A Woman on the Edge of Time (6 page)

IT IS A TANTALISING
story in itself — the lost boy, lost boys even, in the forest — but it is more than that. This is the man who abused my mother, turned her into a lost girl walking down a corridor at night. I need to know what he was capable of.

Armed with this new information, I search in
The Times
online archive, and within moments I am staring at a headline from 19 April 1936: ‘Caught in a Blizzard — Five London Boys Dead'.

I have to pay to read more, and I key in my credit-card details. The article that comes up is about a party of twenty-seven boys from the Strand School in Brixton, on a walking holiday in the Black Forest, led by a single teacher, twenty-eight years of age. After spending their first night at a hostel, the party set off in the morning to climb the Schauinsland mountain. There was a light sleet when they left, the paper records, but by mid-afternoon it was snowing heavily:

During the next few hours several of the boys became weaker and finally collapsed. The older ones carried their packs and helped them along until their strength also gave out. The teacher, who had been carrying the youngest boy in the party for about a mile, finally stayed behind with four of the exhausted boys and sent some stronger ones on to try to find their way down to the village. They reached the village at about 8pm. The villagers immediately formed search parties, and under great difficulties and danger to themselves twice made their way with sledges up to the exhausted boys. It was not until 11.30 pm that the last of them with their teacher was brought down to safety in the village inn, where six boys who were unconscious were given artificial respiration.

Hunched over the computer, I follow the story through the pages of the
Times
. The survivors were saved by the ringing of a church bell, which guided them to the village. The bodies were repatriated in ‘black-stained coffins, made from the timber of the woods in which they died'. ‘Herr Hitler' sent wreaths of ‘arum lilies and fir, tied with white silk and draped in swastikas'.

An enquiry exonerated the headmaster of any blame. The unseasonal storm was ‘catastrophic and beyond all calculation'. The headmaster, the inquiry concluded, showed ‘courage and fortitude'. But something nags at me. I go back over the articles and read how, even after one of the boys ‘showed signs of collapsing', the headmaster continued to push for the summit of the mountain.

There is something familiar about this, and I call Susan Downes and ask her again about going up the mountain with K. There were only a couple of lifts, she says, so they were taught to put skins on their skis and walk up the mountain. It was hard work, but the headmaster insisted they keep going until they reached a hut he had set as their target, even though it was already growing dangerously dark.

I go to the newspaper library in Colindale and order up other newspapers. In the
Daily Telegraph
, I read that some of the boys were already floundering ‘up to their necks' in the snow when they met a group of woodcutters, who directed them on up the hill. Why had the headmaster not asked these woodcutters for help? To guide the boys back down to a village or an inn? Why had he kept going up in the storm when he could have gone down?

I go to the London Metropolitan Archives to read the report of the inquiry. From this, I learn that the headmaster had been a star pupil at the Strand School before becoming a teacher there, had been head boy, captain of football, cricket. I learn, too, that he had spent his vacations from Cambridge leading school parties on mountain excursions in the Swiss Alps. After university, he worked in the German Alps, guiding skiing and climbing tours.

In the newspaper reports, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the headmaster's testimony. But here, in its full length, his account is more logical. In this version of the story, the snow was not yet too deep or heavy when they met the woodcutters, and it was not so much the top of the hill for which he was heading but an inn he believed was on the other side.

I still have my suspicions — did his experience in the mountains make him overconfident? — but I am alone in them. ‘I can say with a clear conscience that the master in charge of the boys behaved in a very brave and manly fashion,' one of the villagers who helped to bring the boys off the mountain testified. ‘He was the last to come in from the mountain slopes where he did everything to put heart into the children and to help them out.'

The tragedy, the inquiry concludes, was caused by freak weather, not human error. The headmaster of the school, arriving in Freiburg two days later, found ‘a clear sky and a hot sun — comparable to a hot June day in England'.

HERE IN LONDON
, the summer is drawing on, the days shortening. I am exhausted by the past few weeks, by obsessing over Hannah and the headmaster. But I still have one more task — to go to Oxford to see Tasha Edelman.

Tasha doesn't speak on the phone, so I made the arrangements through her niece, Sonia's daughter, Becky, who also lives in Oxford.

Before going to Tasha's, I meet up with Becky. She tells me about Tasha's health. After a car accident, which caused a stroke, she had recovered and gone back to work as a psychiatrist. But subsequent strokes had diminished her.

We talk, too, about Tasha's troubles with her son and daughter from her first marriage. When the children were young, she left her husband for another man and lost custody of them, and as they grew older they refused to see her. Becky talks of Tasha leaving birthday and Christmas presents for them on the doorstep of their house, and never hearing anything. She subsequently remarried and had another daughter, but she hasn't seen her older children in years.

It is hard for me to understand: to be searching for a mother who is forever out of reach, and to hear of these children who have a mother they will not see.

