My mother - Mutti

My mother (Mutti), Elfriede Gertrud, the third child of Elsa and Max Lucas, was born in the small town of Reichenbach in Germany on 27th October in 1916. Elsa was a housewife and her husband, Max had the important job of being the station master at a large train station.

Max had suffered with lung disease and died when Mutti was only 2 years old. He must have had TB as shortly after his death Mutti became very sick and it was discovered that she also had TB but that it was in her bones. My grandmother was kindly told by the doctors to take her very sick child home and allow her to die in peace. She refused to give up and took her little girl to a naturopath who prescribed various poultices, herbal concoctions as well as patience. My mother recovered. The only lasting effect was that the bones in her ankles and the middle finger of her left hand were enlarged.

My grandmother had a hard time bringing up three children but she took in a boarder to supplement her small widow's pension. She had a large garden where she grew vegetables and a vast variety of fruit trees and berries which were eaten fresh and the remainder bottled to be eaten during the cold months. Luckily she also had family on the land who could occasionally supply other staples such as meat.

Mutti said she had a happy childhood although things were always tight. She loved her mother very much and was the darling of her older brother and sister. She grew up and became very attractive - tall, slim and blonde.

After high school Mutti went to the equivalent of secretarial college and then got a job as a court stenographer. After her marriage to my father she had to leave work, as was the custom in those days, and moved to Werdau where my father was the foreman of the largest printing firm in Europe.

My parents married in May of 1939 and war was declared in the September of that year. Those first few happy months were 'bliss' according to my parents. Mutti got into the swing of being a 'Hausfrau' (housewife) in the lovely apartment supplied by the firm where my father worked. The years that followed however were very difficult.

My father considered Hitler an evil person and refused to join the Nazi party, which was a dangerous thing to do in those days. My mother told me that there would be knocking on doors in the middle of the night and people would disappear. She was always terrified that my father would be taken away. My father also refused to join the army. Luckily his job, printing maps for the airforce was considered essential war work, so he was spared. He joined a voluntary branch of the fire brigade so felt that he was at least helping people during those dark days.

During this time Mutti was struggling to get enough food on the table. There was the supply of some meagre rations which you had to queue up for for hours and there were those relatives on the land who were able to provide potatoes, so my parents survived.

After the war, my enterprising father set up a baking powder factory, assisted ably by my mother. Eventually, however, things got to be too difficult as they were in the communist controlled sector of Germany which became known as East Germany and that's when my father thought it would be good to set out on an adventure to India where he had been offered a position in a printing firm. My mother fully supported him and went along with his plans.

In fact Mutti always supported my father whatever his endeavours. The times in India, where I was born, were hard, then starting life in Australia away from all that was familiar in Germany was a challenge. My father eventually set up a business in Australia and my mother was there supporting him all the way. She did the books for the business and she cannily managed the family finances. We were about as poor as you could be. Every penny had to count. Nothing was ever wasted but as a child I didn't feel I missed out on anything.

My earliest memories of Mutti are of me sleepily cuddling on her lap as I woke properly from my afternoon naps. I remember sitting on the bench in the kitchen whilst she braided my hair singing German folk songs. Unbeknownst to us our neighbours also loved listening to her singing to me in the morning.

She taught me lots about housework, how to cook, how to judge when fruit and vegetables were ripe, how to set a table nicely, how to make a house into a welcoming home. Both she and my father had a real social conscience and they both taught me the joy of being able to give to others.

When I was little and adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said I wanted to be a mother and a housewife, just like my Mutti. I couldn't think of anything more wonderful.

How times change! As I started to grow up and my friends became more and more important in my life, my attitudes altered. I started to resent the restrictions placed on my life. I hadn't been aware of how strictly I had been brought up. In later years the neighbours told me that they had felt sorry about how often I had been in trouble for minor misdemeanours. I always had to be respectful. I was not allowed to 'sully' the family name.

