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How credit card frauds take place
Recently, credit card frauds made front page headlines.
In some cases, the credit card of someone in India was used in the US, despite the fact that the card was with the customer in India.
Though fraudulent transactions are reported on lost or stolen cards, the factor contributing the most to fraudulent transactions is duplication -- copying the data on the magnetic strip in a card, when it is used for a valid transaction.
So, does this mean you should stop using your card? No.
Come July, cards with an embedded chip and a compulsory pin (like that used for ATM transactions) will be made mandatory in India.
This would make your credit card transactions more secure.
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How credit card frauds take place
Till then, here are a few things to keep in mind.
If you do not use your credit card much, reduce its credit limit.
Most banks have this facility.
The original limit can be restored whenever you need it.
If you need a higher credit limit, split the amount by taking multiple cards from the same bank.
If the bank doesn't allow this, take a card from another bank as a back-up and reduce the limit on the card you use frequently.
Memorise and scratch out the three-digit card verification value code on the back of the card.
Note down the bank's call centre number, as well as your card number, and carry this with you.
This way, you can block a card whenever the need arises.
Click NEXT to read further. . .
How credit card frauds take place
When abroad, keep your India number in use, even if you are using a local number.
This will allow access to text messages from your bank.
Ensure you read all messages sent by the bank carefully and promptly block the card if any transaction is not authorised by you.
Avoid using credit cards outside India, as such transactions are expensive (3.5 per cent foreign exchange surcharge is levied on all foreign exchange transactions) and the card is prone to duplication in certain countries.
Instead, use foreign exchange debit cards or traveller's cheques.
Click NEXT to read further. . .
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How credit card frauds take place
Online frauds
Using credit cards online has become more secure after the Reserve Bank of India mandated an independent password, known only to the customer, in addition to credit card details.
If you are providing your credit card details on the phone to any establishment, the requirements are more stringent -- you have to use a PIN generated specifically on a request through your registered mobile number.
To prevent online fraud, never go to your bank or credit card account online by clicking on links from an e-mail.
Save the link to your online account in Mozilla 'bookmarks' or Internet Explorer 'favorites' if you use these browsers for online operations.
Whenever you log on to net banking accounts, use the virtual keypad.
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How credit card frauds take place
More |
This way, even if your computer is virus-infected with a keystroke logger (it keeps track of your keystrokes), your password would be secure.
While using the card at a merchant outlet, use the message facility available on the verification programme.
You can enter a message while verifying your credit card for the first time in the 'verified by Visa' or 'MasterCard Secure' programme, such as 'if this phrase is displayed, I will know this is a genuine website'.
Use the net card facility offered by a few banks.
Through this, while shopping on websites that charge foreign currency amounts on your credit card, banks provide a temporary one-time virtual credit card.
These steps will ensure credit cardholders remain relaxed, even as the regulator tries to make the overall environment more secure.
The writer is CEO, Apnapaisa.com


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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Like a lot of fans of the High Line, the opening of the first section a day early was a welcome surprise. It surpassed any hype that I had put on it myself. But to be honest I would have been happy with just about anything that gives a walking path with a new view of New York City that hasn't existed before. I've also been following the construction for the past three years when I moved here. Back when they had limited public tours of one of the more northern sections I jumped all over that experience. I was also fortunate some time back to hear Diller Scofidio + Renfro talk about the High Line in the IAC building. That culmination of background experiences made the walk that much more fun for me.
After hearing about people being allowed on the High Line a day early all over Twitter I made the trek from Soho to the Meat Packing district around 7.30 pm which in hindsight was the perfect time to visit. There's still a lot of daylight to take in the whole first section. As the sun slowly sets the lights around the High Line and city, new views appear. Colours pop in a different way and the tone is a different kind of chill from the regular day time experience.
As I was walking and taking pictures every couple feet there was a couple themes I was looking for and came across a couple unexpected contrasts. First and foremost I was looking to see how the High Line integrated a pathway with constructed foliage that was there as a nod to the natural habitat that had grown from years of neglect and the steel rail road. In some parts of the walkway there's a really great balance of all three elements while elsewhere it does feel a bit concrete heavy. This is especially true walking south to north through the Chelsea Market building, though there's a great view of the IAC building clustered with a couple other buildings the to the north west. One of the unexpected themes was the contrast between complicated angles and very clean simple lines.
An almost too obvious thing to consider but worth bringing up is how does the city look from the view on the High Line? Depending where a person is standing or sitting there's a lot of clusters of area that become unique blocks—no kidding when considering the size of New York but when a person considers that the High Line that's open only runs a couple blocks is quite a visual feast. There's the gritty side, there's the flashy architecture side, there's the historic side, there's the the Empire State Building side and then there's the Jersey side (which isn't too bad either). Something that shouldn't have come up as a surprise yet was, was all the construction cranes jetting up. For a moment it was easy to forget that there was an economic melt down and that progress via construction was still going strong.
While the High Line is meant to be walked, it's also meant to be a place to sit and relax. There were a ton of places that I was scoping out to visit again with a book. A person would be hard pressed to find a bad spot to sit down though I suspect one of the most popular sports will be where people can put up their feet on the long wooden chaise's. I enjoyed sitting there for a while. The theatre seating is another stroke of genius. In it's current state I would be surprised if I saw more then die hard runners moving by quickly on the pathway. It seems like it would be more effort then warranted to run a short distance on the High Line though once the entire route is open that will probably change. As some people have mentioned, dogs aren't welcome up there. I have a dog and to be honest I don't really mind that much. My opinion on that could change but at the moment it wasn't the first thing I was thinking about as I was walking.
As other sections of the High Line open up, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the pathway changes my perspective of the city. As the news hype over the next couple of days grows I've created a page powered by Daylife that has all the High Line articles out there. That can be viewed at http://topics.designnotes.info/page/highline. I also have more photos of my first walk through on flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/michaelsurtees/sets/72157619404502549.


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"Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough."
Emily Dickinson
"Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human."
Anthony Robbins
"Our lives a series of defining moments, strung together by passing time. Surrender fully to this moment, because it is not the moment itself that defines us, but how we choose to live in it."
Jill Anzinger
"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
Mark Twain
"love life, engage in it, give it all you've got. love it with a passion, because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it"
Maya Angelou
"There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."
Albert Einstein
"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."
Erma Bombeck


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Portrait by Peter Marlow
Albert Speer touched my life before I even knew of his existence.
My father, who died when I was two, was a passionately Anglophile Hungarian, whose greatest ambition for me was that I receive an English education. And so it happened that in 1934, I was travelling from my boarding school in England to my home in Vienna when the train broke down in Nuremberg. I was an 11-year-old girl, on my own, wearing my English school uniform - brown, as it happened, though I don't really think it influenced subsequent events. The German Red Cross, or its equivalent Nazi organisation, quickly took charge of me; within an hour, to my amazement and, it must be said, pleasure, I found myself in a spectator's seat at the Nazi Party Congress.
I was overcome by the symmetry of the marchers, many of them children like me; the joyful faces all around; the rhythm of the sounds; the solemnity of the silences; the colours of the flags; the magic of the lights (these, though I didn't know it, Speer's creation). One moment I was enraptured, glued to my seat; the next, I was standing up, shouting with joy along with thousands of others. I saw the men on the distant podium and heard their hugely amplified voices. But I understood nothing; it was the drama, the theatre of it all, that overwhelmed me. (Forty-four years later, Speer described to me his own feelings that day and said, resignedly, "To think that when I'm gone, that's what I will be remembered for: not the buildings I designed but that - theatre.")
A few weeks later, back at my peaceful school near the Kentish downs, we were given the subject for our first essay of the new term - not surprisingly, "The Happiest Day of my Holiday".
