‘When the soldiers came, we hid in the woods’

Alexandra Jones, 28, was born in Romania and came to England aged six, with her mother and English stepfather. Her grandmother, Elizabeta Moldovan, 80, was born in Bistrita, Romania.

My grandmother was eight when the second world war passed through her village. With her father and brother fighting, soldiers swarming the village and bombs raining down, her mother decided to pack up their cow, pig, some clothes and polenta flour, and head for the nearby woods. They lived there, in the middle of a freezing autumn, for a month until the fighting subsided.

“I wasn’t afraid,” my grandmother tells me. “I had a child’s bravado and, more than that, my mind was occupied by something else: a calf that we’d left on the farm. I remember feeling heartbroken that we’d abandoned it, so I decided to go back to the village. It was an hour’s walk. When I got there, all the windows in our house had been smashed and the floors were strewn with hay where soldiers had been sleeping. The calf was still there, weak and bleating. I dragged over as much feed as I could and a trough of water, then headed back. I tripped along, the ground shaking from the bombs, soldiers crashing through the fields to my left and right. I remember bullets hissing past, but I kept going. It never occurred to me that they might have hit me.”

I left Romania in 1993 and, though I’ve always been close to my grandparents and make yearly pilgrimages to see them, I didn’t know this story until last year. They often quizzed me about life and school, or, later, university, jobs, rents and career prospects, and I’d answer, passively: “Fine, nice, expensive, difficult.” It never occurred to me that I should show a similar interest in them.

‘This vision – of my grandmother, younger than I am now, feeling real despair, hopelessness – is sobering.’ Photograph: Davin Ellicson for the Guardian

It’s an attitude that’s parodied in a particularly genius episode of US comedian Aziz Ansari’s 2015 Netflix series Master Of None, called Parents. Sitting down to dinner with his family, he finally asks his Indian parents about their experiences. As well as poking fun at a particularly millennial brand of self-centredness, it portrays an epiphany that every immigrant’s child has at some point in their life: compared with your ancestors, you will never work so hard, nor so long, nor face so many obstacles.

In just half a century, the world has changed so definitively that my grandparents’ experiences are almost unimaginable to me. And perhaps mine to them.

“Did anything ever make you anxious?” I ask my grandmother. “You know – you can’t breathe properly, your heart beats too fast?” She looks puzzled. “OK, is there anything that kept you awake at night?”

“Well, my one great worry came when your mother was two [in 1970, when my grandmother was 34]. I got cancer. All I hoped for was that I’d live for five more years, just long enough for her to remember who I was.” There’s a common refrain in Romania that goes something like, “It doesn’t matter about anything else: as long as I have my health, I’m happy.” Having lived through the war, the communist regime, the revolution and the subsequent economic and ideological upheavals, my grandmother understandably subscribes to this school of thought.

Career prospects, the cost of rent – those subjects that might keep me awake at night don’t seem to have been as big a cause for concern. “When I left school [aged 12],” she says. “I knew, for certain, that all I wanted was to get away from the village and that country way of life.”

“It seems as if every generation has that ambition,” I say, “to move away and do better.”

Walking with her mother one evening, my grandmother saw a man coming in the opposite direction, dressed in a navy uniform. He was freshly released from a four-year conscription. A mutual friend had told this man about her: a hardworking woman with dark hair and green eyes. A few days later, he turned up at her house, introduced himself and made a proposition: would she go with him to the city where he had the promise of a house and a job in a coalmine?

“And you said yes?”

“Yes.”

“But you’d never met him before? You’d never… had a chat?”

“I knew him, a little – we had mutual friends – but no, we’d never really spoken. My dad sat me down and said, ‘You don’t know this man from the next.’ But I said, ‘If even the wild animals in the countryside can work it out, I’ll manage.’”

“It seems… brave.”

“Yes, but if you’ve got nothing to lose, it’s easy to be brave.” That man became my grandfather.

