by Rosie Alison
It was just after lunch when she heard the sound of the great doors opening, and with a rush of joy she saw her father appear. He had a slight limp, and his face looked older and thinner than she remembered. She ran over to him so that he would know it was her.
“Daddy!”
“Anna, my darling.”
His arms were outstretched, familiar arms which could hold her tight. He beamed at her, shaking his head, marvelling at how she had grown. He lifted her up and swung her round, a swoop of elation racing through her as the room spiralled by. She was giddy when he put her down, and shy about exactly what to do next.
“This is the Marble Hall,” she said, turning solemn as she started to give him a guided tour of the house. Children came by, stopping to meet her father, and she held his hand firmly; he was hers alone.
Lewis could barely hold back his own tears.
Her suitcase was packed, the one she had arrived with in 1939. In her happy trance, Anna still knew that there was an etiquette to be followed, and people to say goodbye to. Her friends, Beth and Mary – she hugged them both at once, and promised she would write. Mr Stewart, inscrutable but avuncular, shook her hand and told her father that she was a most promising pupil. Mrs Robson, the housekeeper, embraced her fondly.
But there was still Mr Ashton to say goodbye to. Anna was eager to find him: she was hopeful that he might be impressed by her polite and tidy father. But as they reached his study door, she realized with a sickening lurch that this was the last time she would see her teacher, that she was almost gone from him.
The door opened, and Mr Ashton welcomed them in. He was charming and polite to Lewis, who was at first a touch confused by this disabled gentleman’s role in his daughter’s life. Anna stood very still in his study, he noticed, attentive but slightly breathless. Mr Ashton, meanwhile, was very particular in his praise of her.
“You must be so proud of your daughter, Mr Sands.”
“Of course. Thank you for having her here, I can see she’s been very well looked after.”
“It was our pleasure – she’s been one of our best pupils. I only hope she will keep up her studies, because all things could be open to her. Any university she chooses, I should imagine.”
“Really?”
“Very much so.”
Lewis looked at his daughter, who was blushing with pride and gladness. Mr Ashton turned to her, and extended his hand.
“Goodbye, my dear,” he said.
Anna stepped forwards, her eyes widening in an anxiety of love. She shook his hand and looked into the warm, smiling face of this man who had entered her heart and soul without her even noticing.
“Goodbye, sir,” she said, swallowing her words.
“It’s been a privilege,” he said, and held her face with his smile for a moment. His eyes were liquid with tenderness.
“Thank you,” she said, almost looking at him. “Thank you very much for everything.”
Neither of them could muster anything more substantial to say to each other, though their handshake was firm and deep and reached through both of them.
Lewis waited for Anna to turn before thanking Mr Ashton once again, then he took his daughter off and away on the long journey home to London.
Anna did not look back as they set off down the drive, but she was quiet and thoughtful.
Thomas wheeled himself back to his desk and continued to mark the exercise books of other children. He wondered what would become of Anna Sands, and wished her well in his thoughts. A lovely girl, he said to himself.
Several of the evacuees had returned home now, and their replacements were dwindling. The German threat was waning, the Allies were gaining ground. But he did not want Ashton house to be left empty of children. It occurred to him that perhaps he should try to turn the house into a school permanently.
That was his chief solace now, the sound of children running around the place.
47
Back home in Fulham, Lewis and Anna did their best to settle down together. They found their house clogged up with dust and dirt, and on their first night they simply sheltered from the miserable unkemptness of the place. But the mess gave them a task to tackle together, and the next day they cleaned and dusted and scrubbed until it felt once more like their home.
Lewis buckled several times a day at the thought of his missing wife, though he did not let his daughter see that. One afternoon he went up to Anna’s room and found her hunched on her bed, clutching her old teddy and weeping over her mother’s photograph. He sat down beside her and held her as she cried, clenching back his own tears.
“You shouldn’t have to go through this,” He said. “I’m so sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am.”
It occurred to him then, as Anna shook in his arms, that his own grief for Roberta was nothing compared to his anguish that Anna had lost her mother. The people at Ashton Park had clearly been kind, but that could never have been enough; his child had been left alone for too long. He wished he could comfort Anna and help her, but he knew that what she really needed was her own mother. And the stolen years of her childhood.
Lewis was naturally patient, and organized too. He found the nearest school which was working and settled Anna back there. Then he took an instructor’s job with flexible hours at a staff college in Wimbledon, so he was often able to join her at home for a late tea. He cleaned their clothes and looked after the house and got up early to make breakfast for both of them.
He loved his daughter. Practical care was his way of showing it.
Anna was surprised by the feelings which crept up on her at home. The pain of her mother’s absence was revived by the strange silence of the house, the lack of conversation and laughter. Her father was kind, but untalkative.
But more, she had no idea that she would miss Ashton Park – yet she did. She wrote letters to her friends, anxious for news. Then found that their short replies did not satisfy her. Only gradually did she admit to herself that it was news of Mr Ashton that she craved. Because it was him that she missed.