What else could I, not yet 12, have described other than that experience in Nuremberg? Although my essay was not chosen to be read out to the class (that honour fell to a lovely description of the birth of a foal), my teacher, Miss Hindley, told me that it was "a very good piece of work". She had a strangely formal way of speaking which I found very beautiful, and I thought her a marvel of erudition and adulthood. In fact she was in her early twenties, a slight, delicate, rather shy young woman, with a fine English complexion. She had a quiet sense of humour, was passionate about books and drama and had the wonderful gift of imparting that passion to her pupils, however cloddish.
"I think you need to understand what you were seeing," she told me. "Anyone who comes from your part of the world needs to understand." And she handed me a book. "Read this, or as much of it as you can."
The book was Mein Kampf, and I did read as much of it as I could. Years later, when people told me they had found Mein Kampf unreadable (in Speer's case, he said Hitler had told him not to bother, that it was outdated), I never understood what they meant. It was hard going, true enough; I skipped large portions, and certainly I wished that it had more paragraphs. But I understood what Hitler was saying and, above all, that his vision of a new Germany, a new Europe, could not be realised without war.
Was I particularly prescient? I don't think so. Throughout those hundreds of densely written pages, he repeated, again and again, Germany's need for Lebensraum in "the East". I knew nothing about politics and very little about the geography and tortured history of Eastern Europe, but it seemed to me obvious that no country would voluntarily give away any of its territory. How could anybody doubt that?
I also knew very little about anti-Semitism. "Why does he keep talking about 'the Jews'?" I asked Miss Hindley when I returned the book.
"He hates them," she said. And, as she so often did with all of us, she left me to think it out on my own.
I did not succeed. I knew, of course, that there were, in the school of my early childhood in Vienna, three classes of religious instruction - Catholic, Jewish and, my own class, Protestant - but I was really not aware of who among my classmates belonged to which group. This must sound strange, but I have since asked Viennese friends of my own age, from similar backgrounds, about this, and they too, I found, had little awareness of religious difference - which is perhaps a tribute to our schools.
For a privileged child like me, Vienna was paradise. I lived with my mother, who was beautiful and much courted, in a large flat overlooking St Stephen's Cathedral. She had been an actress when she was young, and her life revolved around the theatre, actors, playwrights and drama. Was St Stephen's Cathedral, with its powerful smell of incense, its monotonous singing and its silences, its bleeding or smiling statues, just drama to me? I don't know, but until I was sent to England, I went in there every day on my way to or home from school, leaving my irritated governess outside when I knelt there in a curious pretence of - or perhaps wish for - religious fervour.
My other passions were more prosaic: my mother, for her looks; a few of her gentleman friends, for their charm and elegance; the countless books I read, many on the sly by torchlight under my bedclothes at night; teachers - there was always a special one - for their cleverness and, as I was mostly lucky, kindness; the theatre, which obsessed me from my first visit at the age of four; and Vienna, because it was Vienna.
By the time I was 14, I had left my English boarding school and was back in Vienna, studying at the Max Reinhardt Drama School. Although I had not inherited my mother's looks - I was a little girl with puppy fat - I somehow never doubted that they would give me a place, and for some reason I was accepted on the spot, as was another girl my age. She was delicate, with a cloud of silky, dark hair, and was most appropriately named Elfie. We were inseparable from that moment on.
The Max Reinhardt Drama School was a wonderful place, housed in the extraordinary setting of the Imperial Palace of Schonbrunn. Reinhardt, the greatest director of his time, who had had to leave Germany and his school in Berlin because he was Jewish, made a speech on the day the school opened in Vienna which was reprinted in a brochure we were given: "Use this place. Walk in the park on your own, think on your own, speak on your own, dream on your own: before you can know anyone else, in life or on the stage, you must know yourself!"
These were powerful words for young minds, and both Elfie and I followed his advice, conscientiously taking long walks on our own, speaking aloud as he advised, expressing our thoughts, our longings, our anger, on occasion, and our dreams.
Most of Elfie's and my life was spent together. We would meet every day half way between our homes, by the statue of Johann Strauss in the park. We would go together to our fencing or dancing lessons close by, or attend rehearsals at Reinhardt's theatre, the Josefstadt. Later on, we would take the tram to Schonbrunn and most nights - often very late, because many of our teachers were directors and could only take classes in the evening - we would walk home past the park, down the immensely long Mariahilfer Strasse and finally along the Ring with it's trees and baroque buildings. When we reached the Opera we parted, Elfie turning right and I left. No one ever bothered us; despite its many political conflicts and frequently violent demonstrations, Vienna was a strangely safe city for children.
This innocent, or insouciant, life ended shockingly and quickly in March 1938, when Hitler invaded Austria. At about 9.30 in the evening on 11 March, Elfie telephoned me. "Meet me at the statue," she whispered.
"Why are you whispering?" I asked.
"Just come," she said, and hung up.
While I waited for Elfie in the dark, deserted park, I heard for the first time a sound that was to echo around Vienna for weeks: the rhythmic chant of many voices shouting words I had never heard before: "Deutschland erwache! Juda verrecke!" - Germany awake! Jews perish!
When Elfie arrived, we stood stiffly in the darkness, listening. Then she said, "My father..."
"What's the matter with your father?" I asked, and then, to my own surprise, added, "Is he a Jew?"
Elfie looked at me helplessly. "A Jew?" she said, confused, her voice tight. "He is a Nazi. They told me tonight. He's been an illegal for years. He said I was never to speak to any Jews at school, and that anyway - her voice sounded dead - "the whole place will be... disinfected from top to bottom. What shall I do?" She sobbed, holding on to me. "How can I not talk to Jews?" Then, for the first time, she put into words the subject that had never touched us, reeling off the names of four of our teachers.
I was almost speechless. "But why?" I asked, and then, immediately, "How do you know they are Jewish?"
"He knows," she said, tonelessly. "He says they are Saujuden and that they will all be got rid of."
"Got rid of?" I repeated stupidly, and she cried out then, furiously, "Didn't you hear what I said? Disinfected, he calls it. The schools, the theatres, everywhere" - she spat out the word - "disinfected". The chanting from the street went on and on as we stood there under the trees. "What shall I do?" she said. "How can I live with them?"
She could do nothing, of course; well brought-up teenage girls in Vienna did not leave their families. (In the end, happily, she did manage to escape; by the time she was 16, she had become a big star.)
Two days later, I stood in a crowd underneath a hotel balcony and heard Hitler speak.
I had become terribly, achingly aware of wrong, wrong in my small world and in the world beyond it. But I don't remember Hitler saying anything outrageous; he was just lauding the Austrians for welcoming the Germans. And indeed, huge numbers of Viennese, and Austrians all over the country, did welcome them, and the air was full of excitement and joy. What I remember most clearly - to my horror - is how excited I felt myself as, part of this seethingly emotional crowd, I Iistened to that man. Four years earlier, in Nuremberg, I had sat high up in the stands and found myself shouting with joy. Small as I was, I was aware that my pleasure derived not from any person or words but from the theatrical spectacle. But now? I had heard the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg announcing the plebiscite of 13 March, his voice breaking at the end: "Austrians, the time for decision has come." I had beard Elfie crying about her father's betrayal. I had heard those raucous voices, "Deutschland erwache, Juda verrecke!". And here I was, standing before this man whose orders had sent troops into Austria and who had followed those troops so as to seal the deed with his presence. What was it that made me join the mindless chorus around me, welcoming this almost motionless figure to our Vienna? What was it in him that drew us? What was it in us - in me too, that day - that allowed ourselves to be drawn?
