Two Old Fools in Spain Again

by Victoria Twead

  “You did not know?” asked Paco. “Pah, everybody in the village knew what they were doing!”

  “We had no idea.”

  “Every room in that house was full of plants, you could smell them as you passed the house.”

  “We didn’t notice anything. It’s illegal, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. You are not permitted to grow more than a few plants for your own use.”

  “But all the villagers knew about it? Nobody reported it to the Guardia?”

  “We talked about it amongst ourselves. But what happens in the village, stays in the village. We protect each other. We never tell outsiders village business.”

  Lola and her partner replaced the old wooden front door with a modern, white PVC security door. The trickle of unsavoury looking strangers stopped, so we assumed the marijuana farm had closed for business.

  December saw the launch of my third book, Camel and I felt we could relax.

  “I think we’ve had quite enough excitement for one year,” I said to Joe. “I’m looking forward to a nice quiet December.”

  A vain wish because, as the year drew to a close, a gigantic family secret was about to explode into the open and send me reeling.

  22. Alice

  I should explain. Both my parents died long ago, in 1993, within three months of each other, but I didn’t know very much about either of their backgrounds. They never discussed them with me but I knew my father was English and the youngest of several children. Finding his eldest brother’s memoir, Horizon Fever, was a revelation, as I had no idea we had a famous explorer in the family.

  I knew even less about my mother’s side of the family. I was aware that she was an only child and was estranged from her mother, my grandmother. I never knew the cause of the rift, but on the rare occasions that she mentioned my grandmother, it was accompanied by a snort of contempt. Consequently I never met my grandmother and I was told that my grandfather had died long before I was born.

  My mother was Austrian but she had lived in England so long that her accent was barely perceptible. I was rather proud of being half-Austrian, picturing Austria to be a land of snow-capped mountains and edelweiss and imagining my ancestors yodelling to their goats on the mountain slopes.

  The revelations all began with a letter the day before Christmas Eve. Joe had already checked our mailbox for last minute Christmas cards but, as usual, it remained empty. Then somebody knocked on our door. It was an unusual knock, not the customary rap of knuckles or fist, but I recognised it immediately.

  “That’ll be Marcia,” I said. “She can’t manage the steps to the front door any more, she’s knocking with her walking stick.”

  I opened the door and was proved right.

  “I have a letter from England for you,” said Marcia, leaning on her stick. She pushed away a strand of silver hair from her forehead and a hairpin tumbled to the ground narrowly missing her black cat, which wound itself around her ankles.

  “Thank you, Marcia,” I said. “But you didn’t need to bring it to us. We’d have collected it from you after Christmas.”

  “It looks important,” she said, turning the envelope over to peer at the back before handing it over to Joe. “It has official stamps all over it.”

  “Well, thank you,” he said. “And feliz navidad to you and your family.”

  Marcia shuffled off up the street, the black cat scampering ahead. Joe looked at the brown envelope in his hand.

  “Who is it addressed to?” I asked.

  “You. And it has ‘Salvation Army’ stamped all over it.”

  “How very odd,” I said, taking it from him and tearing it open.

  I unfolded one of the sheets of paper inside and started reading aloud.

  “The Salvation Army

  Family Tracing Centre

  Dear Ms Twead,

  You may know about The Salvation Army’s service which seeks to locate family members with whom contact has been lost for some reason.”

  I stopped.

  “I haven’t lost contact with any family members! I’ve absolutely no idea what this is all about!”

  “Read on,” said Joe.

  “We give below details regarding one of our current enquiries and we are writing to you in the hope that you may be the person we are trying to contact. If you believe the information may refer to you, we would be grateful to have your reaction to this enquiry and to know whether you would wish to be put in touch with the enquirer.”

  I looked up.

  “Who? Who is trying to trace me?”

  “Read on,” said Joe.

  “Should you not wish to have contact at this time, please let us know, so that we need not trouble you again.”

  I searched the bottom of the letter. And there it was. Alice Frank Stock.

  “Alice? Alice? I don’t know of any Alice.” I shook my head, confused and dug in the envelope again. “Wait, there’s another letter and this is from ‘Alice’ herself.”

  “Well, read it out then.”

  “Dear Victoria,

  I am calling you Victoria rather than Mrs Twead because we are related. Your mother was my cousin because your grandmother, Anna, was my aunt. The main purpose of this letter is to talk to you about your grandmother Anna. I don’t think you ever met her because your mother, for all sorts of reasons, was on very cool terms with her own mother.

  I could tell you lots about your grandmother but as I am 94 and almost blind, I would prefer to do this by telephone.

  I would be very happy indeed to be in touch with you, or at least make your telephonic acquaintance. Do let me hear from you soon.

  Affectionately,

  Alice”

  “Well!”

  “Did she give you a number? Are you going to phone her?”

  “Of course I will!”

  It took a while for me to gather my thoughts before dialling the number. Why had I never heard of this cousin before? Why did my mother fall out with her mother?

