Fern der Heimat / Loin de la patrie
1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
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.
4.
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.
All over Italy they know his concertina/Poppa Piccolino, Poppa Piccolino/He plays so prettily to every signorina/Poppa Piccolina from sunny Italy.
Take me back to Constantinople/No, you can’t go back to Constantinople/Now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople/Why did Constantinople get the works?/That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.
I sailed up the Skagerrak/And sailed down the Kattegat/Through the harbour and up to the quay/And there she stands waiting for me/With a welcome so warm and so gay/Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.
On the baby’s knuckle, on the baby’s knee/where will the baby’s dimple be? /If it’s always covered by the safety-pin/where will the dimple be?
I do not know what fate awaits me/I only know I must be brave/For I must face a man who hates me/Or lie a coward/A cravin’ coward/Or lie a coward in my grave.
A man with so many notches on his gun/Everyone admired the fearless stranger/Danger was this man’s specialty/So they never bossed nor double-crossed/The Man from Laramie.
Champion the Wonder Horse/Champion the Wonder Horse/Like a streak of lightnin’ flashin’ cross the sky…/The time will come whe everyone will know the name of/Champion the Wonder Horse.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock/Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’ clock rock…/We’re gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight/We’re gonna rock, gonna rock aound the clock tonight.
In the music charts, 1953 1954 1955. Songs evoking faraway places at a time when foreign travel was next to impossible, baby boom novelty songs, songs from Westerns, imaginary or not. (Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger stay at Glasgow’s Grand Central Station Hotel!)
Then there were the songs, the surprisingly small number of songs, sung on the bus returning from Sunday school outings or from class trips on which I went with my mother when she was a student teacher. (Trips that combined views of the natural sublime with the utilitarian, Loch Katrine and Glasgow’s waterworks presented as 8th Wonder of the World.) I suppose there was only a limited number of songs of which the boys and girls could be expected to know the words or in which they could join in. The singing was always initiated by the teachers or Sunday school leaders when the return leg of the journey was already half over, in the shadow of the hills around Glasgow, so to speak, home metaphorically in sight. The children were to be delivered to their parents in cheerful mood, all squabbles and bad behaviour forgiven and forgotten. Everyone had a good time! children and teachers alike.
And they would sing:
She’ll be coming round the mountain/When she comes (Toot, toot!)/She’ll be comin round the mountain/When she comes (Toot,toot!) Singing ay-ay yipee yipee-ay/ay-ay yipee yipee-ay/singing ay-ay yipee, ay-ay yipee/ay-ay yippee yipee-ay.
Oh the Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen/Seem home sweet home to me/The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen/Are what I long to see.
Oh ye’ll take the high road and/I’ll take the low road/And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye/But me and my true love/Will never meet again/On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
And the inevitable ‘I belong to Glasgow’ in all its fake egalitarianism. And if it was a Sunday school trip, even the church elder or two present (but young people, you understand) would join in, just to show (others, themselves) that they weren’t snobs, oh no.
I belong to Glasgow/Dear old Glasgow town…/I’m only a common old working chap/As anyone here can see/But, when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday/Glasgow belongs to me!
My mother and me would be sitting on facing banquettes at the rear of the bus along with a couple of the particularly naughty children kept apart from the rest and she would nudge me to join in the singing, but I couldn’t, not really, and I sat there, a foreign body, barely mouthing some words, sat there like a stookie, as my father would probably have put it, but at least he never came on such a trip anyway.
It was a world before rock ’n’ roll, on the brink of rock ‘n’ roll, worlds and less than ten years before the Beatles, worlds before James Brown, before Folk and Protest, before Bob Dylan, worlds before Cream and Led Zeppelin, before Disco, before Punk and Rap, before the DJ saved my life before House Music all night long, before dance clubs became a big as the biggest dance halls had ever been.
