In December 1919, Rozsika woke her children up early to give them the best possible news, an early Christmas present. Their father was coming home. The excitement in the nursery was palpable. Although the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow, Charles would surely help them catch bugs and play music. There would be jokes and games. Everything would be better again, as it had been before the war, before Daddy had to go away. The children organised an exhibition of all the bugs they had caught over the summer. There had been a spectacular heat wave in September when the hedgerows and garden had hummed with insects.
On the morning of their father’s return, the children were dressed in their best clothes waiting in the hall. Just six, Nica was particularly thrilled; she hardly knew her father and wanted to show him all the things she had learned in his absence. Charles arrived by car; Rozsika and a nurse helped him out. He walked very slowly and with a bad limp. Later they were told that a nurse had accidentally spilled a boiling hot-water bottle on his foot. The children did not mind and rushed forward to embrace him. Rozsika raised her hand, a warning to stay back. The children stopped but could hardly contain their enthusiasm. Miriam, their leader, called out, “Hello, Daddy.” But Charles did not even look at them. It was as if they were invisible. He hobbled straight past them, past the Christmas tree and into his study.
“And that is the end of the story, as far as I was concerned, because from there onwards my father was mad,” Miriam said, the memory still fresh. “My poor mother. She adored my father. The man she married disappeared and she was left with this lunatic in the house.”
While Charles’s illness followed no predictable pattern, his moods moved without warning from high to low, from calm to manic. At times he was charming and sweet but moments later he could be aloof, irascible. He experienced bouts of extreme grandiosity and compulsive generosity in which he tried to give all his possessions away to the nearest person. For days on end he would not sleep, padding around the house, peering across rooms at no one or nothing in particular. Then he would crash, falling asleep in the middle of lunch. He became totally obsessed with a subject and, once fixated, would talk about it doggedly to anyone who would listen. The children and the staff alike lived in dread of being caught in the headlights of his mania.
Charles’s brother Walter and his mother Emma tried to pretend that nothing was happening; Walter buried himself in research, Emma in running the estate. It was an almost intolerable situation for Rozsika, who had no real role at Tring, few friends and scant idea of how British life worked. Her parents had died during the war and her siblings were stuck on the other side of Europe. In one of his rare moments of tender lucidity Charles wrote to his wife: “I wish you and I hadn’t lived through this, I am sorry we lived to see this.” It was not clear if he was talking about his illness or the war.
In 1923 Rozsika decided to take her family to Ashton Wold, hoping that the onset of spring would bring out the wildlife and raise her husband’s spirits. Charles particularly loved the abundance of insects and rare butterflies found in the garden. On good days he watched his children play and, for a brief period, his spirits rallied. The house was suddenly full of optimism, but it was short-lived. As summer gave way to autumn that year, Charles’s mood darkened.
Seventy-five years later, Miriam and I were sitting near the fire in her drawing room at Ashton Wold. I had set up my camera opposite her wheelchair and perched on a chair next to it. What I heard next was so shocking and unexpected that I sat rooted, unable to move, for the next hour. “One afternoon my father went into a bathroom and locked the door behind him. Then he took a knife and slit his throat,” Miriam said.
Although I had heard about Charles’s suicide, I knew nothing of the details. My great-aunt’s deadpan delivery of the facts was far more moving than if she’d cried or had betrayed a shred of self-pity.
We sat in silence while I tried to think what to say or whether, indeed, to say anything at all. Eventually I asked, “Did you ever talk about it, afterwards, as a family?”
“No, never.”
Miriam had been speaking for so long that the light had faded and the fire had gone out. I changed the tape in my video recorder. Miriam reached for her cup of tea, which must have been stone cold. I asked if she’d like some more. On the side table, a nightlight still burned under a silver tea caddy. I half rose to fetch a warmer brew. She waved me back into my chair, not wanting to be interrupted.
“I will never forget the first time that my mother and grandmother met after it happened,” she continued. “We came into the hall at Tring and my grandmother appeared at the top of the stairs and just looked at us. My mother couldn’t bear it and ran away.”
