THAT HOLIDAY IN Heidelberg in 1951 was not my first experience of Continental Europe. In the summer of 1947, when I was twelve, Uncle John and Aunt Lu invited my mother and me to visit them in Brussels. (Dad was unable to accompany us because of his work, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway.) John and Lu enjoyed a standard of living considerably above ours. They occupied a very comfortable apartment in an exclusive residential area of the capital, and owned two cars: John had one for his job as travelling salesman for his father-in-law’s business, and Lu had a new Morris Minor, a coveted vehicle in England for which there were long waiting lists, which she drove con brio, swerving in and out of the Brussels traffic, a cigarette smouldering between her fingers on the steering wheel. She also had a Flemish-speaking maid who came in daily to clean the apartment and help her prepare meals. The rationing which was still in force in Britain, and was sometimes more severe than during the war, did not apply in Belgium and the Brussels shops displayed food that astonished Mum and me with its quantity, quality and variety. Lu was an excellent cook, but I was too young and unsophisticated to appreciate much of what she served to us, or indeed to appreciate the whole experience of ‘abroad’, a privilege which at this time was available to very few British people. I enjoyed some of the more familiar food, and I enjoyed being driven at exhilarating speed by Lu in the Morris Minor, its tyres pattering on the cobbled roads. (Dad’s first post-war car was an old Ford Anglia which frequently had to be started with a handle.) An excursion to the site of the battle of Waterloo genuinely interested me, but for the most part I felt ill at ease in the foreign environment.
Lu’s son Philippe was several inches taller than me, but a year younger. I did not speak enough French and he did not speak enough English to allow us to communicate very well. We were both shy and there was no spark of instinctive liking between us, so we did not become playmates. The domestic atmosphere of the Brussels ménage was volatile and this added to the strain of being a guest, for Mum as well as for me. In retrospect it is obvious that John was already finding his fairly humdrum job – travelling round the country selling English tweed and worsted to Belgian tailors – irksome and somewhat infra dig, and that he resented Philippe’s claims on Lu’s attention as much as Philippe resented his alien presence. Both John and Lu were emotional and quick-tempered people who relieved their feelings in outspoken and often angry terms. Their rows never lasted for long, and they soon recovered their good humour – John usually cracking the jokes and Lu providing the laughter; but to Mum and me, used to a much quieter tenor of domestic life, their vocal disagreements were alarming. I think we were both relieved to get back home.
Nevertheless that visit was an educative experience, and meant that when my aunt Eileen proposed, early in 1951, that I should have a holiday with her in Heidelberg that summer, the challenge of travelling there on my own was not quite so daunting as it might otherwise have seemed: I had some idea of what was involved in crossing the Channel and what to expect on the other side. Eileen wrote an enticing description of the attractions of the historic city, of which I already had some idea from the postcards she had sent us, showing its situation on the river Neckar, overlooked by a castle halfway up a tree-covered mountain. She promised that she would spend as much time as possible with me, and obtain a PX card which would allow me to use all the facilities reserved for American personnel – restaurants, snack bars, local transport, the riverside swimming pool and the PX store – while she was at work. It certainly sounded a lot more interesting than the holidays I had shared in the last couple of years with Mum and Dad. When he was a jobbing musician Dad was always reluctant to arrange holidays in case he missed some lucrative gigs, but in the late forties he obtained a steady job as leader of his own trio (piano, drums and saxophone/clarinet) at the Studio Club in Knightsbridge, where his boss for a short time was Clement Freud before he became famous. It closed briefly in the summer and so Dad had no excuse not to take Mum and me on a proper holiday. We went in successive years to a boarding house in Shoreham near Worthing. Timothy in Out of the Shelter went on such holidays. ‘He was lonely and bored – bored with his parents’ company and bored with Worthing; bored with the promenade and the pier and the putting green and Mrs Watkins’ Spam salads’ – and so was I. I decided to accept Eileen’s invitation.
Dad and Mum gave me the money for the journey, but no other assistance in making the necessary arrangements. I had to obtain my rail and boat tickets from Victoria station, a passport from the Petty France Passport Office, and a visa from the West German Embassy. All required separate journeys into central London and much tedious waiting in line. There were moments, especially as I stood in a queue for hours at the West German Embassy, when I regretted what I had let myself in for. But it wasn’t just the tedium of the bureaucratic formalities that drained my enthusiasm for the trip: the ugly German eagle stamped on my passport by a rather surly clerk at the embassy triggered some apprehension about venturing into the land of the hereditary enemy, whose evil deeds in wartime had overshadowed my childhood. It was now safely disarmed, but the defeated population would surely be hostile to a young British visitor who they might think had come to their country to gloat. I comforted myself with the thought that I would be under the protection of my aunt and her American friends, and resolved to go through with the adventure. It turned out to be one of the formative experiences of my life.