The next day, Elfie and I went for a walk around the city. On the Graben, one of Vienna's loveliest streets, we came across band of men in brown uniforms wearing swastika armbands surrounded by a large group of Viennese citizens, many of whom were laughing. As we drew near, I saw that in the middle of the crowd, a dozen middle-aged people, men and women, were on their knees, scrubbing the pavement with toothbrushes. Horrified, I recognised one of them as Dr Berggrun, our paediatrician, who had saved my life when I was four and had diphtheria. I had never forgotten that night; he had wrapped me again and again in cool, wet sheets, and it was his voice I had heard early that dawn saying, "Sie wird leben" (she will live).
Dr Berggrun saw me start towards one of the men in brown; he shook his head and mouthed, "No," while continuing to scrub with his toothbrush. I asked the uniformed men what they were doing; were they mad?
"How dare you!" one of them shouted.
"How dare you?" I shouted back, and told him that one of the men they were humiliating was a great physician, a saver of lives.
Stunningly beautiful, her trained voice as clear as a bell, Elfie called out, "Is this what you call our liberation?"
It was extraordinary: within two minutes, the jeering crowd had dispersed, the brown guard had gone, the "street cleaners" had melted away. "Never do that again," Dr Berggrun said to us sternly, his small, round wife next to him, nodding fervently, her face sagging with shock and exhaustion. "It is very dangerous." They gassed them in Sobibor in 1943.
(When I told Speer, 40 years later, that I was in Vienna in March 1938 when he, too, as he had told me, was there to prepare a hall for a rally at which Hitler was to speak, I asked him whether he had seen the shop windows marked in white paint with the word "Jew", or noticed Nazi brutalities. He said no: "I saw nothing like that; I wasn't there long. I did my work...I stayed at the Hotel Imperial. I strolled along the Ring and the old streets of the inner city, and had a few good meals and lovely wine. And I bought a painting - that was nice. That's it." He hadn't known that people, Catholic and Jewish patriots, were being arrested in droves by then and that the first wave of suicides, mostly elderly Jews, had started? "No, I knew nothing about that. I still know nothing about that. Suicides?")
The schools and colleges reopened within days. I have tried to recall the changes in our lives. The main one, at least for me, was a sudden awareness of feelings I had not felt before, an excitement that I didn't understand, and didn't really want to feel.
Though Hungarian by nationality, I loved Austria and above all Vienna; even now, having lived in cities all over the world, I cannot recall ever having been so joyfully aware of the changing of the seasons as I was there. Is there another city in Europe where the scent of lilac lingers so heavily over the streets in May, or the leaves of the trees in the parks turn so golden and red in October, or the snow lies so thickly on roofs and streets in winter? I remember as if it was yesterday the hard, clean feel of the pavement under my shoes once the galoshes were put away: childhood memories of unimportant things that mattered. All this probably didn't change, but my awareness of it did. It was a warm and beautiful March, but I don't remember the sun or the buds on the trees or the smell of the lilac later that spring. It is people I remember: the first day we returned to school, two students wearing swastika pins, and a few days later, the school administrator, too, a man of great importance to us all, appointed by Reinhardt himself.
By now, we knew of course that there were three categories of people who were in real danger: Jews, Communists and Austrian patriots. For the rest, life could go on more or less as usual, although foreign embassies sent small pins in the national colours to their citizens, urging us to wear them. My mother and I received small Hungarian flags, and I wore mine not so much for protection as to separate myself from those at school who wore that other pin.
In the weeks that followed, people began, slowly, to disappear: one of my teachers, a small man of quite incredible kindness to fumbling young drama students, killed himself by jumping out of a fourth-floor window; two others left for the United States. Elfie and I no longer walked home because her parents and my mother forbade it. We no longer went to theatres, for rehearsals or performances. All of us came and went in groups, orderly, quiet and in many cases suspicious of each other.
A few months before the Anschluss, my mother had become engaged to Ludwig von Mises, one of the country's leading economists. He had been living and teaching in Geneva for several years, spending only his summer holidays in Austria, where he and my mother indulged their passion for mountain climbing.
Among my mother's many other admirers was a high-ranking German diplomat. One evening in May 1938, he appeared at our door and told her that the Nazis intended to arrest her and hold her as a hostage against von Mises's return; being both Jewish and a prominent intellectual with dangerous ideas, he was high up on their blacklist.
I don't know whether the Nazis would actually have taken my mother hostage, but she believed it and so we had to go. By 11 o'clock that night, she had packed our cases and arranged for friends to send on to Switzerland my father's collection of paintings and other valuables. Austrians, by then, needed exit permits for travel abroad, but we had our Hungarian passports and we left the next moming for Geneva.
I don't think I was bitter; just as Elfie could not leave her family and live on her own, I could not stay behind by myself in the political cauldron of Vienna. But having experienced the adult freedom of drama school, I was both sad and furious to find myself in a finishing school near Lausanne. I developed a particular loathing for the headmistress when, just weeks after my arrival, a little German Jewish girl was suddenly removed from the classes and our luxurious accommodation and sent to work in the kitchen; her parents, it transpired, had been sent to a concentration camp, and there was no money for her fees. My mother and my new stepfather, together with the mother of my co-conspirator, a wealthy New York socialite, came up trumps; they threatened not only our removal but the most unpleasant publicity for the school unless the child was immediately given a free place.
This incident, which demonstrated that the Nazi poison was not limited to Germany and Austria, along with Elfie's carefully phrased letters, which clearly conveyed her unhappiness, convinced me that an expensive finishing school was not the place for me. At dawn one lovely Sunday, when I knew my mother and stepfather were away for the weekend, I ran away. I confided in two slightly older American girls who thought the plan mad but romantic, and gave me a large sum from their considerable hoard of pocket money. I packed a small bag; my American friends agreed to lock the door behind me (they also promised to telephone my mother that night, having told the teachers at Sunday breakfast that I had joined my parents for the day); and without great difficulty I got to Geneva in time for the early-morning train to London via Paris.
I knew nobody in London, having only been there on brief excursions from my school in Kent years before, but I had a plan. Either I would obtain a place at the Old Vic theatre school, where I would complete my training; or I would audition for Alexander Korda, Britain's top film producer, and get into films. Of course, neither plan worked. At the Old Vic, the suspicious school secretary, having seen the address I had written down of a fleapit hotel in a less than salubrious part of London, asked whom I was staying with and then added kindly, "It's none of my business, but don't you think you should go home, wherever home is?" Fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda, upon learning my name and that I came from the Reinhardt school, granted me an audition and talked to me for a long time about what was happening in the world, about books and about music. By the time we got down to my audition, his wife, Merle Oberon, had joined us, and he had managed to extract a lot of information from me. "You have some talent," he said, after hearing my Juliet (I had played the part in Vienna in a special English performance for the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson). "I'll help you here, if you really want, but I suspect this is the wrong direction for you. You are too young, and you are uneducated. I advise you to go away, grow up, study, then come back and see me in a couple of years." Merle Oberon then took me to lunch, lent me a handkerchief when I cried and arranged for me to telephone my mother.
By early autumn, I was living in Paris with two young academics, sister and brother, in a wonderful old flat off the avenue Henri Martin. I had a pass for lectures at the Sorbonne, had signed up for a typing course at Pitman's and was taken on as a pupil by one of the most generous and awesome actresses in Paris, Madelaine Milhaud, the wife of the composer Darius Milhaud. Vienna, the Anschluss and the Nazis were suddenly far away.
When war broke out on 3 September 1939, I was in Les Baux en Provence, at that time not even a village, more a settlement of about 50 people who lived in caves dug out of rock on top of a mountain. There was one extremely basic hotel, the Reine Jeanne, which the conductor Pierre Monteux took over for a few weeks every summer for a seminar to which, that year, thanks to the Milhauds, I had been invited. There were about a dozen of us, French and American. We had been immersed in music for two weeks when we heard on the radio that the Germans had invaded Poland and that France and Britain had declared war. French mobilisation was incredibly swift - the young men in the valley were gone within days - and a request arrived from the mayor at the foot of the mountain that the maestro's young students should come down and help with the grape harvest.