“I took a suitcase of clothes and Mum gave me a pan for cooking, and your grandfather and I went together. The house had a kitchen with a broken coal-burning stove and one other room. I walked in, and saw this miserable place with no furniture, and I sat down on my suitcase and cried. At 24, I saw myself for the first time as a poor woman.”

Laughably, I’ve often seen myself as a poor woman, too – every 15th of the month, when the rent disappears from my account. But this vision – of my grandmother, younger than I am now, feeling real despair, hopelessness – is sobering. I may feel poor, but I buy lunch most days. And coffee. Despite my bank accounts sometimes running close to zero, my life seems somehow built on a more solid foundation.

“But you had a house,” I venture.

Elizabeta Moldovan at 28. Photograph: Davin Ellicson for the Guardian

“Yes, and in that respect I am luckier than you, maybe. It was a hard way of life, because at first there weren’t shops where you could buy things, so I made everything myself [from cheese and butter to fabric from raw hemp]. But the communist system meant everyone had somewhere to live and everyone had work, even though the wages were low. Society generally isn’t as nice as it was then.”

“What do you mean? You think the capitalist system has made people less caring?”

“Yes. Now, everyone just wants to make money. Life has always been a struggle, no person has it easy. You have to pass through the fire and the water – as the saying goes – but somehow it seems better if there are people with you. It’s why you should get married. When will you? You’ve kept your boyfriend waiting long enough.”

My boyfriend and I have been together since university, and while there was a period when the thought of marriage appealed to me, that has long since passed. Nothing profound happened; it just stopped seeming important. “I’m not sure that’s what I want.”

“But don’t you want children?”

“Well, I do want children, but I don’t need to be married to have children.”

“No, but it’s nice to have stability. Children need stability.”

At the heart of this small disagreement is that our understanding of stability doesn’t quite align. To her, marriage is an immutable fact; my grandparents have been married for 56 years. For me, it represents a profoundly mutable life choice – a very special life choice, no doubt, but, like so many things nowadays, liable to change. “Oh, well, you shouldn’t complicate it so much,” my grandmother says when I explain this to her. “You pick a man and get on with it.”

“We’re moving into a shared house soon, so I’m not sure we’re quite marriage-ready.”

“Why not just get your own place?”

“Can’t really afford it at the moment.”

“But you’re constantly going on holidays.”

“Yes, but what would you suggest? That I never see any of the world?”

“You’ve seen more countries than I’ve seen towns,” she sighs. “Save for a house. Get some nice furniture. What else do you need to see?”

Well, Japan, hopefully. But she’s absolutely right, of course.

Perhaps in my case, as with all first- or second-generation immigrants, the differences in our lives are a little starker. But I’d venture that anyone who spends some time in conversation with an older family member will feel it: the dizzying sense of evolution in action. Generations of accidental encounters and near-misses – those bullets whistling through the corn – all leading, with haphazard precision, to you.

Alexandra Jones is a writer for Stylist magazine

‘The world travels too fast. Any advice from anybody so old to anybody young is futile’

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, 27, is a writer who has lived in London, Norwich, New York, Tokyo and Madison, Wisconsin. Her grandmother, Jean, 87, was born in Shanghai and has lived in Hong Kong, Dallas and New York.

At 87, my Shanghainese grandmother Jean resides alone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I lived in New York, drifting in and out of her apartment, until last autumn, when I moved to Norwich in England. I go to my windowsill with the best reception and ring her. I want to talk to her about the differences in our lives. I close my eyes, imagining I’m in New York, listening to the pigeons that perch on her air-conditioner box. Is she picturing my little house that she has never seen and may never see?

“By my age, you were married and had a baby, right?” I ask. I have no child, no spouse, not even a cat. “You’d been in America for seven years?”

“It’s like this,” she says, her voice lilting on the “this”, then tells me how China was in the midst of a civil war. The communists had just taken over Shanghai and stopped all trains. When they decreed there would be one last run to Hong Kong, her mother bought her a ticket immediately. “On the train, there were families fleeing Shanghai. Little children, grandparents and so on. But I am 19; everything is something to look forward to.”