BECKY DROPS ME
at Tasha's house, and I follow Tasha into a back room piled with old books and magazines. The curtains are pulled shut, but the material is so thin that the sunlight shines through them and I can see the dust in the air. Tasha herself is like a ghost. The last time I saw her, more than a decade ago, she was overweight, but now her clothes hang off her. Her hair is long and grey, her eyes gazing through big round glasses. She moves and talks immensely slowly, with long pauses while she thinks or searches for the right words.

I ask her about following Hannah to Frensham.

‘I would have gone anywhere to be with her,' she says.

‘Why?' I ask.

She smiles. ‘She was so fascinating.'

Sonia had talked when I saw her about Hannah leading Tasha into trouble, and I ask her about this.

‘She always told me what to do,' Tasha says.

‘Like what?'

‘Split up with my boyfriend.'

‘Why?'

‘She decided he was bad for me.'

‘Did you?'

‘Yes,' she says, and a smile comes slowly again to her face. ‘Then Hannah went out with him.'

‘Hannah told you to split up with him, and then she went out with him?'

‘Yes. Though after she finished with him, I got back together with him.'

‘The thing about Hannah,' she says, after a long pause, ‘was that she had to have what she wanted when she wanted it, and everyone else had to get out of the way.'

‘You make her sound like a character out of
The Lord of the Flies
.'

There is another silence, and then she says, ‘She was fierce, but there was also a very looking-after side of her. She looked after me.'

She talks about how Hannah was ‘always smiting boys left, right, and centre'.

I ask whether serious relationships were common at the school.

‘Some people went all the way,' she says.

‘Was Hannah one of those?'

‘I would be quite surprised if Hannah wasn't one of them.'

‘Did you go all the way?'

She smiles. ‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I wouldn't have known how.'

I ask how Hannah knew.

‘Hannah always knew how to get into things. She was always doing, doing. She would go too far, too fast into things.'

‘Is that how it was with the headmaster?'

She thinks for a while. ‘I suppose it was.'

There was something ‘mesmeric' about the headmaster, she says. ‘When he spoke, you had to listen. You always wanted to hear what he had to say. He made you want to do well at everything.'

‘Hannah was the person he cared about,' she says.

‘He cared about her?'

‘Yes.'

‘And how did Hannah feel about him?'

‘She was mad about him. For a long time, I really thought that they loved each other.'

‘She loved him?'

‘I think he was the love of her life before your father.'

I tell her what Susan Downes said about the headmaster being cold, how Hannah came to his study at the wrong time and he was cruel to her.

‘I don't think he was cruel to Hannah,' Tasha says slowly. ‘I think Hannah threw him over because she met your father.'

Can this be true? Is it her professional opinion as a psychiatrist? Or is she seeing Hannah and the headmaster through a fifteen-year-old's eyes, her understanding frozen in the past, like Hannah herself?

I ask about Hannah's suicide. She doesn't think it was depression — more not being able to see a way she could cope any more.

Cope with what? I ask.

‘Not getting what she wanted.'

What did she want? I ask. But she only smiles.

I ask again about Hannah's letters. When I had spoken to Tasha on the phone several years back, she had suggested they were lost in her attic, and I offer now to go up into the attic to look for them, but she shakes her head.

It is important, I say, I have almost nothing of Hannah's, no personal writing. But she only shrugs sadly.

It has started raining outside. We sit in silence, the rain coming down. ‘I do so still miss Hannah,' she says.

Four

ONE LATE SUMMER WEEKEND
, Susie comes down from Edinburgh with a suitcase of my grandparents' papers. From my memories of sorting though their house, I don't expect there to be a treasure trove of Hannah material here, but I am still disappointed at how little there seems to be: a folder of early poems and drawings, reports from her primary school, some photographs.

Of the usual teenage paraphernalia of diaries, letters, schoolbooks, photographs like those Shirley showed me, there is no sign. Though Hannah spent five years at boarding school, there are none of the letters she must have written to her parents. Unless Hannah got rid of her teenage things when she left home, they must have been discarded either by my grandparents or my father. Suicide not only ends a life, it changes how that life is remembered. The happy, hopeful times are refracted through the end, invalidated by the act of the death.

Most of the papers are my grandfather's unpublished typescripts. He published half a dozen books, as well as hundreds of articles and essays, but these are various attempts at a memoir. To my grandfather, though, memoir meant recollections of his times, the people he met, rather than his own personal life, and there again seems to be disappointingly little about Hannah.

It is a relief, though, after the turbulence of the past weeks, to hear my grandfather's familiar wry voice in my head. He was the wisest man, at least in the ways of the broader world, I have known, and I loved talking to him, listening to him. And as I read, I find, tucked away in his portraits of interesting people and times, occasional mentions of his family. From these fragments, and others in his published books, along with clues Susie continues to send, and conversations with her, I begin to piece together Hannah's early life.

