Ella was my grandmother. I would like to say she was a lovely person, a cuddly kind of gran – the kind you see portrayed in books and pictures. The truth is, she was a rather miserable woman. Prim and proper with no sense of humour might have been how I felt about her in my youth, although now I realize she was a brave woman who fought the norms of her time and got through life on her own terms.
If I were to put myself in her shoes, I realize that I would have been miserable, too. A farm girl from a small village in Germany, she arrived in England to work as a maid when she was in her late teens, leaving her parents and three sisters behind. She knew no English, and she arrived in London two years before the start of WWI - when she was on the enemy side.
But those were the least of her problems, because in 1912, this very prim and proper young lady became pregnant and, to make matters worse, when she gave birth in January 1913, there was not one illegitimate baby but two: a boy and a girl. Since the topic was never discussed in our house, we have no idea how she made it. This pressure is likely what led her to give up her son.
I often wonder why she didn’t return to her family on the farm. There is no evidence that she was shunned, and she visited her sisters often in later years. Perhaps she took too long considering what to do, because no sooner had she taken on the task of providing for her daughter, World War One started, and she was stuck in England as an enemy alien, confined to a limited geographic area, and subject to constant check ins with the British authorities. In fact, she went through a second World War as an enemy alien before finally becoming a British citizen in 1948. We were told that in wartime, Ella told people she was from Holland to deflect criticism of her German citizenship.
Around 1914, Ella started working as a room maid in hotels – a job she continued for the rest of her working life. Perhaps the disgrace of being an unwed mother prevented her from obtaining a position in a private home, but more likely hotel work was not only more anonymous, it also offered an opportunity to obtain accommodation and food while receiving tips which, together with her wages, allowed her to pay for foster care, and later, boarding school for her daughter. She was determined that her daughter should finish high school and make something of herself, so you can imagine her disappointment when her daughter fell in love with and married a practically illiterate, but completely charming rogue - with, it was felt, no future.
I guess Ella recognized a rogue when she saw one, because, although her son-in-law did make something of himself professionally, he just couldn’t stay away from the ladies – in a sense vindicating her early doubts about the marriage, and, one suspects, giving her a guilty sense of satisfaction knowing she’d been right to object to the marriage in the first place.
It appears history was repeating itself. Ella’s daughter was left with two young daughters and a cheating husband.
Ella must have transferred some of her indomitable spirit. Soon enough, out went the cheating husband, in came twelve hour working days, and things went along relatively smoothly until her daughter remarried, this time to a hard working, faithful man who doted on her.
Ella retired at 65. She regularly visited her daughter and granddaughters and was a grim presence at Christmas and birthday celebrations. She never married, never seemed very happy, and never appeared to have any close friends. Ella couldn’t even win her grandchildren’s affection by bringing my sister and I the chocolate bars left as tips by GIs staying in the hotel during the post WWII era, because – she stored the chocolate in drawers filled with mothballs! She was never a warm-hearted woman, but she knew the meaning of hard work and sacrifice (something which, as children, we never fully appreciated about her). She saved all her earnings so that when she retired, she was able to buy a partially occupied house and was ready to enjoy her remaining years in the upstairs apartment - only to find she had sitting tenants who somehow found out about her past and who teased her and swore at her every time she passed their door. Things just never went right!
In a way, it may have been a blessing that she developed dementia. After being brought home by police, wandering in front of a bus in her nightgown, it was decided she should move into a nursing home, and there she retreated into her girlhood. She forgot every word of English and happily recounted, in German, the fun times she was having with her sisters. After a life of disappointment and hard work, it must have been wonderful to be a young girl again.
There’s a footnote to this story: when my grandmother died and we were going through her effects, we found an old newspaper clipping from 1914 about a young man we had never heard about who had received a Military Medal for his part in the Mons Retreat. She had kept that clipping for 60 years. It makes you wonder.