By late 1943, my mother had a lot more to thank Eddy for than the delicacies that he continued to secure as food became ever scarcer and rationing ever tighter.
German refugees like her, still designated by the British authorities as enemy aliens, were under strict curfew; but she had forgotten to keep track of the time as she and Eddy and two of her fellow Rostal students, Norbert Brainin and Hans (soon to be Peter) Schidlof, played a Beethoven quartet, and then, at his insistence, one by Schubert, before he served an unmissable dinner. As they started the desert, she realized that it was already after curfew time. The prospect that this might force her to stay the night delighted Eddy; but she knew what that was likely to mean and decided to risk the walk home, leaving the other two to sleep over.
Hurrying through darkened streets – streetlights were turned off to make it more difficult for German bombers to locate their targets – she ran straight into the law.
‘And who are you, miss?’ the policeman asked, confident that he had caught a sex worker on the way back from a client. ‘Your papers, please.’
But he hardly needed to see papers. The accent said it all. My mother was arrested on the spot, taken to a police station, and locked in a cell for the night. After questioning the next morning, she was released on bail, guaranteed by Eddy, and told to report to a magistrates’ court a fortnight later.
‘Why were you out so late when you say you know the rules?’ the magistrate demanded as she stood in the dock in a borrowed dress and wide-brimmed hat. From his condescending tone my mother was sure the court assumed that she had been engaged in the sex industry – and, worse, earning money, which was usually illegal as an enemy alien.
‘I was playing quartets.’
‘Playing quartets?’ the magistrate enquired, convinced she had quickly incriminated herself. ‘How, pray, do proceedings unfold when one is “playing quartets”?’ He clearly supposed that the playing in question involved some act of group sex, involving two couples or perhaps three sex workers and a client.
My mother looked confused. ‘You know,’ she stammered, ‘string quartets: Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart . . .’
The gallery broke into laughter. Beethoven! That was an original excuse, and certainly more imaginative than the usual run of self-justifying lies.
‘Case dismissed!’ the magistrate proclaimed, after further enquiries about what actually happened when one played string quartets.
As my mother was about to leave, the policeman who had detained her appeared out of nowhere. Expecting an apology, she stopped to smile at him, mumbling that she had never been in a court before, though her father had practised family law in one of Berlin’s oldest. Instead, he asked if she would like to go to the cinema with him one evening.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ she shot back, contemptuous of the officer’s nerve to ask for a date after inflicting on her that cold, lonely night in custody, fearful of the punishment that breaking the curfew might bring.
In fact, she owed the good cop serious gratitude. On returning home the morning after her incarceration, she found that a German rocket had scored a direct hit on her boarding house, leaving a pile of rubble, a giant crater, and a vestige of facade. Neighbours said that it had struck at about 2 a.m. Eddy’s dinner and her arrest had saved her life.