Almost a Great Escape
Page 19
In the Album I found Jens who loved My Goodbye Mother with all his heart. He didn’t love her because she was beautiful. He didn’t love her because she came from the wealthy Tyler family. He just loved her.
As I read his letters I couldn’t help but think how straightforward he always was about their future. He kept reminding her that he was a fighter pilot. That he had left university to become a fighter pilot. He told her he would come back for her with nothing to offer but his love. He kept his word. Jens never considered not keeping his promise. I will come back for you.
As I read and reread the Album, I had to stop every few hours and sort through the tumbling images of Alice escaping from my heart. I didn’t sleep in those first days of remembering.
When my thinking cleared, I began my search for Jens Müller:
The sun has just come up. I make coffee and turn on my computer. I try a Google search for Jens Müller. Nothing relevant. I try Jens Müller Stalag Luft III. A screen of hits.
I click on NOVA. The banner reads: GREAT ESCAPE.
Two clicks and halfway down the page is a photo of Norwegian Jens Müller. The same Jens Müller who is in the Album.
The same Jens Müller!
The endless falling into myself. You are not in your urn at Eden Brook. You are here in my hands in this Album. This is you. For sixty years you kept yourself hidden. I sit by the window wondering if you will just happen to drive by.
I quit. Stop. No more. It is weeks before I can resume my search for Jens Müller. He must be famous. It will be easy to find him. But Jens Müller, it turned out, did not want to be found too easily. Jens Müller would always be poker-faced.
In my email inquiries to embassies and war museums, I said I had photographs of Jens Müller taken during his training in Canada. I never mentioned the Alice/Jens romance. I thought it best to keep it private until I could discuss it with Jens. I decided that, if nothing else, Jens deserved to know that Alice had kept all his letters and photographs.
I hoped he would want to meet me.
With each email I included a little silent piece of my love for Alice, hoping it would help my inquiries find the right destination — Jens.
It would be months before I picked up his trail. Nobody but me, it seemed, was interested in what happened to Jens after the war. On May 10, 2005, I received a helpful response from a director of the Norwegian Air Force Museum. He told me about Cato Guhnfeldt, a journalist in Oslo who had written several books on Norwegian fighter pilots.
In early May 2005, I sent Cato an email asking if he could help me contact Jens’s family and if he knew of any sources for more information on Jens.
By coincidence, I had just found an email address for Jon Müller, Jens’s son, on a Great Escape website and I sent this message:
Hello
My name is Tyler Trafford and I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I have some photos of your father taken in Canada where he was training as a fighter pilot.
I would like to send you copies if you are interested.
Tyler Trafford
On May 11, I received replies from Cato Guhnfeldt and from Jon Müller.
And My Goodbye Mother’s blue eyes laugh as she figures out where I found Jens’s Messages From The Grave.
Hello Tyler
I would be delighted. I have just one photo of my father in front of a 331 sqd spitfire. I have managed to make a PDF copy of my father’s book on the “great escape” but it is a 20Mb file so it’s hard to send it as attachment but I could put a stamp on it. Interested?
Regards / Jon Müller
I almost fell off my chair when I read the second paragraph of Cato’s email.
Did you know that he had a Canadian girlfriend that went to school in Montreal? Müller flew a Hurricane in 1941 that carried the school emblem of his girlfriend. I have a photo of Müller and a girl at a Canadian ski resort. Maybe it was the resort your mother’s family ran?
It was nice to hear from you. Look forward to hear from you again.
Best regards
Cato Guhnfeldt
One question answered. Jens had died five or six years ago.
I still wasn’t prepared to reveal to anyone that I had Jens’s love letters to Alice, so I continued my email correspondence with Cato and Jon on the basis of the photographs. Still, I was hoping to find out more about Jon and the rest of the Müller family. Cato subsequently sent me several emails full of information on Jens, the plane he crashed in training, and the plane he flew in his early fighter missions on which he had painted Alice’s school crest.
