Oh dad, oh dad E-Book

Wolfgang Nutsch

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 195

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Times are changing. Everything used to be different. Who hasn't heard such statements from their parents or grandparents? As a child, you might still be interested in the stories of the past. When you're young, you usually have other things on your mind. But interest in stories is awakening again. This is precisely why Wolfgang Nutsch has written down experiences from his childhood and youth. Born in Hildesheim in 1935, he lived through the Second World War and its aftermath. His experiences, written in short stories, are not only of interest to his descendants, but to anyone who wants to read stories about everyday life in the past.

Leseprobe

Foreword

Our children were still small. I kept thinking I had to tell them what it had been like when we were the same age as our children now. That might be interesting, I thought. But at some point I heard a sigh of disapproval: "Oh Dad, oh Dad - you always with your earlier days." So, now I knew about the children's interests and I took a very low profile on the matter.

Now the children are grown up and have children of their own. Suddenly their interest in the past grows. They realize that soon there will be no one left to tell them about their past experiences.

That was the reason for me to write down a few incidents from the childhood of our older generation and also to add one or two memory sketches to the text. Perhaps the now grown-up "children" will read it one day, or even their children, the next generation.

If not, then I really enjoyed writing these short stories myself. Not only because it brought back old memories, but also because it made me realize how much you can experience at almost ninety years of age.

After all, an incredible amount has changed in all areas of work, technology, social understanding and private life during this period of our lives.

Wolfgang Nutsch, born 1935 in Hildesheim

Earliest memories

My memories probably don't go back any further than the age of 6 or 7. Nevertheless, there are some things from that time that are deeply engraved in my memory.

My father was still at home at the time. He worked in the accounts department of a large company nearby. On some evenings during the week, as a member of the stenographers' association, he still gave lessons in shorthand and typing.

Father went to work early. He came home at lunchtime to eat, because lunch breaks were relatively long in 1941-1942. I think he had at least two hours. Enough time to stretch out on the chaise longue after lunch and listen to the news on the radio. But he usually fell asleep and woke up again when the news was over. "I think I had fallen asleep," were his words. We often picked Dad up from work in the evening. It wasn't very far to walk. We just had to walk down the stone steps from the upper cross street via the so-called Brauhof to the company. On the way home, he naturally asked how school had been and sometimes announced that he had brought us rabbit bread. That sounded tempting. But it wasn't always so delicious because it was the uneaten breakfast bread that mother had already prepared for him in the morning.

On Saturdays, my father only had to work until midday. When I was allowed to pick him up, I left a little earlier. The porter then let me through the gate and showed me how to get to my father's office. That was always particularly exciting for me. I was allowed to sit on a swivel and height-adjustable desk chair and do handicrafts. I had two types of glue at my disposal. The honey-colored liquid glue, the gum arabic, with the practical rubber pacifier on the bottle, or the pleasantly sweet-smelling white glue paste with the small application brush in an aluminum can. I liked to link the paper clips together to make a long chain. Dad didn't find this particularly funny though, because every time he wanted to grab a paper clip, he had a whole rat's tail of clips in his hand. The Walther calculator was also a lot of fun. Here you could set the numbers on small levers and multiply them by cranking them forwards several times noisily and divide them by turning them backwards. Of course, you could also use the machine to add and subtract. But then you had to reset the numbers to be added or subtracted each time and then turn them forwards when adding and backwards when subtracting.

When the weather was nice, my father would ride his bike into town in the evening to the business school to teach shorthand to young ladies, or more rarely to men. He often gave me a lift on his bike. Men's bicycles used to have a horizontal bar between the handlebars and the saddle. A small child's saddle was bolted to this in such a way that I could still grip the handlebars with my hands. My feet were supported by footrests attached to the side of the front fork. In this riding position, as a child you could really steer and, above all, see where the ride was going.

In the classroom I saw all grown-up ladies. The wooden school desks were divided into two parts. They consisted of a desk-like front section with a slanted writing surface, a groove at the top for writing implements and a compartment for the inkwell, and a seat for two people. The seat and desk were connected in the middle by a beam. This was my seat. I had to put the beam between my legs and the full-grown ladies flanked me on my left and right. Sometimes my father would call me to the front. Then I had to write a word or abbreviation in shorthand with chalk on the bottom edge of the wide blackboard. I think he was always proud when I managed to do it without mistakes.

