Jigsaw E-Book

Sybille Bedford

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 670

Beschreibung

This intensely remembered, partly autobiographical novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989, describes the childhood of Billi, a girl growing up in Europe between the wars. When her father dies, she swaps life in a run-down German château for an exhilarating existence with her beautiful, talented and unreliable mother on the French Riviera. Sent away to England for schooling, the gypsy-like Billi ricochets between short-lived tutors and a life of reading, friends and public lectures. Returning to the Mediterranean, her unorthodox education - intellectual, emotional and sexual - continues among the vibrant community of artists, exiles and intellectuals who have colonised the coast, coaxing her towards a life of literature.

Leseprobe

JIGSAW

An Unsentimental Education

A BIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL BY SYBILLE BEDFORD

TO ALLANAH HARPER for half a century

The way things looked before

later events made them look different.

And this is as much a part of history

as the way things actually were.

Robert Kee

In the end most things in life

– perhaps all things – turn out

to be appropriate

Anthony Powell

Author’s Note

The Kislings and the Aldous Huxleys are the Kislings and the Aldous Huxleys and themselves …

The Falkenheims, the Nairns, the Desmirails are not Falkenheims, Nairns or Desmirails, and to a large extent themselves …

My mother and I are a percentage of ourselves …

These, and everyone and everything else, are what they seemed – at various times – to me.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

PART ONE Antecedent: Germanypage

PART TWO Fugitives: Italypage

PART THREEIn Transit: England–Italypage

PART FOURAnchorage: Francepage

PART FIVELandslides: Sanary–London–Sanarypage

Afterwordpage

About the Authorpage

Copyright

PART ONE

Antecedent: Germany

A FIRST coherent memory is being wheeled through leafy streets in a pram that felt too small for me (I was well able to walk). I knew it was Copenhagen. I must have been over two years old. Presently I was in some kind of a narrow space and my mother wearing an enormous hat and veil was bending over me for it was she who, quite exceptionally, had wheeled the pram. She spoke to me in the tone of voice in which vows are made. Please be good, please keep quiet, he hates to have a baby in the hall. Please just go to sleep. I did. For the whole blessed afternoon. Elucidation came later, years later, but the actual sequence – the streets, the pram, the narrow space, the urgency in my mother’s voice: an appeal to reason and accompliceship, my instant fall into oblivion – is a first-hand memory. The narrow space was the hall of a man’s flat. He was a Danish novelist, a bachelor nearer fifty than forty, fastidious, fêted. We – my mother, nanny, I – were staying at an hotel. It was nanny’s afternoon off. My mother did not know what to do with me. ‘You couldn’t be left alone, you were very active. I couldn’t trust the chambermaid, she might have told nanny. Nanny wasn’t supposed to know. Nobody was to know. So I popped you into that pram and took you to Peter’s. Yes, I took a chance. But you were angelic.’

The next flash (days later? a week?) is sand, broad white sand. A beach – it has remained the archetype – we were at Skaagen. Where I wanted to get to was into the water. But between the sand and the water there lay a thick band of small fish, dead wet glistening fish. The whole of me shrivelled with disgust. Nanny, who wore boots and stockings, picked me up and lifted me over the fish. I was in the water – coolness, lightness, dissolving, bliss: this is the sea, I am the sea, here is where I belong. For ever. And then the not-I state fades as dread comes stabbing back: the dead fish, there’s the dead fish to cross again, sometime … soon … almost now.

A third flash. Still Denmark. I am sitting on a high chair at a large table, children around me. The infants’ table d’hôte at the hotel. There is a lot of window and it is very light. In front of each plate, in front of my plate, there stands a small china bowl. In it there is cream and in the cream – delight – there floats a whole round yolk of egg, uncooked egg. This egg in cream is to be put into our food. Nannies sit behind us in a circle ready to interfere. I am entirely determined to handle my own egg, to choose whether to stir it into my soup, my spinach or my mashed potatoes and I win.

This is the total of my recollection of Scandinavia, yet what memory selected to retain is indicative perhaps of three future trends: a passion for swimming in the sea (and a controlled aversion to touch live fish), great love of cookery and a tendency to side with lovers.

* * *

My father is straining at his watch-chain. He is walking up and down beside the waiting carriage. I am in the back seat with two of the dogs, ready and kicking. (I want to sit on the box with the coachman but he won’t let me. He is my father. He says it isn’t safe.) We are to drive to Freiburg – or Basle – for the day. My mother has not appeared yet. She is late. This is supposed to be terribly bad for the horses. People are being sent in and out of the house. My father is not angry, he is anxious; we are all anxious. This goes on. One dog jumps down, the other follows; they are lifted back. I pray for it to be over. My mother. My father pulls his watch again; she doesn’t answer him. She is not anxious. This makes it worse. My father now notices that she doesn’t carry an umbrella. She looks at the sky. He says, One always needs an umbrella. Someone goes into the house for one. He says we won’t be able to do what we planned to do – the journey is ruined, the day is ruined. His voice is very unhappy. But convinced. I pray again. Then it is discovered that I have no gloves (I left them behind on purpose). That child … they say. More minutes. My father acts out despair. When we are off, the relief is great. Of the ensuing journey: the day at Freiburg, or Basle, I have no recollection.

