Emotional Rollercoaster
A Journey Through the Science of Feelings
Claudia Hammond
For Nick and Bonnie
Table of Contents
An Emotional Optimist Louise Tucker talks to Claudia Hammond
A Day in the Life of Claudia Hammond
The Joy of Penguins by Claudia Hammond
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Germany, October 1944
Reg lay down on his bunk in the German prisoner of war camp to read the longed-for letter which had finally arrived in the latest Red Cross parcel. In the officers’ camp at Eichstatt near Munich he and the other 600 prisoners slept twenty to a room. Much of the time he was both cold and hungry. It was the letters from Marjory, the stunning dancer he had met at the outbreak of the war, that kept him going. But for three months he had heard nothing.
The dapper, dark-haired army officer had first spotted her when she was one of eight dancing girls in a Max Miller show at the Holborn Empire in London. She looked like a film star with her mass of blonde hair and her long, long legs. Had he not needed to catch the last train home straight after the show, he would have waited outside the theatre in the hope of meeting her. She was gorgeous and he was besotted, but would she even have noticed him among the other stage door Johnnies? There must be some way he could get to know the lovely dancer.
He was in luck. A neighbour of his parents knew Marjory and promised to pass on a message. Might he be permitted to write to her? Yes, she would like that. And perhaps they could meet for afternoon tea? Yes, that would be very nice. Reg was overjoyed, sensing that Marjory was the girl for him. But the war was to intervene. Before that first date his territorial army regiment was suddenly dispatched to Lille in France so, determined to remain optimistic, the young subaltern arranged to meet her when he came home on leave two months later. The day of their date soon arrived but Reg did not. Marjory heard that Reg was listed as missing in action and at first feared that he had been killed. However, soon the news came through that he had been captured on 12th June 1940 at St-Valery-en-Caux, just south of Dieppe. Now he was a prisoner of war in Germany. Theirs was to be a love affair by letter.
Usually Marjory’s letters lifted Reg’s spirits but as he opened the envelope he sensed something was wrong. There was something not quite right about the handwriting; it wasn’t Marjory’s, it was her mother’s, and she was writing with bad news. With the London shows long since closed and determined to contribute to the war effort, Marjory had been working as a convoy officer with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She lived with twenty-five other young women in a manor house in Kent and each day they set off to collect military trucks, ensured they were filled with the correct equipment and drove them off in a long line, always observing the mandatory distance between each truck, to wherever the army required them. But one morning Marjory had such bad stomach pains that she was unable to work so the other girls left without her. A couple of hours later she heard the familiar pulsating motor of a doodlebug overhead. It sounded like a small plane chugging along through the sky until the engine suddenly cut out. She waited to see where it would drop, praying that it wasn’t on her. She was used to that slow ten or eleven seconds where you were temporarily suspended between life and the possibility of imminent death until you heard the explosion some distance away and for you, at least, life continued. But this time things were different. The bomb fell directly onto the roof of the manor house, collapsing all three storeys deep down into the cellars. Marjory was left trapped under the rubble, pinned down by an oak beam which had crushed her legs. As she lay in agony amid the debris of the building she tried to scream but couldn’t. She listened in silent terror as the neighbours explained to the firemen that luckily the house was empty because all the girls were out at work. No, they couldn’t leave her here. Don’t go! As she heard the firemen’s voices become more distant,