A Prince Among Stones (4 page)

In Paris, I was told, my mother used to leave money in a dish for anyone who wanted it – a practical communist. The person who saved my mother's financial life on a regular basis was the manager of Barclays Bank in Piccadilly, just next to the Ritz. I recall many an occasion when my mother would park me in the Ritz's bar downstairs while she went off to endure a difficult half-hour with the bank's manager, but it usually seemed to be all right in the end. My mother always believed that something would turn up, and my father once said, ‘If only Bianca was running the finances of some small Latin American country, she would do very well, but just running her own life seems a waste of energy.'

If my mother's sense of the value of money was virtually non-existent so, too, was that of beloved Uncle Bubi. After his rescue from Buchenwald, he became mayor of two of Berlin's post-war sectors, had moved into theatre and film production – in Düsseldorf he put on some Brecht plays – and occasionally turned up in London. He was the same as ever: I later attended his wedding to an Italian girl at the Chelsea Register Office, and as the official stressed the importance of the vows of marriage, Bubi turned round and gave me an enormous wink.

One time, I was staying on the island of Patmos with a great friend of mine, the painter Teddy Millington-Drake. Teddy's property, two seventeenth-century houses in the village of Chora, was high up on top of the island next to the monastery of St John the Theologian. As we looked down at the activity on the harbour front below, we saw a small boy astride a large donkey, its ears poking through a battered straw hat, coming up the hill. The boy and the donkey having made their ponderous way to Teddy's house, the boy delivered a telegram, after establishing that the recipient with an odd foreign name was indeed me. I opened the telegram, written in a strange ink. It was from Bubi. The message read simply: ‘Total financial support needed forever, Treuberg'. It was the archetypal black sheep's bleat.

Around the time I was leaving school, and drawing on her sculpting skills, my mother started a small workshop in Glebe Place in Chelsea, making very pretty costume jewellery cast in brass or silver. She first found an out-of-work German to do the accounts who couldn't speak a word of English, and then had to employ a friend, Benvenuto Sheard, to translate the German accounts into English. Nuto Sheard might not have been a wise choice for the role. At around the same time, Nuto, an investor in Claud Cockburn's magazine
The Week
, had been fired from his role as manager of the magazine for, according to Cockburn, ‘a particularly sharp bout of what is known as “financial irresponsibility”, in the course of which he removed the funds'. Nonetheless, somehow and improbably my mother's jewellery business contrived to make a bit of money.

Jewellery seemed to be central to my mother and money. She had owned one-sixth of the Brazilian crown jewels, because one of her great-grandmothers was a daughter of Emperor Dom Pedro I of Brazil. Amongst them was a splendid emerald necklace, which she kept on her dressing table. One of her friends had declared, ‘I loathe emeralds', whereupon my mother picked up the necklace and hurled it out of the bedroom window into the street below. By the time they went to look for it, most of the stones had already disappeared.

I asked my mother what had happened to all the Brazilian jewellery. ‘Oh, darling,' she replied. ‘I left it all with Marie', who had been my mother's maid in France. ‘What's her surname?' I asked. ‘I don't know, she's called Marie, and
Marie, c'est une brave Bretonne
, a good honest girl from Brittany. She'll turn up at the end of the war with my jewels.' I was sceptical: ‘A likely story.'

Sure enough, come the end of the war, Marie,
brave Bretonne
though she might have been, was nowhere to be found, nor were the Brazilian crown jewels. I trust that Marie and her descendants appreciated either their beauty or their value.

One day, when I was fourteen, my mother sent me to an art gallery to sell a beautiful painting by Balthus, whom she had known well in Paris. She was sitting with friends in the bar downstairs at the Ritz, and said, ‘Darling, you must go to the gallery and sell this nice portrait because Mummy needs the money.'

I asked her how much she had agreed with the gallery owner – it was £40. Even at fourteen I thought £40 was not very much for such a lovely painting. Off I trudged to the bottom of Duke Street where I handed over the picture and received in return the money in the form of eight of the crisp white fivers of the day. I returned to the Ritz and by the end of lunch the money was no more. Next door in Barclays Bank, the manager, had he known how swiftly the money had been consumed, would have been furious. To me it was a good example of how not to use money. I was starting to realise that while my parents had no sense of money, I had. And I developed a lasting determination never to find myself in the same straits as they navigated on a daily basis.

2

 

 

‘There is a good deal to be said for frivolity. Frivolous people, when all is said and done, do less harm in the world than some of our philanthropisers and reformers. Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness'

 

Gerald, Lord Berners

 

 

 

My school days, like much of my childhood, had been a little unusual. When I had been staying with Madge and Hans-Jürgen in Buckinghamshire during the war, I had attended the local village school briefly. I went along for a month and then they took me away. They saw it was absolutely hopeless. I could read and write at six and a half, and none of the other pupils could. So I was dispatched to boarding school at eight.

This was a small co-educational school, Long Dene, in Stoke Poges. Thomas Gray, it is popularly believed, set his
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
in the parish church of St Giles in the village; the poem was displayed on a monument near the church.

I was very much an odd fish in Long Dene's pond. As an only child brought up by nannies, and to a certain extent by very bright intellectuals, I had really never met – let alone made friends with – any children of my own age (with the exception of Roger, the cook's son at the villa near Grasse). So I was somewhat mystified and even a little frightened by my coevals, and they quite probably saw me as snooty. Although I had loved all the sports at the school for my first year or so I developed asthma at the age of nine and I was unable to cope with the physical demands. There was nothing I could do about it. I did regret not being able to join in the sports, but it may have added to the impression that I was not joining in, all of which resulted in a certain tension which occasionally ended up in a fight. On those occasions I would fight back, but one part of my mind hated the actual fight, and the fact that some blows would cause pain, while the other part of me stood back and observed these two boys wasting their time over something so trivial.

