It was always a challenge to squeeze out everything there was of the night and still manage to get back to Charlottenburg before the trains and trams stopped running. Cabs were rare that late, and costly, and now I needed to save as much money as possible for America. Karin had no money. That night we were lucky; we managed to get most of the way back to Giesebrechtstraße before the U-Bahn shut down.
We were hustling the last blocks from Uhlandstraße in a downpour when Karin suddenly asked if I ever thought of our summer days at Sanssouci.
“Often!” The rain was really pelting.
“Light,” she said. “That’s what I remember. Nothing else do I want more of, Billy, except light. Not so often available in Germany. Quite precious, actually.”
“Hence, el llano,” I told her.
She stopped all of a sudden, so I had to as well. We had the street to ourselves. Trams had all returned to their barns for the night, no squealing of steel wheels from the Kurfürstendamm, no traffic rumble. All the windows in all the apartment blocks were black, and the street shone with rain. It was as though no one else were alive in that quarter of the city. We were both getting soaked to the bone.
She peered at me closely. “We’re no longer children, Buffalo Billy. And aren’t you talking about a dream, a childhood fantasy?”
“We’ll see for ourselves,” I promised her.
MUSWELL HILL
Holograph letter. Addressed Captain H Lange, Alexandra Palace Camp, London, postmarked Muswell Hill N10, 11:30 PM, 19 Dec 1915. With addendum dated 12 Dec. 1955, initialed E.McD.L (Eilín McDermott Lange). Lange Family Archive, 12 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
19th Dec 1915
15 DUKES AVENUE
Muswell Hill
London N10
Mein Liebster I am pressed very hard don’t know that I can stand it. London smashes us, the boy has a cough now 3 weeks. You say—we must think of going to—Ireland! only it means my father’s house. I cannot live with him—if you knew what passed between us you never wd suggest
When my poor mother was dying I returned only to comfort her she was so frightened poor little Mamaí—and my father a madman, embraced and kissed me most foul. So don’t say that we ought go to him. I can’t stand this I am in a box everything pressing—why did you leave us
Never Sent!—E.McD.L 12.12.1955
Sometimes a shaft of sun broke through the London smoke, producing rare silver light. Khaki soldiers were everywhere, and policemen in blue. There were stabs of other colors, quick, violent, like bayonet thrusts. The scarlet tabs and hatbands of staff officers. The grimy, daily red of pillar-boxes and London buses. Eilín and I spent hours riding on buses or waiting for them.
I was always protecting Eilín, or imagining myself protecting her. On dirty London streets or riding buses, I stayed watchful and alert—I imagined for her sake. Because the city frightened me, at least until I got used to its growl.
London was thronged with men in khaki. At first I saw them as threats, potential attackers, but soon I grew accustomed to the uniforms, and after a while the men wearing them seemed ordinary enough.
Men interned at Alexandra Palace were permitted one family visit per month. Twenty minutes. That was cruel, but at the start of the war the English, like everyone else, forgot their decency. Or perhaps those individuals with the most vindictive and primitive mentalities suddenly found themselves at last in a position to give orders. Later on, when decency came somewhat back into fashion, weekly visits became the norm.
Ally Pally had a pretentious dome and enough size to dare call itself a palace, but it was really just an unsuccessful indoor fairground, a Victorian hulk on a hill, too big, too bleak, and too far from central London to be popular.
Now the perimeter was surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.
Buck was penned up with two thousand German civilians, middle-aged men who’d lived in England most of their lives. They ate rations of soup and horsemeat and bread they baked themselves. No one starved, but internees died of pneumonia, of heart disease, and periodically men hanged themselves. Dozens of internees died during the influenza epidemic just after the armistice.
They all slept in the Great Hall: two thousand men, on plank beds, under army blankets, grunting, snoring, shouting out from nightmares.
For the rest of his life my father would sleep with all his bedroom windows open. It didn’t matter how cold it was outside; the windows had to be open.