Of course, she knew that he had liked her, spoiled her even. But now that she was gone, she could only imagine that some other child was his favourite. The thought pierced her with jealousy.
One afternoon, Lewis returned home from work to find her sitting in the kitchen, a picture of melancholy. He asked her what was wrong, but she would not say: she could not reveal her feelings to anyone, least of all her father. So he assumed – as always – that it must be his inadequacy as a father, and his daughter’s longing for her mother.
One Sunday morning, Anna decided there was no harm in writing to Mr Ashton: if he did not want to reply, he need not. She spent three days writing and rewriting her letter, then posted it and waited, daily, for a response.
In due course, a reply arrived. It was short and polite, but also friendly and full of jokes about the antics of a new school dog called Harold. It was signed “Yours sincerely”. Anna replied with a description of her home, her new school, and many loving remarks about her father. She also signed off “Yours sincerely”, following her teacher’s lead. He replied ten days later, this time with a longer letter, one addressed to the cracks he had observed in her cheery account of school life. He wanted her to be sure, above all, to believe in her abilities, and to keep up her reading. He signed it “with my love”. Anna spent the next few days reading and rereading the letter just to try and understand whether he really meant love or that was simply a casual sign-off for a letter.
But she did not reply to his letter, because she did not know how to – nor did she show it to her father. It was a loving letter, but it felt conclusive: there was nothing else he might say to her, nor did he indicate any wish for an answer. So she cherished the letter, but accepted that it signalled an end to her relationship with Mr Ashton. Thereafter, she only thought about him, and felt a secret comfort that perhaps he cared about her, even if they did not see each other.
Her new home life was at last taking shape,
and she was beginning to feel more at ease with her father. He would tell her stories of his months in the Western Desert. How it was so hot that they could fry eggs on the jeep bonnets. How he had loved the vanishing horizon of the desert, and the star-studded velvet night skies. How he would never forget driving along the coast road, and the day he ran down a scalding sandy beach into a sea so blue, so clear, so perfect that it just made him shout with joy.
He missed out the frightening bits. Driving in bumpy convoys over miles of desert scrubland, never knowing when they would hit a minefield. Finding abandoned tanks with fy-blown corpses. The boyish German soldier he had seen lying dead beside a bombed jeep, still clutching a photograph of his smiling baby. The day his own jeep had toppled down a dune, leaving him howling in pain with a shattered leg.
All that seemed to belong to another world. Here they were back in London, a city of shifting shapes: so many buildings and people had disappeared without trace.
In the summer of 1944, when Hitler’s lethal V1 flying bombs were launched, Lewis wondered if he would have to evacuate his daughter again, but Anna begged him to let her stay. No more family partings. So they used the cellar shelter, and stuck to their new life. Breakfast together, then school for her and staff college for him, culminating in evenings listening to the wireless.
Once a year, father and daughter visited Roberta’s grave in Putney Vale, bearing flowers. They stood there solemnfaced for a few minutes, side by side in the quiet cemetery. Sometimes, Anna would cry at the sight of her mother’s name on the headstone.
Well-meaning people occasionally said to Anna that although her mother had died she would still be there for her, as a star in the sky. But whenever Anna looked up at the night sky, all she could see was blank space – a vastness which killed any hope of contact, or closeness of any kind. There was just you, and the universe beyond, and the two might never connect. All those school hymns of singing constellations, or the music of the spheres, meant little to her now. There was only cold dark space stretching on for ever, split by the eerie whine of Hitler’s bombs.
Until these, too, faded away, replaced at last by the pealing of London church bells as Berlin fell, and the war ended, leaving Anna and millions of others to get on with the rest of their lives.
48
In April 1945, Lady Norton left the British Embassy in Berne and drove across Switzerland to the German border, heading towards the concentration camp known as Dachau. She was driving a lorry loaded with medical supplies which she had rounded up from various Swiss pharmaceutical firms. Near Munich, she struggled to find fresh supplies of petrol, but soon cajoled some American soldiers into filling her tank.
The year before, Jewish refugees had escaped into Switzerland with shocking reports of German camps designed for systematic genocide. They had briefled her husband at the embassy, who had sent urgent dispatches back to London proposing that Allied planes should at least bomb the train lines to the camps. But word came back that although Churchill was sympathetic to Norton’s report, the air commanders had scotched the plea, arguing that they could not afford to lose any more airmen.
Peter had shared her husband’s frustration at the Allies’ inaction, but with the German surrender came the opportunity to bring aid to those rumoured camps. After living out the war in the strange comfort of Switzerland, she braced herself for a glimpse of what had been going on across the border.
Two hours before she reached Dachau, the first American soldiers had liberated the camp with a hasty round of illegal executions, which later became notorious. The young Americans had apparently been so horrified by what they found that they raised their machine guns and mowed down more than three hundred SS guards. By the time Peter drew up in her lorry, the place was in chaos.
