Heidi's Story
In 1934 Heidi had her tenth birthday. Hitler had just come into power as Chancellor the year before in 1933. Germany had been hit by the world depression and times were hard with millions unemployed. She doesn't remember much about this time. She was now in the senior part of the same school. The headmistress was Mrs Martin. "Nobody liked her. She was very strict". Around this time, probably when Heidi was 11, this head teacher sent her out to buy a cane from a shop down the road to bring back to the school to use on her and her friend Elsbet. She caned them both with it. "Flippin bitch. That's why I don't like her. And it wasn't much either, we weren't bad kids... I think Elsbet and I were sitting together talking and mucking about a bit when we shouldn't have".
Heidi often visited her Aunties and Uncles homes to play with her cousins during her childhood in Hagen. These cousins incuded Egon, who was five years younger than Heidi. Egon sometimes visted Oma's and stayed overnight and when he did he would share a bed with Heidi ("he always tried to pull the eiderdown over him, the bugger"). When she was 12 the twins Hildergard and Helga were born and she used to take them out in a pram for walks and to the stadtgarten. The photograph by the Rhein with the donkey was taken around this time on a day trip to Cologne and the Lorrelei Rhein area and up the hillside to the castle at Koenigswinter. In that photo are Heidi's Oma, Uncle Emile and his wife Maria, Heidi, and her two cousins Matilda and Martha (sisters). Matilda, the younger sister, is sitting on the donkey.
Heidi's mother was now living in the large ground floor apartment of a house on a road called Seeweg, directly overlooking the Harkortsee near Herdecke with her new husband - Herr Philip Meyer. They had an alsation dog called Harris. The husband worked as night security in a nearby power plant and Harris was an ex-police dog who went to work with him at night as his guard dog. Harris had his own place in a small store room annexe. "My mum was happy there". Heidi used to stay there over the summer holidays for six weeks. There was a swing there in the garden that Heidi played on. They also had two pigs and Heidi used to feed both with cooked potato skins and left overs, until a local butcher made the larger one into sausages which Heidi saw hanging on the wall. There were lots of wild rabbits around. "It was lovely there. It was a good time". The area is in the countryside and surrounded by woods and hills and Heidi used to run around there with Harris "I wouldn't have gone in there on my own". The only neighbours were one other house around 100 metres away and a pub close by. Harris is buried in the garden and Heidi still remembers the exact spot where they buried him.
When she was 12 years old Heidi had her appendix out at the Heilige Geist Catholic Hospital close to her school in Haspe. This was the first time she was in hospital. People were kept in far longer in those days than today, and Heidi thinks she was there for ten or maybe even 14 days. She remembers one day being very embarrassed, passing wind "blowing off", in front of one of the nuns (all the nurses were nuns). She apologised and said sorry and the nun said "Besser in weiter welt als in dem Bauch" or "Better out in the world than in your tummy". Heidi says "Oh they were lovely nuns. They were kind".
The next time she was in hospital was when she was 16, soon after after Oma died, when she had an operation on her right eye at the St Jospeph Hospital in Hagen. She remembers that she had her eye out and she had to hold it on a spoon. "I wasn't put to sleep" she says. She had the operation because she was slightly cross eyed and had been wearing glasses, which Oma thought would correct the eye. "But it didn't, so I had the operation. I had been wearing glasses as a child for as long as I can remember. I always wore them".
In 1938, when Heidi was 14, she left school. A few weeks later she started her first job in a flower shop on the corner of Corbacher Strasse in Haspe. The shop was called Rosenkranz, named after the owners, a Jewish couple. She learned how to make flower arrangements and also wreaths built around a wire frame. The Rosenkarantzes grew their own flowers on an allotment and Heidi collected the flowers from the allotment and watered the plants there and she also delivered the flowers to customers on the bike. She also worked in the shop as a sales person. She would deliver wreaths to funerals two at a time, one hanging on each handlebar of the bike.
