Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  But I must not be unfair. No one who has not been in such a position themselves can judge parents for their reactions to the intolerable pressures placed on them by a poisonous dictatorship. Perhaps, if we had stayed together, I would remember my parents with more affection. The fact that we did not was not their fault. On the contrary, it reflected their concern for our well-being.

  The Kindertransport trains had been running for about six months when the decision was taken to send us away. Time and funds were running out. But it was not a simple matter. Forms had to be filled in, documents stamped, permits queued for at inconvenient times, guarantees provided. We spent several weeks in a children’s home - of which I remember little beyond the fact that it had a large indoor swing on one of the landings - while my mother devoted herself full-time to grappling with the obstacles of Nazi and British bureaucracy.

  Meanwhile, there was the scarcely less urgent problem to be addressed of finding a way for my parents to escape too - and, if possible, for the family to be reunited. The difficulty was identifying a place that would accept us. The Refugee Children’s Movement had found Renate and me a foster family in England who were prepared to guarantee, with £50 of their own money, that we would not be a burden on the state. But with millions of would-be refugees seeking safe havens from Nazi Europe, and with the Nazis making it all but impossible for them to take any wealth with them, most adults had no choice but to remain where they were, irrespective of the dangers they faced.

  Renate and I left Vienna eight weeks before the outbreak of war. A few weeks earlier, my father had escaped over the mountains to Switzerland on foot, like the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music. The Gestapo had visited our house a few days earlier, and he must have realised that he was in imminent danger of arrest; but I think the idea may also have been that, with him gone, my mother could be freed from the handicap of being considered Jewish or anti-Nazi.

  If so, it was a good strategy. Unlike most of the parents who sent their children away on the Kindertransport, mine survived. While Renate and I were struggling to find our feet in our strange new world, our parents both managed their own desperate journeys to England. My father got there before us - I have a strange memory that he actually appeared for a few moments while we were being collected from Liverpool Street - but was soon interned as an enemy alien and in due course transported to Australia, where he remained until 1941, subsequently joining the Pioneer Corps in the UK and, much later, becoming attached to the US army in Germany.

  My mother was able to escape by train - apparently on the basis that she was an ordinary Austrian with ordinary travelling rights. She was more inclined than my father to fit in, sometimes even wearing a swastika to avoid drawing attention to herself. None the less, she had no intention of staying behind without her family, and, when she fled, she had to leave behind everything that she possessed. When she eventually reached England she was penniless, homeless, jobless and stateless. It would be a long time before we heard from her again.

  Meanwhile, in a small village in the English Midlands, Renate and I were already beginning to forget the wide avenues of the central European cities which had hitherto formed the backdrop to our world. Instead, we were absorbing the unfamiliar rhythms of a new culture and a new language - and, in effect, a whole new life.

  Those early pre-English days now seem almost unreal to me, as if they belonged to someone else’s memories. As an adult, on at least one occasion, I have given my date of birth on an official form as July 1939: an entirely subconscious slip with an obvious explanation.

  Looking back today, from the other end of a life that has been exceptionally rich in nearly every sense, I can see that most of my subsequent achievements can be traced back to that unnatural separation. It marked the beginning of a narrative far more interesting than the one that had originally been scripted for me. But it also taught me, with the ending of my first life, a profound lesson: that few things in life are as solid as they seem; that tomorrow will not always resemble today; and that wholesale change, though often terrifying, is not necessarily synonymous with catastrophe.

  3: England, My England

  MY NEW LIFE in England began badly. Our foster parents, Guy and Ruby Smith, had no experience of child-raising and seemed to be as taken aback as we were by the gulf between our cultures. They were a middle-aged, conventional couple, set in their ways, who had read about our plight in a local newspaper. “Two sisters,” the advertisement had said, under pictures of Renate and me, “brought up in a nice family. Will somebody give them a home?” You can imagine the horrified doubts they must have harboured during their first days as custodians of the real, flesh-and-blood sisters in question: two strange, bewildered children, one of whom - Renate - was becoming withdrawn and sullen while the other - me - scarcely stopped crying.

  This formal portrait of Renate and I was done immediately prior to our leaving Vienna on a Kindertransport.

  The Smiths lived in the West Midlands, in a village called Little Aston, now a prosperous suburb of Sutton Coldfield but in those days quite modest and rural. Their home, called Northways, was an unremarkable detached house, solid and relatively new - but also barer and colder than anything we were used to. There had obviously never been children in it.

  Renate and I shared a small double room, with nothing in it apart from a double bed (which we would divide down the middle by a bolster); a dressing table (with a black ebony tray on it bearing matching hand-mirror, hairbrush and comb); and a rather unsettling portrait of Ruby’s father on the wall. It was perfectly comfortable, but it was hard, on those first strange nights, not to fear that life in our nice new home was going to be a grim ordeal.

  Yet things improved surprisingly quickly. Shortly after our arrival, Ruby, having failed to mollify me over the loss of my doll with soothing words that I could not understand, disappeared for an hour or two and returned with a gift: a rag doll. It was a pretty disastrous piece of needlework, to be honest: just a couple of dusters badly sewn together. But as a childcare tactic it must have worked, because I kept Kate - as I called her - for at least a decade and was devastated when she was eventually thrown away.

