peeling the onion

In whatever year it was in this picture my dad joined the army and was sent to Germany, where he taught English to German kids. He once dramatically revealed to me, when I was a child and clearly in need of a shock for some reason, that he had "lived with Nazis." It turns out that the father of the family he was billeted with was either in prison or missing - I forget which - and everybody preferred not to talk about it. Or him.*

One thing I'm thinking about at the moment, in the context of Papa Baroque's decline, is this way in which we edit, or re-write, our lives. We decide which bits were real, or important, or influential, and turn out backs (in extreme cases) on the bits we didn't feel comfortable with. My dad has spent his whole life running away from the past, in that particular way in which you hold bits of it close. You edit it.

And we, his kids, have edited too. As we became part of what he was writing out of his story we wrote him out of ours. And his parents. Though I never really wanted to write out entirely the fascinating world he grew up in: Aunt Ruby and Uncle Kenneth, for example, had a farm, and my childhood did include climbing around (maybe only a few times) in their barn! It was a lost world I'm grateful to have had a glimpse of, especially as my own world is now so far away and different. I kept it, in the same way that Papa B kept his parents' collection of depression glass.

All of this, including and especially the German family's self-editing process, seems to be sitting in the same part of my mind as the furore about Günter Grass' Nazi childhood, as revealed in his autobiography Peeling the Onion. Grass was villified in the press last autumn for "lying" about his childhood. His response at the time was that he has never lied; rather, he has waited until he could find way to write about it. This seems fair enough.

Grass presented his side of the story:

"What was published later about the Waffen-SS, about all its crimes, was something I was not aware of until much later," he explained. "My sense of shame grew over time ... which is largely why this unique episode in my life was something that I kept to myself." He denied, however, actively hiding his past. "I've always admitted my involvement as a young man in the [Nazi] system," he said. "That has never been a secret."

In the excerpt from Peeling the Onion published in Saturday's Guardian, Grass writes:

"The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth. What happened before and after the end of my childhood knocks at the door with facts and went worse than wished for and demands to be told now this way, now that, and leads to tall tales.

"As soon as I summon up the boy I was at the age of 13, subject him to the third degree, and feel tempted to judge him as I would a stranger to whose needs I am indifferent, to condemn him, I see a kid of average height in shorts and kneesocks constantly grimacing, running to his mother, and crying, 'I was just a child, just a kid ...'

"I try to calm him down and ask him to help me peel the onion, but he rejects all entreaties and refuses to let himself be exploited as my early self-portrait. He denies me the right to - as he puts it - do him in and 'from your high horse'** to boot."

This seems to me an excellent account of a conversation with one's own young self. It's a hard conversation to have, too, and maybe the need, or desire, or even willingness to have it is what makes a writer.

Easier from the outside to observe how my father is actually all of a piece, not the fragmented being we thought when we were children. I don't think I have a single picture of him as a boy. You could wonder what that boy would say to him, or to me.

* Years later I had a call from my sister to say that there was yet a third Princess de Baroque at large, in the form of a baby born to some girl while my dad had been over there... erm, the 'sister' was apparently 39 at the time, which seemed old to me then (ha!) but as I can't remember what year it was, I can't tell you how old she is now. But probably 55-ish. That was the first and last I have ever heard on that subject.

** That "high horse" is so my dad! I bought mine from him (however tempted to pretend I got it somewhere else). It was a steal.

nb: I remember appearing in the presence of my grandmother at some point with my hair scraped back into a ponytail. "You should never do that," she said, with her usual lack of word-mincing. "With your hair combed back like that you look like a skiinned onion."