Trip back in time

(This is yet another post of no particular interest for most readers, another Sunday musing about family history and “old” days…)

Last week, I went with my brother to help my mother move items away from my grandmother‘s house, which has just been sold.  (A bit of a surprise as the house has no strong appealing features and the mud walls in some parts could even be considered a nuisance!) There were only a few items of furniture and it was quickly done, but it was also the opportunity to say a last good-bye to places where I spent my summer vacations and that I will presumably not visit in a long while… Things had already changed so much that it indeed felt like a place from a distant past. The post WWII prefabricated wooden house my grandparents lived in for most of my childhood had disappeared, as had their beautiful garden, the small Norman town they lived in had lost most of its soul thanks to an ugly supermarket built right in the middle, and the empty house now sounded as if it had been abandoned for ages, so different was it from the well-kept home of my grandmother! Only Mont-Saint-Michel that we passed on the way there remained the same majestic silhouette in the distance, as well as in time, since it had played an important role in my grandfather’s life…

Interestingly (for me!), the most important items of furniture we brought back were the bedroom parts from the 1930’s that had survived the June 1944 bombing of my grand-parents’ house. And the following days of pillaging by German troops and neighbours alike. Along with tiny bits my grandfather has salvaged from my great-grandmother’s house which had been completely destroyed. Like this upper piece of (all that was left of) a clock. My mother also found in the barn a collection of notary documents dating back several generations that she intends to study in order to reconstruct this branch of the family tree…