When I got home that day and let myself into the house, my father was already there. Very occasionally, if he had a meeting out of the office, he would make it home for lunch on his way back. But just at that precise moment it did not sound as though he was eating lunch, nor was my mother busying herself in the kitchen making anything. In fact, they were both carrying on an argument at the tops of their voices, my father in stentorian German, my mother mostly in German but with snatches of English thrown in whenever words failed her. As I closed the door, she was just finishing a sentence with “… this complete arse of a bloody town!”
My heart sank. I hated hearing my parents arguing; and arguing about whether to continue living in Germany was not only unsettling, it was pointless. Where did my mother think we would go? In the heat of the moment she sometimes said she wanted us all to move to England, but she might as well have suggested moving to the moon.
My father would counter, as he always did, by pointing out the difficulties of his finding a comparable job in Britain, the impossibility of buying a house anything like the one we had in Bad Münstereifel. It didn’t make sense, anyway; when my mother wasn’t having what she called one of her Down with Deutschland moods, she used to complain about Britain, the ludicrously high cost of living, the traffic that congested the whole of the south of England, the poor state of the schools, the hospitals… the only things she missed, she said, were British tea and Tesco. German supermarkets were never properly organized; whoever thought of putting the Christmas Stollen next to the soap powder aisle?
As for me, I knew quite firmly that I didn’t want to go and live in England. Even the things that my mother spoke about with affection, such as British tea-with milk in it!-sounded awful. And then, as I well knew from hearing her describe it a hundred times, the school system was totally different; children started school at the age of five, and had to stay there all day. They had lunch in the school, and it always tasted terrible, according to my mother, who seemed to find this very amusing. Puréed potatoes and chunks of meat, without any cream sauce or anything.
I remember once we had to do a school project about where our families came from. I drew a wobbly map of Britain with my mother’s hometown on it. We had to include some information about the major products of the area, so I asked my mother what Middlesex had lots of, and she said, “Roads.”
I put my Ranzen carefully down on the floor of the hallway and was preparing to escape up the stairs without interrupting my parents, when the kitchen door opened and my mother stomped out. She was twisting a dishcloth between her hands as though she were wringing a chicken’s neck.
“Pia, I’m glad you’re home.”
Uh-oh, I thought. My father appeared in the doorway behind my mother; he had composed his features into a mask of placidity, but the florid hue of his complexion gave him away.
“Kate…” he said in a warning tone.
“Shut up, Wolfgang,” was my mother’s conciliatory reply. She bent toward me, strands of dark hair flopping untidily over her eyes. “How would you like to go and visit Oma Warner, Pia?”
“She’s not going,” cut in my father over her shoulder.
“Yes, she is.” My mother’s voice was steely.
“She cannot go,” announced my father. “She has things booked already for the summer holidays. The summer camp in the Schleidtal, the art course.”
“I’ll unbook them,” said my mother.
“Thomas and Britta are also coming,” persisted my father. “Pia should spend some time with her cousins.”
I shot him a mutinous glance at this; spending time with Michel and Simon was akin to falling into a snake pit.
“What about my family?” demanded my mother, shaking the hair out of her eyes. “She hardly ever sees them. She should spend some time with them for once.”
“We invited your mother for the summer, but she would not come,” my father pointed out. This was perfectly true; Oma Warner could rarely be lured over the Channel to visit us in Bad Münstereifel. She claimed that both flying and sailing brought on her “funny turns,” and she couldn’t stand either German sausages or German bread, which she said tasted soggy.
“That’s beside the point,” snapped my mother.
“What is the point, then?” barked my father back at her.
“The point is…” began my mother, and stopped. “The point is…” She put her hands up as though to clutch her brow. “I don’t want Pia staying here all summer. It’s not…”
“Yes?” said my father in a loaded voice.
“It’s not safe,” said my mother eventually.
“Ach, this again!” said my father, throwing his hands up.
“Yes, this again!” my mother snapped back. “If you want the honest truth, Wolfgang, I’d like to pack up right now and move somewhere else, somewhere you can let your kids out of the house in the morning and know that they’ll come home again in one piece, not bloody vanish like that poor Voss kid.” She turned to me. “Pia, Oma Warner would love to have you when the holidays start. Would you like that?”
I looked at her dubiously. “Ye-es… but what about the summer camp?”
“You can do that next year.”
“I really wanted to go.”
“You heard her,” cut in my father. “She wants to go.”
“I know,” said my mother. “I’m not deaf. But”-turning to me again-“I think this time it would be better if you went to Oma Warner’s, Pia. Maybe your English cousins can visit. It will be fun.”
“Mmmm,” I said noncommittally.
“And you can practice your English,” she went on. She shot a look at my father; this was her trump card. “She can practice her English,” she told him. “It will give her a really good start when she goes to the Gymnasium in the autumn.”
If I had dared, I would have rolled my eyes at this. In my opinion, my English was perfectly acceptable, and it was certainly ten times better than the English of any of my classmates, since my mother spoke so much English at home. But it was sort of uncomfortable speaking it when I could be speaking German-a bit like putting your tights on the wrong way around; you could still walk about but it felt funny.
Unwillingly, I allowed myself to be dragged to the telephone while my mother dialed Oma Warner’s number; perhaps she thought my father might manage to talk her out of the idea if she did not settle everything right away.
“Mum? It’s Kate.” The voice at the other end of the line said something tinnily, and my mother held lightly on to my shoulder as though to prevent me from running away. “Yes, I’ve spoken to Wolfgang”-spoken seemed an understatement considering the haranguing she had been giving my father when I came home-“and she’s definitely coming.” There was another explosion of crackling at the other end. “Would you like to speak to her?”
Now I stood in my mother’s clutches in resigned dejection; she was going to make me talk English to Oma Warner on the telephone. There was no escape.
“Pia?” My mother handed me the receiver and I put it gingerly to my ear.
“Hallo, Oma.”
“Oma?” said my grandmother. “Who’s Oma? Omar Sharif?” She always said this, and I was never sure whether I was supposed to laugh or not.
“Ich meine… Grossmutter,” I managed uncertainly.
“Granny,” prompted my mother, poking me in the shoulder with a finger.
“Granny,” I repeated dutifully.
“That’s better, darling,” said Oma Warner, chuckling. She clucked with her tongue. “Ooh, you do sound German, Pia.”
“Yes,” I said seriously. “I am German.”
“Dear me,” said my grandmother. “So you’re coming to see your old granny?”
I tried very hard not to heave the sigh I could feel coming.
“Yes,” I said.