Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  In any case, Win could feel safe with Bernard’s confirmed bachelor friends. They provided male companionship in Bernard’s absence, without posing the slightest danger to their marriage.

  Here is Win on meeting Gifford in London on April 29, 1940: “I rushed home to make myself look beautiful for Gifford . . . I found poor Gifford pacing up and down outside the club, which was our rendez-vous, because it was closed on Sunday, so he hopped into my taxi and we went to the Piccadilly. He gave me a slap-up dinner, & even offered me champagne, which I rejected in favour of an excellent claret, and we watched the queerest people dancing, including a real gigolo!”

  That the innocence of these liaisons was not always obvious to Bernard is revealed in their correspondence about Ben. Win clearly adored him. On May 4, when Ben is still in Narvik with Bernard, Win sends her love to them both and tells Bernard that when she is “digging and delving” in the garden at Mount Pleasant, she often makes “castles in the air”; indeed she was just “thinking what fun it would be if one day Ben could come out to Hohfluh with us all.”

  On June 4, she mentions her fears of the future: “I have never let on to anyone but you and Ben how incapable I really feel of coping intelligently if any awful emergency should arise. It isn’t so much that I am physically frightened, but I am afraid I should just feel helpless & not know what to do for the best & everyone depends on me.”

  I have little doubt that her feelings for Ben were entirely innocent. But wartime separations tested even the most resilient marriages. Romance could blossom swiftly in times of crippling uncertainty. Some of these affairs destroyed marriages, some lasted just one night. Win’s friendship with Ben clearly put Bernard on edge. In the autumn of 1940, he was stationed at a field hospital in the Kentish countryside, feeling rather useless. When Win was invited to stay with Ben and his mother in Edinburgh, so they could practice the César Franck Violin Sonata, Bernard had deep misgivings. As was so often the case, when he felt deeply about something, his prose acquired a slightly pompous tone.

  “I am still not enamoured of your proposed trip to Edinburgh,” he writes on September 29. “Apart from stupid jealousies and fears which you say are quite unwarranted, I foresee snags.” Ben might find the presence of a “comparatively strange female” an “embarrassment at such times when he wishes to disport himself elsewhere.” Still, he continues, Win is “old enough to know what is best.” He realizes that “wartime leads to quick friendships & ‘comparatively strange female’ is perhaps the wrong term; still you know what I mean.”

  Win replies on October 1 to “My own darling” that she loves him dearly: “It is not likely then that I, a reasonable woman of advancing years, would do anything in the world that could possibly come between us. On the other hand, Ben is a man of the most scrupulous honour and integrity, & I would trust him anywhere in the world with myself, my daughters, or anyone else . . . I know that he is at least as loyal a friend to you as he is to me, and he takes a genuine interest in the whole family. Apart from all that we are keen fellow musicians—we enjoy playing together and we play well together.”

  To which Bernard answers, three days later, that he simply wants her to be careful, or as he puts it, to “prenez garde”: “You were always a large hearted little lady & have always got on better with the opposite sex. It is perhaps a characteristic of your family to jump into male friendships more speedily than most people and possibly more intensely than do those you make friends with. Most bachelors have curious reactions to married women, & particularly attractive ones, who befriend them and I should be very sad if your feelings were ultimately hurt.”

  Win, on October 7:

  I am quite sure that “bachelor’s reactions to married women” don’t enter in at all . . . I certainly have always got on better with men than with women, as you say, although I don’t know any other member of my family to whom this particularly applies! According to Winnie Stiles I have got a man’s mind & a man’s approach to music, so perhaps that accounts for it . . . As a matter of fact I think that a respectable solid friendship with a man is stimulating and helps to keep a happily married woman from lapsing into comfortable matronliness & domesticity, and thus most definitely benefits her husband.

