Wild fires out of control

 

 

This summer might be remembered by some people for the wrong reasons, writes Bert Cargill of St Monans Gospel Hall. 

Heat waves and prolonged drought have badly affected many parts of the country, but worst of all have been these terrible wild fires. Many countries on the continent have fared really badly, with loss of life and property, but nearer here, huge areas of land in the Cairngorms, in Suffolk, and at Arthur’s Seat, have been disfigured and spoiled by fires getting out of control. It will take a long time for them to recover their beauty and usefulness.

 

And they all started with something small. 

Moving the boundary - an international incident

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

Earlier this year, a farmer driving his tractor noticed a large stone in his path, and moved it out of the way. Such an event would not normally cause headlines, but it did on this occasion, for the stone had been there for two hundred years, marking the border between Belgium and France. Thus, ‘on the ground’, the farmer was increasing the size of Belgium by about 7.5 feet, and reducing France by the same amount! It appears that he did not know the significance of his action, but it was serious nonetheless; for the boundary had been established by a treaty in 1820, and no-one had the right to move it.

A refugee's gratitude

All photos courtesy of Unsplash

Eric Schwam died in December 2020, at 90 years of age. His entire estate, the total was thought to be around Euro 2 million (£1.7 million), was bequeathed to a village, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in south-east France. Why would anyone be so generous? Eric, an Austrian Jew, arrived there with his parents and grandmother in 1943, fleeing from the Nazis. We do not know how the refugee family got there. They had previously been held at Rivesaltes camp, a military facility in southern France used to intern civilians, before its closure in 1942.

The village people hid them in the local school, where they remained, undiscovered, until the end of the Second World War. Mr. Schwam intimated that the legacy was ‘in gratitude for the welcome he received 78 years ago’. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had a reputation for protecting thousands of Jews, shielding people from persecution, and being a place of refuge dating back to the French Protestant Huguenots. The village, which currently has about 2,500 people, undoubtedly never expected such a generous payback decades later.