Jigsaw (4 page)

My own life was full. I opened up the chicken coops and shut them again at dusk, I fed the geese and made the dogs’ dinner (it was served by my father), I fanned the smoke-house fire, turned the joints of pork in their barrel of brine, drew our daily cider. There was no more slow time to dread. There was weeding to be done and watering, and vegetables to be picked and windfalls to be gathered and kindling to be made, and I now could muck out the donkeys’ stable on my own. Then there were seasonal tasks, apple picking and storing (on the parquet floor of my mother’s drawing-room now empty of its light gracious furniture), the brief vintage, the gathering and stacking of wood, the autumnal raking of leaves … The leaves were my
responsibility
(they were needed for the donkeys’ bedding as we could not afford to buy straw); spreading and drying and turning, then piling them into the cart and driving them to the barn, Flora between the shafts (Fanny being too tricky). I also had private pursuits. Teaching 
the dogs arithmetic – having heard of Calculating Horses – trying to make them tap out numbers with their paws, by persuasion and rewards; that was an entire failure. Trick bicycling, on an old machine: I was seldom allowed out on the road so I taught myself stunts in the yard – I could kneel on the saddle going downhill and I could ride backward in tight circles (
not
within sight of my father). And tennis. Solo tennis by the hour with the pre-war balls and the ill-strung racket against the wash-house wall, keeping the score and dreaming of Wimbledon. (Oh, the things I had heard of.)

A new worry came to beset my father.
He
had my custody but my mother still meddled (his word); she wanted me to be educated, so apparently did the law. In the now distant past nanny had taught me my pot-hooks, reading I had more or less picked up on my own, figures I liked to play with; at Voss Strasse I had quite enjoyed the
biweekly
visits of a rather decrepit tutor … At Feldkirch we forgot all about it. When my mother nudged our memory, she suggested a governess; my father beside himself with vexation decided to send me to the village school.

The school house was a recent building implanted by some distant authority – a classroom on the ground-floor and some lavatories above, a flat for the schoolmaster and his family – and it smelled of cement, linoleum and piss. Here I was brought one day in the middle of term. The children, about thirty of them, sat on benches, each with a slate before them, girls on one side, separated by an aisle, boys on the other. They were placed according to their age, six-year-olds in the front row, eleven-year-olds in the back. The schoolmaster, a youngish man in a town suit, came in and everybody stood up and broke into a chant,
Grüt’zi Gott Herr Lehrer
. He stepped in front and began to do something quite fascinating – making each row learn a different thing at the same time. The six-year-olds were told to practise their letters – how their slates squeaked – the next lot were set sums, the row behind was learning a poem and the back row was given a map. We
nine-year
-olds, a girl and I and three boys across the aisle, were made to read aloud in turns. Then there was dictation for some and learning 
by heart for others; later there was singing and reciting the catechism by all. It was noisy but not really confusing, and I soon got the hang of it. The teaching was done in real German (with a strong southern accent) and the children too repeated their lessons in
Hochdeutsch
, which came out quite stilted, but when they talked, even to the master, they dropped back into patois. Each row formed what they called a school-year; mine had a set of textbooks marked Fourth: a
Fiebel
for reading, a
Rechenbuch
for arithmetic, stories from the Holy Bible; the content of the books, the curriculum (a standard curriculum!) was the same word for word through the whole of Baden and had to be learned day by day, week by week by every child of nine throughout the land.

The girls were meek and most were hopeless at their lessons, the boys were lazy and noisy. The chief punishment was
Tatzen
, pawsers, a beating on the hand with a short swishy stick. If you were late more than once or couldn’t do your daily lot you were given two
Tatzen
, for something worse four, for something really bad six. Six was rare. Sometimes the schoolmaster would just hurl a boy over the desk and beat him on his behind. The boy usually yelled (stoicism was not prized).
Tatzen
and spankings would be given then and there in front of the school, the innocents sitting still and cowed with an
undercurrent
of nastier feelings:
Schadenfreude
, an unholy excitement.

School-hours were not long, the children being expected, as I did, to give a hand at home. One o’clock till four in the afternoon for us in the lower school, seven to eleven in the morning for the twelve- to
fifteen-year
-olds. So were the holidays regulated by the needs of the fields and seasons – hay holidays, harvest holidays, potato and wood-making holidays. Nor do I remember much homework. When the threshing machine was due or someone was repairing a barn, the school children were given the day off – we’d sit on ladders, forming a chain, handing up tiles.

