Mutti then disappeared back to Oswestry - I presume that she would have been required to return there that same day. But the issue then arose of whether and how we could be reunited on a more long-term footing. This was, again, less straightforward than it might sound. Mutti had only a single bedroom - and scarcely enough money to feed herself. Logic - and the prevailing wartime consensus that doing what was best for children didn’t necessarily involve keeping them with their parents - dictated that we should remain in our stable foster home. This prospect pleased me a great deal more than it pleased Renate.
I feel, in retrospect, huge sympathy for Renate. Not only had she lost her family: she had also had to look after her little sister for a year. It distressed her to have Ruby occupying the place in her life that had hitherto been occupied by our mother. And now she came under two additional pressures. Our school, recognising her talent, had begun to coach her with a view to getting a scholarship to a fee-paying school - but, they had told her, don’t tell your foster parents as it will be a wonderful surprise for them. At the same time, she began to receive letters from our mother saying, in effect, I think I may have found a way for us to live together again - but don’t tell anyone else for now. Those were huge secrets for a 10-year-old heart to carry around.
But both hopes were in due course realised. Renate won a scholarship to a girls’ high school in Oswestry, and the Blythes agreed that Mutti could have one child - but not two - living there with her. So Renate left Little Aston to live in Oswestry, and I was left with Auntie and Uncle.
I hadn’t exactly been thrilled when it had first seemed that there was prospect of leaving my foster parents to re-join Mutti - and no doubt Mutti had taken this into account. Yet when it sank in that, forced to choose only one of her daughters, she hadn’t chosen me, I felt bitterly hurt.
The pain faded. Auntie and Uncle now pampered me like an only child, and I felt more loved than I ever had in my own family. It must have been around this time that they bought me a dog: a “spaniel” called Topsy. I put the word “spaniel” in quotation marks because, although she had been sold with all sorts of assurances about her pedigree, it soon became clear that, whatever else she was, she was not a spaniel. Eventually we took this long-legged mongrel back to the pet shop, where the manager, spotting me in the background, cleverly offered to take her back, no questions asked. Predictable floods of tears followed, and Topsy came home with us. (I see this now as an early lesson in the power of imaginative marketing.)
Meanwhile, Auntie and Uncle had become concerned that, at the village school, I was learning to speak in a Birmingham accent. So I was sent instead to a convent, St Paul’s, just outside Sutton Coldfield, to which I travelled each day by bus. I was happy there. I enjoyed the slightly more serious lessons, and the nuns who taught us were lovely: gentle and tolerant, not forcing their religion on us but, instead, quietly promoting such fundamental values as honesty and compassion. Perhaps as a result, my memories of that period are largely religious in flavour: the prettiness of the Masses I used to attend if I went to stay with my friend Christina at weekends; and the sense of calm by the grotto in the convent driveway, where the Catholic girls would stop and say a “Hail Mary” each time they passed while the rest of us would just stop for a moment in respectful silence.
I enjoyed the lay teaching of the Roman Catholic nuns who educated me in the 1940’s.
My other vivid memory of that period is far from pretty. It is of going with Uncle in his car to Coventry on 15 November 1940 - the day after the notorious German bombing raid that reduced half the city to rubble. Uncle’s light engineering business had a factory there, and it was, it turned out, among the 60,000 buildings that were damaged. I don’t think I appreciated the full awfulness of what had happened (more than 500 people were killed), but I can still remember driving past the smoking ruins of what used to be the cathedral. We children might not have thought about it often, but there was, without doubt, a very nasty war going on.
For the most part, though, that war passed us by. The last significant bombing raid on Birmingham was in May 1941, and thereafter the main day-to-day signs of the conflict were rationing and the black-out, both of which we had long since taken for granted; and, to a lesser extent, travel restrictions. I mention these, because, from late 1941 onwards, I began to make relatively regular journeys, by train, to Oswestry. (I think that Auntie and Uncle must have paid.) Each time, as a “friendly enemy alien”, I had to report my journey in advance to the local police station and then register at the Oswestry police station on arrival - so that there was, in effect, an official record of where I spent every single night of the war. Perhaps that seems excessive for an eight-year-old (as I then was). On the other hand, we children were at least spared the curfew to which the adults were subject. I can remember several days out in Oswestry - with my mother, Renate and one or two other refugee families - when the adults had to hurry home at sundown while we children carried on playing.
My visits to my mother rarely lasted more than a day. I think the Blythes, who were a kind, elderly couple, must occasionally have allowed me to sleep there, but for the most part these were just flying visits - facilitated by Auntie and Uncle (and, I suspect, my mother) largely out of a sense of duty. My main memories of these visits are of the house itself: a big Edwardian building on the edge of town with a large hall and central staircase; an Ascot “geyser” water-heater that emitted a terrifying roar when it fired up; and a living-room with a strange squiggly pattern on the wallpaper that made it look as though the wall was crawling with insects. I can remember sitting in the living-room at least once when my father was visiting as well, listening in complete silence to a concert on the radio.
