For Virginia Woolf, the great gardens at Sheffield Place, with their series of descending lakes, came to reflect something too intimate to find its way into works of historical reference. ‘No place was more like home to him [Edward Gibbon] than Sheffield Place,’ she wrote, ‘and he looked upon the Holroyds as his own flesh and blood.’
Virginia Woolf hands over the telling of her story to Sheffield’s daughter, ‘the soft and stately Maria’, as Gibbon described her. Only she could bring understanding to this devoted friendship between the Peer and the Historian, or ‘the Gib’ as she sometimes calls him (my father would have liked that). It was a friendship based on opposites, an attachment that (like biography itself perhaps) enabled them both to live lives each could never have lived simply in his own person. In the headstrong figure of Sheffield, Gibbon found someone caught up in those sorts of political and military affairs that, from the calmness of his study and over great distances of time, he sat composing into the sonorous sentences of his Decline and Fall. With his friend Sheffield, he was able to slip off his purple language and become quite racy and colloquial. In matters of the heart, where Gibbon was so ineffectual, Sheffield appeared recklessly extravagant. This emotional extravagance troubled Maria who looked to Gibbon for support. For though he was ridiculously vain and prodigiously fat, over-dressed and top-heavy, a waddling indoor figure of a man, ‘rather testy too, an old bachelor, who lived like clockwork and hated to have his plans upset’ (this must have brought her friend Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf’s mind), yet he was also ‘le grand Gibbon’ whom Maria could not help liking. She saw how only in deference to Gibbon would her father check the self-destructive riot and confusion of his passions, and she felt grateful.
In ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’ Virginia Woolf was indicating the change she wanted to see in historical biography, ‘changing as the furniture changed in the firelight, as the waters of the lake changed when the night wind swept over them’. It is a turning away from the general narratives of history, with their wheeling armies and splendid processions that pass through the gorgeous tapestry of Gibbon’s pages. It is an attempt, in miniature form, to put into practice Samuel Johnson’s advice to biographers not to dwell on ‘those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, but lead the thoughts into domestic privacies’: an eye-level rather than the overall view of our past.
This is what has attracted me to biography: the idea of an ‘intimacy between strangers’, a closeness growing up during the acts of writing and reading between an author, the reader and their subject, all unknown to one another before the book began coming into existence. For I do not think of biography as being an information-retrieval exercise: information, now the fruit of technology, has little fascination for me unless it takes root in my emotions and grows in my imagination into knowledge. What increasingly absorbs me is the unconscious process of learning. While writing I forget myself, and when I return to my world I sense that I am someone slightly different. The effect of these working holidays is of course cumulative, and perhaps there is significance in my having two birthdays. I was born the son of my parents, the grandson of their parents, and so on; and then, as it were, reborn the child of my writings – for it is they that have taken me round the world and shaped my adult existence. Now I must sit at my desk and see if I can bring together these two people who were consecutively, and who are cumulatively, myself.
3
The Swedish Experiment
My mother’s beginning was dramatic. In 1916 her parents were living at Örebro, 200 kilometres west of Stockholm. They had been married three years, had a two-year-old son Karl-Åke, and my grandmother was over five months pregnant with her second child. On 19 November Karl-Åke was playing in the kitchen where his nurse was cooking – simply boiling water it seems at the fireplace. Some say the child knocked over an oil lamp and started a fire; others that he tipped the boiling saucepan over himself. He was rushed to hospital, lingered there almost three weeks, then died on 9 December. The shock caused my grandmother to give birth prematurely to a tiny daughter on the day after the accident and in the hospital where her son was dying. They called their daughter Ulla. This was my mother.
I knew none of this until my mother wrote it down for me. I am not certain how much she knew of it herself before then – perhaps it is the sort of knowledge we suppress. But while preparing her account she told me that Greta, a neighbour of her mother in Stockholm, ‘is trying to pump her without her knowing so, to keep her mind off her health – let’s see what we’ll get.’ In other words Greta was doing what I was doing.
What we got was to be one of the main sources of my mother’s rapid narrative. She wrote on lined paper, twenty centimetres long, and with forty-six narrow lines to the page which her fast-flowing handwriting often overlapped. She wrote in pencil, suggesting the impermanence of the past, yet with great speed and dash, almost violence, underlining words – names, dates, countries, towns, as well as words that needed special emphasis such as all and dead. Her writing appears full of activity, as if responding to the urgency of these events which streamed confusingly in and out of each other until they came to an end at the top of the thirteenth page. Then she started again, from somewhere near the middle, ending this time with notes of her various dogs: another fourteen pages. My mother had little time for the past. What absorbed her was the eternal present. Nevertheless, as she wrote, and then as I read, an unusual interest in these events seemed to grow up between us.
She noted that her father, a major in the Swedish army, had died in 1945. That surprised me. I had thought it was very much earlier. Only when I came to write this book did I realise he actually died several years later. I never met him. Nineteen forty-five was the year I began making regular sea-journeys with my mother to visit our Swedish relatives in Borås and Stockholm, Göteborg and a holiday island nearby called Marstrand.
