Jigsaw

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.

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.