Memory Lane
My siblings and I were army brats in Trieste from 1951 to 1953, when our father, a major in the Royal Engineers, was posted there. At the time the city and surrounding area were administered by the British-american Allied Military Government, Free Territory Trieste. I still have an envelope franked AMG-FTT.
It was an extraordinary place for us children. Aged ten
when we left, I was the eldest. Walking though the central market we used to be picked on by traders to sample their food: chubby kids enjoying it made the potential customers go ‘Aaaah!’
We often swam in the sea with other army brats at Miramare Castle. On one occasion, when a few of us were on a raft about 100 metres from the beach, we saw a fin cutting the water. ‘Shark,’ we shouted, and stupidly jumped in, thrashing wildly to the shore. Of course, it was probably a dolphin.
At the seafront in the city, I remember the huge American army trucks, their tyres howling as they went; also the freight trains with 100 or so carriages, rumbling slowly across the harbour. I wasn’t as brave as some of the local kids, who would duck between the carriages as they crawled along, to get across the tracks.
The bora, a violent wind from the Alps, similar to the mistral in France, was known to blow 500cc Fiat Topolinos off the quayside into the sea. To stop pedestrians being blown into the road, pavements had chains on the corners.
During a late-night journey home by car from a holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, our father thought nothing of knocking on the door of a closed restaurant and getting the owners out of their beds to serve our family of six a slap-up meal. This they did, standing beaming at us in their nightwear as we wolfed if down.
AMG-FTT ended with large-scale demonstrations and riots in 1953, and the evacuation of the service families, transported en masse across the Continent on troop trains. Largely oblivious of the political storm, we kids rather enjoyed the journey.
By Peter Chambers, who receives £50. Readers are invited to send in 400-word submissions. Every Thursday, we update the Readers’ Corner of the website with unpublished Memory Lanes. Go to theoldie.co.uk.