Author: Elisabeth

To mark out the generations

I wore my daughter’s purple sandals a few days ago and
looked down at my feet.

  

They could
be the feet of a younger person.  They could be the feet of a teenager, and
something inside me recoiled. 
‘Mutton dressed as lamb.’  
When I was my daughter’s age I revelled in the fact that my
mother was a frumpy woman who looked her age.  

I saw other young women around me whose
mothers looked almost as young as their daughters, or at least they dressed as though they were the same age, with firm tight gymmed-out bodies and I recoiled.

Did I want my mother as a frump to mark
out the generations?  

A Freudian might say it was about sexual rivalry – mothers and daughters.  Just as a mother is coming to the end
of her sexually active life, a daughter is entering hers.  There’s no room for both.  Or so we like to think.  

The women in my family of origin are all shapes and
sizes.  We span a ten year time
slot from oldest girl to youngest.  There are brothers slotted between, but
here I refer only to the girls because as girls we were bunched together – the girls versus the boys.  
My older sister erupted into her adult, and to my mind, sexual body and I once thought it revolting.  I wanted to
stay young, even as another part of me longed to grow breasts of my own.  
Childhood seemed then a safer bet to
female adulthood with all that adulthood entailed, from the beauty of breasts to the
ugliness of pimples.  

I wanted none
of it.  I wanted all of it.  

My older sister prepared one day to go
into the city to meet friends.  I
watched her as she sat at the dressing table.  She dabbed powder from a tight compact onto her cheeks on top of the stuff she had squeezed
from a pink bottle of what was then called foundation.  

My sister spread it well concentrating on the blotchy bits of her
face to cover any blemishes.  Her face makeup caked on like a mask, she then smeared her lips, a deep pearly pink with a touch of
purple. The lipstick suited her blue eyes. 
She pressed her lips together and puckered to even out the stain, and then dabbed at
the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief.  

She wore a tight woollen jumper, with a V neck that accentuated her cleavage.
Winter time and her skirt was also made of wool, hip hugging and knee length
above her black tights.  She wore
low heeled  black shoes, middies, that clicked as she walked across the concrete
footpath on her way from the house. 
I could walk her to the station if I had
wanted but by then my jealousy was intense to the point that I could not bear
the comparison any longer.  
Me, four
years younger and every bit the gawk, torn between growing up and staying small. 

My mother’s story

‘Why,’ I ask my mother, ‘do you always look on the bright
side?  Why this need to compare
your lot to that of others.’  
To my
mother there is always someone worse off, even in the worst of
circumstances.  
She gives me a wan
smile.
‘We lived through two world wars,’ she says.  ‘We were hungry all the time.’  
My mother draws a deep breath. ‘Once I woke in the night and someone was chopping down our
tree.  It was not really our tree
but we called it our tree because it was on the other side of our house and we
had planned for a long time that it was ours.’
My mother dabs a tissue to her nose.  She goes through tissues as though she
has an unlimited supply.  The
wastepaper basket beside her chair is filled to overflowing with these tissues.  I think of them as my mother’s tears, the
ones she can no longer shed.
 
‘Everyone everywhere was chopping down trees for firewood,’
my mother goes on.
‘I woke my husband and he went outside and chased them
away.  By then the tree was half
hanging and so he chopped it right down and managed to get it over the back of
our fence. We were staying with my parents at the Marnixplein.  We had just managed to get the tree
over our fence when the German soldiers came and shot their guns in the
air.’  
My mother hesitates, whether
for effect or out of her memory of this time.  I can see the garden, the fence, the tree in my mind’s eye as if a scene from a movie.
‘Just in time,’ my mother says in her lopsided English,
‘because now the tree was inside our back garden.  It was ours.  Still, we were hungry all the time.’
My mother takes a fresh tissue and folds it in four, ready
for the next dab of her nose.
 
‘Once we went on our bikes to the north of Holland and we
brought with us things.  I brought
a beautiful table cloth, what I had embroidered for my mother.  It took me a whole winter to sew. 
The farmers didn’t want money, they wanted stuff.  Someone took the table cloth and we got
something to eat for it.’
My mother is on a roll. Tissue, nose dab, wastepaper basket
and words.
 
 ‘Once there
came beggars to the door.  My
mother offered them what we were eating. 
They looked at it, smelled it and then went away.  Even they did not want it.  Some people who were really rich, they could buy on the
black market and they did.’
My mother stops again, as if to take stock of her
memories.
‘What you got when it was time to eat, very little.  My mother would dish up for
everybody a little and everybody made sure that the one next to them didn’t get
a crumb more.  People started to
hate each other because there was never enough to satisfy your hunger.’
I feel a slight thrill inside at the mention of the word
‘hate’.  My mother rarely owns up
to such a powerful emotion. 
She never owns her hateful feelings – at least not out loud, at least
not to me – but here she is telling me that she too knows what it’s like to
hate.
‘It took quite a long time till the war was over and then
we heard that from Sweden there would come planes and they would drop  packages of margarine, of bread and
butter.  Everybody got their share
and you saw people, they were so starving, sitting on the street.  They got the food and they started to
eat it.’  My mother’s eyes gleam
with the memory.
‘But my mother said, “Don’t do that.”  It’s not good to start eating when your
body was so hungry.  You have to
eat a bit at a time.’  
She looks
down at her hands in her lap and as if unable to bear the sight of them empty, my mother  takes up another tissue.
 
‘I had somewhere a photo of myself and I was that
skinny.  Never in my life have I
been as skinny as then.  There were
photos of my dad and mum and they looked ten years older.
My mother around this time in a blouse she embroidered herself (the birth date above belongs to me, strange that someone has accidentally given it to my mother who was born 5 October 1919, strange but understandable given my mother and I share the same name).
My mother continues, ‘The priests in the country churches said, “If you have
family bring them here.  Let them
come.”  Because there’s nothing in
the city.  In the country, not
so.  In Heilo where we had cousins,
next to them was a farmer. They had milk.  The family said bring your baby and little child and we can
feed them here.
 
‘We went on our bikes without tyres and my husband had a
little cart behind his bike.’
The story shifts here. My mother has told me that my
father had a bike with a cart in which my older brother, then something like
two years old, traveled.  My mother
pushed her pram with the baby, who later died and is buried in Heilo.
 
My older sister who died at five months of age during the
Hunger winter of 1945.  I have
wondered what she would be like had she survived.
 
And what it might be like if I were the third daughter and
not the second.