Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  There may have been some truth to the story about the letter-writing honeymoon. In fact, I have seen some of the letters Bernard wrote to his parents on the day after the wedding, describing a very stormy crossing from Folkestone to Boulogne, and his securing a cabin for Win while spending the night on deck, himself getting drenched in a howling North Sea gale. That the story was not the whole truth can be deduced from several letters written many years later, when Bernard was in India. Being cut off from the family for three years, from 1942 till the summer of 1945, was hard to bear, harder perhaps even than the long years of their engagement, but different in that longing was filled with nostalgia. Instead of dreams of future bliss, he fell back on his memories.

  Wedding in London

  The Channel storm braved, they spent their first nights in Paris, at the Hotel Wagram on the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries gardens, almost half a century after Oscar Wilde had spent his honeymoon at the same hotel with his wife, Constance Lloyd. The Hotel Wagram is an apartment building now, but I found the letters H.W. laid out in a pretty yellow and light brown mosaic on the pavement. A plaque over the door says that Tolstoy once lived in the same building. Next door is a cheap souvenir shop selling postcards and miniature models of the Eiffel Tower.

  In a letter sent from a troopship on the way to Bombay in May 1942, Bernard wonders whether they would ever see their old hotel in Paris again, which must now be “filled with pot-bellied cropped Bosch officers.” A year later, writing from a dusty barrack room in Agra, he returns once more to “that little suite of ours at the Wagram . . . I can see it now, our little haven from the noise & tumult of a foreign city . . . Here I learned more of my love and of a vision only first revealed to those who have travelled far in patience and adoration.”

  During the war, the Boche had indeed taken over Bernard and Win’s little haven. The Wagram was one of several fine hotels used by the Gestapo for their grisly enterprise.

  They traveled by car through France, where Win was photographed in a cloche hat, her face turned slightly away, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, looking like a 1920s flapper. Thence to Italy as far as Naples, where they visited the ruins of Pompeii. Their private joke, recalled in several lonely wartime letters, was that they had to learn the moves of love from the erotic frescoes left by the ancient Romans. “And to think,” Bernard remembers in February 1943, “that we had to get inspiration of ways and means from Pompeii. I am afraid you married rather a greenhorn but we learned a bit together as the years went by.”

  LEFT: Honeymoon in Pompeii; RIGHT: Honeymoon in France

  Almost exactly one year later, Win gave birth to their first son, John Richard Schlesinger. A year after that my mother, Wendy, was born. The twins, Roger and Hilary, followed in 1929, and Susan was the last, in 1933.

  Bernard and Win had got what they always yearned for: a family. Devotion to “the family” was perhaps the most Jewish thing about them. The family offered safety, protection, a refuge. It is a recurring theme in Bernard’s letters, and intimately linked to his idea of a “haven,” beginning with the Hotel Wagram. Despite his penchant for rugged sports, army life, riding motorcycles, swimming in icy midwinter seas, sleeping in the rough, and other hearty pursuits, he cultivated a rather Victorian idea of domestic tranquility, a mixture of English coziness and German Gemütlichkeit, something Jews of a different class would have called heimisch.

  He wrote, on August 9, 1921, “Oh, Win let me marry you soon—ever so soon and we’ll get a topping little house with lovely flowers in the garden . . . a splendid little up-to-date kitchen where you can give masses of orders to our general,* a sitting room furnished just right, where you can give masses more to the same girl & pretend you have a staff of six . . . I mustn’t forget the spare bedroom containing—why of course all our real art treasures and so on up to the chimney pots which show a tell-tale cosy fire downstairs and before which a very loving couple together in one arm chair etc.”

  The image of Darby and Joan, the paragons of connubial contentment in old age, celebrated in poetry and prose since the eighteenth century, often crops up in Bernard’s letters. Darby and Joan are first mentioned in a poem by Henry Woodfall, published in 1735: “Old Darby, with Joan by his side / You’ve often regarded with wonder / He’s dropsical, she is sore-eyed / Yet they’re ever uneasy asunder.”* Clubs for senior citizens in Britain often used to be called Darby and Joan Clubs.

