Perhaps the strain of getting pregnant four times in five years tamed Rozsika, or perhaps her new life stunned her into some form of submission, but there are no reports of her barrel jumping in England. She was constantly surprised by the formality that existed in her new family’s household: although she and Emma lived under the same roof for twenty-five years, they never kissed or hugged. Rozsika knew what was expected of her.
Hence, the birth at the Rothschild family home in London of Kathleen Annie Pannonica on December 10, 1913, was a terrible blow. The baby girl, swaddled tightly, was immediately dispatched into the care of two nurses. The following day, the infant, still in the sole charge of her nannies, was transported by private train and taken to live with her siblings on the Tring estate of her grandmother Emma.
For the next seventeen years, Nica, as she was known, would live between the Rothschild houses, playing with other Rothschild children and hunting with the Rothschild hounds. Cousins were by far the most frequent guests at family houses. Even today, although these estates have gone, the closeness continues. All families fight and fall out, but we still meet up for significant birthdays, anniversaries and celebrations. As Nica said in Yiddish slang, “Maybe I come from a weird mishpacha but we’re a close family, believe it or not.”
* * *
* Charles’s daughter, my great-aunt Miriam, used to send out a Christmas card with an image of swirling colours, and took great pleasure in correcting those who assumed that it was a lesser-known work of some famous Impressionist painter. “You are looking at the greatly magnified reproductive organ of a butterfly,” she would tell princes and statesmen with glee.
4 • Fight, Flee, Flounder
Nica described her childhood wearily: “I was moved from one great country house to another in the germless community of reserved Pullman coaches while being guarded night and day by a regiment of nurses, governesses, tutors, footmen, valets, chauffeurs and grooms.” The children’s lives were regimented to suit other people’s timetables. No expense was spared but neither was any allowance made for individual needs or personal idiosyncrasies.
The pre-war routine never changed. The children slept in a room with their nurse, who woke them at seven every morning. After a bath, the girls were encased in a tight bodice, followed by an immaculately ironed petticoat and finally a starched white dress. Each daughter had a different-coloured ribbon tied around her waist. Miriam’s was always blue, Liberty’s pink and Nica’s red. Their hair would be brushed with one hundred strokes and fixed in place with tortoiseshell slides. Victor, the son and heir, was away at boarding school and only saw his sisters in the holidays. Contact with their parents was limited but when Rozsika was at home the girls would be taken to her boudoir, where they would kneel on the floor, put their hands together and pray for “God to make me a good little girl, Amen.” Their mother did not observe Jewish customs. Wherever the children slept, they tried to stay awake long enough to hear their father return on weekends, and hear the tell-tale sound of horses’ hooves crunching on the gravel, and the steady progress of the gas-lit carriage making its way up the drive.
The children took their lunch in the nursery and were only allowed to eat dinner with their parents once they had reached the age of sixteen. The food was prepared by a renowned French chef who spent £5,000 per year on fish alone. Their menu never varied. On Mondays, breakfast consisted of boiled fish; Tuesday was a boiled egg; Wednesday was boiled egg; Thursday was boiled fish, and so forth. The food and daily routine at Tring was, according to Miriam, “immaculate, incessant and monotonously boring.”
Their routine was as repetitive as the menus. Every morning at exactly the same time, the children were taken on a walk around the park. Running and hiding were forbidden in case the girls soiled their white dresses or got lost. Unlike the children, animals were allowed to roam free in the park, and their enclosure, behind a high fence, was a man-made paradise. There were fallow deer, kangaroos, giant tortoises, emus, rheas and cassowaries, collected by Uncle Walter. The emus terrified the children; they made a curious drumming sound with their feet and followed the prams hoping for food. Miriam remembers the giant birds leaning into her pram with “nasty gimlet-like eyes and long beaks.”
The winter months were spent at Tring but during the summer the children—along with their servants and animals—decamped to Ashton Wold, some sixty miles away. That house, mothballed during the winter, would have had its dustcovers swept away, the stables prepared and the drive raked to receive Charles and his family. Though informal in comparison to Tring, Ashton had twenty permanent servants and their number swelled to accommodate additional needs.
When Charles was home the children would help him catch and mount butterflies and other insects. Routine and convention would be temporarily abandoned. To his children, who adored him, Charles was “absolutely the ideal father.” Victor, Miriam and Nica all told me that he had a great sense of humor. Miriam said, “My father was a very humorous man with puns and jokes. He’d ask, what’s the difference between a sheep and a deer? Mutton is cheap and venison is dear. And everyone would roar with laughter.” Nica, Miriam and Victor told me different versions of this story. “Occasionally he came to see us in the nursery where he used to tell jokes, which I couldn’t understand, but which kept the nursemaids in hysterics.” Charles had a gold bar in his office and promised that the child who could lift it up with one hand could keep it. Nica and her siblings struggled and strained but none ever managed it. When I was growing up, my grandfather, her brother Victor, repeated the same trick when we went to visit him at the bank.
