HE OFFERS TO send contact details for other members of the class. When these arrive, I send out emails, attaching my Hannah article, and within minutes I receive a reply from another classmate, Chris Harrison.
‘This is a blast from the past!!!’ he writes. ‘I had the pleasure of knowing your mother very well at Frensham. I often wondered what became of her as we lost touch after school. Of course very sorry to hear that she died so young. I will delve into my memory banks and see what I can come up with.’
The email he sends the next morning is very different in tone, though:
I have read, with sadness, your account of Hannah. Unfortunately, this has left me in somewhat of a dilemma. When I knew your mother, I was an innocent and gauche teenager who became unwittingly involved in the relationship between her and the headmaster, which nearly led to my expulsion from Frensham. Before I discuss this with you further, I really need to know to what ends any information I give you will be put as it certainly influenced the path my life took from then on.
He gives me his telephone number, and I call straight away, but his wife tells me he is out, playing golf. Waiting for the hours to pass, I pace the kitchen. When I stop, I notice that my legs are trembling.
When I call again, I try to sound calm, afraid that he might not be willing to talk to me, but he seems to have forgotten his reservations.
He was very fond of Hannah, he says, and for a time they were ‘an item’. It was ‘all very innocent, walking hand in hand to the cricket pavilion, a bit of snogging’. But then, one day, his housemaster came up to him looking very grave. ‘He told me I had to go up in front of K — he wouldn’t say what for. I was taken to see K, and he accused me of raping Hannah. He told me he had proof, and things were going to be very difficult for me.’
The proof was a letter Hannah had apparently written to him from the sick bay, describing sexually explicit things. She had asked another girl to deliver it, and the matron had intercepted it. Chris was expelled, but after his parents — and Hannah’s parents, too, he thinks — were called in, Hannah admitted she had made up the things in the letter, and his expulsion was rescinded.
I ask if he read the letter, but he never saw it, he says, and if he talked to Hannah about it he can’t remember what she said. He can’t say whether she had been involved with the headmaster then; he hadn’t known about that at the time.
The funny thing, he says, is that the headmaster later made him head boy, but he was never comfortable again at Frensham. He was planning to be a scientist, but he lost interest in his studies and only passed two or three O levels and one A level. He talks about how his life panned out, how he went into business with his father as a commercial artist. But he keeps coming back to the incident with Hannah and the headmaster and the letter, as if he is still trying to work out what exactly it was that happened.
I KEEP COMING back to the headmaster, too. It is partly like staring at a snake; partly it feels real in a way that other stories I have heard about Hannah don’t, is something I am discovering, digging up, for myself.
Though there is something else. In all the years I have lived with the knowledge that my mother killed herself, I have assumed that her death was to do with her impetuosity, something careless in her. My father said once, perhaps on that walk on Hampstead Heath, that my grandmother told him that Hannah developed passions for things and then dropped them abruptly. In my newspaper article, I offered the explanation that ‘all her life she had taken things up and then thrown them aside — horses, acting, my father and, finally, life’.
What I didn’t add to the list was my brother and me. What was in her mind when she left me at nursery school that afternoon? Did she turn round for a last look? How do you understand a mother who could do what she did?
But the headmaster provides an alternative narrative. That it was not that Hannah didn’t love us, that she wasn’t a good mother, that she didn’t care, but that she was damaged by the headmaster. That she was not the seducer, but the seduced — not the instrument of her death, but the victim.
I AM A son possessed. I cycle to Paddington to meet Carole Cutner, another old Frenshamian, who shared a dormitory with Hannah and tells me how she would come back from her ‘extra German coaching’ with the headmaster and ‘swoon onto her bed and say, “Gosh I think he’s wonderful, how I love that man.” ’
I take the train down to Chichester to see Bill Wills, a former carpentry teacher at Frensham, now in his nineties. He remembers Hannah, remembers before I mention it that something went on her between her and the headmaster, and suggests, as Shirley did, that ‘she wasn’t the only one’. He remembers the headmaster coming into the common room to tell the staff that the board wanted him to retire, that he wasn’t going, though he did.
I speak on the phone with Richard’s mother, who doesn’t know anything about Hannah, but says that the headmaster must ‘have had a thing for young girls’, for he ‘absolutely fell’ for his wife. She describes him as both ‘overly friendly’ and ‘unknowable’. He would ‘unburden himself to the sixth formers in a not entirely appropriate way, complaining that his life had been a failure’. Coming from a ‘modest background’, he had won a place at Cambridge University, but she felt that he had always ‘really wanted to be a public-school man’.
‘The thing about K,’ she says, ‘was that nothing ever quite came off with him. He always looked marvellous playing cricket. He had a wonderful late cut, but it was one of those strokes that only succeeded one in fifty times.’
ANOTHER EMAIL ARRIVES from Chris Harrison, with scans from a school photograph. One is of the headmaster and his wife. She is indeed beautiful, as Susan Downes said, like a 1950s film star. It is a more flattering picture of the headmaster, too: he looks handsome, distinguished, but also crueller — or am I projecting this?