The children were not told the cause of their father’s death. The staff were forbidden from discussing it and there was an embargo on all newspapers being delivered to the house. Recently I found the following contemporary report in The Times of October 16, 1923. “The heir presumptive of the present Lord Rothschild was found dead at his home at Ashton Wold on Friday. At an inquest on Saturday it was stated that he was found with his throat cut in his bathroom. The evidence was that he had been in indifferent health and had suffered from depression, though so far as was known, he had no cause for worry.” I read the last sentence several times: “He had no cause for worry.” I realised that Charles had faced the added pressure of guilt—he had been unable to enjoy his perfect life.
For the Rothschild family his death was an unimaginable catastrophe. They had to cope with the loss of a beloved son, cousin, brother and father, but they also faced the terror of having lost the heir to the British family. Charles’s death left both a vacuum and a terrible sense of shame.
In 1923 suicide was illegal, an affront to the law, to society and to the monarch. Miriam, Nica, Victor and Liberty had to endure an almost universal silence for some years regarding the nature of their father’s illness followed by the added difficulty, years later, of finding out about the circumstances surrounding his death.
Suicide leaves in its wake a wash of confusion, anger, guilt, sorrow and loss. The suicide escapes, while the living are abandoned in a perpetual darkness, their questions unanswerable, their fears irresolvable. There is always the haunting, fleeting thought that it might not have happened if only something had been done differently. The survivors wrestle with the entirely futile desire to reach a hand back into the past, and seize the person, hold them tight and persuade them to do otherwise. Children feel all this without the knowledge or experience to temper their reactions. It is easy to imagine the devastating impact this has on a child, particularly when there is no one to confirm, deny or help interpret his or her fears. Nica and her siblings not only lacked that person but they also lived in the constant fear that the same thing might happen to their mother or to others they loved. There is also a lingering fear: could it happen to us? Is there a tiny mental ledge that we could step over at any time?
What becomes of that child in adulthood? Are there common anxiety disorders or behavioural traits? The medical and psychiatric reports on the subject are inconclusive and yet all-inclusive: the children of a suicide experience a gamut of symptoms, ranging from fear of intimacy to suicidal tendencies to a propensity for addiction. Every child suffers trauma of a kind at some stage but as the child psychiatrist Alice Miller succinctly puts it, “It’s not the trauma we suffer in childhood that makes us emotionally ill but the inability to express the trauma.” As Nica and her sisters had no one to share their unhappiness with, the process of intense grief was difficult for them to navigate alone and in silence.
Nica understood from a young age that suppressing one’s own needs and natural vitality leads to terrible forms of self-destruction. It was one of the reasons she would, in the future, refuse to be trapped in an unhappy life. It also helps to explain why, many years later, she would risk her personal freedom to keep Thelonious Monk out of jail and then fight tooth and claw to let him live out his last years away from the demands o
f public life.
In accordance with the Jewish religion, Charles was buried within twenty-four hours. Only male family members and associates were allowed to attend the funeral. Women and children stayed at home.
Two years after Charles’s suicide, Victor, then fifteen, called Miriam from Harrow School, asking her to visit him urgently. She drove straight there. “He was terribly upset and said that some of the boys had been teasing him that his father had killed himself and only madmen or convicts did that.” Miriam, who was seventeen, had already adopted the role of protector in the family. She calmed her brother, saying it was a pack of lies, promising to sort out the confusion, while assuring Victor that their father was neither mad nor a criminal. Racing back to Tring Park, she confronted her mother, asking for the truth. Rozsika, Miriam told me, “never looked up from her desk.” Hardly missing a beat, she told her daughter, “It had been coming on a long time.” After that, the subject was closed. Her mother refused to discuss it ever again.
