by Yehuda Koren
In spite of the deep selfish streak in Assia, she could not harden her heart against her family and eventually she wrote to Steele. She later confided to Keith Gems that she did it only because her parents had appealed to her to save them: ‘In a family ruled by iron discipline, she had no option, and had to sacrifice herself.’ Steele was surprised, and although he was dating other girls, he was won over in a flash. ‘She has decided she loves me again, and as time does nothing to alter my feelings, we have the basis of happiness anyway. I think we shall cope all right,’ he broke the news to Gems. Within days they got engaged. ‘Assia and I want to get hitched fairly soon. I think we have waited quite long enough,’ he wrote to Gems. He thought that Assia was not mature enough for marriage, ‘but I gamble that she would change as she grows up.’ Steele was so perplexed and so unsure of Assia’s place in his life that he made a curious slip, describing Assia to Gems as ‘that fiancée of yours’. He crossed out ‘yours’, replaced it with ‘mine’, and then, in brackets, scoffed at himself with the word ‘Freud!!!’ as if he could not believe he was really heading towards marrying her. Gems thought that John and Assia were an unlikely pair. ‘But I was glad for him,’ he recalls, ‘because he was never any good with girls, and here he was, in love and infatuated. He wasn’t much of a Romeo, so I thought: bully for him!’
With the propriety of marriage in view, Assia and John went to bed for the first time. The occasion was laden with anxiety and Steele urged Gems to send him an ‘anti-Chico mixture [some abortion-inducing liquid] and also any other abortive measures you know or can find out about.’ In the following month Assia’s period failed to arrive, she had morning sickness, and John foresaw a disaster: ‘I saw myself losing all my money over an abortion, and then, impoverished, marrying a cripple.’ After three nerve-racking weeks they breathed a huge sigh of relief. Evidently, it was a false alarm and they decided to quit sex until the wedding, when they would get ‘all possible help from the clinic’.
Assia remained carefree and independent and John was annoyed that she was too friendly to all and sundry, and so eager to cultivate as many friends as possible: ‘Any man has only to see Assia, with or without me, to try to get off with her … I go through all sorts of private hells at the thought of losing her.’ On the evenings he was unable to take her out, Assia nevertheless went off on her own. John had an urge to keep her confined and locked up ‘in a gilded cage’, but admitted she was playing fair with him, stopping short of romantic dates. He decided to subdue his jealousy and trust her, especially since her manner of ‘friendly affection’ towards him was not affected. It did not escape John Steele that Assia had been driven into marriage in order to get her family into England but he could not harden his heart to her parents’ predicament, nor could he send Assia back to a life she loathed in a country she hated: ‘Yet, I cannot wait, for Assia’s money is running out, and I have to marry her as surely as if she was holding an unborn offspring at my head like a pistol.’ There were moments when he wished Assia would vanish from his life altogether, when he regretted that he had ever got to know her. But just a day or two without her and he would ‘moan like a schoolboy’; he couldn’t cope and felt that if he didn’t marry her life would be ‘a far worse hell’.
They set the date to be married in May and Steele asked Keith Gems to be the best man to a ‘clueless groom’, who was marrying ‘a dizzy bride’. Steele’s parents and two sisters found Assia a strange, exotic plant. His father, a quiet, witty man, was so glad to see his only son emerge unharmed from the war, that he accepted the bride and supported him in his ‘folly’ with little comment. Deep down Assia hoped for a miracle that would save her from marriage but the money she got from her parents was running out and she could not find a job, so she resigned herself to her fate. Like a child holding a bunch of colourful balloons, she saw her fantasies vanish one by one: the expensive car, the service flat in Kensington and a life of leisure and luxury. Steele was aware of her dreams and was pleased that she was relinquishing them: ‘God bless her,’ he wrote to Keith Gems, ‘she’s actually facing up to it – and we’ll, my dearest friend, go forward together arm in arm and cheek to cheek.’ All this while, Assia had no idea that her future husband had already decided – indeed, he had told all his friends – that he was determined ‘to get out of this wretched isle’ as soon as he possibly could, and settle in South Africa for good. Had she known that he intended to emigrate, it might have provided her with the excuse to cancel the wedding.