SHE WAS BORN
, I know, in Palestine, but I learn now how my grandparents had come to be there. They had met and married in London, where my grandfather had lived since his wandering Zionist parents had brought him there at the age of thirteen, and my grandmother had come from the small town in South Africa where she had grown up to ‘go to the theatre and see art galleries'. My grandfather was working as a floorwalker, or trainee manager, at Marks and Spencer, and writing a novel. When his novel was published without much notice, he threw in his job and they sailed to South Africa to visit my grandmother's family, and it was on the way back that they stopped in Palestine.

They had meant to stay only a few weeks, to see my grandmother's brother and sister, and my grandfather's father, who had settled there. But my grandfather was still working out what to do with his life, and through his father's Zionist connections he got a job at the Jewish Federation of Labour. My grandmother also found work at a school run by a disciple of Freud in Tel Aviv, and it was in this modern city rising out of the sands, on 19 August 1936, that Hannah was born.

Two early influences on Hannah's life emerge from my grandfather's writings. One is a memory of standing at the glass looking at his newborn daughter, and his sister-in-law beside him saying, ‘
Das Kind ist klug
'
— that child is clever. It was something Hannah had to live up to all her life: that she was clever, precocious, that things were expected of her.

More immediate was the world into which she was born. My grandfather was reading newspaper reports from the Spanish Civil War when a nurse came to tell him that he had a daughter: ‘I was only too well aware that in Hannah I had acquired a new and special responsibility and there was world war looming ahead.' Hannah was always known as Hannah, but the name on her birth certificate was Ann — the English, non-Jewish, version of the name.

There is nothing more in my grandfather's writings about Hannah's first year and a half, but among the material Susie brought is a small photograph album that gives a sense of her early life in Tel Aviv. Here are my grandparents holding Hannah proudly in a flat furnished with the sparse austerity of settler life. Here is her nanny pushing her in a wicker pram along dirt roads past low stone apartment buildings. And here she is, a year or so later, riding a tricycle, toddling into the sea, with the broad smile I know from later photographs, looking at different times remarkably like both my daughters.

An ‘enchanting sprite', my grandfather wrote, in his one written recollection of her in Palestine:

Small, slender, agile, she was enormously precocious. At eighteen months, when we were passing a kindergarten, Hannah ran inside, insisted on joining in the game and there she remained and held her own. Now she was twenty months, she was running in an imagined game through our apartment, she spoke in clear sentences and then started out on what she unfortunately already knew was her parlour trick: reciting from her Babar books, which she knew by heart, and turning the pages at the right word, as if reading.

By now, my grandfather had given up his job to write a book about the prospects of Palestine. He had grown up in a Zionist household, and he writes of falling ‘under the passions of that insecure little land'. Returning from a tour of kibbutzim, with their utopian dreams, he ‘felt suddenly and uneasily aware of the barrenness, the hollowness, of Western middle-class life'. But it is interesting that his Zionism didn't blind him to the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs, and the prescient thesis of his book, with its equally prescient title,
No Ease in Zion
, was to advocate a combined Jewish–Arab state.

In his later years, he followed Israel's progress closely, still arguing for more pro-Arab policies, increasingly saddened by how those utopian dreams had turned out, but it is only now that I realise how close he and my grandmother came to throwing in their lot with Zionism and staying in Palestine. How differently Hannah's life would have turned out, though I wouldn't be here to write about it. But as it was, more powerful than my grandfather's attraction to Palestine was his desire to be a writer. When the news broke that Hitler had annexed Austria in March 1938, the ‘action for a writer', he decided, was in Europe, and he flew back to London, my grandmother and Hannah following more slowly by sea.

IN LONDON
, my grandparents rented a little house in the Vale of Health, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Hannah, now nearly two, ‘briefly produced a sleep disturbance and crying fits'. Removed from her home and her nanny, this was hardly surprising, but my grandmother's work in Tel Aviv had turned her into a confirmed Freudian, and hearing that the Freuds themselves were living only a short walk away, she wrote to Anna Freud for help.

Anna Freud ‘wrote back with exquisite politeness that she could not yet take cases', but suggested another refugee psychoanalyst, Marianne Kris, who agreed to see Hannah. My grandfather recalled with a mixture of amusement and fascination how ‘the eminent Dr Kris at once gained Hannah's attention, gave her a Daddy doll, a Mummy doll, a Hannah doll and a nanny doll, and asked her to play a game'. Separation anxiety was duly diagnosed, and after being prescribed some extra cosseting, Hannah was soon running about with her ‘usual zest'.

My grandmother enrolled her at a nursery school in Highgate, and in the mornings, waiting for the school bus to pick her up, her excitement ‘was so great she could not contain herself, hopping madly from leg to leg'. She soon acquired the ‘precise, high pitched enunciation of English upper-middle class children'.

