A man claiming to be one of Adolf Hitler’s sons has turned up in France, intending to sell his memoirs. One of the other ones has not been slow to follow.
I was born on January 18, 1923, at 17, Bolitha Villas, SE26. It was an ordinary little Sydenham terraced house, flanked to the left by Dunlookin, and to the right by Fredberyl. Ours was called Arbeit Macht Frei.
It was distinguishable from the rest only by virtue of its paintwork. The front door was puce, the downstairs windows were yellow, and the upstairs were variously blue, green and beige. They were painted thus by my father, this being his trade; but he was constantly going abroad on business, leaving the job partially done, and finding upon his return that the paint in the open pots had gone hard.
He would then throw the pots at my mother and run up and down Bolitha Villas in his bare feet shrieking that the Jews had left the lids off. By evening, he had invariably calmed down, and would be found, weeping, in the shed, muttering that he had gone off beige, or blue, or eau-de-nil, or whatever it happened to be. Towards midnight, I would be awoken by the strains of Wagner, and would tiptoe to the window and stare out towards the shed, through the tiny window of which I would be able to see my father in a flaxen wig beating the cat with the flat of his wooden sword.
Years later, recalling such memories, I asked my mother what had attracted her to him in the first place. She explained that she had met him at a dance in Leytonstone, where he was the only man in a helmet; halfway through the evening, he took the head of a conga line and marched it nine miles to Dagenham, in driving hail. She was, she said, carried away by his natural authority. He also had a lighter side, she maintained, and was well known, before his broody period set in, for his impressions of Charlie Chaplin.
None of this, of course, was known to me in my childhood, and my father remained, in consequence, something of a puzzle. I did not, for example, know why he slept on the roof in all weathers, and I was acutely embarrassed, being but four years old, when he took me to the Natural History Museum and insisted on goose-stepping to the bus-stop. He also, when we arrived, screamed at the dinosaur skeleton for some minutes on the grounds, as I recall, that it had given up without a struggle. He calmed down somewhat upon the arrival of three uniformed attendants, pausing only to inspect their buttons, feel their biceps, and pat them on the head affectionately, before taking me away to look at a stuffed gorilla beside which he delivered, to my total incomprehension, a long lecture about the decadence of jazz.
That Christmas, an aunt gave me a golliwog, which my father hanged. When I asked him why, he jumped out of the window.
In the spring of 1929, on my father’s insistence, I joined the Cubs.
Although, initially, I was a figure of derision (I was the only one in a brown shirt; and also, try as I might, I could not fully disguise the fact that my cap had a spike on it), before long my little playmates were treating me with more and more respect. This was largely on account of my accoutrements; each time my daddy returned home from one of his foreign trips, he would bring me a new piece of equipment, until, by midsummer, I was turning up at meetings in riding-boots, Sam Browne belt and a gas-mask, carrying a Schmeisser machine-pistol. Where other boys wore cheap blunt penknives on their belts, I wore a grenade pouch; where they sported a woodcraft badge, I bore the Iron Cross.
Akela, our leader, was very decent about it: not only was she trained in the Montessori method, and thus responsive to self-expression irrespective of its prime motive, she also had steel spectacles gummed together at their broken bridge, thinning hair, a concave bust, and legs like Indian clubs. When my father, therefore, clasped her to him on collecting me one evening, kissed her on both sallow cheeks, and informed her that she would be the flower of the New Sydenham, a mottled glow suffused her entire visible surface.
Thereafter, I could do no wrong. When, the following week, I led my patrol away from its ostensible mission to pluck four-leaf clovers on Sydenham Hill and took them instead on a house-to-house search of Dulwich looking for Bolshevik printing presses, she awarded me the Blue Max with Oak Leaves and Crossed Swords, and allowed me to blow her whistle.
There is no guessing the heights to which I might have risen, had it not been for a characteristically over-enthusiastic blunder on my father’s part. That autumn, our group went away to weekend camp. My parents took me down in our old Morris Ten, my mother driving and my father standing on the seat beside her with his head and shoulders poking up through the sunshine roof. Upon our arrival, my father dismounted and, catching sight of the tented camp, immediately began encircling it with a roll of barbed wire he always carried in the boot.
It was while he was attempting to construct a makeshift searchlight tower by lashing one of the Morris’s headlamps to a telephone pole that an assistant to the Chief Scout ran up and insisted that he come down and explain his behaviour.
Daddy then threw himself to the ground and began biting the grass. Soon afterwards, we received a brief note informing us that Sydenham Cub Pack 1374 was being reconstituted under new leadership and that my membership of the group would not be looked upon with favour.
Of the subsequent career of Akela, I have little first-hand information: between her departure from SE26 in 1929 and her suicidal single-handed attack on General Vasilevsky’s 4th Armoured Division outside Stalingrad, history has drawn a disappointing blank.
For two years thereafter, I saw little of my father. There had been some local unpleasantness on Guy Fawkes’ Night 1929 when, by dint of a nocturnal raid on the files of Sydenham Public Library, he managed to steal enough tickets to allow him to take out its entire stock, which he then piled in our back yard and ignited, having first topped the heap with a stuffed effigy of Issy Bonn; and as the result of this he once more left the country.
Apart from one notorious flying visit to Bolitha Villas in the winter of 1930, when he showed up proudly on the arm of an aristocratic English girl – it ended in chaos when she laughed at our three china ducks and Daddy in consequence attempted to garotte Mummy with his armband – I did not see him again until late on Midsummer’s Day, 1931.
It is an occasion which remains embossed upon my memory, despite the passage of almost fifty years.
I was coming home from school, and upon turning into Bolitha Villas from Pondicherry Crescent, I noticed a large crowd outside Fredberyl. Most of them were neighbours, but there were policemen in the crowd, too, and a fire-engine was drawn up at the kerb. Fredberyl being the house next to Arbeit Macht Frei, I was therefore amazed, upon drawing nearer, to see my father at an upstairs window of it, shrieking and waving a makeshift flag.
‘What’s going on?’ I enquired of an elderly police sergeant, whom I had met when my father, during one of his many bursts of wild enthusiasm, had written to Scotland Yard applying for a submarine licence.
‘It’s your old man,’ he replied. ‘He has annexed Fredberyl. As I understand it, he intends to knock down the dividing wall and use the combined premises for a spring offensive against Dunlookin.’
Being only eight, I could not of course grasp the full implications of the situation; I was, however, understandably concerned for the welfare of my father.
‘Oh dear!’ I cried. ‘What will happen to my daddy? Will you have to go in there and drag him out and all that?’
The sergeant stared down at me in some irritation.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘Intervene in a domestic wossname? You must be joking, son! I don’t know what your old man’s got against Fredberyl and Dunlookin, but one thing’s for bleeding sure, I have not come all the way here from Tulse Hill to interfere in a quarrel in a faraway street between people of whom I know nothing.’