Part 4 – Mamie, my Grandmother, the Iron Lady
1943 – Likasi Country Club- Mamie, my grandmother
I was 6. Or 12. It does not matter. It did not matter. During the year, my domicile was Rueil, a Western suburb of Paris. That life was about optimising school attendance and performance. Out of the house by 0700. Dropped off at 0730. Waiting for the gates to open at 0815, and anyone else to show up. Back by 1730 for homework, eat, sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Family as a boarding school.
Then, Summer.
The Family shakes off the hibernation, phone calls start, we are summoned to Claviers, Var, South of France to spend the next two months of holidays, as prescribed by the Matriarchy.
Mamie and her 3 daughters, the Matriarchy, had endured the Veldt, the War, Boarding Schools, Nice and weddings. Now, Claviers, that was the real Home. It was always kept warm, safe, obvious. Home, a heavily scripted and redacted narrative.
Ancestral schedules kept the old times ticking by. Wake up early, but wait for the door to the kitchen to open. Until then, sit at the top of the stairs and wait until it is proper to be seen and heard. Lunch at 1200. Dinner at 1900. Kids eat first. And like that, time is optimised for everyone to prepare food, rest, sit and enjoy the views in the scorching afternoon sun. Maybe we will have a walk later, when it has cooled down. Or not? That is what we all like, don’t we?
Time suspended. The tent in Katanga, the living room in Claviers.
Continuity, eternity.
A lifetime just ported to a new location. Same heat, same dryness, same life.
Men were out there, working, hunting, or whatever it was they did to provide. But at the edge of the pack. Always. That is what they liked anyway. Women stay in a mutually supportive pack, ensuring subsistence, managing Life, getting on with what really matters, planning, talking about what really mattered. That was what Life was about. That was how it had always been. The Family as a Manifest Destiny. Never said, always hinted at. In tones, looks, and sudden silences.
The Family was a lion’s pride, the daughters the lionesses, and my grandmother, the Alpha.
And, as it had been in the bush, the Lion, my grandfather, was always present and never there. He had died less than a year before I was born, not 5 years after Congo’s independence in 1960. Revered in words, he would forever be memorialised in a few brush strokes: loved Africa, liked the bush, spent all of his free time trekking and hunting. And he liked to cheat on the Brussels tram by jumping on the rear platform. All true. Although, a library full of Huxley and Orwell books does indicate that this description may be slightly simplistic. But then again, true enough, he would literally run out of the back every Friday evening to go hunting. A Great Man that roared in the sunset.
My grandfather, the votive Lion of the pride.
In these early days back from Africa, my grandmother was truly the ringmaster of Life. She was the gravity centre, the heart, the face and the voice of the Family. Even in the earliest pictures, in the 1940s, my grandmother had been the one sitting at the centre of the table, entertaining, commenting, telling. And years later, that was still pretty much what was happening. Anyone who ever met her, every visitor, neighbour, will tell you the same: she was tough and unbending. The energy, the commitment to defend the family was endless. She was laying the law on what, who and how it should happen. Mamie, my Grandmother, the Iron Lady.
My grandmother. The soul and voice of the Family as it had been on the trail in Africa, so it was in the mountains of South of France.
Her authority rarely needed roars or shouts, just snarls and growls. Challenge was treason. Word was order. Advice was demand. Everything was always reasonable, measured, undeniable. And her daughters had settled in well-rehearsed, well-choreographed roles. You could swap 1947 with 1977, Jadotville with Claviers, still there they were: the dreamy elder daughter, the mischievous younger one, and the laughing one in the middle. Façades naturally, roles certainly, but probably for all of them a youth replayed, every year. Life made simpler in 3 predictable orbits around a moment frozen in time.
And what was Life? Duty to the Nation and the Bible. Life was kids. So the Matriarchy, although exclusive, could not be selfish as it would revolve entirely around children. Two per head was ideal. The 3 daughters were clear on that. And my grandmother too. No-one needed prompting. Kids were Duty, mandatory moons to each planets. And so, one by one, we kids took our positions on our orbits around our mothers, dutifully rotating on our own assigned trajectories. 7 cousins, born, cherished and loved by order of the Family, protected and defined by it.
And summer would simmer away in the hot embrace of the Family Orrery.
The fathers? They surely were invited, or summoned at intervals when it had been enough. They were the comets of the system. Predicted, expected, but also always threatening the elegant revolutions of the planets. The lions to the lion’s pride. Providing and present as He had been.
A Matriarchy.
And so time would slide on, as it had been 30 years earlier in Katanga. Mamie mending clothes sitting on a chair. The three sisters talking to each other about cats, kids and food. Among furniture cobbled together from a thousand moves, mismatched antique styles to sit on, practicality and expediency. Even if the furniture was a 18th century converted settee, it was there for practical reason, party of a flotsam of some half-remembered family story or other. Something like that. Who cared. All had to fit in, to sit, to eat, to talk. Furniture and house as social informality.
Come as you are and gather around the stove, the fire.
Because feeding was a social and cultural duty. Entertainment and ceremony. Everyone crammed around a tiny formica table in the kitchen. Kids would be herded, and told how lucky they were to be born in the lenient 60s, and in this Family. On the biggest occasions, we would remember the Past, and eat “like Belgians”: bread and spreads, Vache Qui Rit and the one true glory of Belgium, the Côte d’Or chocolate spread of course. And for truly exceptional occasions, damn etiquette, we would eat like Gauls !! Without cutlery !! Not even on the trail in Africa did we eat without cutlery! It was only with true authority, the chiefs, that you would eat with your hands in the bush, to show respect. Else it should be cutlery, etiquette and pageantry.
The transgression, the thrill. And sit up straight. My grandmother had learnt manners by eating holding books under her elbows. How lucky we were to live in such lenient times!
And so the background noise would go on into the evening, the trill of the family reminiscing a Belgium they never knew, the France of the 1910 Belle Epoque and the Africa they had left yesterday.
Images, words and remarks that revealed their puzzlement at the disconcerting turn their lives and times had taken.
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