This new life was not to last long, though. To my surprise, I learn that in the summer of 1939, whether with the intention of escaping the looming war or of taking Hannah to see her parents before war made this impossible, my grandmother and Hannah sailed for South Africa. Equally surprising, my grandfather set off on travels around Europe, taking in, among other places, Berlin, where he wandered ‘among the “No Jews Desired” notices like a spook'. He had spent his early years in Strasbourg and Zurich, but he was born in Cologne, and he wrote how grateful he was for his British passport.

Whatever her intentions in travelling to South Africa, my grandmother must have decided to outrun the war back to Europe, for by the winter of 1939 the family was together again in a guest house on the Ridge in Hastings. Perhaps they had chosen that spot so my grandfather could gaze across the sea to France, ‘the waters silvery in the moonlight along the blacked coast'. In September 1939, he had ‘stood for a day in a senseless queue of volunteers outside the War Office'; but in his efforts to sign up, his German birth counted against him, and instead he began writing a book about racial equality, influenced by what he had seen both in Germany and South Africa, to which he had taken a dislike from the moment his ship ‘arrived in Cape Town and I saw the black African porters in their cast-offs standing on the dock below like accusing dark shadows'.

In the mornings, he or my grandmother took Hannah on the trolley bus to her new school. When it snowed, she ‘played boisterously in the deep snow with two friendly Alsatian dogs'. In May, the Germans attacked the Maginot Line, and three weeks later the family watched the flotilla of boats sail for Dunkirk.

By summer they had moved again — into a farmhouse near Twyford, in Berkshire, with my grandfather's publisher, Fred Warburg, and his wife. Warburg introduced my grandfather to George Orwell, who was a frequent visitor, and the three of them came up with the idea of the Searchlight series of books on war aims — my grandfather's book on race,
The Malady and the Vision
, would be one; Orwell's
The Lion and the Unicorn
, another.

Hannah, now nearly four, and the only child in the house, was ‘the little queen of the place'. My grandfather wrote of ‘Fred Warburg, that haughty publisher, lying on his back in the grass and holding her high in the air' and ‘Orwell, stretched out on the grass, reading Hauff's fairy tales to her'.

She was already on her fourth educational establishment, a few miles away in Sonning, to which she travelled on her own by Green Line coach. Returning one afternoon, my grandfather recalled, ‘she asked for the stop too late, and the coach overshot the stop where I was waiting by three-quarters of a mile. Hurrying in that direction, I came upon the tiny figure running towards me along the Great West Road with a tear-stained face, nearer, nearer, and into my arms.'

The arrangement at Scarlett's Farm was not to last either, though, and by the following summer my grandparents and Hannah had moved again, this time more permanently, to the cottage outside Amersham.

My grandfather was in England for another couple of years, but he was working for the BBC, and later the Foreign Office, in London, and there is no mention of life in Amersham in any of his writings from that period. In 1943, he was finally taken into the army as a psychological warfare officer and he sailed for Algiers. His years in the army were good times for him, and his memoirs record his travels through north Africa and Italy, where he interrogated prisoners at Monte Cassino. But from the story of Hannah's life his voice now fades, at least for a few years.

ON A COLD
late autumn day, I drive out to Amersham. Susie has told me that the cottage was on London Road and was called Evescot, but the name must have been changed, for the only reference I can find online to Evescot, London Road, is a notice from 1942 of my grandfather's anglicising of the spelling of his surname from the original Feiwel to Fyvel, in his efforts to get into the army.

Susie told me it was one of a row of a dozen-or-so cottages, and with her directions I find the cottages without too much difficulty. I had always understood that Hannah lived on the edge of town, but it is a mile outside Amersham here, cars speeding past, and fields climbing hills on both sides of the road.

Susie was four when they moved away, and the only clues she could give me is that Evescot was towards the southern end of the row; that ‘Clarkie', or Mrs Clark, the housekeeper Hannah locked in the chicken shed, lived next door; and that there was a cherry tree outside the front door.

I walk along the row, examining the cottages. A couple have cherry trees out front, and I pick one of these and ring the bell on the door behind it. A middle-aged man eventually comes to the door. He has been here for twenty years, he says, but none of the cottages was ever called Evescot, as far as he knows, and he doesn't remember any Clarks living here. No one else has been here as long as he has. I explain my interest, peer past him hopefully. This could be the cottage where my mother lived. But he does not take the hint, does not invite me in.

I drive up to the local library, but there is no information there. I call Sonia, but she can't help either. Susie says she would recognise the cottage if she saw it, and suggests we drive out together next time she is in London, though she is not due down for a few weeks and I am impatient. It is hard to explain why it is so important to me, but it is: this is the cottage where Hannah grew up, where she lived in the stories that until recently were all I knew of her childhood.