Escape

by Barbie Probert-Wright

  At this time I was seeing Ingo, my first and only German boyfriend. He was two years younger than me, so I always feared he might meet a girl of his own age, because when you are that young, two years is a big gap. We had remained close all the time I was away in Geneva. We were deeply in love, but we never made love: in those days girls saved themselves for marriage and Ingo was too much of a gentleman ever to try to compromise me. I was remarkably innocent. Once, when I was at a sports day, I was watching a long-distance race and the boy who came first had an erection, which showed in his running shorts. I had no idea what it was and was sure there was something seriously wrong with him. I worried about it for a few days, then mentioned it to Eva. She laughed and explained it all to me, that it was caused by excitement and would soon go away. When she told me the purpose of erections I was shocked: until then I had thought you got pregnant from French kissing.

  I would have gone to the ends of the earth for Ingo, who was training to be an engineer. He was very good-looking and reminded me of the soldier who rescued me when I rolled down the hill. He had a wonderful way of explaining things, whether they were technical, mechanical or philosophical. I still have all his letters and all the presents he ever gave me. I treasure a red leather folder for keeping letters in and a brown leather vanity case, as well as the books he gave me. We went on holidays together with my sister and her family, and his mother, a widow, and his sister Heide. Like me, he was very family orientated.

  After much heart-searching, Ingo and I decided we should try being apart for a while to make up our minds about each other. We ended up being separated for two years and, sadly for me, he did meet someone else. I was heartbroken, but felt that we had obviously done the right thing. That’s when I decided that I wanted to leave Hamburg and make a completely fresh start.

  In my job it wasn’t difficult to arrange. I was transferred to Frankfurt and then offered a job in San Francisco. I needed to arrange a US visa and my cousin Ulrich, who was by then living in the States, sponsored me. In the meantime I was sent on a temporary posting to London and while there I was offered a permanent place in England with Lufthansa. I had to choose between America and England, which was not easy, as I was really drawn to both countries. My mother always joked that the stork put me in the wrong nest and that I should have been born in England or America. I chose London, simply because it was so much nearer for visiting my family, and my father was not well.

  Before I left Germany, my mother gave me a leather-bound notebook. I took my lead from Eva and began to write down poems, quotations, extracts from books I was reading, as well as keeping pressed flowers and even a four-leafed clover in there. The very first thing I wrote was from a seventeenth-century writer, John Amos Comenius, and I chose it because I was still so close to the war and its aftermath:

  Why should we look down on other races? We are all human beings, of one world and of one blood. To hate a person just because he was born somewhere else, just because he speaks a different language, just because he thinks about things in a different way, does not make sense. We should get away from that. We are all people, nobody is perfect, and we all need help.

  I believed then, and I believe now, that if everyone kept this in their heart, the world would be a better place. My own heart was still full of my love for Ingo and I wrote a sad poem about our separation. It flows a little better in German but I include the English translation here, as it captures so much of how I felt at the time:

  My love for you is always yours,

  It will engulf all your uncertainties,

  It will protect you always, lovingly and magnificently,

  Its strength and might are without boundaries,

  From all your troubles and worries you can flee into its solitude.

  My thoughts are all around you,

  Your heart will find its rest,

  Lovingly, I melt myself into you.

  In London, I became resigned to losing Ingo and was determined to make the best of my new life. I wrote, ‘Before you go to bed, give your troubles to God. He will be up all night anyway.’

  I did a variety of jobs for Lufthansa in London, sharing a flat in Eaton Square with two girlfriends, close enough for me to be able to walk to the airline offices in Old Bond Street. Before long I met Michael, who worked for Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS). He was the epitome of an Englishman: he wore a camel coat, played cricket at weekends and socialised at his cricket club. We quickly fell in love, and within seven months we were engaged and married four months after that. We were married in a register office and went to Hamburg to have the wedding blessed at the Hammer Church, the Dreifaltigkeitskirche. The original building, where I was christened, had been destroyed in the bombing and for a few years we used a wooden temporary church, which was where I was confirmed and where Eva was married in 1947. I sang in the choir there for many years. By the time I married, on 16 March 1963 at the age of twenty-five, a splendid new church had been built.

  I loved setting up my own first home. I would have done it anywhere, but England already felt like home to me and it was near enough to Germany for me to see my family, so I didn’t regret living in another country. I kept in close touch with them, especially Mutti and Eva – we often wrote, talked and visited each other.

  A year after my wedding I had my first child, Michael, who was born on 21 March 1964. Even after I got married, I was still remarkably naive compared with girls today. Just before my wedding, my mother gave me a little gadget that looked like an egg timer. I asked her what it was for and she said that I should put into it the dates of my periods, and it would tell me when it was safe to make love. It failed to work.

  I didn’t mind getting pregnant so soon, as I had always believed that I wanted to have children, build a home and live happily ever after – all the things that Eva yearned for so wistfully in her wartime diary.

  While I was pregnant with Michael, I went to an antenatal clinic and the doctor asked me if I had ever had German measles.