I was often in strife when I got home from school because I didn't feel like talking. My mother was always judgemental about my friends and their parents and I resented that. I got in trouble for swallowing or sneezing too loudly, or for laughing aloud when I read a funny book. These were not the best of times.

Of course things improved as I got older. I guess all mothers and daughters have periods of not getting
on.

I got married and moved away from Sydney to Canberra. I hadn't really been away from my parents for any length of time, so much to my new husband's frustration we had to return to visit my parents much more regularly than he was happy with. I rang my mother every week from phone boxes armed with masses of coins. I missed her dreadfully for quite some time until I got into the swing of Canberra.

Mutti was devoted to my father. He had had a very hard life with a cruel step mother. My mother poured all her love into him and he cherished her for it. Not long after I was married my father had his first stroke. From being the most definite head of the family, my mother took over and became his carer.

He lived for another 30 years, having a series of little strokes which progressively diminished him. Mutti made his life as pleasant as she could. Towards the end of her life she was constantly exhausted. She could never just go out for a day. She had to keep an eye on him and make sure she was there to provide his meals. She always had him looking immaculate, but showering and tidying up after him became a huge chore.

My parents had moved from the family home to a self care unit in the German retirement village which my father had founded, but my poor old father was becoming more and more difficult to look after, so he was moved into the hostel part of the facility. Still Mutti would check up on him several times a day. She would wash his clothes and take him special treats.

We hoped that having my father in the hostel would give her a bit of freedom but she couldn't relax. Very sadly, two days after her 87th birthday and just before she was going to come for a
holiday to Canberra I got a phone call to say that she too had had a stroke. My father had refused to get out of bed that day. He must have sensed that something was wrong. He said he wanted to see his wife and so she was found. My father was devastated when I broke the news to him.

A period in Manly hospital followed until she was able to move back to the retirement village - not into her lovely self care unit, but also into a hostel room. My father waited for her to 'come home' and died the following day.

Things didn't improve for poor Mutti. She was recovering reasonably well when she fell and broke her pelvis. Another stint in hospital. The retirement home management then informed us that she wasn't able to come back to the hostel as she had become a high care patient and so she had to move into a nursing home. It was a dreadful smelly old building. It seemed that I was always travelling between Canberra and Sydney trying to make her life as pleasant as I could as well as trying to be a wife and mother to my own family. It was an impossible task.

Mutti was constantly unhappy. She had lost her independence and the love of her life. She had nothing to live for. It was a tragedy.

One night about 8 months after my father had died I received a phone call in the middle of the night. Mutti had had a massive stroke and death was imminent. My husband and I rushed to the hospital in Sydney. I held her hand and told her that I was there for her. The nurse said it was impossible, but I'm sure she squeezed my hand for the very last time before slipping deeper into unconsciousness. The doctors expected her to die that day but she lasted another three. It wasn't surprising - she had gone through countless hardships in her life. She was tough!

After her death I felt bereft. She had always been there even though we had had our differences. She was the only person in the world who was interested in the minutiae of my life. Who could I ask about long gone relatives or bits of forgotten family history? It's all lost now. I wanted to tell her so many things in the period after her death. That it was snowing in Canberra, that mangoes were on special, boring, nothing stuff that only a mother would be interested in. It took ages to get used to the idea that she was no longer around.

My mother's request was that her ashes be mingled with the those of my father when they were to be scattered. I couldn't let my parents go for about 5 years. I brought the boxes with their ashes to the family home at the coast each Christmas and put them under the Christmas tree. They had always loved that time of year so much. Finally, one Christmas Day at sunset I felt the time was right and I opened the boxes allowing the ashes to mingle as I gently let them go over the cliff just outside our house. I visit my parents every time we come to the coast. I'm sure they would approve of their final resting place.

Last night my husband and I went out to dinner with some friends who have just become great grandparents. We drank a toast to the new little boy in their lives and then we drank a toast to the woman who had been one of the biggest influences in my life. May she rest in peace.