Story Time Friday #7

 

A text-heavy post today - I know I have photos of our time at SHAPE but I have a feeling they are all slides and I have not had them converted to another format yet.  I hope to update this post at some time with photos.

We lived in the apartment in SHAPE Village for a little over a year and then we moved to off-base housing.  In those days, it was rare to move off base so I don’t know how it was allowed.  Our family size didn’t increase and no-one had any kind of injury that meant they couldn’t climb the stairs to the third floor any longer.  Another one of those questions that I should have asked Mum or Dad and didn’t.  Ugh, as I shift through old photographs and papers, it makes me more aware that documenting the who, what, when, where, and why is so important.  Please, friends, label your photographs, journal, scrapbook, blog, do something to preserve your family history for your children and future generations.

Anyway, back to my story.  The off-base housing was in Casteau, which, according to Wikipedia, was a village between the towns of Mons and Soignies on the road Mons-Brussel.  That’s the main thoroughfare to get from Mons to Brussels, the Belgian capital.  Most of the houses were duplexes, with flat roofs like you see in the Flintstones, and there were a few single-family units.  There was a set of driveways between each unit with a garage at the end of each driveway.  We had a four-bedroom unit with a large living/dining room that stretched most of the length of the unit with a small kitchen, two bathrooms, and a long hallway that ran behind the living/dining room that was a solid row of closets, for hanging and with shelves for linens and storage.  It was not carpeted and boy, were those floors cold in the winter if you happened to step off an area rug!

The off-base neighborhood in Casteau

Source: http://regulus-starnotes.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-monkey-of-mons-bats-in-belfry-and.html

Our house looked like this but there weren't any hedges when we were there and the trees were still pretty small

Source: http://regulus-starnotes.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-monkey-of-mons-bats-in-belfry-and.html

It was a great neighborhood, everyone had a grass area at the back although I don’t recall any of them being fenced.  There were lots of dogs so I guess they were either very well-behaved or were kept on a leash.  The school bus picked us up for school, a German Army bus with a driver and attendant, neither of the several soldiers we had over the years spoke much English but we managed.  I remember the weather as being temperate with all four seasons and some snow in the winter.  The area had playgrounds and a pond and these were the days when we played outside and rode our bicycles until the street lights came on.  We had one hour of English-speaking television per evening; Skippy the Kangaroo was a favorite and Daktari, the tales of a veterinarian running an animal study center in Africa (thanks, Wikipedia, I remembered animals and Africa but not much else).

SHAPE was made up of service members from all branches and from many countries and this was reflected in our neighborhood.  My Dad was U. S. Army with a British wife, our neighbors across the driveways were German, the family across the street was Dutch, and next to them was a U. S. Air Force airman also with a British wife.  There was at least one Canadian family on our street as well.  You could pick out the British and Canadian families easily if you went into their houses.  They were not allowed to ship their own furniture so everyone was issued with the same living room, dining room, and bedroom furniture!

There is one memory that overrides a lot of my memories of SHAPE and that is that my Dad seemed to always be on call in the evenings and weekends.  He worked in Plans and Operations, who knows what that involved, but his role was primarily administrative, and the generals he worked for during his time there thought nothing of sending their driver over to our house to tell my Dad he was needed at the office.  I think that’s one of the reasons we didn’t have a phone!  I think this is also one of the reasons my parents bought a caravan and we decamped to the beach every weekend April through October.  More to come…