Like my sister’s house, school opened another world for me. Again I discovered the pleasures of social life. First there were the children, though they treated me with curiosity and restraint at first (their parents and the schoolmaster called me by the preposterous name of Baroness Billi – Billi was what my family always called me, a corruption 
of the last syllables of my first name), I tried to make friends with the zest of a puppy. Where are they now my ephemeral companions of Feldkirch (for my schooldays were numbered)? Where and what are they likely to have been doing in 1933? in 1939? in 1945? Josephina, my coeval, a silent sallow girl with black hair severely pulled back? Clara, another slow child, Katherina who never washed (nor did I when I could help it) and whom I could seduce into mischief, the five Martin girls, each one year older and two inches taller than the next and otherwise exactly alike? The girls were a tame lot on the whole, their idea of play was promenading arms linked down the village street of a Sunday afternoon, bawling sad songs. I soon turned to the boys, forming a gang with three older ones, Alphons, Robert and Anton, as we shared tastes; my Meccano, playing trains, getting on a farm horse when no one was looking.

I was interested in their home life and pleased when my new friends took me to their houses after school. There I was hospitably received by their elders. The meal in progress would be the four o’clock
Z’fiere neh’
in Baden patois which is a language unto itself. The fare was the same in house after house; cold raw bacon, bread and cider. The bacon was cut thick, right off a side in the larder, as thick as a beef steak. The bread was home-baked in big round loaves weighing about five pounds, whitish, not snow-white, good bread not unlike the French
pain de campagne
though harder and closer in texture; and at its best when about eight days old. The cider was spoken of as wine, and not up to ours, as many stretched it by adding water and a powdered stuff, a kind of must, that came out of a cardboard box. Nobody in the village, except the priest and the mayor, drank grape wine, and they rarely drank beer.

It was a small village, one long curved street, unpaved, a few lanes, some two hundred and fifty inhabitants in less than fifty dwellings. They had about four surnames between them, Rinderle, Faller, Martin and Hauser. Everybody farmed (except the priest and the schoolmaster) and nearly everybody farmed their own land. Some had only an acre or two, some had thirty or forty; some were said to be in debt to the mortgage bank, some were quite prosperous; a few 
did something on the side such as keeping the smithy, the post office (with the one and only telephone which went dead at seven p.m.), the village shop and the inn. All lived much in the same way. The houses varied in size, all were stone and most of them had two storeys. A few were shiningly clean with polished cook-stoves and floors, a dustless quiescent parlour, a main bedroom with a
store-bought
suite, double bed, wardrobe, framed wedding photograph on the chest of drawers, often a photograph too of a son fallen (so recently) in the war. Some were less speckless, some were sluttish. At the back was the yard with the dung heap and the pump and trough (only the schoolhouse, the presbytery and the château had water laid on), then the stables and barns, and these also were tell-tale. The mayor’s were a joy to behold, the stables airy with the straw high and clean, the harness-room sparkling, the milk churns scoured and the apple loft smelling sweet. There was an enclosed vineyard. The mayor, like a few other big farmers, had four horses, most had only one and you often saw a horse and an ox teamed up before a load. Oxen did much of the work, and one man who was also the cobbler had to do the ploughing with his only cow.

When I say that the whole village lived much in the same way, I am thinking of their work, their food, their religion and their leisure. For breakfast everyone had milky coffee made of roasted barley and chicory essence, bread and plum jam. No butter; butter and eggs were for selling. Later on the men in the fields had a bacon and cider break. The midday meal was between eleven and twelve and much like Lina’s cooking, starch with an occasional over-boiled cabbage or carrot. The cooking fat was lard. A salad meant a potato salad. Meat, unless some great chore was going on, was for feast days and Sundays. Then it would be roast pork or boiled beef or fowl or a superfluous cockerel. Large four-o’clocks every day, supper at nightfall a bowl of coffee and bread. The clothes interested me less but I can see them still. By today’s standards they were dreadful. Shapeless skirts, high-necked blouses, ill-made dresses of cotton and serge. No one over thirty wore any colour other than black and brown. There were no jerseys or cardigans then for women; ‘jumpers’ had come in, they did not reach us. A girl 
displayed clothes twice in her lifetime, at her first communion and her wedding, both of course in white. The men made do with dingy work clothes (no trim-cut jeans) and a stiff Sunday suit. Children from May to October went barefoot. Reading? Among adults I saw no print ever, except for the local paper and the mail-order catalogues.

