A Very Simple Secret

A fascinating and searingly honest insight into a life which so many of our generation experienced but have never talked about, to anyone. The admirable and singularly focused idealism of Judi's parents came with an awful, and lasting,price attached to it. She learned to hide her emotions, pretend everything in the garden was rosy. A familiar tale and a story which should be told to the wider world. I doubt the modern generation would be able to comprehend what she, and many others, endured. A lost childhood.

Judi Conner’s largely compelling account of her peripatetic childhood, “A Very Simple Secret,” was especially involving for me with how my early years were also spent regularly on the move. And like her I was always discomforted by questions about my family situation, though in my case the question that made for the most discomfort was where I was from – I was born in Spokane, but we moved just months afterward – rather than in her case what her father did. Easier to answer for me, the latter, because there was no great difficulty in understanding what my dad did – he was a career military officer – whereas in Judi's case the explanation was a little trickier with how both her parents were emissaries for Moral Re-Armament (MRA), a Christian-based peace-seeking group which even after some online research I was a little confused about. Hard enough, at any rate, to understand its mission that when Judi was asked at school what her father did she had to resort to bringing in some explanatory material for her teacher. So not the most easily communicated thing, what her parents did, with the feeling of foreignness it made for her exacerbated by the family’s regular relocating, which Judi handled well enough, but the strain would show on occasion. There was the time, for instance, when she flared at her grandmother, who’d merely made a suggestion about Judi’s piano playing, or when she staged a minor strike of sorts at one school or did some biting and bullying at another. A minor thing, granted, her personal distress, against the world crises that MRA was attempting to address, but even so it had great resonance for me. For instance, although I never had to have to live in a school dorm, as Judi did, some of my schoolmates at one of our overseas assignments did, so I could well relate to Judi’s account of very small children, no doubt apart from their parents for the first time, crying themselves to sleep. So: an evocative walk down memory lane for me, Conner’s book, even if the prologue, in which Judi and her mother shed tears as they begin their respective journeys into their past, gave me to think that there might be some sort of mystery or secret that was going to be unlocked in the course of the book. But in the end the book proved to be pretty much a straightforward memoir which even with some off-putting organizational detail about MRA made for an informative and at-times compelling read, particularly with my having grown up, as Judi did, outside the normal childhood experience.

Judi Conner’s searingly honest autobiography combined with her memories of her parents’ extraordinary mission “to change the world” is a compelling read. Her father, Bill Conner, served in the UK Armed Forces in Africa and the Middle East during World War II, while her mother, Chérie Oram, worked on the land during the war years producing the food that kept UK citizens alive. They met in the 1930s through their mutual dedication to the work of world-changing initiated by Frank Buchman, known as Moral Re-Armament. Judi describes how her parents were later part of a team of people who helped Cyprus become independent by bridging the differences between the Greeks and the Turks, and helped the dockers of Rio de Janeiro find hope and build thousands of new homes for shanty dwellers. This kind of work involved almost ceaseless travel, so the Conners put their children in the care of friends and boarding schools. The Conners were never paid a salary nor received a recognisable title for their calling. They lived by “faith and prayer” which made it very hard for the author to describe her parents’ work to her school friends and teachers. Even when she told them of some of the people she met–famous actresses, North American Indian Chiefs, and other unique individuals–they didn’t always believe her. The conflict and sometimes embarrassment in her heart form the glue that holds the book together. I was struck by her voracious appetite for reading and the insight she gives into life in English girls’ boarding schools, also by her amazing memory of her childhood. Rarely have I completed reading a 400-page book; never have I read one which left me hungering for another 200 pages of Judi’s story to take us through her life. I recommend the book to those who want to understand the “Cold War” years of the ’50s and ’60s, and to learn how Japan became accepted back into the international community, France and Germany became the backbone of the European Union, and many more historical developments. At the same time, the book opens one’s eyes to the human cost sometimes carried by the families of those on the front line of efforts for reconciliation and forgiveness.

This book illustrates the paradox experienced by families in a close-knit international movement whose world-changing aims appeared to require the sacrifice of normal family life. The movement in question was Moral Re-Armament (MRA); the time was the postwar period of the late 40s to the 60s, when rival ideologies of the left and right vied for the control of individuals and nations. As Conner writes from her own ‘boomer’ childhood experience within this movement, her parents ‘solved’ the problem of what to do with her on their many and long overseas missions by leaving her with carers, sometimes related but often not, and at a series of boarding schools. A sense of parental abandonment was to haunt her, and she describes candidly her ever present fear of being asked what her parents did, and some of the coping strategies she devised. Conner recounts without judgment some of the fruits of her parents’ and their colleagues’ work overseas: for anyone wanting to know more about the background to post-war reconciliation that took place between France and Germany, Japan and the Philippines, and Greeks and Turks in Cyprus, there is a wealth of material here on the often unseen and unsung role played by MRA, among other such unofficial groups. These international ‘success stories’ provide a vivid counterfoil to the author’s intensely personal anguish as she was shifted from pillar to post, her material needs met but her parental needs starved, ironically in the name of building sound family life and peace in the family of nations. What makes her account particularly poignant is the sense of a divine mandate on the decisions taken by her parents and their peers, and that questioning this, whether by the parents or the children, was considered ‘selfish’. Conner’s mother in particular did question it at times, but initially gave way to the then prevailing consensus that the world mission came first. It is this and the movement’s all-encompassing reach into the most personal areas of life that marks it out from the more common experience of, for example, children of civil servants overseas in colonial times (Conner does however cite a parallel case in the memoir of South African born Gillian Slovo, whose committed Communist parents subordinated family life to ideological aims). Conner’s book finishes on a satisfyingly hopeful note, although when I got to the end I wanted to go on reading …

Compelling Childhood Memoir Like not a few children of her era, Judi Conner was 'dumped' in a series of boarding schools from an early age, her parents usually abroad. This remarkable and page-turning memoir recounts her experiences without bitterness or recrimination, while leaving the reader in no doubt of the unhappiness felt by a child in a family where hugs and kisses were unthinkable and upper lips were stiff. Remarkably, though, Judi Conner includes sections told from her parents' point of view, making the book an unusually empathetic and satisfying account of a kind of childhood which, one hopes, is unlikely ever to be replicated.