Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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English with a Canadian accent. I had lost the accent quickly on returning to England, just as she seemed to have lost the command of her first language.
As I could not ignore the fact that I was half German, I had to consider whether it ought to make a difference to my behaviour. I was not about to start cheering for Germany in a World Cup qualifier, but shouldn’t I stop the name-calling 1918, 1945, 1966 John Bull jingoism? After all, wasn’t it possible that members of my own family had played for the opposition in all three contests? Unlikely in 1966, but still possible in theory. Shouldn’t I own up to the Germanic part of my ancestry, take on the responsibilities of being German, the guilt? The people I told seemed to assume I would, and would break the flow of a tirade against, say, what Germans do with their beach towels in Mallorca to make placatory reference to my ancestry – ‘no offence’, assuming their remarks could offend. I did not know enough about my newly revealed family to feel that bothered.
The subject of Fritz Grossmann came up only twice more in the next thirteen years. Occasionally a story was told about the girls’ childhood in Palestine, usually as a digression from some other topic – a news item about rabies inoculation reminds my mother of the time she was bitten by a dog in Tiberias and of the long needle required to pierce the solar plexus; a picture of flat bread being fished out of a tandoor in Peshawar transports Lizzie to the Old City of Jerusalem. Although younger, Liz seemed to feel much more of a connection with the German side of the family than my mother did as a result of her closeness to Granny G. At one time she had been a regular visitor to our relatives there. It was after one of her visits that a folder of photocopied documents and pictures appeared in our kitchen. Among them was the first photograph I had seen of my real grandfather.
It showed a man of medium build smartly dressed in a light summer suit and wire-rimmed glasses. The jacket is buttoned over a striped tie. The trousers have turn-ups. He has dark wavy hair and a sun-tanned face which is inclined down and slightly away from the camera so it cannot be clearly seen. In each brown hand he holds that of a small girl in a short cotton dress, white socks and sandals. Nearest the camera stands my mother, wearing the serious expression of an eldest child reminiscent of my own at the same age. Furthest away is Lizzie, peering round her father’s legs at the lens. She is almost two and looks to have the potential for mischief. They stand on a gravel path edged with black and white stones. There is a bit of a lawn and a flowerbed; a rose climbs up the wall of a white-washed brick building in the background. A palm frond intrudes from the left. The picture was taken at the Lido on the Sea of Galilee, my mother said.
The only other time my real grandfather was mentioned, and then not even by name, was at a dinner in a restaurant in London. It was winter, almost a year after Susan’s death, and I had been flat-sitting her apartment while it was on the market. Granny and Grandpa and Lizzie had come up for the night, something to do with the Order of the Bath as I recall, and certainly the conversation came round to one of Grandpa’s favourite subjects – his ancestry and coat of arms. I do not remember exactly how it came up, or who suggested I take a more active interest in compiling the Hackett history. It was an idea that had to be nipped in the bud and, reckoning they knew that I knew already, rather than offend with a direct refusal I said I would be more interested to find out about my real grandfather. Lizzie let out an exclamation of horror. I may have been breaking a family taboo, but it was too late to take back the words, and what with the wine and the wide open opportunity, I wanted to say more. I said that Grandpa was the only grandfather I had known and that I loved him as much as a grandson could, but the fact remained he was not my blood relation. As a consequence there was 25 per cent of my genetic inheritance about which I knew nothing and was curious, and which I could no longer deny. My interest was noted and it was said that we would talk about the matter at a more appropriate time.
The time more appropriate never did come. Grandpa’s reminiscences began to stretch further back, leaving behind the smouldering issues of the Cold War and Northern Ireland and revisiting his years in the Eastern Mediterranean. One day he would be reiterating the argument he had advanced at the time, that Rhodes rather than Sicily should have been the site of the Allied counterattack in 1943; on another he would be reliving a cavalry charge against Arab irregulars, sabres drawn, while serving with the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, and as an aside, ‘that was when I first met your grandmother’. Frequently he told stories that we had heard before, often using the exact same form of words as he had on the previous telling. He was rehearsing his memoirs. He was given a dictaphone one birthday, but he did not start to use it until shortly, too shortly, before his death.
Coberley Mill began to show signs of it’s aging occupants. Tubular handles in a hospital-white plasticized finish appeared in doorways and bathrooms. A stair-lift was installed. The rituals of gathering remained broadly the same, although the bottle of champagne before lunch became New Zealand sparkling. Nonetheless, Grandpa would still produce his silver swizzle stick and defizz it somewhat. The trout in the pool below the millpond sluice grew fatter on the bread we threw them. Ducklings disappeared one by one. Dippers flitted past the drawing-room window. If Grandpa was now less inclined to argue, he was more prone to insult, and Lizzie bore the brunt of this.
The isolation that made up so much of the charm of the house came to be a liability for eighty-year-olds. The narrow lane leading down the hill from the main road arrived steeply at a bridge over a stream; snow made it impassable. If that were to coincide with a power-cut or a problem with the boiler or a burst pipe … The loneliness of the spot must have made it seem vulnerable to burglary. One day, when my grandparents were away, a gang of thieves reversed a pick-up through the heavy oak front door. To silence the burglar alarm they tore the bell off the wall and threw it into the millpond. What they could not have realized was that, ever since the IRA threats against Grandpa’s life, the alarm had been hard-wired to Special Branch in Cheltenham. A rapid reaction unit had the place surrounded in thirty minutes.
In the new year of 1997 Grandpa went for a walk up the lane and was discovered sometime later lying on the verge. His balance had not been good for a number of years, but it was not clear whether he had fallen and then suffered a stroke or the other way round. He was admitted to hospital, and then to a rehabilitation centre where his recovery progressed to the point where he was able to go home. Soon after, though, he developed jaundice and returned to hospital for more tests. These revealed he had cancer of the liver.
The old soldier faded away over that spring and summer, as the Halle-Bopp comet waned. The warrior became meek, and I would push him in his wheelchair to feed the fish, or to inspect the lambs in the meadow where I had played kiss-chase as a boy with the girls from the farm in the village. He stayed at home until the end. The final phase of his illness came at the beginning of September. The last time I saw him he was yellow and swollen. His hands were puffed up and dimpled at the knuckles. His eyes were closed. His carer had said that he might be able to hear so I should talk to him, but I could not find anything to say. I sat watching his chest rise and fall as he took gulping dry breaths, between which there were interminable intervals, so long I had to wonder if he would ever breathe in again. I bent over him to tell him I loved him, to kiss him goodbye. His moustache tickled my cheek.
Grandpa often said he could start the day only if when he turned to The Times obituary page his was not there. What the comment said about him depended on which camp you were in, those who thought him an egotistical martinet, and those who found in his amused take on public life irreverence and self-deprecation. The former resented being told that ‘egotistical’ should be pronounced with a short ‘e’; for them his querulousness was merely a way of showing off that he was cleverer than you. The latter were inclined to see a certain intellectual mischievousness in his pedantry. Besides being the subject of jest, the ritual of turning to the obituary page first was for him a memento mori, an acknowledgement that the day would arrive when his own appeared there.
When it came, the obituaries were indeed encomious. Condensed into fifteen hundred words his public career glittered with decorations and honours. His qualities as a scholar, soldier and leader were dwelt upon. His sense of humour and approachability were mentioned in the same breath as his pedantry, or rather, to quote his entry in Who’s Who, an interest in ‘the pursuit of exactitude, called by some pedantry’. It was a fitting send-off for one of the breed obituarists know collectively as ‘the Moustaches’, the