Fern der Heimat / Loin de la patrie

I show my mother the invitation to a one-day conference in Berlin at which I am to speak. (My friend Bernhard Sallmann has shot a video essay on Viktor Shklovsky and his book ‘ZOO or Letters Not About Love’, written and published in exile in Berlin in 1923. The conference is to accompany the premiere.) She reads out the names of the participants. All men, she says. It’s a boys’ club – Hartmut, Volker – I thought they had given up names like that. My mother means old German or Germanic names, now associated with the Nazi period. Oh, they’re in their thirties, I say, they must have been given their names in 1965 or 1970. Then just to provoke her a little, I say, one of the others even has Schmisse, I stroke my cheek. (A Schmiss is a duelling scar, which is, still, a mark of honour in certain student fraternities.) Is he old? asks my mother in disbelief. No, he’s in his thirties, too, I reply.

(Shepton Mallet, Christmas 2005)

It was spring 1990. A Sunday dinner at my mother’s in the house she had retired to in Somerset. Angela, my ex-wife, and Hanna, our daughter, a teenager, had driven down with me. The conversation turned to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Formally, however, at this point there were still two German states. My mother was very doubtful that unification would really take place. She frowned. ‘Do you think the Jews will ever let Germany be re-united?’ I now don’t remember how the conversation went on after that. Only the silence, which probably didn’t last as long as I think it did.

I was four and about to start primary school when my mother began her course at Jordanhill Teacher Training College. It was then that my grandmother left Germany, left Berlin to come and stay with us in the one-room-and-kitchen in Glasgow to look after me while my mother studied in the foreign language. My grandmother, my oma, turned out to be quite resourceful in negotiating everyday life in a Glasgow tenement district, despite her lack of English (or Scots or Glaswegian), much harder in the days before self-service stores, as they were called at first. I realise now that she must have been lonely, also that my mother wasn’t always nice to her, and in any case the three of us were living in a single room, usually with a cat or a dog, while my father slept in the kitchen, where there was also a bed recess. Probably, too, she had come to some kind of end point in her own life, which made it easier for her to leave behind Berlin, in the early 50′s still a city of ruins, and quite a large clutch of relatives.

Nevertheless we, my oma and I very quickly, so it seems to me, formed a team. It wasn’t just that she cooked for me when I came home for lunch, school was only a few hundred yards away, and at teatime. Or that on Saturday afternoons the three of us would go into town, me in my short trousers and raincoat if it was wet, my grandmother in her green raincoat, brown hat with a feather, thick stockings and sensible, I suppose, shoes. In town we first did some shopping, then we invariably went to Wendy’s Tea Rooms, then to the cinema, to whichever cinema had the shortest queue or no queue at all. It wasn’t just that: In school holidays, on Sundays, when my mother was studying or, later, preparing lessons or marking jotters, we, my grandmother and I, were inseparable, we went to the local shops, we went for walks, sometimes long walks up Bearsden Rd. or along the Boulevard. One day, we thought, we would get right to the end of the Boulevard, where the Old Kilpatrick Hills, which we could see from our fourth floor window, fell away to the river. It was our rainbow’s end, which we never reached, at least not on foot.

But apart from the shops and walking (and there was Dawsholm Park as well and the ‘Bluebell Woods’) we went to the pictures as often as we could, in the afternoons. Mostly to the Ascot, as people still called it, the Odeon at Anniesland Cross, but there was also the Vogue in Knightswood or we got the bus down to Partick. And in those days unless the main feature was expected to be particularly popular, programmes changed mid-week, one bill Monday to Wednesday, another Thursday to Saturday. On Sunday of course cinemas were shut.

So on grey or rainy afternoons in summer, and there are many grey and rainy afternoons in a West of Scotland summer, and the school summer holidays lasted almost eight weeks, we would go to the cinema. Usually there was no more than a handful of customers and most of them were old and probably hard of hearing, and no one minded if I leant over in my seat in the stalls and gave my grandmother a running commentary in German on what the characters in the film were saying. My first translation exercise. We saw whatever films a child accompanied by an adult was allowed to see. War films like Sink the Bismarck, the Iron Bayonet, the Cockleshell Heroes, Reach for the Sky and once, though that was in the evening in a crowded cinema, Pabst’s film ‘Ten Days to Die’ about Hitler’s last days in the bunker. (The recent ‘Downfall’ with Bruno Ganz playing Hitler, was not very different despite the claim that it was drawing on more recently published material. It was in colour, the bangs were bigger, but otherwise didn’t have much to add to the earlier film. The Pabst film was released on the tenth anniversary of the end of the war, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger’s ‘Downfall’ appeared in time for the 60th.) But back to the stalls in the Odeon, Anniesland: We saw westerns, of course, and musicals, if we were lucky, and many terrible English comedies, often starring the deeply unfunny Norman Wisdom. His adult baby face was one of the persistent images of the 50′s and 60′s. But we watched Norman Wisdom just as solemnly as we watched everything else and probably I didn’t need to whisper as much to my grandmother as in other films. But there was quite a lot of celluloid to comment on anyway, the B feature, Look at Life, the Pearl and Dean advertising, the trailers, the newsreel. I remember my mother and grandmother staring transfixed with fear at footage of the fighting in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising. That and a nuclear test in Nevada were the two events that burned themselves into my mind via British Movietone News and the stentorian cheer of ‘Leslie Mitchell reporting’. And always, in a repeated ritual, I would put the same question as we got outside or were already outside: ‘Hat Dir der Film gefallen?’ – Did you like the film? – And my grandmother would reply with greater or lesser enthusiasm, rarely with great enthusiasm.

