And it feels as though I have entered a different world. A world where absolutely anything could happen. A world where people stand naked under waterfalls; where they talk and laugh and love each other, and each other’s children; where people sing of couples making love up in their bedrooms and bridges over troubled water; where chattering children lie on the floor and play, their filthy bare feet waving in the air; where strangers are welcomed with hugs and kisses and cake; where a little brown and white dog with three legs can run like the wind. And now that I have gone through the door, into this other world, I don’t ever want to go back.
Caroline Statham didn’t believe me when I told her about Jane Bentall.
‘You can’t have met her! I don’t believe you.’
‘I have. I promise.’
‘Liar!’
‘I have! We went to her farm. At half-term. She invited us.’
‘Where is it, then?’
‘I don’t know. Somewhere in the country.’
‘Why would she invite you to her farm? And why would a film star live on a farm anyway?’
‘I don’t know. But she does. We stayed for tea.’
‘Mum! Julia says she’s met Jane Bentall.’
‘Really?’ said Mrs Statham spooning spaghetti hoops on to thin slices of white toast cut into triangles, the crusts neatly removed. ‘I saw her at the Odeon just the other day. On the screen, I mean, of course. Not actually in the cinema. She used to be married to that good-looking actor who was in all those action films with a twist, wasn’t she? Whatsisname. Matthew Someone-or-other. Quite a pair they were, by all accounts. There used to be lots in the papers about them – the parties they had, and everything. All jolly racy. And she was in that French film without her top on.’
‘Mum!’
‘Well, it was quite something. Everyone went to see it. There was rather a hoo-hah about it at the time. People said it was art, but I don’t know. Your father went to see it twice, Caroline, and he’s not even all that keen on the cinema! Are two pieces of toast enough for you, Julia?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘So how come you know Jane Bentall?’
‘My dad operated on one of her children.’
‘He’s a clever man, your father. But then, so many of them are. Worcester sauce, girls?’
So it can’t have been true – what I said to Max. That we spent our childhood not knowing that there were other ways of being. That my eyes were first opened the summer of the Fourniers. They were opened long before that – on the day we went to Jane Bentall’s farm.
What do you think we did? Pull the heads off chickens? Ferret out Jewish families from Berlin’s attics and cellars and parade them through the streets with placards round their necks? Spend our days manufacturing little yellow stars? What do you think we did? We marched, we sang, we camped, we kept fit, we searched through burning rubble for survivors after bombing raids, we kept our uniforms smart, we had fun. What do you want me to say? That we all knew? What did we know? We knew nothing. Okay, yes, we knew there was some kind of prison in Oranienburg. It was for political prisoners, we were told. Did I wonder why those Jews were leaving – the ones my mother helped – and where they were going? I don’t think I did. Is that such a crime? Is that such a terrible thing? What do
you
think goes on in that big house across the road with the very small brass plaque on the door? Come on – you sit here every day gazing out of the window – you must know. You go in and out of this house every day. You must know what’s happening over there. It’s just across the road. But you don’t, do you? Have you ever even read what’s on the plaque?
It’s a dental practice, I think.
You think. But you don’t know. And if it says it’s a dentist, is it really a dentist? And where’s that tramp who used to sit on that bench in the square? You know, the one who mumbled and dribbled and generally made the place look untidy? You
can’t say you never noticed him. Where’s he gone? To another bench, you assume, but have you asked anyone? Have you ever wondered whether he’s all right – if he perhaps needs medical attention, or a decent meal? Where do the gypsies go when the police move them on from the common? You don’t know, do you? You drive past the common every day but it’s not your problem, is it? Someone else is in charge of all that. And there are rules about how people have to be treated so they must be all right, all those missing gypsies and tramps, mustn’t they? The council has procedures. No one beats up or kills people like that – it’s not allowed, is it? They’re all bound to be fine. They’re just not here.
Why are you so angry?
It’s all right for children to be told about Father Christmas, isn’t it? And the tooth fairy. By people they trust? People they look up to? Well, isn’t it?
Yes. I suppose it is.
And then, when the child grows up, it’s all right too for the child to say, ‘Well, I believed in Father Christmas and the tooth fairy absolutely and thought they were marvellous, but then when I got a bit older I realised it wasn’t true and I moved on.’
Yes.
