Story Time Friday #6

Really hoping that this time, I will be able to keep this up as a monthly feature.  Here's a quick recap - I'm chronicling my life story, recreated for the most part, from the stamps in my various passports (remember the good old days when they always stamped your passport?).  So far we have...born in Germany, adopted at birth by an American Army soldier and his British wife (hereinafter always referred to as Dad and Mum), moved from Germany to Boston and then to Norway.  Left Norway for the San Francisco Bay Area where my sister, Barbara, joined the family.  Dad went to Vietnam for a year and when he returned, we drove across the country to New York and hopped on a plane for his next duty station in Belgium.  Our destination was the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).  There are currently 30 member nations but when we moved there in 1967, there were only 15.

This was the headquarters building and the flags about the time we were there - looks like there are fourteen flags when this photo was taken.  The flags were rotated weekly.  SHAPE had only been in Belgium since early 1967 after being asked to leave France by General Charles de Gaulle.  The area it was to occupy was originally a Belgian Army summer training camp, a lot of work would be needed to make it into a working and habitable international headquarters.

We arrived in Belgium on December 27, 1967 and it was freezing.  Snow, black ice, just about the most dismal weather you can imagine.  I remember we flew from London to Brussels but I have no idea how we got from Brussels to Mons, about 45 miles south.  I remember a train station so perhaps the train and then a taxi to our hotel.  Somewhere a sponsor was involved but I do remember that he certainly would never have qualified for Sponsor of the Year!  The hotel was grim, the floor in our room buckled from age or perhaps a plumbing mishap, I can't imagine.  The first night we were there, we went downstairs to the restaurant for dinner only to be told that it was closed for a private party.  I have no idea what we ate that night.

Dad found us a new place to stay the next day.  The Hotel Monaco which doesn't appear to exist any longer became our home for the next couple of months.  There were lots of families bound for SHAPE, lots of kids our age (I was almost 8 and my sister Barbara, almost 2).  I celebrated my 8th birthday at the hotel; I'll never forget it because I still bear a small scar on my wrist from trapping my arm in a closing door.  Must have been quite a gash to leave a scar.  About the fondest memory I have of our time at the hotel is of the waiters bringing big cereal bowls of milk to us before we left for school.  The moms had stocked up on the mini boxes of cereal from the commissary.  Sugar overload, I'm sure our teachers loved that!

I started 2nd grade in January.  I remember Dad and I walking down the street in the freezing weather to the bus station and taking the bus to SHAPE.  I don't know how long it took for our car and househood goods to arrive, six weeks at least, I'm sure, so we relied on public transportation until then.

We moved into our first home at SHAPE eventually, an apartment in SHAPE village.  The enlisted housing was composed of 12-unit apartment buildings, divided into six units on one side with a central stairwell and six units on the other side,also with a stairwell.  There were parking spaces in front of the building and detached garages in a row off to one side.  I don't have any photos (I might have some slides but they have not been converted to a more modern format yet) but I can remember it very clearly.  We lived on the third floor, our neighbors across the hall were a British Navy family, Kay and Peter Lee, and she and my Mum became great friends.

This is part of the schools campus - it was surrounded by a circular road and every afternoon, 40+ school buses would line up to take students home.  There was everything from luxury motorcoaches, to yellow school buses, to military buses from the various nations.  It was quite a sight.  In this photo, the high school gym is on the right, the elementary school building is shown in the distance in the center, and the cafeteria is behind the trees.  The tip of the roof of the Chapel is just visible on the left.  Next to the elementary building was the International lower grades/forms section and in front of the elementary building was the American high school (both not visible).  I joined the second grade mid-year and we left after I completed seventh grade (at that time, it was the first year of high school).  I do have school pictures, but I"m saving those for next Wednesday's Let's Look at...Your School Pics post.

Here's a shot below the schools area - the building on the left housed the teen center, nursery (daycare center), and the library.  The large white building behind that is the bowling alley connected by a corridor to the movie theater and in the distance is the hospital.  The hospital was under construction when we got there.  To the right is the shopping center - a Belgian grocery/department store called Bon Marche, the laundromat, bank, post office, Class VI (alcohol and cigarettes), the bookstore where there would be a line out the door every Sunday for the international newspapers, and the furniture store.

Coming next month...we move from the apartment building to off-base housing and how we spent our leisure time in Belgium.