Writing Life

Last Saturday Julie and I attended an antiques faire in Auburn, California. In a vast assemblage of paper collectibles Julie spotted an unpublished original manuscript titled “Stories Grandmother Told Me.” The dealer was asking twenty dollars for it. We eventually got him to sell it to us for ten. The manuscript is about fifty pages long. The first half is typewritten and the second half is handwritten. Contained within those pages are dozens of short vignettes from the life of the author’s grandmother. The author doesn’t identify herself. But the grandmother is identified in the very first paragraph:

In the small town of Neustadt, Mecklenburgschwern, Germany, was born on February 23, 1834, Sophie Marie Carlina Fredenhagen. She says she thinks there was another name or so but she has forgotten them but thinks these are quite enough.

The document was compiled in 1930, when Sophie was 96 years old. The author of the document, obviously, is Sophie’s grandchild. It appears that the grandchild asked Sophie for recollections of her life and times. Sophie obliged by recalling anecdotes from her early years, which Sophie’s grandchild then faithfully recorded on paper. Here are some quotes from the opening pages of the grandchild’s manuscript:

Neustadt, in Grandmother’s time, was just an ordinary small German town. Not pretty at all, Grandmother says. A river and a canal surrounded the town and crossed it twice, [they were] so interwoven [that] folks never knew which was the river and which the canal.

The narrow streets were made of large cobblestones force into the sandy soil and the walks made the same way of smaller stones.

Grandmother’s home was a rather large structure built on a part of the filled-in moat of the Old Castle which belonged to the Grand Duke. This castle was rarely used in Grandmother’s time except on the Grand Duchess’s birthday which fell on the same day as Grandmother’s. Then the officials would have a Grand Ball in the palace. Grandmother’s folks always went so one time she too was allowed to go for half an hour because it was her birthday. There she saw the older gentlemen playing cards and the younger folks in gay attire dancing. The supper was always an elaborate affair with the long table burdened with delicious food.

Still very vivid in Grandmother’s eyes even at the grand age of 96 is the tower of the castle where the prisoners of decades before had been kept to serve out time for their misdeeds. One time some of the men of the town took out some of the bricks and crawled into this deserted tower, and there they found human bones. Can’t you imagine the shivers it made down the little back of our Grandmother.

Sophie was the third of Victor and Sophia Fredenhagen’s ten children. Victor was a prosperous German businessman who, according to the manuscript, operated “two mills rented from the government, making flour and groats. Besides this he fatted stock for market with the leavings from the distillery in the town.” Great Grandfather Victor was also a land baron. Here’s how the author of this family history describes her Great Grandfather’s foray into real-estate:

The government owned heather lands all around the town and folks just thought of it as wasteland. What could anyone expect of the lands covered with this course [sic] heather. But one time the city needed money so decided to auction off this wasteland. Great Grandfather decided to buy it so he bid until, at last, his bid stood alone and the land became his among the laughs of the town folks. But he set to work at it with a will. First, he had his men drain it and after a few years it was as good if not better than any around him. Then the town folks and officials said he’d gotten it too cheap and he robbed the government. But they never gave his hard work on the place any consideration.

Because Great Grandfather owned land he was a Burghermeister, an honorary title which gave him certain privileges and more taxes to pay. One of his privileges was the right to cut two hundred squares of peat for fuel. Now fuel was very scarce in Germany and folks would come to Great Grandfather to beg for his right to cut the peat and he would divide it among them.

Thus Sophie’s father was a wealthy burghermeister. He owned cottages that he rented out to the working people of the town. Sophie loved to visit these cottages with her father and watch the women as they did their cooking. In 1847 and 1848, when a great famine spread all over Europe, Sophie’s father sent out word to all the families in town that, for the duration of the famine, he would feed any child who showed up at his house at mealtime. According to the manuscript:

The food provided was a large kettle of buckwheat groats from his mill. This the cook had ready and in good weather put up in a tub in the yard (in bad weather in the back hall). On this she placed the hot, well cooked groats covered with milk. Each child with the spoon he had brought ate his fill. At first the cook tried to provide spoons but as the number of children increased each one had to bring his own.

In those days there were no double boilers and the cook had to stand and stir constantly. One day, in spite of her efforts, the food was slightly scorched whereupon the children announced that they did not want it burned and that the Grand Duke paid for this food and they would have him told about it.

Apparently, the children in town believed that Sophie’s father was hired by the Grand Duke to provide their free meals. But that was not the case:

“Very well,” said the cook, “we’ll see what the Grand Duke has to do with this. There will be no dinner here tomorrow.” [The next day] the children came as usual but no meal was forthcoming and they went sorrowfully away. Great Grandfather discovered this and saw to it that the groats were ready the second day but there was no more talk of the Grand Duke.

Years later two of Grandma’s brothers were taking a walk around the old town of Neustadt when they saw an old man sitting on the bench at his door. They recognized him and went up to speak to him. For a while he did not know them. Then he said, “You are two of the Fredenhagen boys, which two I do not know but this I know. If it hadn’t been for your father I would not be here now. He fed all the children of the poor of this town in ‘47 and ‘48 and I was one of them. Your father was a good man and I hope you are as good.”