The journey had five stages: London to Dover, Dover to Ostend, Ostend to Brussels, Brussels to Mannheim, and a short final leg from Mannheim to Heidelberg. I set off in the morning, and was met in Brussels by John and Lu, who gave me a meal, transferred me to a different terminus and put me on the overnight train to Mannheim. I had not thought of reserving a seat and I was unable to find a vacant one. The train was incredibly crowded, its corridors packed with passengers and their luggage. I had to stand for the whole journey, though I spent the latter part of it sitting or reclining on the floor, propped up against my bag, a large RAF officer’s holdall that had belonged to Uncle John and for some forgotten reason had been left in our loft, collecting dust, for years. Timothy Young, the sixteen-year-old central character of Out of the Shelter, makes this same journey and in the course of it has an intuition that perhaps owes something to Stamboul Train: ‘a sense that, in Europe, life had always been like this, like an endless train journey through the night, across frontiers, loudspeakers blaring harshly over bleak platforms, uniformed men waking you up to examine your papers, no more immediate end in view than to make a little space for yourself and snatch a little sleep’. Like Timothy, I derived a gratifying increment of self-esteem from completing this gruelling journey, successfully changing at Mannheim on to an antiquated little local train which trundled out of the city past bomb sites rendered grimly spectral by early-morning mist and delivered me half an hour later into the embrace of my aunt Eileen on the platform of Heidelberg station.
My first day unfolded almost exactly as described in Out of the Shelter. Eileen checked my unwieldy bag at the station and took me to a nearby guesthouse where she had found a room, warning me that it was not great but the best she had been able to find, as accommodation was ‘like gold dust’ in Heidelberg. It turned out to be a bleak, barely furnished garret at the top of a tall, gloomy house, owned by a large middle-aged German woman who spoke little English. I spoke no German, a language which was not taught at St Joseph’s, except for a few words picked up from comic-book stories about the war, like ‘Achtung’ and ‘Dummkopf’, which were not much use to me in the circumstances. Eileen, who had acquired some basic German, and quickly sensed that I didn’t relish making this place my home for the next two weeks, told the landlady that we would make a decision after I had had some breakfast, as I was extremely hungry, which was true enough. She took me to a cafeteria reserved for US personnel in the middle of a green square near the station called the Stadtgarten, where I had my first introduction to the plentiful food the occupying forces enjoyed – two fried eggs were served with rashers of bacon and sausages – and learned two new idioms when a white-coated cook asked me if I wanted my eggs ‘sunny side up’ or ‘over easy’. While I tucked into this meal she apologised for the uninviting guesthouse room and said she would try to find something better in the coming days, but meanwhile I would have to make do with it. Then a dea ex machina rescued me from this fate. An American friend of Eileen’s greeted her, sat down at our table, and was introduced to me. Informed of my plight, she said that she was just leaving for a three-week vacation, and offered me the use of her room in a hostel for civilian employees of the US Army while she was away. Just like that. This was another revelation – of a quality of friendliness and generosity in large sections of American society, bred of affluence and uninhibited manners, utterly different from the cautious, calculating, protective attitude to personal possessions that most English people display to anyone who is not ‘family’. I would frequently experience it again when I lived for two longish periods in America. This woman – I think she was called Ruth – was not an especially close friend of Eileen’s, but she was willing to let a sixteen-year-old English schoolboy whom she had never previously met occupy her room for the duration of his holiday. There was only one snag: the room was in a women’s hostel. Ruth saw no problem, as men were allowed in the building till midnight. Eileen could take me to the room and leave me there at night and I would just need to lie low until the girls had gone to work in the morning. Eileen responded enthusiastically to this idea. In retrospect I decided this was not just because it offered me much more comfortable accommodation than the guesthouse garret, but also because it would save her quite a few Deutschmarks, and because she was tickled by the element of intrigue and role-playing in the proposal. I was much more doubtful, precisely for that last reason. ‘Well, think it over,’ Ruth said. ‘I must be on my way. Here’s the key to my room.’ She took it out of her handbag and gave it to Eileen.
That holiday was the primary inspiration for Out of the Shelter, and in writing it I drew extensively on my memories of those two weeks, adding material garnered on two later visits to Heidelberg. It is probably the most autobiographical of my novels, though it contains too many fictional elements added to, or displacing, the reality of my experience to be classified generically as an ‘autobiographical novel’. The wartime and post-war childhood of Timothy closely resembles mine, but his experience of the Blitz is more traumatic. It is not his aunt but an older sister, called Kate (perhaps an unconscious incarnation of the daughter my mother lost, though the conscious reason was to avoid portraying Eileen), who works for the American Army in Heidelberg and invites him to visit her there. All the sexual episodes are invented, including Timothy’s initiation into heavy petting with the American teenager Gloria. I returned to England as innocent in that respect as I had left; but I did feel enormously more grown-up.
