A Next Door Neighbor Remembers the Franklins #2
by J. Thomas Allison
The Franklin household in early 1950s also included a toddler girl and a boy on the way. Finding a time to write might have been a problem, but not for Madeleine. The old farmhouse had an ample pantry with three sides off the north wall of the old kitchen. Its shelves were now filled with heavy albums of 78rpm classical music and opera which Madeleine’s mother sent from her own home in Jacksonville, Florida. However the shelves by the north window were kept free for her books. The wide, well-worn wooden board on which two hundred years of homemakers kneaded their breads was now her desk. On it was the dark green portable Royal typewriter her father Charles Wadsworth Camp had taken with him to Europe as correspondent in World War 1 and for several novels under the name Wadsworth Camp.
Madeleine wrote here from the time Hugh went to bed about 10 or 11 until perhaps 4 in the morning when she took her daughter for a potty and all snuggled together under the counterpane for a couple hours.
Between our double windows on the south wall of the living room and the two storey back wall of their house was an expanse of two large hay fields. At night with our lights off, we could see their dining room windows and the upstairs bathroom’s ablaze. At 2 in the morning when my mom got up for her “walk about,” she always included a detour through our front room to see if there were any deer or wild turkeys on the lawns.
At that time, the only light was from the pantry window and she knew Madeleine was at work. More than 60 years later I can remember her waking my dad and me to come down. We’d had a severe ice storm a couple days earlier and fortunately the power did not fail. From our house up through the two meadows was like a sheet of cellophane with stalagmites of glass that had once been grass. In the darkness from their house to ours was a long yellowy path like moonlight on a millpond coming from her window.
A few stolen hours in the middle of the night, a frosty damp room and the glowing curly coils sizzling and popping on an antiquated heater may be all you can find. You have to make the most of it, I guess.
Tom Allison is a retired Congregational Minister living in Albany NY. Rehabbing a house once owned by a Hudson River Steamboat Captain inspired his looking into that history culminating in “Hudson River Steamboat Catastrophes Contests and Collisions” (History Press 2013) available Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Since 5th grade he has enjoyed offering to the public illustrated history lectures. Among the 40 plus have been American Cookbooks, plumbing,, transatlantic steamboat travel in the golden age, Litchfield Connecticut: America’s most historic mile and A neighbor remembers Madeleine L’Engle, (for the 100th anniversary of her birth) to name a few. He is pictured here at Crosswicks, with the typewriter Madeleine gave him on the occasion of his high school graduation.