Michael Hutchings also sends scans of photographs from the school magazine. One is of the woodwork room where Hannah stood up and made her pronouncement. Another is from The Duchess of Malfi, with Hannah as Julia, kneeling in front of the cardinal, played by a teacher.
In a blonde wig and antique dress, Hannah looks to me ethereally beautiful, as she did in her actress’s headshot, but there is something in her face in this photograph, a wistfulness, a distance, that pierces my heart. She is acting, of course. The Duchess of Malfi is a tragedy, and I have heard how good she was in this play — but what I see, or feel that I see, awakens the father in me, makes me want to step into the photograph and rescue her.
I HAVE NEVER read or seen The Duchess of Malfi, but I go now to the library to get a copy. The main story is of a duchess who marries beneath her and incurs the fury of her two brothers, but it is the secondary story, of the cardinal and his mistress, that I read more closely. Julia is young, attractive, emotional. The cardinal is powerful and cold. He dresses in the robes of a churchman, but his behaviour is scarcely holy. He has a murky history, is said to have been responsible for a man’s death.
The first time we see the two characters, they are arguing. Julia tells the cardinal that he wooed her with tales ‘of a piteous wound i’th’heart’, as Richard’s mother told me the headmaster inappropriately unburdened himself to his students, and prevailed upon her beyond her strongest thoughts, as Shirley told me the headmaster wrote Hannah letters and followed her up to London. When the cardinal dismisses Julia, she makes an inappropriate play for Bosola, a servant, accusing him of putting love powder in her drink, as Hannah wrote her sexual letter to Chris Harrison.
The play wavers between seeing Julia as admirable, ahead of her time, ‘a great woman of pleasure’, and pitiable, confused by her sexual feelings.
It had been performed, Michael writes, in the spring of 1952, when Hannah was fifteen — in the midst, it seems likely, of her involvement with the headmaster. Was she conscious of these parallels? Did she see the play, her part, as a commentary on her own life?
Is that what I see on her face?
I AM CONSCIOUS that what I am doing is not entirely rational, or healthy, but I can’t stop myself. Searching again online I find a record of the headmaster’s death, from cancer, in his sixties. I look him up in the 1911 census, and learn that his father was a postal sorter, his grandfather a Baptist minister. The family lived in Merton, in south London, and I peer at the satellite image of the street and think about going to see the house, though I never do.
I do cycle into the archives of the Institute of Education to read some letters he wrote to a female friend. They date from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, long before he met Hannah, and I don’t expect to find much in them, but it is disturbingly thrilling to open the folder I am brought and touch the actual letters he wrote, to see his blue handwriting sloping neatly across the pages.
In only the second letter, though, sent during his first term at Bedales, he writes that he has ‘fallen completely in love with two or three pupils and especially one really charming Viennese girl of about fifteen’. His correspondent is some kind of love interest, and I understand this was meant to be a joke. But a few letters on, he writes of being banned from inviting students to his rooms because of ‘a rather beautiful girl’ who ‘does like to come and talk to me’, and how the other teachers are watching his ‘every move’ and suspecting him of being a ‘Don Juan’.
This doesn’t tell me much more than I have already heard — the ‘beautiful girl’ was probably his future wife — but I write it all down, along with other possibly incriminating evidence. His fondness for all things German. A querulousness, an arrogance, that emerges at times (another teacher is ‘an evil sham’); though I have to admit that he can also be charming, endearing. It is hard to read someone’s confidences without being drawn into their point of view.
The only possible reference to the lost boy is a complaint that he has been banned from taking boys on holiday. But in a brief autobiographical note accompanying the letters is something else: ‘He took a party of schoolboys ? 1935 or 1936 to Germany & tragic death of the group ? number in snowstorm in ? mountain forest.’ The date explains why I could find no mention of this in the Bedales literature, why Richard had heard nothing — it was before the headmaster taught at the school. But what does ‘tragic death of the group ? number’ mean? Could there have been more than one lost boy?
IT IS A TANTALISING story in itself — the lost boy, lost boys even, in the forest — but it is more than that. This is the man who abused my mother, turned her into a lost girl walking down a corridor at night. I need to know what he was capable of.
Armed with this new information, I search in The Times online archive, and within moments I am staring at a headline from 19 April 1936: ‘Caught in a Blizzard — Five London Boys Dead’.
I have to pay to read more, and I key in my credit-card details. The article that comes up is about a party of twenty-seven boys from the Strand School in Brixton, on a walking holiday in the Black Forest, led by a single teacher, twenty-eight years of age. After spending their first night at a hostel, the party set off in the morning to climb the Schauinsland mountain. There was a light sleet when they left, the paper records, but by mid-afternoon it was snowing heavily:
During the next few hours several of the boys became weaker and finally collapsed. The older ones carried their packs and helped them along until their strength also gave out. The teacher, who had been carrying the youngest boy in the party for about a mile, finally stayed behind with four of the exhausted boys and sent some stronger ones on to try to find their way down to the village. They reached the village at about 8pm. The villagers immediately formed search parties, and under great difficulties and danger to themselves twice made their way with sledges up to the exhausted boys. It was not until 11.30 pm that the last of them with their teacher was brought down to safety in the village inn, where six boys who were unconscious were given artificial respiration.
