Bag Baby by Mary McCabe
One sunny day in my back garden my late mother-in-law, Elfriede Tiemann, told me a tale which cut me to the core.
In 1920s Germany it was customary to send sickly children to schools in the country for a few weeks, to build up their strength. It was after a month spent in such an establishment that 6 year-old Elfriede found herself and her suitcase offloaded in the centre of Hamburg.
The bus started up and disappeared round the corner. Elfriede waited for her parents to come and get her. She waited while the shadows grew long. She waited until the sun disappeared behind the tenements and the lamplighter went round with his pole.
Smart girl, she knew her address. Approaching nice-looking ladies, as her mother had taught her, and asking the way, Elfriede finally found someone who had heard of her street. She set off in the right direction, bumping and dragging behind her along the pavement her cardboard case, nearly as large as herself. No wheeled luggage then!
There was far less traffic around than today, but no designated crossings either, and to a girl from the countrified edge of town, the main arteries of the city were daunting. She crossed roads wherever she dared. She asked the least-scary-looking grown-ups whenever she was faced with a choice of roads.
It was pitch dark and raining when Elfriede at last reached the familiar streets. Leaving the luggage at the close mouth she stumbled up the stairs to her home.
Something about the door was unfamiliar. It was the nameplate. She sounded it out, letter by letter.
The name was not her own.
For a long moment she stared at the nameplate, unsure whether to believe her eyes. Were her new reading skills letting her down?
Timidly she tapped the door. No reply. Frantically she thumped it, with both fists. She kicked it with her toes.
A man opened it and informed her that her family had moved home. He told her they had flitted to No 12 Hoppenstedtstrasse. He closed the door again.
Hoppenstedtstrasse. She had never heard of it.
Elfriede went downstairs and grasped her suitcase again. Along the pavement, bump, bump, bump. Reach a crossroads; look for a lady to ask. Get the new direction, on the road again.
On several occasions the suitcase burst open and her clothes spilled onto the wet ground. She piled them back in, sat on the case to close the clasps and carried on.
Finally she reached No. 12 Hoppenstedtstrasse. She climbed the stair, recognised the name ‘Tiemann’ on one of the doors and knocked. She banged it until her knuckles were cut. She thumped it and kicked it. She called through the letterbox: Mama!
The neighbour across the landing opened her door and scolded Elfriede for making such a racket late at night. People were trying to sleep. She told her the Tiemann family had gone away on a trip somewhere. She closed the door.
Elfriede went down again and lugged her suitcase up to the landing. She plunked down on top of it and softly burst into tears. She was still there, forlornly sprawled on her suitcase, when her parents and baby sister came home. They were surprised to see her. They had expected her only the next day.
My mother-in-law told me other tales that day: of teenage years spent in a country on the losing side of World War II, of her 21st birthday and the days following spent trapped by rubble in a bunker while firestorms raged above, of emerging into the ruins of her family home and seeing before her a woman clutching a dead baby in a suitcase.
Of a mad frantic last dance laid on to boost morale amongst the soldiers leaving next day for the western front; there she witnessed a murder by a jealous young soldier of his colleague who had danced too closely and too often with the other’s girlfriend. The murderer’s punishment was he was sent east instead of west and was dead within two weeks.
But I could recall how my own city, Glasgow, appeared to me when I was six. The unfathomable streets. The unnavigable traffic. The baby years, when travelling from A to B meant only keeping a blind grip of some adult’s hand.
So it was the image of the infant grimly humping a suitcase up and down the rainy streets of an implacable city to find her family had flown the coop and left her behind which somehow stirred my soul.
