Under Seven Flags

By Eve Searle

Eve Searle has led a life filled at different times with danger, adventure, fun, and a zest for living. Born in 1934 in what was then Czechoslovakia, she lived through World War II and the Russian front and then moved with her parents to British India, only to get involved in the horrors of the Indian civil war following the end of British rule and the formation of the countries of India and Pakistan. Her family then moved to Australia, where she finished her schooling and began a successful career in business. After several years she developed a passion for flying and, in quick succession, obtained her private pilot's license, then her commercial license, and finally an instructor rating. She spent several years in the flying world, being at the time one of only three female commercial pilots in the country. After several years, she and her husband decided to join her family who had moved to the United States and applied for a resident visa. As they could not await the granting of this within the United States, they moved to Mexico, where they spent a colorful two years awaiting their US residency permit. When this was granted, they moved to Boulder City, Nevada, and then settled on a farm in Arizona. After several years the marriage fell apart; and Eve moved to a remote canyon in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona, where she met her future husband, an Arizona cowboy and rancher. Together they developed a successful guest ranch visited by guests from all over the world. After several years they purchased an adjoining cattle ranch; and Eve then spent her time between hosting the guest ranch visitors and her "family" of animals, consisting of her favorite horse, Comanche, a pet cow called Clementine, three sheep, and a family of assorted goats, the main one, orphaned Snowball, being raised in the house, which had to be "goat-proofed" during her residence. Her husband having died in 2006, she ran both operations single-handed and then sold the guest ranch and settled down to the life of an Arizona cattle rancher, a fulfilling life that she still enjoys today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645597513

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under seven flags

Eve Searle

ISBN 978-1-64559-750-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64559-751-3 (Digital)

Copyright © 2020 Eve Searle

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Richky, 1942

About the Author

I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my lute while the song I came to sing remains unsung.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Foreword

Over many years I have, from time to time, recounted some part of my life history, often to hear the words, You should write a book.

My parents, then a young nineteen and twenty-five years of age, had a varied and adventurous life and detailed their history in a book which my mother and I wrote together and which met with quite a lot of success.

The book is called Tomorrow Will Be Better by Zdena Kapral, and its publication resulted in two editions and many appreciative letters sent to my mother by her readers.

The book was translated into Czech and published several times in the Czech Republic, where it was even more popular than in the United States.

On reading it, many people said to me, You should write a book of your own life! I would say, Maybe sometime. I received many encouraging e-mails from friends and business acquaintances from all over the world, all urging me to write a story of my own life which had its share of excitement, from my survival of World War II, experiences in the Indian Civil War, and much that followed after. So I did.

It all began in 1934.

I was born into one of the most turbulent times of the twentieth century—in 1934, in the soon-to-be ill-fated Czechoslovakia, today the Czech Republic.

I don’t remember my earliest years—my first memory is one that my mother would have preferred not to have happen. It was early in the German occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia. We were living in the executive block of apartments in the huge industrial complex of which my father was managing director, and I had caught a cold and ran a fever high enough that my mother called in the local doctor.

He was German, as were many of the then population of the country. He came and prescribed the appropriate medicine and was about to leave when I grew very communicative. I became convinced that I should impress him with tales of how much illegal meat we had in the larder and told him at length of this piece this long and that piece that long… My mother was petrified—people, already in the early part of the war, had been arrested for hoarding less food than that.

Luckily the doctor was a good man. He listened for a bit and then bent down and said to me, Evie, you know that is something you should not talk about! You can tell me, because I am a doctor, and I know how to keep a secret. But you should not talk about things like that! It’s just not done! My mother realized, of course, that he was speaking to her, and she was most grateful for his kindness—but after that, she took good care to muzzle me whenever any strangers came to visit.

I think I was always a rebellious child—for me to do something, I only had to be told not to do it. I remember a time when I was about four years old and my aunt, who was only about eighteen or so herself, was deputized to babysit. I had a toy of which I was very fond—it was a glass board with little cavities in it into which one put small glass beads of various colors, and I spent a lot of time making many designs and color combinations.

My aunt, for reasons best known to herself, said to me, Now, Evie, don’t put those beads up your nose! It had never occurred to me to do such a thing; but as soon as it was discouraged, of course, I had to do it. It wasn’t much fun, but the fun began when I decided to fish the beads out by sticking my finger up my nose.