He was wearing, by this stage, a British Army uniform, which he had acquired after a circuitous and painful journey. As a male adult German refugee he had been categorised as an “enemy alien” and briefly interned before being deported, in July 1940, to Australia. He went there on the transport ship HMT Dunera, along with around 2,000 other German Jewish refugees and more than 400 German and Italian prisoners-of-war. The conditions on the 57-day voyage were so appalling that - to Britain’s everlasting credit - Parliament found time in the midst of the war to debate the scandal. Those deportees who survived the journey were interned in a camp in Hay, in New South Wales, where the largely middle-class inmates made the best of their plight, printing their own money, creating their own system of law-and-order (my father was a judge) and developing a remarkable educational and cultural programme - with lessons, concerts, discussions and much else. By May 1941, however, partly as a result of the outcry in Britain about the harshness of their treatment, a substantial number of these internees were released to join the Pioneer Corps, a relatively new auxiliary force that provided valuable back-up work for the conventional armed forces. My father was among them, and, at some point in 1941, he found himself based in the UK, at Bicester in Oxfordshire. Even then, however, I didn’t see him more than once or twice a year, and I don’t think my mother did either.
My mother and father, who was on leave from the British army, in Oswestry.
This strange approximation to family life continued for much of the war. I lived my generally contented, uneventful life with Auntie and Uncle, travelling to Oswestry as often as circumstances permitted. It was clear, even then, that there were issues of jealousy between Ruby and my mother, but Auntie and Uncle clearly considered that it was their duty not to come between us, and so the visits continued.
At some point, my mother got a job as a cook in a hostel for girls attending the school that Renate was going to and - with help from a charity set up by the Quakers to support refugees - was able to rent a two-bedroom house of her own. It was called Llys Arfon (Arfon - as in Carnarvon - Court) and was, again, on the edge of town, with fields beyond its little garden. My visits became more frequent now - or, rather, less fleeting - and I was certainly staying ther
e when Renate, who must have been about 15 by then, became alarmingly ill.
She had gone to bed the night before feeling fine. Then, in the morning, she was unable to move. This was the terrifying and - at the time - widely dreaded symptom of paralytic poliomyelitis. Likely outcomes ranged from permanent paralysis to death, but Renate was one of the lucky ones (roughly half of those who developed the disease) who eventually recovered, thanks in large part to my mother, who, even in her impoverished state, had somehow managed to pay a penny a week into an insurance fund. This meant that Renate now received the best possible treatment. There was a former military hospital nearby, at Gobowen, which specialised in such cases, and she spent nearly a year in a special ward, one wall of which was entirely open to the elements. (Fresh air was considered crucial to recovery, even if the beds were occasionally covered in snow.) For much of this time she was in an “iron lung”. She was also treated with penicillin, which was still in its infancy and - as we were often reminded - hugely expensive. (Producing large stockpiles of penicillin was considered a vital part of Allied preparations for D-Day, so it was remarkable that any at all was spared for a young refugee from Germany.)
As a result of this frightening episode, Renate and I became much closer. Coming so near to losing her made me appreciate how much she had done for me, and how much she meant to me - perhaps especially when I had to go back to Little Aston and worry about her from afar. We had spent much of our childhood as rivals: she the sensible one, me the silly one; she good at arts and letters, me good with figures; she the first-born, me the baby. Being refugees had meant different things to each of us: largely painful for her, more positive for me. Yet it remained essentially a huge, life-changing, shared experience that only we two could entirely understand. Even when we were living at opposite ends of the Earth - as, for much of our later life, we did - I never lost the feeling that Renate in some way saw the world through the same eyes as me, in a way that no one else could. (My jaw does still drop, though, at the memory of one trick she played on me when we were still in Vienna. My parents noticed that I had suddenly become very sedentary and, after a few days of worrying, made inquiries. They discovered that Renate had persuaded me that I had an artificial heart, and that if I made any sudden movements it would break down.)
But Renate’s illness did little for my relationship with my mother. Her desperate - and understandable - concern for her elder daughter made it all the more obvious, in my eyes, that she felt no such warmth for me. She always seemed to be finding fault with me: for my immaturity; for my clumsiness; and (less explicitly) for my attachment to Auntie and Uncle. “Vera is stupid” was the unmotherly refrain that has stuck in my mind through the years. I seemed to irritate her and she, in turn, seemed to me to be unfairly unappreciative of me. As my teenage years approached, the distance between us increased: no doubt as much through my fault as hers, but no less painfully for either of us.
Physically, however, events were bringing us closer together. The nuns at my convent in Sutton Coldfield had noticed that I was showing promise in mathematics - to such an extent that they didn’t feel qualified to give me the tuition I needed. So they suggested that I should sit for a scholarship to go somewhere else. I did so, and in due course I won a place at a fee-paying school in Lichfield called The Friary.
I rather liked it there - partly because of the daily train journeys (paid for by my scholarship) that began and ended each day. But within a year I had been moved again: to Oswestry, where I was given a place at the same school as Renate. (The precise administrative mechanics of this escaped me, but I was told that my scholarship had been transferred from one school to the other.)