The locality of that scene was a southern corner of Germany, what was then, in 1914, the Grand-Duchy of Baden. The house was walking minutes from the French border, a longish carriage ride from the Swiss. When the war began that summer (I was three) my father, who was too old for war and against it, said that we must all take refuge with his parents-in-law in Berlin. My mother poohpoohed his fears and we stayed put till next spring. She, too, was against war, and talked about it. My father did not. They were matter-of-course internationalists, both of them – they had that much in common. He had been brought up to regard Prussia as a barbarous menace and united Germany a new nonsense. He never changed his ideas. Besides he loved France, where he had spent a large part of his life, and whenever he had the faintest chance of being understood, he spoke French. His was the catastrophic view of events – the war was a dangerous folly bringing ruin to all concerned and best not to be thought about. To my mother it was a matter of people – men and women, she said – what they were capable of doing, doing to one another. She used words like maiming and killing. Most of our servants came from the village and talk about our attitudes seeped out. We went on speaking French and English. One day a stone was flung over the park wall when nanny and my half-sister and I were playing. It hit me on the forehead, just a gash but there was a lot of blood and I howled. I still have the scar, a small one, under an eyebrow. It was nothing, yet the memory worked on. In a novel I wrote decades later, there is a German episode which I called the Felden scandal where a stone is thrown at the child narrator by the mob.

In 1915 our house was shut for the duration and we travelled across the length of Germany to Berlin. It is my first memory of a train journey. I had been told that I might see ‘the wounded’. Long grey iron trains, the compartments jammed with people all the way, long long waits in grey steel-vaulted stations, soldiers on the platforms, in the corridors, looking in through windows, soldiers being helped into the compartment – soldiers on crutches, soldiers with head bandages, soldiers with great casts about their chests – it was impossible not to see them; that memory too has not ceased working on.

My father’s parents-in-law who took us in were not my mother’s parents but those of his first wife who had died young. It had not occurred to them not to go on treating him as their son-in-law. They were rich, capable of affection, and preposterously limited in their outlook. My father, who was rather nearer to them in age than he was to his second wife, my mother, had been and still was extremely good-looking, le beau Max they had called him in his day in the Parisian half-world, and one of his laments was the loss of youth. He could not stand clever women. (My mother had been too beautiful for him to notice that she was one and when he did notice it was too late.) The Berlin in-laws were the heads of a Jewish family, Edwardian Jewish, called Merz in that novel. There I described their characters and customs and those of their relatives and hangers-on. (True to life? I think so, give and take a novelist’s margins.) I described their house in Voss Strasse, its back gave on to the Imperial Chancellery in Wilhelm-strasse and the whole block was destroyed in the Second World War. It was a large, dark house, over-upholstered and over-heated; the inhabitants never stopped eating. Some were exceedingly kind, some were critical of our presence. I was a guest on an upper floor leading my own life: I could read by then. I was the only child in the house (my half-sister, their real grandchild, was halfway grown-up). Dinners were family dinners and their number happened to be fourteen: whenever someone fell out I was summoned to eat downstairs to prevent their being thirteen at table. I was caressed, made the target of sarcastic remarks by uncles and cousins; for the rest they saw to my plate and forgot that I might be alive. I was put either next to Grandmama Merz or at the end of the table; everyone spoke freely in his or her own way and so I imbibed quite a deal of German-Jewish family life, if of a particular kind. (Rather like a child in an I. Compton-Burnett novel, a well-treated child though, and goodness the milieu was different! Ivy herself once said to me when I had asked for a ginger nut instead of a ginger biscuit, ‘I take it that you were not entirely brought up in England?’ She said it in her astringent tone, she often made me feel my outlandish place, she had no use for ‘abroad’, indeed it is a thought that in this respect she was quite as insular as Grandmama Merz.)

Christmas. Celebrated on the 24th, on Christmas Eve, at night. In the white and gold ballroom, the one room in Voss Strasse that was not darkest mahogany. For the rest of the year it was shut up, had been so since the two daughters died, decades ago of TB, my father’s first wife and her sister, young women in their twenties, one following the other. Now the chandelier is unshrouded, there is a tree, up to the ceiling, ablaze with electric candles. (This, both my father and mother said, was vulgar.) Along the walls are long trestle tables with damask cloths to the floor, and on table after table there are presents, not wrapped but displayed like things in shop-windows. Every member of the household has his own length of table and in the middle of each place there is a plate heaped with home-made cakes, marzipan animals, bright apples, gilt nuts. The servants – the butler who rules us all, cook, the maids, Marie and Ida, who have grown old in the house – and some of the cousins also receive money; and the money too is not wrapped, but stands among the stockings and the cigars in small stacks of gold that outshine the walnuts. When I see Christmas Eve, it is always that first minute when we stand and admire in silence. (I don’t remember any singing, no one in Voss Strasse was able to carry a tune.) Only my father was not given the plate of sweetmeats, he had a small basket in which nested some coal, only the coal was truffles. I still have their scent in my nostrils.

I met no children, except for one thin, stiff boy who was already a cadet, the son of an army widow who came to read the newspaper to Grandpapa Merz after his nap. This boy – I only remember his surname, von Moser – was brought to tea during his holidays; how he endured these visits, to a girl, at least five years his junior, I do not know. I had a rocking-horse and a toy railway and a toy stable (Merz presents) and we played politely enough. He died in 1918, we heard, of under-nourishment and the Spanish flu. 

There was also a charming young man – not in uniform – who used to come to see me upstairs. For a time he was my half-sister’s fiancé, the one my mother approved of. (He vanished.) To me he talked. One day his eye fell on a piece of gruyère cheese I had saved from my tray and which was melting in a little pan over the radiator. What’s that revolting mess, he said or words to that effect. It’s an experiment, I say. ‘What for?’ ‘Eat it.’ ‘You are a pig.’ ‘Don’t care.’ ‘If you grow up like this nobody will want to marry you.’ ‘In that case,’ I say, ‘I shall marry a pig.’

Of what went on outside our hothouse, I had no idea; of Berlin I knew and saw little. Except for one treat I cherished. Sightseeing I called it. It was not being taken for walks in the Tiergarten, the rather dismal public park, or so it seemed to me, remembered only as being cold and dank. The paths were straight with rails round the grass; there was no question of my picking up someone to play with. I think that was a Merz veto upheld by my father – since their daughters’ death they were afraid of infection (when they travelled, which was rare, they took their own bed-linen into the wagons-lits).

