My grandmother
When I was small I couldn’t pronounce the words ‘Grandma’ and ‘Grandpa’, the best I could manage was Mama and Ba. This is how my grandparents came to be called Mama and Ba by everybody. Mama cooked wonderfully, but her speciality was potato pancakes. Nobody else in the family has ever been able to make them like she could. My mother could beat her hands down when it came to baking cakes but Mama’s potato pancakes were world class. She would prepare a mountain of them, grating potatoes and onions until there was a huge pile of oniony potatoey mush which was then bound with flour and egg. The frying pan would be put on a fierce heat; the pall of smoke wafting from the kitchen would permeate most of the house. Then there would be a loud hiss as the first dollop of the potato mixture hit the sizzling hot oil. Mama worked tirelessly, patting pancakes flat with her spatula with one hand, sipping from a glass of sherry with the other. One by one golden brown potato pancakes were flipped onto a plate and piled high; we’d eat them on their own sprinkled with salt.
We lived at my grandparents’ house until I was about three. They lived in a 1930’s semi-detached house in a quiet street in a northwest London suburb. During the summer, the quietness was only occasionally broken by the chimes of the Tony’s ice cream van. He never did much business in that street, not many kids lived there, people rarely ventured out for his ice cream. On the rare occasions I was treated, pistachio was my favourite, coffee came a close second. If I sit still, close my eyes and concentrate, I can almost smell my grandmother’s kitchen. It’s a warm, slightly spicy smell; cloves and bay leaves mixed with freshly brewed coffee. And just at this minute the memories that are coming to me are of thick lentil soup with dumplings, an earthenware jug of coffee at breakfast time, along with Rice Krispies and boiled eggs, and slices of white rye bread thickly buttered and spread with jam.
The house had pebble-dashed walls that grazed your skin when you accidentally brushed against them, and a black and white mock Tudor frontage, as was the in thing at the time. The wooden front gate sometimes swung open, more often scraped, at a lazy angle onto steep stone steps that led down into the front garden which was populated by my grandfather’s prized rose bushes. Once through the pale green front door you found yourself in the hall. The stairs were to the left, straight ahead led to the dining room and kitchen. On the wall on the right hung a small, framed oil painting of a woman chasing geese, apparently painted by a German friend of my grandfather. The woman had a fierce, determined look that always made me think of witches.
A couple of steps further found you at the door to the front room, a cold, slightly damp-smelling room with heavy embossed wallpaper. The best furniture, which was never sat on, was in there, along with a cabinet full of special things that were never used. Beneath the stairs was the cupboard where the upright Hoover lived. Everything about that beastly appliance seemed ominous to me; the long handle with the trailing snake of electrical flex wound round it, the slack, dark brown dust bag that puffed out when it roared into life. That noise terrified me; when that thing came out from under the stairs I crawled straight in there to hide.
The living room was long and narrow. On the left as you entered was a chest of drawers where the radio sat. The radio had a wooden cabinet with round Bakelite knobs, and a glass louvered front printed with intriguing names of faraway places like Berlin and Hilversum. I don’t remember it being switched on very often. In front of you, close to the wall, was the dining table, to the right the sofa and armchairs. Years later, after my grandfather had bought a television, he would sit there on a Saturday afternoon watching Jackie Pallo and Billy Two Rivers wrestling to Kent Walton’s commentary. Straight ahead was the cramped kitchen, my grandmother’s domain.
My grandfather
My grandfather was a wonderful man, handsome and charming, a sweet talker who bypassed difficult situations with a twinkle of the eye and a smile. The slightest hint of confrontation would have him walking a country mile to avoid it, or at least a circuit of the local golf course, filling his pockets with lost golf balls on the way.
My grandmother, on the other hand, was a doodlebug of tension about to run out of fuel at any second. She had never really adjusted to living in England; if it hadn’t been for the war she would never have left Germany. She was the youngest child of a proud Prussian family and was used to being spoilt and pampered. With her haughty attitude, her pride and her Greta Garbo good looks she was definitely officer material. Instead, she’d fallen for a good-looking, half-Jewish country boy. She didn’t make friends easily, if at all, and wasn’t good at socialising. She despised most people, felt superior to all of them and didn’t have much in the way of an outlet to let off steam. Consequently the sherry bottle got the occasional caning.
Ba died one autumn in the early 1970s, shortly before my birthday. I went to visit Mama one evening soon after. She cooked an enormous pile of potato pancakes, enough to feed a regiment, just for me. As I manfully attempted to eat my way single-handedly through Potato Pancake Mountain, she sat urging me to “Eat, eat”, knocking back copious amounts of sherry and smoking her way through a packet of Rothmans. Thinking back I remembered that before the Rothmans she used to smoke Du Maurier. Their orange pack looked quite posh, slim and flat with a hinged lid, the cigarettes laid out on the silver foil as if they were arranged in a rather smart cigarette case. But then Mama always did like to do it with style.
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