We arrived in London as émigrés when I was five. Our home was a flat in a large mansion block in Hammersmith. During the day, the dark, empty garages in the basement were where the children of the flats used to play, and we all joined them. One day, during that horrible game of hide-and-seek (while both my protective brothers were at school), I became very scared when it was my turn to find the other children. Even though I had known so well in advance that I couldn’t find them on my own, I just couldn’t say it and began sobbing instead. That rather traumatic experience stayed with me, and I got into the habit of often preparing and forestalling to stave off disaster. ‘Marlene, why are you worrying about that now?’ people say. The answer would be: I believe in the power of worry. It works.
I was sent to a Froebel nursery school2 and refused to speak for the whole year I was there. The teachers said I seemed settled and spent my time mainly playing in the sandpit. But I had become a self-imposed mute. Maybe it was a fear of not speaking English well enough (I think I was confused about being a German-speaking child at home), or it could have been stubbornness, or maybe I was upset at not being a proper English girl like the others. Being unprepared meant everything came as a shock, and I think it was the beginning of the University of Life for me.
In I938, a year later, we left London to live in Manchester, where I was enrolled in the junior school of Manchester High School for Girls. However, with the outbreak of war in 1939, all children were evacuated; Vicky was sent to Blackpool and Walter and I to Uttoxeter in Staffordshire. I can see the huge room full of children sitting on the floor with gas-mask cases and belongings. We were supposed to go to our families in pairs, and I was expecting to be with Walter, when suddenly a lady announced that there was a family who would only take one child and ‘would anybody volunteer’. My heart sank because I knew my brother Walter’s hand would shoot up, and indeed it did. I don’t remember any goodbye. And so we were all dispersed. Only Mother and Father were together.
My foster family lived in a small, modest house and another child my age also lodged there. My recollection is that everything seemed brown, both inside and out. I began to lie like a trooper, telling them all sorts of imaginary tales about my real family in Manchester. I invented a baby brother and told them a lot about ‘him’. Even though I knew my parents were coming to visit very soon, when I would be unmasked to one and all, I still couldn’t stop. ‘Should I get nappies?’ asked my foster mother, ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘Definitely.’ Later my mother told me she just couldn’t make me out, and I could not explain. Life was incomprehensible to me. I found that praying did no good whatsoever, but instead my rosier fantasies consoled me. And they still do, but now I keep them to myself. Psychology must have been unknown to my folks at that time, despite us being a typical Freudian nuclear family from Vienna.
We could attend a nearby school on alternate days to the local children. I can remember an open shelter outside, but of the inside I remember nothing. I was in a trance. Walter went to his foster family at the end of the same village but we never coincided. One day, on my own, I walked to the large mansion he was staying in (with a Rolls-Royce in the garage) and rang the bell. A servant came to the gate with a very big dog and I asked to speak to my brother. I was told to wait right there. Walter soon appeared and said, ‘What do you want?’ and I was suddenly struck dumb, answering, ‘I don’t know.’ In my head I had prepared to ask, ‘Tell me again exactly why we are here.’ He just replied, ‘If you don’t want anything I will continue what I was doing,’ or something along those lines.
Luckily we were not evacuated for long. There was a military miscalculation (not unknown in wartime) and when the Blitz started in earnest – when the bombs really fell – we were all back again in our own homes in the big cities, ready targets for the whistling bombs.
But the Blitz was a good time for me because of the nightlife in the bunks in our well-kitted-out cellar. We were all of us together, and that is the only thing I wanted. We ate delicious food that Mother had prepared during the day and it all seemed very jolly to me, not to mention my lovely new red boiler-jumpsuit (only to be worn during air raids). The long raids provided another advantage. Children under a certain age, like me, did not have to go to school the following day and I spent my time with the women in the house: my mother, our Irish cleaner and one of my father’s sisters, Tante Hedi, who used to shriek, ‘The veesling bombs!’ when she heard a noise. I also played with some of the children of the large Irish family across the road. But I knew my mother was worried about me. She wanted the best for me and so did my father. One of the children in our continental circle of friends, an only child of about ten called George, was apparently happily settled in an English Quaker boarding school in Wigton, Cumberland. It had a good reputation and was known as Brookfield.
Alas, my parents, thinking that an English boarding school was synonymous with the best in life and where I would make many English friends, thought it would be a good idea for me. But it was the worst idea ever.
I was nine when I was sent to the Friends’ School, Brookfield. It must have been around this time that I began to switch off from even trying to understand what was going on in my world, which had once again been turned upside down. What the heck was WAR, anyway? Had there been television I probably would have fared better. None of it made sense to me. It was beyond me to figure it out. I turned myself from out to in and became a very un-inquisitive child. I continued with my vague notion that grown-up minds are different and I had better think for myself.
The boarding school was situated in the beautiful Cumbrian countryside and I remember lovely long walks on Sunday, to and from church. But I was very unhappy to be there in spite of it being an interesting school. All letters home had to be shown to our teachers first. But during the holidays I told my parents about desperately wanting to leave and come home. My father said he would find an alternative and meanwhile I should give some letters to the day children to post for me. He sent me stamps, which I managed to hide safely, so I could write freely – I can see one of my letters now: I carn’t bare it (sic). And father wrote back to be patient, but I wasn’t.
I say I was ‘unhappy’, but of course children carry on with their lives in unhappiness. I have some letters of mine, which seem quite typical of any boarding-school girl writing home about her activities and most likely I stood in the queue for my skipping-rope turn just like everyone else. But then came the drama.
Towards the end of my second year at Brookfield, I ran away. Not only that, but my worst crime was that I went with a much younger girl! We got very far, reaching the train station, when they grabbed us. In any case the strategy I had in my head would have been doomed: it was to get off the train at any station and ask the way to the nearest police station. I knew my address in Manchester and was convinced that we would be helped – ‘That is surely what policemen are for!’ I had prepared to say to the police that if they helped me get home, my parents would definitely reimburse the fare. What panic there must have been at the school had we succeeded even a bit. There was an uproar and my parents were immediately summoned; finally they grasped my situation. I think a dog or a cat might have made a better fist of getting back home than I did.
Running away from boarding school brought about the end of my dramas. I returned to the junior school of Manchester High School for Girls as before. My mother later told me that once I was back there and wearing the familiar red-checked dress and panama hat, and living at home, they seemed to have no more trouble with me. Maybe all my difficulties had finally been expelled. I sometimes think my generation of émigré children, who actually lived through this experience, felt better in some ways than the next generation, who could only wonder at the relayed stories of another past in another country. Some parents didn’t want to talk about the past at all. My brother Walter, on the other hand, always rejoiced and felt blessed and lucky about being in England, and had nothing but praise for the foresight of our dad, who had the wisdom to get us away in comfort and ease when it was still possible to do so.
Vicky was ten when he came to England, and integrating was different for him. He must have had much deeper memories of Austria than Walter or me. He had the sunniest disposition and was used to being adored by his teachers in Vienna. He and Walter were sent to Colet Court Preparatory School for St Paul’s in Hammersmith, and I sometimes imagine how he might have felt on his first day there in the playground. ‘WHAT did you say your name was? SCHWARZ?!’ All conjecture on my part, but maybe around that time a tiny seed was sown which grew with his desire to be like an Englishman and above all, a gentleman. When he became an adult he decided to change his name to Victor Black (by deed poll), as when applying for jobs he was advised against a German name.
2 Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) established the first kindergartens (and coined the term), using a play-based learning system.