Occasionally however I managed to get myself taken to that great avenue nearby, the Sieges Allee, built by Kaiser Bill, with its giant marble-works of Prussian history like an over life-size Madame Tussaud’s. I’ve been told since that the sculptures of Victory Avenue, Dolls’ Avenue, the Berliners dubbed it, were a pile of monstrous pomposities, the apex of the Wilhelminian era’s taste. (It too was destroyed in the Second World War.) I loved it. I would stand before each Margrave of Brandenburg or King of Prussia upon his pedestal and study his countenance and dates and that of his spouse and counsellors – the monarchs were modelled, in white marble, from toe to crest; the courtiers were mere busts. Here then was history in the round, history visible, as well as in nice order, for the statues began at one end of the avenue with remotest Brandenburg and culminated with Kaiser Wilhelm I. Sometimes I was intrigued by an appearance, sometimes by a name; my favourites were an epicene youth leaning upon his shield, Heinrich the Child, and a mysterious personage covered in chain-mail, Waldemar the Bear.

*

Autumn 1918. The war is as good as over. My mother is taking us back to Baden. My father says it is no time to travel. Another train journey. After a time the train goes no further. ‘They’ve taken off the locomotive.’ We are at an hotel, it is evening, there are no rooms to be had, we are in a lounge full of people on an upper floor looking over the square where shouting sailors and soldiers are marching with banners. The shutters are pulled down, we are moved away from windows, some of us crouch on the floor. There is a great noise below and some shooting. Some say it’s machine guns, I hear words like Mutiny, Revolution. My mother says it was inevitable and probably deserved, and as for ourselves one ought to be fatalistic. After that nothing more: I may have fallen asleep. An hotel lounge overlooking a square, gun fire and the sound of crowds – later I was told that I had seen the beginning of the German November Revolution.

* * *

My father is straining at his watch-chain. It isn’t because it is bad for the horses, we have no horses any more, we are poor now. It is still a full-sized carriage, high but light, the shafts have been altered and it is pulled now by two donkeys, one grey, one black, Fanny and Flora. They look small; my father, like the carriage, is too tall for them, still beautifully dressed in his greatcoat, gloved and hatted, long whip in hand. Flora had belonged to a market gardener but Fanny, who had come from a circus and been with us for years, does not take to the new demands; all in all they’d both as soon wait as work. Nor is it my mother who makes us late, she has left us some time ago. So has nanny. It must be 1919. We are back in Baden, at our place, in the village of Feldkirch. An old name – meaning a church in a field. The church, rustic Romanesque, is still there, our house is a Schloss, a small château, inside there are flights of rooms filled with my father’s collection of furniture and objets d’art, the ceilings are high and to me all seems vast. Before the war, in my mother’s time, there was a good deal of life: my sister was with us, and her French governess and there was my mother’s maid and a cook and the maids from the village, the butler, also French, the coachman and the stable boy, the gardener and a raffish Italian who ran the electric plant. Now we are only three. My father, Lina, a slight, sinewy elderly woman from the village, and myself. Lina is kind and patient and she does everything. She loves my father, strange as this seems to me; I don’t mean in love, I mean sheer, good-hearted devotion. She cleans, she cooks, she airs (we do a lot of airing because of the collection), she does the washing, chops the firewood and carries it upstairs, lights the stoves and the range, looks after the fowls and what is left of our kitchen-garden (the nettles have got the rest) and, helped by me, mucks out the donkeys’ stable. We are only three humans but we still have animals: two dogs, a cat, some sheep, always a pig, chickens and geese and a vile-tempered turkey-cock. Only the pre-war cow, the ornamental ducks and the peacock have gone the way of the horses. With the animals my father, who has ceased to ask man or woman into the house, is on trusting terms. The sheep come when he calls them – wild birds come too – the pig rubs his snout against his immaculate trousers, the geese do not hiss and the turkey-cock does not attack him. As for the donkeys, only he could have turned Fanny and Flora into a carriage pair. He loves them, they love him. He also loved me, I know now, but – this is the unhappy part – he could not show his affection, only his anxieties, his fretting, his prohibitions – Don’t ride, don’t climb, don’t run fast: You will fall. And I with some curious callousness, with the arrogance of a lively, ignorant, if intelligent child, felt impatience with him and contempt. He also created fear; perhaps because he was not reachable by any give and take of talk, perhaps because of the aura of solitariness about him. Today we might call it alienation. My father in those last years of his life must have been a deeply unhappy man.

When I wrote that novel – A Legacy – some thirty years after, I tried to unravel something about his character and his story. To say that Jules, the Julius von Felden of the novel, was my father would be as misleading as to say that he was not. Jules is like my father and unlike; to what degree of either I do not know. My intention was to draw a character in fiction; I used facts and memories when they served and discarded them when they did not. For instance, I never actually knew my father’s own father and mother – my grandparents – they having died a long way back in time, and I knew nothing interpretable about them as my father’s talk was about events and objects seen from outside, not about people, not about what made them tick. So I invented Jules’ father in the novel, the old Baron, out of whole cloth (he who got stuck in the eighteenth century as his son did in the nineteenth); the only fact I know about the actual old Baron, my grandfather, is that he was a High Court judge, which makes me inclined to think that he at least could tell a hawk from a handsaw.