This didn’t work at all. It drove the beads further and further up, until one of them was well beyond reach and, I thought, in danger of getting to my brain. I dug harder and harder, but the darn bead refused to return and kept retreating further up my nose.

I began to panic. I let out a yell to wake the dead, and my aunt came running, almost beside herself. The situation seemed hopeless—until my grandmother walked in.

She was a lady with lots of common sense, having raised three sons alone while her husband was in the White Army in Russia, fighting in its revolutionary war. She took one look and said, Hold your nose closed on the other side and then blow! I blew, and the offending bead flew out of my nose like a bullet. I don’t remember what Grandma said to my aunt, but I remember she confiscated the board and its beads.

Another memory also concerns Grandma. I had been left with her while my mother went shopping, and I was exploring their apartment. I might have been about five years old then. This time it was Grandma who caused the furor. I had gone to the toilet, and she told me, Close the door, but don’t lock the latch! Naturally, that was the first thing I did—it slid home with a resounding thump and stayed there, no matter how much tugging and pulling I did.

Of course, again panic set in. I began to yell and scream, and the panic communicated itself to my grandma and grandfather, who was also home at the time.

They issued various instructions and advice, but to no avail—the door remained locked, and I kept on screaming. Grandpa was calling the fire brigade to come with a long ladder and get into the toilet through the window, but they lived on the top floor of the building, and it would have been quite a trick.

Finally, the situation was solved by the seamstress, who was then staying with Grandma and making her some dresses, as was the custom at the time—this was years before store-bought clothes became available. She came to the door and, through my screaming, said, Evie, take off your shoe and bang on the latch! Yes, bang, but which way?

Which way? I asked.

She took a gamble and said, To the left!

It happened to be the correct direction. I banged, the latch slid away, the door opened, and I fell into the righteous wrath of my grandmother, who didn’t mince words and perhaps slaps.

We lived in a spacious apartment in the executive block of the factory complex with the back of the apartment facing a large flower garden. As we lived on the second floor, there was a wooden staircase leading from the sunroom down to the garden below, and this staircase caused my mother a big headache one time when my father was away on business in Prague and we were home alone.

Late one evening she suddenly heard footsteps on the wooden staircase leading up from the garden—stealthy footsteps, which stopped from time to time and then resumed, stopped, resumed… She was terrified. There was only a wooden glassed-in door between the stair landing and the sunroom, and there was nobody else in the building. She waited; and the footsteps stopped, then resumed, stopped, and resumed. This went on for some time, and finally she decided that the best thing would be to barricade the door between the sunroom and the living room. She dragged a heavy table up against it and spent the rest of the night dozing, waking, dozing…

In the morning she went to check the staircase and found the cause of the mysterious footsteps! There was a big horse chestnut tree next to the building; and it was the chestnuts, falling off the tree and rolling down the steps, which had impersonated the mysterious intruder!

Another early memory of mine concerns a gift from my grandmother, my father’s mother. She was as much of an animal lover as I was, and one day she arrived with a gift—a raven! He was lovely—large, black, and quite friendly. My mother received the gift with very unmixed feelings. She came from a farming family, and in her world, animals and birds belonged outdoors. However, this was from the mother-in-law, and I adored her and her gifts—so no choice but to thank Grandma and adopt the raven. However, Mom drew the line at letting him fly all over the apartment. He was housed in the garden room, where, unaccountably, one evening someone left a window open; and when, in the morning, I went to see my pet, he was long gone! How sad!

Another gift from my grandma was a jar of white mice—and since my mother was the kind to leap up on the table at the very sight of a mouse, this was even more unwelcome than the raven! However, I loved the mice, and so my mother gave in—until one day I dropped the jar. It hit the floor with a resounding thump and shattered into a thousand pieces, and the mice escaped. As our apartment backed onto the factory warehouse and as mice can find their way through unseen holes in walls, they soon infiltrated the warehouse; and for quite a time after, the warehouse mice were an interesting mixture of colors, ranging from dark gray to light gray to off-white.

