A House on the Rhine

by Frances Faviell

I chose Berlin. When all the other towns had been allotted the ball was set in motion. Breathless we all hung over it. It came very slowly to rest on Berlin.

  “You’ve won! You’ve won!” the children screamed joyously.

  “Try again?” asked the woman smilingly. “Or will you choose your prize first? Here’s your prize voucher.”

  “We’ll all try again!” I said.

  This time Barbel won on Leipzig. After that Gela on Brandenburg. All of us had vouchers for prizes except little Tomas.

  “They are from the East?” asked the woman. When I nodded, she said, “One can tell at once. This Oktoberfest is a special one to help the East. Many of the shopkeepers and large firms have given goods, hoping that the East Germans will win them.” She lowered her voice: “And I, for one, see that they do. Come, little Tomas, here’s a free try for you. What town will you have?”

  The child looked long and carefully. “Hamburg,” he said firmly.

  I lifted Tomas up to watch the ball. He wore a little green Bavarian hat of felt with a feather in it. His jacket was green with brass buttons. The woman looked at me and then at him. The ball stopped right on Hamburg.

  “You’ve won! You’ve won!” screamed his sisters delightedly. “Now we’ve all got a prize.”

  When it came to choosing the prizes I was astonished at the children’s choice. Ignoring firmly the boxes of chocolates held out to them they asked anxiously if the vouchers included groceries. They chose tins of milk, packets of margarine and butter and tins of meat. I asked what I could send their mother with my voucher, suggesting cigarettes or chocolate.

  They looked at me with large, serious eyes. “Oh, no. That would be a terrible waste. We need food – not luxuries.”

  “Well,” I said, “what shall it be, then?”

  “Sardines! Sardines!” shouted Tomas. “That’s what Daddy wants. He’s got a bad cough and needs oil.”

  We got three tins of sardines and Tomas was overjoyed. The kind woman offered to look after the things for us while we tried our luck elsewhere and visited some of the animals.

  We then collected our prizes and repaired to one of the many open air cafes for some refreshment. While we were sitting sipping raspberry juice and eating hot frankenfurters I asked the children if they would have any trouble in getting the food back through the East-West check-point. They showed me the labels on every article stating that the commodity was a prize won in the Oktoberfest.

  “See? We’ll be allowed most of these – not all. It’s a special day! We got passes for it. The guards may give us another test in Russian, it’s compulsory in our schools!” said Gela. “But it won’t be difficult. They’ll ask is the names of all the food in Russian – if we know the words they’ll let us keep some of them.”

  “And do you know them?” I asked.

  They began reciting the Russian words for each thing in their high childish voices and I saw several people at neighbouring tables looking amused. They knew them all – Tomas was made to repeat each one after his sisters. But when they came to the most important prize – the sardines – they couldn’t think of the Russian word for sardines. And neither could I!

  We sat there under the golden trees whose leaves were dropping on to the check tablecloth. We thought and thought – but none of us could remember it. Despair was in the children’s faces. It was hard to realise that the loss of the sardines would be a major tragedy for them – but it would be. I hadn’t a dictionary with me – who would have thought that I would need it? “What is it?” cried Barbel. “I know it quite well – but I can’t think of it.”

  Their faces were so gloomy that I was in despair.

  “Go and have a ride on the auto-racer!” I suggested. “Perhaps if I sit quietly I’ll think of it.”

  Tomas and Gela raced off joyfully but Barbel stayed with me. Her high round forehead was wrinkled with anxiety, and I hated to see such a look of apprehension and worry on so young a face.

  “Try to think of it, please, Tante Frances. If Tomas makes one of his scenes at the check-barrier it’ll be awful!”

  It was almost time to take them to the station. I had promised to put them on a certain train. There was no time to go hunting for a dictionary.

  “What was the word? What is the Russian for sardine?” I groaned aloud.

  At the next table a rather ugly, big man with high cheek-bones and attractive humorous eyes had been watching us for some time. He was sipping a glass of beer. Finishing it now, he stood up, took the bill from the waiter and after paying it took a pencil from his pocket and wrote something on the back of the bill.

  He smiled to himself as he did so. As he passed our table he brushed heavily against me, then excused himself in German.

  I looked after him in surprise. It seemed that he had bumped into me purposely. He wasn’t a German, I knew that from his accent.

  “What a clumsy man!” I said. “I’ve seen him somewhere before,” said Barbel in a puzzled way. “Look Tante Frances, he’s left a piece of paper on your plate!”

  It was the bill for his beer, and on the back he had drawn in pencil a sardine. Its eye was half-closed in a deliberate wink! Above the fish he had written the word sardine in Russian letters.

