The Other Brother

T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas Edward Lawrence (known professionally as T.E.) had four brothers.  His youngest brother Arnold is probably the most well-known of these today.  He was a professor of archeology at Cambridge University and also inherited the enormous job of being T.E.’s literary executor. 

Two younger brothers, William and Frank, were to die in military service during WWI, the same war that brought Lawrence of Arabia to fame.  The other brother, the oldest of the siblings, was Montagu Robert who was known by his second name.

Bulgari Serpenti

A Bulgari Serpenti watch (at stylecurated.blogspot.ca)

I am revealing my ignorance around jewelry in saying I became familiar with the Serpenti watch for the first time yesterday, when the heavyweight glossy magazine ‘Style & Fashion’ fell out of our neighbour’s Sunday Star newspaper. At $88,000 for this version of the ornate gold and diamond ‘snake’ watch I saw in the magazine (not the image above) I wasn’t really in the marketplace. 

But the sight of the BVLGARI name, with its Latin ‘V’ for ‘U’, caught my attention.  It is more usual for me to see the brand while weaving through duty free malls in airports (these days, you can’t seem to get from security clearance to your departure gate without this steeplechase).  Each time I see it I think about something I read a number of years ago; the addition of two members of this family of jewelers to the List of the Righteous Among Nations, a Jewish recognition process for those who helped save Jews in in peril during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, compiles and maintains this list of now around 24,000 names.

Arrivals and Departures by Moonlight

Noor Inayat Khan in uniform

The Tiger Claw is a novel about the life and fate of Noor Inayat Khan, codename ‘Madeleine’, one of many operatives behind enemy lines during World War II. She and other agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were often delivered by Westland Lysander aircraft into improvised landing strips in darkness, the pilots landing with the brief guidance of small lights illuminated to mark the edges of the arrival field.

A Different Nightingale

WWII RAF recruitment poster for the WAAF 

In a 2008 Daily Mail article  on three war-time ‘Flying Nightingales’, Lilian Bancroft, Elsie Beer and Joan Crane, are brief descriptions of their experiences as WAAF Nursing Orderlies in World War II. They and other ‘Nightingales’ looked after the seriously wounded being airlifted in C-47 ‘Dakota’ aircraft from the ever-moving front lines after the D-Day invasion.

I featured one ‘Nightingale’ flight of an unknown WAAF Orderly from a log book entry found on the RAF Museum web site in my ebook In a Moon’s Course, despite the fact it was not an Air Transport Auxiliary flight.  I was moved to do so because, like the pilots of the ATA, it was about courage in the air in World War II rather than courage in combat.  These women had to deal with sights, sounds and situations that would have many of us in shock, unable to react.