They decided to spend the last weekend of their bachelorhood apart and travelled in opposite directions: John Steele to Bournemouth and Assia Gutmann to Oxford. Five days before the wedding, Steele confessed to Keith Gems that neither he nor Assia had any colossal light of happiness in their eyes. ‘Assia is a bit peculiar lately, she wants to marry me but she seems to be thinking herself into a peculiar state of indecision, she says she can never leave me, but she doesn’t really like the thought of being married as an absolute state.’ Nevertheless, Steele tried to convince himself: ‘It’ll all work out … we’ll both be happy.’
The marriage was solemnised at the register office in Hampstead, at noon on Saturday, 17 May 1947, two days after Assia’s twentieth birthday. In the register office, Assia stated her occupation as an art student, living at 6a Primrose Hill Road, NW5. Her small room overlooked the lush green park of Primrose Hill, with a breathtaking view of London. She would return to her adored area and live there in the 1960s, the most turbulent years of her life. In a time of austerity, a white wedding was an excessive luxury, so the bride wore a severe black suit, very tailored and chic, with a calf-length skirt, and a white, off-the-face hat, which gave a halo effect. She had no relatives in London, so with Steele’s family and friends they had a wedding lunch at the smart restaurant of the Berkeley Hotel, where they spent the wedding night as well. Reluctantly, they relinquished their former idea of an expensive honeymoon in Switzerland and instead settled for Lake Windermere. On a postcard, Assia wrote to Keith, ‘if this is paradise, I’ll see no more’, though she was probably referring to the beautiful scenery.
The young couple moved to a self-contained flat in Purley, south of London, where they shared the household chores. ‘We are being surprisingly temperate in bed, but I’m still tired out,’ Steele reported to Keith Gems a month after the wedding. ‘I find now, I’ve always had a frustrated longing to chat, argue and hold forth in bed, and we do so until too bloody late every night.’ Assia cut short her art studies and the boredom and loneliness of suburban life, with John away in his office, took their toll. What was left of her fantasies of a sophisticated literary salon and a life of indulgence and luxury was replaced by a mundane, boring existence with her clerk of a husband who was exhausted from commuting daily to the City. She had dreamt of splendour but was stuck with shabbiness.
With Assia away in London, the Gutmanns in Tel Aviv managed somewhat to ease their financial straits by letting her room to a nurse, who also paid for the meals that Lisa cooked for her. Winds of war between the Jews and the Arabs were blowing at full strength again and Dr Gutmann felt the earth shaking beneath his feet. Too impatient to wait for the longed-for visa to Britain that Assia was supposed to get for her family, he hit the road in the autumn of 1947. In his wallet, he put Celia’s radiant photograph, inscribed on the back: ‘To my darling father, who left his girl behind, all the best of luck, and keep smiling.’ South Africa was a popular destination, since its prime minister, General Jan Smuts, was very welcoming towards Jewish refugees. It was supposed to serve as Dr Gutmann’s temporary shelter until he had made enough money to move his family to London. But a few months after Gutmann’s arrival, Smuts lost the premiership, and the National Party with its blatantly anti-Jewish policy came to power. Gutmann, who was wary of historical upheavals and always prepared for the worst, hastily packed his few belongings again and moved to the neighbouring Lourenço Marques, the Portuguese colony in Mozambique which had a large immigrant Jewish community.
When her husband left for South Africa, the rent for their three-room flat became too much for just Lisa and Celia and another refugee doctor took it over. Fourteen years previously, the Gutmanns had left Germany very much against their will and had reluctantly dismantled their home in order to replant it in a barren new land; now they were glad to go. Disillusioned, with a bitter sense of failure, Lisa Gutmann wished to be relieved of the burden of the past. With the high cost of shipment in mind, she sold their precious, heavy furniture and most of the household utensils that they had so lovingly brought with them from Berlin. She could not join her husband in Mozambique and aired her distress in her correspondence with British army veterans, who had been frequent guests at her home. One of them suggested that she be his family’s housekeeper, thus qualifying her for an entry visa. In retrospect, Assia’s marriage to Steele was unnecessary; her parents extracted themselves from Palestine without her assistance.