A world in which for many people the quickest way to see moving pictures of the Coronation was to wait for the (colour!) film of the occasion that was distributed to cinemas a week after the event. We went, of course, saw the raindrops on the carriage pane in front of the pale face under the crown, the slowly waving hand. The Anniesland Odeon was packed. To my mother, Elizabeth was at once the professional woman carrying out her duties flawlessly, and at the same time, as monarch, an embodiment of continuity and stability, a guarantee that her second life would not be destroyed as the first had been.
My mother, said my mother, in the same tone of voice as she says, ‘your father’, didn’t have a single sensible thought in her head. She was always, continued my mother, laying cards, all day she would lay cards, and sit there, chewing and cracking coffee beans, and if it wasn’t coffee beans she would be biting her finger nails, muttering over the cards, reading her fortune. And she would forget all about cleaning the house and there was dust under the cupboards and under the bed and I knew I didn’t want to live like that. And to underline my grandmother’s foolishness, my mother went on to say, if I wanted to skip school on Saturday morning, my mother wouldn’t object at all and I would dictate an excuse note to her, which she would sign, so that I could take it with me on Monday morning. And she could never hold on to money, and was always spending it on clothes and shoes that were too small. And she didn’t like fruit, there was never fruit in the house, except apples for my father, for his packed lunch, and fruit was all I wanted to eat as a child, said my mother. Then, as final confirmation of her mother’s, my grandmother’s lack of sense, my mother told me about her mother’s cucumber salad.
She would cut the cucumber into very thin slices, said my mother, and place them in layers in a large bowl and between the layers she put salt, and then a plate weighed down by a stone would be placed on top and the cucumber and salt left for a couple of hours. The accumulated liquid would be drained off and water poured over the cucumber slices and then the bowl would be drained again. After that the cucumber slices would be mixed with sour cream. And you couldn’t taste a thing, said my mother, just the salt
Whether my grandmother made it successfully or not (and you should probably add some dill) and whether my mother liked it or not, this is, in fact, a standard eastern European salad recipe. In Polish it’s called miseria, perhaps because it was seen as a poor people’s dish or a dish for hard times and because cucumbers are cheap to buy in season.
Perhaps my grandmother was not a good cook, but I loved and grew plump on the endless plates of rice with melted butter and cinnamon, of pancakes made with sliced apples, of potato pancakes sprinkled with sugar, of chips and fried eggs that she made for me. And that no doubt was further proof for my mother of my grandmother’s thoughtlessness, but my mother was out working and so it was left to my grandmother to feed me.
I don’t have many memories of my grandfather. I last saw him at my father’s funeral, and no doubt he took my hand at the end of the ceremony and I suppose he must have been at the funeral of my grandmother, my mother’s mother, my oma, six years earlier, although I have no recollection of him being there.
My grandfather, James Chalmers, was a trombonist, both a player and a teacher. He was born in 1890 in Kilbirnie in North Ayrshire where his father was a hecklemaker. (A heckle or hackle was, or is, a comb used to separate the coarse fibres of flax or hemp.) He served an apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards to become a journeyman ship plater. That is still the description given on the certificate of marriage (to Elsie Sutherland) in 1913 and on the birth certificate of my father two years later. To begin with my grandfather will have learned the trombone in a Kilbirnie band. By the early 1920’s, however, he was a member of the Stonehouse Silver Band, at that time considered one of the best bands in Scotland. (Stonehouse was a rural and mining village south of Glasgow.) Not only that, he had won the title of British Empire Champion Trombonist. He was now a professional musician and featured on recordings. In 1933 he was filmed by Pathé Pictorial for their newsreel, playing as a soloist with the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Band. The band, the musicians resplendent in slightly fanciful uniforms (every one an officer!), are introduced by a title (there is no voiceover yet) informing audiences: ‘The Joker./The Scottish C.W.S. Band/ (Winner of many contests/North and South of the Border/and/James Chalmers/The celebrated Champion Trombonist/play this famous/Burlesque for us – ’. My grandfather subsequently went on to be a member of the Scottish National Orchestra – this was in the days before orchestra musicians were conservatory trained. Later, in semi-retirement, he continued teaching and played the summer season in dance bands in the more genteel seaside resorts like Scarborough.