  ‘Well, I have had measles and I was in Germany – does that make them German measles?’ I asked, which made him laugh.

  Michael was a beautiful baby. I know all mothers say that, but it really was true in his case. I gave up work to look after him, and every summer my mother and father would come across, and my father would stay with me for three months until Mutti came back again to take him home. He had had seven strokes and was partially paralysed, so I looked after him to give her a break. Although he spoke no English, he enjoyed his trips. My husband got on well with him despite the language barrier: they both enjoyed a flutter on racehorses, which gave them a lingua franca.

  My baby Meiki (I always called Michael ‘Meiki’) helped me ‘sting’ my father for a large amount of money. I was changing a nappy and, emulating what Eva did with her babies, even though he was only three months old I held him over the potty before I put the clean nappy on. Father laughed and said I’d be very lucky if he did anything – and added that he would give me £10 if Meiki managed to do both things. To my great surprise, Meiki promptly did. I told him for years afterwards that he started earning money at three months old, and good money because £10 then was worth more than £100 today. The following day I asked my father if he wanted to bet again, but he said no, emphatically.

  My daughter Babette was born on 1 July 1966. I really concentrated on keeping her in the womb because I was determined she would not be born in June, as that would have meant the last three digits of her date of birth were 666 and someone had told me they were the devil’s numbers. She was born in the early hours of the morning, so I only just made it. She weighed a whole pound less than Meiki and looked scrawny, like a little skinned rabbit. When he first saw her my husband said, ‘That can’t be my baby,’ but I had to tell him she was. Aunt Hilda said the nicest thing: she said Babette looked like ‘an Oriental princess’. She has certainly grown up to be a real stunner. Although they were born in different years, she shared her birthday with Princess Di
ana and people have always commented on how like Diana she looks.

  I didn’t work for a few years while the children were small and it was a very happy time. We lived first in London, then bought a house in Walton-on-Thames and were surprised to find that our garden backed on to that of two friends of ours, Brian and Maureen, who used to live next door to us in London. A hole was quickly made in the fence so that both families (they had two daughters, Priscilla and Alexandra, who are my god-daughters) could move between the gardens with ease. Then, in 1968, both families bought four-bedroomed detached houses in East Molesey, this time opposite each other, in an ideal location, a cul-de-sac carved out of the glorious parkland belonging to the Charter Bank. It was a safe and happy environment for the children, and once again I was living in a park.

  I always felt very at home in England. There was no real anti-German feeling that I was aware of, although I remember an incident when Meiki was playing in the garden with one of his friends. They kept kicking their football into the middle of a new flower bed I was trying to establish, with tender young plants. I opened the bedroom window and shouted to Meiki to be more careful where they kicked the ball. I spoke to him in German – he grew up fluent in it. Babette understands it but doesn’t really speak it very much. Meiki’s friend looked at me in astonishment, not understanding anything I was saying. Meiki said to him, ‘It’s all right, my mother is German. But she’s quite nice really.’

  Another time he was playing with his toy soldiers and I walked into the room just as he was muttering to himself about shooting all the Germans. He caught sight of me and hastily changed it to ‘Japanese’.

  When the children were both at school, I applied to the German Food Centre in Knightsbridge and was taken on as a home economist. It was a great job because I could work my hours around the children. My boss knew that if he gave me something to do, it would get done well. I had a very good friend, Edith, the wife of one of my husband’s colleagues who was godmother to both Meiki and Babette. She was always happy to step in to look after them if I had to be away overnight. Edith only lived 600 yards from us, so it worked out very well. She is still a good friend and stays with us weekly.

  At this time I also met one of my dearest friends, Maria, who is Austrian, and is like a sister to me. She, too, was married to an Englishman and we clicked as soon as we met. We have been great friends for thirty-five years and now she lives two roads away from us. I am very good at keeping and nurturing my friendships, and I sometimes wonder whether it is because, when Eva and I were on our long march, we met people who became close for a short time and then we never saw or heard from them again. That was what war was like and perhaps that is why I value my solid, long-standing relationships now.

  I worked for the German Food Centre until it closed down in 1988 and it was a fascinating time. My job was to organise big promotions, cooking demonstrations, stands at fairs, give lectures on German food and drink, set up delicatessens in big stores and so on. I and the other girls always dressed in German national dress. I met lots of celebrities. I met Prince Charles at the Royal Show at Kenilworth where he was touring all the stands. I was the supervisor and had to show him the German stands. When he reached us he said he could not sample any beer or wine, as he had been having too many alcoholic tipples at the other stands. Of course, Germany is famous for its wine and beer, and I’d been expecting to offer him some to taste. So I said, ‘Then you must have some of our German natural fruit juice. It refreshes the parts that even Heineken beer can’t reach.’

  There was a famous advertising campaign for Heineken running at the time, which said it ‘refreshed the parts other beers can’t reach’, so Prince Charles laughed and said he would tell my little joke to his wife, Princess Diana. For two or three days afterwards I was haunted by journalists asking what I had said to make the Prince laugh, but I never told them.