I don't have many more memories of my father before he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Just this one. One day, my father had to say goodbye. He had to join the soldiers, we children had been told.

My sister, who is two years younger than me, and I wanted to give him something very special as a farewell gift. We eagerly rehearsed a song and then performed it the evening before. "Must I, must I, must I go out to the village and you, my darling, stay here..."

His mother and father burst into tears and left the room. That was probably not the right way to make it easier for him to say goodbye.

Visit to the grandparents

It must have been Grandma's birthday. That was the occasion for a family reunion. Her paternal grandparents lived in Eckemeckerstraße. There were lots of pretty half-timbered houses here. On the way there, we passed a smithy in the Alter Markt. Sometimes you could hear the blacksmith's hammering from afar, the two or three dull blows on the red-hot iron, followed by two or three high-pitched blows on the anvil. When the large double-leaf door was open, you could see the smoldering coke in the forge in the dark black room, which only glowed brightly when the bellows were kicked. The numerous different tongs lined up on the wall and the anvil in the middle of the room were also visible after a long look into the sooty forge. This was always interesting for me. Especially when one of the sturdy brewery horses was being shod. The struggle the blacksmith had with the horse to pull up one of the hooves, clamp it between his legs and put the iron on. The smell of hot iron and burnt horn is still stored in my olfactory cells today. The speed with which the blacksmith attached the horseshoe to the hoof with long nails, bent the nails that had come out of the side of the hoof and used a rasp to adjust small protruding horn parts of the hoof to the iron, always instilled great respect in me. Unfortunately, my mother didn't have that much patience and urged me to finally move on.

Eckemeckerstrasse was not far away. Grandma was already waiting for us and waved to us from the small window on the upper floor. The front door consisted of frames and panels and was painted in different colors. The heavy colored bar key, which was stuck in a large box lock from the inside, was impressive. A narrow staircase led up to the living room. It was impossible to get to the living room secretly, because every step was audible and perceptible with the creaking of the steps and floorboards. Grandpa came up behind us. He had filled the enameled water bucket at the only tap in the house and now placed it in its usual place, on the dresser in the upstairs hallway. Grandma used a ladle to scoop water into the kettle to make coffee, real muckefuck. It was a coffee made with pointed beans, Katreiner or Lindes, which was given a particularly dark color by adding chicory. My mother had brought the cake with her. It was also a dark coffee cake, garnished with beechnuts that we had collected in the Berghölzchen as a substitute for walnuts or almonds.

A boring phase now began for us children. As always, I pored over Grandma's extensive button collection. Of course, the buttons were always removed when an item of clothing gave up the ghost. Grandpa was extremely handy. He had made a large box with a lid, which was divided into at least 30 compartments. All of them were filled to the brim with buttons, large and small, simple to magnificently shiny. I rummaged through all the compartments. I searched until I had collected a large number of identical and similar buttons. I arranged them in rows and groups to form formations. These were my troop units, marching across the floorboards in precise order.

At some point it was unavoidable. For better or worse, I had to go to the place where the emperor is said to have gone on foot. Certainly not to this one, because it was an outhouse in the outbuilding ten meters away. The wooden door had no lock, just a hook to hold the door shut. Inside was a large box made of boards nailed together. A large hole was cut into the top surface of the box, which was covered by a heavy, solid wooden lid. You had to fold it up. I quickly sat down on the box, which was too high for me, because looking down into the depths was always a challenge. The warped plank door was not tight. What's more, the window hook didn't allow the door to be locked tightly so that enough light could get inside through the wide gap. His eyes had also become accustomed to the darkness. Hanging on the wall was a wire structure on which newspaper had been impaled, about the size of a postcard. What was it for? Today you buy toilet paper with flowers on it. In the corners, I noticed the many cobwebs arranged in steps on top of each other. It was interesting to see how quickly the spiders could repair a destroyed web. How they used their nimble legs to knot the thread to the radial spider threads. When I then managed to catch one of the green iridescent flies and throw it into a spider's web, it was a particularly exciting observation. The spider shot out of its corner at lightning speed, wrapped up the prey with all its legs with its spinning thread in great haste until only a bright ball could be seen. But at some point it was better to leave this place again. Not only because of the unpleasant smells, but also because of the slowly noticeable cold.