My understanding at the time was that, despite being in one of the country’s safest professions, the Swedish army, my grandfather had died young. I imagined him, sword in hand, falling gloriously from a horse during hectic manoeuvres in a northern forest.
From my mother’s notes I see that he was the son of Knut Johansson, a director of the Växjö Match Company in southern Sweden and his wife Amanda Hall who came from a family that ran the Krueger Match Company. On her marriage certificate my mother was to give her maiden name as Ulla Knutsson-Hall. Evidently her father took, or was given, his father’s first name, a second syllable to remind us that he was the son of his father, and finally his mother’s maiden name. He is Karl Knutsson-Hall.
Karl (or Kalle as he was usually called) had a good voice and had once dreamed of being an opera singer. He did sing in a few amateur productions, but his parents wanted him to take over the family’s match empire. Eventually, by way of compromise, he went into the army which was thought to provide a respectable career.
My mother’s maternal family had come from southern Germany, and her great-grandfather, Gustav Jagenburg, worked in Moscow early in the nineteenth century before settling down with his wife at Rydboholm, near Borås. He was a textile manufacturer and his son Rudolf was said to have invented a wondrous dye that never faded. In the eighteen-eighties Rudolf married the daughter of the prison priest at the Castle of Varberg. The second of their six children was my grandmother. Her formal name was Karin though we all called her Kaja.
How Karl and Kaja first met I do not know. But I do know that the Jagenburgs considered themselves socially superior to Karl’s matchmaking family which was lower-middle class. They strongly opposed the marriage of this handsome couple on the grounds that Kaja could do better for herself. There was no money to be made in the army and Karl’s excellent horsemanship did not particularly impress them. But Kaja in those days was a headstrong, passionate girl. A photograph of her in her early twenties among my mother’s possessions shows a sweet face, with watchful slanting eyes, a rather sensuous but determined mouth, her expression provocati
ve and full of character. No one was going to tell her whom to marry. She was in love with this charming officer, and that was enough.
So, in 1913, she married Lieutenant Karl Knutsson-Hall and went up to Boden in the north of Sweden where he was stationed. She was twenty-one and could marry without parental consent; he was four years older.
It seems probable that the marriage never recovered from the burning to death of their infant son Karl-Åke at the end of 1916. They had no more children after my mother Ulla and by the nineteen-twenties, when the family moved to Stockholm and my mother was old enough to notice things, Karl was spending more time with his brother officers than with his wife. They seemed to regard him still as a romantic bachelor. ‘A more gentlemanly officer than Karl Hall could not be found in 1920s Sweden,’ wrote one of his subordinates who recalled this ‘idyllic warrior’ during their company’s ‘legendary manoeuvres in Trosa during 1922… and the merry ball in Trosa’s grand hotel where Karl Hall reigned over the dusty recruits and young beauties… a generous, chivalrous heartbreaker.’
Ulla went first to the Margaretha School in Stockholm and then to Franska Skolan at 9 Döbelnsgatan where she began to learn her many languages. In the holidays she often went to Växjö where the Hall family had a large country house. Her most enduring memory was of twin earth-closets in a red building with white gables where ‘I used to sit with my cousin’. Her father being the eldest of nine children, there were plenty of these cousins with whom to play. At the end of the garden stood a lake where they would all swim (‘trod on a snake once on the way down the slope’, my mother wrote). What she most enjoyed were the children’s suppers by this lake in the endless summer evenings – sandwiches made from newly-baked brown bread with delicious fillings. ‘I once ate 15!’ my mother boasted. ‘A record.’ She was looked after during those early holidays by Karin – not her mother (who disliked the Hall family and didn’t often go to Växjö) but one of her in-laws whom she thought of as her ‘nanny’.
At the age of twelve Ulla was sent to a French family in the Haute Savoie for three months to practise her French. But there was another reason for removing her from Stockholm. Her parents had decided to separate. This was not a friendly arrangement but a stubbornly-fought duel that lasted almost four years and according to the family was to lead to a change in the Swedish divorce laws. Up till that time ‘we lived in various nice flats’, my mother wrote. But after she returned from France everything changed. Mother and daughter moved rapidly between small apartments and boarding houses pursued by Karl. Sometimes at night there were drunken brawls in the street and on one memorable occasion Karl staggered towards them shouting and waving a revolver.
Kaja was determined to win her divorce. But though Karl was apparently drinking heavily and had, Kaja told her daughter, contracted venereal disease from an extra-marital liaison, there seemed no way for her to obtain a legal divorce unless her husband consented to it. His condition of consent was a million kronor, which he calculated Kaja’s father (he of the miraculous unfading dye) could afford to pay him. There was a prolonged and bitter feud that my mother found unnerving. ‘I suffered,’ she wrote. But what struck me as strange when reading her brief account was that she didn’t appear to blame her father for those dreadful years. Perhaps she romanticised him, not knowing him so well, and missing him. Kaja had never been very ‘understanding’ with her as a child and was, Ulla felt, too ‘demanding’ with her husband.