  I was married to my first husband for sixteen years, then we split up and divorced. He subsequently remarried, but we managed to remain on good terms and, sadly, he died in November 1997.

  The catalyst that gave me the strength to end an unhappy marriage was meeting Ray, who five years later became my second husband. Ray was also married when we met, with four young sons, Stephen, David, Andrew and Matthew, so it was a traumatic time for all of us, but everything worked out well.

  He was born in the Forest of Dean seventeen months after I was born in Hamburg (I refer to him as my toyboy). He was one of nine children and his mother, a widow, brought them all up in a two-bedroomed cottage. The whole family was musical, all his brothers and sisters sing, and some of them play musical instruments. His two older brothers used to sing at local concerts and at big family parties, and they took Ray along as a mascot. The first time he sang in public he was only five or six years old, and he insisted on turning his back to the audience because he didn’t want to look at them.

  He learned to play the cornet and the trumpet in a local brass band. After he left school he worked in a sawmill, which he hated, and later trained as a manager at the Co-op. Like all young men in those days, he was called up to do two years’ national service. He was originally in the army catering corps, but when he became a regular soldier and they realised he had musical ability, he transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps, which later became the Royal Corps of Transport Band. After that, he joined the band of the Welsh Guards. Although he played the trumpet and cornet, his main instrument was his voice, so he was the official vocalist for the band – we have many records on which the bands are featured.

  Ray was in the army when we met. As well as my career with the German Food Centre, I also did private catering and I got to know the bands who provided entertainment at these functions as I was sometimes asked to co-ordinate the music as well as the food. Ray played in his spare time with a group of his fellow army bandsmen in a band called the New Clubmen (an earlier band had been the Clubmen). He was the vocalist and compère.

  I was putting on a function for the German Food Centre and we needed a German oompah band to play at it, so I asked Ray if he and his friends would do it, which they did, very well. From then on we worked together many times, doing promotions for BMW cars and motorbikes, Mercedes Benz, Holsten lager, Löwenbräu beer and so on.

  I told him he should set up his own band, which he did, calling it the Rupert Hentzau Bier Band, the name taken from the main character in The Prisoner of Zenda. They didn’t only play German music: there was always a medley of English favourites like ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’, so that everyone could join in the singing if they wanted to.

  Gradually our feelings for each other developed and eventually we knew we had to be together. There were painful times as our two families changed and reassembled, but after five years together we married in 1984. Ray was not happy living in my old family home, so we bought a beautiful cottage at Hinchley Wood. My ex-husband and Ray got on well, and when he came to pick up the children they would play table tennis tournaments with them in the garden.

  My son Michael, and one of Ray’s sons, David, both had music lessons in drumming from a friend of Ray’s from the Welsh Guards band.

  Ray and I worked very hard: at the start, he had his army commitments, and spent his evenings and weekends with his band. I used to do the private catering at the same events, as well as my job. Sundays were our only free time, when we could be together and relax. I once said to Ray, ‘I love Sundays.’

  He replied, very romantically, ‘With you, every day is Sunday.’

  Then, even more romantically, he went to the piano and composed a piece of music for me, called ‘Every Day is Sunday’, which he gave me on our anniversary instead of a card. He plays it to me often. He loves sitting at the piano, playing and singing, and I love listening to him.

  He left the army in 1981, a few months after playing for Prince Charles as he came out of Buckingham Palace on his way to St Paul’s Cathedral to marry Princess Diana. He has always said how
relieved he was to be playing at the beginning of that day, because afterwards he and the others could take off their dress uniforms and relax, whereas other bands had to wait until the end of the ceremony to perform.

  After twenty-three and a half years’ service, Ray left the army and became the building superintendent for an office block in Piccadilly, which gave us the use of a flat right in the heart of London. We had our family commitments, but we were still able to spend time there. By now the children were teenagers and loved to be able to stay in central London. It was a happy, busy life.

  22

  Michael

  Now I must come to the saddest and most difficult part of my story. My beautiful son Michael, Meiki to me, Mick to his friends, died in 1998 from cancer. He was only thirty-four and at that time he was living in America, in a beautiful part of New Hampshire, happily married and with everything to look forward to.

  After school Meiki followed me and his father into the airline business, working at Heathrow for Scandinavian Airline Systems. Not long after he started he began e-mailing and phoning a female colleague called Joanie out in New England. Before long they were exchanging photographs and eventually, about twelve months later, Joanie took the initiative and asked Meiki what he was doing for his summer holidays, as she had to go to her best friend Debs’s wedding in Cape Cod and she needed an escort.

  He flew out to the States for two weeks and some time later she flew over here and met us, and it was clear they were really smitten with each other. Before long, they were flying backwards and forwards every month, so they decided they needed to be together. Joanie and Meiki took a year out to travel all over the world, meeting their extended families, before they eventually decided to settle back in the States.

  It was a wrench when Meiki left England to live so far away, but I saw how happy he was with Joanie and knew that they had to be together no matter what. Besides, as Meiki pointed out, it was easy enough to take a plane over to see him.