  I tried to picture Alice. Born in 1918, I imagined her to be very frail. I rang the number at the bottom of the letter and the phone was picked up in Bristol, England, almost immediately.

  “Hello? This is Alice.”

  This was not the quavering voice of a fragile old lady. This was a strong, warm voice, lightly accented.

  I introduced myself and the next three quarters of an hour flew past, packed with surprises.

  “Your mother was born in Vienna,” Alice began. “We were cousins and used to see quite a bit of each other. We even went skiing together when we were children. I still have a photo of your mother and me on skis, I will send it to you. Our family was very rich, you know, because we had land and the textile factories in Czechoslovakia that your great-grandfather had set up. Your grandmother, Anna, fell in love with a dashing Austrian officer, but that didn’t go well.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he was very handsome, likeable and full of life. They had a big, flamboyant wedding, but over the years she became impatient with him. He left the army to help run the family textile factories, but he had no head for business. He was spending all Anna’s money socialising and having a good time.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, I think they both had affairs after your mother was born. Your mother adored her father and when Anna left your grandfather, your mother never forgave her. She was young, of course, but she couldn’t accept that her father had gone and she blamed Anna. Did your mother never talk of Anna?”

  “Only very rarely. She made it very clear that she no longer spoke to her mother.”

  “Well, that is a great pity, because Anna was a delightful person, very funny, a good writer and very resourceful. She died in Belfast, you know.”

  “What happened after Anna and my grandfather split up?”

  “Well, when Hitler began his war against the Jews everything changed. I managed to escape to Paris. Anna had the choice of an Austrian or a Czech passport for herself and your
mother. Luckily she chose the Czech one. It saved her and your mother’s lives.”

  “Just a second… Are you saying that my mother and all her family were Jewish?”

  “But of course! We are all Jewish. Didn’t you know?”

  “No!”

  Alice chuckled. “Well, your mother kept that little secret very close to her chest! What religion were you brought up in?”

  “We were Church of England. I was baptised and later confirmed. My brother and I were both married in churches. I taught in a Catholic school for years.”

  “Good heavens! Our family name was Goldschmidt, you know.”

  I was astounded. This was news to me and I knew for a fact that neither my brother nor sister had any idea of our Jewish heritage.

  “So what happened next?”

  “Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and, of course, all the Jews had to flee. Your mother was 19 and she chose to live in England with relatives who had already settled there.”

  “And Anna?”

  “She went to Ireland. Mother and daughter never saw each other again. Your mother always blamed Anna for the marriage split and losing her father.”

  “And my grandfather? What happened to him?”

  There was a small silence.

  “I’m afraid your grandfather died in one of Hitler’s concentration camps.”

  It was almost too much to take in. I discovered that my hand was gripping the telephone receiver so tightly that my knuckles had turned white.

  “You didn’t know?” asked Alice gently.

  “Nothing. I didn’t know any of this.”

  “Anna was a clever lady. If she hadn’t chosen the Czech passports for herself and her daughter, they would also have died in the concentration camps.”

  And I wouldn’t exist, I couldn’t help thinking. Neither would my brother and sister. Or my kids. Or Indy.

  “What a terrible waste of life,” I said. “Thank goodness they managed to get out in time.”

  The horror of the holocaust had suddenly become so much more real with the knowledge that my own grandfather had perished in one of Hitler’s despicable concentration camps and that my mother, grandmother and Alice had narrowly missed the same fate.

  “And what happened to the textile factories? And the land?”

  “Oh, Hitler took all those,” said Alice. “The family lost everything. Anna came to Ireland with nothing and had to start from scratch.”

  “What did she do?”

  Alice chuckled. “As I told you before, she was a very resourceful lady, very clever. She was good with her hands. She made belts and Tyrolean toys that were so beautiful that Liberty’s, in London, placed orders for them. She loved animals and she always had dogs. She discovered she could write and began to write articles for the Dublin Times and the Belfast Telegraph, even the Manchester Guardian. Then she began to write books.”

  “I write books!” I exclaimed excitedly.

  “Do you?” asked Alice and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Ah, then you must have inherited that from her.”

  “What books did she write?”

  “She wrote books about keeping dogs. West Highlands were her favourite. She began to breed dogs for a living. I have the books still, I will send them to you.”

  “That would be wonderful!”

  “Anna’s house in Ireland was bombed by the Germans and she boarded with Professor Estyn Evans. They remained friends for the rest of her life. By the time Anna died, she had made many good friends. Professor Estyn Evans wrote a beautiful obituary for her, which was published in the Irish Times. I think I am right in saying that the Belfast Telegraph wouldn’t publish it because she was Jewish, in spite of the fact that she had contributed articles about the war and dogs and other things for years.”

  “When did she die?” I asked.

  “I believe it was the early 1970s.”

  That would make sense. I vaguely remembered my mother opening a letter and telling my father the news.

  “Humph, that’s no loss,” she had said as she tossed the letter aside.

  “Was my mother told that her mother was dying?”

