Way Things Used To Be-- My Aunts Johanna And Margareta

The boycott my Aunts Johanna and Margareta conducted against the British Empire always reminds me of my father’s story about the mouse making love to an elephant underneath a coconut tree. A coconut fell and hit the elephant on the head.

“Ouch!” cried the elephant.

 “Did I hurt you?”asked the mouse.

My father’s sister Johanna was born fifteen months before him in 1882, his sister Margareta, fifteen months after him in 1885. In 1914 my father, his two brothers, four sisters and their parents moved into two adjoining brownstones off Central Park. They lived in the one nearer the park; the second housed medical offices for my father and one of his brothers, a law office for his youngest sister and a floor-through apartment for my adopted Aunt Marie, a first grade teacher and her husband, Bob, a New York City policeman. Each morning, the family breakfasted together on fresh rolls delivered by Cushman’s, Dundee Marmalade with chunks of bitter orange rind, shipped by the case from Harrods, and soft-boiled eggs. Most nights they ate dinner together too.

Seventeen summers and the length of seventeen long winters passed during which they lived together in self-sufficient tranquility, “never looking out the front window,” as my Aunt Marie once put it, “only at the back yard, speaking only to each other.” Then, at the age of forty-seven, my father announced his engagement to my mother and the seventeen-year-long logjam broke apart.

My father married my mother, his doctor-brother and lawyer-sister married, their brother Marcus and sister Lillian died, both parents died, they sold the brownstone they’d lived in and moved into separate apartments on the Upper West Side, and everyone but Aunt Marie and Uncle Bob blamed the cataclysm of changes on my mother.

Aunts Johanna and Margareta moved into a twelfth floor apartment on Central Park West and continued breakfasting together on rolls from Cushman’s, Dundee Marmalade and Darjeeling Tea from Harrods. They taught high school English, Aunt Johanna at Wadleigh, Aunt Margareta at Stuyvesant. They knew Latin, were fluent in German and French, read the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the Economist.

They traveled to England, France and Germany during the summers, wore long dresses and low-heeled black shoes fastened with laces. They believed in classical education and capital punishment for those who deserved them, never used spices or sauces on their boiled meat, boiled chicken or boiled fish, never put dressing on their salads, never “used” tobacco, coffee, or alcohol, never “painted themselves with cosmetics” and they detested FDR and his “national socialist braintrust.”

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and the British declared war, they contributed money and clothing to British War Relief, willingly gave up their shipments of Darjeeling Tea and Dundee Marmalade to help the War effort, and made a place in their Pantheon for Winston Churchill. They listened to his speeches on their Philco radio and assigned them to be memorized by their students along with the speeches of Pericles, Mark Antony, Edmond Burke, George Washington, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.

They followed all rationing regulations, knitted six inch squares for soldiers’ blankets, flattened cans, bound stacks of newspapers, and led neighborhood drives for scrap metal. They sewed blackout curtains to cover their windows, served as air raid wardens, gave pints of blood every three months, volunteered at hospitals, followed the War on maps and wrote letters to 10 Downing Street urging Churchill to restrain Roosevelt’s giveaways to Stalin.

They followed the American landings in Africa, Italy, and Normandy. They followed the British-American advance up the Italian peninsula, the advance across France into Belgium and Germany, and the unconditional German surrender in May 1945.

“This is your victory!” cried Winston Churchill to the British People on VE-Day. 

“No yours!” cried the British People and Aunts Johanna and Margareta.

Then two months later, those same British People voted Churchill out of power in favor of a mustachioed socialist who advocated a welfare state. The shock to my aunts was as grave as the day my father announced his engagement to my mother.

To be continued in Aunt Johanna and Margareta’s Boycott

Herb L

oldtimewriter.com