Victor, Miriam, Liberty and Nica Rothschild, circa 1923 (Photographic Credit 4.1)
Music became intrinsically linked to Nica’s happy memories of her father. On his return from work Charles let his children crank up the phonograph and helped them choose a record from his collection. His tastes ranged from classical masters to contemporary innovators such as Stravinsky and Debussy, but he was also captivated by the new sounds coming out of America and liked listening to a young ragtime player by the name of Scott Joplin. Following the Great War, more records were being produced and Charles brought home Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong’s first outings with the Fletcher Henderson band and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, all of which would echo around the house.
Although Victor was sent to Harrow, Nica’s parents disapproved of formal education for women and loathed teachers on principle. “They thought,” Nica said, “it was all like David Copperfield,” and crushed a child’s individuality.
The girls’ governesses were brought to the house by pony trap each day but they taught little beyond sewing and the piano. The three daughters were not even prepared for menstruation and had no idea about men’s anatomy. Occasionally their Rothschild cousins came to stay but other children were usually only fleetingly glimpsed from a car or carriage window. “There were aristocratic families nearby but they didn’t invite Jewish children to play or if they did it was to large events,” Miriam said. Nica and her sisters were confined to the class known as “Yids” or “not one of us.”
Victor left a paper trail of his achievements during his school years but it was impossible to find any record of Nica’s classroom reports, let alone essays or books. Miriam told me, “The lessons were in the day with a lot of intervals for games play. And then at five o’clock the pony trap would appear and take the governesses off to their homes outside the house. When I was asked at sixteen or seventeen what I had been taught in history, I said, ‘Well, we never got beyond the Romans.’ ”
Visiting the family archive in London, still based at the bank in St. Swithin’s Lane, I scoured the records for any mention of Nica. The search was made harder by the family’s mania for destroying all personal records. Only the more public documents were kept and there were hardly any references to the children. I can still remember the thrill of a rare sighting of Nica’s name in one of the family visitors’ books: there in 1928, sandwiched betwee
n her sisters, a duke, a minister and a foreign prince, was her signature, “Pannonica Rothschild,” in large, curly writing.
Finding her photograph album at Ashton was another exciting moment. Miriam’s bookshelves were crammed with books and objects. Photographs of relations and dignitaries were interspersed with her own publications and books written by friends. Pushed to the back of a lower shelf, I found, by chance, a dark-blue leather photograph album with Pannonica etched in gold on the front. Untouched for years, it smelled of neglect and damp. Mice droppings were scattered around it like confetti, but this book, luckily, had not caught their fancy. There, within the heavy, time-stained pages, I saw pictures of a pretty little Nica, who grew, with each page, into an exquisitely beautiful teenager. These were formal photographs and the clothes, apart from their size, never changed: Nica always wore a white lace dress, her hair was neatly tied back with ribbons and her socks were exactly the same length. Yet despite the formality of the pose, her expression crackled with intensity, as if she were taking on the camera lens, challenging the photographer to really capture the essence of her personality, making the period details and the props redundant.
Gradually I pieced together a picture of Nica’s upbringing. Besides having few friends, Rothschild children had no privacy. More than thirty people worked in the house and at least another sixty were employed on the farm, in the stables and gardens. The children slept with nurses, ate with footmen standing behind their chairs, rode out with grooms, took baths overseen by maids and walked with their governesses. In addition to the normal retinue of the butler, head housekeeper, chefs, footmen, scullery maids, nurses, grooms, gardeners and chauffeurs, there were members of staff with titles I had never heard of, let alone imagined. A lad was employed to iron top hats but the “groom of the chambers” had nothing to do with horses; he looked after works of art. The “odd man” checked the fire buckets; there were separate employees to wind clocks, set alarms, exterminate vermin and polish the grates.
Tring Park, Hertfordshire. Nica’s childhood home—and some of the other occupants (Photographic Credit 4.2)
“I knew nothing else; I thought that was how the world was made. I assumed it would always go on like that as there was a real sense of finality about it like the sun rising and setting,” Miriam said, reflecting on her childhood. “It really was a cage; freedom didn’t exist. That was the trouble; it was all perfection, but as far as the children were concerned, it was boring and repetitive.”
Like the lives of many in society, the lives of the senior members of the Rothschild family were well documented in The Times Court Circular, which acted like a Hello! magazine of its day. Information as anodyne as “Lady Rothschild has left London for Tring Park” or “Mrs. Rothschild will take tea with Princess Alexandra” was reported and at grand society parties every single invitee would be solemnly listed. When Emma was younger and before Charles started to withdraw, there were huge parties at Tring, sit-down lunches and dinners for several hundred, with bands, fêtes and shows. Nica remembered Albert Einstein coming to some event and performing magic tricks for the children, one of which was to take off his shirt without removing his jacket.
Marrying Rozsika had only temporarily banished Charles’s blues. Soon after Nica’s birth in 1913, he became more withdrawn, sometimes failing to speak for days on end. At first the family dealt with it by pretending it was not happening. Charles still appeared at mealtimes but sat there in total silence before returning to his room and staring disconsolately out of the window or down the barrel of his microscope.
