Loving Spirits at the Vintage Teashop by Sharon Booth is out now ๐ป
If you look at the dedication at the front of Loving Spirits at the Vintage Teashop, youโll find that itโs dedicated to Herbert Kean. He was my maternal grandad, and he died when I was only seven years old, so I have very few memories of him and the ones I do have are mostly connected with illness.
My mum freely admits that she didnโt have much of a relationship with him. She was four or five years old when she first met him. In Kindred Spirits at Harling Hall, I told the story of young Janet, who was outside playing on her bike when a strange man scooped her up and swung her round, making her scream. That was my mumโs story. Like Janet in the book, my mum hadnโt met her dad until that point because heโd been a prisoner of war. My grandad spent years in a camp in Austria.
I often wonder what effect that had on him. He was a very quiet man. My mum says their relationship was a difficult one and that he wasnโt always kind. In fact, he could be prone to outbursts of anger and even violence.
Iโve looked at his wedding photos and I see a young man in uniform, smiling and happy. He was only twenty-one when war broke out. When he returned home, he was more than likely a different person. Who knows what he endured in those years? Who knows how that changed him?ย
Mum admits she never asked him, and he never offered any information. Like many men who went through the experience of war he didnโt talk about it. At seven years old it didnโt occur to me to ask him anything. I didnโt even realise heโd been in the war until years later.
Researching my family tree decades after his death, I was stunned to discover that my nanna โ his wife โ was actually of German descent. Her grandad was German. Iโve traced her line back to Hannover, which is what prompted me to make Max a Hannover man. Her grandad was a fisherman who stayed in England when he met his future wife, so itโs more than likely that he had relatives who stayed in Germany.
I realised that in all probability, I had German family whoโd fought on the opposite side during both World Wars, and that was a strange feeling. I wondered how Grandad would have felt about that if heโd known.
That led me to think about the German experience of war, and what it would have been like to be a German prisoner-of-war in England. I learned that the PoWs were kept in England long after the war had ended, to help with the rebuilding of our country, even though Germany itself was in ruins.ย
There was so much suffering on both sides. The one thing we can be certain of is that, in war, there are no real winners.