  Not long afterwards, I developed measles. This was no laughing matter then, and death must have seemed a real possibility. But Ruby, horrified at the thought of losing one of the children who had been entrusted to her, nursed me assiduously, and, in due course, I pulled through. I don’t know how effective her practical ministrations were, but her obvious, tearful concern and tireless attention helped to create a bond between us. Before long, I was settled quite happily in my new home.

  Guy and Ruby could hardly have been more different from my own parents. Neither was very educated - Guy had left school at 14 - and there was nothing intellectual or cosmopolitan about them. They owned half-a-dozen records and a library of perhaps 20 books. Yet they were, in their stolid way, a lovely couple.

  Guy was in his mid-forties, the managing director of a small light engineering firm in which he had started out, three decades earlier, as an apprentice. He was hard-working but wonderfully solid: firm, loving, consistent and calm. He had done well for himself but never talked about work when he came home - and never betrayed the slightest sign of any stress he might have been feeling. Instead, he went about his domestic duties in a patient, methodical way, radiating reassurance to those around him - especially children and animals.

  Ruby was more of a flibbertigibbet: an impulsive, highly strung, romantic woman who had married Guy on the rebound and often told him so. There was something slightly ridiculous about her: she was brittle, self-centred, hopeless in the house, with a “mutton dressed as lamb” approach to clothes. She was also rather snobbish, with more interest in appearance than in substance. Yet there was a genuine warmth inside her that her foibles could not stifle. It had been her idea that they should take us in; and it was she, I think, who was first to love u
s.

  Renate found it hard to love her back. I remember her getting desperately upset when Ruby insisted that she brush her hair in a different way from the one she was used to. Another time, there was a huge row involving Renate’s use of butter. I never grasped the details - only the fact that, for Renate, it was a mortal affront to be forced to do things differently. Little physical foibles and habits are part of what defines families, and Renate - who had inhabited the world of our family for nearly twice as long as I had - felt almost violated by the requirement to adopt different habits. (In later life, when I learnt about the experiences of other Kindertransport children, I realised that she had been far from alone in this. Almost invariably, it was the older children who had found it hardest to settle.)

  Despite the tears, however, we grew used to our new world. We called Guy and Ruby “Uncle” and “Auntie”, which is how I have thought of them ever since. They in turn called me “Pickles”. My actual name, I should add, was Vera: Vera Buchthal. (I adopted Stephanie, hitherto my middle name, when I was 18, along with the anglicised surname of Brook. The Steve and the Shirley came later, for reasons that will become clear in due course.) Renate was nicknamed “Bob” - a reference to her hairstyle - but never took to it and soon became Renate again.

  Within a couple of months, we were deemed to have learnt enough English to be capable of being educated. So we were enrolled at the little village school, down Forge Lane. It was near enough for us to be able to walk there - just a few minutes across the fields - and near enough, too, for Ruby to observe through binoculars what went on in the playground. (When Renate learnt that she had been doing this, there was another furious row.)

  The children at school were friendly enough, with none of the anti-Semitism that had blighted Renate’s earlier schooldays. Outsiders were not uncommon in rural England: more than 800,000 schoolchildren had been evacuated to the countryside because of the risk of urban bombing. And, in any case, the headmistress, a formidable lady called Miss Proud, would never have tolerated bullying.

  But although we enjoyed school, it was the atmosphere at home that I remember most vividly. Even with Renate’s unhappiness, and Auntie’s volatility, there was something very calm, and very nurturing, about that household. Auntie and Uncle had clear ideas as to how children should be brought up. Some of these, which I attribute to Auntie, were superficial: we were supposed to wear little gloves when we went out, for example, and she was very keen on table manners. But most of them involved traditional, almost Victorian values. We had to do the housework before we were allowed to go out and play, and Uncle was always quoting the kind of sayings that were commonplace among respectable people in those days, such as “Waste not, want not” or “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” It may have been a rather clichéd outlook, but most of it sunk in - and I am glad that it did.

  Both were patriotic - Uncle had fought in the Great War - and this rubbed off on me too. The handful of 78rpm gramophone records that they owned consisted largely of tunes such as “Pomp and Circumstance”, “Rule Britannia”, “Jerusalem” and Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary” (tunes that still move me), and they believed strongly that everyone had a duty to their country. Sometimes they would have friends round to play whist, and, when they did, we would listen to their grown-up conversation. A recurrent theme was the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. When I first had the story explained to me, I thought: how romantic, he gave up the throne for the woman he loved. But the grown-ups insisted that this wasn’t the point. “Yes,” Uncle would say, “but he didn’t do his duty.” He said it with such certainty that I was eventually persuaded. Even now, I can never quite shake off the idea that, somehow, you always have to do your duty - otherwise you are letting yourself down.

