Unlike most people, I don’t remember the summers of my youth being hotter. But that could be because the temperature dropped by 20C as soon as Granny Ruth arrived. Back then we had no idea why, and could only observe my mum banging pots in the kitchen and demanding how one person could get through so many strawberries. Meanwhile, her mother-in-law sat serenely, pale flesh pillowing from her armature of boned pink satin, tapping out Lili Marlene with pearly fingernails on the wooden arm of her chair. We didn’t know it was all about The Mistress, whom Granny considered a better match for her boy than the baffling, brainy Yorkshirewoman he had married. Perhaps the Yorkshirewoman can be excused her response.
I don’t know how much pleasure anybody got from those visits, but at Christmas she wisely sent a parcel instead, which seemed to work much better. Parcels back then were double-wrapped in brown paper and an agonising skein of knotted string, every knot of which had to be unpicked for future use. The parcel needed to be strong because, apart from the inevitable copy of Struwwelpeter, which my mum just as inevitably pounced on and threw away before it could give us nightmares, it contained almost exclusively tins and jars of food. Wax beans, goose liver paté, pfifferlinge mushrooms in brine: all the tastes of my dad’s childhood, imperfect like all recollections but good enough to transport him, temporarily, back home.
German food has never caught on in Britain. So, once the parcel was finished, my dad had to improvise surrogates, bizarre cargo-cult tributes to the flavours he remembered. Raw bacon instead of Black Forest ham, raw mince sandwiches instead of steak tartare, and on occasional visits to the countryside, whatever wild mushrooms he could find that looked slightly familiar. These would be bundled into his pockets, taken home and poured into a saucepan with butter, then eaten on toast while we stood around, torn between fascination and terror as we waited for the horrible consequences to play out.
In the event, he rarely suffered any ill effects, and those were normally attributed, at least by my mum, to extravagance with the butter.
To the rest of us, his eating habits were, depending on how publicly he indulged them, either mortifying or, at best, just something you did if you were a mathematician and had a job that appeared to consist of sitting in an armchair staring into space, imagining things that weren’t really there.
But to him, this food must have been the only way he could summon the memory of a childhood that ended too soon and too suddenly. First, at the age of seven in 1933, when he lost an older brother and discovered from the Nazis that he was not, after all, a good little German boy but a Jew. Then, five years later, when he was put on a train by loving parents, with a big family of cousins and a comfy home, and got off on his own in a place where he knew nobody, wasn’t allowed to speak his native language, and started every day with a cold shower and a brisk hour of bullying.
We never went along on his return visits to Granny Ruth in Heidelberg. So it was years before I understood what he had been missing, as I witnessed the extraordinary dissolution of my thin-skinned, thick-accented father into a happy little boy, speaking his own language with his own people and reunited with the unarguably delicious food he had been trying, for all those years, to rediscover.
