by Michael Ransom
Reading time: 9 minutes
Barb Henoch passed away on February 17, 2024. This coming May will mark twenty years since I first met her and her husband, Phil, to begin working on their memoir, Sentimental Journeys. We became friends through the process of writing their life stories. In 2005 I wrote the story about Barb that follows for publication in the Generations of Today magazine. I share it now in the spirit of keeping Barb’s memories alive. I miss her and Phil very much.
Paradise Lost
Barb Formby was born of English parents in the tiny hill station of Mpwapwa near Dar-es-Salaam, East Africa. The year was 1930. Barb’s father, Rowland, was a Certified Public Accountant for a veterinary department in the British Colonial Service. As the wife of a government employee in Mpwapwa (pronounced “im-pwa-pwa”), Barb’s mother, Elsie, led a life of leisure, enjoying the services of maids and house servants. They had a stable of riding horses. Life was extremely good—Barb would admit opulent—in a place called “haven of peace.”
Barb (left) with her sister, Hazel.
In 1936, Barb traveled by steamer to England with her family on vacation, a trip her father received every two years. During their stop in Malta, Elsie bought several expensive silk scarves. Barb and her younger sister, Hazel, waved the scarves from the porthole in their suite. Many of them flew through their fingers and set sail. Soon, Barb would be separated from her family for eight years, let loose and tossed about like the scarves that were blowing from her hands.
Barb discovered surprising news when she reached England. Because there was no education available for Barb in Mpwapwa, her parents had enrolled her in a kindergarten boarding school in Calderstones, a suburb of Liverpool. Her enrollment was typical of what British parents stationed far from England did, though it was likely not typical to do so without the child’s knowledge. The private school was run by the principal, Miss F. A. Bell, and her sister, whom Barb called Auntie Bogie. Barb’s mother, father, sister, and other relatives left for a vacation in Scotland. When they returned in September, school was starting. Barb remembers her father and mother coming to see her. Her father knelt by her and said, “Now you be a good girl for your daddy and let me be proud of you.”
Barb, center, on a beach with friends in 1938.
Barb replied, “Oh, yes, I will.” She never questioned what was about to happen, for she thought she was going to school for a short stay. Boarding school was a big shock for Barb. She cried much from September until Christmas, hoping each day for her parents’ return. Even though Barb asked about her situation after her family left, Miss Bell and Auntie Bogie politely ignored her. Finally, they told Barb that her family had returned to Africa, leaving her behind. She was devastated.
In January 1937, Barb—then seven years old—received a telegram from her father that said, “Had to come back to Africa to work. Promise me again you’ll be good. We’ll see you in 1939.” Fortunately, they were kind to Barb at the boarding school. They taught her manners, elocution, ballet, piano, horseback riding, and band. In hindsight, Miss Bell and Auntie Bogie were two of the most influential people in her life. For nearly three years, they looked after her as if she were their beloved daughter.
When Neville Chamberlain returned from his visit with Hitler in April 1939 to reassure Britain that there would be peace in their time, everyone breathed a big sigh of relief. But a few months later, Hitler was on the move. As war clouds loomed on the horizon, all the children but Barb had left the boarding school. Miss Bell was communicating with Barb’s father, but orders weren’t clear as to what to do with her. He must have OK’d Miss Bell’s taking Barb wherever she would be safe. In July, Barb was put on a bus with other children. A label on her coat indicated her name and destination: Barb Formby going to Betws-y-Coed, Wales. At first Barb laughed with the children and had fun, but as darkness settled in, she began to worry about going to a family that she didn’t know.
Barb’s new family lived above and below an ice cream parlor that they owned and operated. Their youngest child was in her early teens. Barb recalls climbing trees in their back yard, falling several times, but luckily never breaking any bones. Barb basically ran wild without much supervision, and she was allowed to stay out all hours of the night. One time, a boy pointed a cork gun at her; shot, and the elastic on the cork broke. The cork hit Barb between her eyes and knocked her out.
Auntie Connie, a sister of Barb’s father, came to visit Barb one day. Connie was a private midwife and had been employed nearby. Horrified by Barb’s condition, she held both of Barb’s hands and asked, “Oh, Barb. What have they done to you?”
