Remembering a father she barely knew
Album handed down to Marylyn Peringer gives a glimpse of humanity against horrors of WWI
It’s nearly all that remains of her father’s life: a crumbling suede album of fading pastel pages filled with drawings, signatures and messages scrawled by prisoners of war.
“He was the captor and they were the captives,” Marylyn Peringer says of her father as she cradles the 100-year-old book.
“But he liked them. I think he found them interesting . . . And the album shows how much they respected him.”
Born in 1878, Peringer’s father, George Salter, was a British Army schoolmaster before the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914, he was transferred from his posting in India to the picturesque Mediterranean island of Malta, then a British colony, to work in a PoW camp. Salter’s job was to record and distribute money sent to prisoners by their friends and families — a task that put him in direct contact with an eclectic mix of military personnel and civilian detainees from the Central Powers and their colonies in Africa and the Middle East.
“They were mostly sailors,” Peringer says. “But there were also civilian enemy nationals that the British feared would be drafted.”
At 79, Peringer is a veteran storyteller who has travelled across Canada for nearly 40 years to recount folk tales at schools. She deftly spins her father’s yarn: a story of a middle-aged man who forms friendships with his nations’ enemies; a man who felt increasingly estranged from his wife, who remained in India; a man who meets a Maltese teenager named Mary working alongside him at the camp; a burgeoning yet unconsummated love with a woman 21years his junior; a man who leaves Malta in 1920 after the last of the prisoners have been repatriated; a secret shorthand correspondence; a decade of separation; the lovers finally recon- necting in the 1930s after the death of both of their spouses.
“They had no Skype in those days,” Peringer laughs. “He proposed marriage in a letter and she said ‘yes.’ ”
Two days after Mary arrived in England in1933, the couple was married. Peringer, their only child, was born not long after. But as German bombs began to rain on England during the next Great War, Peringer and her mother fled for the safety of North America. The year was 1940. Peringer was 4 years old. Her father, who stayed behind to help with the war effort, died of tuberculosis in an air raid shelter in 1942.
His album became Peringer’s in 1984, after the death of her mother. Most of what she knows of her father comes from its weathered pages. But those pages, Peringer says, show that Remembrance Day can be a celebration.
“Given who my father was and what he was doing, I like to think that while we remember the suffering and the tragedies and the deaths, we should always remember that during wartime, people did unexpectedly wonderful things for one another,” Peringer says.