The young Steeles were in financial straits: Assia was not working, and John, at 25, was restless and fed up with the plumbing business. To top it all, ‘Assia was being difficult. There was considerable evidence of making up to men, of deceit, lies and strange absences,’ Steele recalls. His hope that marriage would put an end to Assia’s behaviour was shattered. Assia complained to Pam Gems, Keith’s newly wedded wife that John was ‘cold, unkind and repulsive’ and she could not bear him, finding it difficult even to sleep in the same bed with him. ‘I told her she must leave him, but she had no money, and nobody else in England,’ Pam remembers. Returning from a visit to an old schoolfriend who had emigrated to Vancouver and been very successful, Steele’s father encouraged his son to move there as well and offered to cover the travel expenses. Without consulting Assia, John bought two tickets to Canada, hoping that a change of scene would also help the marriage. It was during a holiday on the Isle of Wight, as guests of Keith’s parents, that Assia heard for the first time that she was soon to leave England. Shocked and outraged, she swallowed fifty aspirins. A good pumping at the hospital left her with deafness that passed after only a few days. ‘She was a woman with intellectual aspirations, immersed in books. Leaving Europe, with all its delightful decadence, and settling in Canada, which meant intellectual death for her, was something Assia could not bear,’ explains Keith Gems.
In April 1948, John and Assia Steele left England for New York on the Holland–America liner Veendam, then continued by train to Toronto, and across the grand sweep of Canada to Vancouver. A short while after Assia’s departure, her mother arrived in England and started a job as housekeeper in Ramsgate. Seeing her own future in the newly established state of Israel, the eighteen-year-old Celia insisted on doing her military duty. With her mother gone, Celia became virtually homeless and became an unhappy lodger in rented rooms during her leaves from the army. In the spring of 1948, therefore, the Gutmann family was scattered across four continents: Dr Gutmann a doctor in Mozambique, Lisa Gutmann a housekeeper in England, Celia a soldier in the Israeli army and Assia a manual worker in Canada. Two years would pass before they would all be reunited.
Assia and John lived in a series of tiny apartments and old houses, disappointed that in spite of their monumental upheaval, the only job John could find was that of a low-paid bank clerk. An acquaintance talked him into selling books and magazines from door to door. Assia was reduced to being a chambermaid, and later a hat-check girl in The Cave nightclub. It was hardly a reassuring prospect for an increasingly jealous husband, who was working late most evenings. She moved on to modelling furs, then, as she wrote to Gems, to working as a ‘secretary for a local radio producer and a mad actress, with whom [she] became very pally, and from whom [she] got hardly any salary at all.’ She showed a remarkable talent for fitting in and meeting people, and used to drag Steele with her on outings with local celebrities she happened to meet. Riding on a bus, she struck up an acquaintance with an elderly gentleman, who turned out to be a reporter for the Vancouver Sun. It resulted in an interview with John Steele about the difficulties of post-war immigration to Canada.
But the change of place did not restore their marriage and John was exasperated, admitting that Assia’s voltage was much too high for him; helplessly, he watched her restless dependence on the overtures she received from other men. ‘How much was entirely sexual – I don’t know. My experience was that she was frigid in bed, but how much this was due to my own youthful ineptness – I don’t know,’ he says. In January 1949, the Steeles once again tried to escape their financial and matrimonial problems by moving to the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island. John continued his door-to-door book selling, this time with considerable financial success. His job involved much travelling and absences and he installed Assia at the Cherry Bank Hotel, at off-season rates. Assia made herself known to Sarah Spencer, a grande dame of Victoria society, a department store heiress with a penchant for the arts. Assia impressed her so much that soon she became the receptionist and sole employee of the newly established Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. In that small front-of-shop undertaking, Assia met the cream of Victoria society. The experience would later prove useful for the girl from Tel Aviv in getting involved in literary London.