From there, she applied to Columbia University’s MA programme, to study political science. In 1949, the college still did not accept women, but the graduate school did. Luckily, she’d already got her degree. “I graduated when I was 18 – that was when the communists came in. My class was the graduating class. The university sped up, gave us the test, gave us the diploma, and so we left. And later on, I learned my school president was executed.”

I, too, went to Columbia; by then, the college took women. Every summer, I lived with my grandmother. People said: “It’s nice you’re taking care of your grandma.” In fact, she took care of me, buying me boxes of strawberries and rotisserie chickens. She was always offering to take me and my boyfriend out for sushi.

“You met Grandpa at Columbia, right?”

He was a Japanese student getting his masters in international affairs. They met across a library desk and it turned out they took classes in common. “International law and international relations.”

I say, “That seems appropriate”, and she chuckles at my childish humour.

On their first date, he took her to a Chinese restaurant, but it wasn’t “the good one”. She laughs. “There are all kinds of misunderstandings other than cultural.” She saw a movie with a tandem in it and wanted to ride one. So he rented one. But she couldn’t ride: “Not a one-person bike or a two-person bike. I often have ideas that are… not reality.”

“That’s why Mommy says I take after you.”

“Well, I wish I write books, then I’d be truly, truly your grandmother.”

Despite the “not reality”, their courtship continued. “I was living on campus in a graduate women’s hall. We had a suite facing the street. In those days, the hall would close at midnight – no visitors, so everybody had to stay put. He used to buy hamburgers and throw them up to us.”

By my age, you were married and had a baby, right?

They went out for pizza. “We had never seen a pizza before, and then one pizza place came and everybody was so excited. It had pepperoni on it and, of course, cheese. In those days, there’s no choice of topping. Just one topping for all.”

After graduation, she worked for Scandinavian Airlines, preparing route maps. “They decided the different areas they are going into – it’s just like connecting dots. You draw a line.” She married and started her American family.

“Did you miss China?” I ask. No matter where I live, I always manage to be homesick.

“No. The Cultural Revolution came up. They drove my parents out of their place. My parents had no place to go. My mother had a stroke. I couldn’t contact them for at least three years, because I don’t know where they are. I probably would have lain down on the ground and given up, but then I had to take care of your mommy. If I don’t take care of your mommy, where would you be? Right?”

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s grandmother, Jean. Photograph: Courtesy of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

She raised my mother, and got a job at American Airlines using Sabre, the first industry-wide computer reservations system. At 50, she earned her MBA from Columbia and returned as a manager in the marketing department. Management or not, she was hands-on. When a programmer quit, she learned the programming language, Cobol, herself. “When the computer malfunctioned, all the cards were just flying out.”

Feeling nervous, I ask what she thinks of my life. She says, “The world travels too fast. Any advice from anybody so old to anybody young is futile. By the time the advice spits out, it’s from the past.”

“That’s scary,” I say.

“For me,” she says.

“For me, too.”

She pauses, then adds gently, “Do what you want – write. The only thing is, other than writing, what else would you like to do?” I tell her I don’t know, but that I would like to find a way to stop moving back and forth between places – to find somewhere permanent. “Well, as I said to you one time, in China, as long as you are not married, the family is always there. I mean, you can stay as long as you want and you can leave any time you want.”

She pauses, and when she begins again, it is in an even softer voice, as if worried she’ll upset me. “But, sooner or later, you have to have a more permanent thing. I mean, your own family, no?”

There is a person I love in London, but he and I are a long way from being a family. We are just two people who try to be kind to each other. My grandmother has not met him. I hope she will some day. I do not say this. Instead, I think of how young she married and ask how she was so certain: how did she know?

“I never know. The worst yet, I know what I want when it’s too late. I did not appreciate your grandfather as much as I should until he passed away. But I’m very happy he left me your mother.”

What strikes me is not how times or technology have changed, but how strong this woman is. If someone asks me about my life at 87, I hope I have so much to say.