As the Great War progressed, Charles’s apathy increased until finally the family could no longer ignore his behaviour. After 1916, he and his wife were never listed at any social functions; later that year he was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland in search of help. Although it was supposed to be a period of convalescence Charles was bombarded with requests from the bank: there were pension problems to be dealt with for employees; changes to the manufacturing of gold bars; the payment of Cousin Alfred’s death duties; the sale of Rio Tinto shares, to mention but a few. At the same time, he initiated his dream of setting up a nature reserve: private letters show that he was trying to buy land in Essex to start a wildlife park.
Charles remained in Switzerland for two years but although his return was greeted with tremendous hope and optimism, it was clear the “cure” had not worked. For the family it was a devastating disappointment. For Nica, living in that atmosphere, alongside the constant spectre of mental instability, would come to seem normal.
Lonely and isolated, she was left more and more to her own devices, while her parents spent most of their time in London. Her two elder sisters, who were great friends, did not particularly want little Nica messing up their games. Victor was away at school. Uncle Walter lived in a parallel universe of his private museum. Their ageing grandmother Emma had no time for children. Later, when Nica said, “My only friends were horses,” she was telling the truth. Her childhood was one of physical luxury combined with personal neglect. A Rothschild cousin who knew Nica as a child said that she became increasingly wild. If there was a tree to climb, she would go up it; if there was a higher fence to jump, Nica would aim her horse at it.
Nica, Miriam and Liberty with their mother, Rozsika (Photographic Credit 4.3)
Nica aged eleven (Photographic Credit 4.4)
This sealed-off, slightly rarefied existence was what Nica, Miriam and Liberty were expected to inhabit until they came of age. Many of Nica’s female cousins never left Rothschild homes, choosing to remain spinsters or to marry relations. The result was that, despite their astonishing material advantages and cosmopolitan backgrounds, their horizons were as limited as those of many less fortunate women. They were confined by expectation as well as opportunity; their adult wings clipped, they were as trapped as many of the specimens in Walter’s collection. Without independent means, and without access to capital, living on an allowance set by the iron whims of their fathers, Rothschild women were left in a state of comfortable dependence and anonymity. In the family records, only the daughters of the first sons are recorded; their husbands and children were unrecognised.
Rothschild men were equally trapped: they grew up knowing they had no choice but to go into the family business. For both sexes, the weight of expectation was either too heavy or too light. Miriam, Liberty and Nica were not submissive types, nor were they cut out for domesticity. The outlook for the three sisters seemed unbearably narrow since they had been cushioned by luxury and privilege but given no outlet for their creativity, no vehicle for their talents. They had three choices: to fight, to flee or to flounder. Each of the sisters would choose one of these options.
5 • Long, Dark Prison
Do you know anything about anything?”
Miriam was furious when she found out how little I knew about our Rothschild forebears. We were having lunch alone at Ashton Wold. My mistake had been to try to bluff my way through family history. Attempting to get anything past Miriam was a bad idea.
“I was never terribly interested,” I confessed, before adding the pathetic postscript, “until now.”
“Not interested! Until now! Are you aware that a person’s life is shaped long before they are born? We don’t appear from thin air. Do you understand anything about genetics or chromosomes? Even the Bible teaches us that the sins of the fathers are visited on at least four generations,” she said, glaring at me. I felt foolish and defensive. Family history, I reasoned, was something to explore in one’s dotage, along with God and gardening. Besides, Nica was a twentieth-century figure. Running out of excuses for not delving into the past, I booked a flight to Frankfurt, where the Rothschild story had begun.
I arrived in Germany one wet winter’s morning armed with an address and a camera. I had gone in search of the birthplace of the Rothschild family but found a mass of concrete and tarmac where it had once stood. The only feature that the Allies had not flattened during the raids of 1944 is a small
section of wall. The autobahn covers most of the tiny street where the founding father of the Rothschild dynasty, Mayer Amschel, was born in 1744. In the Rothschild museum and archives, I began to piece together our history.
In 1458 the Emperor Frederick III proclaimed that Jews were allowed to remain in Frankfurt only if they paid to live in this cramped, gated street on the north-eastern edge of town. Jews Lane, a narrow thoroughfare only a few hundred feet long, was meant originally to be home to about one hundred people. By the fifteenth century more than five hundred families lived there. By the eighteenth century, a staggering three thousand people somehow squeezed into the Judengasse. Efforts were made to restrict the population by allowing no more than twelve weddings a year and only if bride and groom had reached the age of twenty-five. With Jews being forbidden from owning land, from farming, from entering public parks, inns or coffee houses, or from going within a hundred feet of the town’s cathedral, the options for any Jew seeking a profession beyond usury and certain forms of trade were negligible.
As national law didn’t or wouldn’t offer them protection, Jewish communities created their own systems of justice, medicine, prayer, education and custom. In effect they created states within states, which alienated them further from a suspicious and uncomprehending Gentile community. Moneylending was one of the few professions that Jews were allowed to practise. There is nothing shameful in the Jewish scriptures about handling or even making money; indeed, it’s incumbent on Jews to better themselves for the sake of their community and every Jew is expected to give at least 10 per cent of their annual income to charity.
The Baroness Page 4