Jules in the novel is a man by no means originally devoid of feeling, whose contact with reality is snapped by events at one or two points in his life. He protects himself by limiting his grasp. A man who has lost his nerve. A man also seen in the context of a particular time and the changes in that time. Now my father, too, was a man who had lost his nerve; I can only guess as to when or how. (He used to harp on his three concussions – as a young man he used to ride in steeplechases.) Like Jules he was born in the eighteen-fifties; for the purposes of the novel, which I wanted to bring to an end at the verge of the 1914 War, I had to make chronological changes – both Jules and Grandpapa Merz die some five years before they actually died and therefore Francesca, the narrator, had to be born five or six years earlier than I. In the novel Jules’ first turning point comes when at the age of twenty he fails to prevent his younger brother’s being sent back to one of the notorious cadet schools. The brother is sent back and consequently becomes insane. Half a century later he is accidentally shot by an army officer, a public scandal ensues which among other things destroys Jules’ self-built world. Was there a victim brother? Was there a Felden scandal? No, and yes. When I wrote that story I thought that I had done with it for ever. Are the facts I am now trying to recall much more reliable than the fiction? My sources are the same – hearsay: elders overheard, Voss Strasse gossip, stories my father told me when we were living alone together after the war at Feldkirch, he in his sixties, I a child of eight … of nine …

He had been brought up in a house like Feldkirch, like Feldkirch before we were alone. There had been brothers, country pursuits, they had been happy. One boy was sent to a cadet school, could not bear it and made a dramatic escape, walking by night, hiding by day, making immense detours to escape re-capture. He reached home half-starved, half-crazed. They fed him up, then sent him back. He tried to kill himself by swallowing a boxful of matches. They sent him back all the same. He did not go mad, he was not put away. In fact he became a cavalry officer, commander of his regiment and in due course he married. How far was he maimed? Too late to say. Eccentric he must have been. Animals were his interest and he had a great way with them. Wild animals. He kept wolves and used to give them jewelled collars for Christmas, or so my father told me without turning a hair. Sapphires (were they really?) for the wolves, not for the wife; my father’s tone indicated that this was a mistake. The wife was a beautiful young woman with a great appeal to men. My father’s brother was stationed in a small garrison town called Allenstein at the confines of East Prussia, and she is supposed to have slept with half the regiment, commissioned and non-commissioned. One Christmas night (1908 or ’09) a captain came to dinner; afterwards he pretended to leave and instead hid in the drive. When the house was in darkness he crept back. He had put thick socks over his shoes and he had a revolver in his pocket. My father’s brother called out, Who’s there? and turned on a light. He stood in that light and the captain shot at him and killed him. In prison he wrote a confession saying that he had been madly in love with the colonel’s wife, Antonia was her name, and that she had made him do it. She had given him the woollen socks, her husband’s socks, and a key. The captain hanged himself in his cell before the trial. Antonia was arrested and tried for murder; she was sentenced to death. A psychiatric expert managed to get her certified and she was not executed – which according to German law would have been by the axe – but confined instead in a mental institution. From that she was released, by the psychiatrist’s efforts, within weeks. They went to Italy and got married. The Allenstein murder was a national sensation – the goings-on in one of the Kaiser’s regiments, the murder of the colonel by a brother officer and his own wife, Christmas night, the socks, the wolves, the suicide in prison, the beauty of the woman and her getting off scot-free. Some people got extremely angry. Behind the audible  sabre-rattling there was a good deal of feeling against the top-heavy military establishment and what it cost; the Allenstein affair provided grist to many mills and was turned into a political scandal by factions of the press, the parliamentary opposition and the public. Maximilian Harden, a hard-hitting radical journalist of the day, wrote a searing leader under the heading of our family name; we – what we were supposed to be and stand for – became a target. (My father was just bewildered and appalled.) The scandal was remarkable for the variety of ill-natured emotions it aroused; it even excited more anti-semitism, my father’s first marriage to a deceased Jewish heiress was dragged in and the poor Merzes with it. At the time of the murder my mother was engaged to my father but beginning to have second thoughts. In outline their engagement came about much like that of Jules and Caroline Trafford – he, being susceptible to beauty and vitality, fell in love with her and was single-minded in pursuit; she, caught up in this pursuit, became affectionately amused by him and his archaisms, was tempted by the offered leap into entire change; through this, she believed, she might survive the heartbreak and stalemate of a previous attachment that had come to an end. (The man was long married and too honourable to abandon a wife older than himself, my mother concurring in that decision.) She was about to doubt the wisdom of her engagement when my father’s brother was shot and she found it no longer permissible to back out. They were married in 1910. Some people found it amusing to ask when being introduced to her, ‘The murderess?’ whose name of course she bore now. Eventually she took my father away and they lived in Spain for a time. My impending birth put an end to that. They went back and bought Feldkirch. I owe my existence to the Allenstein affair.

* * *

I am trying to climb over a wall. It is the wall that encloses the garden and park land. It is high but there are a few footholds. I fail the first time, the second. I am seen, it’s the village postman. What am I up to? Oh exercising, training my muscles … Glib lies: it was training all right, training to get over that wall, over that wall and out.

In the long run, the not so long run, my mother had been right – it could not last, it did not last; so now my father and I were living alone at Feldkirch, he was divorcing her. This I was not supposed to know. We did not speak of her. During the early weeks of the new life I was beset by a heavy feeling that seemed to come from inside myself and I could do nothing about. It was there every morning. If a small child can suffer depression, it may well have been this. I could not eat much at table and as this upset my father it did not help the unease between us. I would run round the park three times before meals but found that it made no difference. Now let no one think that I was missing my mother. I was interested – and influenced – by my mother’s general opinions, but dreaded being alone with her. She could be ironical and often impatient; she did not suffer little fools gladly. That I was her own made not a scrap of difference. When I was slow she called me slow, when I was quick she called me a parrot. Compassionate in her principles, she was high-handed even harsh in her daily dealings. Between her and my father there had come much open ill feeling – scenes, verbally violent, and these had shaken me. So in my early years (our rapport came later) I was afraid of my mother, more afraid of her, and in a different way, than I was of my father. He too had taken against her, now that she was gone; it came out not in what he said – he said little – but in what he did not say. He, who had once done everything to get her for himself: this puzzled me, how could people change so? Feelings I thought were for ever.

The one person I loved outright then was my half-sister, my sister. They shook their heads over her because she was fond of dancing and flirting and clothes, and got into debt as a girl (in spite of a large Merz allowance); suddenly she had dropped all her young men and insisted, still under age and all, on marrying a man in his late forties. She was warm, generous, pleasure-loving; oddly enough she had taken to me like a mother when I was born (she must have been all of twelve); she made no scenes, though she would see that I behaved – with her I felt no constraint.

