The trip

“Why can’t I go? Is it because it is too expensive? I don’t understand why Mother is so against it! She says I should concentrate on my studies instead! But I am already a good student and I keep telling her this language trip to Germany can only be beneficial for my future. Please Grandma, be on my side for once! After all, she is your daughter, you must know a way to make her change her mind? All my friends are going, I have to go too.” 

Feeling somewhat sorry for myself, I was now calmly perched on a stool by the rustic table in Grandma's tiny kitchen, distractedly measuring flour, butter and sugar to make a shortcrust pastry and still ruminating about Mother's incomprehensible decision to refuse to let me go on this school trip to Berlin. It was October 1991 and I had just turned 15 years old. The weather in this part of southern France was still kind; the kitchen door, slightly ajar, was letting in a gentle soothing breeze and through the open window, we could see the ever-changing colours of autumn on the hills opposite. The vast array of chestnut, almond and oak trees was indeed displaying a myriad of leaves, each a different shade of warm yellow or rusty orange randomly grouped together like tiny dots in a giant impressionist painting. An hour earlier and totally oblivious to the glorious scenery around me, I had ridden my bicycle at speed to Grandma's house, fiercely pedalling out of anger following the heated argument with Mother about the notorious school trip.

I had hastily ditched my bicycle by the back door of her little stone house and burst into her modest kitchen, my face red by the effort of cycling uphill but also still burning with rage after my dispute with Mother. Grandma was hunched over her kitchen table. From the back door, I could only see her distinctive long silver hair reaching almost the middle of her back. She had always taken great pride in her long hair, categorically refusing to have it cut at the hairdresser's, arguing she could do a much better job herself. Huffing and puffing, I noisily approached the table. She was mechanically removing stones from the fruit that her beloved plum tree had produced. The kerfuffle of my arrival had dragged her out of her sweet reverie. She had calmly listened to my fury and she had remained collected throughout my lamentations. Once I had finished, she had looked up at my rosy cheeks and fiery looks, pointed at the stool next to her and suggested I make a shortcrust pastry to help her finish her "paté aux prunes". I had rolled my eyes to the ceiling and shrugged in disbelief at her proposition: baking this stupidly named and obscure cake from her native Loire Valley in northern France was not going to solve any argument with Mother here in the south. Unfortunately, my derisive behaviour had not gone unnoticed; Grandma had read my dismissive thoughts. Seeing the heavy feeling of sadness on her wrinkled face made me immediately regret my self-centred behaviour. How selfish of me to react like that! After all, this cake always reminded her of her happy childhood; she was so proud of the plum tree she had planted on her arrival in southern France 45 years ago. It had survived, against all odds, the limestone soil of Provence and its dry weather. This year again, the ill-placed tree had not disappointed, yielding a decent crop of the sweet dark green "Reine Claude" plums, usually grown in rainier and more temperate climates.

Ashamed of myself, I proceeded to retrieve the ingredients from the kitchen cupboard to make the pastry for Grandma’s most-cherished plum pie. As I sat down quietly on a stool next to her, she ventured: “Perhaps your mum will see some sense and change her mind? Give her time.” To which, I replied flatly: “I don’t think so Grandma. She was really upset this morning. I could tell because she kept rubbing her little scar. She always does that when she is really annoyed. I really don’t know what to do to make her change her mind”.

From the corner of my eyes, I could see the pain in Grandma’s look at the mention of her daughter’s scar, the indelible mark of an accident when, as a toddler, she had banged her forehead in the sharp corner of a sewing machine table. Although now faded, the scar, a little cross above her left eyebrow, was still visible. Great Auntie Marie had told me that Grandma had always blamed herself for it, for being too exhausted and not vigilant enough to prevent the accident. It had happened towards the end of the War when, as a single mother, she was working all hours to sustain herself and her young daughter.  

War times had been difficult for Grandma. She had just been married a few years when the conflict had erupted in 1939, shattering her prospect of a good and comfortable life in the city of Tours in the Loire Valley.  At the time, my grandfather was working as a mechanic for his father’s flourishing garage there. Soon after their marriage, Grandma had left her native and rural village of Montjoie-Sur-Loire to join him and help with the accounts of the business. However, when the zealous Vichy administration, keen to show support to the German occupier, had devised the infamous STO directive - Travail de Service Obligatoire (Compulsory Work Service), my grandfather, like hundreds of thousands of other young French men, found himself forcibly enlisted and deported to work in Germany and help with the war effort there. Lacking labour, the family business had quickly collapsed; destitute Grandma has had no choice but to work endlessly as a seamstress to make ends meet. My grandfather never returned, she never remarried.