Also a gift from my grandmother was a beloved dog, a dachshund puppy named Nellie, which I was given when still in the cradle; and we became inseparable. Nellie was a pampered dog. She knew her importance in the household, and she hated the cold. In the winter, when my mother took her outside to do her business, she resolutely refused, holding everything in and then communicating her displeasure on their return home by peeing on the hallway rug—not a very popular move which almost drove my mother crazy.

When I was old enough to be enrolled in school, my parents learned that according to the authorities, I had to be enrolled in a German school, probably in order to receive early indoctrination—something they were determined to resist. Also, they began to feel increasingly unhappy and worried about remaining in the vulnerable living quarters of the industrial complex. Who knew when Allied bombing would begin? The factory, a huge farmers’ cooperative, producing fertilizers, chemicals, animal feeds, and such, was an important part of the economy.

Consequently, my father began looking for a property in the country, and soon he found the ideal place. It was an old flour mill, about fourteen miles from the city, set in a picturesque valley in the middle of the vast forests belonging to the Counts of Liechtenstein.

It had been built a couple of hundred years before, situated on a creek—actually two small creeks joining to become one a little way up the valley. He bought it and built a modern villa on the front of the mill, so that the back wall of the living room was up against the wall of the old mill. There was a narrow space between the two walls, something that later in the war had a huge significance for us and saved our lives—but that was still in the future.

We moved to the mill called Richky (which means streams in Czech), and my father commuted to his job in the factory.

Richky 1942

Richky, 1942

The year 1940, when we moved to the country, was also the year my little sister, Janet, was born, on March 15, which was also the first anniversary of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia—a sad day for the country, but a happy day for us.

Her birth was traumatic for my parents, because my mother contracted thrombosis in both legs and almost died. She was very ill, and her legs swelled to enormous proportions. Although children were not allowed into hospitals at the time, she so much wanted to see me that the visit was allowed. I remember seeing her on the bed looking ill and weak, and I also remember the nurse bringing in my sister. I had been looking forward to her coming for a long time, and I was very disappointed at how little she was and how uninterested she was in me.

Apparently the visit did my mother good, as she rallied a little, but the real recovery came when she developed terrible bedsores and the skin specialist who was called in said that the only remedy was for her nurses to throw sheets soaked in boiling water on her legs. Her doctors objected, saying that as she was in such a weakened condition, this might kill her; but the skin specialist was adamant—this was the only remedy, or gangrene could set in. Accordingly, the nurses would bring in tubs of boiling water; and, using gloves and with much care, they would soak a sheet in it and then throw it on her legs. Due to the swelling, she didn’t feel any pain for a long time, until, one magical day when the hot sheet hit her, she screamed, Ouch! The medical staff were delighted. The feeling was coming back to her legs, and the thrombosis was abating. She recovered and came home, very thin and weak, but recovering.

I was still a little disappointed in my sister, being such a little baby; but she grew fast, and one of my earliest memories of her is her behavior after being wakened from her midday nap. She was always grumpy on waking; and her favorite position following her nap was to sit on a volleyball, chin in hands, being grumpy. I can still see her sitting there, even today. This grumpiness on waking persisted even in her adulthood, and it was ironic that when she became an actress, she found that many auditions were scheduled for early mornings!

As the idea of my having to attend a German school still threatened, my father managed to get the authorities to agree that if we had a German governess, the German school attendance requirement would be waived. Consequently, he began to look around for a suitable person. This was no small feat, as the woman in question would be living with us and so be able to overhear their conversations and possibly report these to the Gestapo.

But we were lucky—after some time he found the right woman. I don’t recall her real name, as to us she was just mademoiselle or, very soon, Madi for short. She turned out to be the ideal person for the job. She was Austrian and had been governess to a noble family in Poland—her employer had been a count—and when the German troops occupied Poland, she had been forced to leave and lost everything. She then moved to Belgium, where she again lost her job when the Germans occupied that country, and she hated Hitler and the Nazis as much as my parents did.

My mother Janet, Madi and I

My Sister Janet, Madi and I

My sister, Janet, and I remember her as very kind and loving toward us; and she also proved to be a pillar of strength for my mother later, when my father was arrested by the Gestapo.

Soon food shortages began to be felt, and a strict system of food rationing went into effect. Many people who tried to cheat finished up in prison, but there was one friend of my parents who had the greatest luck. He and his wife had been to the country where they had bought a very illegal goose to eat. The law said that one was only allowed the amount of food provided by the ration cards, and this was not very much and not very tasty either, so a goose was totally out of the question.

