I’d heard the stories before, from my father, who enjoyed telling them. I knew Joseph had earned the dollars from the Yankee sailors in his tavern. I knew a reefer was a ship that carried frozen meat.
While Buck’s life hung by a thread, I explored the island lanes with Hamilton, startling rabbits from hedges and pausing to stare at bulls in the fields. Hamilton would suddenly ask me, “What is your daddy doing at this moment?” as though she expected me to know.
As though it were perfectly rational that I should know.
So I’d make up stories of his doings, packing in as many details as I could.
“He is polishing his boots and eating a sandwich and putting brown sugar in his tea. He is looking out the window and watching the king. The king is getting out of his royal-blue state coach pulled by six horses.”
“What color are the horses?”
“Oh, grays. Beautiful matched grays. Wonderful pullers. And Daddy has a pencil. He is making a drawing of the horses for me. He’s very hungry for his tea. Crumpets and blackberry jam, honey and milk, hard-boiled eggs and ham sandwiches.”
Hamilton liked to try on Eilín’s clothes and especially her magnificent hats. Dread of going back to Ireland was preying on my mother’s mind. The house at Strandhill, Sligo, where she’d grown up was the red house. Her father was a barrister who had married a fisherman’s daughter from the island of Inishmor. After her mother died, Eilín had applied for the position of secretary to Lady Maire, Baroness von Weinbrenner, by answering the notice in the Irish Times with a letter written in three languages—English, German, and Irish. The German section was very short, and her sister Kate helped her with the Irish. Her application was successful, and Eilín left her father’s house and went out to Germany.
On wild winter days while rain and wind knocked the house, we had our tea by the library fire, and my mother would tell Anne Hamilton and me all about leaving Ireland for the first time. Hamilton loved to hear it and sat enraptured.
“In those days, barefoot girls sold mussels and oysters on the streets of Dublin and the bridges over the Liffey. They had peculiar cries, like seabirds, I thought. Very haunting and beautiful, but they frightened me. I couldn’t imagine myself barefoot and wearing a shawl and crying a basket of mussels in the city while people hurried past.
“I was too shy and wary to spend money on food, and by the time I boarded the steamer I’d not had a morsel in sixteen hours. A group of county Monaghan girls, going over to work in the woolen mills of Yorkshire, they were very kind and shared their food—mostly potatoes—and porter as well.
“They were very strong girls, real northerners. They smoked pipes and drank porter. One or two spoke the same sort of Irish as my own mother had, and I was nearly overcome to hear it, but that was really the only time I was sad to be leaving Ireland, and the feeling didn’t last. I’d never taken drink before and was sick most of the way across. Then I caught a train across England to Hull, caught the steamer for Holland, then more trains. I was too frightened to speak to anyone, until a handsome student came into the carriage at Utrecht.
“His name was Peter, such fair skin he had, and black hair and jet-black eyes. Beautifully dressed all in gray, and his boots gleamed. We became great friends. We shared our food, and when it was time to change trains at Venlo he helped me through it or I certainly would have been lost. I fell in love with him. If you can call it love if it happens so quickly as that.”
“You can,” Hamilton assured her. “It does happen all the time, missus. Often on trains, especially in the war.”
“Well, it wasn’t war then, war was the furthest thing from our minds. In those days people thought there’d be no wars ever again, except perhaps in Ireland.”
“Tell us about the singing,” Hamilton encouraged.
“Well, he was scribbling for half an hour after Duisburg, before Köln. I was a bit hurt, I thought he was turning away, ignoring me.”
“But he was writing the song!” said Anne Hamilton. “In German. He was.”
“He was. Perhaps there’s nothing sounds quite so strange and beautiful as a song sung in German by a young man with a fine voice.”
“There can’t be,” Hamilton agreed.