Barb said meekly, “Nothing.”
She repeated, “Oh my gosh, what have they done to you?” She was so upset with Barb’s situation that she made immediate plans for her to move from there. Connie was working for a Doctor Cunningham and his family, who lived in Benllech Bay in Anglesey, North Wales. She called them to ask if Barb could possibly stay with them, indicating that Barb’s father would compensate them. Barb went to the Cunninghams, who had a beautiful home, including a cook and a maid. The Cunninghams had twin babies and Margaret, a girl Barb’s age. Margaret and Barb started school, where they learned Welsh and enjoyed horseback riding along the beaches. Life was wonderful once more.
Months after the war broke out, the submarine Thetis left Liverpool and sank in Benllech Bay when a junior officer opened the inner door of a flooded torpedo tube. A few men made it out through an escape hatch, but ninety-nine died. Goronwy, the boyfriend of the Cunninghams’ maid, drove the truck that pulled the Thetis up on the beach, and he went inside the submarine to help retrieve the bodies. This shocked Barb and the other children. War had hit home.
Dr. Cunningham was so busy managing other surgeons and doctors at a large hospital north of Liverpool that he couldn’t come home on weekends. Eventually the Cunninghams moved back to Prenton, a rural, safer location on the Birkenhead side of the River Mersey. Auntie Connie didn’t want them to take Barb, because she thought it would be too dangerous, but Barb wanted to go with them. Instead, the solution was to send Barb to Mrs. Cunningham’s brother, Mr. Watson, who had been an elementary school principal. He and his wife lived in Amlwch, also in Anglesey, and had no children. Barb endured a miserable time there. She was denied any privacy and forced to eat certain things whether she liked them or not. “You will eat it,” they demanded.
This time, Barb’s mother’s side of the family came to her rescue. Auntie Vera (Elsie’s sister) would travel with her husband, Frank, to Holyhead when he degaussed ships on the River Mersey. (Degaussing involved ridding a ship’s hull and equipment of magnetic fields to make it less prone to attracting mines and torpedoes.) On one of those trips in the latter half of 1940, Vera took a bus to visit Barb. When Barb saw her, she clung to her aunt and pleaded, “Can we take a walk?” The Watson’s wanted to come along. Auntie Vera could tell there was something wrong, so she said, “Barb will be OK, we will just take a little walk and get some fresh air.” When they were alone, Barb cried, “I want to leave right now. I just hate it. I am so unhappy. They won’t let me have friends.” Barb wasn’t a fusser, just terribly miserable, and she knew that Auntie Vera was the only person she could turn to.
Auntie Vera said, “You have to stay here.” She went back to Frank and talked to him, but they decided that there was nothing they could do right away. Cities were being bombed, but Barb was safe in Anglesey. Vera began a correspondence with Rowland regarding Barb’s situation. Communication was extremely slow, so it was not until after Christmas that she received the approval from him to assume responsibility for Barb. As part of the bargain, Barb would help take care of Vera and Frank’s son, David, then one year old. She was thrilled at the prospect.
In July 1940, the governor of Tanganyika ordered Elsie to engage in work for the war effort. She had refused his earlier request with the attitude, “Whom did they think they are talking to?” Quite snobby, she was not about to do war work. A letter from the British government arrived for her that said, “You will do war work. You are assigned to teach natives to do blanket-stitching.”
As rolls and rolls of blanket material began arriving in Mpwapwa from Libya, Elsie taught a class of thirty-six natives how to measure, cut, and stitch blankets. The governor came, inspected the operation, and praised her for her work. Soon, however, all thirty-six natives died from cerebro-spinal meningitis, which they contracted from bacteria in the blanket material. In November, Elsie—then forty years old—was admitted to the isolation unit of the British hospital in Dar-es-Salaam. She, too, had cerebro-spinal meningitis. She survived but had permanent paralysis on her left side.
This was a grim time for Barb’s family. Rowland tried to get them out of Dar-es-Salaam in 1941. He managed to get a ride on a troop ship, but Elsie became so violently ill that they had to get off at Durban, a port in southeast Africa. He found a hospital in Durban that would care for Elsie, and there they would stay until 1944.
Liverpool blitz destruction.
