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The Wreck of the Horstfels

"Step-mother easily wins heart of step-son after much effort"

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CHAPTER TWO

Call me a hopeless romantic, but what I really needed was a reason to worship not my step-mother Adalind, but Adalind the woman, a female Viking wearing a horned helmet in the shield-ring. The wind plucking at her skirt, her figure braced against it: her voice heroic, shrill and commanding. There had to be something reborn in her out of the ages, some ancient power of domination which would awaken in me the ancestral response to her call.

After lunch my barrack-hut buddy Rob collected me in his car for our return from leave. Curfew was not until ten and so we had plenty of time for tea and scones in Worthingthorpe, and a visit to the local lighthouse.

The Worthingthorpe lighthouse stood on a high cliff above marshes. The sea never came there now, for big dykes had been erected to keep it out. The three former lighthouse keepers inhabited the cottages alongside it at a peppercorn rent and eked out an existence on their pensions and money gifts from tourists.

It was a pleasant sunny afternoon and we lingered. When I asked our guide if we might see the interior of his cottage he was quite amenable. It was a charming and neat little place with gilt-framed oleographs of ships in storms with inky-black clouds.

A portrait which interested me more stood above the mantlepiece and showed a grain ship wrecked in a terrible winter gale. Its title was: "The Wreck of the Horstfels at Worthingthorpe, 13 December 1938." I asked our guide for more details if he had them.

"A routine shipwreck with no loss of life," he commented. "On the stretch of shoreline below, long before the dykes were put up, perhaps once or twice in a generation the sea came raging in over the marshes with the incoming tide, submerging everything before it. I was on duty that day. was first to see the plight of the Horstfels.and I raised the alarm. It was sunset after the worst day of storm in living memory, towards six that evening.

"Two of her masts were down, her spars and tackle wreckage on her decks. She was heeling over, her cargo having shifted, and seas swept the hull from stem to stern. She hit the shingle bank over there-" at this he gestured to the northwards, "- and several village people and the lighthouse crew hurled themselves into the swirling waters and waded out chest high to the wreck. They brought back six passengers and crew, including the captain with a broken leg, unconscious with a head injury, and also his eight-year old daughter. Germans they all were, and all saved. The cargo of wheat spilled out and could not be salvaged."

So the Horstfels was just a routine maritime casualty meriting no more than a couple of hundred words in a newspaper and the painting hanging in my guide's living room. We got back to camp ten minutes before curfew.

A couple of weeks later, my Company commander ordered me to attend in civilian clothes at a legal office at Viking Moos. Mr. Robertson introduced himself as the family solicitor and explained that Adalind Rosenhagen my step-mother had given him instructions to transfer to me half ownership in the bungalow.

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I saw in this move another part of her plan to tempt me into marriage with her and keep me tied to her apron strings.

"I've drawn up the papers and all it now requires is your signature," he told me. He passed me his fountain pen with the remark, "By the way, did you know she was one of the villagers at the Horstfels incident just before the war? Gashed her leg terribly. Nearly bled to death."

"I know nothing of it," I told him.

"Well, you'll find it all set out in the commendation the Germans sent." He went to a filing cabinet and brought out his 1939 file. "Yes, I've got the translation here. The Germans weren't very popular in 1939 as you can imagine and not as much was made of their commendation as should have been. Want a photocopy?"

After reading the commendation I rang Adalind and asked her to come for lunch in Worthingthorpe as I needed to discuss the sharing of ownership in the bungalow. After we ate I got her to accompany me to the shingle bank. She was none too keen on this since it was an awkward place to get at, but I insisted.

I led her down the long stairway to the marshes. Corn was growing there. Each year the blades pushed their way up to the stage of full corn in the ear, but it was never reaped, a mere travesty of what corn should be. So it fell and died, and next year fresh life reappeared, curiously persistent. The cargo of the Horstfels.

Finally at the shingle bank I showed her the skeleton of the Horstfeld, its rusty heavy machinery, transverse frames and the keel resting in the shingle bed. I got her to stand on the keel so that she stood higher than I, took out the 1939 German commendation and read it to her:

"On 13 December 1938 on the shingle bank at Worthingthorpe where the German coaster Horstfels had grounded, 16-year old Miss Adalind Bundsoe volunteered against advice to board the almost submerged wreck to search for the captain's missing eight-year old daughter believed to be hiding below. Rough seas were sweeping the deck and the tide was still making. Despite the danger to her life and limb, Miss Bundsoe went below, found the child and brought her up to rescuers. As Miss Bndsoe was leaving the wreck it shifted and she sustained a serious injury to her right leg. In consideration of the above facts as authenticated by the crew, the German association for the saving of life at sea awards its gold medal for outstanding bravery to Miss Adalind Bundsoe."

Neither of us would ever forget the scene which was now played out between us. Here was the true female hero of the Nordic fairy tale, the Queen of the North, and in that wild windy spot against the backdrop of shipwreck Adalind lent an air of high ceremonial. On my knees I asked for her hand in marriage.

"Do you promise to love, honour and obey me all your life?" she asked.

"Come hell or high water," I promised.

"Then I accept you. At bloody last!"

And I kept my promise faithfully throughout our long and wonderful marriage.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Published 
Written by Rosehay
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