The jilted fiancée: and a lost dinner service
This story was recounted by Jane Geddes Cowie who worked at the Norwegian Consulate in Kintrae on East Church Street during the Second World War. She worked for both Gustav Puntervold and Sverre Brosvik, the two consuls during the war. Through working there she learned quite a bit of Norwegian and was useful to local girls after the war ended for translating letters from their sweethearts who had returned to Norway.
Triste jenter: sad quines
Many relationships had been formed between Buckie quines (girls) and Norwegian and Danish exiles. Sometimes they ended happily with marriages and Scottish brides making a new life in Norway or Denmark. Sometimes the Norwegians or Danes opted to settled in Buckie or elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Sometimes, however, they did not end happily.
The end of the war and the arrival peace made many Buckie girls sad. The surrender of the Germans and the liberation of Norway meant that it was possible for the Norwegian boys to go back home, something they had yearned for through five long years of war. |
Jane Geddes Cowie recalled in 2000 that she "did not translate everything". She understood that they would never meet again and therefore wanted to spare them of the details. And sometimes things went very wrong....
One girl was even engaged and sent all the expensive cutlery and dinner services in a big box which her fiancé took back to Norway on the fishing boat, recalled Cowie. The North Sea separated them forever and she never saw him again. So that means a Norwegian family, most likely in Western Norway, have drunk their coffee from a Buckie cup for sixty years. |