The weather was glorious; it was fun to wash our feet and legs with rough country soap, rinse them in a stinging, green disinfectant and then walk, jump and dance on the grapes. We held hands and made a ballet of our first war-work. On the last evening, Monteux conducted his student orchestra in a piece by Brahms; "N'oubliez jamais," he said at the end, "lui aussi etait Allemand".
My mother and stepfather ordered me to return to Switzerland. When I refused to go, they stopped my allowance in an attempt to force me. But I was 16 and in love - with an English boy, with France and with my studies. Nothing would have made me leave and, after a few weeks during which I slept on friends' sofas, ate very little and walked wherever I had to go, they relented, at least for the time being. I was not an easy daughter or step-daughter; I suspect that they were almost relieved.
My return to Geneva soon became a moot point. Five months into 1940, the Germans, with almost unbelievable swiftness, occupied France. Thousands of refugees streamed into Paris, among them many children whose parents were dead or lost.
For the next year, I worked as a volunteer nurse for an aid organisation called the Auxiliaire Sociale. It established reception centres for abandoned children in Paris and homes for them in chateaux all over occupied France. I went to Villandry, one of the great chateaux of the Loire, which belonged to the American mother of Isabelle de la Bouillerie, the president of our charity. There were two young volunteers and one paid nurse to look after about 20 children between the ages of three and 14 in a hastily converted stable block. Downstairs was the kitchen with one tap, a huge, old, wood-burning stove and a long table with benches; upstairs was a dormitory with 20-odd iron bedsteads. I had a tiny room off the dormitory; the other helpers and a number of refugees from Paris, Isabelle's friends and staff, some of them, incidentally, Jewish, were lodged in the chateau.
My mother and stepfather had gone to the United States, and I had no money at all except for pocket money Isabelle sometimes gave me, particularly after I became her interpreter in negotiations with the Germans. It was an important function, given our desperate need for documents to facilitate the running of the centre and food for the children and, as a well-brought- up Viennese Hungarian, I was peculiarly qualified for it.
I was, of course, passionately Franco- and Anglophile and - mainly, I suspect, to give myself an identity - furiously anti-German. As time went on, there were a few opportunities for minor practical acts of opposition - hiding a few shot-down British airmen, smuggling out documents - but there was not much opportunity for subversion; the most one could do was treat the visiting Germans with disdain. Hundreds of - rather polite - Germans, mostly officers, who came to see Villandry on their rounds of the chateaux of the Loire, were received very coldly indeed.
There were two in particular who came quite often, one an army doctor, the other a supply officer who had been a schoolmaster in civilian life. Both took an immediate interest in our children and helped us obtain medical supplies and food. They were - though I refused to see it at the time - good men and, I suppose because of that very fact, allowed themselves to be targets for my fury. For months, they accepted my railings and Isabelle's more elegantly phrased criticisms without demur. And then, without warning, they disappeared. The doctor, I later discovered, was soon sent to the Russian front, where be died within weeks; the former teacher, older and not very fit, was sent to a concentration camp. They had both been devout Christians and opponents of the regime.
We had never known. They hadn't told us; they had just tried to express it by showing affection to the children and helping us to care for them. Indulging our own feelings, we had abused their kindness. We had never sensed their pain and their dilemma, or that they desperately wanted to be and indeed were our friends. (Three years later, when France was liberated, Isabelle de la Bouillerie was imprisoned at the Sante, accused of collaboration - principally on the basis of her friendly relationship with those two Germans; she died there.)
It was another German who, some months later, undoubtedly saved my life. He was a Prussian aristocrat, head of military intelligence in the nearby city of Tours. He had helped me get assistance from official quarters for the children and had become something of a friend. I had suspected for some time that he was an anti-Nazi. One day, getting no reply when I knocked on his office door, I opened it. The room was empty, but the door to his living quarters was open. As I walked across the room to announce myself, I heard the radio, tuned to the BBC. For the average German, listening to the BBC was a crime. Perhaps this rule didn't apply to officers, but even so, he was startled when he saw me.
"You see," he said, spreading his fingers in a gesture of surrender, "I'm in your hands now. Will you spare me?" He was a charmer.
One night, about six months later, Marie, the oldest of our children, who had appointed herself my friend and assistant, tiptoed up to my bed and whispered that there was an officer in a car at the gate who had asked for me by name.
It was just before dawn; the air was sweet. I ran out to the gate. "You are going to be arrested this morning," he said, very quietly. "Get dressed quickly. Don't say goodbye to anybody. Hurry."
Not long before, we had hidden a British airman for a week or so, after which, disguising him with a nurse's cape and veil (he was very young and thin), I had driven him in a horse-drawn buggy Isabelle had lent me to a rendezvous from where he would be taken to safety. I had been stopped by a German security patrol, but the Auxiliaire passes I carried - issued with the help of the officer who now waited for me at the gate of Villandry - plus my Hungarian passport, got us through, and I had thought myself quite safe.
I sent Marie back to bed, swearing her to silence; dressed in my uniform; packed nothing except soap, a toothbrush, a change of underclothes, a spare shirt and my papers; and left. I had no money, but he gave me all the French currency he had and drove me to Orleans, from where I got an early train to Paris.
It sounds dramatic, but it didn't seem so at the time. I was grateful, but not that surprised that he'd come to my aid - I would have come to his, had the opportunity offered itself. As I rode on that train, it was a beautiful day; Paris, a few hours later, was still Paris; I had very good friends. Two days later, still in my nurse's uniform, I was taken over the Pyrenees by a mountain guide, and walked out of France and into Spain.
(When I told Speer about this German, I asked him, "If it had been you, would you have helped a young girl like me?" He thought for a long moment before he answered. "I don't know," he said, finally - he always tried to be honest, though he didn't always succeed. "I really don't know. Thank God, the question never arose." I said that wasn't quite so, that a number of people at risk, for political or "racial" reasons, had been offered a safe haven in his ministry. "True," he said, "but that was my ministry, not me: I knew, but I didn't have to know or do anything myself.")
Although I was sad to leave, and quite determined to return as soon as possible, I was also glad. I had many friends of my age in the growing French maquis who already knew of Gestapo cellars, particularly in Paris and Lyons, where people were subjected to appalling tortures. I fear I was not a heroine; I was afraid of physical pain.
The next three years I spent in the United States. This period has never seemed quite real to me; amid the incredible plenty and - even in wartime - peace, I never stopped feeling guilty and ashamed: guilty for having left Europe, ashamed for being safe. Everyone tried to make me feel at home - I had never experienced such kindness and generosity - but the only way I could deal with my grinding homesickness, which wasn't for one particular place but for all the places in Europe I so loved, was to work at things connected with my life there and so remain a part of the struggle.
For my first 18 months in the United States, I travelled across the country, lecturing in schools and colleges on the war and Europe's children. Still practically a child myself, and trained for the stage, it was not difficult for me to communicate with the thousands of young Americans I met. I gave, on average, three lectures a day, driving from town to town and city to city, travelling through about 20 states in all. It allowed me to get to know the country, and I grew to love it too. America touched, fascinated and also frightened me: that extraordinary mixture of innocence and chauvinism, kindness and incipient violence was utterly different from anything I had known before.
I learned, when giving my lectures, that the most effective way to engage people, whether they are children or adults, is through emotion. This was a great lesson. I often had to remind myself to hold back, to go easy when I felt waves of emotion coming from my audience in response to my accounts of what was happening in Europe, and I grew to understand that people's need to feel must never be abused. Many years later, when Speer explained to me how Hitler had exploited people's emotions, I remembered my own temptations on stage in America, and was glad I had resisted them.
