lost

but not forgotten

After a long day in which I had frantically finished weaving a small cloth river so that I might have something to illustrate a magazine article I have been invited to write, I sank into the sofa with two dogs, a cat, a glass of sparkling ginger-water and my 21st century palantir (an iPad) . An advertisement for a television series set in Europe in the 1930s (a time I might forty years ago have described as “between the wars”) drifting across the screen triggered a memory of a photo album of that era, entrusted to me by an old friend some fifteen years ago. She wanted me to keep it safe as she was sure her stepson would simply throw it away if something happened to her.

We had sat together, martinis in hand, her dog at our feet, as she talked me through the pictures. Kitty with her sister, sumptuously dressed for a night out, standing on the front steps of a mansion somewhere in Berlin with a beautiful German Shepherd dog next to them, panting benignly at the camera. Kitty’s first and dearest love on the day they were married, a month before he was killed in a war he wanted no truck with. Kitty in a rubble-strewn street overlooked by shell-shocked buildings, their windows gone, their walls blackened. Kitty with the diplomat lover who flew her to his home in Australia sometime in the 1950s, a journey that took about three weeks as she told it, flying during the day and being accommodated in luxurious hotels she had only ever dreamed of, each night. Kitty with her first car (a beetle), Kitty with her last car, a luminous red Datsun she called ‘Speedy’ that she polished zealously and drove with panache, until she came home from a weekend interstate and found that husband number four had traded it in for a hateful Holden clunker. There were no pictures of Kitty looking for her neighbours under the rubble, or fighting off Russian soldiers by any means she could (then, as now, they were an army of rapists). No pictures of the hunger after that ghastly war ended. No pictures of the deep shame of realising that the country you were born in, had flamed into such an aggressor, destroyed so many lives and caused so much misery. I needed no pictures to see that, her stories cut to the bone. I don’t think she ever forgave the Nazis for destroying her world, and though she frequently sent parcels to her sister in the DDR, she never went back to Europe herself.

There were tears on that afternoon together, but mostly smiles and laughter and as I was preparing to leave, she pressed the album into my hand. Six months later her stepson, not satisfied with moving her out of her house and into the grannyflat that he had been permitted to occupy by grace while his father was alive told her she would be moving into a care facility so that he could have full run of the home she had worked so hard for. Did I mention that Kitty had spent long hard hours employed as a cleaner? Had overcome language barriers and was relentlessly grateful for her life and whatever it had thrown at her? A killer scrabble player (in several languages), open-hearted dog-lover, unfailingly cheerful and eternally optimistic, she took everything in her stride. As a teenager I was sometimes stupidly embarrassed by her voluble enthusiasm when out for dinner with us, now that I’m in my sixties it’s crystal clear to me that Kitty felt if you love something, you have an obligation to say so. Kitty knew how to live, and did so very thoroughly no matter what her circumstances. I’d bring paper-wrapped fish and chips and a bottle of bubbly on my visits to her and she’d invariably have a friendly pigeon or magpie that would come and tap at the window to share in the meal. I think the saddest thing for her when she became bed-ridden was that she could no longer sneak crumbs to her feathered friends outside.

Kitty passed in her 105th year, and I raise a gin martini (dirty) to her memory each time her birthday comes around. But for now I need to find that photo album. I took it with me on my last visit with her and I’m hoping I brought it home.

Berlin, 1945

Photo sourced from

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Berlin-_the_Capture_and_Aftermath_of_War_1945-1947_C5284.jpg

Or maybe share them with someone else?