She worked at the shop until she was 16 and left the shop after working there for around a year and a half, in the Spring about 2 months before Oma died. She left to work in a sweet factory in Weringhausen with her friend Annie Rickman, her school friend who lived still in the flat below Oma's. The factory was a bit closer to home than the flower shop, the money was better than in the flower shop and Annie told her it was good there and you could eat the sweets. "I liked it better than the flower shop. I had got fed up with it there. In the beginning I was eating a lot of sweets. But by the end I wasn't eating them any more. I can still smell it." As they were neighbours they walked to work at he sweet factory together, just as they had walked to school together as children.
World War 2 started in 1940 while Heidi was working at the sweet factory. The bombing of Hagen started started very soon after the start of the war. Heidi and Oma went down the the cellar along with all the other tenants during bombings. The bombing raids could take place at any time, day or night, and when the sirens sounded and the bombs dropped it was time to go down to the cellar. After a while they started going to a big specially built Bunker in Haspe as this was safer. It was packed with local residents. Bombing raids were nightly and they often spent the whole night in the Bunker sleeping on the floor under blankets that they took wth them. Oma kept a suitcase packed the whole time to take with them. People didn't sleep well and they still had to go to work or school in the morning as usual. Heidi would leave the bunker in the morning to go to work. "After Oma died I didn't bother anymore. I didn't go to the bunker anymore".
At age 16, when Oma died at age 72, Heidi moved briefly to her mum's flat in Tulpin Strasse for around 4 months. It was far from the main bunker in Hagen so Heidi and her mum stayed in the building and went down to the building's cellar during bombing raids. It was a long way to the factory by tram so Heidi left the sweet factory and started work in Schneeweis laundry. This was a large industrial laundry and Heidi worked on very large electric mangel machines which dried and ironed the sheets and then she folded them. "It was a horrible job. I didn't like it but I had to work and it was near to my mother's place. But then my mum got into trouble and I had to give up the home and couldn't stay here and I went to live with Tanta Paula. I had to arrange everything, and arrange for storage of my mums furniture, and pay for it all out of the little bit of money I was earning". Aunt Paula (Egon's mum) had a small spare room and Heidi moved in there. She stayed with Paula and got another job working on the conveyer belt in Brandt, a Swiebach Fabric, a biscuit and toasted bread factory, because it was near to Paula's. "It wasn't bad there but we had to be bloody quick and they had shift work, one week 6am to 2pm, the next week 2pm to 10pm, and the next week 10pm to 6am". After around 2 or 3 months she had had enough and left. NOTE: The "trouble" that Heidi's mother "got into" refers to her going to prison for shoplifting. "During the war there was nothing there. You couldn't get anything".
The flat that Heidi lived in with Tanta Paula was a black slate house in Heubing Strasse in Haspe. I only discovered now, in August 2020 as I write this section in Olhao, Portugal, during the Covid Pandemic, that this is the same flat and house that I stayed in one summer when I was 18 and hitch hiked to Germany with my friend Hoppy. I had no idea at the time that my mother had lived in that same flat when she was around my age at that time. I remember it well.
The next job was in Wittmann factory in Haspe where they made hand grenades and other explosive weapons. Egon came every lunch time and brought a hot meal from Paula's. She worked hard there as the more grenades she made the more money she made. "You had to be flippin quick to earn your money".
"It was rotten after Oma died, I lost interest in everything after Oma died. I was moving around, shoved around, from here to there. I wasn't happy and I felt lost and like I didn't belong anywhere. It was not a good time. I tried a lot of things, different jobs, but I didn't like them."
"And then I got ill and ended up in hospital to have an operation on my stomach." She was 17. The hospital was the Algemeine Krankenhaus, in Hagen, where she later worked as a nurse. "At the hospital I met a nurse, Analiese. I was seriously ill and they put me in the bunker in the hospital cellars". The hospital cellar was used as a shelter, a "bunker", for air raids. They put the serious cases there and those who could not be moved. The ones who could be moved stayed up in the wards and were brought down to the bunker during the air raids. Heidi doesn't remember know what the operation was. She still has a very big scar over a foot long starting about 8 inches above her belly button and going straight down, through and past her belly button. She liked it at the hospital and decided to become a nurse. She was accepted and started nursing when she was 18, moving into a shared room in the hospital with her new friend, the nurse Analiese.