Once, on one of the rare occasions when my father had to look after me on a weekend afternoon, he took me to see his father, whom I hardly knew. It was some time in the late 50’s, I was eight or nine and my grandfather was living in a flat in Scotstoun with his second wife. (My grandfather’s first married home, where my father was born, had also been in Scotstoun, in the west of Glasgow, close by the strip of shipyards and iron works then lining the north bank of the River Clyde.) He and my father didn’t look alike, James had a longer face with a long prominent nose, there was something coldly Presbyterian and remote about him, even if he wasn’t a believer, whereas my father’s more rounded delicate, one might almost say weaker features were inherited from his mother.
Without me knowing of it beforehand, this visit turned out to be a kind of audition, to see whether it would be worth my grandfather’s time to teach me to play. I remember we stood in the hallway, lobby, as it’s called in Glasgow, my grandfather took the big shiny golden-yellow instrument out of its case and helped me hold it. As instructed I blew into the mouthpiece of the trombone, but nothing came out the other end but the quietist of spitting raspberries. “Nae puff,” judged my grandfather dismissively and with that the subject of learning the trombone was closed. I have no idea whether my father was disappointed. My grandfather, I suspect, was rather relieved. I don’t think he had much patience with children, even though he had been the father of five. My father was always at a loss as to what to do with me and it may be that my grandfather feared that the trombone lessons were intended to take me off my father’s hands.
It will have been in Primary 4 at Temple School. Mrs McCabe must have noticed my boy soprano voice during singing lessons. The voice itself and the way it held a tune. She had me stand in front of the class to sing the hymn ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill’. I remember Mrs McCabe’s attentiveness as I sang and as she accompanied me at the piano and how the silence in the room seemed to grow and surround us both as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I knew the words of all four verses, but I was very angry at being singled out and was at the same time moved by the words, the beauty of the melody and by my own voice and these things combined, my anger and the melancholy and resignation of the hymn, brought on my tears.
Dependent on Thy bounteous breath,
We seek Thy grace alone,
In childhood, manhood, age and death
To keep us still Thine own.
There were a great many hymns and psalms and paraphrases sung, both at primary school and later at the High School. At Temple they were often part of Religious Instruction and of preparation for the end of term service, for which we walked in procession, two by two, to a grey church at Anniesland Cross. At secondary school there was assembly, with a hymn or psalm every morning. Except perhaps at Christmas, these were of two main kinds. There were those which, like ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill’ expressed a resigned trust in God’s will. God is judge of the worshipper’s salvation or suitability to be counted among the elect, and the underlying doubt as to whether one is going to pass the test is captured and reinforced by the vocal line. The most famous example is the 23rd Psalm which, to the tune Crimmond, and as made famous in a recording by the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, was an informal Scottish anthem in the 1940′s and 1950′s. The words speak with conviction but the music is so mournful that it’s hard to be certain of any more joyfulness in the next life than in this one.
Goodness and mercy all my life
shall surely follow me:
And in God’s house for evermore
my dwelling-place shall be.
The other big group of hymns presented God as a warrior king with the martiality of 17th century poetry: “His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form,/And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.” The congregation, the worshippers are cast in the roles of the Lord’s warriors, confident of having been chosen. Faith is vindicated. The pillar of fire may not actually be mentioned, one may not even see it, but the singers can feel its heat as they are led forward into the Promised Land (or Heaven’s Gates). This is the image evoked in the 100th Psalm, the Old 100, which was sung by the soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army before they went into battle.
O enter then his gates with praise,
Approach with joy his courts unto
Praise, Laud and bless his name always
For it is seemly so to do.