One reason was that I had to pretend to be older than I was much of the time in Heidelberg, beginning with my first evening when I agreed to try out the room in the hostel. The plan was to give the impression that I was a male friend of Eileen’s escorting her home and being invited up for a cup of coffee: she would let us into the room and then leave after a discreet interval. All went well that first evening – and subsequently. Even though Eileen looked at least ten years younger than her true age of about forty-five, we would have seemed an odd couple to anyone who scrutinised us closely, but no one did. It helped that the hostel was a larger, more impersonal establishment than the one in which Eileen had her own bedsit, where I sometimes spent time during the day with the co-operation of the friendly German caretaker. There was no visible caretaker in the larger hostel, and the residents scarcely gave us a second glance as Eileen and I made our way to Ruth’s comfortable room in the evenings. It had a washbasin but no en-suite bathroom. I peed in the sink at night and waited till the women had all gone to work in the mornings before using the nearest lavatory along the corridor. Sometimes the German women cleaners mopping the floor of the entrance hall would look at me curiously when I appeared at about nine o’clock on my way to take breakfast at the Stadtgarten canteen, but they never said anything except ‘Guten Tag’. The expression ‘toy boy’ didn’t exist then, but perhaps that was what they thought I was. It still astonishes me that, as an unsophisticated and temperamentally cautious English schoolboy, I had the chutzpah to live clandestinely for two weeks in a women’s hostel in a foreign city, always conscious that at any moment someone might challenge me to explain what I was doing there. I can only suppose that my fear of exposure was weaker than my reluctance to spend a lot of time alone in the forbidding ambience of the German Gasthaus.
The longer I evaded detection, the more confident I became in the nightly charade of escorting Eileen to Ruth’s room. I was acquiring a more grown-up appearance and manners from other sources at the same time. Eileen bought me some new clothes at the PX, more suitable for the hot and humid August weather than the thick Utility garments I had brought with me: cotton shirts and trousers, and a lightweight jacket of fine wool in a pale oatmeal shade, with fashionable draped shoulders, to wear in the evenings. Eileen and her mainly American circle of friends, all civilians working for the US Army, lived a very full social life and dined out frequently. A favourite place was the Officers’ Club, to which civilian staff like Eileen belonged, a large requisitioned restaurant high up on the mountain overlooking the town, which offered an American-style menu that suited my taste perfectly. I don’t remember eating out with my parents in England except occasionally on holiday, and then it was a purely functional matter of filling one’s stomach as expeditiously and economically as possible. Now I began to learn that a meal might be made to last for several hours very pleasantly, from aperitifs to coffee, with entertaining conversation. I was introduced to gin in a delicious long drink called a Tom Collins on my first evening, to wine later in the holiday (we never drank table wine at home), and was encouraged to smoke the occasional cigarette – the health risks were not understood at that date, and it helped to make my presence in adult company seem more natural.
I led a largely solitary existence in Heidelberg during weekdays when Eileen was at work. Often I took a book to the open-air swimming pool beside the river, which had been commandeered by the Americans to the understandable resentment of the local Germans. There I observed teenagers of my own age swigging Cokes and engaging in flirtation and horseplay, but I lacked the nerve to speak to any of them. Sometimes I took a sketch pad and watercolour box to the other side of the Neckar and painted views of the Castle and the Old Bridge with its graceful arches and two cylindrical towers, capped with domes shaped like German helmets, at the entrance to the Old Town. Occasionally I took a yellow-painted American bus to the PX, to browse the displays of consumer goods unobtainable in England and had a hamburger and milkshake at the soda fountain. In the evenings and weekends I became an honorary adult, with access to the world of leisure and pleasure which my aunt and her friends pursued in their off-duty hours. Over a memorable weekend I accompanied a group of them on a trip to the resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, where the Americans had established a Rest and Recreation facility for their personnel. We travelled overnight by train in sleepers and stayed in a vast timbered hotel beside a lake surrounded by mountains, where swimming, waterskiing, boat trips and excursions were available to visitors. One day I took a bus tour of the region on my own and visited the site of the Oberammergau Passion Play and a fairy-tale castle built by mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. I had become a tourist, and had travelled a long way, psychologically as well as geographically, from Brockley Cross.