  In the end, still against Bernard’s protestations, Win does go to Edinburgh, where she instantly suffers from stomach cramps, but is too polite to mention this to anyone. Ben is “angelic” to his mother, whom Win finds “very domineering.” Win fears that she has been “very poor company for [Ben], as I have been tired and unwell all the time & I look at least 150.” They try the César Franck Sonata with another lady friend of Ben’s, a pediatrician named Peggy, who plays the piano beautifully, “but it was a hopeless fiasco & I was utterly dejected . . . Ben has not asked me to play again to-day, and I don’t suppose he ever will again either.”

  The curse of the Regensburgs again.

  Ben’s mother very much hopes that Ben will marry his pediatrician lady friend Peggy and settle down. Win thinks “he will one day too.” Whether she still thought so after Ben came down to Kintbury with his friend James, I don’t know. James, who was a housepainter before the war, has “perfect manners,” writes Win to Bernard on October 16, 1941: “He wrote me a very nice ‘thank you’ letter after he left. I should like you to meet him. I think you would like him.”

  The only male who meant almost as much to Win as her husband was her eldest son, John. But in those early years of the war, he was a source of constant worry, not least because she found some of his ideas too “pansy.” This was in January 1940, when John was fourteen. Quite what these ideas were is not spelled out. But John’s natural inclinations were certainly rising to the surface, even if the signals were not always picked up very clearly by Win. On April 21, she writes that John and Wendy, my mother, were to hold a fancy dress competition at Mount Pleasant: “John and Wendy informed me this morning that they are going as ‘Glamour Girls’ and they wanted to borrow some brassieres from me for the part.”

  Kintbury Follies: John and Wendy as the Glamour Girls

  A full report of the fancy dress competition follows on April 23: “I wish you could have seen John and Wendy as the Glamour Girls, J. resplendent in my satin knickers with an overskirt of fringed crepe paper, Laura’s best bodice stuffed with kapok and a chaste bunch of dandelions pinned on the appropriate spot on either side, a crepe paper bolero, my silk stockings . . . and a chic little crepe paper hat, & the pink feather fan hailing from Worthing.”

  Wendy was “very much made up by John,” and the two of them, in Win’s opinion, “really looked most fetching, & I must say produced two admirable pairs of legs, which would have done credit to any wartime show.”

  That John was desperately unhappy at Uppingham, his father’s old school, was perhaps not surprising. Utterly unsuited to its spartan milieu, he was so badly bullied by heartier boys that he ran away from school more than once. On August 2, Win mentions what a “hellish time” John is having with “little prospect of a better future.” Changing schools was not an option, however, for these problems have “got to be faced.” Was “forty-five” perhaps a factor? Win: “The only other Jew in the house is very unpopular and quite friendless too apparently, but in John’s case I do not think it is primarily ‘Jew’; I think that is a good excuse for venting personal dislike.”

  Both parents agreed that John’s plight, though unfortunate, should not be treated with excessive indulgence, lest he become too much of a softie. I had often been led to believe, by my mother among others, that Bernard took a harsher line in this regard than Win. The letters do not really bear this out. Three days after telling Bernard about John’s hellish time at school, she writes:

  I’m extremely worried about John, and really cannot wonder at his school career . . . He is the laziest, most selfish & feckless boy I have ever come across. He is not interested in the world’s affairs & seems quite unaware that there is a war on . . .
He sits in an armchair all day unless forcibly evicted & listens to rubbish on the wireless all day . . . I’m afraid I must sadly say that our eldest son is a washout . . . Apparently many of these qualities are the cause of his unpopularity at school. The boys had him on the mat one day and asked him what he was interested in, or was any good at & when he quoted music and drawing, they said his music was rotten and his drawing average. A perfectly good assessment, I consider.

  Alas, the one thing John was very good at and took deeply seriously didn’t find much favor with his mother, not yet. On May 3, he has “a hell of a row” with Nanny, “over the eternal question of one of his perpetual shows, around which the entire life of the community has to centre in the holidays. Apparently Nanny was uncooperative, & John was thereupon insufferably rude to her.”