Eventually Kaja won the divorce battle largely because one of her uncles was Riksmarskalk of Sweden (equivalent to Lord High Chamberlain in England). After ‘Lex versus Hall’ was settled in 1932 it became easier for women to get divorced in Sweden.
Following their divorce Karl retreated into a home for alcoholics where he was nursed by the daughter of a priest (the home was apparently managed by the Church). Then in her mid-twenties, Marianne was half Karl’s age, but ‘understanding and kind which was what he needed’, my mother insisted. So they married. As a bonus, she was ‘very good-looking’, my mother observed. This suggests that she must have seen Marianne, but she gets her name wrong (Margareta instead of Marianne) which suggests she did not actually know her. Perhaps they met only at Karl’s funeral. In my mother’s speedy narrative, the happy couple are disposed of rather brutally: ‘My father died of T.B. and god knows what else,’ she wrote. ‘He caught T.B. from his wife who was later killed by being squashed by a lorry against a wall whilst walking with a girlfriend in Stockholm – 5 years after Papa died.’ This must have been based on what Kaja was telling her neighbour, Greta. In fact Karl’s cause of death is given as a respectable heart attack (‘Infartus cordis kardiosclerasis’).
In her ’teens Kaja had done some sewing and cutting in her father’s textile workshops in Borås. Then, arriving in Stockholm as a married woman, she persuaded her father to introduce her to Countess Margareta von Schwerin, known as Marg, who in 1927 was to open the celebrated fashion house Märthaskolan where elegant ladies had their dresses made. Before long Kaja became a consultant there and was coming into contact with Swedish high society. She took her work seriously and, she would tell her daughter, was never late, not even by five minutes, for an appointment. ‘I can see Kaja entering the salons well aware of the impression she made, so sure of herself and her beauty,’ a friend of my mother’s wrote to me. ‘Everyone had to admire her, and then entered Ulla, pretty, laughing and much more warm at heart, everybody felt.’
Kaja soon floated free from the disreputable business of her divorce and settled into her work as a couturier for Märthaskolan. This was a school of dress as well as a fashion house and in those days the greatest single influence in the creation of Swedish femininity. The Countess Margareta von Schwerin herself was really a fashion reporter with strong opinions as to what would be useful for young girls. She travelled widely and dealt with most of the French couturiers. But she did not promote a single style or confine her interests to high fashion. She was an ambitious woman and wanted to dress all women in Sweden, whatever their age or status. She saw herself as an educator. Her mission was to give Swedish women confidence in the home and at work by the way they presented themselves.
Among the bits and pieces my mother left after her death are a few photographs of our trips together to Sweden from the late nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties. There I am sitting on the floor with my pretty cousin Mary. She is smiling, blonde and lively; I, aged nine or ten, am blank-faced and bird-like, decked out in foreign tailoring, with blue and yellow Swedish cufflinks, a frilled handkerchief and bow tie (my God! What would my schoolfriends in Surrey have said?). Behind us, sitting and standing in rows, a contingent of the family has formed up for the photograph. I can recognise my grandmother Kaja, a formidably handsome woman looking frankly at the camera; and I can see my mother, unsmiling, with a similar gingham frock and hair neatly arranged like my grandmother’s – she is on her very best behaviour. But I cannot identify anyone else. Which is Elis? Where is Inga?
But with my mother’s written account before me I can at last make some sense of this family group. My grandmother was in her mid-fifties at the time these photographs were taken, though she looks younger. And these are her brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands and children, who have lined up before the camera. There is a bank manager, an engineer, a doctor, a businessman: all respectable middle-class people. Of course there are some lapses from respectability. One of the brothers, for example, an import–export manager, imported syphilis from a Hamburg brothel and has never quite recovered. My grandmother believes it must have addled his brain – why else would he have married a waitress from a Borås hotel? My mother likes Kristina, her waitress-aunt, who has always been kind to her. But my grandmother cannot stand her and makes pointed remarks such as, when Kristina comes into the room with some drinks: ‘You must be used to carrying trays.’
My grandmother is a snob. Snobbishness is her form of authority. It cows other people, and this suits her. That is why she looks so
young in the photographs and my mother so ill-at-ease. My grandmother believes in appearances and, living up to her beliefs, she appears splendidly superior.
Kaja always walked, sat, spoke and generally carried herself with soldierly precision. She had the unquestioning air of an officer – more so than her ex-husband. She assumed the posture of high command, straightened her back, raised her chin, yet somehow retained her attractiveness. This is a determined and successful couturier we see in the photographs.
Kaja revelled in this work and felt proud of being part of the Countess’s team at Märthaskolan. She allowed herself one acknowledged admirer, Birger Sandström, a middle-aged gentleman with a brilliant white moustache, whose presence breathed respectability. He escorted her to parties and she employed him almost as a fashion accessory. It was a discreet arrangement which became easier to manage after 1934 when Ulla sailed for England.
4
Basil Street Blues Page 2