For the rest of my time in the States, I worked at the Office of War Information, writing anti-Nazi propaganda and broadcasting it, via England, to German troops.
Four months before the end of the war, I finally managed to return to Europe. I had joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as a child welfare officer, working in the displaced persons camps in what would become the American zone of Germany. I had arrived in the States in the navy-blue uniform of an Auxiliaire Sociale nurse; I left just over three years later in the khaki uniform of UNRRA.
My very first assignment in the field, which lasted only two weeks, was the care of child prisoners from Dachau concentration camp. For someone like me, arriving with only the shortest of briefings, it was traumatic. There was, I now know, no comparison between the condition of the prisoners at Dachau and those at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald (and of the camps in Poland we knew absolutely nothing, not even their names). But Dachau was bad enough those first few days - especially meeting those people who had been force-marched south for weeks from other camps, and then, of course, the children. Was it thinkable that they would have sent children to these places? It was: children of all ages, all religions, many nationalities, including Germans.
There were very few Jewish children - most of them, we found out later, had been killed - but many from Eastern Europe: young children who had been taken away from their mothers when they were sent for forced labour; older ones who, even during that last year of the war, had been taken away from their countries to work in Germany and who, at the end, had been marched south to end up in concentration camps. And then, perhaps more incomprehensible still, were the German children who, curiously isolated from the others, looked less worn but were, if anything, the most helpless of all. These were victims of the Sippenhaft, the imprisonment of families accused of treason, frequently the children of high-ranking officers and diplomats, some of whom had doubtless attended Nazi elite schools.
My job was to help the American army authorities to get all the children out of Dachau as quickly as possible, to their homes, if that was feasible (it almost never was), to hospitals if necessary but in most cases to the UNRRA reception centres and camps which were being set up all over Germany in expectation of many thousands requiring care.
I would eventually work in three camps, the first in Neumarkt, a small town in Bavaria not far from Nuremberg, looking after 6,000 Poles. After that, I was sent to Regensburg, to a camp which housed about 20,000 Ukrainians. Most of these people had been slave labourers, but hidden among them were men who had served as SS auxiliaries in the worst of the Nazi camps. This was an immense installation which, over the years, would turn into a loosely fenced-off township with its own, highly politicised administration, its own churches, schools, playgrounds, meeting halls and thousands of barracks, where men and women would live, court, marry and have children. These people, most of whom had been brought to Germany by violence, now didn't want to go home, where they feared more violence awaited them.
My third assignment was the finding and care of children from Eastern Europe whom the Nazis, having decided that they were "racially desirable", had kidnapped from their families and brought to Germany to be brought up as Germans. I found 47 such children and, in the summer of 1946, was able to return 38 of them to their families in Poland. By this time I was about as deeply immersed as anyone could be in the misery the Nazis had caused. My wish - indeed my need - became more intense with every day to find out how it could have happened.
It was at the beginning of that year that a friend of mine, George Vassilchikov, one of the first two simultaneous interpreters in the world, obtained a visitor's pass for me to attend the Nuremberg trials.
This was the first time I saw Albert Speer. I knew nothing about him and only noticed him among the 21 accused because, then 40 years old, he looked young and, with his smooth face and strangely shaped, bushy, black eyebrows, startlingly handsome. In contrast with many of the other defendants, who pretended to be bored or asleep, or who read or fidgeted endlessly, he always sat very still, listening intently, his face immobile except for those dark, intelligent eyes.
"Who is Speer?" I asked George one night at the Grand Hotel where we were dining and dancing.
"The second most important man in Germany," he said, leading me, a rather bad dancer, expertly around the floor. "It was because of his requests for ever more workers that the people you are looking after now were shipped to Germany as forced labour." I remember feeling an odd sense of surprise. It was hard to reconcile the terrible treatment of the slave labourers with the interesting, chiselled face I had become aware of in the dock.
"You mean, he was responsible for the way they were treated?" I asked.
Georgie was always precise in his answers. "We can't really know yet about the nature and extent of people's individual responsibility," he said. "But of course, he had to know."
Later, I learned that if it hadn't been for Speer, Hitler would have had to give up at least a year earlier than he did. A year. How many people died in that year? It was then, I think, that Speer entered my subconscious. The next two times I attended the trial, I looked harder, focused more on that silent figure, that attractive face in the dock.
It was - it seems incredible - 31 years later, in the second half of July 1977, that I received a letter from Speer, who had been sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison and released in 1966. He was writing, he said, because he wanted to thank me for an article I had written in the London Sunday Times.
A great many things had happened to me in the intervening years. I had got married in 1948 to the American Vogue photographer Don Honeyman, and we had had two children; we had lived in Paris and New York and, in 1958, had decided on London as the place where we wanted to bring up our children and work. I had written a novel, The Medallion, about a little boy who was kidnapped from America and taken to four-power-occupied Vienna, and had decided that writing would be my life. I worked as a journalist, and remained passionately interested in two subjects: the Third Reich and troubled children. (In 1969, I was to write a book on the case of Mary Bell, an 11-year-old girl in Newcastle who killed two little boys.)
In 1967, I went to Germany to attend some of the Nazi war crimes trials which, virtually unmentioned in the foreign press, had been going on for several years. Despite my experience in the UNRRA camps, I found the testimony I heard during the four trials I attended harrowing. But those six weeks I spent in Germany reinforced my feeling that there was a great deal missing, not so much in our knowledge of the past as in our understanding of those who enacted it. This feeling led to my writing my third book, Into that Darkness, the story of Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka, as he told it to me during weeks of conversations in Dusseldorf prison after he had been sentenced to life imprisonment. I wanted to understand how a perfectly normal man with average gifts and of presumably average morality could be made into a monster, and whether, under slow moral pressure, he could be brought to recognise his guilt.
It was an extremely difficult book to write, at times nightmarishly so. And when it was finished, I promised myself that I would stop exposing myself to Nazi horrors. But I never quite succeeded in suppressing my involvement with the Third Reich and its aftermath. I often succumbed when editors asked me to undertake commissions in or about Germany. It was one such commission that resulted in my letter from Speer.
The article Speer had read was written in collaboration with a colleague, Lewis Chester. Its subject was a book, Hitler's War, written by the British revisionist David Irving. He claimed to have discovered that Hitler had not known about the genocide of the Jews until October 1943 at the earliest. On first reading, his arguments were plausible - just; his proof, in the form of quotes from Hitler, Himmler and others, was intriguing. Revisionists all over the world had for years been trying desperately to clear Hitler of the gas-chamber murder of the Jews. If they could prove that Hitler had not been involved in the order for genocide and indeed had not known for years that such genocide was happening, then they would have succeeded in changing Hitler's image and, with it, the history of the Third Reich.
Our method of investigating Irving's claims was to follow the trail he himself laid. Irving himself was surprisingly helpful: "This is my Jew file," he said, pointing to a long box filled with meticulously cross- indexed cards. "Everything is in it; you can borrow it." He was so generous and persuasive that I almost thought he might have something.
I spent just under two months talking to survivors from Hitler's circle and checking in German archives every document he had registered in his "Jew file". By the end of our research, we understood the devices Irving had employed to support his thesis, and our long article completely discredited his claims.
In his letter, Speer wrote that it was "ludicrous" for anyone to claim that the genocide of the Jews could have been anyone's idea but Hitler's: "It shows a profound ignorance of the nature of Hitler's Germany, in which nothing of any magnitude could conceivably happen, not only without his knowledge, but without his orders." The fact that there was no documentary evidence of such an order from the Fuhrer meant nothing, he said. He knew from personal experience that many of Hitler's most critical orders were issued only verbally. "From the historical point of view," he wrote, "the matter has now, thanks to your expose, been dealt with. Nonetheless, unfortunately, Irving has provided fodder for the abominable efforts of those whose aim is to create a new Dolchstoss Luge (war-guilt lie), as it was called after 1918, in order yet again to deceive the German people. It appalls me."