When she came out of the hospital She went back to Paula's and kept in contact with Analiese who helped her take some exams and get accepted in the hospital to train and study to be a nurse. It was only a few months after leaving as a patient that she returned as a nurse. She moved into the hospital and shared a room with Analiese on the top floor over the childrens' wards where she was working during the first year. There were two wards: one for births and new borns and one for sick older children. She studied a lot during this time and they had exams every three months. She was in this ward for one year. In the second year she was moved around to different wards. "I was happy there. I felt that I was settled. Like home again, after Oma died".
In the second year she spent six months in a woman's ward and six months in the men's ward. In the third year she was in the TB ward. Day shifts started at 7am to 7pm. Break was around 2pm to 3.30pm. The uniform was a blue and white striped dress and white pinafore. White nurse's hat with blue stripe. Night shifts were 7pm to 7am with no real set break time. Some nights were busier than others and there were two nurses per ward at night and four nurses per ward in the day. Each nurse did three weeks on day shifts and one week on nights per month. She gave injections, took blood pressure etc, temperature was always taken under arm, she changed dressings and did all the usual nursing duties including helping them to eat and bathe etc if necessary. Patients were kept in longer than today, for example appendectomy patients would be kept in for two weeks. People would be kept in with high blood pressure for a week until it stabalised. It was unusual for anyone to be in for less than a week or two. She says that it was different than today when "as soon as you get in they kick you out again. Flippin heck." After finishing the three years she wanted to go out to the front line and help the soldiers in the war and she joined the Red Cross. She went to Bochem for training and then to Hamburg where they all lived on the airport where they learned how to drive trucks and basic mechanics and how to change wheels. She still remembers how an engine works with four or six cylinders.
After training she was sent to Kitzingen in Bavaria where there was a lot of bombing and war casualties. They were based in an army camp and from there they would drive every day to Frankfurt, which was being very heavily bombed, to tend to casualties. They would normally leave early in the morning and return late at night although a couple of nights they also stayed overnight in the hospital there. "Most of the people we took to the hospital were badly hurt and some were dead already". People were being dug out of bombed buildings and she had to help pull them out and resuscitate some in the street with mouth to mouth etc and they had to do whatever they could in the street with very limited resources and no modern equipment - just basic stuff like pain killers, bp machines, bandages, dressings, stretchers, stethoscopes etc in the vans - and they cleaned wounds and bandaged and patched people up before taking them to the hospital. Others were traumatized rather than, or as well as, being physically wounded. She saw dead bodies that had been burnt and shrivelled into baby size distorted corpses by phosphorus dropped on them by the bombers. She was just about to be sent to the front line when the war ended. "That's where I wanted to get to. To the front. I wanted to do a bit for the war and help the injured soldiers". But the war ended suddenly and she had to find her own way back home in a country with no trains, bridges, bombed motorways and hardly any transport. It took about six weeks walking to get back and she didn't know the way and had no maps. "I went the wrong way I think". "There were a few of us to start with, one had to go to Bremen and somehow I ended up in Bremen but that was right out of the way. No wonder my feet are in a state." There were five girls, all nurses she had been with since the Red Cross training in Bochem, to start with but this number went down one by one as they reached their destinations. The last one to go was Laura who lived in Bremen. By the end Heidi was the only one left walking back home from Bremen. "I don't know how on earth I got there". She would sleep overnight in farms most nights. "The farmers let us sleep in the hay in the barns and they always gave us a good breakfast in the morning when we left, homemade bread and eggs and something to take with us on the way. And then walking and walking all bloody day, through towns and through villages and we didn't know the way, we just asked people when we saw someone." She remembers she also went through Thuringan: "Americans army were there with tanks and they had a curfew." She says that if she had had a map she could probably have walked it in half the time.