  On another occasion, in April 1941, by which time John had been given a film camera by his grandmother, Win writes that John “is engaged upon his favourite occupation of ‘making-up’ Wendy as an experiment in cinema photography, and the twins form an admiring audience. It is all proving rather distracting from letter-writing.”

  The other member of the Kintbury household who caused Win much anguish was Hans Levy. His mother, Lotte, had just managed to get out of Germany at the last possible moment and found work in Oxford. Hans still had raw memories of Kristallnacht, when his father, already suffering from cancer, was badly beaten. He died several weeks after Hans left for England. Being thrust into a new family with five boisterous children cannot have been easy. Having to pass muster as a proper English schoolboy in Win’s eyes, while speaking German with his doting mother during the holidays, must have been confusing, to say the least.

  So, on one sunny day in May, Hans made a dash for it on his bicycle, supposedly bound for Oxford. He didn’t get farther than Kintbury station. Nanny threatened the child with “all sorts of dire punishments” and Win was inclined to send him back to his mother. She relented when he expressed his wish to stay with her at Mount Pleasant. In Win’s view, the boy was simply trying to get attention—“pure limelight.” He should understand that she never made a fuss over any of her own children, and he would be treated just the same.

  Responding to this little crisis from Narvik on May 25, Bernard is more understanding. The child probably feels “a little cold-shouldered” by the Schlesinger children, who see one another only during the holidays. His “equilibrium” must have been upset. Still, he writes, “I think your action in the matter has been full of wisdom.”

  This was probably true. Win was a compassionate woman, whose judgments expressed in private could be a little severe, but she was nothing if not self-aware. In a letter written on July 26, 1941, she describes her own children being criticized, quite unfairly in Win’s view, for their lack of manners by Win’s sister-in-law, Walter’s wife, Dora. She writes, “Now you will understand why I didn’t want to send our five children to strangers in Canada. It is always other people’s children who are dissected and found fault with, whereas natural parental love overcomes these troubles. I rather feel that about poor Hans.”

  The year before, on September 13, Win actually had rather nice things to say about poor Hans, who was “not a bad little kid really.” He was “a jolly sight more obedient than our own brats.” But in his case too, the “de-Germanization” was not going as swiftly as Win had wished: “Unfortunately his table manners have reverted to complete Boche, & he has forgotten some of his English.”

  By that stage, however, there were more serious things to worry about. The Blitz had started in earnest. On September 13, 1940, an incendiary bomb fell on 15 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Bernard’s parental house in Hampstead. On the twenty-fourth, Fitzjohn’s Avenue was hit once more. “I can’t help feeling,” Win writes, “that the Jerries have a hunch that it was once called Fitzjew’s Ave. and that you once walked its whole length in one of your gayer moments singing ‘Christians awake.’”

  On September 27, Win describes her day trip to London. The last two nights, she reports, “seem to have been very sticky.” She finds a familiar hotel on the outskirts “completely demolished, belching forth bedding & odd sticks of furniture. Outside the little house a poor old man with a blanket round his shoulders stood among the wreckage of his home, with ARP [Air Raid Precaution] workers buzzing round like mad clearing up the mess.” Picking her way around broken-up streets and unexploded bombs, Win inspects Swiss Cottage,* which is more or less still standing.

  Bradley’s, the rather grand lady’s clothing store, was still unscathed on Chepstow Place. When the sirens went off five minutes after Win has stepped inside, “nobody appeared to pay any attention and my assistant explained to me that they had spotters on the roof who reported immediate danger overhead. Later I went to the millinery department, & in the middle of my discussion about colour schemes etc. the assistant suddenly said quite gently and quietly ‘I’m afraid we must stop now and go downstairs,’ and then I heard whistles blowing all over the house.” Below stairs, Win relates, “the best joke was when my assistant carried on our business . . . with the enemy immediately overhead—‘I think modom that this colour would pick out the fleck in your tweed,’ etc.”

  Buying herself some respectable clothes in the midst of the Blitz was one reason for Win to come to London, despite Bernard’s admonitions to stay away. The other was to deliver Tante Lise, Ashley’s mother, back to her digs in Hampstead. Win was fond of her “Aunt Liz,” as she had now become.