Although I knew a great deal about Speer, had read his two books and had seen him many times on television, I had never wanted to meet him. I had admired his books, the second one, Spandau: the Secret Diaries, even more than the first. This story of his 20 years imprisonment - his bitter relationships with at least four of his six co-prisoners; his extraordinary personality change under the tutelage of the French chaplain Georges Casalis; his transformation of the prison yard into a flowering park; the thousands of letters he wrote to his best friend and his children; his organised reading and study programme (he read 5,000 books, taught himself English and French and by the end of his imprisonment could probably have obtained degrees in literature, ethics and even theology); and, finally, his "walk around the world", carefully measured hikes he took daily around his "park", supported in his imagination by maps and descriptions, walking from country to country and city to city over deserts, plains and mountains until, 12 years after he had started, he had walked just under 32,000 kilometres - all this made it the most extraordinary prison memoir I had ever read.
But none of this had emerged from what I saw of him over the years on television after his release and read in countless interviews where, too glib, too smooth, too sure, he appeared only to repeat himself endlessly, above all in denying that he had ever known anything about the Nazi crimes. He made me uncomfortable; I didn't like him; I didn't want to know him. Then, the day after receiving his first letter, another one arrived. He had forgotten to mention, he wrote, that a year or two previously, he had read Into that Darkness, which had caused him sleepless nights. If I was ever in the vicinity of Heidelberg, would I perhaps care to come and talk?
I telephoned him after receiving this second letter. His voice came as a great surprise, and was partly responsible for me changing my mind about meeting him. In the interviews I had read, perhaps because the questions and answers had essentially always been the same, his replies and obvious evasions had irritated me; on television, particularly when he spoke in his heavily accented English, he had almost always sounded arbitrary and arrogant. But on the telephone, he sounded hesitant, shy - not of me, specifically, but as a person. What intrigued me most, however, was that I sensed a great sadness in him.
At the beginning of 1978, the editor of the Sunday Times magazine agreed that I could do a profile of Speer, and that Don, my husband, could take the pictures. By the time we went to Heidelberg in April, Speer had telephoned me many times - we had already talked for hours, and my feelings about him had changed: I no longer regarded him with active dislike, though I could not say that I liked him or, above all, trusted him. Even if he had been truthful about everything else in his books and interviews, he was, I was sure, lying about not having known until Nuremberg about the murder of the Jews. But I had no idea what he felt, admitted or denied about Hitler's other crimes; nor did I know about his family, about his friends and enemies during the Third Reich and since, about what his life had been like before the Nazis.
To find out about the background, motivations and feelings of Franz Stangl was one thing. To try to discover how a man of Speer's talent and immense intelligence could have been convinced by the arguments of National Socialism and become - as far as was possible - Hitler's friend, how he could have stood by him until the very end and probably through his efforts prolonged the war by a considerable period, was quite another.
Over the years, I have established a way of dealing with these professional encounters. When I am talking to someone whose past is immensely controversial, my rule is to tell him at the very start how I feel about him. I do not pretend to come as his friend, to help or console him. If he has murdered, I want to find out what has made him do it; if he has cheated, I want to find out why; if he is a ruler of an industrial empire or a country and I find his rule suspect I tell him so. In the case of people involved with the Third Reich, I tell them what I feel about the Nazis and how I feel about them personally.
For me, this is a kind of insurance policy: I want none of them to be able to say afterwards that, in order to get him to talk, I pretended to be other than I am. And quite aside from feeling that this is, morally, the right approach, I have also found that making such a statement creates a special atmosphere: people respond to it, speaking more openly, saying, perhaps, things they would not otherwise have said. This was certainly the case with Speer.
Speer's house was large and comfortable but, except for his study, which was full of papers and books about the Third Reich and was dominated by a large painting of his mother, it was curiously impersonal: "good" furniture, carpets and paintings; ornaments on the tables; expensive curtains and lots of flowers. It could have been the home of any upper-class German family. It conveyed no sense of Speer, or even of his wife, who had lived in it throughout his imprisonment and raised their six children there. It was later, at their house in the mountains, that I got more of a sense of him; he had created it himself, from an old farmhouse. It was very simple, almost spartan, but everything it contained - the old pieces in the bedrooms and the kitchen, and the new ones Speer had designed for the huge living-room, converted from the former stables - was beautiful.
By the end of that first evening, Speer had made friends with my husband. He had almost immediately suggested that they call each other by their Christian names, which is very unusual in Germany. With me, he was - not reticent, but much cooler. It would be some time before we, too, called each other by our first names.
By the time we left that night, though knowing no details, I knew that Speer had had a miserable childhood and hated the Heidelberg house because it reminded him of it, and that he and his wife and he and his children were and always had been miles apart. I knew that he was deeply nostalgic for Spandau, though I didn't know why; and I knew that he had loved Hitler, though not to what extent. What I didn't yet know, and wasn't to learn until much later, was that he was consumed with guilt by the murder of the Jews. It was a long time before I grew to like Speer but by the end of our first three weeks together, I fully believed, and loved, that feeling of guilt in him.
Albert Speer died in 1981. By then, we had talked a great deal, and I have often asked myself how I really felt about him. Perhaps my reaction to his death goes some way towards providing an answer: I was shaken, because it happened so unexpectedly, in London, while we were away, and because there was a message from him on our answerphone when we returned, by which time he was already dead. But I was not sad. He had given me a great deal of himself, of knowledge and of understanding, and I was grateful to him for that. No one else could have given me what he did; there was no one else who knew and understood as much as he did. But when he died, I thought that his death was right and, in a terrible way, overdue; fate had given him 35 years after the Nuremberg trials, at which he should probably have been sentenced to death, as were others perhaps less guilty than he.
What Speer gave me was a new perspective on Hitler, on his personality, his actions and his goals; a new understanding of the significance, in political events, of human emotions. The book I now wanted to write was the book, I suddenly realised, that I had always wanted to write, ever since finding the imprisoned children at Dachau and the stolen children in southern Germany, ever since learning about the dead children in Treblinka, Sobibor and Belsen. Speer had given me the gift of himself, against whom I could place, consider, deplore and mourn all those events, and all those human beings who had lived and died in my time
My Journey to Speer by Gitta Sereny appears in the latest issue of Granta magazine, which is published next week (available in bookshops from Thursday or by subscription, freephone 0500-004033)
Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth is published by Macmillan at pounds 25
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© Mr Mick Humphreys LRPS
IoE Number: 269423 Location: CHURCH OF ST GILES, THURLOXTON, SEDGEMOOR, SOMERSET Photographer: Mr Mick Humphreys LRPS Date Photographed: 30 June 2002 Date listed: 29 March 1963 Date of last amendment: 29 March 1963 Grade II*
The Images of England website consists of images of listed buildings based on the statutory list as it was in 2001 and does not incorporate subsequent amendments to the list. For the statutory list and information on the current listed status of individual buildings please go to The National Heritage List for England.
