The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  “How’s Joe?” I asked, examining the snapshots of two laughing children by a swimming pool. The boy was an unmistakable miniature Joe, and the little girl even at this tender age so like Lilli that I caught my breath.

  “She has the same very pale gold hair, and the tiniest hands and feet,” said Ursula when I remarked on the likeness.

  “And Joe?” I asked again.

  “He’s fine! Getting fat!” she smiled; “he just dotes on Junior and Lilli; you wouldn’t have thought he’d make such a good father, would you?”

  There were photographs of her typical well-to-do home, and of a charming woman holding Lilli.

  “And you get on well with your mother-in-law?” I asked.

  “She’s a very fine person. We get along splendidly. Mother and I have always understood one another very well.”

  “Mother,” I thought. Ursula must like her very much to call her that. Presently she spoke of her own mother; but with none of the ease with which she discussed her mother-in-law.

  “Isn’t it a strange thing,” she remarked later, “when one becomes a mother oneself things change—I mean, the things I did myself I wouldn’t like my Lilli to do. I’d hate it. Isn’t that funny? But it’s true. I understand now so much better how Mutti must have felt—and how I must have hurt her.”

  We talked about Tante Luise, whom Ursula had come over to fetch back to the States with her. Stampie had come to Cologne to tell me about Hermann’s death on the last occasion I had seen him. Stampie never let us know when he was coming, and we had been on leave in Austria on his subsequent visit and had missed him. He was running a carrier’s business with Hermann’s friend; they operated four lorries between Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover and Düsseldorf. It was, he told me, money for jam, their profit being a mark per kilometre. He had, of course, taken the dangerous Berlin run for himself. He never wrote letters but he sent me cryptic messages by the drivers of the lorries. There existed a kind of freemasonry between these lorry drivers on the long autobahn runs, and they had related some of Stampie’s adventures on the Russian corridor. They would fill a book—he and his cat Lenin had become a legend. “I would so love to have seen him,” said Ursula; “he was a grand guy.”

  The old house, No. 13, in its once lovely garden, looked neglected and dreary when I went there with Ursula. She stood looking up at those twisted iron girders, their nakedness more apparent amongst the new building all round. I wondered if she was remembering how she and Lilli had remained hidden up there from the Russian troops.

  Tante Luise was sitting in the chair in which Frau Altmann had always sat. She was darning her lodger’s socks. No longer such a frightened little rabbit, her face was bright with the excitement of her niece’s visit and the anticipation of returning with her to the States.

  She chattered away to me, asking hundreds of questions about my family and our doings, and then told me all the latest talk in Berlin. Had I heard about the uprising of the East workers on June 17th? I had heard of little else from my friends since my arrival. Every Berliner spoke with awe and fear of those terrible days of anguished anxiety when they had heard the shots and seen the fires through the Brandenburger Tor. What had happened once could happen again, and they had been unpleasantly awoken again to the uncertainty of their very existence in their island town. The Red Flag over the ill fated Tor had again been torn down and burned with all the pictures and photographs of Lenin and Stalin by the desperate and furious mob. I should not be taken in by the gay façade of the new buildings, she said; underneath there was still a grim and tense battle.

  Ursula had been very silent all this time, but she was listening. She had been very quiet since her return from the camp in the Hohenzollernplatz, where her aunt Karin and her two children were now living. Her eyes went round the old sitting-room, looking at the battered chairs and at the same old pink lampshades—and then at her mother’s old sewing machine by the window. Presently she went to the cabinet on the wall and took out a tiny Dresden china dolls’ tea-set.

  “Lilli and I used to play for hours with this,” she said, fingering the tiny cups. “I shall take it back to my Lilli.”

  The Kurfürstendamm was brilliantly lit and crowded with people as we went back, but there were beggars everywhere—refugees with whom the city was overflowing. It was easy to tell the East people from the West. One look was enough. Ursula stopped and gave money to several, and I was amused to hear how halting her German had become. There were many prostitutes in the shadows, and when I stopped to speak to two of them who were obviously refugees too, Ursula averted her face and walked on.

  When I caught her up she burst out in her impulsive way, “I couldn’t live here any more! I couldn’t live here again! I’m American now in thought and feeling. My children are American, thank God. They won’t have to grow up in this terrible, terrible city, still cut into four quarters like an orange. I’m glad, glad, GLAD that I chose a new country!”

  She was near to tears as she told me that she had been horribly upset at finding that her young cousin Heinz had been indoctrinated with Communist ideals by her brother Fritz. Joe’s sister was willing to adopt the boy or the girl Rosalia, but Heinz had refused to go to what he considered to be a capitalist country. “I hate Fritz!” she cried bitterly; “there is no end to the harm he has done to that boy—and probably to hundreds of others.”

