Very superstitious

 My mother believed that there were stronger forces operating than what you saw with your naked eye. She was always getting messages about what was about to happen, good or bad but mainly bad. As a young child, I often had a sense of foreboding when my mother made these pronouncements.

’There’ll be a fight tonight, you just watch. The knife has been left with its cutting edge up. There’ll be a fight for sure.’ She would solemnly shake her head and sure enough, that night when my father came home, a fight would ensue.

’The knife is never wrong. I knew there’d be a fight,’ she’d mutter as she poured herself another drink.

‘Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve spilt the salt. That’s a bad omen. Quick get a pinch of the salt and throw it over your left shoulder,’ and I quickly ran for the salt, worried about more bad luck coming our way.

There were other things too, like heating lead and dropping it into water to see what shape it made. My mother could divine how the next few months would play out just from the shape of the lead. Or lighting a candle on a dark night and asking questions of the dead who would answer by the flicker of the flame. I hated these nights when the candle would be brought out and all the lights turned off. We often sat at a window with the light of the candle reflected in the glass, a ghosted image of the candle beckoning spirits of the past. My mother started with some incantations before calling upon a deceased member of her family for advice.

I felt a cold shudder go down my back whenever my mother leaned into the dark, talking to the candle flame. It was creepy and unsettling, and it always felt wrong. I wondered where this other side was that her mother kept talking about and feared that it may be somewhere just on the other side of that eerie glass pane in the dead of night.

Then, there were the odd sayings that I never quite understood. So much of the adult world seemed strange.

’Never sweep the dirt from your house into the yard or you’ll be poor for the rest of your life,’ and

’You can’t sew on a button while you are wearing the shirt or you’ll sew on poverty,’ which made me wonder how many buttons my parents had sewn on and how much dirt they’d swept into the yard, to be as poor as they were.

‘Now look what you have done! You broke a mirror. Seven years of bad luck,’ which especially frightened me as I was barely eight at the time.

The strangest comment of all was muttered every time my mother ironed. We didn’t have an electric iron, only an ancient, heavy black one that had to be heated on their wood stove. The temperature of the iron had to be closely monitored and my mother sprayed all the clothes with water to create steam when she pressed the iron down. This helped to get the creases out.  She would heat the iron and begin to iron carefully, making sure she didn’t burn the cloth. It was hard work and required concentration on her part, especially when ironing shirts and trousers. Inevitably, my mother ironed creases into the fabric where none were required.

‘I’ve just ironed another Jew into the shirt. Damn. Now I’ll have to reheat the iron and smooth it over. That’s better, can’t even see that the Jew was there!’

It was strange to hear her mother speak like this, but I didn’t understand what any of it meant. I didn’t even know what a Jew was, except that my mother hated them and called my father a bastard son of a Jew whenever she was angry. I thought if my father was a Jew then it couldn’t be all that bad, but I never dared to say this to my mother. It was always Jews and Gypsies that my mother cursed, yet she loved to hear the Hungarian csardás played by a Gypsy violin. It was all very confusing.

On one of those nights when my mother spoke to the dead, she brought out a small jewellery box that I had never seen before. Inside it was a tiny, weathered lapel pin with a red ring on the outside and a white centre piece. On the white enamelled centre was a strange looking bent cross on its side. The cross was black, and it stood out from the white and the red.

‘I have kept this for a very long time,’ my mother said.

‘How long, Mama?’

‘About 25 years,’ she replied. I have kept it hidden because it could cause a lot of trouble for me now, but I still have it.

‘I’ve never seen you wear it,’ I ventured.

‘No, I can’t wear it now. Not now, but I wore it with pride during the war when I was young.’

‘Why did you wear it then and why can’t you wear it now?’ I asked.

‘You wouldn’t understand. Maybe one day you will.  But for now, you can never tell anyone that I still have it. Especially not your father.’

There were many secrets my mother expected me to keep. This was just one more to add. It was only much later, when I was a teenager in Australia that I understood the significance of that German lapel pin with the black swastika. By then, my mother had finally summed up the courage to leave my father.