In summer 1960 we went for a week’s holiday, my mother, my grandmother and me. It was the first time I had left Scotland since I was a baby. (My grandmother had been going back to Germany once a year.) My mother booked us in to a bed and breakfast in Penrith on the edge of the Lake District. A healthy place to go, not the windy seaside, which neither my mother nor grandmother cared for. The only holidays we’d had before, apart from day trips to Loch Lomond or Helensburgh or the mystery tours from Dundas St Bus Station had been in Prestwick and North Berwick. The latter had been particularly bleak and chilly. But now, my mother hoped that by crossing the border, even if not going very far beyond it, the rain and scudding clouds of Scotland would be left behind, the climate would be milder and more interesting history, more intimately connected to the English crown would be accessible, and perhaps also I would lose some of the plumpness I’d put on thanks to my grandmother’s lunches and teas.

It was a mild day. We were walking along a country road, little more than a lane. Grassy embankments, hedgerows on top. I was first, then my mother, and a little further behind, my grandmother. A gentle downward curve. An Austin Cambridge, the streamlining coming to a chrome steel point above the headlights, appeared round the bend, the curve, coming towards us very close to the embankment. My mother pulled me close in to the side of the road, the car almost brushed by me, in third gear. I turned round automatically as the car passed. My grandmother, oma, was suspended above the front of the car, above the headlight, her legs splayed out as if a puppet master had pulled the string up tight, her arms stretched forward, her coat, the familiar green raincoat, ballooning out. Not a sound, I don’t remember a sound, and then my grandmother was a heap of legs and raincoat beside the embankment and the car was drawing to a halt, and my mother was shouting, Mutti, and running.

It was summer ‘96. I hadn’t been to Glasgow for years, once or twice since my mother retired to the West Country. Esther wanted to see something of Scotland. We drove up in the people carrier she still had, which later was passed on to Grzegorsz and Theresa, before the terrible dinner party quarrel about Jedwabne and what it meant or revealed after which they and Esther never spoke again. It was the trip on which I fell into the water-filled slate quarry at Easdale, on Seil, south of Oban, just as I was pointing out the islands, Mull, of course, the Paps of Jura, the low Garvellachs, though I only know that name from checking in the Atlas.

In Glasgow we decided to visit my grandmother’s grave – I think Esther was more determined than I was. If I was reluctant then simply out of a feeling of guilt, because I had neglected to go for so many years. And it wasn’t good enough just to blame my mother for moving away from the city.

We went to a florist’s at Kelvin Bridge, on the other side from the underground station, and as it happened corn flowers were still in season, the floral emblem of East Prussia, where my grandmother had been born. Her stories about East Prussia were my childhood’s horizon of place and history.

It wasn’t hard to get to the cemetery, I remembered the bus route quite clearly, up through Possil and Lambhill. And, at the northern edge of the Lambhill scheme, the cemetery. First the Catholic graveyard on the rising valley slope, with many Italian names on gravestones as well as Irish ones, then, behind a wall with a gap big enough to drive through, the Protestant section.

There had been no extension to the cemetery. My grandmother’s grave was still in the last row against the dry stone wall in the northeast corner. A plain headstone:

Helene Post 1898-1960
(born Kerutt)

Beneath these words spaces for two more names, my mother had bought the grave for my grandmother, herself and me.

The wall was just low enough to look over, nothing built on the other side in the intervening 36 years: a field, rolling countryside, then the bare Campsie Fells, rearing up like a green cliff face. The road to the left coming up from Lambhill housing estate. We put down the flowers, stood silently for a few moments. I was glad that the cemetery was prettier than I had remembered, greener, with low trees and bushes scattered across it, some of it bare cropped grass. And, looking north, the steep bare hills, so different from the forests and lakes my grandmother had described, a place where the wolves supposedly came across the border from Lithuania in winter. Another of the little rituals I never tired of with my grandmother took place on the mystery tours to the Trossachs or Arrochar. Not far, proper bus tours up the west coast or to Royal Braemar left early, the mystery tour starting at 2 or 3 in the afternoon was always the last resort – with a stop for tea and scones at Callandar or Aberfoyle, perhaps in the tea room of the Baillie Nicholl Jarvie. And so, whenever we passed, or passed through any body of trees I put the same question to my grandmother: Ist das ein Wald? Ist das ein richtiger Wald? – Is that a forest? Is that a real forest? – And always, slowly, a slight shake of the head, the same reply, as it had to be. Nein, das ist kein richtiger Wald. – No, that’s not a real, a proper forest.

There were always sheep, and sometimes, more for display than anything else, Highland Cattle. I think we liked them best, and just looking out of the window.

Category >> Stories