If I always think of the 23rd Psalm as sung by an unaccompanied choir, then with this second group I inevitably hear a church organ bellowing and rumbling between the verses and along with the singers, all the stops pulled out. One of the grandest of these triumphant hymns is ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, in which “Zion, city of our God” is
On the Rock of Ages founded
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded
Thou mayst smite at all they foes.
This was sung to the same Haydn-derived melody as the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied, with its opening line and refrain “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” – Germany above all. The anthem has been misrepresented (and misused) as a call to conquest. It is, rather, a more modest plea, dating from the 1840′s, for national unity as against princely particularism. It is usually played today in a way that brings out its haunting, pastoral quality and is a reminder of its use by Haydn in a string quartet. ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken,’ sung to the same tune by a large congregation to a resounding organ accompaniment rehearsed, for a few minutes at least, a powerful merging of religious and national election through Scotland’s national church.
Blest inhabitants of Zion,
Washed in the Redeemer’s blood,
Jesus, whom their souls rely on,
Makes them kings and priests of God.
And of course it can be an exhilarating pleasure to be singing in church as part of such a congregation: The organ inexorable and echoing in the impressive pauses between the verses, the crowd of voices rising together to fill the nave: “Jesus Christ is risen today-hay, hahaha-layloohoojah!/Our triumphant holy day-hay, hahaha-layloohoojah.”
These hymns and psalms were very different from what had been sung at the Sunday school in Temple I attended for a while when I was seven or eight. It was held in the hall of the red sandstone church at the corner of Crow Road and Strathcona Drive. Here the hymns were as sweet as the scenes on the stamps we got as a reward for attendance and which were stuck in an album week by week. They showed highlights of the Gospel story or scenes from the Parables with appropriate Bible verses below each picture. Here we sang ‘All things bright and beautiful’ or ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’ or
Jesus bids us shine
With a pure clear light
Like a little candle
Burning in the night.
In this world of darkness;
So let us shine,
You in your small corner,
And I in mine.
What we sang at secondary school, at the High School, had to have a tune and an arrangement which six or seven hundred boys whose voices were variously yet to break, were breaking and had broken, could manage in unison with piano accompaniment (Mr Bolling or Mr McGill). These hymns, whether representing the humble, doubting believer or the believer triumphant were part of a predictable, prescribed annual cycle with Christmas, Easter and Armistice Day as its most important fixed points. Just as inevitably, before the summer exams there was always the admonitory Paraphrase 11. (Smiles on the platform as its announced, an audible release of air, a momentary relaxation ripples through the hall.)
Oh happy is the man who hears
Instruction’s warning voice:
And who celestial wisdom makes
His early, only choice.
Friday morning assembly at the High School was an extended one. The school orchestra tuned up and played, the school chaplain gave a brief homily and every four weeks the rabbi was also on the platform to read the lesson, which was otherwise the duty of the head boy or another prefect. The Jewish boys attended then, which usually they didn’t.
The school chaplain (he was minister at one of the city’s churches, I forget which) looked like Karl Malden and in my memory he has assumed Karl Malden’s bulbous nose, which he may or may not have had, or perhaps I’ve simply imposed Karl Malden on the figure of the school chaplain, because Karl Malden so often played a priest (tormented, hypocritical) though not in ‘Double Indemnity’. The rabbi was very short, he stepped onto a stool to read from the big Bible on the lectern; his head was much too large for his body, half of which was a huge protruding hunch.
At Friday assembly we sang a hymn as on other days and on alternate weeks either ‘God save the Queen’ or the school song ‘O, alma mater glorious’. The latter I guess to have been written ‘between the wars’. Despite the references to God its resignation is that of the secularised ritual of Armistice Day. The words imply that confidence in empire (eternal in time and space, “on which the sun never sets”) is fading or gone as is a belief in the hereafter, but a sense of service or duty has to be upheld nevertheless.