  “Oh yes, your mother was notified. It was terribly sad,” Alice said and I heard her sigh. “Although Anna had many friends, she longed for a reconciliation with her only daughter, your mother. As Anna lay dying in the hospital, she never tore her eyes away from the ward door. When the nurses asked her what she was doing, she told them that she was waiting for the door to open. She knew her daughter had been told she was dying and she was sure she would come to see her for the last time and make peace. Of course your mother never came, but Anna never stopped hoping and died with her eyes fixed on that door.”

  After that phone call I sat still for a long time trying to absorb all the information I had gleaned. Those terrible events so long ago that I only knew about from history, were now part of my own history. My emotions bubbled over and it was a long time before I was ready to relate it all to Joe.

  A couple of days later, I chatted with my sister on the phone. She was as shocked as I was and had by now also spoken with Alice. We compared notes and memories.

  “Jewish!” said Caroline. “I suppose that explains why we never had any relatives in Austria and why those we knew about seemed to be scattered all over the world.”

  “You’d never guess Alice’s age from her voice, would you? I think she’s amazing!” I said.

  “No, she’s as sharp as somebody a quarter of her age. She speaks three languages fluently, as did our grandmother, Anna. Did you know Alice was very high up in the OECD in Paris?”

  “Yes, I looked that up on the Internet. Apparently OECD stands for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and it was set up to stimulate progress and trade after the War, whatever that means.”

  “Whatever, Alice is certainly no frail little old lady mouldering away in a nursing home,” said Caroline. “I can’t wait to meet her in person.”

  Over the weeks and months that followed, I had many more conversations with Alice and she often had another nugget of family history to relate, something she had just recalled.

  Coincidentally, ‘ancestors’ was a subject that was also beginning to occupy the minds of the villagers. In fact, it became a hot topic, one that was set to divide families and cause major problems in the months to come.

  23. The Cemetery

  Butternut Squash with Herbs and Garlic

  Our house stood just a pebble’s throw from the village cemetery and funeral processions would pass our front door. The first time this happened, many years ago, I was on my own in the living room. At the time, we had one small, quite high, window overlooking the street, too high for people to look inside. I looked up when I heard the tramp of many feet approaching. To my astonishment, a coffin sailed past the window. Being high the window didn’t reveal the bearers, which resulted in the unnerving sight.

  I’d always loved El Hoyo’s cemetery. It was far more intimate than any cemetery I’ve seen in England. Surrounded by white walls, the graves were neat and well maintained. An ancient yew tree, a favourite place for nesting birds, cast its shadow over the sleeping inhabitants. Apart from the graves, rows of niches were set into the walls. Each niche had a shiny brass plaque and was often accompanied by a portrait photograph of the departed.

  From our vantage point on the roof terrace, we could look down on the cemetery. One beautiful January day, Joe and I climbed the stairs to enjoy the view. The sky stretched blue and clear and the almond trees had already burst into flower, their pinky white blossom fresh against the mountain backdrop.

  “There’s a lot of activity around the cemetery today,” remarked Joe, turning his head to speak to me.

  But I had gone. I had ducked down and was crouching by his feet.

  “Vicky, what on earth are you doing down there?” he asked, astonished.

  “I’m hiding!”

  “Hiding from who? It’s only Pancho the mayor showing some
men around.”

  “I know,” I hissed. “I don’t want him to see me. He might remember those English lessons he keeps banging on about.”

  But the mayor and men were engrossed in whatever they were doing, so I bobbed up again to watch.

  “They’ve got clipboards,” I said. “and they are measuring things.”

  We watched as the mayor, deep in discussion, led the men outside the cemetery where they made notes and took more measurements along the wall.

  There was quite a large patch of waste ground beside the cemetery and it seemed to both Joe and me that the party was discussing extending the cemetery. We’d both noticed that it had become very crowded and had wondered where the next newly deceased deceased villager would be laid to rest.

  The mayor finished his discussion and shook hands with the men. They departed in one direction while he headed towards our house. My heart sank.

  “If he knocks on our door, I’m not in,” I instructed Joe.

  Sure enough, Pancho did knock on our door.

  “Don’t you dare let him in,” I ordered Joe through gritted teeth.

  “I have to, it might be important.”

  “Then don’t tell him I’m here!” I hissed, as Joe headed for the door and I darted into the kitchen.

  “Buenas tardes, Pancho,” said Joe, opening the door. “How are you?”

  “Ah, Joe, I am very well. I was just at the cemetery and I thought I would call to arrange those English lessons your wife promised me. Is Beaky in?”

  Hidden behind the kitchen door, I made a face and rolled my eyes. I waited for Joe’s reply, not really trusting him to keep my presence secret.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Vicky isn’t here,” answered Joe as I exhaled with relief. Then, neatly changing the subject, “Yes, we … I mean I ... saw you were there. Are you thinking of enlarging the cemetery?”

  “Yes,” replied the mayor. “The village has been talking about it for a few years. We need more space. We would like to use the waste ground beside the cemetery but there is a problem with the ownership of that patch of land. Never mind, we will sort it out. Please tell Beaky that I called. Perhaps she could phone me some time?”