Following family tradition, Charles left his entire estate (valued at £2,250,000) to his only son Victor. He left each daughter £5,000—2 per cent of their brother’s inheritance. Despite having no formal training in finance, Rozsika took on the management of the estates belonging to her husband and her brother-in-law Walter, as well as her children’s inheritance. Her business acumen was such that she doubled her son’s assets by the end of her life. However, in the process the once gay and beautiful barrel jumper became an aloof and formidable chatelaine. She had to. Her mother-in-law Emma, formerly a powerhouse of activity, was crushed by the loss of her husband and then of her beloved son. Walter, heartbroken, became increasingly eccentric and hid himself in his museum.
Letters to friends show that Rozsika had another huge problem—the health of her second daughter, Liberty. From an early age, Liberty was physically delicate and seemed to contract every passing illness. She was so sensitive emotionally that the smallest event plunged her into a morass of despair. The sight of a bird with an injured wing, a lame horse or a change to routine affected her deeply. In a cache of letters written to a family friend, Rozsika’s worries about her frail daughter haunt every page. “She looks so fragile. I really am in constant intense worry about her.” In her brief periods of good health Liberty showed huge promise. Her paintings won a gold medal at the Royal Academy summer show and at twelve she was offered solo piano concerts in London. Attempting to keep Liberty on an even keel, Rozsika divided her time between caring for her second daughter and managing her children’s finances. With Victor at Harrow and Miriam in London for the Season, Nica was frequently by herself.
The Great Hall at Tring (Photographic Credit 7.1)
Until she was sixteen, Nica, being the youngest, often ate alone in the nursery, while her nurse and governess went downstairs to the noisy, convivial servants’ hall. When Nica was finally allowed to join her mother and siblings in the dining room, she had to get used to another set of rules. A footman in livery, with spotlessly white gloves, stood behind her chair. Her golden plate, stamped with the family’s crest, was framed with rows of knives, forks and spoons, spelling out how many courses would follow. For the duration of the endless meal she would be expected to sit, back straight, eyes ahead, hands in lap, mouth kept dry with tiny pats of a heavy, monogrammed white-linen napkin.
The most perfect remaining example of that way of life can be found today at Waddesdon Manor, now a National Trust property open to the public. The house has been preserved to perfectly capture the atmosphere of that Rothschild era. There are now little red ropes to keep the visitor from stepping on a priceless carpet or touching a piece of porcelain. However, even during Nica’s childhood, the curtains were kept drawn to protect the artworks from light and it was forbidden to run among the priceless Sèvres, the delicately placed Fabergé eggs and the eighteenth-century ormolu. Daylight was banished behind layers of embroidered damask and silk. Heavy French panelling and perfect examples of rare Savonnerie carpets muffled ambient noise. Tring, like Waddesdon, was beautiful but also utterly suffocating, and for all their beauty and comfort, they represented places to escape from.
8 • Pure Pre-War Perfection
Even though Nica was a member of the first generation of emancipated British women, well-brought-up young ladies were still expected to behave like the weaker, gentler sex. Submissiveness, modesty and humility were required female attributes. English society was so small and introspective that everyone knew everyone else’s business. If events were not already listed in The Times or transmitted over the servants’ network, gossip whistled round the hunting fields and drawing rooms. Nica’s reputation as a wild child was broadcast before she even stepped onto the dance floor. My father’s mother Barbara, who used to stay at Tring Park, wrote in her private diaries in 1929: “Amazing red house with plate glass windows. Indoors yellow furniture in the bedrooms, blue bows on my bed and very few bathrooms. Wonderful Lady Rothschild with a lovely witchy face and Uncle Wally with spaghetti in his beard and the old housedog way of being treated. Little sister Nica full of fat and high spirits.”
In 1929, at sixteen, Nica exploded out of the nursery. Finally allowed to stay up after nine o’clock, Nica decided that sleep was a waste of time and switched her preferred waking hours from day to nighttime. The Tring Park visitors’ book shows that the house was now packed with people on most weekends. Selected guests were asked to attend secret late-night sessions in the attic. Between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m., after the stuffier adults had gone to bed and before the servants awoke, the young Rothschilds entertained their friends with bottles of family wine and jazz records. “We used to call it corridor creeping,” my grandmother explained with a wicked giggle.