To those who follow after,
To fill the place we fill,
Who come with shout and laughter,
For ours that shall be still.
We trust this sacred mission,
Pray God when we are gone,
They raise the high tradition
And pass it glorious on
(And pass it glorious on).
My second and last public appearance as a singer was in first or second year at the High School, just before my voice broke. This time I wasn’t a solo performer, but only one member of a mass choir. Every year the school mounted a concert, organised by the music department and given on two successive evenings in the old St. Andrew’s Hall in the centre of Glasgow. The hall sat more than 2,000 people, but it wasn’t hard to fill it with proud parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, older brothers and sisters. Orchestral pieces were played, suites or movements from symphonies, there were choirs of different ages and soloists, but the climax of the evening was always the combination of orchestra and mass choir. It consisted of 200 or so boys who, unless they also sang in one of the smaller groups, had to wait patiently through the preceding concert, sitting in tiers of seats behind the orchestra platform and below the organ pipes.
That year, the year of my final appearance, the music teachers had chosen a dramatic passage from Verdi’s ‘Aida’. Once again we sang about glory, but though thrilling, this was bombastic kitsch compared to the hymns at assembly every morning. At the conductor’s signal we stood up and straightened our backs. We represented the people of Egypt.
Glory to Egypt’s holy gods
Long may they still protect her
To Egypt’s king most mighty
To Egypt’s king most mighty king
Let our triumphant voices sing
dumdadumdadumdadum – GLORY!
dumdadumdadumdadum – GLORY!
Glory to our king
To his praise we sing…
And so on.
At the end the audience clapped and roared with approval, stamped their feet and we had to do the whole not very long thing again.
The St. Andrew’s Hall was destroyed by fire soon after, in 1962, and subsequent school concerts were necessarily less ambitious. That was just as well, because I was never again picked for a choir. My voice broke, I was probably too diffident when I auditioned and Mr McGill quickly dismissed me with a wave of the hand. And so I had to go to the following concerts with my mother and sit with her in my school uniform on the balcony. At least I think we did, because I have only the most shadowy memories of other school concerts and they’ve become mixed up in my mind with yet other concerts, in the St. Andrew’s Hall or the Glasgow Concert Hall, a temporary replacement in a converted cinema, or the school assembly hall. Perhaps it was too much of a disappointment to my mother that I wasn’t on the platform, playing the cello or some other instrument in the school orchestra and so, after a while, after the next concert or the one after that, school concerts weren’t mentioned any more, and I had no interest in urging her to go, which would have meant me accompanying her and sitting among the middle class Scottish family groups, and because the halls were smaller now, there was less pressure on boys to buy tickets, and so we both passed over the matter in silence. Perhaps it was like that.
***
My mother didn’t write much. Her notes or cards to me were heartfelt but formulaic and had an accent which is not English and not of their time. “My dear son,” she would begin, “you have now reached your 30th year…” or “Son, you are old enough now to know…”
Two days after my mother’s death, going through bills and documents, I found a scrap of paper. It was quite out of place, because it was nothing official, a 3 ½ x 2 3/4″ page torn from a diary, from June 1966, the month and year I left school, with a note in pencil in very small letters. She had written:
“M. told me today
how he had to sing in front of
the class at Temple “By Cool
Siloam’s” Mrs played
piano he says in his soprano
voice tears coursing down his face.
He says he did not have to
sob. they just flowed.
It is his favourite hymn.”
My mother had prepared and typed up the order of her funeral service – and paid for it – more than ten years before she died. It was a funeral to which very few came, but it was her final gesture of propriety. Only the undertaker’s tenor voice saved the singing from being no more than disharmonious murmuring. My mother had chosen two hymns. The first one, relatively modern, I did not know, ‘O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder.’ Its final verse begins with the lines
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
to take me home, where joy shall fill my heart!
The second hymn, following the Lord’s Prayer was ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill.’