  Bernard was never in fact the homebody of his fantasies. He was much too gregarious to be stuck at home for long, and home was a place for entertaining friends as much as for family life. Win, less sentimental as always, would not have wanted a Darby by her side anyway. She too revealed herself in letters written during the war. Here she is on January 1, 1944, the day of their wedding anniversary, she in England, he in India, to “Bun, my beloved husband—This time 19 years ago I could not yet call you by that precious title, but it was only a matter of hours until I could . . . I know that had I married some ordinary, conventional man, however good & kind, I should inevitably have grown bored & should probably never have been able to remain faithful to him. But you satisfy all my needs, with you there are always exciting new things to do and to explore.”

  Not quite Darby and Joan, then.

  Sailing on the Norfolk Broads

  In Switzerland

  The longing for a safe haven implies a residual fear of an outside world that can always trip one up. It is impossible for me to think of Bernard as a fearful man. Physically he was quite the opposite, and he was socially at ease with almost everyone (the only time he recalled being stumped for conversation was years later when he dined with the queen, but even then he managed to save an awkward situation by talking about horses, of which he knew very little). Yet he hated being alone. A letter to Win on December 16, 1923: “Sweet one, I would never have made a good bachelor—I hate my own solitary company so.” He needed the cocoon of the family, the company of his wife. For many Jews, Israel is the ultimate safe haven, even if only on a symbolic level. This was not true for Bernard and Win. They were not unsympathetic toward Israel, but they weren’t Zionists. England was their safe haven, England and the family.

  The children were born in the first house Bernard bought in Hampstead, on Hollycroft Avenue, twenty minutes’ walk from the house where he grew up, a detached Victorian redbrick with a white-columned portico, comfortable but not huge. The family moved in 1933 to a far grander Edwardian house on Templewood Avenue, with a tennis court in the copious garden. It was in fact a bit grandiose, the kind of house that now might have a swimming pool in the basement. They held musical soirées there, and fancy-dress balls; on one recorded occasion, New Year’s Eve 1934, Win and Bernard were dressed as aristocrats at the court of Frederick the Great.

  In 1939, Bernard secured a more modest place in the country, a small house called Mount Pleasant in Kintbury, Berkshire, where the family found a refuge during the war. It was to be the main family house until Bernard and Win moved to St. Mary Woodlands, not too far from there, around the time I was born in 1951. Templewood Avenue was kept during the war for relatives who had escaped from Germany, but the family never lived there again, and it was sold soon after the war.

  I have a watercolor picture in my study of the garden at Mount Pleasant, painted by one of my Dutch aunts, who stayed there in 1950. It is a very English garden with roses creeping up a redbrick wall, and flowerbeds tended with infinite care by Win, a sturdy beech tree in the corner of the picture, the safest of all havens, lovingly described in many of their letters.

  Bernard writes from Delhi, on November 11, 1942:

  What a blessing Mount Pleasant has been in so many ways. The one I have in mind at the moment is its antidotic effect on the children against the rather luxurious life of Templewood Avenue. To me those days are now only a memory—but the children must still have their life there quite fresh in their minds. My happies
t times with you were certainly at Hollycroft and at Kintbury. Hollycroft contained all our ever increasing love and hope and aspirations. I lived through many anxieties there when you were lying upstairs and the family were arriving in turn. There I also discovered more and more what a priceless person I had won with whom to share my life. Everything was fun and we were young. Templewood was the scene of so many frustrations and disappointments for ourselves and for the world in general & those who were trying valiantly to stop it slipping into an abyss. I did not give up Templewood with any great regret. Now Kintbury has very special attractions. For us it was a peaceful haven from a mad world . . . the continuous ideal, better spelt Idylle in this connection, of home and England to me.

  The birth of a child can affect the emotions of husbands and wives in peculiar ways that are sometimes hard to deal with. A mother’s attention often shifts from husband to child to a degree that some men find disconcerting; love is no longer undivided. There is no sign of this in the case of Bernard and Win. Explicitly in her case, and more implicitly in his, however devoted they both were to their children, their marriage was still the core of their private world.

