She said, in her post: Choose an image(s) of any kind (photo, art or graphics - your own or attributed) - then write a description, poem or 'scene' about them as you please, and say why they are meaningful to you. These can be on separate posts if preferred; open ended as to when you place them.
The photo below of is of my paternal grandmother and judging from the writing on the back was taken in 1921 in Vienna. Aside from the fact that I love old photos, ones that contain family members strike me as having a special kind of magic – containing faces that reach out to you over time and space.
What amuses me about the photo is it paints a picture of a demure, thoughtful young woman, but by all accounts, my gran was anything but that. She was evidently the life and soul of the party.
My grandmother was born in Bregenz in Austria at the turn of the last century and, after her mother starved during the war, she ran away from home. It was about 1917 and she must have been about 16 or 17 years old. She went to Zurich where she first got a job washing dishes and then trained as a hairdresser. It was there that she met my grandfather, a man born in Vienna of Hungarian parents. He was evidently taken with her and told her he’d soon be leaving for South Africa to open a hairdressing salon and could he send for her. Ever an opportunist, she agreed.
She soon found herself with a backpack and a guitar on a ship bound for Cape Town. She often told me about the wonderful time she had on the ship, playing her guitar and entertaining the other passengers. She loved, she used to say, to dance and sing and make people laugh. When the ship docked in Cape Town, she was having such a good time that she decided to stay aboard the ship. The sailors gave her some of their clothing and she hid until the ship departed for Durban. My grandfather, however, well-peeved that the lady had not landed in Cape Town sent the police after her and my gran soon found herself on the way back to Cape Town. Docking in Cape Town, however, the authorities refused to allow her to disembark as she didn’t have the correct papers and so my grandfather came aboard and said he would marry her. They were married by the ship’s captain and to the day she died my grandmother swore that she never knew she was getting married as she couldn’t understand a word the captain said… The fact that she is likely to have understood everything my grandfather said seemed to have conveniently slipped her mind!
So it was that she found herself married and living with her new husband and her mother-in-law whom she detested. Although my grandmother worked for my grandfather in his salon in the centre of town, her views about her marriage never changed. She used to tell me that my grandfather kept her like a bird in a golden cage. She wasn’t allowed to look at, let alone dance with or talk to other men. He was, she would say, supremely jealous and his mother was an evil old gypsy!
When my father was a young boy my grandmother took him and his younger sister to Austria for six months. There she met up with a younger cousin and fell in love. She was loathe to return to South Africa but when her cousin said he would return with her, she agreed. And so my grandmother embarked on the love affair of her life. Although she attempted to be discreet about her relationship with her lover, it was clearly one of those things that couldn’t be hidden and divorce proceedings were soon instigated. My grandmother left Cape Town for Johannesburg taking her daughter with her – accompanying her was the man I grew up knowing as “gran’pa”. My father was left with is father and grandmother in Cape Town and I don’t think my father or my grandmother ever got over being parted.
When he was sixteen my father ran away to join his mother and in order to have her son legally live with her, my grandmother finally married her cousin.
So, despite the demure looking young woman in the picture, my gran was clearly pretty progressive for her time!
I loved her spirit of adventure, her sense of fun and above all her ability to tell stories. We would sit together in her “bauernstube” (her traditional Austrian farmer’s style dining room), drinking tea and munching anchovy toast and she would regale me with stories about her life. I have no doubt that it was from her and her love of story and story telling that I inherited the same love.
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