My memory of my two grandfathers is very shadowy. One, in fact, died in 1909, the year before I was born, so I can only remember descriptions of him as a rather conventional strict German who came to work in a family business in Liverpool. My ‘paternal’ grandfather died in 1917 and I can just remember him as a gentle retired country parson. He had a false leg, due to shooting his own leg off by accident when he was seventeen. This prevented him having an army career for which he was intended, but I am sure he was a very good country parson and found time for his two great hobbies - rose growing and apple culture.
The two grandmothers, however, I knew well as a child. The German Granny lived in Queen’s Gate after her husband’s death. She was delicate and nervous, but for some extraordinary reason she loved the Zeppelin raids of the second half of the first world war. She would go up to the attics of a seven story house and stand transfixed as they zoomed over London. It needed great persuasion on my mother’s part to make her leave London and her beloved Zeppelins (she said they reminded her of her home, i.e. Frankfurt), but she eventually did and joined my parents and their six children in the country. She sat in an armchair most of the day knitting and pleased us by teaching us (twins aged six) to knit. She made this dubiously interesting pastime more palatable by winding the wool into balls with sweets entwined in them so that we were encouraged to knit more rows so that the sweets would drop out!
She was a tolerant old lady (actually only about 66 years old), but she had two phobias. One was draughts and the other was she hated cats. I can see my father now crawling under the dining room table to convince her that there was no cat there. “But Fred you are wrong”, she insisted. In desperation the cook was asked to bring in the backyard cat (kept for “mousing”). It was put under the table, shown to Granny and then removed. After that we all continued peacefully with our meal! The problem of draughts was never solved as my mother never minded them - in fact she preferred sitting with open windows.
There was still considerable feeling against Germans even for a few years after the war. By 1939 Hitler had taught British people that there were some very nice Germans who had come over here to get away from his persecution but in 1919, when some of my grandmothers’ sisters and nieces came to stay, we were told by our governess to tell people who came to the house they were American. One great aunt talked with such a guttural accent, however, that I blushed every time she spoke thinking my friends would think I had lied! Dear German granny moved next door in 1920 to her other daughter. We visited her almost daily until she died in 1926 [it was 1927].
My paternal Granny was a very different character. She lived ten minutes walk away with her husband until 1910 and then with her unmarried daughter Bella. Quite frankly, my sister and I were rather frightened of her. She laid down the law about most things, but particularly about what to eat and what to wear to keep healthy. My mother meekly gave into her for the sake of peace.
One winter she insisted that we wore gaiters with about 20 buttons per leg to do up with a button hook. This was very time-consuming in a child’s day and I remember longing, but not daring, to bury the gaiters in the garden! We also felt freaks in them as our friends laughed at us. I think, however, that when we grew out of them no more were purchased. Our eldest brother, nine years older [Bertram], fared even worse as, staying with Granny while he had a cold, he was woken regularly at 2 a.m. to have a hot mustard bath. He was about six years old and made my mother promise never to send him to Granny again.
She was also very shockable. We loved running around the garden with nothing on and colouring ourselves with brown mud. One day Granny suddenly arrived at the drive gate in a Bath Chair so we all fled and climbed up trees to hide! She was, however, very kind to poor people and told her two sons they should start a cider business as ‘if you want to get rich, you must make something for people to eat or drink’! I think if I had known her when I was older, I would have appreciated her more as she was a clever woman though rather inartistic - [she] did not care for music or painting.
Well, it is very nice to remember my two Grannies and the times they lived through. Granny Bulmer was born about 1830 [it was 1833], 15 years after the long war with France ended in 1815, and she was only a child of about seven when Queen Victoria came to the throne. German Granny was born about 1850 in Germany in a village outside Frankfurt. I have been there but now, alas, it has been joined to Frankfurt, [which is] a horrible big industrial town with none of the charm of London.