After the first winter the internees were allowed to stake out garden plots and raise vegetables. Some grew flowers. They argued bitterly over techniques of planting, weeding, fertilizing. There were envious rages, hatreds, seething sulks.
Ever after, Buck loathed gardens, especially formal, well-organized kitchen gardens. The sight of a neat potager made him anxious, even angry, and he’d make sneering comments about the gardeners and their “fanatic” desire to impose order on natural abundance.
Eilín and I settled into a lodging house on Dukes Avenue in Muswell Hill. The neighborhood was close to Ally Pally but miles from the suffragist tearoom on Oxford Street where she found work as a waitress.
When I started school she warned me not to mention that my father was a prisoner at Ally Pally, but the boys and girls all seemed to know. And they knew my German name, because our teacher barked “Lange, Hermann” on the first day, mocking me with a guttural Teutonic accent. My chief tormentor was a little boy named Albert Willspeed, and now I think of it, there is something odd and foreign—possibly German—about that name Willspeed, isn’t there? Vilspied? That would make sense, if he himself was a little crypto-Hun. Maybe his father was in Ally Pally, too, or out on the Isle of Man.
Albert Willspeed, or Vilspied, never grew bored with the subject of my Germanness. I was Herm the Germ, the nasty-basty Hun. Sometimes he sounded almost cheerful about it, but the hectoring went on day after day. My father was a traitor. My father was to be shot by a firing squad, or hanged by the neck, and his dead body was going to be pitched into the river, because they would not bury a German rotter traitor in the earth of England.
That little boy was like a wolverine. He’d approach me in the school yard first thing and ask how my German sausage breakfast had tasted. He’d grab my satchel and spill my books. One of his cronies would crouch behind me, and I’d be toppled over his back with a shove. Once they had me down on the pavement, two or three would hold me while Albert hammered me with fierce punches. Sometimes he’d incite seven or eight others, girls and boys, to surround me, all screaming “German sausage! German sausage!” at the tops of their voices. They would lock arms so I couldn’t break out of the circle. There was no question of aid or sympathy from teachers. I don’t recall any teachers, except that one sallow woman who started it all by making fun of my German name.
A woman on the Quaker Emergency Committee had helped my mother find the job at Alan’s Tea Rooms on Oxford Street. Alan’s served only women, and the atmosphere was much less rowdy than an A.B.C. or a Lyons Corner House. But Oxford Street was almost an hour by bus and tube from Muswell Hill. Coming home one evening, Eilín had overheard a young woman on the bus speaking German to an older woman, then quite suddenly both women were set upon by a female passenger shouting at them, calling them filthy Huns and beating them with her rolled-up umbrella.
I was in the white-and-black kitchen of the lodging house when my mother reached home that day. I’d been helping the cook set mousetraps. The cook was frightened of mice; I didn’t mind them; rats unnerved us both.
I can still see Eilín perched on a stool near the stove, wearing her coat and hat and shivering while she described the helpless German ladies huddling down between the bus seats for protection.
“You never saw such a beastly thing. Like dogs fighting—only the Germans weren’t fighting back; they couldn’t. And everyone watching, with no one lifting a finger to help.”
I think this was the first time I rea
lly saw my mother discomposed.
Oh, I wanted so badly to protect her.
“At last a soldier stepped up, an Ozzy”—an Australian soldier. “He got hold of the umbrella and broke it on his knee and pitched it down into the road!
“Oh Billy, Billy man.” My mother sighed. “I know you’d do the same and so would your father.”
“I would,” I said, wishing to sound bold and brave. But I was near tears just from her telling, her dismay, the sense of a disordered London enveloping me.
Going up to Ally Pally on visiting days, we rode buses with other internee families. If they forgot themselves and started speaking German or Yiddish, Eilín would shush them. If they kept it up, we’d move as far away as possible. Sometimes we’d get off at the next stop.