Assia’s move to British Columbia determined her family’s fate for the worse. Dr Gutmann would have enjoyed England much better and would have benefited professionally and culturally but, once his beloved daughter was no longer in London, he had no option but to follow her. One by one the family arrived in Canada. Dr Gutmann landed in Vancouver, his trunks full of typical African souvenirs: hippopotamus skin canes and small black wooden statues. His wife soon followed from England. Celia wanted to stay in Israel but her parents put their foot down and forbade her to live on her own in what they perceived as a war zone. The enforced move to Canada caused constant friction between the sisters.
In the summer of 1949, John Steele decided to change career and become a teacher. He and Assia moved back to Vancouver and lived on the top floor of an old converted house in Cambie Street, near to the Gutmanns in the centre of town. The flats were so close together that they rigged a means of communication between them. Steele took a one-year course, in a special post-war emergency programme, designed to remedy the shortage of teachers. He enjoyed his studies and ‘found some consolation among the horde of young women students for the neglect and evasions of Assia.’ Then, one day they had ‘a bit of a fight’, and he moved out. The agreement to separate was mutual and civilised.
The only possible grounds for divorce in British Columbia at that time was adultery, which created a boom for lawyers and professional co-respondents. Steele, who agreed to play the guilty party, was instructed to go to a hotel, book a room and wait in the lobby for a lady that his lawyers would supply. They nodded to each other and went up to the room; he took off his jacket, she her dress, and they lay down on the bed. ‘We never touched or exchanged names. Then in came a pair of investigators: “What’s all this then!” Maybe they took a photo, and the theatrical scene came to an end. Never saw the lady again.’ It was an uncontested divorce and, since neither owned property nor had capital, no financial support was asked for or given. Assia was the one who faced the judge, who seemed sick to death of the adultery charade as he signed the decree. Steele was waiting in the lobby of a hotel across the street. When Assia came towards him to announce that the deed was done, she added tenderly, ‘You know, John, you and I grew up together.’ Steele felt it was an accurate description of the nature of their relationship. Her words still ‘stick like a burr’ in his mind and eased the pain of what he knew to be her infidelity and duplicity.
Mrs Gutmann was the only one who lamented the break-up, and Steele’s parents rushed from England to support their son and help with the financial difficulties of student life. Two years later John married a fellow teacher, they had a son and a daughter, and he held a variety of posts as teacher and then principal. During a few years’ time off school, he established a wax museum in Victoria with his old army friend Kei
th Gems, who had inherited a wax business. They were very successful and opened or franchised more wax museums. Still he was not content and, missing teaching, he went to university and with his degree became a high school teacher of English literature until his retirement in 1983. Fifty years after the divorce from Assia, and having divorced again, Steele’s most enduring memory of Assia is of her tripping along beside him, rather splay-footed, leaning forward as they hurried down Allenby Street towards the seashore in Tel Aviv.
In later years, Assia painted her marriage to Steele as a melodrama, telling her friends that when she was fourteen, her mother fell for an Englishman. Unable to admit the infatuation, the mother transferred her emotions to her daughter, forcing her to marry the man as soon as she was legally of marriageable age. The story goes that Assia refused to consummate the marriage with a husband who was twice her age. It was only through her father’s intervention that, a few months after the wedding, she ran away from her husband and the marriage was annulled, causing her mother a nervous breakdown. Steele was actually just five years older than Assia, but apparently, she couldn’t settle for an everyday story of marriage and divorce – as it really was – and needed to portray her early life as sensationally as possible.
She could not support herself and, reluctant as she was, the 23-year-old divorcee returned to her parents’ home. For the first time in four years, the Gutmanns were now all living under the same roof again. Since Dr Gutmann’s medical licence was not recognised in British Columbia, he had to sit more examinations, and even then he was only allowed to work as a physiotherapist. His clinic was empty most of the day, his wife having to practically knock on doctors’ doors, to implore them to refer their patients to him. Celia got up every morning at 5 a.m. to walk to a whisky distillery, where she was standing up all day long, sticking labels on bottles. As backbreaking as this job was, her mother asked to join her. The company rule was that no two members of the same family could work in the same plant, so Celia lied to the foreman that Lisa was a divorcee, so that he might feel sorry for her and take her on. Assia was the only one who contributed nothing to the family income.