ST23SETHURLOXTON CPTHURLOXTON VILLAGE7/157Church of St Giles
ST23SE THURLOXTON CP THURLOXTON VILLAGE 7/157 Church of St Giles 29.3.63 GV II* Anglican Parish church. Norman; C14; predominantly C15; C19 restoration including addition of north aisle of 1868. Random red sandstone rubble, freestone dressings, triple Roman tile roofs, coped verge with a finial. Nave with south porch and north aisle, chancel with north vestry, west tower. Perpendicular, aisle Middle Pointed. Embattled 2-stage tower with diagonal buttresses, 2-light bell-chamber windows with louvres, 2-light west window dated 1500, west door. Two bay nave, square-headed 2 and 3-light windows, each light cusped, stopped labels, leaded lights. South porch with a semi-circular head outer door opening, probably C18, dropped keystone, moulded imposts, paired doors, lamp over. Three bay North aisle with 3 cross-gables, 2-light windows. Two bay chancel, square-headed 2-light windows, leaded lights, blocked priests door. Inner doorway to porch with an early door; interior plastered, nave and chancel under C15/C16 ceiled wagon roofs with moulded ribs and bosses. Three bay arcade to aisle. Norman tub font with a C17 cover. Piscina. Rood screen with 3 arches, dated 1734 the middle containing the doorway, a reading and a prayer desk, pulpit in similar style with 4 carved figures and back-panelling. C18 pews; some C19 pews. C18 and C19 monuments, one by Pollard of Taunton; Jacobean altar table, C18 decalogue plaques under tower with painted figures, Arms of Geo,II. C14, C15, C16 bells. Stained glass: East window of 1883; aid C19 West window; 2 Victoria Jubilee windows, C19 organ, Parson Woodforde, the Cl8 diarist famous for "Diary of a Country Parson' was priest-in-charge for 3 months; (Pevsner N., Buildings of England, South and West Somerset, 1958; Church Guide, undated),


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Standout perfs by Bernadette Peters are the only reasons to see Lisa Albright's "Coming Up Roses," a tired '80s-set meller hobbled by lackluster helming and an unconvincing script.
Standout perfs by Bernadette Peters as an aging diva and Rachel Brosnahan as her solicitous 15-year-old daughter are the only reasons to see Lisa Albright's "Coming Up Roses," a tired '80s-set meller hobbled by lackluster helming and an unconvincing script. While the fearsome co-dependency at the film's core registers strongly, thanks to the female leads, the film's more sensationalistic aspects — lesbianism, incest, drug dealing — are cavalierly tossed in with little buildup, stretching pathos to ever-lessening effect. Opened in limited release Nov. 9, "Coming" is going nowhere.
Alice (Brosnahan), still dazzled by childhood memories of the theatrical brilliance of her mom, Diane (Peters), now struggles to support the unstable, bipolar woman, whose grasp of reality is subjective at best. The two have moved to a dicey neighborhood in Nashua, N.H., to be close to Alice's sister, but sympathy and gainful employment are in short supply. When Mom's suitor/would-be savior (Peter Friedkin, creepily benevolent) turns out to be a perv, Alice reluctantly taps the criminal connections of a gamine-like neighbor (a scene-stealing Reyna de Courcy) to avoid eviction, teetering on the edge of the downward spiral that already claimed Diane.Coming Up Roses
A Dada Films release of a Bullet Pictures presentation of a Mary Sunshine Films production. Produced by Adam Folk, Jonathan Mason, Mona Lessnick. Directed by Lisa Albright. Screenplay, Albright, Christine Lazaridi.
Camera (color, HD), Ryan Samul; editor, Ray Hubley; music, Dominic Matar; production designer, Daniel R. Kersting. Reviewed on DVD, New York, Nov. 8, 2012. Running time: 88 MIN.
Bernadette Peters, Rachel Brosnahan, Peter Friedkin, Reyna de Courcy, Shannon Esper, Ann Dowd, Jayce Bartok.


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Mount Field is one of the 4,000 footers of New Hampshire that plenty of climbers summit in their quest to climb all of the 4,000 footers of New Hampshire. The views from Mount Field are fairly limited as there is is only one small area where you can see through the thick pines into Crawford Notch.The climb is fairly easy and the summit can be accessed from several trails. You can easily climb both Mount Tom and Mount Willey (two other 4,000 footers of New Hampshire) in one day. Also, if you are into peakbagging, you can nail Mount Avalon and Mount Willard (two mountains less than 4,000 feet) and still have some daylight remaining, even in the shorter days of winter.
The trails to Mount Field are well marked and you will hike through some very beautiful New Hampshire forests on the way to the summit. There are several nice stream crossings with waterfalls as well.
Getting There
Starting from North Conway, take Route 302 northwest to the Crawford Depot which is on the left side of the road. The depot is a train station. You can park free of charge (this was the case in November, 2003) at the Crawford Depot. (And is still the case now in 2007 -TLP)From the parking lot, cross over the railroad tracks and look for the sign marking the trailhead. Follow the well traveled path into the forest and look for additional signs marking the trail. Almost immediately into the forest there will be a split in the trail. If you go left, it will take you to the summit of Mount Willard. You should stay to the right and follow the Avalon Trail up the mountain. At the next trail juncture, you can either go to the left, which leads you directly to the summit of Mount Field (while passing over Mount Avalon). This route is fairly steep and was difficult on my trip as there was ice on the trails. If you were to go right at the juncture, you would follow the A - Z Trail to it's intersection with the Willey Range Trail. Once you reach the Willey Range Trail, turn left and follow this to the summit of Mount Field.
Red Tape
I have never got a permit while hiking in the White Mountains. Parking was free when I did this climb. I have noted that other SP mountain pages reference fees for parking when using the trails.Just be sure to park at the depot and not the AMC Highlands Center. -TLP
When To Climb
Mount Field can be climbed year round. Snow shoes or crampons may be required for winter climbs. Prepare for extreme conditions when climbing in the winter and dress accordingly.Camping
Several miles to the south of Crawford Depot / 13 miles north of Bartlett, New Hampshireis a camp-site named Dry River Campground. This is a state run campground. There are (31) primitive sites available for $13 per night.Check links on this page for additional information on Dry River Campground.
Mountain Conditions
Check out the Mt. Washington web cam to get an idea of current conditions. Mount Field is very close to Mount Washington.Check out links on this page for additional information on conditions in this area.
If you purchase the AMC White Mountain Guide book, it has the necessary maps for all trails in this area and they were more than adequate for route finding and planning.
Weather Forecasts
External Links
- Mount Washington
Tons of good data on local conditions.
- New England Ice
Current ice climbing conditions.
- Dry River Campgrounds
Local campground information.


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- Luggage Room
- Towel
- Air conditioning
- Free Breakfast
- Free Wi-Fi
- 24 Hour Reception
- 24 Hour Security
- Adaptors
- Airport Transfers
- Book Exchange
- Business Centre"
- Cable TV
- Café
- Card Phones
- Cots available
- Currency Exchange
- Free Airport Transfer
- Free City Maps
- Free Internet Access
- Free Parking
- Hair Dryers
- Hot Showers
- Housekeeping
- Internet Access
- Laundry Facilities
- Luggage Storage
- Meeting Room
- Mini-bar
- Outdoor Terrace
- Parking
- Postal Service
- Reading Light
- Safe Deposit Box
- Shuttle Bus
- Tea/Coffee Making Facilities
- Telephone Fax Facilities
- Tours/Travel Desk
Purchasable Extras
- Airport Pickup 75.61USD
Check-in / Check-out
Earliest check-in: 14:00
Latest Check-out: 12:00
- Credit Cards Accepted
- Credit Cards Not Accepted
- Taxes Included
Map and Directions
The public-transportation to the Old Town is the least expensive way (about 4.00 TL total), To use this method, exit the Arrivals Terminal secure customs area into the concourse, turn right, and look for signs to the "Hafif Metro - Light Rail System". Follow the signage down the escalator to the underground passage that will lead you to the Light Rail Station. There you will need to purchase two tokens (jetons) from the ticket booth, one for the Light Rail and one for the tram later. [NOTE: Any time you change between the Light Rail, tram, subway, or funicular systems you'll need to pay 2.00TL].(You acn also buy an Istanbul card and put some credit in it and use it all the public transportation, busses, trams, some ferries on the Bosphorous) A Light Rail Train leaves for downtown Istanbul every 5 to 15 minutes from the airport (runs 6:00-24:00). Ride it till at ZEYTINBURNU station and pass the kabatas tramline. Remember that you will need your other token now for the tram. Take the tram till the Sultanahmet (the recorded station announcement says "Bloo-mosk" ). Upon exiting the tram walk up the tramline ,pass the tram through the park, pass the Hippdrome (Hipodrrome is a place with 3 obelisk and a German fountain it is a pedestrian street)at the end of the road go downhill till you see the taxi station. Just pass the taxi station walk around 100 meters later on the right handside with a white colour


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Choose Between Two Options
- $39 for carpet cleaning in up to three rooms, a total of 700 sq. ft. ($90 value)
- $75 for carpet cleaning in up to six rooms, a total of 1,400 sq. ft. ($75 value)<p> <div id="category-primer">
Carpet Cleaning: Putting the Heat on Dirt
As techs re-fluff your carpets and your vacuum weeps in envy, learn how they work their magic with Groupon's guide to steam cleaning.