She walked all the way from Kitzingen to Isalone in the hope that she would meet an old boyfriend, Ernst, who lived near there. She never visited his parents' house but she hoped she would bump into him in the town as she walked around. She didn't. "I didn't want to go to Hagen and stay with Tanta Paula again. I wanted to go to work in the hospital in Iserlone and I applied for a job there". But she never started at the hospital as around that time she met Alan George Hardman, a Corporal in the English Army who she was soon to marry, who was based in the same street as Heidi in a commandeered pub on the other side of the road in Iserlone. He was in charge of a small platoon based at the pub. "He spoke such good German. He had a flippin good German accent as well, and he looked a handsome bloke in his uniform. It gave him a good figure."
She met him at the bus stop near her house while she was waiting to meet her mum to arrive by bus. He came over from the pub opposite to talk to her. Her mother was not on the bus so she waited for the next one. She was not on that one either, and then he invited her to have a drink with him in the pub behind the bus stop. He walked her home after the drink, just a few houses down the road, and they arranged to meet the next day. Heidi's mum met him and didn't like him. She liked it that he could get her black market cigarettes though. He told Heidi soon after meeting her that he was going out with a local girl called Waltrout but he didn't want to see her any more after he met Heidi, and he finished with her. Heidi was 22 at this time.
The place where Heidi was living at this time was a shop that was converted into a room with curtains on the shop window. It had a bed, wardrobe, table and a couple of chairs and a two ring portable gas cooker. Her mother had come to stay with her there as she had nowhere else to go. They shared the bed. A few weeks after Heidi met Alan her mother was arrested again for taking a coat from a toilet in a restaurant in Hagen. She was spotted wearing it some days later and was arrested and jailed.
After knowing him for around six or seven weeks Alan was transferred to an army camp in Bielefeld. He found a room in a house for Heidi to stay when she visited, close to his base there. After a couple of visits, with her mother in jail, Heidi decided to move there and she gave up the shop room. In Bielefeld Heidi discovered that she was pregnant. She went to the doctor feeling sick and was told she was three months pregnant. As soon as she told Alan he said that they should get married. Heidi confided to me as I wrote this that she had been thinking of having an abortion before she told him.
When Heidi was around five months pregnant Alan often had to drive a lorry from Bielefeld to Munchen Gladbach and one time Heidi went with him as she wanted to go to Hagen (to visit Tanta Paula) which was on the way. When they were stopped by the army at a check points Heidi was wearing Alan's army coat and cap and pretended to be asleep in the passenger seat as the army did not allow civilians in the lorry. Alan pointed to her and said "Comrade's sleeping". Alan dropped Heidi off in Hagen and picked her up again on the way back. Alan often stayed at night with Heidi in the rented room even though it was not allowed and he should have been sleeping in the army camp. He would have to be back there again early in the morning.
"Alan liked his drink" said Heidi. One night when they were driving in the army lorry on some army business they both stopped for the night in a house in a town where there was a young girl called Karin and Heidi liked that name and she named her daughter after the girl. She remembers that Alan was drunk that night and she had to take his shoes off and put him on the settee.
They stayed in Bielefeld for a few months and then Alan was transferred to an army camp in a small village in the Luneberger Heider. Heidi stayed in a room in the town of Luneburg, 13 xxx Strasse (she remembers the number because she never liked the number 13). Sometimes she would visit him at the camp and she had to walk miles through the country fields and lanes at 8 months pregnant. She couldn't go inside the camp but he would come out and they stayed in the fields nearby. Once when she was walking back she was so tired that a passing man on a bike sat her on the bar of his bike and peddled back to Luneburg giving her a lift. One night, around 10pm, when Alan was staying in the room in Luneburg Heidi thought she was starting labour and they went to a private hospital not too far away with Alan carrying Heidi on his back. They sent her away and said come back when the water breaks. About an hour after they got back to the room Heidi's water did break and Alan had to carry her on his back again to the hospital, a distance of about 300 or 400 metres uphill. Karen was born that night at 3.15 am. Heidi was 23 years old.