My mother was talking about her childhood. About how she would sometimes stay the night with the teenage daughter of the Dorns, who owned Kantstrasse 19 and also had a painting and decorating business, the office and storeroom of which was in the courtyard. She said it was my grandmother who had got the job, and the flat that went with it, as caretaker, although there was an informal understanding that her husband, my grandfather, would carry out any necessary small repairs.
My grandparents had come to Berlin in 1925, when my mother was only a few months old, and at first they had lived in an allotment hut – a Laube – beside a railway line in Wilmersdorf, before moving to Kantstrasse, in Charlottenburg, in the heart of bourgeois Berlin. “My father had difficulty finding full-time work until he was taken on by the stonemason – ” and here I couldn’t make out what my mother said – Galitzer, Galinsky. “What’s the name?” I said and jumped up to fetch a scrap of paper and make a note of it. My mother was silent for a moment. “If you write that down,” she said, “I’m going to stop talking altogether.” And her eyes turned dark and shiny as brown marbles and she glared at me in the way that would have overawed and scared me even in my forties. Now it didn’t work any more, but I was hurt and angry and I shouted at my mother: “Where is my family? I don’t have a family.” (Now you’re bringing that up again, muttered my mother.) “You never think about the consequences of what you do.” (The consequences for other people, I meant, for myself and my daughter Hanna, I wanted to say.) “Stories have names, stories have names in them,” I repeated childishly, helplessly, as if I were confronted by a recalcitrant Rumpelstiltskin.
*
Later, I come into the kitchen and my mother is bent over the sink, her hands in the basin, and for a moment, from behind, she looks like a child playing in the water and soap bubbles. But a child doesn’t have a hump.
Since her fall my mother has hardly been further than the gate to the churchyard behind the house. She was very lucky, she only broke a couple of vertebrae – smashed and lost a couple of vertebrae – but after the brace was taken off, she slowly, not immediately, became more stooped, shrank, and the hump ballooned out from her shoulders. She was always a small woman, but what must it feel like for someone who always stood so straight, to go out now as a hunchback? How must it feel? Perhaps it’s shame, I suppose one can call it that, as much as greater frailty, which restricts her to the ground floor of the house and the few yards of patio and back garden where she throws down crumbs for the birds.
I remember a picture of my mother. (Recently I suggested that we look through the photograph albums together – “What do you want to do that for?” she snapped, instantly on the brink of a bad mood.) I don’t know when it was taken, perhaps still in Germany around 1950. The photographer has caught her striding down a street, in a winter coat, black plaits pinned up, her head turned a little to the side, looking straight into the camera eye. Maybe times were bad, there were disappointments, but here is someone, the image seems to suggest, confidently facing the future. It’s not true, of course, she was always determinedly walking away from things, from whatever past, parts of the past were a burden to her. And she couldn’t walk away from her mother, my grandmother, which is why she became so resentful of her, I think. My mother thought, that her past, these pasts had or should have nothing to do with now, the present. She always acted decisively, but because she didn’t reflect on who she was or had been, her decisions were invariably wrong ones.
(December 2006)
*
When I went through my mother’s documents and pictures, the photograph was no longer there. She must have destroyed it. Why? I have no idea. There is no one she would have given it to. [And so, like her words, her stories, it exists only in this text.]
Also missing was a group of photos of her father, playing cards, joking with friends, a beer bottle in his hand. They were the only pictures of her father. Of the two teenage class photographs I remembered, one, with a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind the class of girls, was gone. In the remaining photograph the most prominent image behind the pupils is of innocuous Cologne Cathedral. Some of the girls are obviously best friends. My mother gazes out at the camera as if she were in a different picture. It is as if her portrait had been inserted in the group portrait. Self-contained, with her smooth skin and dark eyes, her face framed by jet-black hair [...], my mother looks like an ancient Egyptian who has somehow squeezed in among all these German girls.
(December 2007)