A LITTLE STORY OF MY CHILDHOOD

"hot" pictures are here

of course I mean heat !


Last week for Fun Monday we were asked to write a funny story which happened when we were children. I wrote "A BAD WORD" which involves the post war life in Germany you can read it here where I spent my childhood. Some people asked me if I had more stories about this time. I didn't. So today I will tell you another little part of my childhood and believe me when you are a little child you don't realize what really happened but you only see the funny side of it.

For me as a child it was completely normal that all fathers (except mine) teachers or other men around me had something missing. A leg, fingers, a hand, an arm, an eye, sometimes both legs and I only realized that it was not so normal as it seemed to me when for the first time I went to the Belgian coast and saw men there at the beach. It seemed very strange to me that they had all their members and nothing was missing. I was 13 at that time and it was one year before we moved to Brussels.

I remember that once I was spending a night in one of my friends home. I entered the bathroom in the morning and saw an eye starring at me in a waterglass. I was a little surprised but very curious. So I took the eye out of the glass to have a closer look. I compared it to my marbles I had at home. I also found it very funny that the eye seemed to look at me. When I had seen enough I put it back in the glass. In fact it was my friend's father's glass eye. When I returned to the bathroom later the eye had disappeared and a normal friendly man said good morning to me. Of course after that I always starred at his eyes when I thought he would not see me. I found it so exciting that he could take his eye off and I could not.

At another's friends place where I also stayed over night, I opened a wardrobe to look for something I don't remember and suddenly found myself with one leg protheses in my arms. It almost kicked me down I must have been 8 or 9. My friend helped me to put it back and told me that over night her father always put it there and walked with crutches at home. I hadn't even noticed. These things were just part of my daily life.

I only understood many many years later that it hadn't been normal at all.



My best friend and me, we are still friends today. As you can see my mother still wrote in gothic, which was used in Germany. I have two albums where she wrote what was on the pictures but I can't read it ! This way of writing had been forbidden in 1945 by the occupants, because they couldn't read it either ! I remember my grandma who was furious because she had to learn a new writing and when later I got letters from her they still contained some of gothic letters.