All Buck could say was—Hermann must not see his father taken by the police. I instructed Nurse to take him into the village & the bathing beach and not return before teatime. Then PC Goon and the detective arrived in a pony trap. I had Buck’s grip packed with his clothes, etc. only there wasn’t much time to think what he might need & no idea how long he would be gone, or where—for all I know they are sending him back to Germany. The detective would admit nothing only that Buck was arrested by order the Home Secretary. They hold him tonight at Osborne House. I will go there tomorrow morning and try to see him. Hermann has had his bath, Nurse reads bedtime stories, I shall go upstairs presently and kiss him goodnight, he goes to sleep so quickly tired by the sea and sun of these summer days. When he does ask where daddy is I shall go to pieces. No—I won’t. Thank God he is still a baby. Cook caught me weeping in the pantry and said—it must blow over, the trouble won’t last, the Captain is really an Englishman, they can’t keep him for long. I hope she is right but she never has in her life been off this I. of Wight so what can she know really…
I hope it is all panic, fright, excitement because of the decl. of war which no one expected and when things settle down the Home Sec’y must see it is wrong to take up a man who is completely innocent.
I don’t know what we shall live on. Buck’s salary can’t be paid from Germany, and there is no more racing at Cowes. We can’t stay here without funds to keep up the house. If they take Buck to the Tower of London I must find a way to be near him. I can’t think what else to do or write or think—I sit at this escritoire, windows open, wild green sea light and air, telling myself to make sense of what has happened to us by putting it down. If there is any sense to it, which I cannot see.
Yours with love,
Eilín
National Archives. Security Service MI5 file ref NS-1914.8KV 1-39.
THE METROPOLITAN POLICE
Interrogation Transcript
Date: August 11th 1914
Subject: Lange, Heinrich
Officer: Sir Basil Thomson, Asst. Comm. Metropolitan Police
Location: Sir Basil Thomson’s room, Scotland Yard
Date of Arrest: August 4th Shanklin, I of Wight on advisement of Capt. V. Kell, Secret Service Bureau.
BT: What is your full name? Speak clearly please.
Subj: My name is Heinrich Lange.
BT: Your address please.
Subj: The house called Sanssoucci, Shanklin, the Isle of Wight. I am not a spy.
BT: If you are truthful things will go better for you here.
Subj: I am a sailing master. Skipper. Ask Lord Ormonde. Ask Sir Peter Belfrey.
BT: Who is your employer?
Subj: At present no one.
BT: Are you or do you claim to be a British subject?
Subj: No.
BT: Tell us your nationality please.
Subj: German. I’m a German.
BT: But you speak excellent English.
Subj: (groans)
BT: Where did you learn to speak English?
Subj: My mother. Look here.
BT: Where were you born?
Subj: I am not a spy.
BT: Where were you born? In America? Answer please.
Subj: I was born aboard my father’s ship one thousand miles off Acapulco. I was registered for German nationality by the consul in San Francisco. My family, my father was from Hamburg. My mother is Irish. I don’t have anything to tell you, I haven’t any secrets, I don’t know anything. I realize you have a job to do but you are wasting your time with me.
BT: Are you a reserve officer in the German army?
Subj: No.
BT: You have seen service in the German army.
Subj: Yes, I did my service at Potsdam when I was nineteen. The 1st Uhlan Guards. Cavalry.
BT: You are in the reserves, then.
Subj: I don’t know, perhaps, I have not lived in Germany for years. I am not a spy. I was never an officer. I was in the ranks. Eighteen months service.
BT: Your mail has been intercepted.
Subj: (express surprise)
BT: So you see we are aware of your activities.
Subj: But there is nothing, I have done nothing, I am not a spy.
BT: Who pays your salary?
Subj: I have never done this. Nothing. This is a disgrace.
BT: The Baron Weinbrenner pays your salary. Is this correct?
Subj: I sail his yacht. I race it for him.
BT: You are in the employ of the German intelligence service. You have been their watchdog at Portsmouth these last four years.
Subj: Never. I have not.
BT: You make reports in invisible ink, we will have them out soon. We have intercepted letters.
Subj: No, there is nothing. How dare you read my letters.
BT: I advise you to think things through carefully. You are in a very dangerous spot.
Subj: Whatever your name is. I am a sailor. I observe the sailing yachts that is part of my job do you understand. There is no secret, ink, nothing. I am not watching battleships, believe me. I am the skipper of Weinbrenner’s yacht Hermione II. Ask Lord Ormonde at the RYS and he will tell you this is the truth.
BT: They are holding you at the Tower of London, do you understand what this means? Do you know what is done with spies in time of war?
Subj: My wife is English. And my son.
BT: Your wife is Irish.
Subj: I would not spy. I don’t care for the war. My son is English born.
BT: When we have examined your letters we shall have more to discuss. We know you are reporting to the German intelligence service. We know this. It would serve you well to make a clean breast of it now. Do you understand? There is nothing shameful in admitting your activities. You are a soldier of the German emperor, you were doing a soldier’s duty. You are not a criminal and will not be treated as such. You are only a loyal subject and an honorable soldier. Of course we have our own men in Germany performing exactly the same sorts of duties you were performing here. So we understand your position perfectly. There is nothing wrong in what you have done only you see we cannot allow it to continue.
Subj: You do not.
BT: But you understand once war is declared everything changes. In wartime spies are always dealt with most severely. I want to be perfectly clear. I want to treat you as fairly as I would like to see our men treated but to a certain extent my hands are tied. The atmosphere is savage these days. If you could see what is written in the newspapers you would understand. I think we will be shooting spies before much longer.
Subj: I have done nothing.
BT: A loyal soldier is permitted to save his own life. The only way to save yourself is to speak honestly. What I would like from you—
Subj: I have nothing to say to you.
BT: What I would like to give you is a few quiet hours of solemn reflection. Think deeply about where you are. I understand your predicament perfectly and you have my sincere sympathy. But you must think about what we can do to save your life. The newspapers are howling for spies to be put to death. The newspapers are very important in this country. The newspapers say all spies must be shot. The government cannot ignore this. Your best chance is speak openly and answer all our questions. All the other men who are arrested have been doing their best to cooperate because they understand their lives are at stake. Now I want you to go back to your room and think and we shall have another chat soon.
I was “Hermann” until my father was arrested for a spy. Then Miss Anne Hamilton suggested to my mother that the name sounded “too German.”
“ ‘Hermann’ will have people in the village seeing red, missus. No use saying it oughtn’t, it just does. Isn’t there another name you can pull out of the hat for him?”
It was Hamilton who started calling me Bill, after Buffalo Bill Cody. She had a program from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which her father had seen at Southampton. “Bill” became “Billy.” And Billy Lange I have been ever
since.
After they took my father away, first to Osborne House, then to the Tower of London, Eilín and I stayed on at Sanssouci, living like ghosts in a villa befuddled with fog, sea fog blowing through rooms where the Weinbrenners’ massive furniture was shrouded now under white cotton sheets.
If my mother wasn’t a Hun, she was Irish, which wasn’t much better, as far as Shanklin village was concerned. Living in a house that belonged to a German baron—a house where the kaiser himself had once (before our time) spent a night—we were quite foreign enough to be shunned. After the Special Branch detective took Buck away, Sanssouci was no longer a living house, and certainly wasn’t carefree. Autumn lawns grew shaggy and thick with small wildflowers. There was no money to pay the maid, cook, or gardener, so they departed, until Sanssouci, at last, held just the pair of us, Eilín and me. In some ways it was better then, quite magical, really. Most of the rooms were shut up. We lived between the library, the drawing room, and the kitchen. There was a gas fire in the drawing room. A massive iron range kept the kitchen warm, and there was a coal grate that made the library cozy, though coal was costly. As winter settled in, we shifted our beds down to the library. There were ship models, in glass cases, racing schooners. The kaiser’s Meteor V, the baron’s Hermione.
When we brought books down from the shelves, many volumes had their pages uncut. The baron owned an impressive English library, but he hadn’t come to the island to spend his time reading. There was a bay window with a view of the sea and room for both of us on a very comforting window seat. The cushions were covered with a tapestry, rough and nubbly. We lay there and leafed through the baron’s picture books and atlases. Sometimes there was cocoa.
The collection of atlases absorbed us for weeks. The first thing Eilín would look for when we opened any atlas was that point—N 20°56' W 123°23'—where Buck was born. Sometimes the page “Mexico” was arranged generously enough to reach so far out into the empty blue, but usually it wasn’t, and we’d find his birthplace on the Oceana page or in a spread of pages where the globe was sectioned like an orange and splayed out entire. When we found Buck’s spot in an atlas or on a chart my mother would prick a tiny, discreet hole with the tip of a sharpened pencil. In memoriam. Next we’d search to locate my birthplace: in England, on the Isle of Wight, at the edge of Shanklin village, in this very house. I felt dizzy when she pricked the exact place on the correct atlas sheet. It seemed powerful somehow that we were lying on the window seat in the very house where I was born. When she pricked the map I could almost feel the pencil point’s sharp little nudge. Here you are.
Here.
Here.
Here.
At that age I could put myself into a trance by repeating certain words. Here was one of my incantatory words. I, the first person singular, was another. I, repeated often enough and without distraction, would send me tumbling right down the rabbit hole. I suppose it represents a certain stage of development, the infant mind toying with its earliest, dazzling, sense of selfhood.
We’re not the world, and the world isn’t us.
We had barely enough money for food, fuel, and my mother’s trips up to London, and none to spend on luxuries, but there was an enormous tin of Javanese cocoa in the larder, and in the library a humidor packed with Weinbrenner’s special cigarettes which had the Walden crest (Irish shamrock intertwined with German cornflowers) embossed in gold on the paper tubes. In the evening after tucking me into my cot, Eilín used to sit in a leather club chair with her knees tucked up, smoking cigarettes, sipping cocoa, gazing at the fire. I enjoyed watching the firelight playing on her face, neck, shoulders, legs. She would know when I wasn’t asleep, and after a while we’d start a conversation. Sometimes I wonder if these were dreams, and not real conversations at all, but they are grounded by the scent of tobacco smoke, firelight, and the delicious security I felt, being alone with my mother.
“I can’t think where he is right now.” Her voice was calm at night. During the day, she could sound harried; she often became impatient with my slowness, what she called my dreaminess. She was such a brisk person I must often have seemed that way to her.
“Daddy? Is it Daddy you mean?”
“Ah, little man, go to sleep, we’re not to be talking now.”
“But you’ve kept me awake.”
“Have I?”
“I like to look at you.”
“I’m nothing to look at these days. I’m less than nothing.”
Some winter nights the sea wind would rattle and bang at the library windowpanes. My mother said it was the breath of the sea. The world was whirling so fast, she said, the wind was getting bold. “But we’re not going to let it blow us down, Billy. The wind was your father’s strong friend, always. Your father would taste the wind and know everything there was in it.”
“He’s a sailor.”
“He’s more than that.”
“He’s a captain.”
“Captain and master. He’ll come back to us one day. You’ll see.”
I didn’t doubt that myself, except when she said it. Her statements of faith always sounded a bit…doubtful.
“Now put your head down and go to sleep, Billy.”
I could never sleep merely from wanting to. And most nights I didn’t even want to. I’d rather stay awake with her. I wanted to see her—see us both—through the long winter’s dark, with sea wind smacking our villa like a gloved hand, rattling every piece of glass in the place. If the wind played out during the night, a few hours cold calm would leave a gray tongue of hoarfrost on the green, unkempt winter lawns.
We had no visitors except Hamilton, who came nearly every day. Her father was barman at the Crab Inn, her mother a harridan who took in laundry and forbade Hamilton to visit Sanssouci after my father’s arrest. But she came anyway, because she loved and admired my mother, who had escaped her own irascible parent to make a life for herself on the Continent and marry a dashing sailor, even if he was now to be shot as a German spy. We had letters from my grandmother Con—Buck’s mother—in Ireland, and from Eilín’s sisters, my aunts Kate and Frances. None from Germany, of course. Nothing from Buck—he wasn’t allowed to write. Eilín journeyed up to London every two weeks and attempted to see him but was never able to.
In the village they believed Buck had been condemned as a Hun spy and was awaiting execution in the Tower of London. If he hadn’t already been shot.
Hamilton, who was fifteen, warned me to be prepared for bad news.
“The thing with bad news, when you hear it, is keep it inside, Billy. Hold it inside, don’t let no one else see it, Billy, and be brave. That is what your father must expect from a brave boy.”
“Will they chop off his head?”
“Ah, no. They shoot them nowadays.”
She was our friend, but the rest of the village kept their distance. From their point of view we must have been something between criminals and actors in a melodrama. Eilín was very beautiful, after all, and I was very young, and I’m sure that for some of our neighbors our situation had an aura of romance, especially if Buck was executed.
The three of us took many walks along the dripping lanes. Hamilton had promised to marry a boy who was with her brother in the First Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment. The Hampshires had gone to France back in August. In those days I thought the soldiers were the luckiest fellows alive. My sense of what “the war” meant came from heroic paintings of the Battle of Waterloo reproduced in a folio in the library at Sanssouci. Lady Butler’s Scotland Forever, depicting the gallant charge of the Scots Greys on magnificent pale horses, was my favorite.
I remember Hamilton saying she had “had it” with her soldier boy. She was “fed up.” She was “sick and tired.” All these phrases were new and fresh. My ears pricked up as they always did whenever I sensed anger, restlessness, or impatience behind words.
“I don’t miss men. I’m not unhappy they’ve cleared off. I want to clear off myself, I do. Go to London and see wh
at I can make of it.”
“There are plenty of men in London,” my mother said calmly.
One of them being my father, lodged in the Tower.
“Oh, I don’t hate men. My fellow said he would write, but of course he hasn’t, not even a card. Perhaps he is dead. Shot through the heart.”
“Don’t say such things,” my mother cautioned. She had Irish respect for the incantatory power of speech. One had to keep silent about the most important things and never mention whatever it was you most wanted, or most feared. The world was a twisting, scornful place with a dirty mind. And in London firing squads of soldiers were shooting men accused of spying, shooting them through the heart if they were lucky, through the brains or the eyes if they weren’t. There was no telling where a stray bullet could go.
I missed Buck’s hands, the strength in his arms, the timbre of his voice, his way of picking me up so easily, so casually, and blithely throwing me about. I loved tugging, punching, and wrestling with him; he knew exactly how much force I could handle without feeling overwhelmed. I missed the sense of motion radiating from an adult male: defiance of gravity. His tactile, physical playfulness gave me confidence in the world.
After he was taken away the world narrowed. We had cups of cocoa in the library, pinpricks on map sheets, my mother gazing into the coal fire, muddy walks with Hamilton.
Eilín did her best to keep my father alive and constantly in my mind. She told me his stories. Once, in the Marshall Islands Buck had been pursued by a man with a machete who sought to kill him for no other reason except that he had blond hair. My father had escaped by running into a Chinese shop where the shopkeeper brought out a Mauser pistol and shot the marauder dead.
Uncle Joseph, the Negro cook who attended Buck’s birth, owned a tavern on the Deichstraße in Hamburg. When Captain Jack had gone down with his reefer in the South Atlantic, Joseph loaned his wife, my grandmother Con, three hundred and seventy-five Yankee dollars to live on while she waited for her widow’s benefit to be paid. Those silver dollars were good as reichsmarks in the shops of Hamburg.
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