My grandmother Noula could not eat a single meal without bread. No bread? Not a chance. To my young mind it made sense if it was breakfast and there was an egg involved, but why bread with the cornflakes? Salad with a nice piece of toast — yes, but pasta and bread was a carb too far even for my pre-Tim Noakes-influenced world view.
She was violently opposed to any bread that involved a seed, or heaven forbid, rye. It had to be pure, unadulterated wheat, or bust. When the trend for beer bread hit — my father embraced it with alacrity, and my grandmother, visiting from Greece at the time, tolerated the development with a forbearance I couldn’t quite understand.
To my young eyes this bread obsession was a mystery to be filed away with the other many peculiarities of “big people”. Why could my parents not hang a picture on the wall without fighting about it at top pitch as if they were hanging the Mona Lisa in the Louvre for posterity? Nobody knows! Why was my mother always, always late and always completely surprised by it? Not a clue! Why could my granny not eat without bread? No idea!
I suffer from disconnect and quickly move on from the discomfort. ... Because that is how untold stories work until one day you too can’t have your daily bread.
The adults were a different species to be carefully observed from the sidelines of their many passion plays and then abandoned to their foibles — I had better things to do down at my own level. The bread situation was just one of many perplexing behaviours that couldn’t be explained and which, more often than not, didn’t yield satisfactory answers under cross-examination. I still don’t have answers to most of the impenetrable mysteries of my youth.
But the bread, it transpired, wasn’t so complicated. It was an explanation that was akin to the songs she sang to us about some guy called Mussolini who was apparently a big fool, and darker fragmentary allusions to the Nazis. They loomed large.
My granny was a teenager in World War 2. She lived in Athens through the war and the civil war that followed. Athens was blockaded by the Nazis who requisitioned all the food, and as the war progressed, the city starved. I made the grave error of picking up a book on my parents’ bookshelf of grainy black and white photographs that documented the city during the war. I will never get out of my head the image of the emaciated dead in the streets being collected and piled onto death carts in the morning. Why did they die in the streets? War was both entirely unfathomable but also a dark, dank, terrifying thing involving real people who had once been young girls, who had no bread.
My grandmother’s family had a garden and a well, and so they could grow vegetables and they bought some food on the black market. But bread — bread was the stuff of dreams. She told me you made a sad approximation with chickpeas and sawdust and ground chicory for coffee, but it was all a poor substitute for the warm loaf that most Greeks would buy daily from the local baker. The glorious smell of freshly baked bread gently summoning the neighbourhood into the day is still “a thing” in Greece. They love their baked goods. No meal at a restaurant is served without a large loaf of bread landing on the table first.
They call the people who were born between the world wars and lived through the second one the silent generation. And most of them are permanently silenced now. They weren’t people given to self-indulgent storytelling. My grandmother was a wonderful broadcaster — I called her Radio Noula — she was always transmitting. Tune in to her and you could listen to a never-ending stream of fairy tales and jokes, and songs including ad break jingles from our sponsors. But her own stories were carefully filed away in the hidden archives of her heart. They had to pry it out of her with extreme tenderness, and even then she would clam up after a few tantalising clues.
They lived among us, these refugees from the total onslaught and manic destruction we humans unleashed on almost every single country in the world more than 80 years ago. There are very few of them left now, but their trauma lives on in us. I would wake up from dreams as a child with the fear that the Nazis were coming. It was as if the knowledge of how quickly things can fall apart was embedded in the family chemistry. The war was both entirely over, but also still going on. It was always there in the shallow graves the survivors kept silent about. It was in every longed-for piece of bread that never quite filled her up.
We have short memories and the bottled-up emotions of a generation trained on forbearance and a clean slate. Why linger over horror when bringing up all that stuff was to make it real again? I wish she had. Because now I have a problem with reality. In this time of the overconsumption of images of all these horrifying wars taking place in far-flung places happening to other people who I can’t quite believe will ever be us, I suffer from disconnect and quickly move on from the discomfort. Their wars are as distant to me as my grandmother’s mysterious Nazis. Because that is how untold stories work until one day you too can’t have your daily bread.
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