This man succumbed to temptation; and when he and his wife, accompanied by her mother, took a little drive into the country, he bought the goose, which he put into the trunk. On the way back, as they were crossing a bridge on the way into the city, they were stopped by a Gestapo patrol wanting to search the car for illegal items. The man knew he was doomed—people were shot for far less than having illegal food in their possession.

The Gestapo man asked, Anything to declare?

The man, knowing he was lost, said, Only the goose in the back.

And the Gestapo man, seeing the mother-in-law in the back seat, laughed and said, Oh, she doesn’t count! and waved him on.

There was not much to laugh at in those days, but some funny things did occur, albeit the humor might not have been evident at the time. Because food was so strictly rationed, the authorities determined that whenever countrypeople raised a hog to slaughter, the meat had to be surrendered to the government, the owner being allowed to keep only as much meat as he would normally receive on his ration cards—so not very much!

Consequently, many people took the risk of raising two hogs—an official one and an unofficial one. The official one was the one available for the inspection, and the meat of the unofficial one was carefully hidden, secret from the authorities. This was, of course, dangerous, because if the inspector found the illegal hog, the owner would be arrested and executed for hoarding food, which was, the government said, needed for the war effort.

One time in our village, a farmer had slaughtered two hogs; but before the illegal one could be hidden, someone came running with the warning that the inspectors were on their way. What to do? They thought very fast.

They laid the illegal hog on the kitchen sofa, pulled a blanket over it, and stuck a sleeping cap on its head, so only the tip of it was poking out of the blanket. When the inspectors arrived, minutes later, the farmer asked them to be quiet because Grandpa was asleep! It worked. They left, and the illegal hog was woken up and swiftly cut up and hidden.

Another time a farming family was even luckier. They had hidden the illegal hog, but somehow had omitted to get rid of the tail. Luckily this time the inspector was Czech; and when he found the second tail, he said, How amazing this hog had two tails! with a significant look at the farmer, but nothing else was said or done.

Because we lived in the country, we were classified as a farm. As we had a couple of milk cows, the potential milk output of these was calculated by the officials; and we were ordered to deliver most of the milk and butter to the local German authorities, only being allowed to keep what we would normally receive per the ration cards—so not much.

Consequently, the butter, when churned, was carefully kept in the pantry awaiting the weekly delivery to the German office in the local village. One morning, our Great Dane dog, Gondola, somehow found her way into the pantry, the door of which had not been properly closed, and dined in glee on the whole consignment. She was tracked by her greasy paw prints and drips of butter to her kennel in the yard, where she lay, feeling somewhat unwell. I don’t recall how my parents handled the situation, but I do remember that we went without butter for a very long time!

Some of my early childhood memories are also of my mother’s parents, who were farmers in the district of Moravia, some distance from where we lived. I spent several school vacations with them, which I really enjoyed, as grandfather was a great horseman, probably the one from whom I inherited my love of horses.

As the war years prohibited the use of tractors—fuel was needed for the war effort—farming was done the old-fashioned way, with horse-drawn plows and carts. I enjoyed many a day going to the fields with Grandfather on his horse-drawn wagon. However, the story I remember best about him is his handling of the situation when he discovered that someone was stealing firewood from his woodpile. Other people might sit up nights and wait for the thief, not grandfather. He hollowed out a log and placed inside the space a piece of dynamite. He put the log back into the woodpile and waited. Nothing happened for a while; and then, a few days later, the postmaster’s chimney blew up. Nothing was ever said or done, but the wood stopped disappearing!

Quite early in the war, it became illegal for private persons to use motor vehicles, as precious gasoline was much needed for the war effort; and because infractions of this rule resulted in immediate arrest and almost instant execution, it was a law taken very seriously by everyone. My father then had a problem of how to get to work, which he solved in a wonderful way.

Both my parents were avid horseback riders; so my father rode his horse, Jura, through the woods to the city limits. There he stabled him at a gamekeeper’s cottage, and his chauffeur picked him up in the company car. He enjoyed those solitary daily rides—it was a great way to begin and end the stresses of the day, and these became daily more oppressive, as the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the country.

