Introduction from the authors
Two pieces follow, extracted from our fractured hybrid memoir Take Two. We sisters wrote the book from the starting point of having shared a significant chunk of our lives – and also a mix of memories, some of which we disagreed about – in some cases, driving a wedge between us, causing us to live in a state of mutual ‘strangement’ for many years. We came together in later life, wanting to find out about each other and our close family, afresh. How can siblings, close in age and with many shared experiences, have such different perceptions? Do memories change each time they are taken out and dusted? Is memory itself an unreliable witness? Can new information change the shape of our understanding of others – or does childhood itself generate and fix our older selves?
Hands
Titisee, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany
A summer holiday in Germany. The girl hunches on her chair in the crowded guesthouse restaurant, thin arms braced, each exhalation a loud wheeze that draws an irritated tut from her mother. Her stomach hurts, a constant burning. Her sister’s knife slices into a juicy schnitzel. It smells delicious.
‘Das Kind darf keine Soße!’ Her grandmother’s ringed hand hovers over the girl’s plate, deflecting the waiter’s gravy-boat: no cream sauce with tiny mushrooms, nor melted butter speckled with parsley. Whatever it is, she’s not allowed it.
Yesterday, her mother and the village doctor talked over the girl’s head; he prodded her distended stomach, laughing as she flinched. She’d overeaten, he said, ignoring her thinness. He didn’t ask about the daily pills that make her hands shake.
‘You love our wonderful Bavarian food, naturally. But now you diet. No more ice cream!’
Her mother passes her a flaccid lemon slice—to make it nicer, she says. The girl takes a mouthful of boiled potato and reverts to her hunched position.
Her sister inclines her head towards the next table: six adults wreathed in cigar smoke emit a mass sigh as the waitress sets down six Knickerbocker Glories. She hopes they get stomach pains too. Her sister stifles a laugh.
The table cleared, her sister takes her elbow. They stand and walk out together, heads up.
Outside, the girl is soon left hanging on her grandmother’s arm, as if she were the old woman. Spots bloom in front of her eyes; she stoops and coughs to clear the phlegm filling her lungs. Her grandmother’s face creases in distaste.
She’s interrupted by a teasing voice.
‘C’mon, slowcoach.’ Her sister’s beside her and takes both her hands, tugging her upright and two steps further, before skipping ahead to catch up with their mother.
Vivian’s commentary
Among other kinds of writing and drawings, Take Two is a concentration of blurts, thoughts, memories and poems that Caroline and I wrote to each other in response to prompts from our illustrator, Alan Thomas. The prompt that engendered both these pieces was ‘German’. By chance, we both wrote about a particular, rainy holiday in the Black Forest after our parents divorced. I wrote down a clear memory I had of a terrible stomach-ache, my usual severe asthma, the local doctor, my sister running uphill. I chose a third person narrative to give a filmic, observational quality rather than stir up pity or emotion. Caroline’s pained response to my first draft was that it made her seem uncaring, whereas she recalls empathising with me and my illness, wishing she could help me, always aiming to be my ally and helper. The piece now reflects that: it expresses my truth, my experience of this situation, yet also incorporates Caroline’s reality, whittled down. A shared realisation for us both, is that the holiday left a permanent stain on our perceptions of Germany and what it means to be German: I was a pre-teen, we were both angry and confused at being dragged here, critical of our family, hating other people more. But we had each other.
Titisee
How
charming
these tree-laden hills
gushes the brochure pure healthy air
mother and grandmother repeat the mantra along
a mesh of bleak grey autobahns
our arrival under tarnished pewter clouds
puddled carpark awash entrance cloaked in gloom
fir trees louring hearing our moans Mum’s angry face spits
we’re going to have a lovely holiday between clenched teeth of persistent drizzle
the forbidding forest looms phantasms haunt my dreams eidolons hobgoblins spectres wraiths
on our cheerless walks I crack
the conundrum the rain must have unleashed
ancient denizens primeval pranksters lure visitors then pounce
with flabby batter fat and gristle suffocating flour-sauce white-out thick sickly crème wallpaper paste all the food a fraud
Schwarzwälderkirschtorte
unpronounceable mouthful of sweet nothing
sterile sponge insipid bottled gobs shaving-foam froth
faux fake-cake sogged cardboard base unwholesome hoax sickening my sister
ersatz chocolate
disenchantment
Caroline’s commentary
My piece was very much adapted after we’d had our initial exchange of writing on the theme of ‘German’. My original offering was full of angst and anger and yet somehow failed to convey the true impression I had on my first visit to the Schwarzwald together with my sister. I decided to morph the whole thing into a poem, which then transmuted into a ‘Tannenbaum’ shape (Christmas tree), a shorthand format to convey the location. My teenage frustration and anger at this rain-sodden place that was making my sister so ill is represented by the nightmarish apparitions of Gothic fairystories. I have to confess I had great fun writing this poem, wanting to make it as unappealing and scary as possible. The two pieces give two diverse images of the same memory.
About the book
Take Two was launched in London in October 2023 by our UK publisher Charles Boyle at CBeditions. It can be ordered online from CBeditions for addresses in UK and Europe, and from Volume in Nelson, Aotearoa New Zealand, for addresses in NZ and the rest of the world.
Caroline Thonger (Switzerland) is a technical translator from French and German, and writer of historical non-fiction work The Banker’s Daughter (Merton Priory Press, 2007) about her German grandmother’s family. She was Chief Editor of Hello Switzerland! magazine where her articles, investigations and editorials were published. She volunteers with the Geneva Writers Group; her short stories and poems have regularly appeared in the GWG publication Offshoots.
Vivian Thonger (Aotearoa New Zealand) is a writer/poet and actor/performer. Her writing has featured in NZ’s annual Flash Fiction Competition, online in Flash Frontier and Flash Flood, and in the anthologies Bonsai—Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (CUP, 2018), Te Ripo Wai (Pavlova Press, 2021) and 9 print editions of Fast Fibres Poetry (NZ). An experimental, chopped-up, illustrated memoir with soundtrack – Take Two, parallel-written with her sister Caroline – was published by CBeditions (UK, 2023).