Heidi often visited her Aunties and Uncles homes to play with her cousins during her childhood in Hagen. These cousins incuded Egon, who was five years younger than Heidi. Egon sometimes visted Oma's and stayed overnight and when he did he would share a bed with Heidi ("he always tried to pull the eiderdown over him, the bugger"). When she was 12 the twins Hildergard and Helga were born and she used to take them out in a pram for walks and to the stadtgarten. The photograph by the Rhein with the donkey was taken around this time on a day trip to Cologne and the Lorrelei Rhein area and up the hillside to the castle at Koenigswinter. In that photo are Heidi's Oma, Uncle Emile and his wife Maria, Heidi, and her two cousins Matilda and Martha (sisters). Matilda, the younger sister, is sitting on the donkey.
Heidi's mother was now living in the large ground floor apartment of a house on a road called Seeweg, directly overlooking the Harkortsee near Herdecke with her new husband - Herr Philip Meyer. They had an alsation dog called Harris. The husband worked as night security in a nearby power plant and Harris was an ex-police dog who went to work with him at night as his guard dog. Harris had his own place in a small store room annexe. "My mum was happy there". Heidi used to stay there over the summer holidays for six weeks. There was a swing there in the garden that Heidi played on. They also had two pigs and Heidi used to feed both with cooked potato skins and left overs, until a local butcher made the larger one into sausages which Heidi saw hanging on the wall. There were lots of wild rabbits around. "It was lovely there. It was a good time". The area is in the countryside and surrounded by woods and hills and Heidi used to run around there with Harris "I wouldn't have gone in there on my own". The only neighbours were one other house around 100 metres away and a pub close by. Harris is buried in the garden and Heidi still remembers the exact spot where they buried him.
When she was 12 years old Heidi had her appendix out at the Heilige Geist Catholic Hospital close to her school in Haspe. This was the first time she was in hospital. People were kept in far longer in those days than today, and Heidi thinks she was there for ten or maybe even 14 days. She remembers one day being very embarrassed, passing wind "blowing off", in front of one of the nuns (all the nurses were nuns). She apologised and said sorry and the nun said "Besser in weiter welt als in dem Bauch" or "Better out in the world than in your tummy". Heidi says "Oh they were lovely nuns. They were kind".
The next time she was in hospital was when she was 16, soon after after Oma died, when she had an operation on her right eye at the St Jospeph Hospital in Hagen. She remembers that she had her eye out and she had to hold it on a spoon. "I wasn't put to sleep" she says. She had the operation because she was slightly cross eyed and had been wearing glasses, which Oma thought would correct the eye. "But it didn't, so I had the operation. I had been wearing glasses as a child for as long as I can remember. I always wore them".
In 1938, when Heidi was 14, she left school. A few weeks later she started her first job in a flower shop on the corner of Corbacher Strasse in Haspe. The shop was called Rosenkranz, named after the owners, a Jewish couple. She learned how to make flower arrangements and also wreaths built around a wire frame. The Rosenkarantzes grew their own flowers on an allotment and Heidi collected the flowers from the allotment and watered the plants there and she also delivered the flowers to customers on the bike. She also worked in the shop as a sales person. She would deliver wreaths to funerals two at a time, one hanging on each handlebar of the bike.
She worked at the shop until she was 16 and left the shop after working there for around a year and a half, in the Spring about 2 months before Oma died. She left to work in a sweet factory in Weringhausen with her friend Annie Rickman, her school friend who lived still in the flat below Oma's. The factory was a bit closer to home than the flower shop, the money was better than in the flower shop and Annie told her it was good there and you could eat the sweets. "I liked it better than the flower shop. I had got fed up with it there. In the beginning I was eating a lot of sweets. But by the end I wasn't eating them any more. I can still smell it." As they were neighbours they walked to work at he sweet factory together, just as they had walked to school together as children.