When the sadness had gone on for some time, a plan came and I felt the better for it at once. I would escape. (Like my father’s poor brother.) I would run away to my sister. She was living in Wiesbaden then, a spa where her new husband was deputy mayor. Money I had, having hung on to a large tip one of my mother’s admirers had given me in Voss Strasse days; I did not know how far it would go, I had been told that it might stretch to a bicycle. The main problem (I foresaw) was to get out of our place. The gates were locked, the downstairs windows were barred, all was heavily locked up at night, front door and side doors and windows and back door, no Yales or Chubbs, great grinding Gothic keys and heavy bars and bolts. The kitchen door had the most modern lock and it was oiled: some secret daytime practice and I learnt to turn it noiselessly. The right time to escape would be just before first light. It was spring and first light very early and this proved a new difficulty: I did not wake up in time. I tried not to go to sleep at all, but when I remained sitting up I expected icy hands to touch me through the bars of the brass bedstead (the house, we all believed, was haunted), and when I lay down I dropped off. Dawn after dawn was wasted. Then one morning I did wake up. I put on a cotton frock and, shoes in hand, crept downstairs. The stairs were stone and did not creak. The dogs did not stir, the kitchen lock turned smoothly (I left it unlocked behind me, one of the things that appalled my father), I climbed over the wall. I then proceeded to walk, not run, at a good pace. I passed a man who knew us on his way to the fields and called out, Off for an early stroll (that too was held against me). I carried a purse and a book, a book about Red Indians, and nothing else. I’d taken no food, not even a crust (something seldom repeated in subsequent journeys). When after an hour or so I got to the railway station I went straight in and asked for a single ticket, half-fare, fourth class to Frankfurt. There really was a fourth class in those days. The half-fare, drawing attention to my age, was not the best of moves. I said Frankfurt instead of Wiesbaden partly because I did not know how my money would hold out, partly to cover my tracks. I was given the ticket and some change and no questions asked. I went out on the platform to wait for a train in the right direction. I first took a local to Freiburg then changed to another slow train to Karlsruhe. Only the slow ones had fourth class, and the German name for these trains which stopped everywhere was Bummelzug. At Karlsruhe I changed again. I don’t remember my route after that, only that there were more changes. I read my book; I felt no hunger, and I felt quite calm; this was probably my one and only journey without angst. I was resolved to get there – one step after another, and behaved and therefore probably looked as if travelling as an unaccompanied child were the most natural thing in the world. Of course fellow passengers and conductors were trying to ply me with questions and offers of sandwiches and sweets. I warded them off by saying that I was on my way to visit relatives (my luggage following) and plunging back into my book. The sandwiches I refused. To the pursuit that might be – that was – going on, I gave little intelligent thought.

My absence had in fact been noticed early and by mid-morning the police were after me. I had been reported by the man who had seen me on his way to work and by the ticket clerk at the first station. Why I was not caught I do not understand, perhaps it had something to do with my taking so many Bummelzugs and sometimes the wrong one (we later heard that I had avoided detection at Karlsruhe by minutes), in any case I must have been incredibly lucky. When I got to Frankfurt I took a big chance, I remained in the train instead of going out to get another ticket. I was afraid that I didn’t have enough money. Wiesbaden then was occupied by the French. This I had heard but not that to enter the French sector you had to have a pass and that there was a control of passengers’ papers on the trains. In fact no one came. We pulled into Wiesbaden; it was mid-afternoon; at the barrier I handed in my ticket face down. No hand was clapped on my shoulder. I asked my way through the town and after a longish walk rang the bell at my brother-in-law’s house. I had not met him before. In my plan I had never gone further than the point of arrival. I found my sister away from home and the house in uproar. There had been telegrams about me. My new brother-in-law, a middle-aged man with a bald head, was at a loss to account for my presence; nor did I, now that the moment had come, find anything to explain. He started to question me. I’d felt lonely, I said, I wanted to see my sister. To this I stuck. It seemed hours again before they got hold of her – she was playing in some tennis tournament – and brought her home and I was able to fling myself into her arms.

They were puzzled, they were kind, they did not try too hard to understand; I was not punished. My sister tried to bring some of the enormity of my conduct home to me – my poor father: the many forms of anguish I had caused him. I closed my mind. My future was not discussed, or so it seemed, perhaps I was closing my mind to that too. At any rate I was not shipped back at once, day after day slipped by and still there I was.

And where was I? Once more admitted willy-nilly into an adult world. Wiesbaden town and spa must have been pretty unique in the Germany of that post-war period: it was flourishing. There was work, there was food in the shops. Life and money was kept flowing by the occupying French and more fantastically by white Russian émigrés, grandee refugees at their first stage with jewels to sell still in their baggage before they turned to Paris and to driving taxis. My sister’s husband, whose mother had been English, was on excellent terms with the occupying forces and said to be discreetly plotting for a separation of the Rhineland. (For this he paid dearly twenty years on: the Nazis executed him.) He was a man with much musical knowledge and a flair for the theatre: les spectacles. As deputy mayor his functions included the administration of the state opera, the ballet and the fireworks. At home he kept open house to three categories of guests, and to these only, senior French officials, Russian émigrés, singers and musicians. Every evening they came. His hospitality and connoisseurship … my sister’s youth, vitality and chic … (That marriage did not last either.) Although a bedtime was supposed to exist for me, I saw a good deal of it all, and it seems to have been my lot to have known only the more uncharacteristic enclaves of German life. I was dazzled. The singers sang, the musicians played. For the first time I heard Brahms and Schubert and ‘Voi che sapete’; I also heard Stravinsky. (All Voss Strasse and my father had produced between them was Caruso on the gramophone.) A young Hungarian tried to give me piano lessons, a huge old gentleman, a cousin of the late Czarina, gave me ices at the pâtisserie. I was allowed to go to the opera, one night I saw the fireworks. I was taken to the races where someone kindly explained to me the workings of the tote, and let loose about the tennis club all morning. I managed to get work – ecstasy! – as ball girl on the courts.

