Almost a Great Escape: A Found Story

212 Pages·2013·2.69 MB·English

by  Tyler Trafford

Almost a Great Escape

Also by Tyler Trafford
The Métis Girl
Alexander’s Way
The Story of Blue Eye

Copyright ©2013 by Tyler Trafford.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access
Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by John Sweet.
Cover and page design by Chris Tompkins.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Trafford, Tyler, 1949—
Almost a great escape [electronic resource]: a found story / Tyler Trafford.
Electronic monograph issued in PDF format.
ISBN 978-0-86492-763-7
1. Trafford, Alice — Correspondence. 2. Müller, Jens — Correspondence. 3. Trafford, Tyler, 1949- —
Family. 4. Stalag Luft III. 5. Prisoner-of-war escapes — Poland — Żaga´n. 6. World War, 1939-1945 —
Prisoners and prisons, German. 7. Mothers and sons. 8. Authors, Canadian (English) — 20th century —
Biography. I. Title.
PS8589.R335Z53 2013 C813’.54 C2012-906317-7
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick
through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com

For Judy, Sharnee, and Nicolas
“Please Alice remember that I’ll come back . . . ”
Jens Müller.

The Campbell’s Beef Noodle Soup Box
The Jens Album
63 Days
Terms of an Engagement
Consequences
Destinations
My Search for Jens Müller
Acknowledgements

ONE GOOD THING
My mother’s name was Alice Tyler. The story of her One Good Thing begins at
her funeral in April 2004 and ends 60 years earlier, in March 1944, when 76
World War II airmen break out of Stalag Luft III, the Nazi prison camp in
Sagen, Poland. The Great Escape made into a Steve McQueen film: 73
recaptured, 50 executed. Only 3 made it home.
In 1961, when I was 12, Alice knew something was going to happen to us that
I wouldn’t understand. Instead of trying to explain it, she gave me one of her
favourite books: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I still have the
book. It is a first edition, printed in 1952. It could be valuable today to collectors
because Hemingway won a Pulitzer Prize with it — except our dog chewed a
corner. It’s a small book, only 140 pages. I still read it whenever I feel small in a
big world. I have read it hundreds of times.
The plot is simple. An old Cuban fisherman named Santiago fishes alone, far
out on the Gulf Stream where nobody else dares to go. There he hooks the
biggest marlin he has ever seen: 18 feet long.
For two days and nights the fish tows Santiago’s small skiff toward the floating
horizon. The line rips through the calluses of Santiago’s already scarred hands.
His admiration for the fish’s courage and endurance becomes love. The fish is
the most noble experience of his life.
Waiting for his return is Manolin, the boy the old man has been teaching to
fish.
On the third day, Santiago is able to pull the marlin close. He drives his
harpoon into its heart. He still loves it after it is dead. Blood swirls into the
current. The marlin is too long to load onto his skiff, so he ties it to the side.
Then sharks attack. Santiago uses the last of his strength defending the marlin.
He sails through the night and into the harbour. All the sharks have left him is
a skeleton.
In the morning Manolin finds Santiago asleep in his shack. He sees his
teacher’s ripped hands and begins to cry. On his way to buy coffee for the old
man he sees the remains of the marlin in the harbour. He begins to cry again.
Alice told me I must be like Santiago and catch a truly big fish — The One
Good Thing in my life. Never give up. Nothing else matters. Not even the sharks
that come afterwards.
She liked that expression, One Good Thing. We all have one, she would say.
When life shows up with a package and your name is on it. Take it. Don’t
hesitate. The opportunity will never come again.
She told me this in so many ways that I knew it had a significance to her
wrapped around something she kept hidden.
I often wanted to ask her what the One Good Thing in her life had been. But
how can a boy ask his mother what it is she won’t talk about?
After I read the book again, I asked her what would have happened to Santiago
if his fish had gotten away.
She kissed me on the forehead. “A fisherman like Santiago keeps his truly big
fish in his heart, whether he brings it to the shore or not. What or who we love
never gets away. We fight the sharks forever to remember that love. Maybe one
day you’ll write a book with that ending.”
I was Manolin. My mother was Santiago. For twelve years she had been
teaching me to be just like her.
Then I was alone.

