Ligo Haibun Challenge – quote week – What did you do in the war?

I have struggled coming up with anything for recent challenge prompts – the muse is playing hard to get. However, I couldn’t pass on this week’s Ligo Haibun prompts – both proverbs are wonderful. I hope it’s obvious I worked with the first.

 

Only when you have eaten a cockroach do you appreciate soup. — Ukrainian Proverb

 

Either dance well or start drinking. — Ukrainian Proverb

 

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What did you do in the war?

My grandmother always used to tell stories of how hard it was during the Second World War. She was a woman left at home to fend for herself with a young child, while my blind-as-a-bat grandfather was away in the Pay Corps. My dad was born in 1942 leaving my gran weak, and he spent his early years living with his grandparents. I found this out only after my gran died, before that I was given to understand how hard she had worked and suffered for her only son.

I suspect my grandmother was very good at pulling the wool. I never saw her weak – the strength never left those fingers gnarled by arthritis; she never lost a marble or shied from an argument about what she knew to be right and true.

‘Respect your elders,’ was her mantra. I think the unspoken truth ran along the lines of, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ This was the woman who hid black market eggs in the bath when the customs man came to tea. She lived in a port town, her husband worked on the docks: she couldn’t decline visits from the well-meaning powers-that-be. There are other, now lost, stories about her having far much more butter than her neighbours as well.

 

tales of hardship

exaggerated for effect

poverty unknown

 

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