  On February 13, 1940, when fear of the future was acute, Win wrote to Bernard, “I love my mother & my brother & sister & my large flock of children, but none of them mean to me what you do, who after all these many years are still my dear, devoted love.” For Win, at any rate, the safest shelter was always their island of two.

  John, who was unusually close to his mother, must have sensed this. In August 1933, one month after the Nazi Party had grabbed total power in Germany, Win was on holiday with the children on the coast of south Wales. Bernard was working in London. She is wondering, in a letter of August 14, how she will get through the next two and a half weeks without him. She writes, “I miss you, and feel an aching void round my heart now that you have gone, as though you were still my young lover, instead of being the father of my vast family.”

  Then she adds, “John thinks it foolish of me to miss you, as he could quite well be my husband for once!”

  Win with John and Wendy (ON THE RIGHT)

  Even before the grandeur of Templewood Avenue, with the cooks, maids, chauffeur, musical evenings, fancy-dress balls, and games of tennis before dinner, for which Bernard and Win would always dress up formally after saying goodnight to the children cared for by Nanny in the nursery, they led a full Hampstead life. There were evenings “At Home” at Hollycroft Avenue with music starting promptly at 8:30. They took pride in entertaining the Smythes, the “Jumbo” Monteiths, or Sholto Mackenzie, later Baron Amulree, as well as relatives named Schwab, Rosenheim, or Stern. Win, writing home from a holiday in Hampshire on August 20, 1928: “I am so glad everyone likes coming to us. I think you and I together darling have really achieved our ideal of hospitality—a sort of easy-going informality—and people like it, together with the complete harmony which they can feel exists between us.”

  And yet those worries about the impression she made on other people kept nagging. On that same holiday in Hampshire, Bernard had come down from London for the weekend with a medical colleague named Steve. Win had been “in a terrible slough of despond” ever since they left: “I am afraid the whole weekend was a ghastly failure . . . I feel so useless and de trop & horribly unwanted. Steve obviously disapproved of me . . . He was very lukewarm in his thanks and I don’t suppose will ever want to come again.”

  Those thank-you letters again. Bernard’s reply, sent from the Public Schools Club, 61 Curzon Street, London W.1, is one of many reassurances written over the years: “Don’t be a Billy & start imagining all sorts of impossible terrible things . . . I enjoyed the weekend thoroughly. I am sure Steve did too . . . How you can imagine for one minute that he disapproves of you is beyond me! Did you expect him to fling his arms round your neck?”

  Win’s social anxiety must have been sensed by me, as though by osmosis, at a very early age. On one occasion, which I shall never forget, this triggered an act that was almost like a spasm of Tourette’s syndrome. I must have been about five, or perhaps even a year or two older. We had been invited for tea by an old lady in the village near St. Mary Woodlands, named Mrs. James, who looked a little like a kindly lioness. Her husband, Colonel James, the one who is said to have muttered, “Don’t like the name, don’t like the money,” when Bernard and Win moved in, had only just died. Win had impressed on me several times to be on my best behavior, and above all not to mention Colonel James’s death, for that would make Mrs. James feel very, very sad.

  The sumptuous high tea went without a hitch. Mrs. James had outdone herself. Vast amounts of cakes and biscuits were laid out on the table. I behaved like a perfectly brought-up little boy. Win must have been enormously relieved. Then it was time to leave. As we pulled away from her cottage, with Mrs. James smiling and waving at us from her front door, I stuck my head out of the car window and shouted at the top of my voice, “Colonel James is dead! Colonel James is dead!”

  I have never seen anyone quite so mortified as Win at that moment. She was white with anger, but also with shame. An edifice of good manners and proper conduct, so carefully constructed by her to ward off any chance of social opprobrium, had been brutally punctured by my impulsive act of childish cruelty. I had probably hurt the feelings of poor Mrs. James, but I should think the hurt inflicted on Win’s feelings was many times sharper. And possibly that had been the point. It was as if I knew by instinct how to touch her rawest nerves.