Auntie Vera came to Amlwch in April 1941 to rescue Barb from the Watsons. She took Barb by bus back to a suburb of Liverpool to live with her, Frank, and David. A month later, the Germans began an eight-day attack on Liverpool. It was a Thursday at 10:50 p.m. when fifty German aircraft began bombing the city. By 1 a.m. the all clear had sounded. During the days that followed, 800 German raiders would drop 2,000 bombs, start 1,200 fires, kill 1,453, and injure more than 1,000. Nearly thirteen miles of the docks in Liverpool were set fire and destroyed. Richard Whittington-Egan, in his book, The Great Liverpool Blitz, described the scene as follows: “Hour upon hour, the raiding planes buzzed and droned like flights of angry hornets over the river, and death and destruction came whistling and screeching from the flare-lit sky. The heart-fluttering thud and thump of high-explosive bombs trembled the earth.”
Auntie Vera, who thought she had brought Barb to a haven, kept saying, “Oh, my God, what did I do?” This was disturbing to Barb, just as when Auntie Connie had said to her, “What have they (Barb’s first host family) done to you?” Barb was afraid that she would be moved again, so she went out of her way to be as nice and helpful as possible so that Auntie Vera would let her stay.
When the German bombardments started, Barb, Vera, Frank, and David spent every night in their underground shelter, which was called an Anderson Shelter. It opened like a storm cellar, and they would go down underground, under a rockery in the garden, and pull the heavy door closed. It was comfortable there, even though it didn’t have electricity. Some evenings the raids didn’t start until midnight, but Barb—then eleven—and baby David were usually asleep. Sometimes they woke up when the bombs exploded and the ground shook.
One moonlit night, Frank said, “Vera, come and look at this.” When he said that, Barb joined them and peered up into the sky. Barb saw something descending that hung from a parachute. The “thing” was a big, spiked, land mine that exploded about a half-mile from their home. Frank and Vera had glued heavy netting onto the house windows so they wouldn’t shatter from a bomb blast. This was called “having the windows oiled.” The blast from the mine blew their windows in, but because of the netting, they didn’t shatter.
Barb’s mother, 1944.
Barb’s family returned to England in 1944, months before the war ended and eight years after they left Barb at the kindergarten boarding school. Rowland was able to get passes on the Empress of Scotland. It was a miserable trip because the ship was full of troops. Rowland was down below, packed with the troops like sardines. Elsie and Hazel were in a cabin for two people occupied by five, which made it difficult for Hazel, then age twelve, to care for her mother. To make matters worse, a German U boat chased them the entire way, which meant that garbage could not be put out, so the ship stunk terribly. It was a nerve-racking trip for all passengers.
Barb remembers walking down to the gate to wait for her family. Vera had broken the news to Barb that her mother was ill, that she could not use her left hand, and that she had to use a walking stick. But the extent of her misfortune did not hit home until Barb saw her. She was expecting a tall, slim, dark-haired woman—her mother—who had been a gifted athlete. But instead Barb saw a gray-haired woman, sixty pounds heavier than when Barb had last seen her. When Barb saw her mother get out of the taxi, she couldn’t help but stare in amazement. She was so stunned that she whispered to Auntie Vera, “That isn’t my mother.”
Elsie heard those words. She raised her walking stick and rapped Barb soundly on the back of her head. “I am your mother,” she hissed.
After ten years of heartache and irreconcilable disagreements with her family, Barb left England in her twenties to begin life anew in Canada. There she was educated in various phases of personnel work. She had hoped to come to the United States, but could not, because immigration laws admitted only two people who were born in Africa every ten years. In England, her mother remained a bitter invalid until she died in 1962. Her father remarried but died of a stroke in 1976. Her sister never forgave Barb for making her bear the brunt of caring for their mother those eight years that Barb was away at school in England.
From the events of her tumultuous childhood, Barb says she learned patience, how to nurture others, how to ride with disappointments, and how to adapt to new situations. Above all, she learned never to take anything for granted. Barb eventually came to the United States, held various corporate personnel positions, and was happily married. Her haven of peace had returned.
Here is a link to Barb’s obituary that I helped write. My wife (Jeanine) and I are honored and privileged to have been friends with her the past twenty years.
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