Thomas Hawke (soldier_mage) wrote in voicesinmyhead, @ 2007-06-25 10:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | prompt #02, thomas joseph hawke |
Prompt #2 - Family [Open]
Family is a complicated thing for me. I divide family into my father's family and my mother's family because I have different relationships with both sides.
To be honest, I didn't have any sense of family until I was nine. Before that I was placed in a Catholic orphanage and raised with nuns along with children who were there for various reasons. Some had been orphaned because their father died in the Great War (it's still hard for me to think of it as the First World War) and their mother couldn't take care of them or had died of Spanish Influenza. I was there because my mother had died in giving birth to me and my father could not handle his loss and was placed in a mental hospital. My father's parents claimed that they were not able to take care of me and so I was to live in an orphanage which they donated to often.
Some of the other children at the orphanage disliked me because they knew my mother was German (she and my father had married before war broke out in 1914) and they were old enough to remember the fathers they had lost in the war. And let no one tell you otherwise, children are cruel. Cruel enough to almost kill another child if they feel justified in doing so. I don't hate them for doing what they did to me - I honestly doubt they knew how far they went, but it did happen.
But that was the end of my time at the orphanage because after years of not knowing what happened to her sister, Tante Gisela as I call her, came to England and found that her sister was dead and that she had a son. She adopted me as she was my closest blood relative who wanted me and I went to live with her and her family in Germany. She had a husband and a daughter and my grandparents lived with her as well. It was very interesting to suddenly have a family, but things were very different in Germany than it was in England.
There was a lot of bitterness, especially from my aunt's husband and my grandfather. The Treaty of Versailles was a particular sticking point for them. To be paying France and the allies all of the reparations that they demanded in the treaty was too much they said, especially with the inflation and the money troubles they've had. Also my grandfather was very bitter over it because he had lost two sons in that war and now he learned that because of the war, he was unable to know of his youngest daughter's death and the birth of his only grandson.
That side of my family had a tradition of turning out war mages. That magic style ran in the family and I had inherited it as all males do in that family. I was their last hope to keep the family magic going because both of their sons were unmarried when they died in those trenches and my aunt's husband...well, something happened to him in the war and their daughter had something off about her too. I haven't actually fulfilled this familial obligation yet.
As to my father's side of the family, well, that's a bit complicated seeing as my fraternal grandparents never wanted anything to do with me until after the Second World War when I was an adult and living in England again. I am not particularly in the mood to think about them, but I don't really see them as family. My real family is still in Germany, but I don't know if I'll ever see them again because I don't know what has happened to them in the time I have not been able to go back.