Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  At school, meanwhile, I was taking huge pleasure in mathematics, which I found simultaneously easy and stimulating. I wasn’t much good at a number of other things - French, for example, or sport. But anything involving maths or science seemed self-explanatory to me, and I used to look forward to lessons in such subjects with the glad expectation that, when they came, some gap in my understanding of the world would be satisfyingly filled.

  The drawback was that, when the question of Higher Schools Certificate (roughly equivalent to today’s A-levels) came up, and I expressed an interest in studying maths, it became clear that this school, too, wasn’t really equipped to teach me. If that makes me sound like a genius, it shouldn’t. The point was just that this was a girls-only school, and girls, in those days, weren’t expected to study maths.

  A certain amount of pressure was applied to persuade me to choose a different subject, such as Biology - the only science then available to my gender. But eventually the school consented to my undertaking some kind of psychometric test to see if I deserved to be treated as a special case. The psychologist asked me a variety of questions which I have long since forgotten - and was for some reason highly impressed by my ability to remember long sequences of numbers backwards as well as forwards. He subsequently lobbied enthusiastically for me to be given the tuition I needed.

  The upshot was that from the age of 16 onwards I was taught maths at the nearby grammar school, which in those days was for boys only. There were drawbacks to this arrangement. The timetables of the two schools had little in common, and so I was always walking out in the middle of lessons and generally falling behind with other subjects. There was also the ordeal of walking into the boys’ school: the only young woman among hundreds of drooling young men. I never reconciled myself to the daily gauntlet of leering and catcalls. But the lessons themselves were enjoyable and absorbing, and the sexism was, in retrospect, invaluable preparation for the trials I would later encounter in the workplace.

  It still had no idea what I was going to do with my life. But with Renate now at Oxford - reading English at St Hilda’s - it was clear that high things were expected of me. I applied to myself to my studies with a passion that my male classmates must have found intimidating.

  They might have been daydreaming about sport, or girls, or whatever it was that kept distracting their attention from beyond the classroom window.

  I was dreaming about doing well in my exams.

  4: Picking Up The Pieces

  I HAVE, of course, omitted one rather crucial episode. In 1945, the Second World War ended. Victory in Europe came in May, with victory in the Far East following three months later, shortly before my twelfth birthday.

  I spent VE Day - fittingly, I think - with Auntie and Uncle. They took me up to London, where we somehow managed to see Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London before spending the night in a hotel near Marble Arch. I suppose this must have been the occasion when, in an incident that remained in my memory as a symbol of the good heart that lay beneath her snobbish exterior, Auntie reprimanded an American GI for trying to make a black woman give up her seat to him. “You’re in England now, you can’t do that,” she insisted, before telling the woman: “Sit down, dear.”

  But it was the celebration of peace that defined that day. I can still remember the madness in the air. Years of repressed emotion had exploded in an anarchic half-riot of joy. By late afternoon, no one was paying fares on buses; complete strangers were kissing and hugging; and there was singing and dancing in Trafalgar Square. It was simultaneously exhilarating and rather frightening - especially in the company of this respectable couple who, deep down, probably didn’t entirely approve. But I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

  Thereafter, my life carried on much as before. The actual violence of the war had hardly affected us in Oswestry or Little Aston, while the general austerity resulting from the conflict continued for years after hostilities had ended. Yet for my parents there was one crucial difference: they were now free, in theory, to return to the homeland from which they had been driven six years earlier.

  My father returned more or less immediately. Shortly before the German surrender he had managed to leave the Pioneer Corps and (after a spell running a mental hospital for prisoners-of-war in Talgarth in south Wales) transfer to the US Army, who needed educated German-speakers to help with the post-war administration of what remained of Germany.

  My Jewish father kept the dismissal letter he received in 1933 throughout his travels; around Europe, interned to Australia on the HMT Dunera, back to England then, postwar, back to Germany.

  He started out as a very minor jurist, but at least, from his point of view, it was a step back into a world he understood - especially when mechanisms began to be set up for putting Nazi war criminals on trial. But it would have been very difficult, in the short-term, for his family to have joined him in occupied Germany, and I don’t think any of us felt much urge to do so. Renate and I were enjoying our education, while my mother was still so traumatised from having lost everything in the 1930s that she could hardly bear to hear the word “Germany” spoken, let alone start considering the feasibility of living there again. She had scarcely seen my father for the past six years, and any yearning she may have felt to be reunited with him had long since faded.

  But we did, after a year or so, start making occasional visits, paid for out of my father’s US army wages. These visits made a deep impression on me. Germany had entirely broken down. The contrast to the orderly societies of Oswestry or Little Aston couldn’t have been stronger - or more nightmarish. There was no money, no gas, no electricity, no water - and no semblance of civil structure, apart from the crude military authority of the Americans. People were living in the cellars of ruined buildings, among rats and human remains, buying food on the black market to survive and using cigarettes as currency. There was no warmth in people’s faces: just the blankness of hunger and fear. Sinister men loitered in alleyways, and there was no question of going out alone or at night.

