When once you are a grandmamma, and sit in the rocking chair with Grandpapa and dream of your joyful childhood days, remember your Oma Annchen.
I can still clearly remember saying goodbye to her after that visit on Prague Railway Station. I wanted to stay wrapped in her loving arms forever but eventually Claude had to take me by the hand and lead me to the departing train, otherwise it would have rolled away without us. I wouldn’t have minded missing the train at the time so that I could stay with Anna a little longer, but I knew in my heart that that was not going to be possible. I turned to wave to her all the way down the platform and then leaned out of the window once we had boarded and were pulling away, craning my neck for one last look at her small figure disappearing into the distance as the steam from the engine settled on the platform between us.
My grandmother and I were very similar in appearance. She used to say that she saw her young self in me, maybe because we were both very sensitive and thoughtful in our characters, and we both liked writing poetry. I have older cousins who say they too can see the physical likeness now that I have reached the age that we all remember Granny Anna being.
At the time we left she still had Uncle Freddy and his family with her, although I knew that my cousin, his daughter, Marlies, didn’t love her like I did. Soon, however, they would be gone too and she would be completely on her own. It was memories like those which were feeding the nightmares I was suffering from on our nights in the bomb shelter in Hampstead as the war we had been escaping from finally came to London.
As late as 1937 my father and mother decided we should return to Europe to visit Anna back in Reichenberg because they were becoming increasingly concerned about her health. I had recently received a worrying letter from her:
My Beloved Evchen,
Again a year has vanished without my being able to embrace you, my loved ones. Two and a half years you have been away from me. Health and all good wishes for 1937. Your old oma is not well health wise. In thought a very heartfelt New Year.
When they told me about the trip I was beside myself with excitement at the thought of seeing her after so long apart. Claude was still with us in 1937 and the four of us travelled first to Muhren in Switzerland. Our parents must have been talking to other people along the way who had more firsthand experience of what was going on in Czechoslovakia, or perhaps they were reading things in the papers that worried them, because they changed their minds at the last moment and left Claude and me in a hotel in Muhren and went on together without us. This was deeply upsetting for me after having built up my hopes of seeing Anna again.
I think that going back was a big decision even for them but they played down their concerns for Anna in order not to frighten me any more than they had to. In fact at that stage I was more disappointed than frightened, having been so looking forward to seeing my grandmother again and still not fully realising the scale of any possible danger to any of us. My sadness at being left behind was lifted slightly on the morning that I came down to breakfast in the hotel and found my idol, the dancer and film star, Fred Astaire, sitting at the next table, but even that dreamlike encounter couldn’t lift my spirits for long.
Anna was being very well looked after by her son, Freddy, and Czechoslovakia was still a safe haven, being so far away from the tyranny inside Germany. We returned to England but I had not been able to see my granny again. The situation in Europe deteriorated after that, especially when Hitler was allowed to march into and annex Austria without a fight. From then on we followed the news of the apparently unstoppable march of the German Army on the radio and in the newspapers. Opinion in England at that time was divided between those who believed that declaring war on Germany was our only hope of stopping their territorial ambitions and those who thought we should go for appeasement and do everything we could to avoid starting another war like the First World War, which had wiped out almost an entire generation of young men. My parents were firmly of the belief that however terrible war might be, Hitler could only be stopped by force and that sooner or later England would have to join in to protect itself from being invaded as well.
For my mother the move to England had meant making huge adjustments to her status and lifestyle. To begin with she had no help in the house at all and found it hard to have to do everything for herself. My father, on the other hand, was just as comfortable in London as he had been in Berlin. He made friends with interesting people like the famous filmmaker, Alexander Korda and his brother. He had even got to know the Elgar family when he bought Sir Edward’s derelict Netherall Gardens home in 1935 from his daughter not long after the great composer died, with the intention of rebuilding it and selling it on. The house was just around the corner from where we were now living in a ground floor flat at 51 Fitzjohn’s Avenue. While clearing out the attic my father found an old and very valuable violin hidden. It was an emotional episode for the Elgar family when my father arranged for it to be reunited with his daughter.
My father was endlessly intrigued by the English and they in turn seemed to be intrigued by him. His positive attitude to our new homeland rubbed off on me.
‘The English policeman,’ he told me soon after we arrived, ‘is your best friend. Not like a German policeman.’
I decided he was right when on my way to school, I first saw a London ‘Bobby’ at the end of my road, Fitzjohn’s Avenue, holding the hands of two schoolchildren whom he was helping to cross the road. From that moment on I never felt frightened or insecure in England, even with the Nazi threat building up just across the Channel, but I often thought about my grandmother and wondered what terrible fate might have befallen her.
Certain that war would inevitably be coming to Britain as early as 1936 my father had reinforced the wine cellar of the new Elgar house and transformed it into an air-raid shelter, thinking that would add to its sales appeal. He had already knocked down the original house, rebuilding it together with three other houses on the huge site. When he showed the house, a year or so later, to the famous music hall star, Bud Flanagan (the other half of double act Flanagan and Allen), Flanagan saw the air-raid shelter and promptly stormed out with his wife, accusing my father of being a warmonger. In fact it was a blessing in disguise that the sale fell through because when the air raids did start we were able to walk the few steps round the corner and shelter safely in the cellar of our own house instead of having to sleep crammed in with the hundreds of poor folk seeking shelter on Hampstead’s underground station platforms. The station was reputed to have the deepest underground shaft in London.
When the headmistress announced that Kingsley School was moving out of London in 1939 to the safety of rural Cornwall I absolutely refused to go with them. There was no way I was willing to be separated from my parents again. It was bad enough being separated from Granny Anna and worrying every day about what could have happened to her: I couldn’t have borne to be in that same situation with my entire family. I would have preferred to die with them in an air raid, if that was what was meant to be, than to be left alone in the world. My memory of being in Berlin on my own, not knowing where they were or what was happening to them, was still vivid and frightening. It made me all the more aware of how acutely my father and Uncle Freddy must be suffering from being unable to look after their own mother when she was living in such a dangerous place during such a cruel time. I prayed that I would never have to face a similar dilemma to the one forced on them when they had to leave her behind in Prague.
When I turned sixteen in 1940 I became a legal adult, which meant