LITMIR.BIZ

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It was added to the army paraphernalia around the house, from caps and clothes in the dressing-up box, to things stored in ammo boxes in the garage and ashtrays made from the base of a tank round.

      I graduated from Dinky toys to making plastic models of war planes and gunboats, though as my father had served in armoured cars and tanks these were my favourite kits. A Japanese firm, Tamiya, made the best models and their range had a preponderance of German hardware. I do not know exactly how it came about, but I became almost obsessive about the German Panzer Mark IV tank. It is a particularly male condition, the urge to collect and complete series of things, to bring order to the world. It is a compulsion, and I had fixed on the Panzer Mark IV in my quest for perfection. Apart from the standard turreted configuration, with either short or long barrel, the tank’s elegant chassis provided a most versatile armoured platform on which to mount other types of artillery – vast mortars, anti-aircraft guns, field pieces. In all there were fifteen variations on the Panzer Mark IV theme. I rattled through the ones covered in the Tamiya range, and then began to hybridize the kits. It was a phase that passed on encountering puberty and punk rock.

      I never played with the models – I might have broken them. I never imagined them rolling in regiments across Northern Europe killing people. Somehow it escaped me that Grandpa had actually faced German tanks in battle. My only experience of real tanks placed them as things to be clambered over at the Bovington Tank Museum. My pleasure was in the assembly of the models, an incremental achievement of painting and gluing that brought the set closer to completion. Curiously, for a music genre that advocated anarchy in the UK, punk records also provided a collecting opportunity in the form of limited edition sleeves and vinyl colours. Grandpa’s comment on punk, that it was ‘repetitive thump and whine’, led both to my assertion that all music was by its very nature repetitive and to a tedious, though unharassed, luncheon for everyone else.

      Our perennial discussion though centred on language. As a student of literature and modern languages I shared his keen interest in its use, and having studied both Latin and Greek I could appreciate some of his bugbears – ‘logo’ and ‘nomad’ should be pronounced with a short first vowel to accord with their Greek derivation, the ‘e’ of ‘economy’ should always be long by the same token, and ‘the hoi polloi’ was a tautology that betrayed both pretension and ignorance. He was a hard master, but he led by example. He continued to read works in both Latin and Greek throughout his life. When my Greek ‘O’ level came close he tutored me in one of the set texts, Book VII of the Odyssey which opens with the hero and his hyacinthine locks being washed ashore on Nausicaa’s island. As well as speaking French, German and Italian, Grandpa had learned Arabic as a young man, and continued to receive instruction in its weak verbs into his seventies.

      By the time the exam results came, I knew he was not my blood relative and I wondered if, in retrospect, there had been any clues to that fact. The only ones I could pinpoint were in talk of his own family. He was extremely proud of his Norman-Irish ancestry, of the thirteenth-century church in Tipperary where his family coat of arms was escutcheoned on the wall. His father had emigrated to Western Australia and had left it late in life to have children; the fourth of five, his only son, being born in 1910 when he was sixty-seven. Sir John Winthrop Hackett senior died when Shan was six. He had amassed a sizeable fortune through his mineral holdings and ownership of the West Australian newspaper, a fortune his will stipulated would go to the University of Western Australia should his young widow remarry. She did; money thereafter was in shorter supply. Nonetheless, Shan was due to take up a place at Winchester College in England at the age of thirteen, but a severe case of glandular fever caused him to miss the intake. Instead he went to the Geelong Grammar School, near Melbourne. Maybe it was his father dying when he was still so young, or maybe it was as a result of his frequent visits to Ireland while he was at Oxford, but reconnecting with his family’s history seemed to be his chief motivation for joining the army. In fact he often denied that he had ever joined the army. What he had done was quite different; he had joined his great-grandfather’s regiment. And there it was, always ‘my great-grandfather’, never ‘your great-great-great-grandfather’, never ‘our family coat of arms’. Appropriately, when asked to suggest supporters for his banner in the Bath Chapel at Westminster Abbey, it was Susan’s deflating wit that supplied the owl and the pussycat.

      I knew all this about Grandpa, and more, but I knew next to nothing about my real grandfather and my mother had not offered much detail when she introduced me to him. The time came to ask. One of the reasons her real father was not spoken about, she said, was because he had committed suicide, and she had not been told of it until the eve of her wedding in 1961. At that point I had no conception of the matrix of guilt and blame and shame that holds the survivors. My view of the act was still formed by the notions of Romantic literature and rock and roll.

      He was a German called Fritz. Fritz Grossmann, or rather Großmann. He was a hotelier in Palestine, co-owner and manager of the Hotel Tiberias in the town of the same name. My mother was three when he died and she could remember very little about him. She remembered how he shuffled his feet in the slippers he wore around the house, him going to sleep in the afternoons with a newspaper over his face. She remembered one time standing in the enclosed circular bed at the foot of a fruit tree, crying because there were ants crawling over her bare feet, and her father saying, ‘Well, just come out of there then.’ As for the reasons for his suicide, it was said he had a depressive nature. His debts were also mentioned, but no one really knew why he did it. He had borrowed heavily to build a Lido at the hotel’s private beach on the Sea of Galilee, but the unsettled situation in Palestine and the events in Europe that led to war caused the tourist trade to fall away. When war came, his Austrian-born widow Margaret, her two daughters, her sister and her mother-in-law were interned by the British authorities together with all ‘enemy aliens’ in Palestine. Shan Hackett had already been courting her for some time, and continued to call on her in the internment camp. They were married in Jerusalem in 1942. Margaret followed Shan to Egypt, while the two girls stayed with their grandmother – Granny G – and went to school in Jerusalem. In 1944 they all left for England, but Granny G stayed behind in the land of her birth.

      The hotel had been administered by the Custodian for Enemy Property for the duration of the war, and an Arab manager installed. I believe Granny G intended to return to her home and business when it was over, but the hotel was eventually confiscated by the new Israeli government. She lost everything. The compensation, which did not arrive until the 1960s, was of a token nature. She lived in Beirut for a number of years before moving to Germany where she died.

      Most of us have grown up hearing anecdotes not just about ourselves, but also about our parents and grandparents, stories that build into a received family history, forming our sense of where we come from and who we are. Happy or sad, they make up an oral tradition to which the family continuously adds. While the telling of my family narrative was still turning up new digressions and sub-plots, the salient points I thought of as settled. It was astonishing to discover a whole section of the main story line, and such a dramatic one, had remained untold for so long, astonishing to realize I had German relatives of whom I had never even heard. My sense of self may not have been weakened, but it had certainly been broadened.

      Army children often have a problem answering the question, ‘Where do you come from?’ It can even affect one’s national status; my brother has a Canadian passport. I had never thought of myself as anything other than English, even though I knew my grandmother was Austrian, and despite having visited our relatives in Graz I did not think of my mother as anything other than English either. It seemed absurd that her application for a driver’s licence in the mid-1970s should be questioned because she had been born in Haifa.

      There was all the difference in the world between being quarter Austrian and being half German. The former I regarded as a recessive element in my make-up, diluted by a generation and distant enough to be left out of account; the latter could not be so easily ignored. When I opted to study German as an ‘A’ level it was because I got on with its grammatical certainties. Now I knew my mother had been a little German girl called Brigitte Grossmann once upon a time, I wondered (for as long as it took to dismiss the idea) if I might have inherited an aptitude. Did she still, if ever, think of herself as German? We never spoke the language together, although she had taught me to count to ten in German

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