The prose of this family history is occasionally ungrammatical but often very lively and descriptive. Here’s how Sophie’s grandchild begins the anecdote titled “The Hired Girls:”

Let’s take a peep at the hired girls, dressed in homespun skirts – very full and quite long. They wore them until they showed the wear and then they’d use them for a petticoat and have their mother weave a new one for a top skirt. They always wore two or three petticoats under the top skirt. Her blouse was of calico in pink, blue, green, or any other bright color. Over this she wore a three cornered shawl brought together at the rather high waistline where the belt of the apron held it in place. This apron covered practically every bit of her skirt. On her head she wore a band pulled snugly over the top to cover the strings where she had tied her hair. Two streamers hold the cap in place and tied under one ear. “Really,” Grandmother says, “even the plainest peasant girl looked pretty in this dainty cap.”

Her stockings were of homespun hand knit with clocks on either side. Most servant girls wore wooden shoes but because they made too much noise when they walked about Great Grandmother would not have them in her house. Her servants wore leather shoes in the house and wooden when outside the house if they chose.

Great Grandmother preferred the girls from the country because they were not so wise acting as the town girls. They were paid $10 a year when they first started to work which would probably be at the age of 13 years. The highest pay was 20 thalers a year. A thaler is equal to 75 cents of our money. With the tips and Christmas and the like, a handsome wage of 25 thalers might be earned.

How Grandmother loved to sit by the big high desk on the days her father paid the servants. They always came in in the order of their rank. The coachman came first, then the rest of the men, and the women last. Her father saw that each one had a savings account.

“What a thrill I got as I watched my father,” says Grandmother, “as he asked, ‘How much to be saved today?’ Then he would carefully make the slip for each one and put the money to be saved with it and give the servant the balance. Then he would go to the bank and deposit it. I thought him a most wonderful man and he was.”

The titles of the vignettes preserved in this family history tend to be intriguing: “The Hair Pulling Match,” “Gold Paper,” “The Calico Umbrella,” “The Evening Milk,” “Drunken Cats,” and (my favorite) “The Wart Boy.” Other titles sound as if they came from a collection of stories by Chekhov or de Maupassant: “The Beads,” “The Pocket,” “The Nurses,” “The Tomboy,” “A New Governess.”

One of my favorite short anecdotes is titled “Seeing Is Believing.” Here it is in its entirety:

How Grandmother loved to listen in when the tutor was teaching her brothers. One day she heard him telling them about the life and habits of the wasps. He had one [a wasp] in the room which he carried about carefully on a paper for he said, “Even though it is dead, it could still sting.”

Shortly afterwards he put it on the windowsill and they all left the room. Grandmother tiptoed in and went to the wasp. There it lay dead.

“Pooh, a dead wasp sting,” she said to herself. “I don’t believe it.”

With that she picked it up and Oh! Oh! She told me in all confidence, “A wasp can sting when it is dead. You don’t need to try it. I tried it for you and I am telling you that experience is a good teacher.”

Another amusing anecdote is titled “Grandmother and the Funeral:”

In Germany in Grandmother’s time the women of her class did not attend the funerals, which were held at four o’clock in the morning by torchlight attended only by the men folks.

The common folks had their funerals during the day, however.

One day as Grandmother was on her way to the classes at the Klopke home she heard a most pitiful wail from down the street. As she waited for it to pass her she saw a large box being borne by six strong men and a woman following closely behind it crying as if her heart would break.

How it touched Grandmother’s heart even though she didn’t know what it was all about. She fell in line behind the woman and set up a wail that might have been heard blocks away, and thus she followed to where they put the coffin which contained a young girl into its resting place.

When Grandmother arrived at her classes very much later she was still weeping but could not explain just why.

When Grandmother Sophie’s older brother, Victor Junior, was sixteen, “a longing for land besieged him.” To satisfy this longing, he migrated to America where, unlike his native Germany, there were still plenty of open spaces to be homesteaded. After a bit of wandering, Victor Jr. eventually settled in Downers Grove, Illinois, where, with his father’s money, he purchased three plots of 160 acres each. In February of 1855, he married Mary Lambe, an Englishwoman, and started a family. Shortly thereafter, Sophie’s father decided to visit Victor Jr. in America. Because Sophie spoke English better than her father, he brought her along as an interpreter.

On her last night in Germany Grandmother walked into the spotless shining kitchens [of her family’s manor house] and looked at the rows of beautiful copper kettles and thought, “I’ll never see you again,” and she never did.

Sophie’s father discovered America to be a country of opportunity, burgeoning with available land and boundless resources. According to his Great Grandchild’s manuscript:

Great Grandfather bought himself a horse and buggy and went around to see folks and he began to like the new country and its people very much, so one day he went to Grandmother and said, “Sophie, we only came for a visit but we like it so we will write the rest to come. They are too far away to argue.” Great Grandfather then bought a farm west of Naperville on what is now Ogden Avenue and began getting it ready for the folks to come.