  I was a little worried, although Barbel cried joyfully. “Of course! Of course! It’s almost exactly the same as in German!”

  Had he been a Russian? He had been wearing civilian clothes, but he had an air of authority, even importance. Shortly afterwards I saw the children off.

  A week later I got a letter from Barbel. It had been opened by the censor but nothing had been deleted. After thanking me for the afternoon, and sending her love to my young son who was in England, she went on: “We got all our things through the check-barrier! Weren’t we lucky? Not many people got all their food through – but we did. The guards made us tell them the names of everything in Russian. One of them, a big man, seemed to know all about us and our afternoon at the zoo. He kept on teasing Tomas, saying that he knew there were Russian sardines hidden under his hat!

  “He and all the other guards kept on laughing as if at some great joke and asking us: “What is the Russian for sardine?” I thought I had seen the big man somewhere before – he wasn’t at the check point when we passed through earlier in the afternoon. I’ve seen him somewhere besides at the barrier – but I just can’t remember where.”

  Afterword

  I THINK I was about 11 when I realised my mother was becoming a writer as well as being a painter. I was home from my English boarding school for the summer holidays when my father suggested that I should not disturb my mother in the mornings as she would be working. … At the time I was upset as my mother had never seemed to worry if I disturbed her.

  My mother was born and grew up in Plymouth, Devon. She was the fourth of five surviving children born to Anglo Scottish parents. Named Olive, she showed her innate independence at an early age by insisting she be called Olivia .She showed early talent as an artist and in her late teens won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, then still under the direction of Henry Tonks. Her tutor, and later good friend, at the school was the painter Leon Underwood.

  In 1930 she married her first husband, a Hungarian academic, whose work took him to first Holland and then India. But they separated while there (and later divorced). She then stayed on for three months in the Ashram of the great Indian thinker and writer Rabindranath Tagore. Travelling on her own, painting and sketching, she visited other parts of India including Assam and for a few weeks lived with the Nagas, a primitive indigenous people in northeast India .On her way back to England she travelled via Japan and then China – still painting and sketching – until she had to flee Shanghai when the Japanese invaded.

  On her return to England she lived in Chelsea, then a haven for artists, and earned her living as a portrait painter. She met my father, who had recently resigned from the Indian Civil Service, in 1939, and they were married in 1940 after he had joined the Ministry of Inform
ation. Bombed out during the Blitz, as portrayed in her last book, A Chelsea Concerto, they spent the rest of the war, after I was born, in the Home Counties before returning to Chelsea in 1945.

  When the war ended my father was recruited to the Control Commission of Germany and became a high ranking official in the British administration, first in Berlin, negotiating with the others of the four powers on the organisation of the city, later in the British zone of West Germany. We joined him in Berlin in early 1946 and it was here that my mother encountered the Altmann family. It was her experiences with them that inspired her to start writing her first book, The Dancing Bear, which movingly describes Berlin in defeat through the eyes of the defeated as well as the victors.

  Each of her books, whether non-fiction or fiction, were inspired by an episode in her own life. By 1951 we had moved to Cologne and it was here that her second book, the novel A House on the Rhine, was conceived, based around migrant families (from the east of Germany) she had met and helped. Subsequently, she published another novel, Thalia, based on her own experience in France before the War when she was acting as a chaperone to a young teenager for the summer. Her final novel The Fledgeling, about a National Service deserter, was also based on an actual incident.

  My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1956 though I did not know at the time. At first radiotherapy seemed to have arrested the disease. But then two years later, it reappeared. She fought the disease with courage and humour, exhibiting the same clear sightedness with which she had viewed life around her as a painter and a writer. She died just after A Chelsea Concerto was published, in 1959.

  In her books as in her life, my mother had an openness to and compassion for others and, when she saw an injustice or need, would not be thwarted by authority of any kind in getting something done. But as she always pursued her causes with charm as well as firmness, few could deny her requests for long.

  John Richard Parker, 2016

  About The Author

  FRANCES FAVIELL (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940.

  She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists’ community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959).

  After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.

  FURROWED MIDDLEBROW

  FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM4. A Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK

  Frances Faviell

  Thalia

  ‘You are a virgin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How dull! What’s the use of being a woman if you’re a virgin?’

  ‘One has to begin sometime,’ I agreed.

  Recovering from an illness, Rachel, an 18-year-old art student at the Slade in London, is advised to spend a year in a warm climate. She agrees to go to France to act as companion to Cynthia, a delicate, temperamental woman whose husband is in India, and her two children, troubled 15-year-old Thalia and spoiled young Claude. Thalia quickly becomes devoted to Rachel, but their friendship is strained by Rachel’s romance with the son of a well-to-do Breton family.