  Anxiety was, as I wrote earlier, “the curse of the Regensburgs.” It is always tempting to find genetic reasons for one’s own foibles, and probably false. All I can say is that I recognize Win’s social insecurity. Which is perhaps why, already as a very small boy, I felt that attack was the best form of self-defense. To reduce Win’s fretfulness to the self-conscious process of cultural assimilation would be too simple. It is hard to know what Win felt about her German Jewish background at this stage of her life. I’m not sure she knew herself.

  When John was only one and a half, in the summer of 1927, she took him, his nanny, and his baby sister to Worthing for a few days. The trip was evidently a success. Win was glad they went, except that John “shrieked with terror & nearly overthrew nanny at the sight of reclining and quite harmless pigs, but did not mind cows or dogs, and loved ducks and hens. He is a good Jew!!!”

  Except that neither John nor any of his siblings ever came of age in a bar or a bat mitzvah. Perhaps this was because the war intervened. More likely it was because Win, for one, didn’t see the point of it.

  There was, on the other hand, the charming man who ran the hotel in Worthing, a Mr. Schneider, identified by Win as “one of us.” This seems a peculiar slip, at odds with the way Win usually liked to identify herself, since Mr. Schneider was not only Jewish but a foreigner.

  Still, the eternal question whether so-and-so was “forty-five” was always on her mind. I must have heard such talk many times when I was a child, but the meaning clearly escaped me, even when my best friend in the first class of primary school was Wim Boekdrukker, who wore a kippa and stayed at home on the Sabbath. It was not until I was about nine or ten that the penny finally dropped. In the evenings, after homework, I used to roam around our quiet residential neighborhood in The Hague with a small gang of boys who lived in the same street. For some reason our gang never included two brothers named Bloch. Perhaps they were too old for us. Dark and burly, they were also a little intimidating. One day, the oldest boy in our gang told me, not with any hostile intent, or none that I can remember, that the Blochs were “Jew boys.” When I relayed this bit of information to my mother, she laughed and told me I was a Jew boy too.

  —

  Not much is to be gleaned about the state of the world from the sporadic letters in the late 1920s. Family holidays come and go, on the English or Welsh coasts, or at Mr. Schneider’s hotel in Worthing; Bernard tries hard to get a permanent app
ointment at one of the London hospitals, and carries on with a private practice, his income no doubt supplemented by his father’s considerable wealth. There are rounds of golf, horse riding, concerts, rugby matches, and nights at the opera. Win plays the violin in various amateur orchestras and quartets. Nellie Melba in La bohème at Covent Garden reduces Bernard to tears. Win struggles with the César Franck Quartet. They both drive cars. The garden in London is flourishing. The dogs are adorable. Medical conferences are regularly attended, in Paris, Stockholm, Leyden, and Moscow (in 1934). It was, despite Bernard’s professional difficulties, a full and exceedingly comfortable life. There is no mention of the Wall Street crash. Nothing about the rise of Hitler.

  As the children begin to show their personalities, hints of what they would become as adults, when I knew them, are glimpsed, or so it looks in retrospect. It is an odd sensation to read about the childhood of my mother’s generation, since only one aunt is still alive. Time seems compressed, and their lives fleeting, because in retrospect everything happens so fast. In August 1928, on holiday in Hampshire, Win writes about her eldest son:

  A short story of John! Apparently yesterday afternoon, while out walking, mother and nannie went into an old church to inspect it. John ran in after them and said “Oo” at sight of the spaciousness, and was so pleased with the echo he produced, that he repeated the experiment several times until someone said “shhh,” whereupon he said in a hushed tone “shh, baby asleep.” He also admired the “lubby pictures,” apparently ghastly stained glass windows.

  Early intimations of the film director he would one day become? In August 1937, they are unmistakable. Win to Bernard, from Cornwall: “Things are jogging along here much as usual. The rehearsals for John’s play seem to be causing a certain amount of bad blood, because he will take it so seriously . . . what I have heard of the rehearsal from a distance seemed to be excessively noisy, and I believe I am to be requisitioned for future rehearsals (O! Misericordia) to try and keep order!! If only John would confine himself to the piano.”