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s novel Harmless Like You is published by Sceptre at £14.99

‘My grandmother walked to school barefoot in Fiji’

George Shankar with his grandparents Ram and Sarla. Photograph: Freya Najade for the Guardian

George Shankar, 23, was born in the UK. His grandparents, Sarla, 75, and Ram, 92, moved to England from their birthplace, Fiji, with his infant father and uncle in 1961.

Sitting forward in his grey leather recliner, my aaja (grandfather) looks at me with almost boyish excitement. At 92, he has seen and done a lot and now he carefully chooses the moments when he wants to speak. Talking about life in Fiji, though, his exuberance returns. A smile plays on his lips as he tells me about my oldest uncle’s birth.

“I used to go fishing every weekend. Your aaji [grandmother] was expecting Joey in 10 days’ time and she kept telling me, ‘Don’t go this weekend, don’t go. I think he will come when you’re away.’”

Aaji frowns, as if the story still annoys her 57 years on. He continues: “I was fishing when he was born, would you believe it? “He turns his face to his shoes in mock penitence and laughs. “I will never live that down.”

After a pause, Aaja lifts himself out of his chair and makes to leave the room. My grandma notices his high-waisted chinos are getting loose.

“You have to put a belt on and wear your trousers a little farther down.”

“Why?”

“Because you hike them up too much!”

My grandparents were both born under British colonial rule in Fiji. (Aaji and Aaja are Fiji Hindi for your father’s parents.) They grew up on sugarcane farms, the children of indentured labourers from India. Their childhood couldn’t have been more different from mine. I grew up in suburban Kent and went to grammar school, then straight to university; the only farming I’ve ever done was during my gap year in Costa Rica, and I chose to do it.

Aaji and I go to the kitchen to start preparing dinner. She moves around the kitchen with the grace of an experienced chef. She puts cloves and cinnamon in a pot with oil, adds onion, turmeric, paprika and her own blend of garam masala. Nothing is measured. I stir the spices in the pot.

“At the age of 11, I was cooking for a lot of people,” she says. “I was watching like a hawk – just like you are doing now.”

She tells me that she used to wake up at 5am and cook breakfast for her whole family under a paraffin lamp. When I was small, my cousins and I would stand on a chair to help her make roti flatbreads. But when our grandparents bought a computer, we started playing Age Of Empires and stopped cooking roti.

“Your generation is spoilt with material things,” Aaji says. “We used to make our own toys out of sticks and cloth. The first time we saw a gramophone or a radio, it was as though a miracle had happened.”

After preparing the chicken, I ask my grandparents to tell me about their school years. Aaji still bears a grudge against the teacher who prevented her from studying beyond middle school. Meanwhile, Aaja, studying to be a dentist, was moved around from Fiji to New Zealand, India and finally to Edinburgh on a Commonwealth scheme, before returning to Fiji. That’s when he met Aaji. They settled on the north coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island. They were poor: Aaja worked with pedal-powered instruments and people paid him with chickens and vegetables.

We used to make our own toys out of sticks and cloth

“When we had the two boys, Atul and Joey, we had to decide,” says Aaja. “We thought, ‘We’re never going to bring them up here, because they’ll never get a good education.’ There and then we decided to leave and came straight to the UK.”

Was it hard being immigrants in the 1960s? “We weren’t immigrants,” Aaji says. “We were British citizens. We were always British by birth, so although we were taught a lot of things about India, we never looked at it that way.”

They moved to London, made friends and set up a dental practice. Aaji adds: “My life began here, and we assimilated very well. Nobody called us names.”

I remember some of my dad’s stories from his schooldays, and think perhaps Aaji is holding something back. While I don’t remember any specific incidents of racism growing up, I was always distinctly aware that I was one of the only brown kids in school.”

Perhaps that’s why my parents took me and my sister to Fiji just after I finished my GCSEs. We met up with Aaji, who took us all to the school she went to when she was a girl; she used to walk there barefoot from the bus stop.

