Here are some quotes from the book
The Children That Time Forgot by Peter & Mary Harrison:
"When young Carl Eden plays with his toy planes, his parents believe that it is not purely childish behaviour but is an action replay of the time when Carl remembers he was a pilot in the German Air force.
"As soon as he could talk he used to tell us that he once crashed his plane into the windows of a building", says his mother, Valerie. “We gather that he eventually died from multiple injuries sustained in the crash. We thought it strange that he should say such a thing, for as a tiny toddler he never showed any real interest in adventure stories and he had no time for looking at war films or such things.
Valerie Eden went on to explain that as he grew older and started to gain more command over his speech the story became more detailed and he told it in such a matter-of-fact way that she and her husband felt that they could no longer dismiss it out of hand as a little toddler’s day-dream.
The incident which really persuaded the Edens that Carl’s story had a ring of truth to it occurred when Carl first learnt to draw and to colour. Like most small children he went through the stage of experimenting with his coloured pencils and crayons and he had the usual colouring-in books and children’s puzzle books in which he used to join up the dots to make a picture. One day he sat with his crayons and colouring-in book, but instead of colouring in the drawings, his mother noticed that he had drawn peculiar looking badges and motifs all over the page.
The neatness of the drawing was the thing that most caught Valerie’s attention. Unlike the normal scribbles of a 3 yr old, Carl’s little drawings were definite precise examples of various badges and insignia which Valerie confesses were completely foreign to her, except for one little drawing. There on the top corner his colouring book Carl had drawn a perfect German swastika inside a circle, thus making it look like a badge. There were other small badges drawn with the expertise of a professional artist. When Valerie questioned her son about the badges he replied, “That’s the kind of badges I wore on my uniform when I used to drive my plane.”
More surprises were in store when shortly after Carl’s 5th birthday he drew the cockpit of his plane. He remembered the exact positions of all the various controls and he explained to his bewildered parents the functions of each lever, dial and gauge. He even knew the location of the button which he remembers having to press in order to release the bombs.
Carl’s father was intrigued with the amount of minute detail in his small son’s drawings, particularly as he knew that Carl had never ever been in a plane of any description and had certainly never been in a cockpit. “I don’t see how he could have got the information,” said his father, “He certainly couldn’t have got it from a picture book because we would have noticed, and in any case he did not possess any picture books containing German planes or cockpits.”
The little boy can remember how he enlisted in the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, when he was 19 years of age and he was stationed in a large air-force camp with a lot of huts in rows. Carl explains, “The huts had sinks in them, but no taps for the water. The water came out of a pump.” The boy recalls that he and his comrades were all trained in first aid and anyone who was injured was treated by the men themselves. All of them were called upon to perform this duty.
Valerie and her husband were taken aback when their young son suddenly told them that he had been made to salute a framed picture of Hitler. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” said Valerie, “I had no idea that he ever knew, or had even heard of, the name of Hitler. It certainly was never a topic of conversation at home.”
According to Carl, the troops were ordered to gather in a large assembly hall. He says, “There was a picture of Hitler on the wall and we all had to stamp our feet and salute to this picture.” He can demonstrate the stamp and the salute, which he executes as if they were second nature to him.
In reply to his mothers question about what he wore when he was in the hall, he says, “Grey trousers tucked into knee-high leather boots and a black jacket.” His parents did not really believe that what their son described was a proper German uniform, so without telling their child they went along to their local library and looked up some books, only to find that Carl had given a perfectly correct description of his uniform, badges and the cockpit of his plane. His parents were able to check even the smallest details of Carl’s drawings against photographs which they found in an old book on German planes of the last war.
Carl can reconstruct in chilling detail his crash into the windows of the building. He was flying low over some buildings and he must have lost consciousness for a few moments: as he described things, “It went all black for a moment.” When he came round in the cockpit of his plane he was aware of a building rushing towards him at great speed. He desperately wrenched at the controls in a frantic effort to avert the collision, but he was too late. The plane bulldozed its way right through the large glass windows of the building.
Carl remembers the horrendous sensation which swept over him as he realized that he had lost his right leg. The shock of the crash and the loss of his limb, combined with his other injuries, affected him so severely that he died very shortly after the crash.
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Angelcat
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