World War 2 started in 1940 while Heidi was working at the sweet factory. The bombing of Hagen started started very soon after the start of the war. Heidi and Oma went down the the cellar along with all the other tenants during bombings. The bombing raids could take place at any time, day or night, and when the sirens sounded and the bombs dropped it was time to go down to the cellar. After a while they started going to a big specially built Bunker in Haspe as this was safer. It was packed with local residents. Bombing raids were nightly and they often spent the whole night in the Bunker sleeping on the floor under blankets that they took wth them. Oma kept a suitcase packed the whole time to take with them. People didn't sleep well and they still had to go to work or school in the morning as usual. Heidi would leave the bunker in the morning to go to work. "After Oma died I didn't bother anymore. I didn't go to the bunker anymore".
At age 16, when Oma died at age 72, Heidi moved briefly to her mum's flat in Tulpin Strasse for around 4 months. It was far from the main bunker in Hagen so Heidi and her mum stayed in the building and went down to the building's cellar during bombing raids. It was a long way to the factory by tram so Heidi left the sweet factory and started work in Schneeweis laundry. This was a large industrial laundry and Heidi worked on very large electric mangel machines which dried and ironed the sheets and then she folded them. "It was a horrible job. I didn't like it but I had to work and it was near to my mother's place. But then my mum got into trouble and I had to give up the home and couldn't stay here and I went to live with Tanta Paula. I had to arrange everything, and arrange for storage of my mums furniture, and pay for it all out of the little bit of money I was earning". Aunt Paula (Egon's mum) had a small spare room and Heidi moved in there. She stayed with Paula and got another job working on the conveyer belt in Brandt, a Swiebach Fabric, a biscuit and toasted bread factory, because it was near to Paula's. "It wasn't bad there but we had to be bloody quick and they had shift work, one week 6am to 2pm, the next week 2pm to 10pm, and the next week 10pm to 6am". After around 2 or 3 months she had had enough and left. NOTE: The "trouble" that Heidi's mother "got into" refers to her going to prison for shoplifting. "During the war there was nothing there. You couldn't get anything".
The flat that Heidi lived in with Tanta Paula was a black slate house in Heubing Strasse in Haspe. I only discovered now, in August 2020 as I write this section in Olhao, Portugal, during the Covid Pandemic, that this is the same flat and house that I stayed in one summer when I was 18 and hitch hiked to Germany with my friend Hoppy. I had no idea at the time that my mother had lived in that same flat when she was around my age at that time. I remember it well.
The next job was in Wittmann factory in Haspe where they made hand grenades and other explosive weapons. Egon came every lunch time and brought a hot meal from Paula's. She worked hard there as the more grenades she made the more money she made. "You had to be flippin quick to earn your money".
"It was rotten after Oma died, I lost interest in everything after Oma died. I was moving around, shoved around, from here to there. I wasn't happy and I felt lost and like I didn't belong anywhere. It was not a good time. I tried a lot of things, different jobs, but I didn't like them."
"And then I got ill and ended up in hospital to have an operation on my stomach." She was 17. The hospital was the Algemeine Krankenhaus, in Hagen, where she later worked as a nurse. "At the hospital I met a nurse, Analiese. I was seriously ill and they put me in the bunker in the hospital cellars". The hospital cellar was used as a shelter, a "bunker", for air raids. They put the serious cases there and those who could not be moved. The ones who could be moved stayed up in the wards and were brought down to the bunker during the air raids. Heidi doesn't remember know what the operation was. She still has a very big scar over a foot long starting about 8 inches above her belly button and going straight down, through and past her belly button. She liked it at the hospital and decided to become a nurse. She was accepted and started nursing when she was 18, moving into a shared room in the hospital with her new friend, the nurse Analiese.