Treats, long days of treats. Because, it became clear, I was to be sent back. I had only to stay resolute, I told myself (like the Red Indians), then it could not happen. They could not drag me back against my will. What was necessary was to tell my sister. If you don’t send me back, I was going to say, if you let me stay with you, I’ll give up all the rest, the opera, the social life, the tennis: you can send me to a strict day school. That part I had pat but I had no words for the rest – the Why not to send me back. My sister was hard to get hold of on her own, she slept late in the morning and after that everybody streamed into her room with the breakfast tray; every day I promised myself to talk to her on the next. When the bad morning came, it was still unsaid. All I could do was go limp and howl. They did drag me down the drive … they did take me back. That journey was accompanied.

* * *

We are at table at Feldkirch, we are having dinner upstairs in the room we now use in the winter, that used to be called the morning-room. My father sits at the head, he is carving, Lina sits on his right, the dogs are beside us, expectant. What he is carving is a smoked leg of mutton – thin curly slices like raw ham. It is his invention, made from our sheep, killed and cured at home (we don’t have money to buy ham at the grocer’s), in our way, in his way, we live off the land. My father serves Lina first, though a good deal is whisked to the dogs, I come next. The smoked gigot is very good, even Lina admits. (The rest of the village look askance. South German farmers raise sheep only for wool, they do not touch the flesh of mutton or lamb.) We also have a hot dish, some potato or flour mess of Lina’s making, Pflutten, Knöpfli, Spätzli – her cooking is atrocious though my father politely directs her. He is a perfect cook, of simple things too (he must have been well ahead of his time); he had taught himself in his youth, watched the French and Italian chefs of the Eighties and Nineties, sat in their scalding commodious kitchens, made friends, drank iced champagne with them, straight swigs from the bottle (imperial pints: easier on the wrist), later simplifying, refining the dishes he had watched. Now alas he can no longer grill or fry, or cook anything over a range at all, ours burns wood and the fumes bring on his asthma. So he cooks by remote control or over a spirit lamp in his dressing-room – exquisite egg dishes, goose liver in foaming butter … I, too, am coming on nicely, he has taught me not to overcook vegetables.

In front of each of us stands a large clear glass with a stem, my father lifts the decanter by his hand and pours precisely – each glass is one third full. Lina is about to add water to hers and mine, my father stops her, Water in Bordeaux, quelle horreur! I sniff mine, take a mouthful slowly, twirling the wine in the glass, as he has told me to do. He is serious about this as he is about anything involving ritual and skills, but he is not fussy or anxious. Enjoy your wine, he says, and I do. At midday we drink cider – cider made in an old wooden press from apples grown in the orchard; we drink claret at night. We don’t have to worry, he says, we have a decent amount left in the bins. He has taught me to pronounce the names on the labels and to look at the pictures of the châteaux, he has been to them, has met the owners. What shall we drink tomorrow? I am sent to fetch up the bottle. I am proud of the job, but when it’s late in the day it fills me with terror – two flights down from the morning-room, across the large dark hall filled with crucifixes and statues, down another flight into the cellar; in one hand I hold a candle, in the other I shall have a bottle (bring it up gently); I shall have no free hand to cross myself if the ghost appears. He is a bishop, Wessenberg was his name, and he is said to have done a foul deed in this very hall. Lina has taught me an incantation to use if, Heaven forbid, I should see him, a German jingle, All good ghosts praise God the Lord, yet crossing oneself is of the essence. When I’m home and safe upstairs in the lighted room with the right wine and the candle has not blown out, my father often gives me a piece of gingerbread or a few coins. Danger-money. For he professes to believe – believes? – in old Wessenberg as he off-handedly calls the ghost and claims to have found him occupying the chairs he is said to favour in the library and the Renaissance room, chairs I give a wide berth to, the dogs won’t go near them, I’ve seen their hackles rise. Well, once the wine is safely up, it is stood somewhere to settle – that room’s too warm, keep it well away from that stove! – and next day I am allowed to cut the seal and, unless the wine is very old, draw the cork, wipe the neck inside and out. The decanting is done by my father, my hands are not strong enough yet to do it properly.

And what do we talk about over our wine, at table and later when we sit by the lighted stove, a beautiful stove made of sixteenth-century tiles? Lina does not say much. She has confided in me that eating with my father scared her desperately at first (he said it was the right thing to do in these new times, revolutionary times), now she is getting used to it. Her ambition is to end her days as housekeeper to a priest. My father makes conversation as though Lina and I were real ladies. He tells us stories. About his youth; about Paris; about Monte Carlo and ways of breaking the bank. ‘And did you?’ ‘Oh no! But one can. Systems … one needs capital …’ He tells us about the pair of chimpanzees he kept as a young man first on Corsica then at his villa at Grasse where they used to rush out in the morning to feast on the neighbours’ peach-trees. When he married, the Merzes made him give up his monkeys, dirty apes, unhygienic, ‘though, you see, they were actually very soignés’. He tells us about the time he spent with a group of Mesmerists in a castle in central France which belonged to a Polish count, a queer fellow, who claimed that he could raise the dead.

If my father was not good at showing affection, neither did he show hurt or reproach. When I came back after running away, Lina had scolded, kissed and wept; my father let it pass. To me a curious thing happened; the sadness was gone, vanished; I settled down at once. I missed my sister (I did that for many years after wherever I was), the interlude at her house became paradise lost, a dream. Some time again, I promised myself, there would be piano lessons and tennis; meanwhile I was resigned, better than that: without quite realising it, I was content. My attitude to my father had not changed, I was contemptuous about his prohibitions and fears – I was sure I knew better – his minute protection of me made me rebellious, not grateful, and there was an element of mutual evasiveness in our intercourse. Yet detached as I was from him, I lived in his stories (I played with bits of wood which were the horses he had had as a boy and young man), I looked forward to our evenings – the claret helping? – and was open to the skills he taught me.