A Hutzul

Eventually I also was introduced to the joys of horseback riding. My father, on some business trip in Prague, happened to see a circus arriving in town; and pulling the first heavily laden cart was a small horse, but not quite a pony. He was of the Hutzul breed, tough, smallish horses native to the Carpathian Mountains.

He made a deal with the circus owner to buy the horse and arranged for it to be temporarily stabled at the state horse breeding farm which was managed by a good friend of his. The idea was that the horse, whose name was Regent, should be sent to our nearby city of Brno by train, where one of our farm employees would pick him up.

Unfortunately, before this could be done, my father was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. On the day this happened, he left as always, to ride his horse, Jura, to the outskirts of the city. However, this morning he was in for a surprise. Jura, normally the best trained and obedient of horses, suddenly decided he wasn’t going to stand still for my father to mount. He turned and pirouetted and backed up, and finally my father had to get the groom to hold the horse while he mounted. Once he was on, there was a further battle when Jura didn’t want to leave the yard and finally had to be backed out through the gate.

Once out of the gate, he settled down and became once more the perfectly trained horse my father was used to.

Amazingly, this was the day that my dad didn’t come home, as he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned. The details of this are described in my mother’s book, Tomorrow Will Be Better, so I won’t repeat it here; but we always wondered at Jura’s behavior, Did he then have some foreknowledge of bad times to come?

My Father on Jura

The horse my father bought for me remained at the stud farm for almost two years, until my father was tried, pronounced innocent by the judge, and freed from the prison—but not from the clutches of the Gestapo, as the Gestapo seldom released a prisoner once they had him, innocent or not, and they had vowed to cut his head off, as they gleefully told my mother.

Miraculously, she managed to achieve his release by working with the Czech underground, which had a tame Gestapo man in their ranks; and this man was willing, for a fee, to engineer my father’s release. The fee, of course, wasn’t money—money didn’t have much value in those days. The idea was that my mother should supply a vast amount of illegal food, such as ham, cheese, and other unobtainable goodies, plus a huge amount of, almost impossible to get, liquor. He said he would then throw a party, invite his superior officer to it, and, while this worthy was drunk, get him to sign my fathers’ release papers—the idea being that next day the man could not admit to this at the peril of his own life. She had a difficult time getting all the food and alcohol together. Many friends all contributed to the effort.

The Gestapo man told my mother, If it works, he will be home on Monday. If he doesn’t come home on Monday, it means it didn’t work, and there is nothing to be done.

Of course, we girls didn’t know any of this until much later, after the end of the war. My mother waited and waited, with my father’s brother, my uncle Ivan, and his wife, Hannah, who lived on the property, and with our faithful staff—the cook, Fanny; our governess, Madi; Peter, the miller, and his wife, Anna; and the horse grooms and farmhands. It was a dreadful weekend for them all.

For safety’s sake my mother had told us that our father was in a sort of a hotel, where he was having a great time—because the truth could not be shared with children, as one never knew what they might blab out in school. There had been several cases where the Gestapo had made friends with little children in the local villages and asked the kids, So do your parents ever listen on the radio to… It would be the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, which broadcast daily reports of the progress of the war, true news to which the enslaved population listened avidly, in spite of the danger of execution if caught.

Several of these cases resulted in whole families being arrested and shot, including the little children who had unwittingly betrayed them.

On Monday, later in the day, my mother heard a footstep at the door, and my father stepped in! He was dreadfully thin, ill, and nervous, later telling her terrible stories of the horrors he had witnessed—some of which I unfortunately overheard by spying at the door and which, for the rest of my life, I wish I had not heard—but he was home.

Also home was my horse Regent. When my father recovered from his ordeal, he remembered the horse and contacted his friend, the director of the state stud farm. The man told him that Regent was well and ready to go home. He was sent from Prague by train to Brno, and one of the grooms went to the station to pick him up. My father grumbled he was gone and gone and gone long enough to have gone all the way to Prague to get the darn horse.

Finally, after several hours, the man turned up—on foot—carefully leading the horse on a longish lead rope. It turned out that Regent had spent his time at the state stud farm exceedingly well. He was no longer the sad, thin little horse that my dad bought for his little girl. He was fat and sassy and full of opinions about himself, and the groom said there was no way he could stay on him without getting bucked off and right quick!

Of course, there