N
o one expects to see swastikas, chilling symbols, on a bright sunny morning in the idyllically leafy Yarralumla of May 2012. But there they were yesterday morning, leaping up off the page of the 1939 passport of Robin Brown's late mother.
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Brown, semi-retired now but a zealous cyclist (''I'm a MAMIL, a middle-aged man in lycra'') leaves for Europe this Saturday to complete the second part of an epic bicycling journey that imitates as exactly as possible a quite amazing one his English mother, Freda Cole, did in April 1939. Her plans to cycle with a woman friend some 3000 kilometres across Europe from Worcester in England to Bergen in Norway required a visa for Germany. In London, the German authorities plonked one into her passport and validated it with a black ink swastika stamp that still looks eerily recent. Later, in Europe, there was somehow a need for other swastika stamps. They help give the old passport, a family heirloom now, great character.
Although Brown is imitating his mother's expedition, hers is, really, an impossible act to follow. As well as being a woman. her 1930s bicycle (she called it ''Hannibal II''), her son acknowledged yesterday, was probably twice as heavy as his (his is called ''Hannibal III'') and what's more didn't have gears.
Why did she and her friend go on such a daunting tour, and do it at a time when Europe was so alarming with war looming? Her diary of her tour mentions sightings of the Hitler Youth and of villages festooned with anti-semitic signs.
One delicious (but alas unlikely) possibility, Brown laughed yesterday, is that she was a cycling spy. He jokes that until he finds a parallel 1939 diary of hers full of observations about numbers of German warships counted in harbours, there'll be no proof. But she did go on to join the navy for the war and to do intelligence work, and certainly British intelligence, having discovered suspiciously spy-like young Germans cycling around Britain in 1937, may have wanted to send their own spies pedalling into Europe. But what's more likely, Brown thinks, is that she was just an adventurous spirit with an ''internationalist'' spirit fostered by her strong engagement with the Girl Guide movement. By 1939 she was already that rare phenomenon, an Englishwoman who roared around on a motorbike, and so this grand traverse of Europe was probably just more of the same intrepid dynamism.
The other thing that makes his mother's act impossibly hard for him to follow is that she made her journey (south through France and Italy and then up through Switzerland, Austria and Germany and on to Scandinavia) in one long, prodigious, marathon effort. Brown's looming effort will see him do part two of a two-part imitation of his impressive mother. In 2010 he followed her route from Worcester to Switzerland and now, for part two, he'll grind onwards and upwards into Scandinavia and to the finishing line at Bergen.
Why, this columnist challenged, didn't you go the whole way in 2010?
''My wife won't believe me,'' Brown mused yesterday (with yesterday his adorable Cairn Terrier Hamish looking sceptical too), ''but she was back in Canberra and I was missing her terribly. And so I thought it would be a nicer thing to do to break the journey in half and come home, so I'd have a second ride to look forward to.''
Brown will be cycling into a quite troubled Europe, but it doesn't compare with the Europe of 1939 his mother had shimmered across on her heavy, gearless Hannibal II (named after Hannibal's feat of crossing with elephants the Alps she'd expected to cross on a bicycle). Only a few days after she was safe back home in England, Hitler's forces invaded Poland.
Brown's feat that begins in a few days is not only a matter of his following his mother's grand example and of his being an obsessive MAMIL. It is also an effort bristling with altruistic intentions to do with the empowerment of young women in the Solomon Islands through the Solomon Islands Girl Guides.
You can read all about these things online (Google your way to the Billberry Bluestocking Fund and to the Greater Good Foundation) and then may be moved to donate a little to them per kilometre.