Eventually he brought his wife and most of the rest of his family over to America, and the Fredenhagens became Americans. Shortly after arriving in America, Sophie went out for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage with her brother and his wife. During this ride, Sophie, wearing a “Hegeland sunbonnet,” had a significant encounter with Edward Lambe, a “dashing young Englishman” who also happened to be the brother of Victor Jr.’s wife, Mary Lambe.

Just as [the party in Sophie’s carriage] reached the gate, Edward Lambe, who had the next farm, came up with a team. He was riding one of the horses and jumped down as he came to the gate to open it and as he drove through attempted to jump back up onto the horse and missed him and slid right on over the other horse onto the ground. What an awkward spectacle he made of himself. When he got up and brushed off he came over to them and when Uncle Victor introduced him he [Edward] put his face right into that sunbonnet to get a good look at the little German lady. Afterwards he said he had never seen a prettier face in his life.

“Everybody liked that sunbonnet on me,” Grandmother said, “except Victor’s wife and I believe she was only jealous. She made a real homely gingham one and wanted me to wear it because the girls in America didn’t wear the kind I had.”

Sophie and Edward were married on November 17, 1855, her mother’s birthday.

When the preacher was ready to perform the ceremony he asked for the license.

“License?” said Grandfather [i.e. Edward Lambe], “didn’t know I had to have one.”

“Well,” the preacher said, “I’ll marry you and you can get the license later and mail it to me and I’ll sign it for you.”

But before the preacher had left the house they sent Uncle Karl into Naperville, the county seat, to buy one for them.

“My how it rained that day,” Grandmother recalls. “Only once did the sun shine all day and then your Grandfather pulled me over into it, for you know, ‘Happy is the bride the sun shines on.’”

When night came Grandmother proudly took her husband into the small back room that she had worked so hard to beautify.

The walls were freshly whitewashed a gleaming white. A big four-posted bed with carved acorns adorning the top of each post.

That’s as much detail as we get about Grandmother Sophie’s wedding night with Grandfather Edward. But eleven months later, on October 14, 1856, their first child was born, a boy named William Victor Lambe.

Sophie Lambe’s life was not the stuff of sweeping epic novels and her grandchild (a female, I believe, judging from her handwriting) wisely doesn’t attempt to make it into one. As mentioned, her manuscript consists not of cliffhanging chapters detailing a grand adventure, but rather of a series of stand-alone vignettes. Many of these vignettes are comical and can hold their own with the best of James Thurber’s essays about his own family and forebears. Here is my favorite example of the humor to be found in this family chronicle:

Another of Grandfather’s trips that we have always enjoyed [hearing about] was his shopping day in Naperville. He had paid his bill and the boy had taken his groceries to his wagon when he espied a package of limburger cheese and couldn’t resist it, so purchased it. When he climbed onto the seat of the wagon he put it under the blanket on the seat and rode off.

Soon he saw Willard Stafford walking along ahead of him so [he] prodded the horse to a gallop and caught up with him and invited him to ride home with him.

They talked of many things and Grandfather forgot that cheese on the seat. But when the household was settled down for the night and he and Grandmother were toasting their feet on the big base runner [or perhaps “burner”] with the isinglass aglow, he said, “Mother, I had an experience today. I picked up Stafford on the road and I thought I’d never get him home, he smelt so. Right out in the fresh air and a smell I never hope to smell again.”

It was a week or more later before he had occasion to use the wagon. As he was ready to climb up on the seat he saw a lump in the blanket and so decided to shake it out and, lo and behold, out dropped the limburger cheese.

He laughed so hard he had to hold on to the wagon and then rushed into the house to give it to Grandmother with “There is Stafford’s odor. I shall have to apologize.”

As he left the yard he saw Stafford ahead of him and hurried to catch up. When asked if he wanted a ride [Stafford] hesitated and Grandfather said, “Climb up. I want to tell you something.”

After a merry laugh, Stafford said, “Glad you told me, Mr. Lambe. I told my wife the same thing and vowed I’d never ride with you again.”

Reading the anecdotes and stories in Sophie’s granddaughter’s manuscript, I couldn’t help wishing that I had been as attentive to the stories told to me by my own grandparents. All four of them are dead now, and no doubt many of their best stories have been buried forever with them. Thanks to Sophie’s granddaughter, I now have more stories of Sophie’s early years at my avail than I do of my own grandparents’ early years. If you have grandparents who are still alive, you might want to consider collecting their memories and preserving them in a manuscript the way that Sophie’s granddaughter preserved hers. Today, February 23, 2010, is Sophie Fredenhagen Lambe’s 176th birthday. Thanks to the manuscript that Julie fished out of a pile of junk this past weekend, Sophie’s words, her stories, and her memories still live on long after the death of the grandchild who recorded them for her. What better gift could a grandchild give to her grandparent?

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