  Her aunt Karin had been dispirited and discouraged at not having received a permit to be flown to the West, where she hoped that Heinz would forget his Communist ideals. They had been in the camp for “unrecognized” refugees for over seven months now.

  “It’s too late to do anything with Heinz; he is fourteen,” said Ursula angrily, “and Fritz has been deliberately influencing him for the last three years. I wish Joe was here, he would know better what to do about it.”

  She was thoroughly upset and depressed.

  “Go to bed,” I suggested; “you are tired, and visiting old scenes has brought back unhappy memories.”

  “If it has, they must go back in the cupboard where I keep my skeletons.” she replied tersely.

  On the evening before the funeral of Professor Ernst Reuter, Berlin’s beloved Burgomaster, we were sitting in the café in the Reichskanzlerecke where we had so often sat before. Two American friends of Ursula’s were with us. The city was very silent—stunned by the sudden death of this man who had fought so valiantly for its freedom.

  “There is no one to follow him,” said the Berliners, whose faces wore the tense look of not knowing what comes next. “He was the only one who really cared about our city’s future. What will happen to us now?” And they pointed to the black bears on the standards. “Poor bear,” they said; “he must dance to every tune.”

  In every window round us burned a candle for the dead man, who had introduced the lighting of one for every German still missing in Russia. Now the Berliners burned them for him.

  Ursula’s friends left us to greet some acquaintances, and Ursula who had been very quiet suddenly asked me about Max. Had I heard from him lately?

  I had been dreading having to tell her that Max was in prison. Influenced doubtless by his uncle in Bavaria, who was a member of the Naumann group, Max had become interested in the Frei Deutschland Korps, and had been arrested in the unexpected swoop the Federal Government had made on the party in the early part of the year He was due to be released shortly, no specific charge having been preferred against most of them. Stampie had first told me of his Nazi activities. He and Max had quarrelled violently about it. When Stampie had said that it was childish to go on playing at Nazis when Hitler was dead and extreme right wing politics a thing of the past, Max had shouted that Christ was dead but that there were still millions of Christians. What could you do with a man like that? asked the bewildered Stampie.

  Ursula was incredulous, and could not believe it at first. Then she asked, with two brilliant spots of colour in her cheeks, “Hasn’t he married that Austrian girl?”

  I to
ld her that, according to Stampie, Max’s whole heart was in the Nazi revival. I remembered his words, “Whatever I do, I do with my whole heart.” Stampie was probably right. In any case Max had not married and did not appear to be interested in women.

  “He must be mad to go on with that ridiculous rubbish,” cried Ursula. “I would never have believed it of him.”

  She had obviously received a severe shock, and when her friends rejoined us she tried in vain to resume her naturally gay manner. Suddenly she cried violently:

  “Let’s have some drinks—anything to forget this terrible, terrible city with all these refugees—and Heinz, and now Max. I can’t get over it.”

  The waiter brought the drinks.

  “Well, what shall this one be?” asked one of her young friends, as he held up his glass.

  “To Berlin!” cried the other before we could speak. We drank to the city’s future freedom—and all round us the little lights twinkled for the dead Burgomaster whose coffin would be carried on the morrow past that great Russian tank on the Potsdamer Chaussée to the lovely Wald cemetery.

  I was suddenly aware that Ursula was weeping bitterly. Tears were pouring down her cheeks unchecked as she put her head down on the table and sobbed. Her friends were concerned and embarrassed, thinking that she was overcome by the melancholy of the whole atmosphere.

  “Leave her alone,” I whispered; “it will do her good to cry a little,” for I realized at that moment that the orchestra which had been playing the waltz theme from Moulin Rouge was now beginning to play very softly the Rhapsody in Blue, which Ursula loved so much and which they had played all through her wedding party.

  We went outside into the cool air and I looked at the Square where I had first met her mother, now an elegant place with the latest traffic signals. There were trees and flowers in the centre where once guarded prisoners had cleared away debris. I looked at the black bears on the standards fluttering in the breeze and thought of the Berliners’ words about the bear having to dance to so many tunes. The German tune would now be added to the other four; the Federal Government was no longer a puppet one and Dr Adenauer was making his voice heard about an independent Germany.

  I turned to find Ursula beside me. She was quite calm, although her face was tear-stained. She made no attempt to wipe away the wet marks and looked very young and vulnerable.

  “It’s over,” she said, slipping her arm through mine, and in her tremulous smile there was now something of her mother’s courage. We stood there together for a long time looking at all the little lights.