This was a big improvement in academic terms, but not in terms of domestic arrangements. I began, briefly, by living with my mother - which proved a fraught experience. I think it was around this time that I looked in my drawer one evening on returning from a visit to Little Aston to find that Kate, the rag doll that Auntie had made for me when I first arrived in England, had disappeared. I asked my mother about it. “What?” she said. “That disgusting thing? I threw it out.” It seemed an apt symbol of the jealousy and mutual incomprehension that had poisoned our relationship. With the intolerance of youth, I resolved not to forgive her.
Then (presumably when Renate returned from hospital), I was boarded out to a nearby hostel, called Queen’s Park, where I and other evacuees shared Spartan dormitories and were taught ladylike table-manners. I never entirely understood if I was sent there to save money, or to ease the overcrowding in my mother’s house, or to ensure that I was brought up to be a proper young Englishwoman. Whatever the truth, it felt a lot less homely than Auntie and Uncle’s house, and I was delighted that, in the holidays, I was able to go back to stay in Little Aston.
A little later, my mother got a job as cook in a new hostel, called Oakhurst, which had been set up for pupils of the same school. I was moved here - and, once again, slept in a dormitory and had a careful eye kept on my manners. But it was a lot more pleasant, both physically and in atmosphere. Oakhurst was a converted stately home, with plenty of space and small comfortable dormitories, and I remember a distinct sense that here, finally, we were becoming young adults. There was a large hall, a great big sweeping staircase and a big landscaped garden that had partly reverted to nature, and I think that at some level our surroundings encouraged us to think about life’s possibilities in a less circumscribed way than we had been used to.
Oswestry was far from the war, and far from any urban smoke or bustle. We still carried gasmasks, but it never occurred to us that we might ever need to put them on. Like everyone, we spent much of our free time on the time-consuming mechanics of living - which in our case included lots of food-gathering: for example, picking blackberries or rosehips, or (as older children) helping with the potato harvest. But I also remember going for long walks - especially on a spectacular patch of grassland above the town known as The Racecourse, which had been a real racecourse in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the coming of the railways. I remember pausing on such walks and gazing out over the green, velvety hills of Wales, and feeling a sense of the wonder and potential of the world stirring in my heart.
I had more friends by now, including my two dormitory-mates - one of whom, a tall, kind-hearted bank manager’s daughter from Derbyshire called Val Adams, remains a close friend today. The other was a troubled, highly strung character called Hazel who, I discovered later, had a schoolgirl crush (unrequited) on me. There were ups and downs in our shared lives, as there always are in adolescence: in my memory, I was always being told off because Hazel had been “upset” by one thing or another that I had done or said. But there are worse places for a teenager to grow up than in a quiet market town on the Welsh border. We had many happy walks in the countryside - often involving a certain amount of trespassing on the estates of the local aristocracy - or just met up after school to do nothing in particular in the town, browsing in the bookshop without ever buying anything, while catching occasional exotic glimpses of passing boys; or enjoying the atmosphere of market day, when all the old farmers came down from the hills, many of them speaking Welsh.
No doubt I have sentimentalised the memories, and filtered out the miseries of adolescence and family life. But when people ask me nowadays if I love my adopted country, the resounding “Yes” with which I invariably reply is prompted largely by idyllic memories of the two sleepy rural places - Little Aston and Oswestry - in which I was allowed to grow up in safety. My image of wartime England - or rather of Britain, because there is much about Oswestry that is Welsh - is of a quiet countryside, where even outsiders like me could be confident that those in authority would generally do their best to do the right thing by us. Civilisation might have been collapsing over most of the planet, but Britain remained committed to the values of peacetime.
But my main pre-occupation in those days was not what happened outside school but what hap
pened in it. Even in my early teens, it was always important to me that I should do well in my education - not least because Renate continued to do well (eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford) and because my mother was never slow to criticise me if she felt I was underachieving. I also knew that we remained fundamentally poor. We couldn’t, for example, afford to buy the sweets that we were allowed under rationing, but instead could only give away our sweets points as presents. Every Saturday I would accompany my mother to Lloyds Bank, where she would collect her small weekly charitable payment from the Quakers, to help her pay the rent. The staff always treated us very tactfully (and we vowed, as a result, that we would always bank with Lloyds in future). But we had no desire to remain dependent on charity any longer than was absolutely necessary. And it was clear to me that, if I wanted to escape from the frustrations of poverty, doing well at school was a pretty indispensable start.
But I also genuinely loved - and love - learning things. One of my greatest pleasures outside school was to go to Oswestry’s wonderful library, where I could borrow any book under the sun without paying a penny. Light, serious, fiction, non-fiction, appropriate or wildly inappropriate - I read everything, voraciously, and learnt much as a result. (I might, however, have derived even more benefit had I taken the trouble to work out how the books were organised, rather than simply starting at A and trying to work my way through the alphabet.)
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 3