Although steam can be an effective cleaning tool, when pros talk about steam-cleaning a carpet, they're usually talking about a process technically known as hot-water extraction. That's because steam—which occurs when water reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit under normal conditions—is simply too powerful for many residential jobs, posing a risk of damage or shrinkage to some kinds of carpet fibers. Fortunately, water usually only needs to be heated to around 140 degrees to kill most of the microorganisms that can live in a carpet and cause odors. A skilled technician will know what range of temperatures is ideal for any given fiber.
Whether it's a rolling model or a massive van-mounted machine, a carpet cleaner has three important elements: a heating device, water jets, and vacuum suction. As the water is heated, it will sometimes be mixed with detergent, but one of the benefits of steam cleaning is the fact that soap isn't necessarily a must—pressurized jets can reach deep into fibers to get at grime. A vacuum hose then pulls most of the liquid back into the machine, though some dampness will linger in the carpet. Generally, after about three or four hours a carpet will be ready for you to walk on and set all your little army guys back in position.


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This group is for those She Writers who write fiction for young adults.
Location: #Children's Literature
Members: 348
Latest Activity: Dec 14, 2016
And don't forget to join other Young Adult She Writers at our Live Chats every Sunday night, 8pm Eastern! Just click "She Writes Chat" on the bottom right of your screen to join in.
Having trouble? Check out our How to Chat Guide.
Started by Candy Fite. Last reply by Brittany DeMaria Oct 5, 2016. 123 Replies 4 Likes
Icebreakers are known to:Create a positive group atmosphereHelp people to relaxBreak down social barriersEnergize & motivateHelp people to "think outside the box"Help people to get to know one anotherTell us about yourself. Who you are, and what…Continue
Started by T. Swift. Last reply by D.L. Gioe Jul 15, 2016. 10 Replies 1 Like
Hey there ladies,I am so happy that I finally finished my book. So now what? What is next? I am going to do my re-write checking formatting, spelling & grammar and plot details and story. After that I will have two folks who I know who are…Continue
Started by B. Lynn Goodwin. Last reply by B. Lynn Goodwin Sep 1, 2015. 2 Replies 0 Likes
Fifteen-and-a-half year old Sandee Mason wants to find her talent, get her driver's license, and stop living in the shadow of her big brother, Bri, who's missing in Afghanistan in B. Lynn Goodwin's forthcoming novel, TALENT. If you are a published…Continue
Started by B. Lynn Goodwin Nov 7, 2014. 0 Replies 0 Likes
WRITER ADVICE'S SCINTILLATING STARTS CONTEST www.writeradvice.com $20 ENTRY FEE3 PRIZES OF $100Deadline: 11/10/14Entice us. Submit the opening (up to 1500 words) of your book (any prose genre) to Writer…Continue
Tags: perspective, novels, feedback, opening
Thanks so much for the comment Suzanne - I really appreciate the feedback!
Well done on getting The Time Keeper out there. The blurb makes it sound very interesting to me. Good luck with the sales :-)
This week was an exciting one - I self-published my time travel/YA romance novel, The Time Keeper, as an eBook on Amazon. Who knew, after months of writing, that the hardest bit would be writing the blurb! It's surprisingly difficult to find exactly the right thing to say to make readers want to buy your book without giving away too much of the plot! If you're interested in checking it out, here's the link: The Time Keeper
Hey lovelies, any
Hey, all of you New Yorkers and northern Jersey peeps, I'll be reading from my YA Dorianna next week on Feb 4 at 6 pm at the Jefferson Market Library branch. Come on down! The link for deets:
You just got my vote, Catherine. Congrats on the Top 5 ranking.
Happy Holidays! My YA horror novel Dorianna made it to the top 5 final round in the Kindle Hub awards! Would you help by voting for Dorianna in the Best Horror Book category (not best horror series)? You just need to keep scrolling down until you see that category then click Dorianna. Thanks! Voting there is brutal and it means a lot to me as an indie author. Cheers! Catherine https://www.facebook.com/events/331950386990372/?source=1
Thank you Lynn!!! This book means a lot to me, because it comes from my own experience. I'm so glad it is getting this great reception.
Congratulations, Barbara. WTG!
I wanted to share with you that my new ebook After is getting great reviews:
Lauren gets a phone call from her father while he is having a heart attack. What will happen to her and her family after the phone call? Will Lauren's father recover? How will Lauren cope with her new feelings for Joey her best friend from kindergarten?
"The conversations seem so real. I almost felt like I was eaves-dropping in their lives!"
"Full of emotion and heartache AFTER will make the reader hope for a happy ending and doesn't disappoint for good story telling"
Check it out for teens and up if you are looking for a sweet romance as a gift:
Why, thank you too, B Lynn! Ruby is dear to me for her bravery and spitfire.
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We have spent much time exploring what is wrong with today's health care system and what needs to be done by its participants (providers, insurers, employers and patients). This article will address the remaining very important system participants – elected and appointed government officials.
To the officials: Your role is critical. To a significant degree you regulate health care and health insurance. You enact laws that make it easier or more difficult for health care participants to do business in a responsible fashion.
You have, up to now, enacted laws and regulations that have added untold millions of dollars to the costs of providers' (particularly hospitals) and health insurers' businesses. These take the forms of premium, property and other taxes (even on nonprofit insurers), mandated coverage, subsidies, Medicare and Medicaid shortfall coverage, inoculation program funding, specialized childhood coverage funding, prescription-drug program funding, testing in schools, ambulance coverage (one of many that used to be provided by your organization using tax revenue), and more.
Many of these costs used to be covered by the state and federal governments. These are nothing less than hidden taxes that have been shifted from the government to insurers and providers. If we removed all of the foregoing from health-insurance premiums, rates would decrease by as much as one-third. So officials, your role is critical.
Every civilized nation should make quality health care available to every man, woman and child lawfully in that country regardless of ability to pay. Health care is a fundamental human right, and yes, I believe it should be regulated. It's too important not to be.
Moreover, health care is the largest single industry of the Rhode Island economy, and it deserves respectful and informed attention. The past Lifespan/CNE attempt at a merger is an example. Regardless of whether you were for or against it, the participants at least deserved a prompt and thoroughly thought-out decision. It got neither and it dragged on for years, bleeding both organizations unnecessarily.
Likewise, our health care system is begging for a statewide strategic health plan – something that can be relied on in future planning by health care participants and that the General Assembly can use when considering the hundreds of health care bills that come before it each spring.
While our legislators spend substantial time on bridge tolls, marijuana dispensing, naming the state's insect, gambling spats and the traditional June/July rush of important bills through to enactment or defeat without time for appropriate consideration, health care in this state languishes from lack of focused and expert attention.
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