My Mother, Part IV: Thyra Dohrenburg

       My mother was an extremely  principled woman, stern, when necessary and at the same time  fun-loving. She was very organized in everything she did. OnMonday mornings  she planned the menu for the week. One day a week was meatless. On Friday we ate fish. Not because we were Catholics but because the fishing boats came in with fresh fish. On Sundays we had roast as was the custom, with the left –overs served in some form or other during the week. She was very conscious about were she bought produce. She never bought  anything because it was cheaper somewhere but because it was better. On the other hand she was very frugal. When she traveled she stayed in small  hotels in order to save money. Whatever money she earned she put into a savings account where it was safe until one day she took a closer look and realized that she had accumulated  a goodly amount and thus decided she could afford to buy a piece of property. So she went to Denmark and ended up buying a two hundred year old cottage  surrounded by thirty acres of land.

         Here she spent the last fifteen years of her life, tending her garden, making  jams and jellies from the berries she had grown and entertaining  her guests during the summer. And, of course, sitting at the typewriter working on the latest translation.She was a sought after lector because she was able to translate straight from the page without having first to type a ew pages. So, if the publisher wanted to hear a bit more she just turned the page and continued to read in German, no hesitations no stumbling. As perfect as she was in eithr language she had absolutely no talent for dialegs. Though she was a true Berliner she was never able to speak with a Berlin accent.Neithr was she ever able to speak Platt-Deutsch, the language  spoken along the shores of Northern Germany and somewhat inland. Where-ever she moved she gained the respect of the locals who not only trusted her but came to her with their problems.

After the war, still at the seashore she became the refuge for some who were afraid of what the British might do to them since they were occupiers. I will never forget seing her still with her swollen leg propped up, trying her school- English  on the young officers who had come to tell us we had to evacuate.She, very quickly, was in charge of the situation inspite, or maybe because of her awkward English.Naturally everybody in the neighbourhood came to her for advice  or help such as the boy who stood one day in her room,dusty and tired, telling her who he was. His mother was a schoolfriend of hers in Berlin who had a baby with whom she was going to flee but wanted her son, maybe fourteen years old, as far away from the Russians as possible. So she told him to hitch hike about two hundred miles to St. Peter where he landed, tired but good spirits.She was able to enroll him in a makeshift Highschool, find housing and later connect him with his mother who had made it safely out of harms way.

After sh died of cancer in Denmark it was the locals who looked after me the first week after her death, waiting for my sister and her husband to come back from Italy.Every day someone would come and simply decide, now we will go here, or now we will see some-one else, and give them the message. Nobody wrung their hands,exclaiming   how sorry they were. Everybody very quickly came up with some story they remembered and  soon one had the feeling she was around the door waiting to come in.It certainly helped  me over the carkest time of the year, way uo in the North where it doesn’t get light until around  eight in the morning  and the sun sets around four.

Because of her dread of any kind of a show she stipulated, she wanted no burial ceremony and not even a flower.  So she is buried  in a paupers grave  which sounds dreadful but is simply a massgrave, beautifully tended.