Hunched over the computer, I follow the story through the pages of the Times. The survivors were saved by the ringing of a church bell, which guided them to the village. The bodies were repatriated in ‘black-stained coffins, made from the timber of the woods in which they died’. ‘Herr Hitler’ sent wreaths of ‘arum lilies and fir, tied with white silk and draped in swastikas’.
An enquiry exonerated the headmaster of any blame. The unseasonal storm was ‘catastrophic and beyond all calculation’. The headmaster, the inquiry concluded, showed ‘courage and fortitude’. But something nags at me. I go back over the articles and read how, even after one of the boys ‘showed signs of collapsing’, the headmaster continued to push for the summit of the mountain.
There is something familiar about this, and I call Susan Downes and ask her again about going up the mountain with K. There were only a couple of lifts, she says, so they were taught to put skins on their skis and walk up the mountain. It was hard work, but the headmaster insisted they keep going until they reached a hut he had set as their target, even though it was already growing dangerously dark.
I go to the newspaper library in Colindale and order up other newspapers. In the Daily Telegraph, I read that some of the boys were already floundering ‘up to their necks’ in the snow when they met a group of woodcutters, who directed them on up the hill. Why had the headmaster not asked these woodcutters for help? To guide the boys back down to a village or an inn? Why had he kept going up in the storm when he could have gone down?
I go to the London Metropolitan Archives to read the report of the inquiry. From this, I learn that the headmaster had been a star pupil at the Strand School before becoming a teacher there, had been head boy, captain of football, cricket. I learn, too, that he had spent his vacations from Cambridge leading school parties on mountain excursions in the Swiss Alps. After university, he worked in the German Alps, guiding skiing and climbing tours.
In the newspaper reports, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the headmaster’s testimony. But here, in its full length, his account is more logical. In this version of the story, the snow was not yet too deep or heavy when they met the woodcutters, and it was not so much the top of the hill for which he was heading but an inn he believed was on the other side.
I still have my suspicions — did his experience in the mountains make him overconfident? — but I am alone in them. ‘I can say with a clear conscience that the master in charge of the boys behaved in a very brave and manly fashion,’ one of the villagers who helped to bring the boys off the mountain testified. ‘He was the last to come in from the mountain slopes where he did everything to put heart into the children and to help them out.’
The tragedy, the inquiry concludes, was caused by freak weather, not human error. The headmaster of the school, arriving in Freiburg two days later, found ‘a clear sky and a hot sun — comparable to a hot June day in England’.
HERE IN LONDON, the summer is drawing on, the days shortening. I am exhausted by the past few weeks, by obsessing over Hannah and the headmaster. But I still have one more task — to go to Oxford to see Tasha Edelman.
Tasha doesn’t speak on the phone, so I made the arrangements through her niece, Sonia’s daughter, Becky, who also lives in Oxford.
Before going to Tasha’s, I meet up with Becky. She tells me about Tasha’s health. After a car accident, which caused a stroke, she had recovered and gone back to work as a psychiatrist. But subsequent strokes had diminished her.
We talk, too, about Tasha’s troubles with her son and daughter from her first marriage. When the children were young, she left her husband for another man and lost custody of them, and as they grew older they refused to see her. Becky talks of Tasha leaving birthday and Christmas presents for them on the doorstep of their house, and never hearing anything. She subsequently remarried and had another daughter, but she hasn’t seen her older children in years.
It is hard for me to understand: to be se
arching for a mother who is forever out of reach, and to hear of these children who have a mother they will not see.
BECKY DROPS ME at Tasha’s house, and I follow Tasha into a back room piled with old books and magazines. The curtains are pulled shut, but the material is so thin that the sunlight shines through them and I can see the dust in the air. Tasha herself is like a ghost. The last time I saw her, more than a decade ago, she was overweight, but now her clothes hang off her. Her hair is long and grey, her eyes gazing through big round glasses. She moves and talks immensely slowly, with long pauses while she thinks or searches for the right words.
I ask her about following Hannah to Frensham.
‘I would have gone anywhere to be with her,’ she says.
‘Why?’ I ask.
She smiles. ‘She was so fascinating.’
Sonia had talked when I saw her about Hannah leading Tasha into trouble, and I ask her about this.
‘She always told me what to do,’ Tasha says.
‘Like what?’
‘Split up with my boyfriend.’
‘Why?’
‘She decided he was bad for me.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes,’ she says, and a smile comes slowly again to her face. ‘Then Hannah went out with him.’
‘Hannah told you to split up with him, and then she went out with him?’
‘Yes. Though after she finished with him, I got back together with him.’
‘The thing about Hannah,’ she says, after a long pause, ‘was that she had to have what she wanted when she wanted it, and everyone else had to get out of the way.’
‘You make her sound like a character out of The Lord of the Flies.’
There is another silence, and then she says, ‘She was fierce, but there was also a very looking-after side of her. She looked after me.’
She talks about how Hannah was ‘always smiting boys left, right, and centre’.
A Woman on the Edge of Time Page 5