I was deep in thought, still trying to work out a way of getting Mother to change her mind about the trip, when I heard Grandma say: “Shortcrust pastry is much nicer with a couple of eggs in it. I don’t have any left in the kitchen but there should be some in the pantry downstairs. Could you please go and fetch half a dozen? I think they are in a basket on the top shelf of the pantry”.

I rarely went downstairs but I knew the pantry was just off the small workshop where Grandma was keeping the fruit and vegetables she cultivated in her little garden. She was a good gardener, having been raised on a farm in fertile Loire Valley alongside her eight older siblings. The workshop was quite a mess now, full of odd bits that most people would have discarded. Not Grandma! She was from a generation which had endured the scarcities of the War. I noticed the old Singer sewing machine in one corner, once her proud and only possession. She had told me many times, how she had arrived in Aix-en-Provence in the summer of 1946, clenching the box containing her sewing machine with one hand and with the other, tightly holding her 2-year-old daughter. The move from the north to the south of France had been prompted by Mother’s asthma and once again, Grandma had settled down as a seamstress and worked very hard to provide for her child.   

The pantry was separated from the workshop by a curtain. I lifted it and turned the light on. The bulb was old and dusty, the light very dim but I could guess the rows of conserves filled with legumes neatly organised on the shelves in front of me. The top shelf was more haphazard, full of disused cardboard and plastic boxes and there, on the left, was the egg basket, totally out of my reach. Why on earth was Grandma keeping her eggs so high and so inaccessible? I decided to stand on tiptoe on a wooden box, one hand clinging to a shelf to steady myself, the other aiming for the basket. Even then, I could just about touch the bottom part of it. I gave the basket a little push to nudge it out of place slightly. But it heavily tipped forward and failing to catch it, it came crashing down on the floor.  I was expecting a big slimy mess of crushed eggs on the dusty beaten earth but to my relief, the basket had landed on its side revealing instead, an old biscuits tin which now laid open with its content scattered. I must have got the wrong basket. 

The tin had been full of old photographs and other bits which I quickly picked up. I would have hastily pushed everything back in the box if it had not been for a piece of paper looking like the torn page of a newspaper. The headline of the article and the photograph underneath had caught the ray of sunshine coming from underneath the curtain, immediately attracting my attention: “7  Septembre 1945 - Les femmes tondues de Montjoie-Sur-Loire en parade sur la place du marché” - The black and white photograph depicted three distressed women briskly walking across the market square. Their heads had been roughly shaved and it looked like they had been forcibly stripped down to their nylon petticoats and corsages. Their faces were strained, embarrassed, their eyes sheepishly riveted to the floor, desperate to escape the taunting and jeering crowd of men and women gathered around them. My eyes were drawn to the tallest of these women standing on the right hand-side of the picture. She was frantically trying to protect and soothe the screaming child in her arms. I looked closer at the distressed toddler and my heart jumped. I had just recognised Mother, the little cross on her forehead raw, bleeding, painful and clearly shaped like a swastika.

I went back upstairs clenching the six eggs I had found lurking in the dark corner of a bottom shelf. Avoiding Grandma’s gaze, I resumed my position on the stool next to her. My head buzzing with a thousand questions, I gently cracked an egg in the pastry and said: “I did not know you had shaven your head once.” I sensed Grandma flinch. “Not out of choice”, came the quiet reply. ”It was the price some of us had to pay to survive the hard and lonely times of the War. I was only 25 then, very naïve.” She paused as if transported back in time. “I had to mend German soldiers’ uniforms all day long, so I had no time to queue for rations of bread, eggs or milk, which, in those days was the only way to get food in a city like Tours”. She paused again, hesitant to carry on. Then taking a low and resigned breath, she continued in a low voice: “One of them, he was kind to me. I let it happen. It made life so much easier, so much nicer but we paid a heavy price for it. After this dreadful day in September, your mother and I had no choice but to leave. We did not belong anymore, we felt so out of place.” Finally, as if waking up from a dream, she slowly turned towards me and carefully measuring her words, she added: “I wish your mother could make peace with her past. I have. And I hope you go on this trip to Germany.”