But I began muttering secret, gobbledygook German to myself while walking to school along Muswell Hill Broadway. I couldn’t speak a word of real German, but had no trouble generating guttural grunts and vowels that sounded, to me, defiant and subversive. Whispering ersatz German was like uttering a charm, allowing me to feel, in a small, secret way, untouchable. It was a carapace, protecting me.
One morning when Eilín was due at work in the West End, I had a bad cold. She was afraid to send me off to school because my teacher would probably send me home, and the cook, who sometimes “minded” me, was unavailable, having gone down to Somerset to visit her brother, whose son had been killed in France.
My mother decided I must spend the day with her at Alan’s Tea Rooms, sitting at a table with my schoolbooks, pencils, and drawing paper.
We boarded her usual bus, but when the conductress came around, somehow Eilín hadn’t brought enough money to pay both our fares.
This was unlike her. She’d been in a flurry getting me ready, hurrying me along. Maybe she’d left her little purse behind. Maybe she just did not have the cash to pay two fares.
We stood humiliated on the breezy, sooty rear platform while the conductress, who wasn’t nearly so nice or pretty as Hamilton, scolded my mother. “You’re off at the next stop, if you please! We aren’t a charity!”
Eilín held on to a post to steady herself as the bus grumbled and rocked. She didn’t argue. She just shut her eyes, and what frightened me was that she kept them shut as the bus trundled along, wheezing and smoking.
It seemed to me my mother was wishing herself away. She wanted to fly from the freezing, smelly bus and the rude conductress; from harridans with furled umbrellas; from boardinghouse lodgers and tearoom customers, Ally Pally guards and inmates. From everyone, including me.
Those old London General buses were brutally cold on winter mornings, no heaters and no window glass. The upper deck didn’t even have a roof. Out on the rear platform, the swirling air tasted of black smut. We weren’t permitted to take seats, and everyone was glaring at us. I was ashamed. My mother clutched the steel post and kept her eyes shut as we rocked and swayed. I could feel her shutting me out along with the rest of the world.
Then a young soldier stepped up. Even to me he looked young for a soldier. Pink face, khaki cap, puttees, brown boots. I bristled and knotted my fists—if anyone noticed, how ridiculous I must have seemed, how “cute” and how pathetic.
The soldier paid our fares.
The bus was slowing for the next stop. I sensed my mother poised and ready to jump off. But I wouldn’t let her. I grabbed her hand, seized hold of the polished post, and hung on. I refused to allow her to jump down off the bus.
Meanwhile the conductress cranked out a pair of tickets and held them out with a sneer.
Had I not held on to her with all my strength, she’d have leaped off the bus. She’d have dodged into the sidewalk crowd and disappeared. She’d have left me. She might have regretted it a few moments later, but at that instant, if I’d let her go, she’d have disappeared into that blurred stretch of north London between Muswell Hill and Highgate.
Instead we climbed the twist of stairs to the top deck, which was open to the weather and truly, frightfully cold. The young soldier followed us and tried to make conversation, but Eilín was very cold to him. She’d been taught to refuse attentions from a stranger. Even kindness, or pity, or whatever it was.
We never spoke of what had almost happened. What was there to say? She hadn’t left me, after all. We had made it through all right.
One Sunday a few weeks after we came up to London we went into Regent’s Park to see the last roses and the autumn leaves. A demonstration trench had been excavated in the lawn to show civilians how their sons and husbands and brothers were living at the front. There were tangles of barbed wire curling on the grass, and thick breastworks of tawny sandbags. There was a wooden parapet for Tommies standing guard duty. Wooden duckboards lined the floor. It was very neat and dry. Signboards explained that the trench was cut in a zigzag so that if a portion were overrun, the enemy would not obtain a clear field of fire along the entire length.