  Auntie and Uncle were comfortably off, but our life was austere by modern standards, largely because of the war. Food was rationed, and we would never do anything like, say, buying clothes. (My mother, not wanting to put our foster family to any avoidable expense, had sent after us a trunk packed with clothes. Some were for me to wear straight away and some were for me to grow into; others, similarly, were for Renate to wear straight away or for her to grow into. Both of Renate’s sets would then be handed down to me. By the time I had grown out of all four sets - all of which looked embarrassingly foreign - the war would be almost over.)

  We spent a lot of time being cold. The boiler was switched on once a week, briefly, so that we could have a bath, and I have painful memories of the vividly mottled shins that resulted from standing too close to the fire - when we had one - trying to warm up.

  It was a much more rural life than anything we had known before: walking to and from school through the fields, playing among the sweet-smelling bluebells in the woods, or helping Uncle in the vegetable garden he had made by digging up his long back lawn - these were all new and rather delightful experiences. Uncle used to push me around in a big wooden wheelbarrow, or just chat to me in his slow, matter-of-fact way as he dug up his root vegetables, in which he took great pride. (We ate a lot of beetroot.) I grew to love the reassuring smell of his pipe smoke, and the approaching purr of his car when he came back from work. Sometimes we would rush out on to the lane to meet him and ride the last few yards of his journey on his running board.

  Auntie and Uncle had not had children but brought us up as if we were their own. Renate did not settle easily but I am totally their child.

  At Christmas, we went to stay with Uncle’s parents - whom we called Large Uncle and Little Auntie - in a tiny cottage in Bromley Wood, near Abbots Bromley in east Staffordshire. This was truly rural. They had no gas, no electricity, no running water: just the patient, plodding power of their own incessant labour. To a child’s eye it seemed idyllic: a magical pocket of ancient country life that had somehow survived into the 20th century. You could pump water from the yard, but the water from up in the village tasted nicer. I can still see today the image of Large Uncle going to collect water with a yoke over his shoulders, with a bucket on each end.

  As 1940 unfolded, we became more aware of the war. The Germans began to bomb Birmingham, which was near enough for a decoy “factory” to have been built in a field not far from Little Aston. It looked like a mass of chicken huts on their sides, all lit up, and was supposed to look like the target factories in Birmingham. It only ever attracted one bomb. People joked that the German pilots knew all about it and used it simply as a landmark from which to take their bearings for the real Birmingham.

  But air raids were taken seriously. Uncle, who was an Air Raid Protection warden, had dug a large shelter into the garden, big enough both for us and for the neighbours. There were plenty of alarms, and I have many memories - all blurred into one - of being lifted out of bed and carried half-sleeping down to the shelter. But I don’t remember feeling frightened.

  The other thing that was curiously absent - at least in my memory - was anxiety about what had become of my parents. As a five-year-old, one adapts and forgets quickly. But we did have reason to believe that they were both alive - and an early letter from my father in which he said that he had heard nothing from Mutti for a long time and assumed that she was “lost” was, I think, kept from us until later. The Red Cross ran a wonderful communication service that allowed people to send five-word telegrams across the war-torn continent. Every few months, one would arrive from our grandmother, who lived in the Netherlands. Most just said things such as: “Hope well. Be good. Granny.” But she also tried to keep us - or our foster parents - abreast of what was happening, and I know that there was one, a few months into our stay, that said - with reference to my mother - “We think she’s got out.”

  Post-war my mother trained as a teacher – refusing to return to Germany with my father. We were both naturalised British in 1951. But Renate chose to remain stateless. When she emigrated to Australia, she – almost immediately – applied for Australian citizenship.


  At some point, presumably in 1940, a letter arrived from Mutti herself. I don’t think I was told about this straight away; in fact, for all I know there may have been more than one letter. But the gist of the message or messages was that she was in England but had no money, no fixed home and, for the time being, no way of coming to see us. There was no work available to her as a refugee, apart from domestic service or working in the fields. I think she tried both.

  Eventually, she found a job in Oswestry, in Shropshire, working in a school kitchen. I think she had heard the town recommended by some other refugees from Germany. She had stayed briefly in the house of an émigré German professor called Dr Hachenberg, but now that she was working she had been able to find somewhere more permanent to live: rented rooms in the house of a family called Blythe.

  Today one can drive from Little Aston to Oswestry in less than an hour and a half. In 1940, without motorways, or a car, or petrol, or money, for a “friendly enemy alien” who in any case was subject to travel restrictions and a curfew (and who - unlike Auntie and Uncle - did not have access to a telephone), we might as well have been on different planets. So it was a long time before we met up, and, when we did, the meeting was brief and stilted. Mutti visited us in Little Aston, where Auntie and Uncle gave her tea and everyone was on their best behaviour. Perhaps Mutti felt it necessary to “be brave” for our sakes; or perhaps, as it seemed to me, she just wasn’t very pleased to see me. Either way, things took a turn for the worse when she said something about hoping that we would all be able to move to America before too long. I burst into tears and clung to Auntie’s knees, wailing “I want to stay with Auntie!” - with predictable effects on my long-term relationship with both women.