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When I think of my granddad, I think of the farm and going to stay with
him and my Grandma in what seemed a story like cottage in the middle
of the countryside; Eating ten rounds of toast and jam on a morning.
I think of his cute cross Hungarian-Yorkshire accent. I think of him
making his wine and the time he had to cut chewing gum out of my hair.
The way he called my grandma silvery instead of Sylvia. Most of all
I think of grandma. You see they were two halves of a whole, complemented
each other like icing on a cake. When I met my fiancé, I said
to him that is what I want us to be like in fifty years. I have many
fond memories of my granddad but in some ways I realise that I didn’t
really know the man he was until he was gone. My grandma always has
a story to tell (don’t even get me started on Robson Green!),
and from the wonderful and often strange stories that she has passed
on in her wisdom over the years I’d like to thank her for helping
me with the story of my granddad, Joe.
Josef Anton Wittmann, was born in 1924 in a village called Dorobanti, which is the Romanian name. The Hungarian name is Kisiratof (the S is pronounced sh). The village is entirely Hungarian, and is in the home of vampires, Transylvania! It borders Romania and Hungary, and the border used to fluctuate. After the Austro Hungarian Empire fell, the village became trapped in Romania. The village is a sleepy place on the surface but everyone is kind and they all look out for each other. His name, and indeed my own, Wittmann, is German. In the village, there are many Wittmann’s. The baker, the apothecary, the vet and we think that the doctor may be a relative too. The Wittmann’s were big landowners at one time.
When my granddad was 18, his father, Anton Wittmann, left to join the Romanian Cavalry, as there was a war coming, and wanted to take my granddad with him. His mother protested that he was too young and would not allow it. When the German’s eventually came, they took my granddad away at gunpoint. He never saw his mother again. She died just before he and my grandma were able to go back, in the sixties. He left home then, at 18 as a conscript with not much more than his will to survive. He couldn’t speak any German and so life through the war was made hard for him. To train they made them jump out of windows into the deep snow and run for a mile in the middle of the night. He gave up to the British army in 1945 and was moved from camp to camp, about 4 or 5 in Germany and 2 or 3 in England. He said he was once so homesick and unhappy he contemplated suicide. We are all very glad he didn’t contemplate it further. In one camp, they were all so hungry they thought they might die. Granddad picked out all the toadstools, roots and berries he could find, put them in some water in a rusty tin can and boiled them. He offered them round but no one wanted any so he ate the lot. All the P.O.Ws were sitting waiting for him to die and making bets (puffs on a cigarette). Of course he didn’t, because what they didn’t know was his grandfather, whom he worshipped, had taught him which toadstools and mushrooms he could eat to live and taught him well!
When Churchill said that prisoner’s of war could come to England to work on farms, he took his chance and came. A warm hearted man, he loved all animals, and looked after the farm animals with the same love. Once, a cow kicked my granddad’s favourite pig in the head. He was told to shoot the pig and put it out of its misery, but my granddad took it into the barn, took out his needle and thread and stitched it’s head. The pig lived, had a long and happy life, and had many more litters after that! Another time he was wakened in the middle of the night by a telephone call. A load of cows had escaped and he had to go get them. They had wondered onto the busy A1 and had all been hit by speeding cars. Nobody stopped. They would probably have got into trouble if they had. A cow as you can imagine, is not an easy thing to kill. Granddad had to go pick them all up off the road. Grandma said it nearly killed him he was so upset by it.
Now he has passed on, the little things crop up that remind me of him. For example, my family was sitting round the table for dinner at my grandmother’s and when somebody asked for lemonade she realised she hadn’t any. She always left that to granddad, she said, and it was true. That was his little job. I wrote in an earlier poem, about him offering lemonade around, but never really thinking about it as significant. I was visiting a friend with my cousin one day and when I introduced her to my friend as Samantha, the friend asked if anyone called her Sammy. I couldn’t think of anyone but she replied that our granddad did. I thought it was most odd the funny little things that reminded us of him, yet these funny little things that were so characteristic we never really thought of before.
My granddad was sometimes a quiet man. He was always the one taking the photograph, rather than the one the photograph was being taken of. He was often more of a background person, possibly because my grandma was always the one doing all the chatting, maybe because he was a little hard of hearing. However, that wasn’t to say that he didn’t listen. When I was about seven I took up the violin. One of the first things I learned to play was an exercise on the top string which my teacher named ‘have a cup of coffee on the open E string,’ because that is what the rhythm sounded like. It must have sounded terrible, but God bless him he always asked about my music and how it was going. They encouraged me to play at family times such as Christmas, and for years, even after I had progressed and done many grades, played many different pieces, he always remembered ‘have a cup of coffee on the open E string.’
This is the granddad I knew and loved, but there was so much that I never knew I didn’t know. Such as the story my Grandma told, when he was once stalked by a wolf in the forest as he rode home on his bike. All he had to protect himself was a bike pump! He shouted at the top of his voice and, swinging the bike pump, kept it at bay.
I was always very proud of him in a sense, as a child. I had a name that nobody could spell correctly, and nobody else had the same name as me I knew that for sure. I liked that. Although I didn’t think of it in these terms when I was growing up, I liked having something to talk about to my friends. I could say that I had Hungarian blood. I used to dream about meeting ‘my other family’ in Romania. Cousins and great Uncles and Aunts that I had never met in a different country. It was strange to think that there were people who knew about me and I knew about them but I didn’t even know what they looked like, apart from the slide shows that my grandparents used to give every few years that of course were not always of much interest to little girls. My Dad and his sister, my aunt, had been over when they were young. My Grandma and Granddad went across many times and came back with interesting gifts from afar. My great uncle’s granddaughter, Timmy, a cousin of sorts, once sent my sister and I each a tape of Hungarian music. My best friend and I made up a silly dance to it, tried to guess what they were singing about!
I did have an opportunity to go to Romania once a couple of years back. My grandparents were going and this time it was to be a family trip. My dad and his partner joined them and my aunt, and my sister and I were invited. I was excited at the prospect. I had been abroad many times but not to a place like this. Although by no means is it a third world country, compared to way we live in England it is primitive. They mostly live off what they grow and the animals they keep, and there is no flushing toilet or plugs for hairdryers! Although the prospect of going to the loo in a barn didn’t appeal, I was still desperate to see where my family came from. Unfortunately, a holiday to America had already been booked at the same time as they were planning to visit Romania and so my sister and I could not go, which I still regret. They probably knew it would be one of the last times they would make the journey. Shortly after returning, my granddad’s brother, Jonshi, passed away. It seemed so sad that we had never met. We did plan to go back a couple of years later, all together, but it never came about. Just two years after his brother passed on, my granddad too joined him last year. It would be very difficult to go back as none of us speaks Hungarian apart from the odd word. Without granddad, it wouldn’t be the same.
We all miss him, but this is for the life-for it could have been very different if circumstances were changed-and the history, and the family that he gave us. Thank you.