And no one thinks any worse of them for having once been persuaded to believe in a lie. They’re not damned for life, and never allowed to be forgiven, for having once believed the lie. I was chosen to present flowers to Hitler on one occasion. There! I knew you’d be impressed.
Go on.
You know, there is not a single photograph of me as a child. If any were ever taken – and I don’t even know if any were
– they were all destroyed during the war. Then, a couple of years ago there was an article in the
Observer
. Celebrating the life and work of some photographer or other. And there I was. There we were. The Führer bending down to receive the garland, and me – blonde-haired, blue-eyed, straight-backed – beaming up at him.
That must have been a shock.
I went to Rommel’s state funeral and there weren’t many young people invited. It was a great honour. I remember everything about it. It was an incredibly big, sad occasion – a hero’s funeral. And there he was, lying in state with this magnificent eulogy about how he’d died a hero from wounds sustained in action in Africa, and there was a huge wreath from Hitler and everything. And then in 1945 all those secrets and lies were exposed and I found out that Rommel hadn’t been killed in action and that the state funeral had been a total charade. He had turned against Hitler and one of Hitler’s cronies had given him a pistol and said if you shoot yourself and go quietly we won’t shoot your wife and son. And so Rommel shot himself and got a state funeral. Lies. All lies. And I believed them all.
I open my eyes, and for a second or two I see the green and cream spines of the children’s encyclopaedias that I used to open at random and read in bed while waiting for my mother to come home from her woodwork evening class. Martin Luther King; Bedlingham Terrier; Volcano; Pluto; Karl Marx; Dubrovnik. For much of my school career, my general knowledge was legendary. If my school had ever entered a team for
Top of the Form
, with me at the helm, we’d have walked it.
I don’t know any more why it seemed so important to wait up to see my mother when she got home. Perhaps I hoped that the contentment she had discovered through transforming pieces of wood into tables, magazine racks and bookshelves would last the journey home; that when she came up to kiss me goodnight, a vestige of that happiness would somehow permeate into me.
When I could no longer keep my eyes from closing, I’d get out of bed and arrange the encyclopaedias into complex geometrical patterns across the floor, then attempt to traverse the room without touching the carpet. As soon as I heard my mother’s car drawing up in the drive, I’d quickly gather up the books, put them back in alphabetical order and get into bed to wait for her. But I hardly ever managed to stay awake long enough to kiss her or breathe in the smell of teak oil and wood-shavings. I’d fall asleep the moment I heard the front door open.
I look at my watch. I still have a bit of time left. I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and stand up. It feels as though it should be dark outside, but the sun is still shining. I smooth the outline of my body from Catherine’s bedspread, put her things back where I found them, and walk out into the corridor. Judging from the
Thomas the Tank Engine
stickers on the door, the room next to Catherine’s must now be Ben’s. Our neighbours in the Close would probably have called this the guest room, but in our house, where no guests stayed long enough to require a bed, it was very definitely the spare room. My grandmother stayed in it when she came to see us every few months, but I never felt that she really counted as a guest.
My father would telephone his mother every Sunday evening and sometimes, while hovering outside his study, clutching whatever piece of homework I needed him to do for me, I’d listen to the stories he’d tell her. They were stories of a family that sounded quite a bit like ours – the children (who were doing extremely well with their piano and violin lessons, their swimming, schoolwork and drama productions) were even called Max and Julia. But, in the family that my father spoke of, there was very definitely no mother who sometimes disappeared into the night, deaf to the howling and pleading of her frightened children; no father who had cigarette burns in all his grey cardigans and whisky stains on all his ties, whose hand sometimes shook so violently that the golden liquid sloshed on to the carpet; no son who finished his violin practice and then crept into his cupboard to sleep; no daughter who hurled her maths books across her father’s study in rage and frustration.
I remember my grandmother’s departures more than her arrivals. My father would drive her to London to catch the train back to Oxford and Max and I would drift quietly through the house, hoping that our mother would have stopped crying before he returned. We couldn’t understand
why our grandmother upset her so much and so often. We knew that she could say hurtful things: ‘Julia – take off those glasses before I take your photo. You look so ugly,’ was one comment that I remember particularly clearly. We learned to ignore most of her wounding observations, something my mother never did.