Upstairs in the small living room, the atmosphere was now at its peak. They were playing "Mensch ärgere dich nicht". Time and again, the players managed to get kicked out before the end. I only remember the last scene, when my aunt Trude tore open the window in anger and threw the whole game out of the window along with the little men.

The farewell that evening was a little frostier than usual.

We key children

My mother went to work now, so we children were alone during the day. A wide ribbon was pulled through the loop of the key to our apartment and knotted in such a way that it could be pulled straight over my head without tearing off my nose. Back then, burglary security was probably not yet an issue. The front door was not locked and could be opened from the outside with a black cast-iron door handle. Only the corridor doors to the individual apartments were locked. However, this was only possible with a Buntbart key, so it was no problem at all to remove the lock latch with a bent nail and open the door.

My mother got up very early in the morning. She was always washed and dressed before she woke us children and got us ready for the day. We always had oatmeal with a spoonful of sugar in the morning and, if mother wasn't looking, two spoonfuls of cocoa. Warm milk was poured over it. As it was mostly coarse oatmeal, we always had to chew it hard. Mother also made our breakfast sandwiches, which were stored in a small leather sandwich bag. She had usually already cooked the food for lunch. The pot of soup, usually a stew, went into the corner of the sofa. It was wrapped in newspaper, blankets and pillows so that it was still warm at lunchtime.

Dressed and with her lunch bag on her back, my sister was taken to kindergarten. In addition to the lunch bag, I had to carry a leather satchel with my neatly packed school utensils on my back . As we had to write with a stylus on a slate board in the first years of school, a sponge and a small cloth hung out of the side of the satchel and were connected to the board with a string. Later, of course, we wrote with pencil or ink in lined notebooks. Writing with ink was done with a pen holder into which a red pen was inserted. This had to be dipped back into an inkwell after every few words. But not too deep, so that there was no smudge on the paper.

We were given certain rules of conduct for the day and had clearly defined tasks to complete, such as polishing the floor, fetching a few things from the shop across the road, lighting the fire in the tiled stove and, of course, doing our schoolwork properly. I enjoyed polishing the floorboards. A heavy floor brush was available for this.

After waxing, this was moved back and forth in the direction of the floorboards. To achieve a particularly good result, my sister was allowed to sit on the floor brush. We both enjoyed it and the floor was super clean afterwards. After all, we wanted to make our mother happy too.

I only had to cross the street to go shopping. Grüneberg was a very small store, but it had almost everything you needed for food and handicrafts . Oatmeal, semolina, flour, sugar and salt, for example, were stored in large drawers. Mr. Grüneberg used a wooden scoop or a shovel made of sheet zinc to fill the bags, which he then placed on a weighing scale. The last remainder was finely scattered from the chute by tapping the handle of the chute with his finger until the tongues of the scales were level with each other. For quantities under one pound, he used the pointed cones, otherwise the wide square ones. I seem to remember that blue bags were used for sugar and reddish bags for salt. If you wanted to buy nails or screws, they were counted out. You could also buy tools such as hammers, pliers, files, sandpaper or thread and shoelaces from him. We children were keen on sweets. They were in large screw-top jars that could be stacked and had a larger opening at the front to reach in. Sometimes we were lucky if we got a sweet after paying.

When I had to fetch milk, I had to walk a little further to Dingworthstraße. We had a two-litre aluminum milk can for fetching milk. It was closed with a lid, as long as it still fitted on the dented can. The handle was made of wire that ran through a round wooden handle. The jug was already quite dented. It had already fallen at my feet several times. Inside the jug was a note telling me how much milk I had to fetch and the money, usually counted out. At the Milch-Heidel, there were the large metal milk cans, just like the ones you would find on farms, and on the wall were the filling measures for, for example, ¼ liter or ½ liter. These were then used to scoop the milk out of the large cans and pour it into the jug they had brought with them. Because the jugs were not always filled to the brim, there was a little sip on top at the end. On the way home, I sometimes had the idea of letting the filled jug spin vertically on my outstretched arm. At the right speed, no milk was spilled.