Despite all the rumours about these camps, nothing could prepare her for the shock of her arrival. There was a sickening stench by the railway entrance, where a mass grave was piled high with rotting corpses whose skeletal limbs obtruded at odd angles. Then, entering the gates, she had her first harrowing sight of emaciated figures walking towards her in staccato steps, halfway between life and death.
Peter steeled herself to her task, unloading her provisions with blinkered energy and trying to be helpful, but the horror of the place soon overwhelmed her. It was a stinking rubbish dump of dead people, and those walking skeletons still clinging to life appeared almost devoid of humanity, with sunken eyes. The aid workers were reduced to a defensive stupor, dazed by the unimaginable cruelty inflicted on these prisoners.
But it was not the brutality of the guards which made the greatest impression upon Peter – rather, it was their victims’ capacity for suffering. She was finally overcome by the agonized grief of a dying mother stroking her skeletal child who was long since dead.
Escaping from this woman’s flailing hand, Peter retreated to her lorry cab for a moment to gather herself. But once alone, she found herself shuddering into tears. She cried that they were too late to help these people lying at their feet in meaningless, ungrieved heaps. She cried in anger that nobody had listened to her husband’s reports. She cried because she had no faith which might bring shape or sense to the calamities of this camp.
All her life, she had lived through art, but all the art she had ever known could not redeem the despair of this place. Here there was pain and anguish beyond any expression, and beyond any hope of relief.
She wiped her face and breathed deeply, and returned to the back of the lorry for the next batch of medicine. Bit by bit, she did what she could to be practical on behalf of those who might recover. Something is better than nothing: that was all she could hold on to.
After three days she had exhausted her supplies, and the survivors had all been attended to – and the dead tidied away. So she drove her empty lorry back to the embassy at Berne, and returned to the carefully anaesthetized existence which passed for her life there.
She tried to tell her husband about what she had seen, yet she could not quite retrieve the truth of what she had felt.
Within months, she and her husband began to pick up the pieces of their pre-war routines, and she resumed her bracing enthusiasm for daily life. But every now and again, the smell of that camp would come back to her. And for a moment, she would grasp again what the place had told her – about the limitless capacity for human suffering. And the fear would seize her again that random but unspeakable pain might strike anyone at any time, and that her own blithe disposition was a mere carapace of deluded hope, no more than a defensive illusion.
Back to the Old House
1946–2006
49
Soon after the war, when the storage vaults of the British embassy in Warsaw were reopened, someone uncovered a stack of Peter Norton’s paintings which she had left behind when fleeing the Nazis in 1939. There were canvases by Kandinsky, Klee, Duchamp and Ernst, all from Peter’s prewar collection at the London Gallery.
“Let the Poles keep them for their galleries – they have lost everything else,” she insisted with her usual generosity.
She and her husband had recently packed up all their belongings yet again, after being posted to a new flashpoint, Greece, where civil war was devastating a country already ravaged by the Nazis. But by 1948, the steady flow of American dollars from the Marshall Plan was beginning to revive the economy, allowing the Nortons to enjoy their post-war life in Athens.
Peter continued to support the cause of modern art, although her enthusiasm for young artists did not always suit the more dignified trappings of diplomatic life. One Christmas, she hid two young painters – John Craxton and Lucian Freud – in the embassy garage, where they kept themselves scarce from Sir Clifford, until General Montgomery came to stay and rumbled them.
More acceptable to her husband was the major Athens exhibition of Henry Moore’s work, which she mounted with the artist in 1951, to international praise. Norton was proud, too, of how readily the Greeks treasured his wife for her indeflatigable charity work
; during the civil war, she made numerous trips up into the mountains with mules, ferrying parcels of food and clothing to camps of orphans and refugees made homeless by fighting. In recognition of her tireless initiatives to relieve poverty in outlying Greek villages, she was awarded the honorary citizenship of Athens – “a rare distinction”, as Norton told their visiting friends.
After the Nortons finally retired back to Chelsea, Peter continued to fund new and undiscovered talent, supporting the early careers of numerous painters, from Francis Bacon to yves Klein, and many others whose work was later lost along the way.
She spent much of her time in Paris too, seeking out French avant-garde artists, and it was on the Left Bank, in 1955, that she bumped into Pawel Bielinski again at a party. He had lived there since the war, he explained, and was now part of a circle of Jewish artists and writers, Avigdor Arikha and Paul Celan among them.
The following morning Peter walked up the many stairs to Pawel’s studio and there, propped against the walls, stood several paintings of a naked woman with long hair, reflected in a triptych of mirrors.
“I heard about Elizabeth’s death,” he said to her, anticipating her recognition, “but how is Thomas?”
Peter shrugged, said it was always so hard to know with Thomas – he was such a private man, always so polite. But all appeared to be well with him. Ashton Park was a school now, and Thomas was still teaching there.
“I think he’s probably a very good teacher,” she added, to be positive.
“He was a very patient man, I remember,” replied Pawel. Peter did not press him any further, but she did buy one of his paintings of Elizabeth. And when she returned to her house in Chelsea, she hung it in her study.