When she came out of the hospital She went back to Paula's and kept in contact with Analiese who helped her take some exams and get accepted in the hospital to train and study to be a nurse. It was only a few months after leaving as a patient that she returned as a nurse. She moved into the hospital and shared a room with Analiese on the top floor over the childrens' wards where she was working during the first year. There were two wards: one for births and new borns and one for sick older children. She studied a lot during this time and they had exams every three months. She was in this ward for one year. In the second year she was moved around to different wards. "I was happy there. I felt that I was settled. Like home again, after Oma died".
In the second year she spent six months in a woman's ward and six months in the men's ward. In the third year she was in the TB ward. Day shifts started at 7am to 7pm. Break was around 2pm to 3.30pm. The uniform was a blue and white striped dress and white pinafore. White nurse's hat with blue stripe. Night shifts were 7pm to 7am with no real set break time. Some nights were busier than others and there were two nurses per ward at night and four nurses per ward in the day. Each nurse did three weeks on day shifts and one week on nights per month. She gave injections, took blood pressure etc, temperature was always taken under arm, she changed dressings and did all the usual nursing duties including helping them to eat and bathe etc if necessary. Patients were kept in longer than today, for example appendectomy patients would be kept in for two weeks. People would be kept in with high blood pressure for a week until it stabalised. It was unusual for anyone to be in for less than a week or two. She says that it was different than today when "as soon as you get in they kick you out again. Flippin heck." After finishing the three years she wanted to go out to the front line and help the soldiers in the war and she joined the Red Cross. She went to Bochem for training and then to Hamburg where they all lived on the airport where they learned how to drive trucks and basic mechanics and how to change wheels. She still remembers how an engine works with four or six cylinders.
After training she was sent to Kitzingen in Bavaria where there was a lot of bombing and war casualties. They were based in an army camp and from there they would drive every day to Frankfurt, which was being very heavily bombed, to tend to casualties. They would normally leave early in the morning and return late at night although a couple of nights they also stayed overnight in the hospital there. "Most of the people we took to the hospital were badly hurt and some were dead already". People were being dug out of bombed buildings and she had to help pull them out and resuscitate some in the street with mouth to mouth etc and they had to do whatever they could in the street with very limited resources and no modern equipment - just basic stuff like pain killers, bp machines, bandages, dressings, stretchers, stethoscopes etc in the vans - and they cleaned wounds and bandaged and patched people up before taking them to the hospital. Others were traumatized rather than, or as well as, being physically wounded. She saw dead bodies that had been burnt and shrivelled into baby size distorted corpses by phosphorus dropped on them by the bombers. She was just about to be sent to the front line when the war ended. "That's where I wanted to get to. To the front. I wanted to do a bit for the war and help the injured soldiers". But the war ended suddenly and she had to find her own way back home in a country with no trains, bridges, bombed motorways and hardly any transport. It took about six weeks walking to get back and she didn't know the way and had no maps. "I went the wrong way I think". "There were a few of us to start with, one had to go to Bremen and somehow I ended up in Bremen but that was right out of the way. No wonder my feet are in a state." There were five girls, all nurses she had been with since the Red Cross training in Bochem, to start with but this number went down one by one as they reached their destinations. The last one to go was Laura who lived in Bremen. By the end Heidi was the only one left walking back home from Bremen. "I don't know how on earth I got there". She would sleep overnight in farms most nights. "The farmers let us sleep in the hay in the barns and they always gave us a good breakfast in the morning when we left, homemade bread and eggs and something to take with us on the way. And then walking and walking all bloody day, through towns and through villages and we didn't know the way, we just asked people when we saw someone." She remembers she also went through Thuringan: "Americans army were there with tanks and they had a curfew." She says that if she had had a map she could probably have walked it in half the time.