The trench’s narrowness, cleanliness, and depth appealed enormously. The London world was too wide open for me. In the school yard in Muswell Hill I felt exposed, vulnerable. The trench offered control and security. I was eager to climb down inside. There was a flight of steps at one end, built of pungent Canadian fir. I tugged Eilín’s hand impatiently, but she didn’t want to go down into it. I suppose she didn’t want to risk getting her good shoes or her dress dirty. But she finally let me go, and I ran down the steps alone.
Tightness, enclosure, security, earth. Could it have been a grave I was really after? Part of me wanted to shut my life down, or at least become a spirit, not a schoolboy. Become invisible.
Cool earthen walls seven feet deep were sparingly braced with timbers. Burrows and notches had been scooped out of the walls—snug places where soldiers could nap, or shelter from bombardment. The trench might have been excavated by a very precise and skillful set of burrowing mammals—moles, badgers.
I felt untouchable in there so long as I remained perfectly still. A thrill of resonant safety. Is that why I remember so well the trench walls, carved sheer through layers of earth, with different colors to each stratum? The topmost was a fascinating tangle of yellow and white roots. Then came layers of black, brown, red, and gray earth and clay, with paler streaks—perhaps deposits of chalk or animal bones. It smelled of a different world, a cool, overwhelming earthiness.
My first tactile experience of solitude, a charged feeling, delicious, almost sexual in intensity.
During our year in London I only saw my father a few times, right at the beginning. On my second or third visit he presented me with a model ship, a three-masted bark with her name—LILITH—scribed on her bow, and her homeport, HAMBURG, on her stern.
My mother told me much later that seeing me in the camp was very painful for him. He felt humiliated by his shabby clothes and squalid surroundings. It was difficult enough to endure her visits and feel the gulf opening between them. She seemed to be living at a different speed, breathing a different kind of air. Compared with the internees, their pallor and sleeplessness, my mother must have seemed feverishly exhilarated, rambunctious, and alive.
He couldn’t see that war and separation were wearing her down as well.
And he hated that I should see him helpless. After the model-ship visit—which ended with all three of us in tears after I’d asked why he was afraid of the camp guards, who were all such old men—my mother began going alone to Ally Pally on visiting days. My father didn’t wish to be a prisoner in my eyes. He thought my spirit would be stunted and I’d never make a success of life.
He and other prisoners tried constructing little tents or huts around their beds, in a feeble attempt to create some privacy. The camp authorities ordered these torn down.
Eilín’s wages and tips from Alan’s Tea Rooms were never enough to live on; we had to depend as well on the charity of the Quakers. Sometimes we found our dinner in a Quaker soup kitchen. My grandmother Con once sent us a ham from Ireland.
Then the matter of the s
tipend was settled. This was a small sum of money from the German government to be doled out every month to families of civilian internees. It would come via the Swiss embassy. It wouldn’t be much, but it was something, and would be paid no matter where we lived. It would go a lot further if we weren’t living in expensive London.
That was my father’s argument. He was the only one in favor of us going to Ireland. My mother resisted. To her, Ireland meant her father, Joseph McDermott, with whom she had a fraught relationship.
My father said we might go to live at Wychwood, his mother’s house at Sligo, only three or four miles from my McDermott grandfather’s red villa at Strandhill. But Eilín had never met her mother-in-law, and Wychwood, though in Irish terms a “big house” owned by a family who for a hundred years had considered themselves gentry, was in famously poor condition, and undoubtedly cold and damp, as most “big houses” were. My mother thought it would be unhealthy for me.
When Eilín came down from Ally Pally hill, she was often frighteningly remote. She might reach out to embrace me—if she remembered. She didn’t always remember. This was probably the period my parents were in disagreement over Sligo. My mother hated to be caught weeping or to be seen in any way as vulnerable. Eilín was forceful and competent, could even seem hard, but underneath she must have been close to despair. She always mastered it, but that didn’t mean despair wasn’t there, just below the surface and rising up especially during transitions, and in liminal spaces like train stations and ship quays.
We were riding aboard a London bus around this time when she remarked, “Daddy wishes us back into the bog.”
Carry Me Page 6