When I say that my father did not reproach me, I mean that he never spoke of my having deserted and exposed him (my mother for one, inevitably hearing of the escapade, treated it as a huge joke in her letters); he did scold me about having left the house unlocked, a prey to thieves and marauders. What with the changes brought by the end of the war and the setting up of the Weimar Republic, he saw himself surrounded by an almost entirely hostile environment. Monarchy with its concomitants of courts and protocol was if dull – at some early point in his life he had done his stint as ADC – of the natural order of things: it was safe. My mother’s defection did not help; nor did our poverty, our being ruined he called it. He felt himself betrayed by her, by his parents-in-law, by the times, by social forces he could neither understand nor name. And by me, God help me. (Are all young children unregenerate creatures? Incapable of moral responses? responses of the heart? Can these be awakened? Mine were not. I was unregenerate and self-absorbed.) What about that poverty of ours? Was it real? Or was it self-protection? Was it relative? I think it must have been all three, and at any rate very bitter for a man in his sixties who had been brought up not exactly to money but to the sweetness of life. (In a moderate, very civilised way: not for him the Merz opulence; his taste was too good, his fastidiousness too great, in their house he held himself aloof like a prisoner of honour at the victor’s banquet.) The little money he had inherited he went through early, afterwards the money came from his wives. When the first one died, the Merzes made him an allowance which continued after he married my mother. Now, my mother was gone and Grandpapa Merz was dead. He had died in his nineties at Voss Strasse before the end of the war – I was there: a death in the house. The Merzes had been believed to be very rich but the old man had long ceased to look after his affairs and when he was gone there was barely enough left for Grandmama to carry on in that huge house: my father, like many other of their pensioners, was left out in the cold. He still had Feldkirch (bought by my mother) and his collection of objects, to these he was enslaved, the house was a necessary setting to contain them. Were they beautiful? What he was after, ever since he began as a young man to stalk the sales-rooms, were craftsmanship, rarity, decorative quality, not art. He had bought few paintings, and he spurned anything much after 1600. Here too he indulged a gloomy, even macabre trend. Gothic carvings, altar vessels, mediaeval chests, rows of pewter mugs, fifteenth-century bronzes, Renaissance chairs, fragments of tapestries – we lived inside a museum, one that nobody came to see. (If he were here today, could he have borne to turn public?)

How did we exist? Well, by barter up to a point; and here my father, being country-bred, developed some ingenuity. For we had no land to live off, only park and lawn, and courtyards and drives where the nettles stood waist high. He had some grass ploughed up (a man and horse came to do that) and put it under potatoes and poppies. The poppies were to make cooking oil, poppy-seed oil – Lina and I had to crack and shell the pods, and my poor father deploring it all, sadly talked of olives. What was left of the lawn was used by sheep and geese. Our cooking and heating was done with wood from the park, and there was enough left to trade in for the donkeys’ feed and the fowls’, and flour for our bread. We had nearly three hundred apple-trees, good strains and known to be so, both eating and cider; these too were traded: for milk, for cream (we churned our butter), for honey and man-hours. Every few months a butcher’s assistant came out from the market town to kill a sheep or a pig. We had poultry, we had eggs, we grew vegetables, and grapes on a south wall. From these in October my father made a small quantity of fine white wine. So much for our table. My father’s wardrobe – suits, greatcoats, shirts, boots – was inexhaustible; mine was not replenished. For every day I wore a kind of overall, trousers and apron in one, or my Red Indian outfit, a relic of Merz bounty not yet too badly outgrown. To mass I wore one of my old dresses and over them, as they became shorter and shorter, one of my father’s jackets, Lina having adjusted the sleeves and little else. We took in one paper, a local one, chiefly for the agricultural ads; that must have been paid for in cash. So must some other items – salt, soap, candles, matches; and being on main electricity by now, my father’s mind was much exercised by future bills. The thing that cost most, he told us, was switching on, as the current had to flow in from so far. So we kept lights burning in the morning-room and in my father’s suite and went about the rest of the house candle in hand. (I tried to save candles by melting and remoulding the ends but found no way of managing the wick.) I quite enjoyed playing the Robinson Crusoe game, yet in my unfeeling way I was irritated by my father’s groans about money. Again, I knew so much better – he’d only have to sell some of the stuff, a few pieces from the collection, and we’d be all right again. Poor man, I fear that this is precisely what he must have done, secretly, agonisingly, in minimal instalments. He would never allow a dealer to come near the place (some prowled), but there were days when carrying a Gladstone bag and looking aloof he drove to the station in the donkey carriage and took the train to Freiburg or Basle. He’d come back in the evening inscrutable, bearing presents for Lina and me. I am sure now that this was the way the electric bills were met and Lina’s wages got paid.

My own life was full. I opened up the chicken coops and shut them again at dusk, I fed the geese and made the dogs’ dinner (it was served by my father), I fanned the smoke-house fire, turned the joints of pork in their barrel of brine, drew our daily cider. There was no more slow time to dread. There was weeding to be done and watering, and vegetables to be picked and windfalls to be gathered and kindling to be made, and I now could muck out the donkeys’ stable on my own. Then there were seasonal tasks, apple picking and storing (on the parquet floor of my mother’s drawing-room now empty of its light gracious furniture), the brief vintage, the gathering and stacking of wood, the autumnal raking of leaves … The leaves were my responsibility (they were needed for the donkeys’ bedding as we could not afford to buy straw); spreading and drying and turning, then piling them into the cart and driving them to the barn, Flora between the shafts (Fanny being too tricky). I also had private pursuits. Teaching the dogs arithmetic – having heard of Calculating Horses – trying to make them tap out numbers with their paws, by persuasion and rewards; that was an entire failure. Trick bicycling, on an old machine: I was seldom allowed out on the road so I taught myself stunts in the yard – I could kneel on the saddle going downhill and I could ride backward in tight circles (not within sight of my father). And tennis. Solo tennis by the hour with the pre-war balls and the ill-strung racket against the wash-house wall, keeping the score and dreaming of Wimbledon. (Oh, the things I had heard of.)