  THE END

  The following sketches were made by Frances Faviell while she lived in Berlin between 1946 and 1949. They have never before been published and appear here courtesy of her son, John Parker.

  Afterword

  I THINK I was about eleven when I realised my mother was becoming a writer as well as being a painter. I was home from my English boarding school for the summer holidays when my father suggested that I should not disturb my mother in the mornings as she would be working. … At the time I was upset as my mother had never seemed to worry if I disturbed her.

  My mother was born and grew up in Plymouth, Devon. She was the fourth of five surviving children born to Anglo Scottish parents. Named Olive, she showed her innate independence at an early age by insisting she be called Olivia. She showed early talent as an artist and in her late teens won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, then still under the direction of Henry Tonks. Her tutor, and later good friend, at the school was the painter Leon Underwood.

  In 1930 she married her first husband, a Hungarian academic, whose work took him to first Holland and then India. But they separated while there (and later divorced). She then stayed on for three months in the Ashram of the great Indian thinker and writer Rabindranath Tagore. Travelling on her own, painting and sketching, she visited other parts of India including Assam and for a few weeks lived with the Nagas, a primitive indigenous people in northeast India. On her way back to England she travelled via Japan and then China – still painting and sketching – until she had to flee Shanghai when the Japanese invaded.

  On her return to England she lived in Chelsea, then a haven for artists, and earned her living as a portrait painter. She met my father, who had recently resigned from the Indian Civil Service, in 1939, and they were married in 1940 after he had joined the Ministry of Information. Bombed out during the Blitz, as portrayed in her last book, A Chelsea Concerto, they spent the rest of the war, after I was born, in the Home Counties before returning to Chelsea in 1945.

  When the war ended my father was recruited to the Control Commission of Germany and became a high ranking official in the British administration, first in Berlin, negotiating with the others of the four powers on the organisation of the city, later in the British zone of West Germany. We joined him in Berlin in early 1946 and it was here that my mother encountered the Altmann family. It was her experiences with them that inspired her to start writing her first book, The Dancing Bear, which movingly describes Berlin in defeat through the eyes of the defeated as well as the victors.

  Each of her books, whether non-fiction or fiction, were inspired by an episode in her own life. By 1951 we had moved to Cologne and it was here that her second book, the novel A House on the Rhine, was conceived, based around migrant families (from the east of Germany) she had met and helped. Subsequently, she published another novel, Thalia, based on her own experience in France before the War when she was acting as a chaperone to a young teenager for the summer. Her final novel The Fledgeling, about a National Service deserter, was also based on an actual incident.

  My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1956 though I did not know at the time. At first radiotherapy seemed to have arrested the disease. But then two years later, it reappeared. She fought the disease with courage and humour, exhibiting the same clear sightedness with which she had viewed life around her as a painter and a writer. She died just after A Chelsea Concerto was published, in 1959.

  In her books as in her life, my mother had an openness to and compassion for others and, when she saw an injustice or need, would not be thwarted by authority of any kind in getting something done. But as she always pursued her causes with charm as well as firmness, few could deny her requests for long.

  John Richard Parker, 2016

  About The Author

  FRANCES FAVIELL (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940.

  She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists’ community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959).

  After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.

  FURROWED MIDDLEBROW

  FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON

  FM4. A
Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL

  FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK

  Frances Faviell

  A House on the Rhine

  The rubbish in the once-lovely garden, the broken toys, the bicycles against the toppling fence, the neglected, trampled flower-beds – all were highlighted by the merciless midday sun. The house itself, with paint peeling, tiles missing from the roof, its pretentious pillars pitted with gunfire, looked forlorn and neglected. But nothing could detract from the beauty of the acacia trees whose proud flowering dominated the scene and apologized for everything.

  Having made her publishing debut with The Dancing Bear, a superb memoir of life in Berlin immediately after World War II, Frances Faviell applied first-hand knowledge to fiction, telling the riveting, harrowing tale of one large, troubled family in Germany nearly a decade after the war’s end.

  In a town near Cologne, rebuilding is proceeding at a frantic pace, factory work is plentiful and well-paid, and the dark days of near-starvation have ended. But Joseph, a former Allied prisoner of war, and his enormous brood—his wife having received a medal under the Nazis for bearing more than 10 children—face new problems ranging from the mother’s infidelity, the oldest child’s involvement with a brutal youth gang leader, and a beloved adopted daughter’s plans to marry an American soldier.

  Vividly portraying the love and conflict of a large family and the dramatic, sometimes tragic social change of Germany’s postwar recovery, A House on the Rhine is a powerful, heartbreaking tale from the author of the London Blitz memoir A Chelsea Concerto.