She walked all the way from Kitzingen to Isalone in the hope that she would meet an old boyfriend, Ernst, who lived near there. She never visited his parents' house but she hoped she would bump into him in the town as she walked around. She didn't. "I didn't want to go to Hagen and stay with Tanta Paula again. I wanted to go to work in the hospital in Iserlone and I applied for a job there". But she never started at the hospital as around that time she met Alan George Hardman, a Corporal in the English Army who she was soon to marry, who was based in the same street as Heidi in a commandeered pub on the other side of the road in Iserlone. He was in charge of a small platoon based at the pub. "He spoke such good German. He had a flippin good German accent as well, and he looked a handsome bloke in his uniform. It gave him a good figure."
She met him at the bus stop near her house while she was waiting to meet her mum to arrive by bus. He came over from the pub opposite to talk to her. Her mother was not on the bus so she waited for the next one. She was not on that one either, and then he invited her to have a drink with him in the pub behind the bus stop. He walked her home after the drink, just a few houses down the road, and they arranged to meet the next day. Heidi's mum met him and didn't like him. She liked it that he could get her black market cigarettes though. He told Heidi soon after meeting her that he was going out with a local girl called Waltrout but he didn't want to see her any more after he met Heidi, and he finished with her. Heidi was 22 at this time.
The place where Heidi was living at this time was a shop that was converted into a room with curtains on the shop window. It had a bed, wardrobe, table and a couple of chairs and a two ring portable gas cooker. Her mother had come to stay with her there as she had nowhere else to go. They shared the bed. A few weeks after Heidi met Alan her mother was arrested again for taking a coat from a toilet in a restaurant in Hagen. She was spotted wearing it some days later and was arrested and jailed.
After knowing him for around six or seven weeks Alan was transferred to an army camp in Bielefeld. He found a room in a house for Heidi to stay when she visited, close to his base there. After a couple of visits, with her mother in jail, Heidi decided to move there and she gave up the shop room. In Bielefeld Heidi discovered that she was pregnant. She went to the doctor feeling sick and was told she was three months pregnant. As soon as she told Alan he said that they should get married. Heidi confided to me as I wrote this that she had been thinking of having an abortion before she told him.
When Heidi was around five months pregnant Alan often had to drive a lorry from Bielefeld to Munchen Gladbach and one time Heidi went with him as she wanted to go to Hagen (to visit Tanta Paula) which was on the way. When they were stopped by the army at a check points Heidi was wearing Alan's army coat and cap and pretended to be asleep in the passenger seat as the army did not allow civilians in the lorry. Alan pointed to her and said "Comrade's sleeping". Alan dropped Heidi off in Hagen and picked her up again on the way back. Alan often stayed at night with Heidi in the rented room even though it was not allowed and he should have been sleeping in the army camp. He would have to be back there again early in the morning.
"Alan liked his drink" said Heidi. One night when they were driving in the army lorry on some army business they both stopped for the night in a house in a town where there was a young girl called Karin and Heidi liked that name and she named her daughter after the girl. She remembers that Alan was drunk that night and she had to take his shoes off and put him on the settee.
They stayed in Bielefeld for a few months and then Alan was transferred to an army camp in a small village in the Luneberger Heider. Heidi stayed in a room in the town of Luneburg, 13 xxx Strasse (she remembers the number because she never liked the number 13). Sometimes she would visit him at the camp and she had to walk miles through the country fields and lanes at 8 months pregnant. She couldn't go inside the camp but he would come out and they stayed in the fields nearby. Once when she was walking back she was so tired that a passing man on a bike sat her on the bar of his bike and peddled back to Luneburg giving her a lift. One night, around 10pm, when Alan was staying in the room in Luneburg Heidi thought she was starting labour and they went to a private hospital not too far away with Alan carrying Heidi on his back. They sent her away and said come back when the water breaks. About an hour after they got back to the room Heidi's water did break and Alan had to carry her on his back again to the hospital, a distance of about 300 or 400 metres uphill. Karen was born that night at 3.15 am. Heidi was 23 years old.
Heidi Hardman
18 January 1924 - 25 July 2024
Visit the Hardman Institute for Science and Consciousness Studies - a venture inspired by Heidi's unwavering faith in there being "much more than we know" and launched in her memory.