MRS D: City.

KAREN: So that wasn’t too far away then.

MR D: No. So then we went to the Bessborough and had lunch. And you know, whaddya gonna talk to two elderly ladies about?

Present at this lunch were Mr D, Mrs D’s paternal grandma, and Mrs D’s own mother. So the “two grandmas” he refers to earlier are his wife’s grandma, and his daughter’s grandma. I should have drawn a family tree for every interview. Watch as I try and get the relationships straight.

KAREN: Now it was your mum (indicating MRS D) and your grandma? Or your (indicating MR D) mum?

MRS D: My grandma. She was the one that was always a midwife with all the women.

KAREN: So it was your grandma and her daughter?

MR D: No. It was her daughter-in-law.

MRS D: My mum was daughter-in-law to grandma.

KAREN: (Finally cottoning on) Oh.. Okay, I think. So it was your dad’s mum. (“it” meaning the grandma “that was always the midwife with all the women.”)

MRS D: Yeah.

MR D: So then we sat around quite a while…

KAREN: So how many spoke the same language?

MR D: Just the two ladies spoke the same language, I didn’t.

KAREN: Oh my goodness.

MR D: (Laughs very heartily at that.)

KAREN: You mean you didn’t have any language in common?

MR D: Well, with grandma, I could talk high German a little bit but my high German, that wasn’t what we spoke at home.

KAREN: No, it’s not, I know.

MR D: So I could speak to her a little bit, but to mum I spoke in English, and she would answer then in Czech. And so then after we were through discussing things and wondering whether the baby would be born yet we drove to the hospital and they stayed in the car and I went up to the ward and when I got upstairs they said it’s twins.

Well, when I was younger, I always laughed, you know, sort of, it wasn’t a joke but yet I could always smile or laugh about it? And so after I saw the twins and saw that she was all right I went down and while I was walking down and out to the car and… “Now what am I going to tell these two ladies?” So I’m talking and laughing all the way. “Twins, eh? Twins.” So…

MRS D: Did you know how to say twins in German?

Everybody laughs. Mr D had a very dry sense of humour that made his storytelling extremely entertaining.

MR D: So when I got to the car and the ladies are, “What is it? What is it?” And I laughed and I laughed. And finally I could stop long enough to say, “It’s twins.” And: “Huh? Twins? Impossible.” “No,” I said, “twins.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

KAREN: It was nervousness. “What am I gonna do now?”

MR D: (Laughing) Yeah.

KAREN: Three children all of a sudden.

MR D: But finally they came upstairs and they saw the twins. So you see, the second time that was more exciting.

MRS D: Yeah, we didn’t want to go through home birth again.

KAREN: You didn’t, hey?

MRS D: Not when we had an old car to travel with.

MR D: And the thing was, my dad never drove a car. So that day we left the old car there and we took their, it wasn’t a brand new one, but it was fairly new, and he took our old Chevy to go to the field where the boys were working which was only, well, about a mile and a half from home. And he had M____ along. (The couple’s three year old, who was born at home.) And he never got to the field.

KAREN: Why? What happened to the car, did it just break down?

MR D: It just stopped, and he didn’t know what to do with it and, of course, well at that time we were all mechanics so my older brother went and fixed it and he took it home with dad and M______.

MRS D: Maybe it stalled and he flooded it.

MR D: No. I think there was something wrong with the spark. But they said we were sure fortunate we didn’t try to make it with our old car.

KAREN: How many miles?

MR D: Well, from Hanley, from our folks, it was forty-eight miles.

KAREN: You could have had the baby in a field. Two babies in a field.

MR D: So that was an experience.

This interview was a lot of fun, lots of laughs, even during the account of the grave-digging.

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