Grandmothers have stories you wouldn’t believe. Ask about them before it’s too late

In my late 20s, I set out to write a book about the remarkable lives of my Latvian grandmothers and discovered my Nanna Aline was a master storyteller. Over a decade later, as we reached the end of a long journey sitting side-by-side talking about her life, she summed up the importance of what we’d done together. “My granddaughter took the time to really see me. To see our family.”

I grew up close to both my Nanna Aline and Grandma Milda but not really understanding all they went through during the Second World War and the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Latvia.

The author’s grandparents, Eddy and Aline, at Newcastle’s Redhead beach circa 1952.Credit: Courtesy of Andra Putnis

When I was little, my family would drive down from Toowoomba to Newcastle to visit them. I knew there were secrets held within their houses. As my two younger sisters and I entered Nanna Aline’s small weatherboard house out, we’d find a little island of Latvia. It was filled with Latvian wooden dolls in vividly painted folk-dancing skirts, cross-stitched pillows and leather photo albums, but also solemn pictures of Jesus and Mary. Nanna would greet us on her back steps in a terry-towelling housedress smelling of dill, talcum powder and cigarettes, and hold us as if she never wanted to let go. The adults often drank too much and got into hushed discussions.

During our trips, we’d also spend time at Grandma Milda’s much bigger house at Redhead at the beach. With her silver-grey hair elegantly curled, she’d preside over a table full of herrings, boiled eggs and cinnamon scrolls. We’d stare at her walls covered with huge Latvian tapestries she’d sewn herself – rows of wool forming ancient geometric patterns in forest greens, red berry and pale sun colours – and wonder what on earth they meant.

Back then, on the few occasions I ventured to ask a question about the past, lips became pursed, brows furrowed and heads lightly shaken. Disapproval, then distraction.

“Goodness me, where are those biscuits?” Nanna would say. “You go to the kitchen and find them.”

But glimpses and hints of my family story still slipped out. Nanna had a confessional streak and would sometimes lean over, on her own terms, to confide that life had been hard. When I was about 10, Grandma Milda came to live with us and her Latvian books, art and tapestries moved in with her. She’d regale us with stories of beautiful Riga before the war and its skyline of church steeples on the wide Daugava River, with the unspoken sense it had all been wrenched away. I remember once asking her clumsily about what happened with the Soviets and Nazis in Latvia, murmuring that “all sides are the same and terrible in war”.

“Not to the people being shot at, they aren’t,” she retorted.

It can be these childhood experiences and the ingrained fear that we don’t want to upset family members that can stop us having important conversations once we are older. But storytelling is an important part of family life, and many people end up wanting to speak before the end. I found that once I was older and able to pluck up the courage to properly ask my relatives what they knew, my grandmothers’ stories came like a raging torrent of water.

I discovered the huge sweep of history my grandmothers had witnessed and their differing perspectives given their ages, classes and backgrounds. My grandmothers both survived to end up in displaced peoples camps in Germany after the war. They eventually resettled in Australia where they met each other, the events of the war still threatening their fragile new lives for decades to come.

When I learnt my Grandma Milda fled Riga in September 1944 without her husband, pregnant, and with her one-year-old son, I couldn’t imagine how she survived her encounters with soldiers. “[They] started spitting and screaming in Russian. Who owns this [teddy] bear? I froze. Suddenly, the soldier tossed the bear up in the air. I watched it go up, flung like a rag against the grey sky. The soldier aimed and fired.”

I will be forever grateful for the time I spent with Grandma Milda and the deeper conversations I had with Nanna Aline when I became a young adult. Our granddaughter-grandmother relationship evolved to enable us to traverse hard territory, including an unexpected pregnancy, adoption, shame and violence. Nanna Aline and I kept going as she turned 95, 96, 97 … still sharp and able to reflect on the arc of her life. We became adept at moving between light and dark topics. When it all became too much, we’d listen to music.

“Ah, just put on that Old Linden Tree. And get us both a little something to drink,” she’d say. We’d get tipsy, surrounded by dozens of silver and wooden photo frames of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and marvel at how it had all turned out.

Life often feels like it’s hurtling forwards at warp-speed. We face tidal waves of information, upheaval across a changing globe, and an epidemic of loneliness as we strive to maintain connections. Our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles can tell us all they’ve witnessed – both momentous events and the beautiful details of the small things that have mattered most. It can be a life-affirming and intoxicating combination.

We can also often piece together more than we think from the hints, memories, papers and photographs waiting to be explored. The process of pausing the onwards rush of life to sit down and ask for my grandmothers’ stories was a chance for me to stop, look back and find the remarkable tales hiding in plain sight before it was too late.

Stories My Grandmothers Didn’t Tell Me (Allen & Unwin) by Andra Putnis is out now.

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