Childhood

My mother got pregnant without being married or even engaged to my father, and when she told him, he demanded that she get an abortion. Luckily for me she refused. He came from a Catholic Rhineland family and when he told his mother – his father was, to the best of my knowledge, no longer alive - she told him to do the decent thing and ‘marry the girl’. That’s what happened, in a Catholic church in Solingen. I have never known when that wedding took place, have never seen a picture of it or heard anyone say anything about it.

When the birth was imminent, my aunt took my mother to hospital and upgraded her stay from third class, which my mother had booked for herself, to second class. My father did not visit until a couple of days later, looking unshaven and dishevelled. My mother was embarrassed by his appearance.

I have never been told anything much about those few years of my parents’ marriage, but they clearly did not live together when I was born. It was 1948 – most of Germany lay in ruins, and there was a shortage of housing. My grandparents lived in a mediaeval, half-timbered house, part of a cluster of houses called a “Hofschaft”. The main house had by then been divided into three parts to accommodate various sons of the same family, the Kirschbaums. A fourth part had been attached to the main building later. Four of the nine families living there were still called Kirschbaum (cherry tree). There were nicknames for each, according to the name of the son who originally got that place to live. We were the “Manewells”, after someone called Emmanuel, who probably lived a long time ago. The next-door neighbours were the “Lebrechts” after the son called “Leberecht”. Anyway, my grandparents (really my grandmother, because she was born in that house), owned another little house, just ten metres across the yard, which would have been the logical place for my parents to live, but when I was born it was rented out to a family called Dahlhaus, who had been there for many years.

And they were still there, because there was a story my grandmother liked to tell, of how I, probably as a two-year-old was sitting in my little rocking-horse chair in Oma’s living room, Frau Dahlhaus was there, and suddenly I said: “Klein Hotta!” (‘Hotta’ is the German word for horse taught to little children) they looked around to see what I meant and there it was: a mouse. And Frau Dahlhaus, without hesitating, stepped on the mouse and killed it.

So: The Dahlhaus family was still living in that house, my aunt, Tante Rese, was not yet married and therefore lived at home. I was there, my mother would also have been there; my father probably lived with his mother and brother. I don’t know, because questions about any of this were discouraged. I once asked my mother something about the time before I was born and she said coolly: “Darüber unterhalte ich mich mit dir nicht.” (I will not discuss that with you) – I never asked her another question about that time.

A few things were mentioned as time went by. The Dahlhaus family must have left fairly soon after the mouse incident, because my parents moved into that little house.

My father was not prepared to change his lifestyle. According to my mother, he once said “Throw that kid into bed and let’s go dancing.” – Naturally my mother wouldn’t do that, so he went dancing by himself.

When my mother asked him for money for the household he refused. “If you want money, go to work.” So, my mother started to work as a typist and stenographer for the same company where my aunt worked in the accounts department. My mother always clung to her twin sister in ways that I found hard to understand. Anyway, Oma looked after me, and that did not change until I was grown up.

Then when Karneval came around one year – I don’t know whether I was three or four – certainly not older – my mother had saved some money and hidden it under some clothes in the wardrobe upstairs. She was adding something to it when she noticed my father standing on the staircase, watching her. She left the money there. The next day my father and all the money were gone. He did not return until Ash Wednesday, walked in, pulled his trouser pockets inside out to indicate that he had no money left, and shrugged. At that point my mother told him to pack his bags and leave; apparently I sat on the suitcase to help him close it, and off he went.

In those days one needed a reason to get divorced; someone had to be the guilty party. So my father named the person he was having an affair with – the woman he later married, “Ruth”, a widow with a daughter. When the judge asked him “how much are you prepared to pay for your daughter?” His answer was: “Nothing.” That angered the judge and he ordered him to pay 10 Marks a month. He didn’t pay, my mother went back to court about it, and from then on, the money was taken out of his wages before he got access to them.

I have been told that he turned up a few times on his motorbike to visit, but one time he put me in front of him on the bike and I burnt my leg on some hot part of the bike. My mother then asked him to leave us alone and promised to call him if I asked for him. Of course I never did, because I had no memory of him. My immediate family consisted of my mother, my Oma and my Opa, and that was enough.

As my aunt was still single and living at home; there was no room for us in my grandparents’ house, so we stayed in the little house opposite. When my mother went to work, I was left alone in that house, and when I woke up, I went to the window of the bedroom upstairs, opened it and shouted; “Oma!” I usually had to shout many times and for what seemed like a long time, while my grandmother went about her housework. That is my earliest memory. I am sure my family was embarrassed by that shouting, but it could not be helped while Tante Rese was single.

So my mother decided to take the initiative. She devised an ad for Tante Rese, to look for a husband, and they placed it in a newspaper or newspapers. One of the respondents was the man who became her husband: Werner Kuhlen. My mother chose him for Tante Rese, who had wanted to choose someone else. They met and ended up marrying.

Werner’s parents owned a petrol station near a small town called Burscheid, on a main road. It made a lot of money, but it dominated their lives, because it had to be attended all the time, and they were both too keen to make money to employ any helpers. Onkel Werner’s parents retired when he got married, and handed over the petrol station, with a contract that forced them to pay his parents the equivalent of a senior civil servant’s retirement pension, including any pay rises as time went on.

After Tante Rese got married we moved back into my grandparents’ house. The house had two bedrooms, and my mother and I shared the second bedroom until I finished school at almost 19.

The part of the house that was ours had once housed the smithy, I was told. That room was our kitchen. The front door opened straight into it. Behind it was a small living room, dominated by a large table with three chairs and a sofa on one side. There was a coal-burning stove in the room, which provided warmth in winter. That room tended to be very, very warm, while the rest of the unheated house was chilly. The cellar was hewn into the rock, and our cellar was actually under the living-room of the people next door. The first floor had the two bedrooms, and above that was a large roof space, where an unmarried uncle of my Grandmother had once lived. How, I cannot imagine. In my time it was the place where clothes were hung to dry – in winter they froze solid and could be up there for weeks.

A third house had once belonged to my family as well; it was the one in the best position, overlooking the valley and the river. My great-grandparents gave it away to the man renting it, a carpenter. They gave him the house, half the barn that stood a bit above the houses, and a big garden area. Apparently the solicitor who drew up the contract urged them not go ahead with it, but those strange great-grandparents of mine insisted, because they didn’t need a third house.