  Aunt Liz had been staying with the family in Kintbury. This caused one tiresome problem, however, quite unrelated to the bombings. In Win’s words, “Aunt Liz is a dear, but her German accent is appalling . . . To-day we went in and out of Newbury in a crowded ’bus (27 people standing, including myself, both ways) and although she had the tact to keep as quiet as possible, she had to speak occasionally.”

  But the embarrassment of a foreign accent on the Newbury bus, though evidently serious, was but a symptom of a much greater source of anxiety. It was by no means clear yet that Britain would pull through. Win’s feelings are expressed in terms of music, but this stood for so much more. Listening on the radio to “Depuis le jour,” an aria from Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise, she writes on October 2, “It made my heart ache more than ever, and took me back to that dream world before the war when you and I went to the opera together in London, & Paris, & Milan, & Rome, in Naples & Berlin & Moscow & Leningrad. Incredible, extraordinary dream, that that could really have been us. Do you think it could ever happen again?”

  Six

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  When the Blitz finally hit Britain in September 1940, with German Dornier and Heinkel bombers assaulting London on fifty-seven consecutive nights, the family, as well as the hostel children, were dispersed all over the country. While my aunt Susan still remained at home at Mount Pleasant, my mother, Wendy, her younger sister Hilary, and one of the hostel children, Ilse Jacobsohn, were at Badminton School in Bristol. This private boarding school had been chosen by Bernard and Win because of its “progressive” policies under the formidable headmistress Beatrice May Baker, known to all as BMB.

  A tall woman with a leathery face, silver hair tightly pulled back by a black velvet band, and fierce blue eyes, BMB was a Quaker, a strict vegetarian, and a socialist with a marked enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Unusually for a British boarding school headmistress, BMB was an ardent internationalist; she is said to have dressed up as the League of Nations at a Christmas fancy dress party, though quite what that looked like is not related. My mother recalls marching through Bristol with other schoolgirls in uniform behind BMB under a banner that read “Workers of the World Unite.” Some staff members of Badminton liked to call one another “Com,” short for comrade. BMB was also a lesbian who lived happily with one of the house mistresses, named Miss Rendell, or LJR. Apart from LJR, her favorite companion was Major, a Belgian hound.

  Wendy in fancy dress

 
Some of the girls were frightened of BMB. “Brace up!” she would bark whenever she suspected slackness. Every school day began with an ice-cold bath at 7:15, shared with gusto by BMB herself. She liked to encourage something called “Greek dancing,” which I imagine as a cross between classicist fantasy and free expression à la Isadora Duncan, all bare feet and loose white robes. My mother also played lacrosse, without being very good at it. And she often recalled the tapioca pudding, which inspired hateful memories in generations of British schoolchildren, but I ate with intense pleasure when she served it at home in The Hague.

  As far as religious practices were concerned, BMB was a free spirit. Girls could worship in any way they liked, as long as they worshipped something. BMB’s own sermons tended toward the eccentric, ranging from warnings against the wickedness of hot water bottles to the saintliness of Mahatma Gandhi, or Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, the socialist politician who once served as British ambassador to Moscow. The novelist Iris Murdoch, who left Badminton just as my mother arrived, wrote about attending chapel under BMB: “Jesus, as teacher, shared the stage in morning prayer with a large variety of other mentors, including Lenin.”*

  BMB’s regime might sound peculiar for a private school that catered largely to girls from well-to-do families. But it appealed to Bernard and Win for reasons that were not strictly speaking socialist. As a champion of internationalism, BMB made a special effort to take in girls from the colonies, including the West Indies and India (Indira Gandhi was there at the same time as Iris Murdoch), as well as Jewish girls, including a number of refugees from Eastern Europe. Efforts were made to expose the pupils at Badminton to important world events. Veterans from the Spanish Civil War (on the Republican side, of course) would be invited to give lectures at the school.