Oma and Opa

My grandmother was the youngest in her family; her eldest sister Martha was 18 years older than she was. She had another sister, Adele, always called simple “Dele”, who lived just a few hundred metres away, and two brothers, Paul and Karl.

Paul had been her favourite brother; he was a soldier with a regiment of guards in Berlin when the first World War broke out. From what Oma told us, he was gentle, art and music-loving; he worked in the household of his commanding officer. His regiment was sent to the Western Front and came through Solingen. Paul was allowed to stay with his family overnight to say good-bye. Oma said that the next morning he stood at the window overlooking the valley with tears in his eyes. Not long afterwards he was dead. Oma had a photo of him on a wall of her bedroom for the rest of her life. I have no idea what became of it; I think my mother threw a lot of things out.

Oma had learnt to be a tailoress, had done a proper apprenticeship, and was very skilled at making clothes. It was something she absolutely loved doing. All through my childhood she made my clothes, her own clothes, and a lot of those my mother wore.

Apart from that she worked in the garden; there was a large vegetable garden, a quarter of which was reserved for growing potatoes, another quarter for runner beans, and the rest a mix of vegetables and lettuces. Potatoes were a feature of every main meal, eaten at lunchtime; even when she made noodles, there were potatoes as well. Oma also had chickens, who roamed in an area that was really a small orchard, between the house and the road, with apple, pear and plum trees. There was always a rooster with the chickens. Every now and then Opa would kill a chicken by chopping its head off. I sometimes watched, strange though that now seems to me, and then Oma cooked it and we ate it. I always got to eat the heart.

Oma did not like visitors. Only her sister, Dele, was truly welcome; she came regularly to share the valley gossip with Oma. When Opa’s brothers visited, Oma would stay more or less in the kitchen, and if they stayed too long, she would stand in the kitchen, silently clenching her fists. My mother, by the way, was similar; she never had friends and regarded friendships as something odd and utterly unnecessary.

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Opa was very different. He came from a large family. He had five brothers and two sisters. Their father was a small, red-haired, jolly man, a scissor sharpener, and his mother was a strongly-built, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who had been forced to leave school at 12, because she did not fit into the bench any more. It seems that no-one had the idea to provide a table and chair for that girl. She reportedly came from a family of itinerant basket-weavers and pot-menders from Bohemia. It sounds like a fairly accurate description of a gypsy family.

The brothers were all known by their nicknames. It was years before I realized that Opa’s eldest brother, always known as “Dicke” (fat one), was actually called Karl. The others were Otto (Otz), Hugo (Hüh), Ernst (Ern), and Friedrich (Frie). Opa’s name was Hermann, always called “Hermes”. He was actually the second son called Hermann; the first one had died in infancy, and when the next baby boy came along, they recycled the name. Hard to imagine, nowadays. His sisters were Elfriede or Frieda, only ever referred to as “Friedchen and, the name of the other one, who had epilepsy, escapes me. She, her husband and daughter Annelore lived in the original family house in Untenwiddert. It was tiny: kitchen and living-room downstairs, 2 bedrooms upstairs. Opa said the kids slept head-to-toe piled into the beds.

From the stories Opa told it was a happy, if raucous, family. At Christmas, the decorations in the Christmas tree were biscuits baked by their mother. By mid-afternoon the kids were playing games, hurling their wooden clogs (they had no other shoes) into the tree; if a biscuit fell down, the thrower was entitled to eat it.

Then there was the occasion when a neighbour proudly showed their mother two baskets of apples she had harvested from her tree. Opa’s family did not have an apple tree. So: mother turned to her sons and said: “You boys stand by and watch that woman lord it over your mother?” “Say no more, mother,”, said the boys, and then they roamed down the hill and through the valley around Rüden, stealing apples. When they got home, their mother had three big baskets of apples. “Well done, boys!” she said.

Solingen had a number of men’s choirs, and as far as I know, all the brothers belonged to the local one, the “Widderter Sängerchor.” Widdert was the village where the family lived. Opa belonged to that choir all his life. Once he had married my Oma and moved into her home in the valley, he walked up the hill, through the forest, the same way I first went to school, every week, I think it was a Tuesday night, for the choir rehearsal. Late in the evening, in the dark, he walked down the hill through the forest home.

But before he got married, he lived through the First World war, as did all his brothers. All came back; only one, Otto, lost a leg. Opa was a story-teller. He told stories about the war years and his experiences there for the rest of his life, and we heard all his stories many times. But no-one was ever unkind enough to point out that we all knew his stories, and the repetition means that I remember them well.

His Cologne-based regiment was first sent to the east, to Hungary, and maybe elsewhere, and then to the western front, and into the trenches. He spoke about it all without rancour, and it took me years to realize that the people he referred to as “der Franzmann” were actually the enemy.

My favourite story was the one where he and a few comrades got out of the trenches one morning to bury their dead, after signalling the other side – the French or the English - as they regularly did – and they found a ‘yellow dog’ sitting next to the body of a British officer. From the description it was a Labrador, a breed not known in Germany at the time. They took the dog with them, and as Opa happened to have a few days’ leave coming up, he ended up taking the dog on the train home to his parents and sisters. They called the dog Senta, although it was a male, and the dog become a much-loved family pet.

By the end of the war Opa had two Iron Crosses, one First Class for saving the life of an officer, and one Second Class for saving the lives of several of his fellow soldiers. I do not know any details. He did not talk about that.

Prostate cancer: part 1

Secondary School