MY GOODBYE MOTHER
Alice gave me her name, Tyler. My older brother got my father’s name, Ted
(Teddy).
Alice taught me everything she considered important. She taught me how to
care, how to laugh, and how to live my own life.
She taught me to read from New Yorkers and novels. She taught me to ride a
horse, swim, ski, and ignore people who said a boy couldn’t decide for himself.
Because we were more like friends than mother/son, it wasn’t hard for me to
see she kept something hidden that she would never talk about. Maybe she
thought I would eventually figure it out for myself. Figuring things out for
myself was an important part of being with Alice.
People often said Alice was blue eyed blonde slim beautiful. I always said she
was strong. She had the strongest soft hands of any person I would ever know.
You couldn’t break her grip. She always held me safe.
When I was six, I came home from my first day of school and told her I didn’t
think I would learn anything there. She didn’t argue. A month later she
introduced me to Mrs. Bilton, a grade three teacher who was willing to try me in
her class. Mrs. Bilton divided her class into animal groups and pasted bluebirds,
squirrels, and robins on their scribblers. She rewarded students with gold stars
and pinned the best pages on the walls. I tore the bluebird off my scribbler and
pulled my gold stars from the wall. The last time Alice ever came to my school
was to persuade Mrs. Bilton that I would do fine as a group of one. She wanted
me to be able to figure things out for myself. Mrs. Bilton said I was already
doing that and I didn’t have to be a bluebird.
If the snow was good, Alice took me out of school to go skiing. If the grass
was green, we went riding. We considered report cards unimportant.
Alice protected me from my father. And paid for it. He was a charming,
loveless aristocrat — and a good liar — who liked to reach over and rap my
knuckles with a soup spoon whenever I spilled food or wasn’t sitting up straight.
He said he was teaching me British manners. I had to take the rap then, or the
belt later. He expected gold stars from a lad of my possibilities. Alice changed
the subject when she could.
My father was not my mother’s One Good Thing. I couldn’t imagine he had
one, and I wished my mother would tell me what hers was.
Maybe she had missed her One Good Thing. Maybe she had waited too long.
Maybe she had made a mistake. If that were true, I had figured out who the
mistake was.
I may have been only a lad — as my father used to call me in his British way
— but I was old enough to see he didn’t like how close Alice and I were, the
way we laughed at the same jokes, and how we disappeared into the mountains
leaving him at home with the children and the nanny. He worked late those days.
I was too young to know what that really meant.
But I wasn’t too young to figure out he didn’t like my ignore you attitude when
told what to do by him or by anybody else. I knew he didn’t like this and many
other things about me. I didn’t know why it mattered to him what I did. As far as
I could tell, what I did was none of his or anybody else’s business.
When I was 13, my mother of summer horses and rivers didn’t want me to see
the slow dying coming for her: alcoholism, breast cancer, polymyalgia, and an
unfaithful, bullying husband.
The day I was sent away to boarding school, she stood beside me on the
railway platform in Calgary. It was a tearless farewell.
I would never live at home again for more than a few months at a time. My
five brothers and one sister would soon be strangers to me.
I would never see the mother again who didn’t wave from the railway
platform. I would remember her as My Goodbye Mother: the mother I once had.
When the train brought me home for Christmas, Alice’s silent blue eyes told
me there was no going back for us. As much as I didn’t want to, I would have to
face life on my own. I would have to figure things out for myself, the way My
Goodbye Mother had taught me. She had faith in me.
She had 41 years of dying ahead. She expected I would find better things to do
with my life than wait around for that.
I took all the memories a boy’s heart could carry and buried them in silence.
No words, no flowers, no crying. Just a flat grey stone rolled onto my forgetting
place. I would always love My Goodbye Mother, but it got harder and harder to
remember her. Finally I couldn’t remember I had a forgetting place.
The Alice who replaced My Goodbye Mother lived drunk fighting and drugged
in the upstairs bedroom. Radiation burned lungs connected by clear tubes to an
oxygen machine. Pills, magazines, and books spilling from her bed and recliner
onto the floor. My father slept in his study. I visited whenever I thought he
would be out.
Some days I would sit by her bed while she slept and wonder how this had
happened. When I left, I would kiss her forehead. I expected she would know I
had been there. On days when I visited Alice and she was awake, she’d pour a
toothbrush glass of Smirnoff from a hidden bottle and light up a du Maurier. She
enjoyed a cigarette with her oxygen, the mechanical bellows pulsing spurts of
life support into her nostrils. Smoking was her shrugged shoulder
acknowledgment of death, not its denial. Santiago knew the sharks would come.
He didn’t argue the inevitable, but he made them pay for every bite of the
marlin’s flesh.