Talking now, Aaji and I realise we are more alike than we knew. She was a second-generation immigrant in Fiji, just as I am in the UK. We’re sensitive, opinionated; neither of us likes to admit when we’re wrong. Above all, though, we’re protective of our family; we both know how much they have shaped us. As Aaji looks at the photos that crowd the living room – her brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren and great-grandchild – she says: “That is the most important thing. Family.”

‘On the buses, they would chant, “Enoch, Enoch, Enoch.” It was terrible’

Tenata Cuff and granddaughter Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff. Photograph: Freya Najade for the Guardian

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, 23, was born in London and grew up in Edinburgh with her mother, father and her mother’s twin sister. Teneta Cuff, 75, is her maternal grandmother, born in the parish of Saint Ann, Jamaica.

“When I first got off the plane I thought the country was filled with factories,” my nanny laughs, “The smoke was high, high. But it was just chimneys.”

We’re sitting in her house in St Albans, getting to know each other after many years of estrangement. “You’re a grown woman,” she scolds. “You should come visit your nanny. It doesn’t take much to pick up the phone.”

Perched on a gold bed cover, she takes out a pink velveteen sack from her dresser and pours its contents on to the bed. Among pamphlets from relatives’ funerals and old pictures, she finds it: the British-Jamaican passport she used when she moved to the UK. In the photo she looks happy and pretty: afro pinned back, small nose and wide mouth, wearing a spotty blouse and a coin necklace.

I had always known my nanny, now 75, had left for England as part of the Windrush generation, the influx of immigrants who came to the UK from Caribbean Commonwealth countries in the mid-20th century. But, despite pressing my own mother for stories, I hadn’t heard Nanny’s memories of the move.

She arrived at Birmingham airport on 5 October 1960. “I left my parents behind, because they were too old,” she says, “but I had four uncles here, and Uncle Appy said he was going to pick me up and I would stay with him. But when I came, he wasn’t there.”

“Were you scared?” I ask.

“I wasn’t, because I was with a group of girls,” Nanny says. “My friend’s brother-in-law had to go up and tell my relatives where I was after we were dropped off in Wolverhampton. I’ll never forget his kindness in letting me stay the night. It turned out my uncle had been in hospital.”

A thread runs through our conversation: the importance of community and family, and how easily it’s lost. Perhaps it’s because, since my family moved up to Scotland when I was eight, I have only seen Nanny twice: once, aged 13, after the death of my paternal grandfather, and a second time last month, aged 22.

Or perhaps it’s that she has seen a lot of death (her husband, George Cuff, died before I was born), along with the steady decline of the Jamaican community in the UK. In 2001, the Caribbean population outnumbered Africans, but there has been a significant reversal due to mixed-race relationships (43% of British black Caribbean people were in a mixed-race relationship, compared with 22% of British black Africans in 2011) and lower rates of migration.

Tenata and her husband George on their wedding day in Wolverhampton. Photograph: Freya Najade for the Guardian

“He was a nice, kind man,” Nanny says of George. “He always made sure he had sweets in his pockets for the children. When he came to the house, he would check them, and if the sweets weren’t there, he would go straight back out again to buy some.”

Nanny and George, who met soon after she arrived, had four children in quick succession: the twins (my mother Jacqui and Auntie Pauline) in 1962, when Nanny was 21, after which they married; Sonja in January 1964; and George in December of the same year. “He always treated me right. When I was in hospital with the twins, he came and gave me Christmas money,” she says. “They were a surprise, even though I was huge. They were tiny – 2lb 10oz and 2lb 13oz, and in an incubator for months.”

Charlie’s mother Jacqui and her twin sister, Pauline. Photograph: Freya Najade for the Guardian

George had two other children back at home in the parish of Saint Elizabeth. He came over to the UK for work and found a job on the buses. When the children were still young, Nanny decided to join him, getting a job as a conductor in 1965. “I dashed out to sit the test while he was at work, and when he came back, I said to him, ‘I’ve got a job, you know’, and he asked me, ‘What are you going to do with the children?’ I told him, ‘They’re not mine, they’re yours,’” she laughs.