Politics? Well, the men had their council, the
Gemeinderat
, which met in a room at the inn; as for national politics, in spite of the war and recent revolution, feelings did not run high (there was talk though and fear of inflation). During the first post-war general elections in 1919, no candidate for the Reichstag came to address the electorate of Feldkirch. Yet vote they did and it was pretty well known which way. Lina was able to put us into the picture family by family. In spite of my father’s predictions, who saw only potential Jacobins, the village went solidly either for the Democratic or the Centre or some agricultural splinter party, all representing the Catholic interest. Nobody voted for the Nationalist and Conservative parties or groups of the extreme right, possibly because they were seen as associated with North Germany and Protestantism. One man only voted Social Democrat, and was labelled
Sozi
:
he
was known as a reckless drunk who had gambled away his land. No votes were cast for the Communists and Spartacists.

Feldkirch had no resident doctor or nurse, no poor-house, no charity, there was no women’s institute, no club, no band, no
playing-fields
, no games of any kind. Some of the women grew a few flowers in front, otherwise there was little gardening except for the pot. There were mouth organs about and a few concertinas, the schoolhouse had a harmonium; no one, including ourselves, owned a piano; nor do I remember anyone with a hobby, there was no stamp-collecting, no chess. What did they do with themselves? There was no radio then, let alone television, no accessible cinema; only two or three people had ever seen a film. Between being stupefied by ceaseless
machine-produced
distractions and no stimuli at all, there is a world. What
did
they do with themselves? The men could go to the inn to drink and play cards, Gasthaus zum Kreuz, a slovenly stuffy place that smelled of wet boots and schnapps (I penetrated once or twice to fetch lemonade); they could bang away at hares and a few birds (it was flat 
country with little woodland); they could treat themselves to outings when they had a mare to be served or a calf to sell (a lame cryer with a bell would limp up the street announcing cattle markets and fairs). Young married women and the younger old maids would promenade the Sunday lanes, arm in arm, like schoolgirls, singing away about love, early death and the soldier who failed to return. (Those German songs made me want to howl like a dog, and the tunes were a far cry from Schubert and Brahms.) Young men too promenaded in crocodiles of a Sunday afternoon – they must have been idle hands indeed – passing but not mingling with the girls. Segregation was rigid, one might have been in Latin America or Turkey. Single boys did walk out with single girls (of course!) but it had to be in secret or as fiancés. The secret never lasted – tittle-tattling about one’s neighbours
was
a main recreation, and woe to those found out – engagements, unless a pregnancy
intervened
, were apt to be long.

One solace was the great guzzlings, serious enough at vintage and Easter, whoppers at a christening, first communion or wedding. A pig would be killed, geese roasted, barrels of choucroute rolled out. Relations and helpers would be asked to the spread and as everyone had some kinship with everyone the company would be large. Those who could have no place were sent a
Metzgerplatte
, a great dish high with blood-pudding, spare ribs, hot ham,
Kuttlie
(tripe) and a glutinous meat-pulp of a sausage called
Schwartenmagen
.

There
was
one focal point, one common source of drama, fulfilment, pleasure, and that was the Church and her offices. Feldkirch, man and boy, was Catholic. (It knew one Jew,
the
Jew – not resident – who periodically turned up to buy rabbit furs; Protestants, heretics,
Ketzer
, were purely bogy figures; the nearest they had ever got to one was my mother who had only changed to the true faith when about to marry my father.) In the church there was music, an organ played by the schoolmaster; whoever could sing, sang in the choir; one young man served as verger, others rang the bells, the angelus bell at morning, noon and sunset, the bells for mass, the jerky hysterical fire bells and the slow single bell when someone had died. The small high one for a woman, the deeper one for a man. You listened and said your
ave
, or 
got ready for church or ran for help or wondered who it might be. Women looked after the altar linen, swept the church – and a beautiful small church it was, pure-arched, whitewashed, plain – it was the virgins’ job (virgins of any age) to bring flowers and branches, to polish the censer and candlesticks. The mayor and my father in turn provided the wine for mass; the boys I played with served as acolytes. Rosary and missal were treasured private possessions.