A new worry came to beset my father. He had my custody but my mother still meddled (his word); she wanted me to be educated, so apparently did the law. In the now distant past nanny had taught me my pot-hooks, reading I had more or less picked up on my own, figures I liked to play with; at Voss Strasse I had quite enjoyed the biweekly visits of a rather decrepit tutor … At Feldkirch we forgot all about it. When my mother nudged our memory, she suggested a governess; my father beside himself with vexation decided to send me to the village school.

The school house was a recent building implanted by some distant authority – a classroom on the ground-floor and some lavatories above, a flat for the schoolmaster and his family – and it smelled of cement, linoleum and piss. Here I was brought one day in the middle of term. The children, about thirty of them, sat on benches, each with a slate before them, girls on one side, separated by an aisle, boys on the other. They were placed according to their age, six-year-olds in the front row, eleven-year-olds in the back. The schoolmaster, a youngish man in a town suit, came in and everybody stood up and broke into a chant, Grüt’zi Gott Herr Lehrer. He stepped in front and began to do something quite fascinating – making each row learn a different thing at the same time. The six-year-olds were told to practise their letters – how their slates squeaked – the next lot were set sums, the row behind was learning a poem and the back row was given a map. We nine-year-olds, a girl and I and three boys across the aisle, were made to read aloud in turns. Then there was dictation for some and learning by heart for others; later there was singing and reciting the catechism by all. It was noisy but not really confusing, and I soon got the hang of it. The teaching was done in real German (with a strong southern accent) and the children too repeated their lessons in Hochdeutsch, which came out quite stilted, but when they talked, even to the master, they dropped back into patois. Each row formed what they called a school-year; mine had a set of textbooks marked Fourth: a Fiebel for reading, a Rechenbuch for arithmetic, stories from the Holy Bible; the content of the books, the curriculum (a standard curriculum!) was the same word for word through the whole of Baden and had to be learned day by day, week by week by every child of nine throughout the land.

The girls were meek and most were hopeless at their lessons, the boys were lazy and noisy. The chief punishment was Tatzen, pawsers, a beating on the hand with a short swishy stick. If you were late more than once or couldn’t do your daily lot you were given two Tatzen, for something worse four, for something really bad six. Six was rare. Sometimes the schoolmaster would just hurl a boy over the desk and beat him on his behind. The boy usually yelled (stoicism was not prized). Tatzen and spankings would be given then and there in front of the school, the innocents sitting still and cowed with an undercurrent of nastier feelings: Schadenfreude, an unholy excitement.

School-hours were not long, the children being expected, as I did, to give a hand at home. One o’clock till four in the afternoon for us in the lower school, seven to eleven in the morning for the twelve- to fifteen-year-olds. So were the holidays regulated by the needs of the fields and seasons – hay holidays, harvest holidays, potato and wood-making holidays. Nor do I remember much homework. When the threshing machine was due or someone was repairing a barn, the school children were given the day off – we’d sit on ladders, forming a chain, handing up tiles.

Like my sister’s house, school opened another world for me. Again I discovered the pleasures of social life. First there were the children, though they treated me with curiosity and restraint at first (their parents and the schoolmaster called me by the preposterous name of Baroness Billi – Billi was what my family always called me, a corruption of the last syllables of my first name), I tried to make friends with the zest of a puppy. Where are they now my ephemeral companions of Feldkirch (for my schooldays were numbered)? Where and what are they likely to have been doing in 1933? in 1939? in 1945? Josephina, my coeval, a silent sallow girl with black hair severely pulled back? Clara, another slow child, Katherina who never washed (nor did I when I could help it) and whom I could seduce into mischief, the five Martin girls, each one year older and two inches taller than the next and otherwise exactly alike? The girls were a tame lot on the whole, their idea of play was promenading arms linked down the village street of a Sunday afternoon, bawling sad songs. I soon turned to the boys, forming a gang with three older ones, Alphons, Robert and Anton, as we shared tastes; my Meccano, playing trains, getting on a farm horse when no one was looking.

I was interested in their home life and pleased when my new friends took me to their houses after school. There I was hospitably received by their elders. The meal in progress would be the four o’clock Z’fiere neh’ in Baden patois which is a language unto itself. The fare was the same in house after house; cold raw bacon, bread and cider. The bacon was cut thick, right off a side in the larder, as thick as a beef steak. The bread was home-baked in big round loaves weighing about five pounds, whitish, not snow-white, good bread not unlike the French pain de campagne though harder and closer in texture; and at its best when about eight days old. The cider was spoken of as wine, and not up to ours, as many stretched it by adding water and a powdered stuff, a kind of must, that came out of a cardboard box. Nobody in the village, except the priest and the mayor, drank grape wine, and they rarely drank beer.

It was a small village, one long curved street, unpaved, a few lanes, some two hundred and fifty inhabitants in less than fifty dwellings. They had about four surnames between them, Rinderle, Faller, Martin and Hauser. Everybody farmed (except the priest and the schoolmaster) and nearly everybody farmed their own land. Some had only an acre or two, some had thirty or forty; some were said to be in debt to the mortgage bank, some were quite prosperous; a few did something on the side such as keeping the smithy, the post office (with the one and only telephone which went dead at seven p.m.), the village shop and the inn. All lived much in the same way. The houses varied in size, all were stone and most of them had two storeys. A few were shiningly clean with polished cook-stoves and floors, a dustless quiescent parlour, a main bedroom with a