Eileen was an enthusiastic participant in this round of pleasure and recreation. She was a popular member of her circle, regarded as a good sport and good company, always with a new joke or amusing anecdote to tell, often against herself, admired for her elegant clothes and manners, and for her beautiful English accent, softened by acquired American intonations and varied by the occasional Irish idiom. She played up her half-Irish descent, finding it went down well with her friends, who called her ‘Eileen’, with the stress on the second syllable, which sounded much more euphonious and glamorous to my ear than the downbeat British ‘Eileen’. She had an engaging spirit of mischief and daring, as the following story illustrates. On a weekend break away from Heidelberg she and her companions were in a very posh restaurant at Baden Baden, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were dining with some friends. Eileen bribed a waiter to ask if he could take a photograph of the royal party to record the occasion for the restaurant and they agreed. At the crucial moment Eileen walked past their table, and paused just long enough behind the unsuspecting Duke and Duchess to smile at the camera and give the impression that she was a member of the party. The resulting photograph was circulated to all her friends and relatives, and provoked much merriment and admiration for her cheek.
I suppose I must have wondered, or overheard adults at home wondering, why such an attractive and popular lady had not married, and showed no intention of doing so. At that time she seemed happy to be single and independent, free to enjoy the company of male friends without strings. It is hard for me to recall the stages by which I gradually acquired a deeper knowledge of her character and experience. She may have confided in me at some moment in my holiday that when she was working in Paris she had met a charming American officer and started going out with him, but discovered that he had a wife in the States, and broke off the relationship. It was at a much later date that she told me how deeply she was in love with him, and how close she came to becoming his lover, and that she felt this disillusioning experience had prevented her from forming a close relationship with any other man subsequently. She also admitted to having an inhibition about the idea of physical intimacy which she connected to an episode of sexual abuse by an older cousin when she was a child – I don’t know at what age, but she was old enough to feel fear and disgust and guilt, compounded by her Catholic upbringing. It was a sadly familiar story, though it never seems so to the victim. At some point in the late 1950s, perceiving that the military occupation of Germany was approaching its end, and unable to face returning to England, Eileen emigrated to the United States, but she remained single and celibate till her death.
In the summer of 1951, however, she seemed to be having the time of her life in a Europe that was an uncrowded playground for those with the dollars to enjoy it. On my holiday, thanks to the generosity of Eileen, who paid for most of my expenses, and her American friends who treated both of us on several occasions, I had a foretaste of the consumerist good life which the peoples of Western Europe, still recovering from the aftermath of war, would soon aspire to and to a large extent achieve. Eileen and her friends did not live within the bubble of ‘America Town’ – they dwelt in the older part of Heidelberg, and she at least made an effort to relate to members of the German community with whom she came into contact. With her encouragement I spent a day with the friendly caretaker of her hostel, and made an excursion with him on a borrowed bike to meet his equally friendly parents in a dusty dilapidated village in the country outside Heidelberg. These contacts began to displace the stereotypes of Germans derived from the British mass media in my consciousness. And one day I accompanied Eileen to visit an American friend of hers in Frankfurt, which revealed to me how utterly untypical of post-war Germany Heidelberg was, a picture-postcard historic town almost untouched by the war. Large tracts of Frankfurt were still bomb sites – cleared and tidied, in the meticulous German way, but still awe-inspiring evidence of the destruction wrought by Allied carpet-bombing, beside which the scattered holes made in the fabric of London seemed comparatively slight. Not that I felt any guilt by association on this account. It was not until I read David Irving’s book The Destruction of Dresden (1963) that I became interested in the ethical and strategic issues of the Allied bombing campaign, and then I was as much shocked by the scale of Allied air crews’ casualties as by the sufferings of German civilians. At the age of sixteen I shared the general British opinion (which is still valid, though not the whole story) that Germany had brought the devastation on itself, but after my sight of Frankfurt I held it with more compassion and understanding.
Flattened Frankfurt was more representative of the state of Germany in 1951 than Heidelberg, but the latter gave me an attractive image of the country’s history, topography and architecture to take back to England. Soon after I returned home I painted a mural in my bedroom, between the picture rail and the ceiling, of the Old Bridge, with a stretch of the river and a boat in the foreground and the tree-covered mountain rising over the roofs of the riverside houses in the background. I had had plenty of practice with that view, and it was a successful picture. The poster paints I used on the whitewashed wall kept their colours surprisingly well in the years that followed. After I left home Dad redecorated the room, probably more than once, but he did not paint over the mural. It was still there, only slightly faded, when he died in 1999 and I had the melancholy task of clearing the house and arranging for it to be sold. I took a photo of the painting before I left 81 Millmark Grove for the last time.