Family
Gerhard Kress
A family is not central to everybody’s life and development into a person and personality, but it is for most of us. My own experience is that of love and a safe place to be. My parents’ childhood and adult history and that of at least one or two generations before them, has a bearing on how the family they created functions. On my mother’s side, her grandparents surname stems from a Mediaeval, all-powerful governor of the local castle, answerable only to the feudal Lord. History tells of a man who may have liberally exercised Droit de Seigneur.
My grandfather Wilhelm, lost his Jewish mother in childbirth, and his father, who owned a horse and cart for deliveries, died when Wilhelm was perhaps seven or eight years old. Until then they had lived in the stable, apparently bedding in hay. Wilhelm had worked with his father from dawn until school, being picked up when school ended to continue deliveries until the evening. After Wilhelm was orphaned he was adopted by an aunt who later helped him to attend art school to train as a lithographer to produce complicated technical drawings.
Wilhelm was the enemy with uniform and gun when Germany invaded Poland in the First World War. A Polish teenager who was to become my grandmother, watched him making beautiful pencil drawings on postcards. Wilhelm returned to Poland after the war to marry his sweetheart and bring her back to a life in Germany. The second big war took their three beautiful girls who would’ve been my aunts. The youngest son, my father, was sent to the country for safekeeping. My father was a soldier in Hungary where he met and fell in love with the enemy, but unlike his father, he could not return to Hungary after the war. I am the third generation to continue that tradition. A quirky coincidence came to light when my mother told me that, as a girl, she often sat in the vineyards, watching British planes bombing Mannheim’s industrial areas across the Rhine. My future wife’s uncle flew lonely and extremely dangerous reconnaissance spitfires to determine bombing targets. My mother may have seen the plane flying low over the Odenwald.
My parents considered themselves lucky throughout their lives to have found a loving and intelligent partner in each other. My father worked in the post office, my mother in factories, operating heavy machinery in a noisy environment when my brother and I were old enough. My mother, in later life, became the go-to person to care for terminally ill people in their own homes. Often sitting with them and comforting, in their last hours of their life. And here is the parallel with my own life when I too would be holding hands, being there while life ebbed away.
Being the oldest of ten children, my mother was in charge of her siblings while her parents were working. Learning to control, organise, give orders, conflict management among siblings, preparing food and feeding as well as her other chores such as feeding the chicken, ducks, geese. Pre-teenage and early teenage in my development, I felt that I had to fight my mother to gain independence. To outsiders my mother may have appeared to be the dominant force. But important decisions were discussed and supported by mutual understanding and agreement.
We had no living room as such, my parents had no bedroom as such and our bathroom was the Belfast kitchen sink. Every Saturday mother and boys would be in the nearby forest waiting for dad on his bicycle, returning from work. We then walked to the communal bath house to make room for next week’s grime. Family life took place around the kitchen table. Food preparation, meals, conversations, play, homework, family decisions, the entertainment of guests. Were we a close family? Yes we were. And for me, sometimes too close.
My brother had a better understanding of and with my mother and he knew how to get away with things. I felt closer to my father. My mother’s disappointment not to have achieved the full set was palpable. She tried not to show it, but I may have felt guilty at not being the girl she so badly wanted. It may also have prepared me better for the spirit of the 1960s in a city where my female friends began to fight for recognition and equality. I identified with them more easily. I too began to recognise the fallacies, pressure and inequality of the roles of being male and being female.