It was while working on the buses that she experienced racism. She tells me she was sometimes afraid of big, burly white men who didn’t pay for their tickets and sat on the top deck. In 1968, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech inflamed national prejudices. “On the buses, they would chant, ‘Enoch, Enoch, Enoch.’ It was terrible,” Nanny says. “I didn’t get myself involved – I would just do my job.” I’ve brought her a copy of gal-dem, the magazine by women of colour that I work on; we often write about our experiences of racism. She flicks through it, and tells me she thinks things are much better now.

I leave her house with promises to visit and call more often. She’s my only living grandparent, so the obligation is there, but now that I’ve learned more about her life, I feel more comfortable about going to see her again. Getting to know your family can be like an ointment, I know now, soothing wounds and identity crises. I’m glad to have her back.

‘At an age when I was celebrating my barmitzvah, he was enduring a succession of concentration camps’

Darren Richman with his grandfather, Zigi Shipper. Photograph: Freya Najade for the Guardian

Darren Richman, 32, was born in the UK. His maternal grandfather, Zigi Shipper, 86, was born in Lodz, Poland.

When my grandfather was 51, he suffered a massive coronary. My grandmother was told to prepare for the worst. She told the doctor, “The Nazis tried to kill my husband for five years and he survived that; I’m not too worried about this.” On his next birthday, he’ll turn 87.

Grandpa Zigi, as he’s affectionately referred to by just about everyone, was born to Jewish parents in 1930 in Lodz, Poland. Between 1940 and 1945, at an age when I was playing with friends and celebrating my barmitzvah, he was enduring hell on earth at a succession of concentration camps. Auschwitz never felt like textbook history at school, because this genial, optimistic man, a huge part of my life, had survived it.

When I pop in to see him at his bungalow, undoubtedly the last home I’ll visit without Wi-Fi, Zigi starts chatting away immediately: “Do you know how long making a cup of tea used to take? How can people complain about things changing?”

I ask whether he ever feels envious of my generation: “Not at all. It makes me feel so great to see my children, my grandchildren, the education they had. To see the third generation doing so well makes me happier than anything. You are my revenge.”

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with the description of myself as “third generation”. I’m sometimes called not just a third-generation immigrant but a third-generation survivor. But it feels insulting to consider myself a survivor of anything. When, as a child, I was first informed that Zigi had been to a camp for Jews when he was my age, I genuinely assumed it was similar to the ones I went to with youth groups. I couldn’t compute the reality of what I was being told and, to a large degree, I still can’t.

I had enough to eat and room where to sleep – why should I complain?

Yet the man before me, who witnessed first-hand some of the most horrific events of the last century, feels he has had a great life: “I had enough to eat and room where to sleep – why should I complain?” Seventy years in the country and his English might not be perfect, but the sentiment is.

I ask what he makes of my decisions, such as the peripatetic nature of my work (writing about films and football), compared with his own half-century spent running a stationery shop. He’s sanguine: “Do whatever makes you happy. Life is too short.”

One surprising difference between us is our attitude towards Jewish dietary laws. Zigi was brought up in an extremely religious household, yet his experiences changed his attitude towards food. He loathes anyone in the family using the word “starving” to denote hunger, and will eat just about anything. Despite being agnostic at best, I avoid pig and seafood – a superstitious hangover from my younger days, and one I seem unwilling or unable to shake.

When I ask about God, he’s diplomatic: “I don’t know one way or another. But at my age, it’s probably best to keep Him on side, just in case.”

I share little of Zigi’s optimism. Discovering an absence of milk in the fridge is enough to convince me the world is about to end. In July this year, my first child was born eight weeks early and spent the first few weeks of his life in intensive care. Fortunately, our son showed some of his great-grandfather’s survival instinct and he’s home now. The Nazis tried to reduce my grandfather to no more than a number: 84303. They didn’t quite manage that, nor could they rob him of a family. Our child, his great-grandson, is named Isaac Zigi.