My father's father was a jazz musician, a famous sportscaster and something of a raconteur. One of his first jobs was playing piano in the silent movie houses. He married often, and apparently tempestuously, and one of the few things he didn't know much about was raising children.
My father's mother was dotty as hell, always alive, radiant and completely uncensored. I don't know of anything particularly notable she accomplished other than teaching ballroom dancing and writing a language column in which she bemoaned the pronunciation of the word "kilometer" with emphasis on the "LOM" rather than the "KIL." Oh, and after my uncle's wedding, she published an announcement in the local newspaper thanking imaginary notable guests for imaginary gifts (I believe it was emeralds from Lord and Lady Moncrieff).
My mother's father was described in a cousin's memoir as "a genius with criminal tendencies." He was a German aristocrat who, as younger brother, went off to South Africa to seek mineral wealth. And then, when his older brother lit off with a Hollywood actress, got called back home to pretend to be a responsible and dignified person and to set the family affairs in order. What the rest of the family didn't realize at the time was that he'd gotten married while gadding about in the bush. To a commoner. Who wasn't even German. A farmer's daughter.
My mother's mother was a Boer. In her 70s, living alone in a cottage owned by the local church, she was once surprised by a 16-foot-long mamba. She grabbed a machete and lopped off its head. She wasn't impressed, though her sons were a bit taken aback. She'd had a far more adventurous life than that. She'd met this dashing European as a young girl, fell in love and married him. Had a couple kids. Then, when required, followed him to Germany - in 1933. She was a British subject, married to a German citizen, stuck a country whose language she barely understood, surrounded by possibly the greatest snobs the planet has ever produced and her grubby, half-breed, social-climbing spawn. Her first landlady, in Hamburg, was Goering's wife. They didn't get along.
And then her in-laws had her husband admitted to a sanitarium, because obviously, with a marriage like that, he had to be unstable. Unfortunately, this was during a time and in a place when eugenics was not just accepted, but celebrated.
Husband died, mysteriously. She was taken in by an uncle and aunt in Czechoslovakia (along with her four kids). And then Hitler invaded Poland. And suddenly, the rather effete nobles found that, once evicted from their estates and deprived of their numerous retainers, having a farm girl around who knew things about raising chickens and harvesting wild berries was really a bit of an advantage.
There are too many stories to tell - my grandmother kept a diary, and told wonderful tales to her grandchildren. She faced down Russian infantrymen, wrestled bread out of people's hands to give to concentration camp survivors (she herself had been in one as a child, during the Boer War), and with little more than her four kids and an antenuptial contract emblazoned with a British seal, managed to hike across Europe, past the Allied lines, onto an English chrysanthemum farm and eventually boarded a ship back home to the Transvaal, where she had to teach her comparatively posh little upstart children how to eat fried termites and make biltong.
She rocked. I wish I could've spent more time with her. |