Great-aunt Miriam at work (Photographic Credit 8.1)
Rozsika had no idea how to manage her wayward daughter. Cut off from her native Hungary and its traditions, she could hardly rely on guidance from her ageing mother-in-law or the eccentric Walter. Adrift in a sea of arcane and fairly incomprehensible rules, Rozsika sought the counsel of society ladies. The first piece of advice both given and taken was to send Nica to a finishing school in Paris. While ostensibly a reputable establishment, it was in reality “operated by wig-wearing lesbian sisters,” Nica told the critic and writer Nat Hentoff in a profile for Esquire magazine in 1960. These redoubtable women, she said, “made passes at the girls. They taught us how to put on lipstick and gave us a little literature and philosophy to go with it and if you weren’t a favourite, woe betide you. They used to charge the earth for corrupting all those girls. It was all quite revealing.”
Graduating from this lesbian seminary in the summer of 1930, Nica joined her sister Liberty on a grand tour of Europe. A governess, a chauffeur and a maid accompanied the young ladies. The network of maternal and paternal cousins meant that the sisters were in constant social demand. In France, they stayed at the magnificent Château Ferrière. In Austria, Nica waltzed at balls and rode Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish Riding School. In Vienna, she got involved in her first international scandal, although admittedly it was not, for once, of her making. An impoverished, opportunistic countess, hoping to restore her family’s fortunes, announced that her son and Miss Pannonica Rothschild were engaged. There was little substance to the romance apart from a shared love of riding. It was the countess’s bad luck that Rozsika, who took every foreign newspaper, spotted the announcement and immediately published a robust disclaimer.
In Munich, the two sisters took a painting course. “It was during Hitler’s rise, but we weren’t aware of what was going on until it finally occurred to us that the people who were behaving boorishly were those who knew we were Jewish,” Nica told Esquire. It was a rare moment of political awareness; the sisters were strangely oblivious to international events. Another major incident that appeared to pass them by was the Wall Street crash of 1929, although the collapse of the stock market and the ensuing depression bit deeply into the family’s fortune.
With an une
arned income at their disposal but no guiding Rothschild male role model, Nica and her siblings made up their own rules. The four children of Charles and Rozsika were driven by a sense of entitlement rather than duty. Miriam, Victor and Nica masked their insecurities with an air of utter imperiousness. None of them was popular or even well liked.
Despite her best efforts, the finishing schools and London party circuits, Rozsika was failing to marry off her daughters. Liberty, though greatly admired by her French Rothschild cousin Alain, was too nervous to cope with affairs of the heart. Miriam was more interested in looking down a microscope than into the eyes of young men. In 1926, aged eighteen, she decided not to waste nights dancing and flirting, and enrolled secretly in evening classes at Chelsea Polytechnic. Having gained the most basic qualifications, she got a paid job, studying marine biology in Naples. Her family was baffled, while 1920s polite society was shocked. Why would anyone in her position choose a job over a comfortable life? Possessed by a determination to complete the research started by her father, Miriam became one of Britain’s leading naturalists, and a world expert in fleas, butterflies and chemical communications. Without the proper credentials to win a place as an undergraduate, she went on to be awarded eight honorary doctorates, among them from Oxford University in 1968 and Cambridge in 1999, as well as a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1985, and she was later made a Dame of the British Empire.
Thus Miriam showed a generation of young women, including Nica, that there were alternative ways of living and that passions could transmute into careers. By the time Nica left the nursery, Miriam was well advanced in her studies. Following her apprenticeship in Naples, she spent the inter-war years developing a chicken feed made from seaweed rather than grain. However, the inspiration for her work still came from her father’s unfinished research into butterflies and fleas. Miriam became the dutiful eldest daughter who stayed at home, worked assiduously and kept alight the flame of her parents’ memory.
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