By David Lewis
In my kitchen I have an oversized serving spoon, made of aluminium during the metal-shortage years of the late 1930s or 1940s. It is a large spoon by modern standards, though light to hold, almost weightless.Yet it is not a spoon with no weight. It is in good condition, stamped with the anonymous numbers of its manufacture, with some slight marks from its use over the years – the chips where it was caught by a blade or the tine of a fork, cutlery jarred together with enough force to leave a slight mark. Perhaps it was used to serve soup or stew, even desserts, used communally in a mess hall, part of a serving set that belonged to a hall, perhaps even to a table - one of a number of spoons, perhaps oversized forks, even knives and carving knives. It is not a smart spoon, not used I think by senior staff or reserved to impress guests. It is a workaday spoon, used every day, a contributor to the clatter of a mess hall, the talk and laughter, washed in huge kitchens, set aside clean for the following day. It had a relatively short working life, some of the years between 1933 and 1945. It has not been used in the eighty years since.
I inherited this spoon from my mother, who gave it to me during her lifetime, so ‘inherited’ is not the right word. I am not quite sure how it came into her possession, although I know where the spoon came from. Perhaps it came to her from her mother, as my mother passed on to me a number of pieces of cutlery that had belonged to her mother – cake knives, salad servers. This spoon however is unique.
It is a harmless object but that swastika stamped into the handle carries so much weight’
I do know how it came into the family. I am named after my mother’s cousin David Morris, who was a soldier in the British Army at the end of the Second World War. During the advance on Berlin they came across an abandoned Luftwaffe base. The spoon is the only survivor of this story and a lot of the story has been lost; so perhaps the base was not abandoned and David Morris’s unit had to fight the retreating Germans for possession of it, I do not know. Nor do I know the whereabouts of the Luftwaffe base, nor even if it too has survived; perhaps it is part of an airfield, its buildings adapted; perhaps it lies beneath a housing estate or industrial complex. That part of the story has been lost, although it is not difficult to imagine the smashed and ruined buildings, the fires, the danger. Or the water dripping through the roof, the broken ovens, the overturned tables.
The spoon was picked up by David Morris, as a souvenir of the Luftwaffe base, and brought home to the UK as the war ended. He picked it up, light enough to add no weight to his knapsack, but special because of the Nazi swastika and the proud eagle of the Luftwaffe on the handle, stamped into the metal.
David Morris brought the Luftwaffe spoon home and after some time it passed to my mother, who passed it to me. I do not use it. I have other serving spoons that do get used, but the Luftwaffe spoon is not used.It is a harmless object, but that swastika stamped into the handle carries so much weight and even horror.And yet the Luftwaffe were not involved in genocide or war crimes; it is not a Gestapo spoon, nor a piece from the mess hall of a death camp. Yet the swastika stained the whole of Germany, so the reluctance, the revulsion, remains. What would you do with it? It has two identities now. One is as a small but permanent memento of the totalitarian regime that manufactured it, and the other is as a small part of my family’s story, a souvenir picked up in the ruins of Europe, at the end of the Second World War, by my mother’s cousin. With time, the second identity could disappear – if it were sold after my death, for example, and joined a collection of World War Two memorabilia in a museum, its journey forgotten. The first identity it can never lose, unless it is melted down. Metal, they tell us these days, can be endlessly recycled.
Today it is in limbo - it lives with the other spoons, but I do not use it.
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