Grandfather’s biography
He trained to be a carpenter in Ždírec and was also a football goalkeeper.
In his adolescence and early adulthood, he lived through the Second World War.
I can’t really imagine what it was like for him and how much it influenced his life.
He often talked about participating in anti-German raids with the partisans.
His family was poor and since he was a boy, he learned to look after himself and his younger siblings.
After the war he married my grandmother, and they moved to Prague.
My grandfather allegedly went to Prague to look for a job himself first and then lied to my grandmother that he had found one, hoping that he would find one in the meantime by giving out leaflets offering his carpenter services around the Lesser Town in his spare time.
He has been teaching me to mushroom pick and garden since I was three years old.
We walked a lot, sometimes a bit too much – I remember that once he had to leave me alone in the woods and walk across the Brdy Mountains to get his car when I couldn’t walk anymore 🙂
He taught me the passion of being in the forest, he taught me to observe ants in their anthills, which we always fed with sugar cubes during the summer.
He taught me the logistics of being always occupied: when we couldn’t find any mushrooms, we at least brought home some nice soil for the rhododendrons and blackberries for grandma.
He had a red Škoda MB 100 car that he drove to the forest under the Brdy mountains with its engine on, but on the way back home we drove down the hill without starting the engine to save on petrol – even though we had to step out of the car from time to time and push it in a synchronized way to get it going again. We enjoyed that very much 🙂
He was a very strong and tough guy, and his life was all about self-sufficiency. He didn’t like to spend money, but he knew how to earn it through hard work as a carpenter.
After the revolution 1989 also learned a single sentence in many European languages:
“Hello, my name is Rudolf. Me and my wife have a guest room at our home in Libeň, would you like to stay with us?” He would often read this sentence to arriving tourists at the main train station.
At his cottage, he grew everything that could be grown in our climate, his inventive construction of a greenhouse inspired a greenhouse that was presented in the TV gardening show Receptář.
My grandfather loved to give old things a chance of further use. During the last years of his life, it was obviously difficult for him to see where our society was headed. He didn’t understand the consumerist way of life and never got caught up in the imaginary happiness of buying a new thing. He saved and stored things in the cellar, which he started to call “the shop”. He was incredibly happy when he could invite someone to come over and pick out an old thing to take home.
He was special in his own way and in retrospect I think of my grandfather very fondly. But by liking him so much, I also perceived his weaknesses and mistakes. Naturally I try not to repeat those in my own life thanks to him. I actually had two grandfathers, and they were like yin and yang:) A perfect combination of grandfathers, I would say.
They were simply great and inspirational grandfathers and great grandfathers.