“He was a tenor, pure as the air. He was getting off at Köln Hauptbahnhof. As the train was slowing up, he started getting down his things, then he shook hands with me. I was broken up, though trying not to show it. What a ridiculous idiotic elf, falling in love on the train to Germany! Suddenly I felt sick, frightened of everything, of how far I’d come. I didn’t know a single soul in all Europe. I wished to scurry back to Ireland only I didn’t have the money for it. Then he told me he’d composed a song in honor of my coming into Germany. He stood on the platform at the Hauptbahnhof and began singing. As the train started to move out he followed along, still singing.”
“That’s the most wonderful,” Hamilton said. “That will never happen to me.”
“You can’t know,” my mother told her. “You can’t know what will happen. Things do change when you leave your own country.
“When I arrived at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, thirty-six hours out of Ireland, there was Lady Maire wearing a fur-trimmed cape and waiting impatiently on the platform, looking stern and awful. She was a daughter of the Earl of Tireragh, an Irish peer.
“She hadn’t thought I’d be so young. ‘I’m not,’ I told her, ‘only I am a bit tired.’ We rode out to Walden in a motorcar, very noisy and smelly. She hardly said a word. I thought her very stiff. The Weinbrenners’ estate is called Walden, and I thought it terribly strange and cold at first, not at all cheerful or welcoming. The baron was a famous polo player. Do you know what that is? You ride ponies and knock balls with a stick. He shouted at his ponies, and his guests and all the servants and me—though I never saw him treat an animal or a person unkindly. If you could stand being shouted at, he was all right.
“But Lady Maire—she was a queen on a playing card, very stiff. Only when she was with horses did another side show through. Graceful and gentle she was in the saddle. Didn’t matter the horse—even a wild stallion—they all answered to her. Why, the baron would put her up on horses he was afraid to ride, and she would manage them beautifully.
“One night I was in the kitchen with the Swabian cook, weeping from homesickness, when the baroness found me. She took me by the hand and led me upstairs. She drew a bath, with lavender buds strewn in the water. While I sat in it she lit two cigarettes and handed me one. I’d never had a cigarette before, but I took it, of course.
“ ‘You are missing old Ireland,’ said Lady Maire to me, then she read aloud the poetry of Speranza, which is the pen name of Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar, and Lady Maire’s own cousin.”
My mother could recite by heart:
My Country, wounded to the heart
Could I but flash along thy soul
Electric power to rive apart
The thunder-clouds that round thee roll
She loved Lady Maire. Starting in the 1920s they spent a dozen summers driving all over Europe—“Galicia to Galicia!” was my mother’s gay description—at first in a Mercedes touring car driven by the baron’s chauffeur, later in a little Ford that Eilín taught herself to drive. Together they tracked down most of what became the Weinbrenner Collection of medieval religious art. Fourteenth-century Palmesels in manor houses in Württemberg; fifteenth-century altarpieces in mountain churches of Asturias; priestly chasubles in Polish convents: some of the work was crude, some was masterful, all of it had the glow that objects only acquire after five or six hundred years of veneration. Along the way they were stranded, broken down, robbed, arrested, hospitalized with malaria, threatened, jailed more than once, and even stoned, in a Vlach village in northern Greece. They were stoic travelers. And by the time of Lady Maire’s death they were more attached to each other than to their husbands or their children, though my mother would never have admitted this.
“I wish I could go out to Germany,�
�� Hamilton said. “If only it weren’t for this horrid war.”
She must have experienced the Isle of Wight as her own prison, the way certain people do with places that contain their youth. Did she ever escape? She was bold and rugged, and there were new opportunities for young women on account of the war. Later, up in London, we saw women bus conductors, and I used to imagine Hamilton traveling through the London hurly-burly in uniform, in command of her bus, putting up with no foolishness from soldiers on leave.
She rarely spent the night at Sanssouci, though my mother invited her to do so whenever the weather was nasty. When Hamilton did stay over, she slept on a pallet of rugs and pillows my mother arranged before the fire. But Anne Hamilton had no fear of island lanes, even in the wildest storms. She didn’t mind walking after dark, and I think that she, like my mother, relished time alone. Hamilton was one of those people who can accept, even require, a certain amount of social intercourse but also need time to feast on their own thoughts. After putting on her boots (drying before the fire), her cloak, gloves, and carefully arranging her hat, she would shake hands with Eilín, shake hands with me, and start off for the village with a stick in her hand. In those days everyone in the country or the city carried a stick of one sort or another. Eilín would settle me into bed, then sit up alone, brooding and smoking cigarettes before the red glow of the fire.