There was a large tiled stove in the living room, as was probably found in most homes in the past. At the bottom, it consisted of a cast-iron base with doors to the firebox and ash pan. The top was tiled and reached almost to the ceiling. The top had two square openings. There was usually a kettle in the lower opening and sometimes apples were placed in the upper tube. When the stove was in full swing, the water in the kettle sang in a variety of tones and the apples smelled appetizing. Mother had told me to light the fire in the tiled stove at towards evening. Everything would be ready and I would only have to hold a match to it. And that's what I did. But the fire wouldn't light for the life of me. I remembered that when my mother started the coke cold in the kitchen, she used a long-handled shovel to drizzle a liquid onto the coke before lighting it. So I also tried my luck with this liquid when lighting the tiled stove. I had just spread the liquid when an explosion suddenly threw me into the other corner of the room. Somehow there must have been a spark of embers in the stove that caused the spirit vapor to explode. In any case, I had no more eyelashes or eyebrows and my eyes were fiery red. A tile had flown out of the top third of the tiled stove. But nothing else had happened.

Now I was just afraid that mother would notice something. Then she would probably be in for another spanking. Of course mother noticed something, her hair curled in front and her red face were already noticeable. "What do you look like?" she asked, quite shocked. But she was very glad that nothing more had happened and the spanking was not due today.

But this was due another time. Because I also had to do my schoolwork. I also had to do some special tasks such as practising my handwriting and so on. But we were out playing in the street in the nice weather and hadn't considered that my mother would come home a little earlier. It was already a bit dusky and that's when you can play hide and seek so well. But the rule was: "As soon as it gets dark, you go into the house!" Also, my homework wasn't done carefully enough. They contained several mistakes and were sloppily written. The measure was too full and something was set. I think I had to write the homework four times before there were finally no more mistakes and I hadn't made a mistake. Only then did I get something to eat and was able to go to bed. Nevertheless I fell asleep quickly and deeply without hearing the nocturnal rodents under the wooden floor, which had now worked their way through the skirting boards in places and, to my mother's justified annoyance, had once again stolen the valuable chunk of cheese from the mousetrap without it snapping shut.

Photo shoot

Father was at war. That's what it was called back then, in a nutshell. Dad wanted to have a photo of his wife and us children. So we went to a photographer who had his studio on Moritzberg. We children were dressed up. My sister was dressed in a smart little dress made of red checked fabric that my mother had sewn herself, and I was put into a flowery white shirt and dark blue jersey trousers from the Bleyle company. At the top of my neck, a cord was tied under the shirt collar with fluffy blue and white plush bobbles at the ends.

The photographer somehow considered himself a gifted artist and spent a long time positioning us correctly on the bench. My mother was in the middle, with us children sitting to her left and right. Opposite us on a heavy tripod was the camera, a large wooden box. If you looked closely, you could see that this box was divided into two parts and that the front part was connected to the back part by a leather bellows. The photographer kept going behind the box and disappearing under a black cloth. As he did so, he turned the lens at the front. Suddenly he jumped forward to us again, fiddled with our clothes and criticized and corrected our sitting posture, turning and tilting our heads. This little game was repeated several times. But eventually he reappeared from under the black cloth and was satisfied with us. Now he slid a black cassette with the plate to be exposed into the back of the wooden box. He asked us to smile and told us which way to look. Then he lit the white powder that he had sprinkled on the metal plate of a small hand-held device so that it ploded with a bright glow ex . So, that was it! But he wanted to take another picture of us with artificial light. Mother agreed. So the procedure started all over again. Now he moved the lamps back and forth to illuminate us and kept checking the result under the black cloth behind the camera on the screen. After some time, he was satisfied, asked us to smile again and look at his fingers until he finally pressed the shutter release.

After a week we were able to pick up the pictures. Mother had ordered three prints. But she wasn't happy at all. We all looked terrible in the flashed pictures. We were all sitting there with our eyes wide open and the hard shadows made us look almost ghostly. The pictures taken with artificial light weren't much better. The lighting was set up so awkwardly that mother got the shadows of us children sitting to the side in her face. This had given her face sunken cheeks, making her look really haggard.

Mother then took the three pictures with the artificial lighting from the photographer and sent one of them to our dad at the front. He was horrified and almost shocked that his beloved wife was so emaciated back home.