  Though it’s the awkward, emotional Thalia who lends the novel its title, it’s Rachel on whom the novel centers, poignantly telling the tale of her sad first love, her dawning awareness of the vagaries and dishonesties of social life, and the tragedy she is powerless to prevent.

  Set in Brittany in the mid-1930s, with an excursion to the cafés and artists’ studios of Montparnasse, Thalia is a dramatic and poignant tale by the author of A Chelsea Concerto. It includes an afterword by the author’s son John Parker.

  ‘Mrs. Faviell … writes with grace and sensibility; this young, new world of first experiences is brought back and set down with a fresh touch, and, while shadowed by tragedy, it is eminently pleasant to follow.’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘She writes with a sharpness of outline which would not shame Simenon.’ J.W. Lambert, Sunday Times

  FM7

  Thalia – CHAPTER I

  WHEN the car was approaching the docks I looked at my aunt and it seemed to me that this—a profile—was all we ever knew of anyone. We can never know all the aspects but merely those which are shown to us. Was she as lonely as I was? She appeared suddenly such a small person and one at whom I had never really looked.

  Taking a packet from her handbag she said crisply, ‘This is for emergencies. You never know in a foreign country. I remember being in France when we went off the Gold Standard. It was chaotic! Now where are you going to keep this? You lose everything.’ Her voice and manner were matter-of-fact, devoid of any feeling, but to my own astonishment I was flooded with some violent emotion and couldn’t speak.

  She watched me struggling with tears. ‘There are five-pound notes in this packet, Rachel. Here’s the address of my London bank. They’ll always know where I am. You can write to me at Cairo, Alexandria, and Luxor. A letter to Port Said should reach me on the journey.’

  I took the packet reluctantly. My aunt never gave anything graciously. Perhaps that was why I found it difficult to feel gratitude. ‘You’re too good to me. I don’t deserve it.’ She looked surprised and gratified. ‘No, I don’t think you do. But it would be a poor world if we only got what we deserved.’

  I said I was sorry—sorry about everything.

  ‘If you were really sorry you’d have apologized and come with us to Egypt.’

  Her acid tone dried my tears, scorching them as if with a hot wind. Why couldn’t she see that it was possible to be sorry without the formality of expressing it all in speech? That there were degrees in remorse I had already learned.

  I watched her figure recede as the boat drew away from the quay. She didn’t look back once, and for one split second the strangest feeling of sudden terror overwhelmed me; then I thrust it away, and went up on to the top deck where I sat up in the bows on a coil of rope. The boat was the St. Briac. It was a fine clear night and sheltered here from the wind. A large party of hikers were discussing plans. The craze for walking about with a rucksack, clad in the strangest if most utilitarian of garments, had spread from Germany. The men in this party wore shorts—the girls shorts or slacks. A number of large young women were leaning over the rails, their rear views presenting a solid challenge. I reflected that whereas nude their buttocks could have been beautiful, compressed thus into tight material they were hideous.

  A tall, attractive man who had been looking at me for some time suddenly threw away his cigarette and c
ame over to me. ‘Mind if I sit down there too? Those enthusiasts are making me footsore with their indefatigable journeys on their maps.’

  I said I didn’t mind.

  ‘You’re alone, aren’t you?’ he went on. ‘I saw you being seen off.’

  It was as light as day but with the milky elusiveness of moonlight. I saw that his hair, which I had thought dark, was red, and that the backs of his hands were covered with fine red hairs. I thought it a pity—I don’t like red-haired men.

  ‘Cigarette?’

  I said I didn’t smoke. After the usual exchange of platitudes on the night and the stars he asked me bluntly where I was going. He was clever at putting me quickly at ease, and I began telling him of the recent illness which had interrupted my art training at the Slade and which necessitated my being out of London for the forthcoming winter.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought Brittany would be exactly the place for you,’ he said, when I told him I was to spend the winter in Dinard. ‘You should be going with the lady who saw you off. I heard her talking to you about Egypt.’

  And then I began telling him about the disastrous portrait of our vicar, the Reverend Cookson-Cander. I told him how I hadn’t wanted to do it but that my aunt had insisted—of how I disliked the pompous little man—and of how the painting in spite of my efforts grew with each sitting more and more like a disagreeable egg. I could still feel the smart of the furious criticism which had been hurled at me by the admiring ladies of the ‘Friends of the Past’ circle who had commissioned the portrait from me.

  I could still hear my aunt’s ‘It’s outrageous!’ when I had reluctantly pulled the coverings off the canvas and displayed it in the scented luxury of her crowded drawing-room.

  My companion was much amused at my description of my sitter.

  ‘I gather that you didn’t like him?’ he said laughing.