Wednesday 29 October 2014

A Family Reunion - All Saints’ Day - Part II


Aunt Katie’s welcome smile ushered us in. The black and white tiled hall of the cottage was unheated. We shed our coats, hats, scarves and gloves as  quickly as we could and  made for the kitchen-livingroom  where the round cast iron stove blazed fiercely. Grandfather was sitting in state on his sofa under the window; he didn’t get up for us, and we had to squeeze past the table in front of the sofa to shake his hand. I didn’t like to hug him, a peculiarly stale and dusty smell enveloped him, which offended my nose. Although we liked each other well enough, I was never his favourite grandchild; that honour belonged to my cousin Gisela, Aunt Katie’s daughter, who had lived with grandfather since the day she was born.

I loved Aunt Katie. Her smile lit up her whole face and her deep blue eyes sparkled with pleasure. Her kitchen was always cosy, and the large kettle on top of the black stove sang a sweet song of hot drinks to come. The aroma of a good thick soup tickled my nostrils. I was always hungry at Aunt Katie’s; mother hated that. She never stopped complaining about what she called my greediness in Aunt Katie’s kitchen and my lack of appetite at home.

“Let the child eat if she’s hungry,” Aunt Katie blustered in her forthright manner. “Food in other people’s houses is always tastier than food at home, that’s how it is. Everybody knows that.”

By and by Aunt Katie dished up and we all ate her nourishing soup and a piece of good country bread to mop up the last drop and wipe the bowl clean.

Soon other members of the family arrived and grandfather’s cottage began to feel very small. It was time to wrap up again and walk to the cemetery, which was a mile out of the village. We children were not excused the trek, honouring the dead was a duty we learned to perform early.

Once out of the village, a forbidding reddish brown brick wall rising to more than two metres loomed out of the mist. It was breached by equally tall wrought iron carriage gates which rarely opened. The only other entry into the nunnery and convent school, for that was what lay behind the wall, was a much smaller gate let into one wing of the carriage gates. To the villagers the nuns were mysterious creatures, who  never left the convent but allowed services to be held in their chapel on special occasions and, if you paid them, for funerals and weddings. No village child attended the convent school in those days. Cousin Gisela and her friends thought it a spooky, frightening place; they told each other gruesome stories about little girls being whipped and kept prisoner within the high walls. Whenever we visited grandfather, I refused to walk past the gates without holding on tightly to a grown-up, for fear of a hand reaching out and dragging me inside.

The convent was the last building we passed before we left the main road and took the turning towards the cemetery, an avenue of mighty horse chestnut trees, the candle decked branches a picture in spring, but now dark and bare, shiny brown conkers freed from their prickly wrappers sprinkled in the thick layer of dead leaves underfoot.

The cemetery itself was enclosed by low stone walls, with wrought iron gates, wide enough to allow entrance to a hearse, in the side facing the road. There were no other buildings, no chapel, no trees, just bare open fields in all directions; only the dead safely tucked up underground could escape the bitter East wind and its spiteful, bone-chilling whistle. I kept close to the larger adults, their bulk affording my skinny little frame a small measure of protection.

It was the custom in our family that Aunt Katie and her husband, my mother’s brother, my Uncle Peter, ordered wreaths and flowers in the village and that the others paid for their share on the day. Uncle Peter had only very recently returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, and his little barber shop barely earned him enough to feed his family. Grandfather, whose savings languished untouched, didn’t like to advance him the cost of the wreaths, which meant that the flower seller didn’t get his money until after All Souls Day.

Traditional grave decorations were bouquets and wreaths of asters and chrysanthemums, interwoven with ivy and holly and ferns and backed with fir twigs. The men had been carrying them and now they were fussing over their position on the graves. Mother’s family had three plots, all in a row, one large family grave reserved for couples and two narrower ones for single men and women, much like the large wooden sided double beds and the narrower cots in the bedrooms at home.

When each man was satisfied that his contribution had a prominent enough place on the graves,  the women lit everlasting candles, which burned from the afternoon of All Saints’ day until the morning of the day after All Souls. The candles were placed in small lanterns, heavy based to stop them toppling over in the wind, and set on flat stones, each of which denoted the final resting place of an ancestor or sibling. Great grandparents lay there, grandmother too, and uncles and aunts who had died young. There was room for grandfather and a few more awaiting their turn.

“The graves are looking good this year, the cemetery gardener has done well. " He always did, he was conscientious about performing his task. “Very orderly the way he’s raked the pebbles;  zigzags are so attractive."

If you owned a grave, you paid a small annual sum for general maintenance to the cemetery authorities.

“We must do something about the headstone, is it leaning to the right, do you think? And what about the moss, shouldn’t somebody clean it off?” There was always someone finding fault. Making a fuss made the complainant look concerned.


to be concluded tomorrow.



26 comments:

  1. This post is beautifully written. I feel as if I'm there, but as a child.

    Love,
    Janie

    ReplyDelete
  2. Exquisitely written, Friko. The soup smelled wonderful and tasted even better. The Grandfather held some degree of pride tightly within. The cemetery was filled with wanting, grieving, remembrance, and care. I was there with you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank You for sharing the memories-


    ALOHA from Honolulu
    ComfortSpiral
    =^..^= . <3

    ReplyDelete
  4. Family traditions are what keeps us connected through time and space. You caught so much here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Friko, before I have the opportunity to read the conclusion, I will now praise your excellent writing of this first part.

    You write of generational family links that do not play a part in my own family generational history and lore. How odd to add that the church that my immediate family attended for most of younger life, and in whose choir my brothers sang hyms as boy sopranos and beyond, was called All Saints. I never recall anyone ever connected the name with November 1.