My teachers, however, were very kind to me. I found it far easier to relate to adults than my fellow pupils. The music teacher there was excellent and I made firm friends with him, learning much from him and starting to learn to play the violin – strengthening a lifelong love of classical music. There was also a kindly mistress, Mary Hemingway, who taught me to read sensible books, and indeed sometimes invited me during school holidays to stay with her family on the Isle of Man, where her father was an Anglican priest. We remained in touch over the years: she later became a nun, and joined a silent order in Lourdes.

When I was about eleven it was thought important to send me to a more advanced and academically minded school. My mother had something of an obsession about co-educational schools: there were two or three very good ones in Germany, one of which was Schule Schloss Salem, established by Kurt Hahn, who founded Gordonstoun after he left Nazi Germany. Luckily, she didn't send me to Gordonstoun, since it was not co-educational, so I was saved from that experience – one I am sure would not have suited me, since I had heard from other children who had brothers there that the school operated on quasi-military principles.

Instead she selected St Christopher, in Letchworth Garden City, a progressive school, founded in the 1910s by Quakers and initially sponsored by the Theosophical Society. I think my mother was also impressed by the school's intellectual level. The Latin teacher had a great sense of humour and a fund of excellent aphorisms going back to his own schooldays in the 1890s, one of which I in turn taught religiously to my children and then my grandchildren: ‘Even those of the meanest intelligence can be goaded and wearied into something approximating to thought.' My son Rudolf often found that phrase helpful in his own teaching career, although not all of his pupils appreciated it.

It was while I was at St Christopher that I heard the news of my parents' divorce courtesy of my fellow pupils' reading of the newspapers. On another occasion, one of my classmates came up to me with a copy of the
Daily Express
– we were meant to read only
The Times
– which contained a report of a plane crashing on take-off at one of the London airfields. There was a photograph of my mother emerging from the plane, which was in flames behind her, holding a bottle of champagne. The journalist had commented that it was an odd choice of item to rescue. ‘But what else would you do with a bottle of champagne?' she had said, with commendable, and typical, sang-froid.

I was happy at St Christopher, and extremely pleased with myself, since by and large I often came top in lessons. But after three or four years there I decided I wanted to leave for a more conventional schooling. Such children as I had met in the holidays went mainly to Eton or Downside.

I approached my mother and asked her if, in the summer of 1949, when I had passed my Higher School Certificate (the qualification that would be replaced by A-levels a couple of years later), I could go to Cambridge and be tutored for a scholarship to Oxford. This idea had been instigated by my history teacher at St Christopher sending me to Cambridge once a week to be tutored in history by a marvellous, very old-fashioned Edwardian spinster, Miss Anderson-Scott, a teacher who was associated with Girton College, the time not yet having come when women could be members of the university.

My two years in Cambridge were the greatest possible fun. I was found digs by Frances Cornford, the Bloomsbury poet, who was a friend of my mother's. She knew a charming old German philosopher, Dr Strich, whose wife was looking to rent a room or two in their house. She looked after the house and cooked the most delicious Prussian fare, a great difference from St Christopher, which was not only co-educational, but also vegetarian (as indeed I am told it still is even now). The professor and his
Frau
had two very old-fashioned daughters, Lore and Sabine, who were a little older than me and seemed to have stepped straight out of a novel by the nineteenth-century writer Theodor Fontane. My mother was happy that I was lodging with a family like the Strichs, in a sensible, protective environment.

At Cambridge I made many friends including two or three whom I still see today, and I got to know Monsignor Gilbey, the chaplain to the university's Catholic undergraduates, and one of the most well-known and admired priests in Britain.

With additional tutoring in Latin from a Fellow of King's College I prepared myself for the Oxford entrance examination, a perverse choice, it might seem, since I was enjoying myself so much in Cambridge, but by chance I knew more people – either friends of my parents, or friends of mine – who had been at Oxford than Cambridge, and of course it amused me that I was going to have two years at Cambridge before three at Oxford.

I had decided to study medieval history. Classics appealed, but I had only started Greek in my last year at school, and so would, I thought, have made it difficult to catch up. Had I been to Eton or any similar school, I would certainly have read Mods and Greats at Oxford. But that was not possible, although I took Latin as my second subject for my Higher Certificate and continued studying it.

I wanted to go either to Magdalen or Christ Church. When I took the entrance examination, Magdalen gave me a Demyship. I was very happy with the choice, and in the autumn of 1951 I was installed in excellent rooms in the New Building.

Magdalen was famously strong in history. A. J. P. Taylor was a Fellow, as was the medievalist K. B. McFarlane. He was one of the people who marked my Finals, and was angry that I didn't get a first. He later published a book of letters in which I appeared in a passage describing a visit he had made to the tombs at Wertheim: ‘I have a boy, R zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, from this family, who is a complete rascal.' What he meant was that I was not paying enough attention to his words of wisdom.
Tant pis
.

I did not get on with my main tutor. I did not like him – he was very nervous and chippy – and he didn't much like me either, but that was perhaps the only thing with which I was unhappy at Magdalen. It was unfortunate, but certainly not the end of the world.

My parents had taken it for granted that I would get into Oxford. In fact they would have been horrified if I had failed to do so. My mother would come down with a friend perhaps a couple of times a term; my father visited once or twice over the three years I was there. Before the war, his half-brother – my half-uncle – Werner v. Alvensleben had been at Hertford College; among the friends he made at Oxford had been Adam Trott zu Solz, a diplomat who was part of Count Claus v. Stauffenberg's 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. My half-uncle also became great friends with the Chaucer specialist Nevill Coghill. And so I was invited to join Professor Coghill at high table off and on.