Fire and Ashes Read Online Free

all this is still the wrong answer to the question of why you should go into politics. You can’t lead a political life to live up to your parents. It’s also a political error. Any sense of entitlement that you might take from your past is absolutely fatal in politics. The best thing about democracy is—or should be—that you have to earn everything, one vote at a time. I knew enough not to feel entitled. I knew I had to earn it. But the fact that I come from a family with a calling for public life played powerfully in my mind as I considered whether to accept the offer from the men who had come to dinner that October night.
    While my mother worked in M15 she roomed at 54A Walton Street in South Kensington with a tart, diminutive Winnipeg native named Kay Moore, later Gimpel. Between late 1942 and early 1943, they gave a home and a bed to Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, two Canadians who had joined SOE, the Special Operations Executive, in order to parachute into France and join up with Resistance unitscombatting the German occupation forces. My mother grew close to Frank—how close I’ll never know—in the few months before June 1943, when he left one night to parachute into the dark to a landing spot in the Loire Valley south of Paris. Almost as soon as the pair of Canadians landed, they were betrayed and handed over to the Gestapo, who sent them to a concentration camp. For two years, my mother and Kay waited for word. Special Operations Executive asked them to concoct personal messages that only Frank and John would understand—such as “the samovar is boiling at 54A”—to see if they would reply on their wireless telegraph, but the replies that came back didn’t seem to be coming from them. The Germans in fact were playing radio games to mislead the SOE into believing the men were still functioning as agents. Both women began to fear the worst, but it was only in the spring of 1945, when Buchenwald was liberated, that Kay and Alison learned that the two Canadians had been executed there, after torture, months before, in September 1944. 5
    In April 1945, my mother wrote a letter to Frank’s brother Jack, in which I hear—as sons rarely do—the authentic sound of my mother’s young hopes and dreams:
    I do know that [Frank] was happy in England—his time was very full, and consequently to those of us who were drawn into that circle of unbounded affection, love, and happiness, which he created, the loss cannot be counted.
    He bound the household together with his humour, his embracing interest and love of mankind. He set a standard we try to follow. I also know that nothing would have stopped him going—nothing anyone could say or do. He knew clearly and definitely to the day of his departure—he must go. His death is not only a personal loss to a few like myself who know his place will neverbe filled. His brand of courage—his courage coupled with his imagination—are not only needed in war, but needed so badly when the war is over, needed by everyone.
    But his life wasn’t wasted. I feel, as so many of his friends have here said to me, he left us his spirit and faith and uncompromising belief in what was right. That is the legacy he left us. He showed us a way of life and I for one won’t forget it ever.
    In the fall of 1945, my mother came home from the war and married my father. While she almost never talked about Frank, he was a presence in our home throughout my growing up. It happened that during the 1950s, our house in suburban Ottawa was just a block away from Frank’s brother, Jack, and his family. Frank was theirs more than ours, but our house cherished the memory too.
    After the war, my mother and father rose through the ranks of the Canadian Foreign Service, and my brother and I grew up in postings overseas: Washington, Belgrade, London, Paris, Geneva and back home in Ottawa. My father worked for several prime ministers, but one of them, Lester Pearson, was always just Mike to him.