rounded up the Jews, removed their identity documents and shepherded them out of the country all the way to Constantinople where they set them free to walk to Israel. The Russian POWs were then taken to the gas chambers and given Jewish identity via the stolen documents. And that's really what happened."

I was getting cold from both the weather and the chilling story, and it would soon be getting dark. I had one last question for him: "Did you follow your parents and study medicine?"

"Yes" he answered, "but I didn't last long and I studied physics later. I'm a physicist." Then he asked me my name.

"Sherry" I said. 

"Sherry Price?" He asked.

"No, who is she?"

"Just someone I knew a long time ago. She was beautiful. You look like her and when I first saw you I thought you might be her."

I said goodbye and walked off quickly before the blush would reveal my pleasure at being mistaken for Sherry Price. I put my hand up to my neck and felt the ripples of loose skin. I moved my hand under and around my chin to my cheek to check if the deep crevices had disappeared. They hadn't. But my smile grew. It was all nonsense of course; his story; trying to flatter me with a compliment. But it was fuel for me to jog up the hill feeling quite light. In that moment I was the pretty Sherry Price.

When I got home I googled "Sherry Price" and the only age appropriate result I came across had not washed her hair in weeks. It was bedraggled and scruffy like the old and faded denim shirt she wore. And in her LinkedIn photo she was looking exhausted, holding up a tatty to-go paper cup of coffee to the camera. "I need help" she seemed to say.

Then I googled FDR's sister and discovered he was an only child. 

Did this man, who appeared out of nowhere, also need help? Did I need help? I suddenly felt as though I had fabricated the whole story.