Don’t ask me why we had to live in the most ridiculous squalour, but my Father had some strange ideals about the working class underdog hero even in the military. His parents were escapees from the household of the Marquis of Salisbury otherwise known as the Cecils, descendants of the notorious Prime Minister of Elizabethan times. His father was the grandson of the concubine relationship between my great-great gran and the Marquis. The only reason he dragged me to that estate in Hatfield, was to compete with my mother’s revelings of Hapsburg society in the usual underhanded way. Being the critical git that I am from my maternal grandfather’s genes, I was not one to buy into any of it. Neither the “Upstairs Downstairs” mentality, nor selective inbreeding in any form despite what promises of higher education and ettiquette for god and country. My Opa taught me that despite all good lessons in honour and self-respect from old Fritz, the monarchy was on its last legs of degeneracy with nothing viable to fill the void that followed. Bismarck, in all his senility, inevitably conceded to Hitler assuming to be the voice of the new generations. He didn’t see the devil in the detail of “Mein Kampf”, let alone just how senselessly life was lost in the megalomania of WWI. As if for god’s will, we’re all just servants to the cause. That seemed to be the bottom line of all that psychosis. The polemic all these people were operating on, even my father in his own twisted way. Don’t let that fool you, my Opa said, listen to your inner voice, question everything. Only you can know and feel what YOU need to survive in this insane world. My Opa was a med A in the Kaiser’s Cavalry. He spent 8 years looking after the inmates of a POW camp in Sarajevo. In that time my Oma filed a divorce that landed my mother in a Catholic orphanage. I remember the horror stories about the brutality of those nuns. She was scarcely reunited with her father a couple of years when the gestapo came around and put him away for refusing to salute Hitler. Like most adolescents without parents, she landed in the military, the Luftwaffe to be precise. She became a flight technician and test flew nearly everything they had. When the Russians invaded that base, she fled with a friend for the American lines. She made the last train out of Dresden before it was bombed flat. Hid out in Prag until the Russians closed that border too. Finally she made it to Frankfurt and worked as a telephone switchboard operator. Her brother finally found her to say that Opa had been freed from prison and given the job as Employment Director in Hameln.
There she worked as the secretary for the British CO and met my father one night. She was driving an APC around the parade square for laughs. My father was immediately impressed. Unfortunately some nazi had it in for women “selling out to the occupation” and tried to kill her. After spending two weeks in a coma from severe cranial fractures and frontal lobe trauma she could only speak English. Everyone tells me it was so gentlemanly of my father to marry her despite the damage, but his story is he desperately wanted out of the barracks. The fact is I was born 6 months later in Fort Erie, Ontario, and he was out of the service until he rejoined four years later. He was in the sheet metal business with his brothers until he got sick of them catering to the New York mafia. Alot of them lived there to evade taxes and launder money at the race track. I’ve seen some of those tacky villas with the fancy aluminum siding, gaslit swimming pools and ugly plastic flamingo figures all over the lawn. Obviously money couldn’t buy them much in the way of aesthetics. People inclined to shun my mother because of her handicap. My father and his brothers only made fun of that while I became a problem child for all the mismanagement. He never did anything to improve her condition, rather saw her as a means of keeping people at a distance. Whatever abuses I suffered from this was irrelevant, as long as people looked away. Of course, when they didn’t it was my fault, so I was pretty well on my own as far as parental guidance was concerned. Still I don’t share his miserable views on life that should belong in a Fellini movie.