    You see, I've now opened another topic that we might discuss when next we meet. xo

    ReplyDelete
  6. went to a monastery, but that was later in life...never even seen a convent but i have seen a nun or two in my day...they always scared me a bit actually...grew up with a cemetery in the backyard, so i do know the graves...and maintained it by cutting the grass...

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm there alongside you again...smelling the soup, polishing the plate, noting that grandfather wouldn't cough up for the wreaths...just superb, Friko!
    Your uncle was lucky to have been released...i had a German friend who was held for years in Russia: he related that when one of their number was released he was to visit the families of all those surviving to tell them that their husband, son, brother, was still alive. And so many died...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Such a perfect story for the season. I'll be here tomorrow for the conclusion! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh, this makes me want to go visit my ancestors graves! My g, g, g, g, grandparents are buried just down the road. Looking forward to the rest of this post. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  10. I grew up without any extended family. And reading this see (again) how diminished our worlds were. Beautifully written, and very, very moving. I wonder how much of it would have been familiar to my German father?

    ReplyDelete
  11. The contrast between yesterday's chill and the warmth of Aunt Katie's kitchen is heart-expanding. Grandfather seems a stern and perhaps stingy man. I never enjoyed my grandfather's embraces either, too scratchy and he also smelled funny.
    Wonderful images come to mind as I read this. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Friko, you know you could really have a book published. Your writing is much better than some I've read by published authors.

    ReplyDelete
  13. We never had such tradition in our family so it is fascinating to hear all of this...and so vividly portrayed for us. :)

    ReplyDelete
  14. From my dayYs living in Bavaria I remember the seriousness of All Saints' Day very well. You write so beautifully about your childhood and capture so well the intimate details of family life, as well as the details of the place and the historical setting of the time.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hi Friko - fascinating to read your remembrances ... with the snippets of cultural traditions ... but the paragraphs about the convent ... could so easily have been true and worse perhaps - knowing what's come out now ... but the good is the remembrance of your dead. Something we don't do enough of ... Hilary

    ReplyDelete
  16. Friko, beautifully written with luscious detail. I remember many walks through the cemetery where my ancestors and my parents are buried. We have a cemetery here where I live that is partitioned as you described.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Friko, thank you so very much for sharing this with us :)

    ReplyDelete
  18. I find these series of posts beautiful and fascinating. Your Aunt Katie sounds like my kind of person! Isn't it wonderful to have a beloved aunt when you are a child?

    The thing I find most interesting -- and it's a cultural difference -- is that in the U.S., no one really does much for All Saints/All Souls. It has morphed into Halloween with absolutely no family/cultural tradition apart from taking the kids out trick or treating. When we tend to do our graves and family recognition is our May Memorial Day, which started as Decoration Day after WWI and later turned into a time to remember all the family members, with flowers at the cemetery. I'm the keeper of that now as the rest of my family lives away. It's a time I treasure.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Have really enjoyed reading your blog posts Friko. Looking forward to tomorrow's conclusion. You paint a wonderful picture with words and I feel as if I'm taking the journey with you.

    ReplyDelete
  20. very different from growing up here. I don't think my parents ever once took us to the cemetery to pay our respects. only my mother's family, just my great grandmother and great grandfather, and later my grandmother, are buried in the city where I grew up. I don't know where my grandfather is buried. he died when my mother was 15. my father's family are from a distant city. both my parents were cremated, ashes scattered.

    ReplyDelete
  21. What I miss in much of contemporary story-telling, whether fictional or memoir, is the lack of telling image put into words. Photography and film no doubt have much to do with the change. You revive the art of description wonderfully here. I think of Leigh Fermor's work, among others, as I read this.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I am extremely "into" this story--again, those descriptions are so vivid.

    I know you like genuine feedback, though, so I'll also throw out one English teacher tip: when you're using "aunt Katie" as though it's her name, the "aunt" would be capitalized: Aunt Katie. Of course, if it's "my aunt Katie" with the "my" before it, you would not need to capitalize "aunt."

    Then, for me as a reader, I would love even more insight into the people woven into all these descriptions of wreaths and costs. Grandfather is very remote (rightly so, as that's how you perceived him), but he's just lost his wife, and so I wonder if there were any indications of that having an impact on him. Also, Uncle Peter's personal story is a tough one--Russian prisoner-of-war!--and so even a bit more about how he was functioning, emotionally, in terms of getting through his days, would make him more real.

    That's me as a reader, though: I always want more about the thoughts and emotions of people.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Sorry: in the previous comment, I didn't meant "just" lost his wife, with Grandfather. I meant that he'd lost his wife some time before!

    ReplyDelete
  24. What a fascinating glimpse into these old customs, and beautifully told Friko.

    ReplyDelete
  25. This is memoir at its best - vivid, beautifully-written and profoundly true.

    ReplyDelete
  26. How well you evoked my own childhood caution of The Catholics. Their church, just across from our local grocery, evoked both fear and fascination. How we wanted to sneak up and open the door on our way home from school! Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I knew any schoolmates who were Catholic, let alone Anglican. We were't Baptistland, either. Mthodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Lutherans defined our churches and cemeteries -- telling a good bit about our ethnic heritages.

    I do so miss going to the cemeteries each year. For us, it was on Memorial Day, but the ritual was the same, excepting the candles. And you're right about the one who made a fuss, to look concerned. Every gathering has one.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are good, I like to know what you think of my posts. I know you'll keep it civil.