Then came a second, even more startling email from Jon.
Hello Tyler
My father mentioned a few times that there had been a young woman in Canada but he never mentioned any names, but I know he received a Christmas card every year and I suppose this could have been from Alice.
Regards / Jon Müller
Alice mailed hundreds of Christmas cards every year, most with a personal note, so it made sense to me that Jens would receive one. I suddenly felt as if Alice was with me, smiling each year as she slipped a card for Jens into the pile of mail going to the post office.
A week later I received this information from Cato:
Dear Tyler
Further to my email to you sent earlier this evening. Jens Einar Müller was born in Shanghai in China in 1917, but grew up in Oslo. He took his first civilian pilots licence in 1935, and after finishing high school went to study in Zürich, Switzerland, to become an engineer. In 1940 he travelled with fellow Norwegian students to France and sailed with a ship from Bordeaux, first to England, then to the US, where he travelled to Toronto to train as a fighter pilot.
Müller joined the Norwegian airline company DNL in 1946. DNL soon afterwards became a founding company for SAS. Müller stayed with the airline until 1977, and retired on his 60th birthday that year. In retirement he worked on a local farm, took up carpentry, built his own villa (where Jon now lives) outside Oslo. He also worked restoring old furniture. He died in April 1999.
Jens Müller met his future wife Liv in SAS, where she worked as a flight stewardess. Together they got two sons, Jon and Einar. Liv Müller, by the way, is still alive.
Thought this would be of interest to you.
Best regards
Cato Guhnfeldt in Oslo
I sent Jon and Cato a few emails after that, just to keep in touch, but I had lost my enthusiasm for following up that part of Alice’s story. Hearing that Jens had died in 1999 had taken away the possibility that I would ever have the chance to talk to the man who had loved his Dearest Alice.
I began writing My Goodbye Mother stories for her, visiting her at Eden Brook, and talking with her few friends. For 16 months that seemed to be enough.
In the fall of 2006 I began having claustrophobic nightmares in which I was trapped in metal boxes, jail cells, sinking ships, and even sewers. In the morning I’d crawl out of bed tired after a night of fighting with sheets and blankets. It should have been obvious where I was being trapped each night, but it wasn’t. It took months of thinking to realize that, like Alice and Jens, I was a prisoner. Jens in Stalag Luft III. Alice in Big Marjorie’s scheming. Me in the memory of the life I had had with My Goodbye Mother.
It was an unexpected realization. After 40 years of forgetting, I had unearthed My Goodbye Mother and now I was a prisoner of those years. I was unable to live in today. I was comparing everything I was doing today to the days at Canmore. To Dolly. To the New Yorker cartoons. I was desperate to escape.
I sent Jon Müller an email. I hoped that knowing how Jens had fared after his escape would give me courage to make my own escape.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Jon
It has been a long time since we communicated.
I have been working on some stories about my mother’s life and now I think your father had a bigger influence on her than I first realized. Would you be willing to talk to me about your father if I came to Norway?
I am trying to arrange a trip to Europe in February.
I would also like to meet Cato Guhnfeldt. If you would like to meet me and hear what I have learned about our parents, let me know.
I also understand that discussing events from 60 years ago isn’t too interesting for everybody.
Tyler Trafford
Jon replied the next day.
Hello Tyler
Yes, that would be very interesting, meeting you, and to hear about our parents.
I have talked a little with Cato. Sadly, his father passed away a few weeks ago.
Jon
I left for Norway on February 22, 2007.
A TYLER STORY
SANDVIKA, NORWAY
I still hadn’t told Jon the depths of the Alice and Jens romance and why it had ended. I didn’t know how I was going to do that until I had met him. He lived in Sandvika, a 45-minute train ride south of Oslo. We would meet in the train station. Train stations!
You never know how people are going to react to revelations about their parents. Here I was going to Norway to meet Jens’s son, and I hadn’t yet told my five brothers and one sister from another story about The Jens Album.
