February   

As a child I loved drawing. 

My father could paint beautiful pictures and I loved sitting next to him watching. 

I liked very much when Papa took the paper and pen I got from his desk for him, started drawing and after a line or two would  asked: “What is this going to be?”  “A fish.” Next line. “A dog.”  Another line. “A bird.”  And then a few lines more and it turned out to be a seal! 

My sister and I had to help with washing my baby brother’s nappies. Disposable nappies were not yet invented. After our mum had cleaned and soaked the nappies, we had to rub soap onto them, then they were put into the big cauldron and boiled, then rinsed and hung up. We both sat next to each other at the side of the bathtub, a big cake of soap in our little hands and rubbed and rubbed the nappies. To have more fun we each got a piece of differently coloured soap, mine was green and Hannelore preferred pink. And then the real fun began: we decided to draw pictures on the nappies. Mostly we painted smily faces, sometimes trees and flowers.

When I got new colour pencils I was often sitting all by myself  drawing lots of pictures. Many of my pictures had a little houses with a garden and flowers all around. Some times I also drew some people. One of Papa’s artist friend admiring my drawing and said: “Remarkable that children always draw people with far too big heads”. He just had no clue! Really, he, who could paint so well, should have known that the face is what is most important. 

I was about ten years old when the school had an art competition asking all pupils to draw the school, or one of the nearby  lakes, anything of the surrounding parkland. I wanted to participate. Papa gave me nice paper, good pencils and colour pens and off I went. I wanted to draw the small lake. It never seemed to turn out right. Papa said: “You are  drawing the lake like a map, but from where you are looking the lake appears really like uneven broken horizontal lines. You are not a bird flying over the lake.” I tried again and again and never got it right. My lake never looked good and I never finished the picture. Not many pictures were handed in and only a few made it to the school hall, but those which did were really very good.