I loved my lone visits to my grandmother’s house where, liberated from the responsibility of protecting my mother from her mother-in-law’s critical gaze and razor-sharp tongue, I was free to enjoy the thick goose-down quilts, the breakfasts of soft boiled eggs and tinned sardines mashed up in a tea cup, the smell of fresh coffee, the kilner jars of exotic vegetables in her larder, the sumptuous Turkish carpets, the treasures from her travels throughout the world that adorned the sitting room. And her stories.
In former times
… she would start, her English fluent and precise, her accent thick as goose-fat. If I sat quietly enough, sipping my cocoa and nodding occasionally, she would continue for several hours. These were stories she had told many, many times, and she would repeat them practically word for word, as though reciting a kind of
twentieth-century
epic poem.
Your great–grandfather, he had the first car in the city. He was by then already a very famous man. The first thing I remember him saying to me – it was 1898 – ‘Clara, when you grow up you will be a doctor.’ And so that is what I did. And when he founded the medical school, I was the first person to be enrolled. Nineteen hundred fourteen. We were mostly girls, for the men they were all in the war.
Sometimes we would look through her photograph albums together.
Let me see
, she would say, lifting up the crisp semi-opaque paper that protected the pictures.
Ah, yes, that is your father on a school trip, sitting outside a museum. See that? All the public buildings had flags with swastikas on them at that time.
He was then about nine years old. That must have been about a year before we left Germany. And here is your father sitting on the boxes. November nineteen hundred thirty-six. And then the packers came. We had been told that the import of wine into Turkey was prohibited. When I returned from town that day, I was surprised that not all the linen had fitted into the large laundry box. When I questioned the packers about this, I got the reply – if you ask stupid questions, you will get stupid answers. Imagine how happy we were in Ankara when we found in the lower part of the box not laundry but wine, and moreover the best of the wine. How we drank to the health of those packers.
And you know when we arrived in Turkey, your father’s teacher, Herr Schmidt, sent letters from all his class friends explaining what they were learning in case we couldn’t find a good school in Ankara. He was a very upright man, this Herr Schmidt. A good man among so many bad. Later we heard he had been killed directly at the start of the war.
And this, this is our house in Ankara. You see how primitive that country was then. Shortly after we arrived, our cook, Eva, wrote to us and told us she had decided to come to Turkey to join us. Here she is, standing in our kitchen. Look how terribly fat she is! Just like a fat pig. And then we discovered that your father had written to her saying we were all being looked after badly and not eating well, so she must come. For cooking was not something I did in former times. I had far too many more important things to do than cook. So Eva came and your father would spend hours with her in the kitchen, learning how to cook vegetables we had never seen before, like aubergines and courgettes. He was very happy at that time, your father. He loved to cook. And he loved Eva. And Eva, she adored him too. But she did not like the Turks. To her they were all dirty and uneducated and she didn’t care that we had so many very important Turks visiting us who were so very obviously not dirty or uneducated. And Eva,
she was allowed to go for coffee at the German embassy on Sunday afternoons where the ambassador’s daughter gave coffee parties for all the employees of German families. But then, one day, Eva was told that she could no longer go to those coffee parties if she continued to work for us and was told that people might make difficulties for her if she wanted to return to Germany. Therefore we decided to send her back. She did not want to go, but we insisted. She travelled back to Germany on a freighter ship and this was the greatest experience of her life. After her came Miss Krug, supposedly from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, who turned out to be a Nazi spy and who reported every German who came to our house – and at that time we still had many German friends who were not Nazis – to the Blockwart who had been appointed by the Nazis for our part of the city to keep an eye on the German expatriates. We dismissed her immediately when we found out. Then we had a Turkish servant, Cemil, who had already been trained very well by the Zuckmeyers. He became a perfect cook. For large parties, which we very often gave, he would cook and dish up and serve, and he never broke a single piece of my Meissen china. Unfortunately, after we left, he died, like all his family, of tuberculosis. The Fellners, who had inherited him from us, were very disappointed to lose such a cook. Here, and this is our country house in Bavaria. And that is our peasant, Hans, who worked in the garden.
And there is your father with his private tutor, Frau Mehmet. She was a most marvellous teacher – a German married to a Turk. But then in 1939 we decided to send your father to England so that he could attend a really good school there. For he was such a very clever boy and the schools in Turkey were not so good at that time.
But we had not expected that it would be nearly seven years before we would see him again.