  I had lived through six years of the most devastating war in human history, but this was the first glimpse I had had of its utter, dehumanising horror and destruction. I sometimes wish that more people in Britain had seen such scenes: they might understand their fellow-Europeans better if they had.

  The first time we visited, we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast while my father stayed in military quarters. The second time - which must have been in 1947 - we stayed in a hotel in Nuremberg, where my father was working on the military tribunal. There had been some failure of communication, and when we arrived he was not there. His colleagues, however, could not have been kinder or more solicitous to us during the 24 hours or so before he turned up. Only years later did the missing piece of the story become clear to me: he had gone away for the weekend (thinking we were in England) with the young woman who would later become his second wife, and his colleagues were embarrassed on our behalf.

  But several things were clear already. By the standards of the rest of Germany, my father was doing quite well. Anyone connected with the US armed forces was by definition a “have”, while ordinary Germans struggled to avoid starvation. There were special shops - called PBX - where only Americans and their families could shop, and we had access to luxuries such as tinned fruit.

  It was also clear that, by 1947, my father was beginning to prosper even by British standards - or at least by the standards that we were used to. He was still a relatively junior researcher, but it did not escape my mother’s notice that, despite his cramped living conditions, he had plenty of cash in his pocket - none of which had been sent back to us in the UK. This did nothing to improve relations between them.

  I watched a few sessions of the trial he was working on: the famous Justice Trial, in which 16 senior lawyers and officials of the Nazi ministry of justice (including Josef Altstoetter, Oswald Rothaug and Franz Schlegelbe
rger) were charged with crimes against humanity. Most of the proceedings went over my 14-year-old head, but I could understand what was at stake. These had been some of the most senior figures in the German legal system - pillars of German society - and they were accused of, among other crimes, murder; persecution on political, racial, and religious grounds; deportation and enslavement; plunder of private property; and torture. All denied the charges (10 were ultimately found guilty), and every possible legal nicety was invoked to keep justice at bay. At one point my father was called to give expert evidence on the precise linguistic nuances of the phrase “Polnisches Untermenschentum” - “Polish subhumanity” - and its use in German legal circles in the 1930s.

  But there was nothing complicated about the message that sunk home for me: you cannot judge people by their appearance. These were respectable, well-dressed men; men who had occupied positions of authority and dignity; well-spoken and even charming men, with kindly eyes. Yet they were also monsters...

  These post-war visits to the Continent - which also took me to Austria and the Netherlands - were always darkened by the shadow of Nazism. I remember paying a visit to the Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler’s mountain-top retreat (also known as the Eagle’s Nest), at Obersalzburg. There should have been beauty in the spectacular views over Austria - and yet all I could think of was the suffocating atmosphere of evil. And when, a lot later, we returned to Vienna, Renate could hardly contain her horror as we walked along the streets on which she had been persecuted as a child. She kept looking at the faces of passers-by, asking silently: “What did you do? Were you one of them?”

  Another time, my mother took me to see a film - one of many such public information films that the Armies of Occupation were showing at the time - about Auschwitz. I fainted. Whether it was the thought that I might so easily have been among those victims, or some other form of “survivor guilt”, or just simple empathetic horror at the suffering of all those human beings, I don’t know. It was just more than I could bear. (It still is. Even now, I get nightmares after seeing pictures or footage of the concentration camps, and have to be careful about when and how I allow myself to dwell upon the subject.)

  The other theme that dominated these visits - and that must have dominated most such visits by returning refugees - was the search for family and friends. We proved luckier than most. My grandmother - the one who had sent us the Red Cross telegrams - had survived the war in the Netherlands, hiding in the farmhouse of some kind strangers and coming out only at night. She had been arrested at one point, but had talked her way out of it. She was a remarkable woman, who had at one point been mayor of Dortmund - one of Germany’s very first woman mayors. (Since 2007 there has been a street in Dortmund, Rosa Buchthal Strasse, named after her.) When she died, she left me her two sets of identity papers - one real, with a big J for Jew, and one fake and J-less - along with her yellow star; they are now in the Imperial War Museum.

  My aunt Alice - my father’s sister - had been kept safe in a convent. My mother’s best Austrian friends had survived too, somehow; we tracked them down, with difficulty, near Vienna. On another, later occasion, we visited some of my father’s cousins in the Netherlands - of whom I remember little except that they had a very buxom teenage daughter, Annaberte, who wore low-cut dresses and took me hitchhiking, at which she was extremely proficient. I also remember the haunting little plaques we kept seeing - on roadsides, in villages, on pieces of wasteland - commemorating the victims of Nazi atrocities.

  I think this might have been the same trip from which I returned, unaccompanied, with three large trunks full of family possessions: mainly carpets and so forth but also some silver cutlery that had been buried in someone’s garden for safekeeping during the war. I also had six daffodil bulbs, which I had bought as a present for Uncle. When I mentioned these bulbs at Customs, they threw a fit and confiscated them. It only occurred to me many years later that I should probably have mentioned the cutlery as well.

  We also managed - eventually - to visit my mother’s elder sister, Ilse, in Diessen, near Munich. She too had survived the war, along with her two children, Gerhardt and Gelinde, and her husband, Otto. It had clearly helped that Otto, who seemed a pleasant enough man, had been a minor Nazi. The subject caused some tension between the two sisters, and I can remember it being discussed. Otto said simply: “I kept my family fed.”

  He could have added “and alive”.

  I don’t think Otto did anything too awful, although one can never be certain. But meeting him did bring home to me - again - just how lucky my family had been. Millions of parents just like mine had been murdered; countless children like me never got out; most of my fellow Kindertransport refugees lost most or all of their family and friends. And those who lived through the war years in central Europe - while I was enjoying my English idyll - knew fear and hunger and moral anguish far beyond my imagining. More than a year after the war’s end, Gerhardt and Gelinde were still so tormented by fear of starvation that all food in Ilse’s household had to be kept under lock and key.

  Such comparisons - between the security of England and the unhealed wounds of Germany - would no doubt have passed through my mother’s mind as she and my father debated (normally by post) the question of what they should do next. Each had a firm view. Sadly, their two views had nothing in common.

  My father was desperate to rebuild his life in Germany. His legal career could not be revived anywhere else: he had neither the relevant training nor the relevant experience. Without his prowess as a jurist he was, as he saw it, nothing - just another refugee who could do odd jobs or, at best, be used as a translator; whereas in Germany he had a good chance of one day becoming a high-powered judge again. To move permanently to England would mean giving up the career dreams that defined him.

  My mother saw it differently. She had had a world in Germany - a life of comfort, status and material security - and, bit by bit, it had been stolen from her. Perhaps some of her very identity had been stolen with it. Having escaped with her life and little else, she simply could not face the idea of entrusting herself again to the country that had nearly destroyed her. And while she was poor in England, and had incomparably less social status than she had had before she came there, she was not destitute, and at least she could trust the place. It was a stable, predictable society - in stark contrast to Germany. As far as she was concerned, it was unthinkable that her husband should do anything but build a new life from scratch in England, just as she had done.

  The outcome was - to modern eyes - predictable. They decided to divorce. The bitterness and distrust that my mother felt towards Germany had become indistinguishable from the bitterness and distrust she felt towards my father, who had not only brought all this suffering upon her - by being Jewish - but had also been making scandalously little effort to alleviate it, now that he was in a position to do so. I don’t know if she was aware at this stage that he had taken up with someone else - a younger version of herself called Maria; but, if she was, I imagine that she would by this stage have considered his infidelity entirely in character.

  In later years, I found it easier to see all this from my father’s point of view. (“The trouble with your mother,” he told me towards the end of his life, “is that, whatever I did, she was never satisfied.”) At the time, I shared my mother’s view that his behaviour towards us had been disgraceful. But while I sympathised, my sympathy didn’t extend to approving of the divorce. One or other of them, I felt, should have stuck with the other. Perhaps in other circumstances they would have done, but their relationship - like millions of others - lacked the strength to survive the cruel strains placed on it by the separation necessitated by war.

  Back in England, I told no one about this. I’m not sure that my mother did either. This was 1950: no one divorced in those days. Or, if they did, it was a guilty secret. So we “packed up our troubles in our old kit-bag” and carried on with our lives. I continued to
do well at school. Renate did well at Oxford. My mother started training to become a teacher, eventually spending a year at teacher training college in Speke in Liverpool (while I boarded at Oakhurst). If we suffered from my father’s absence - as I am sure we must have - we gave it little conscious thought. We had other things on our mind.

  I turned 18 in 1951, and was faced straightaway with a big choice: did I want to go to university? After much agonising, I decided against it - a decision I have regretted ever since. With no money coming in from my father, and my mother now training rather than earning, we were so short of funds that it was hard even to find the fee for sitting the scholarship exam, let alone to justify the prospect of still more years without an income. It seemed better to try to start earning money without delay.

  But I have never regretted the other big decision I took that year. On 29 January 1951, my mother and I became British citizens. Renate considered joining us but chose not to: she had never really bonded with her adopted country. (Some years later, faced with a choice between naturalising and leaving, she moved to Australia - where she felt so at home that she was naturalised after just six months.) So it was just my mother and I who went to the local police station, paid £9 each, filled in various forms, and swore a solemn oath of allegiance.

  We took the opportunity to change our name, as if closing a symbolic door on the past. Instead of Buchthal, we chose Brook, to mark our shared enthusiasm (one of the few things we had in common) for that most English of poets, Rupert Brooke. It seemed less pretentious without the “e”. I also formally adopted my middle name, Stephanie, which I had increasingly been using for some time.