Assumption of birthdays

August is usually hot up here in the Northern hemisphere, and this year global warming is making it worse (are there really still people around who deny that?). So it’s a boon to have a holiday in the middle of the month.

That’s something the Catholics got right. Countries where they determine holidays get the 15th of August off. A fine tradition to celebrate a key moment.

It’s the feast of the Assumption. That’s when Mary, mother of Jesus, is said to have been ‘assumed’ – taken into – heaven. The Catholic Church has never resolved the fundamental quandary behind this event, one I’m sure gives you just as many sleepless nights as it gives me. That’s whether Mary died first and her soul rose to heaven, or she was taken into paradise bodily while alive. A harrowing conundrum.

In any case, 15 August has always had a significance that matters more to me than the Assumption. It’s the birthday of Yetta, my maternal grandmother. 

Yetta was my favourite grandmother. That’s not because I disliked my paternal one, Eleanor, but because we saw her little so I barely knew her. Eleanor was the daughter of a Serb and an Englishwoman, which strikes me as attractively exotic, but I know little else about her heritage. As for her life events, only a couple of anecdotes spring to mind.

She once visited my grandfather, her husband, in hospital after he’d been wounded in the First World War. For reasons that were never made clear to me, perhaps because they weren’t clear to anyone else, she was convinced that he’d lost a leg. I’d love to have witnessed the scene when, having given up on persuading her by rational argument, he threw back the bed clothes on his hospital bed to show her two legs, safely in place and encased in pyjamas.

Eleanor with my father during WW2
with an unidentified third companion

The other story I liked dates from May 1940. My father was the only one of her family with her as she prepared to flee her house in Brussels before the city fell to the advancing Nazi armies. He’d loaded their cases into a taxi outside their house. Impatient to get going, he was calling for her to get a move on since they were making for the last train to leave Brussels towards the West and relative safety before the Germans showed up.

Eleanor came dashing down the path, but suddenly stopped. 

“Just a second,” she called, and went back into the house. A moment later she came back out dragging a dustbin behind her. 

It doesn’t do, even as you turn into a refugee, to leave a rubbish bin unemptied in your house, now does it?

Yetta as an adolescent

I got to know Yetta far better. I remember the end of one of the many visits we made to her, when my brother and I were young. She’d just kissed us and our parents goodbye and, from the car that was taking us to airport, I saw her at her sink, washing up, with tears running down her face. I think that sight remains one of my most touching and persistent memories.

Another comes whenever I make scrambled eggs. It’s associated with a sense of guilt. For many years in my childhood, I disliked scrambled eggs. I have no idea why. These childish dislikes often have no rational grounds, do they?

One evening she made scrambled eggs for me and I discovered, to my surprise, that I liked them for once. And said so. Later, my parents called me in for a serious talk.

“Do you really like her scrambled eggs more than ours?”

Well, I didn’t. I told them that hers were a bit like stirred-up omelette. All that had changed was that, for no good reason I could think of, my tastes had changed. I now liked scrambled eggs, even hers. But not particularly hers as opposed to my parents’.

Even as I said that I felt a terrible pang of guilt. My grandmother had made an effort to please me, and she was proud it had worked. Even though she didn’t know what I was saying to my parents, it felt disloyal, a betrayal of the bond between us. And I felt uneasy about it.

Oh, well. This 15 August, I took a biscuit in her memory. It was only in her memory because we keep them in a cut-glass jar inherited from her, in which she used to keep water biscuits. Unfortunately, the top makes a sort of ringing sound when you lift it off the jar. She would always hear it if I tried to sneak myself a biscuit.

“Put it back,” she’d call from the kitchen, “lunch will be ready in a few minutes and I don’t want you spoiling your appetite.”

That made it poignant to take a biscuit on what would have been her 122nd birthday, had she not stopped when she was 91. I wish she’d been around to tell me to put the biscuit back in the jar. But at least I had memories to enjoy.

Not just memories, however. Because this time of year has stopped just being associated with my grandmother. Now it’s the time of birthdays from the extremes in my family. My grandmother’s and my granddaughter Matilda’s. Hers is on the 18th, making her three this year. 119 years younger that Yetta. And four generations on.

It’s a key time. She leaves the pre-infant school where she’s been for two school years – yep, they start young here in Spain – and moves into a big school, in relative terms, a full-fledged infant school. I’m excited to know how that’ll work out. There’ll be new kids to meet (though friends will also come with her) and new teachers. 

It’s going to be interesting to see how she copes with the language. As I’ve mentioned before, she’s learning two – English and Spanish – which makes things slower overall. But I was fascinated to learn from my wife Danielle that she now has it clear in her mind that they are two separate languages.

“In English!” she insisted on one occasion while Danielle was visiting her a couple of weeks ago. 

Matilda on her way to Belfast
with her brother Elliott in the background

Well, she’s surrounded by English right now. English with an accent I particularly like. She’s visiting the other side of her family, in Belfast. She’s even been getting to know some of the joys of Northern Ireland, including a trip down to County Down, where the dark Mourne, as the song says, sweeps down to the sea. And the Giant Causeway in County Antrim, where legend has it a Scottish giant and an Irish one nearly came to blows.

A good place to enjoy a third birthday.

Later she and her brother, with parents in tow, will be coming to see us too. So we can celebrate her birthday ourselves. And, if celebrating a birthday is good, celebrating it twice has to be even better.

Ah, the Feast of the Assumption. It’s a good time of year for me. Though more for the family than for the Assumption itself.