Perhaps, I thought as the plane left the Calgary runway and there was no going back for me, when I tell Jon about Alice he will suggest I spend the weekend in the train station.
Jon met me after a small, nervous mix-up at the Sandvika train station. As soon as I shook his hand, I knew the weekend would go well. He’s tall like Jens, but with a heavier build. Soft-spoken, calm, and self-confident. He’s about the same age as me.
We drove to his house where I met Grete, his wife. I was fighting to stay alert after my 18-hour flight. As we had a small meal, chicken I think, and a glass of wine by the fireplace, I wondered if I should wait until the morning to tell them what I knew about Jens and Alice.
Jon and Grete sat opposite me as I thanked them for the meal. Then Jon said, “Tell us why you are here.” That was blunt. For me, it was now or never.
I told them everything I knew about Alice and Jens. About the Alpine Inn. Big Marjorie. Jens’s letters from Little Norway and London. The secrecy. McGill. The arrived too late letter sent days before his escape from Stalag Luft III. My mother’s life after 1944.
Everything. I gave them my blood.
I finished by handing Jon a binder with all the photocopied letters. “Read them,” I said.
He took the binder to the dining-room table and began to flip through the pages. Then I noticed him wiping a tear from the corner of his right eye. He saw me watching him read and said, “Thank you. I never knew this side of my father.”
I went to bed a few minutes later and left him and Grete alone with Jens’s letters.
In the morning, Saturday, we talked a little more about the letters and about Jens.
My father and I built this house, Jon told me. Mostly my father, he added. He was meticulous. After we had the foundation poured, we had a crew of carpenters come to raise the house walls. They repeatedly checked the accuracy of the foundation before telling us that the foundations were correct within a few millimetres. They’d never seen work like that before. That was my father, Jon said.
Then Jon and Grete offered to take me to see Jens’s grave. I had been imagining a World War II Memorial with a Memorial Inscription commemorating Jens’s escape from Stalag Luft III.
At the cemetery, Jon and Grete brushed the snow off a lichen covered boulder. This was Jens’s Memorial: 6,725 kilometres (4,179 miles) from Alice’s Memorial at Eden Brook.
When Jens died, Jon went to their favourite meadow and found a boulder he could carry home. Just as he and his father had preferred to do everything themselves — a familiar to me attitude — Jon neatly chiselled the Memorial Inscription into the boulder.
Jens Einar Müller. *30-11-1917 / 30-3-1999.
My father was an atheist, Jens replied when I asked about his religion.
While I heard many stories about Jens over the weekend, nothing told me more about Jens than that boulder. Jens thought of himself as an ordinary man. Nobody special. He lived that way, he died that way, and was buried by his family that way.
Jens’s Memorial, Norway. The unassuming boulder and inscription are the Müller family’s acknowledgment of Jens’s modesty and steadiness. Photo courtesy of Jon Müller.
Jens, an ordinary man, must have been an enigma to Big Marjorie for whom being ordinary was the same as being second class.
Jon, Grete, and I drove around Sandvika for several more hours as they pointed out places that were significant to Jens, but all the time I thought about that inconspicuous boulder. I hadn’t been in Norway 24 hours and already I knew why Alice had loved Jens.
He was her One Good Thing.
In the afternoon we stopped by the apartment of Jon and Grete’s daughter, Mari. She is in her early 20s and lives with her boyfriend Henrik, whose birthday it was that day. Mari had a cake and coffee prepared. I sat in a quiet corner while Mari’s and Henrik’s families visited. Morten, Mari’s brother, dropped by.
Jon and Grete’s children are about the same ages as Judy’s and mine. Mari is 24, Morten 27. Morten is a musician, a heavy metal guitar player, and very serious about his band. Mari is studying English and American literature history at Oslo University and wants to work in publishing.
