Switzerland’s Banished Children
Dedicated to Marlene Brown-Bieler, Gottlieb Brunner, Heinz Egger, David Gogniat, Charles Probst and all those Swiss children whose stories will never be heard and for whom justice will never be found.
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An Englishman Abroad: Groton School MA 1951 – 1955
Peter O’Connell and Alan Pifer met as students at Cambridge in 1946. Peter was from London and Alan from Massachusetts. Pifer had attended Groton School and graduated from Harvard. By 1950 he was Director of the Fulbright Commission in London.
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As Good as Gold
This article has been adapted and extended from the original essay: The Cuckoo that Laid the Golden Egg: The Legacy of Nazi Gold in Switzerland, from the book Whiteness is Not an Ancestor, Essays on Life and Lineage by White Women published in 2020 by Cab Publishing, USA
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Bullying – a longing to belong
Bullying, whether physical or emotional, is an attempt to compensate for feeling unprotected. It is a display that masks a sense of powerlessness. At heart, it is a longing to belong, a quest for a cast iron certainty that our place in the group is guaranteed, always.
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The Stones of Belonging – working systemically in primary schools
Sometimes grown-ups stop loving each other, one parent may move away, to another town or even to another country, but our parents remain our parents and we remain their children. We belong to our families and they belong to us for a lifetime’.
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‘This article was first published in ‘The Knowing Field’, January 2012 and in ‘Conexao Sistemica Sul’, Brazil, February 2012.
A Swiss Memory
‘My father sailed back to New York for the start of the new term and my mother remained in Bern, awaiting her American visa’.
The Guardian: Snapshot
Like mother like daughter
“May you never lay your head down / Without a hand to hold / May you never make your bed out in the cold” – May You Never by John Martyn
‘It was a Friday night in 1976 and I was driving to a party in my mum’s Mini. Back then, we all listened to the pirate radio stations and every Sunday night, between 9pm and 11pm, Radio Caroline would play a listener’s personal Top 30’.
The Guardian: Playlist
Fond Memories of the 1966 World Cup
My father wanted to create ‘a mini United Nations that really is united’ and so he and my mother founded an English language school in Folkestone.
In July 1966, Dad invited all the students to watch the final of the World Cup on our relatively modest television. I was seven years old. I had absolutely no interest in football but I was spellbound by all the cheering and stamping, the waving and hugging. When England won, our German friends were disappointed of course, but the French, the Spanish and the Italians, the Iranians, the Turks and the Israelis were thrilled, because they loved England, they loved Folkestone and the School of English Studies. They had a strong bond of friendship with their teachers and their host families – it was as if their own country had won the World Cup. On that afternoon in 1966, we really were ‘a mini United Nations’.
‘Fond Memories of the 1966 World Cup’.
Published in The Guardian Journal on August 3rd, 2016