Finding Maynard–
“Dear Sir, Many thanks. I’ll soon be out of here now, then I shall be lit up! God Bless America and F.D.R., Yours sincerely, Pt. Maynard, A.T.” The words were written on the back of a yellowed postcard I came across while I was browsing on a hot, June day in 2003 in a secondhand store near my home in Los Angeles. Curious, I turned the postcard over. It was postmarked April 21, 1942, South Tottenham. It was a tiny thank-you note for cigarettes, I soon realized, the address of a donor in Brooklyn pre-typed and sent under the auspices of a British war relief organization, just a small item in the vast sea of bits and pieces that had been World War II. But there was something that lit me up about the loops and curves of his handwriting, something that reached out to me from the schoolboy penmanship, the way the soldier had carved out eight lines from a small space. Who was A.T. Maynard? Suddenly, I had a strange need to rescue the postcard from the hundreds of others in one of the store’s plastic boxes, to free the unknown Private from his obscurity, weirdly sure that fate and coincidence had collided, and that the postcard had tumbled across time and space from London to New York, landing in Los Angeles, and falling into my safekeeping for a reason. Could the W.W. II soldier be still alive? I was determined to find out, and if he was, to somehow return the postcard to him. But all I had to go on was a British Army serial number and no first and middle name. I turned to my newest best friend, the Internet, and spent a year hunting down hundreds of leads. Along the way, I hired a graphologist, begged and battled with the British Army for confidential information, posted queries on veteran Web sites, scoured British censuses, electoral rolls, and genealogical resources and contacted archivists throughout the world. I got lucky. The British Army offered me one small concession - the soldier’s first and middle names – Arthur Thomas. But even then, I continued to have a string of disappointments. There were many Arthur Thomas Maynards all over the United Kingdom, I learned, and was almost ready to give up, when my search led me to the small village of Stibbard in Norfolk, England. There, I found octogenarian siblings, Tom and Winifred who’s brother Arthur had passed away in 1963. Was he the A.T. Maynard of the postcard? In an exchange of e-mails, correspondence Tom had kept for forty years and scanned for me to see unmistakably confirmed what I had hoped - that Tom’s brother was the A.T. Maynard who had written the postcard I’d found months before. “I think we were meant to discover each other,” Tom said to me when I phoned him, my hands trembling. It was twelve noon in Los Angeles, already nighttime in Norfolk. Less than two months later, I was on an airplane. On the train from London to Norwich with my daughter, the gentle English countrywide brushed green against our train window, and I asked myself one final question - was returning the postcard to Arthur’s family fate’s only mission for me? My answer fell softly, like a feather, later in Tom’s house, the sound of a light rain outside as we sat around his kitchen table. We were exchanging family photographs when Tom and Winnie shared Arthur’s artwork and calligraphy. Although the family had been very poor, Arthur loved reading the classics and painting with watercolors, Tom recounted. It seemed that Arthur’s fondest wish had been that his artwork might one day be exhibited in a gallery or on the cover of a book. I knew then that it was no accident I’d been drawn to the postcard. Coincidence had nudged me for months so that I could return the postcard to Arthur’s family, but there was one more purpose fate had in store for me. I would bring Arthur’s watercolors to light through a medium he could never have dreamed of in 1942 – the Internet. Since that first meeting, we’ve all exchanged letters phone calls and cards, and I’ve been back to England to visit Tom and Winnie a second time. Click here for the newspaper story from the Norwich Evening News. |