As I listened to the families speaking Norwegian, it struck me how many coincidences there were between Jon and me. To start, our names: John (Tyler) and Jon. Our wives, Judy and Grete, both work at colleges. The colleges are “sisters” and have numerous exchange programs. We both have a boy and a girl. The boys, Nic and Morten, are musical. The girls are . . . different. Mari is involved in literature and publishing. Shar is in the military and has served twice in Afghanistan and will likely go back.
Jon and Grete have a cabin in the Norwegian outdoors. Judy and I have a cabin in the Canadian outdoors. Jon and I love our wives, work through life’s problems with them, and would rather spend time with them than anybody else. We’re friends.
In the evening the three of us talked more about Jens and Alice. I told them I sometimes wondered what would have happened if Alice and Jens had been able to marry. Jon shrugged a little, as I imagine his father would have, and thought his answer through before speaking.
“Then you and I wouldn’t be here, having this evening,” he said. He was right. You can’t think about “what ifs.”
Jon handed me a pair of hand bellows from beside the fireplace, saying his father made several like this pair when he retired, using the same leather valve that he used in the bellows that pumped fresh air into the tunnel. He pointed out where his father had burned his initials into the oak handles. JEM.
Jon stood up and said he would be back in a minute. He returned with an identical pair. “You should have these,” he said, handing them to me. I wasn’t sure if I should accept the gift. They were irreplaceable mementos of his father. Burned with his initials. JEM.
Jon insisted.
When I went to bed late that night, my last waking thought was that Jon was my brother. Not by birth perhaps. But in him I saw what my mother loved in Jens. She would have loved Jon as a son. I would have loved him as a brother.
The next morning Grete took photographs of Jon and me. In the one I like best we are standing under one of the timber beams that Jens designed and installed. Both of us are standing with our weight on our right foot, our left crossed over and with our thumbs in the pockets of our blue jeans. He’s taller than me. But we are brothers.
Come downstairs and look at the shop where my father and I worked, he said to me after the photographs were taken. The shop was like Jens’s escape: perfectly planned. The wrenches, saws, hammers . . . everything . . . all in order. Maybe it was too late for me to meet Jens, but I could see him alive in this shop.
Jon Müller and Tyler.
Jon welcomed Tyler into the Müller family home in 2007, an experience that helped Tyler understand the Jens who loved Alice. P
hoto courtesy of the author.
A row of knives in leather scabbards hung on the wall. Jon handed me one. My father made these knives and did the leather work, he said. I asked if he had a sewing machine to make the scabbard. No. He did it by hand. I shook my head in disbelief. The stitches were so uniform that it was impossible to see any variance that would indicate they had been sewn by hand. Later, Jon showed me a leather motorcycle pack he had made for himself. The stitches were just as accurate.
Jon then told me about the knife his father made in Stalag Luft III. “In the camp Jens was a carpenter, and he wanted to make himself a folding knife. So he managed to get hold of a pair of skates to use for the blade.
“First he removed the skate blade from the boot and untempered it. He had some years earlier been an apprentice in a foundry and had a good knowledge of iron, steel.
“To untemper the steel he put the blade in the stove until it became dark red, took it out and let it cool down slowly.
“Then he shaped the blade and put a rough edge on it, all with a small hand file. For the hole he had a drill bit but no drill so he had to use a pair of pliers to twist the drill bit and push it down with his other hand. Took some time to make the hole.
“With this the knife blade was finished, apart from the tempering. To temper it he again put it in the stove, but this time the blade was heated until blue — try it yourself with a piece of scrap steel — then the blue steel had to be cooled down quickly. He dropped the blade into a bucket of cold water, but it went into the water at an angle. This caused the long blade to cool down at a different rate on the two sides, and the blade actually split along the middle.
“Weeks and maybe months of work down the drain!!
“So he set to work on the second steel from the ice skates and succeeded this time. The knife was put to good use and when he was ready for the escape he handed the knife over to a fellow prisoner who would remain in the camp.
“I would love to have that knife!”
After Jens retired as a commercial pilot, Jon said, he made knives for all the members of his family, and one extra. Jon handed me that knife and said: