A Blast From the Past
“It’s a sobering thought for many, but the reality is that after you die you will most likely be totally forgotten after three generations.”
I hear it all the time in my life story workshops. I wish I had asked my parents more about their past. If only I had recorded our conversations. I have no idea what my mother’s life was like during the war.
I can echo those sentiments. My parents and grandparents rarely spoke of the past. We were not a family who kept journals or saved old documents. I only have a handful of items from their past - my grandfather’s rosary beads, my grandmother’s pewter vase, and a photo of my mother in her twenties taken by a professional photographer. These items, however, don’t tell the stories. My grandfather, while Catholic, never attended church but expected my grandmother to attend every Sunday with my mother and her siblings. My grandmother was gifted the vase at eighteen years old while working as a maid for a local family. My mother wears a Mona Lisa smile in her photograph. Why did my grandfather not go to church? What was it like working as a maid for a wealthy family? What was that beguiling smile on my mother’s face? Had she already met my father?
For many years, the stories of my family mattered little to me, except for the war stories. Occasionally, when my grandparents were visiting, they would talk with my parents about their involvement in the Dutch resistance. I would listen quietly, trying not to draw attention to myself, as the conversation would shut down when I was present. They hid families in the attic and a radio in the cellar. My grandfather dressed as a Nazi to help a friend escape imprisonment. My grandmother snuck mothballs into the soup simmering at Nazi headquarters next to the hospital, making it undrinkable for the enemy but providing much-needed nourishment for the patients. My father spoke of witnessing a school friend - shaven, tarred and feathered - paraded through local streets for sleeping with a Nazi soldier.
Now, with my grandparents and father long gone and my mother dying only a few years ago, I wish I had paid closer attention and asked more questions.
The other week, a blast from the past - actually, several blasts from the past!
A message from my mother’s cousin, closer to me in age. My great-aunt celebrates 100 in August. My cousin was sorting through her mother’s photos. Moments later, my maternal grandparents and mother appeared on my screen. Photos I had never seen. One of my mother - smiling and happy. My mother was not a happy woman. I only have a few early photos of her. And she rarely smiled.
Another message from my cousin. She had found a 16-page history of her parents, my grandfather’s younger brother and his wife, written by my grandfather, as a poem, in 1990 for their 40th anniversary. She sent me a photo of the first page.
I remember although it was a long time ago
That our father said to me,
You're going to Uncle Jan today
Then we have our hands free.
I remember, it was very early in the morning
When I left for our house.
I had noticed for a long time
Things weren't all right at home.
I will need to read the rest of the poem to confirm the meaning of these words, but I suspect they were preparing for the birth of my great-uncle and did not want a child underfoot. The whole pregnancy experience was probably also unspoken. I wonder if my grandfather even knew a sibling was on the way? My mother told me once that when she was expecting, she was not allowed to tell her 12-year-old brother she was pregnant.
The blast from the past did not end there. When I wrote Old Hands Hold Memories a couple of weeks ago, I realized how little I knew of my paternal grandparents. Yes, rumour had it that my grandfather was possibly the bastard child of Dutch royalty, but as you can imagine, no one spoke of that! And my grandmother’s family supposedly owned a crumbled castle somewhere in France. Again, another vague, unsupported story. Ancestry testing has revealed no royal blood or ancestors in France. No one, as far as I know, has done a genealogy of my father’s side of the family. Only a few family stories have been shared. And the stories I did hear revealed themselves over the years to be couched in half-truths. I decided to google my grandmother’s family and some keywords - the name of the municipality where they lived and my grandfather’s occupation. To my delight, one of the results that popped up was a 34-page interview with my uncle, my father’s younger brother, conducted when he was in his early 80’s! Now 88, I wish I could visit him and interview him but he has slipped into dementia, just like my father and aunt did many years ago. An ominous thought as I contemplate my later years - a piece of history I would rather not know.
It took some digging to find that the Google document was from a website dedicated to the culture and heritage of the city of Leiden, where I was also born. The interview focused mainly on his career and the history of Leiden as he was a director for a company that did restorations on historic buildings. But he also spoke of his personal life, both as a child and adult. And so this month, I finally learned a bit more about my father’s family.
In the interview, my uncle spoke of growing up in a working-class neighbourhood, and told stories of his family and friends. Although only a young child during the war, he still had many recollections to share. He offered stories of my grandfather’s work for the resistance during the war. He said that my grandfather was a well-respected businessman, and recounted his years as a prosperous butcher. I learned my grandfather belonged to a motorcycle club and owned one of the first cars in the neighbourhood, an Austin. I was surprised to read that my grandparents were very religious in their later years - I have no memory of deep beliefs.
He shared that my grandmother was a good mother. And that is all I learned about my grandmother. She was a good mother.