‘What, dear?’ said my father when I asked him to tell me about his time at boarding school. And then he changed the subject. I never even found out the name of his school.
In my early teens, I went through a brief period of steaming open my parents’ letters. I think we must have been shown how to do it on
Blue
Peter
. Sadly we weren’t told how to re-seal them, but I don’t think my parents ever suspected me of tampering with their post. Mostly the contents of their envelopes were pretty dull – bills, advertisements, samples from drug companies. Sometimes there would be letters to my father from grateful patients, often containing childish drawings that he would leave on his desk for a day or two propped up against his reading lamp before throwing them in the bin.
Then, one Saturday morning when I came down to pick up the post, hoping for a letter from my good-looking Mexican pen-friend, I found an airmail envelope with a Spanish stamp on it, addressed to my father. I turned it over. There was an address – just a PO Box and a Spanish city – on the back of the envelope. There was no sign of anyone else at home so I took it to the kitchen, held it over the boiling kettle and opened it very carefully. Inside were several small sheets of flimsy blue stationery, covered in neat italic writing in black ink.
Curious, I carried the letter up to my bedroom and lay on the bed. The letter started without a salutation, as though, unable to decide how to address my father, the writer had decided not to call him
Dear
anything.
Last month I was back in England for medical treatment – I run a property business in southern Spain – and found myself watching a documentary about surgeons at a London teaching hospital carrying out some ground-breaking new surgical technique. This is not something I would do under normal
circumstances, but since being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus I have had a morbid curiosity about all things medical. When one of the surgeons spoke, the voice was somehow familiar, though all I could see was a pair of eyes peering at the bloody mess on the operating table. Then the narrator mentioned you by name and I immediately knew exactly who it was behind the green mask.
You may remember me – in fact, I fear that there is little chance you could have forgotten me. Though I doubt you ever knew my Christian name. What we did to you during those years at Massingham was, and is, not condonable. All I can say in my – in our – defence is that it was poor timing. Those war years were a bad time to be a Jew with a German accent at a second-rate Methodist public boarding school in rural Suffolk. If you had excelled at rugby or fives rather than biology and chemistry, if you had challenged us, if you had resisted, maybe there would have been some hope for you. Maybe every day wouldn’t have been such torture. But I doubt it. We were a cruel lot. Someone should have noticed what was going on and put a stop to it, but the masters were little better than we were. There was just Mr Creighton, but we soon got rid of him. A few whispers in the right ears and he was gone. I doubt he ever got another teaching position. He was a good, kind, man who tried to do the right thing and deserved better than an ignominious dismissal.
That you have clearly done so well and been so successful in your chosen career is a source of great pleasure and, dare I say it, relief. After that documentary, I made some discreet enquiries and learned that you are married with children. That, too, gives me pleasure. But it does not give me absolution – only you can do that. I do not deserve it, but I ask for
your forgiveness. It is the pathetic plea of a dying man.
I live in hope of hearing from you.
Yours,
Eric Long
I read the letter again and again, committing the terrible words to memory. My hands shook as I folded the sheets of paper and pushed them back into the envelope. The stamp was curling up at the edges. I pressed hard on to the corners. I could feel my pulse pounding in my thumb. I got out my tub of almond-smelling glue and pasted the envelope shut. Then I went downstairs and slid it between two ordinary-looking brown envelopes on my father’s desk.
That evening, when I went into his study with my algebra homework, I saw the blue pages lying on the desk. He was holding the envelope in his hand, just staring at it.
‘That’s a nice stamp,’ I said as casually as I was able to. ‘Where’s it from?’
‘Spain, I think.’
‘Can I have it for school? We collect them for guide dogs.’
‘I don’t think it’ll be much good for that. It’s rather ragged at the edges.’
‘Who do you know in Spain?’
‘No one.’
‘So who’s it from, then?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Who’s it from?’
‘Just someone I was at school with.’
‘Who lives in Spain now?’
‘Seemingly.’
‘That’s nice.’ I wondered if my father could hear my voice shaking. ‘Are you going to write back?’
Without saying anything, my father put down the envelope, collected up the sheets of notepaper, and slowly tore them into tiny pieces. He did the same to the envelope.
Then he leant over towards his waste-paper bin, held his hand high above it, and let the fragments whirl and eddy into the depths.