Rommel’s Binoculars
My mother, in her later years has developed an even stronger dislike for the German race than ever before it seems. I think it was something that had occurred to her when she came back to her own home after a number of months in hospital and a subsequent stay in a care facility.
Those who suffer from dementia of one form or another sometimes develop certain intense and loopy ideas and those of us, namely relatives, who are at the receiving end are advised to remain silent.
“I just wish I had been a little older during the war so that I could have killed some GERMANS”, my mother said to me on a filial visit not long after her return home.
No doubt she now regards me as some sort of Nazi sympathiser as I have a number of German friends but the intention was clearly to try and wind me up.
After several minutes of uncomfortable silence she added:
“You don’t SAY much do you?”
“Shall I make us a cup of tea?” I replied.
I went into the dimly-lit kitchen… a place that seemed deserted and woebegone. Some of my stepfather’s things were still in evidence amidst the dusty grease on the worktops. He had been the cook in their partnership. My mother enjoyed making rich and sickly cakes now and again but the routine cookery had always fallen to Dennis.
“You’ve put too much water in the kettle,” my mother bawled at me across the void.
“Maybe you would like to make it yourself,” I said under my breath.
Just then I noticed the wind-up watch that Dennis had given me when I was in my early teens… it was still hanging on the nail where he had left it after I had asked him if he could take it for repair some 25 years earlier. It was German navy war-issue. He had exchanged it for a packet of cigarettes in Copenhagen in 1945… the gun-metal case and the simple inscription on the face: “KM 586” were what made it a thing of wartime antiquity… Kriegsmarine 586. Those Germans are everywhere it seems.
Revisiting the house several years later was an unsettling experience. Everything just left. Even the pictures of my stepfather and the pet doggies from my childhood in exactly the same places. She had taken none of those to her interim resting place. All abandoned. It was as if she had placed a veil over so much of her life. She had wanted to leave it all. Just forget.
The bound leather volumes dating back to the 1700’s and including my great great great grandfather’s signature and those of his children and their children in turn were still in the bookcase. Unimportant. Untouched. The early photographs of those whose identity I can only guess at, left wrapped in sheets and antimacassars. Never any explanation of who they were and what they may have done in their lives. Just half-remembered fleeting references from many years before:
“Grandfather was very fetching in his Masonic regalia!”
Now here I am with a whole heap of stuff. Faded sepia-tone photos and those of my parent’s wedding, old cameras, hundreds of photographic slides, bills and accounts, diaries , my dad’s home-made shepherd’s crooks, the tiny brown bear made from plaster that supposedly belonged to the children of Tsar Nickolai , a bunch of art books and old paperbacks, Danish Christmas plates and a few oil paintings, a bookcase, my grandfather’s medical diplomas and his wartime trunk, a china lightshade and some rusty tools… but not least… those redoubtable visual aids that featured in war films and kid’s comics of the 50’s and 60’s … Rommel’s binoculars.
The words: “Achtung ENGLANDER!” came into my head and I chuckled to myself. My schoolboy German was pretty limited.
I extracted the binos from an enormously sturdy leather case…they were so heavy it was a bit of a job to lift them up but with substantial items like these, it was no wonder that those Germans did so well at Tobruk.