Grandpa

                                             

F is doing a project for school: Write a biography of someone in your family. He is doing my grandfather, Cecil Edgar Berkman.  Grandpa died at the age of ninety seven, five years before F was born. To research the life of his great grandfather, F is going through an interview video I made of Cecil in 1993 a few months before he died.

I haven’t looked at this video ( now transferred to DVD) for many years and is a strange experience for me, sitting beside my twelve year old son in 2010, hearing again the forgotten-but-so-familiar cadences of Grandpa’s squeaky old voice. His steadiness. The way he tilts his head and  punctuates his reminiscences with ‘At any rate...’ The way his wife interrupts him, gently correcting details about who married who, or when they moved house.

I hear things I never knew, or had forgotten: My grandfather had a dog when he was a boy, a St Bernard called Carlo. My grandfather had an older brother Aubrey, who was a gambler. This Aubrey bought a ‘trotting horse’,  called ‘Warlord’, from Piccaniny. It was 14 year old Cecil’s first paid job to look after Warlord. F is taking notes, and looking older and more focused than I’ve seen him.  Black and white dog, Cecil’s friend, he writes.

Cecil was born at home, above his parent’s jewellery shop, in King St Newtown, in 1896. He remembers sitting with his siblings on the upstairs verandah watching the ‘passing parade’ of traffic. In those days it was nearly all horse-drawn. And in those days, most births were at home. This is interesting to F. because he was also born at home, three generations later, when it had become an ‘alternative’ choice. 

Cecil’s father, we learn, was a peddler, a poor Polish immigrant who sharpened scissors & knives from a kerbside cart in the streets of Sydney, and later travelled to the county with a horse and caravan selling jewellery and haberdashery. By the time Cecil, the youngest of six was born, the Berkman family had became prosperous. 

“Of course there was no income tax in those days” puts in my step-grandmother on the video. “That’s right” agrees Grandpa, meditatively. Like those were the Good Old  Days. The days when anyone could work hard and get rich. He used to work in his parents’ shop after school. 

When I was a child my grandfather was like Santa Claus - he lavished my brother and me with gifts and treats and icecreams and trips to the circus, Luna Park, the Pantomime. 

Later, when I was a uni student and into my early twenties  I rejected him as ‘capitalist pig’ and a right winger. Fortunately he lived long enough for me to tell him what a wonderful grandfather he was and how much I cherish the childhood memories.

I mention to Felix that Cecil would have had his bar mitzvah in about 1908, when he was twelve, probably at the Newtown synagogue, where his father was the treasurer. A couple of kids in F’s class have just had their bar mitzvahs.

My grandfather married for the first time when he was twenty three. Soon after the wedding  his young wife died in the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic  that reached Australia in 1919. His older sister Ruby also died in the epidemic. 

...And so on. Next installment tonight after school. ( He marries his first wife's cousin, my mother is born...) So many lives, loves, deaths, so many stories, all teeming past.