The war felt very close. Standing on the cliffs, we watched steamers and ferries plowing across the Channel, carrying soldiers to France. On certain days, if the wind was right, Anne Hamilton and I believed we could hear the distant grumble of artillery barrage.
“Whatever happens, Billy, you must protect your mother. It’s your duty.”
So said Hamilton, more than once. It was wartime, and duty, being brave, standing guard, were familiar words and phrases.
“You’re her soldier, like. Your duty, Billy, is to stand at arms, be prepared. For you’re her soldier now.”
My mother and I were ghosting it at Sanssouci because we had nowhere else to go. The obvious refuge was Ireland—county Sligo, where Buck’s mother, Constance Lange, and Eilín’s father, Joseph McDermott, both lived, though hardly aware of each other. However, so long as Buck was in the Tower facing a trial and the prospect of execution, my mother could not leave England.
She eked out what savings she had in her post-office account to buy necessities. She traveled up to London and tried to see government officials and lawyers, most of whom refused to meet her. While Eilín was in London, Hamilton settled into Sanssouci with me. She brought eggs and a loaf of brown bread, currant buns, blackberry and elderberry jam, once a freshly killed chicken. Our larders at Sanssouci were vast but empty. There was a wine cellar. We used to go down there and try to count the bottles, but we never reached the end.
We talked about the war. Hamilton’s point was that my father was a soldier who had done his duty, and it was nasty and cruel of the first lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill, to lock him up in the Tower of London and shoot him.
At least they weren’t going to chop off his head, which was what they’d done with Anne Boleyn. While we rambled the island’s green, dripping lanes, Hamilton mimed holding a severed head on her hip as she sang,
Anne Boleyn walks the steps of the bloody Tower
With her head tucked underneath her arm.
Sometimes I was overcome with guilt and tears, knowing it was my job to save my father but not knowing how.
Hamilton said she was going to become a nursing sister once she turned sixteen.
“But I’ll tell you, Billy my man, I don’t intend to spend the duration scrubbing ward floors or emptying bedpans. I should like to be an officer. I should like to be a captain of nursing sisters. You’ve seen how sharp I am, not like the other girls in this village. I’d keep my uniform spotless. I’d have a white cap, sharply creased, crisp white apron, and my navy-blue nurse’s cape fastened with silver chain and clasp. And I’ll tell you this, Billy Lange: when the soldiers are wounded or killed—when the line breaks—if the trench is going to be overcome in a raid—it is the duty of the nurses to pick up the rifles and fight. I should like that. I wouldn’t shirk. And you wouldn’t neither, would you?”
I would not. However, I didn’t see myself fighting in a nurse’s uniform. I’d wear a soldier’s khaki and one of the tin hats the troops were now being issued in France.
At night Hamilton and I slept together in the library in my mother’s cot, which was bigger than mine. Hamilton wore a nightdress of unbleached linen, and her body’s scent was soap and earth. The isle’s winter floated around us in sea fog. Fog was silver, blue, and white. The grounds were green all winter, glowing, anxious green. Fuchsia grew dense in hedges, dripping tiny scarlet and pink petals on the skinny, wandering lanes. The gardens were wreckage, except for one neat plot from which mother and Hamilton and I took beets, carrots, and turnips all winter. Unmown grasses shook in waves as the wind swept through.
In London that autumn and winter there were trials and dawn executions of German naval spies. Of course no one told me. They had all been arrested on the first day of war. Eilín kept going up to London, traveling by coach to Ryde, steamer to Southampton, express train to Waterloo.
Then one afternoon in February Hamilton and I were shopping in the village when I saw my mother climb down from a charabanc just in from Ryde. Something about her seemed different. She wore a narrow gray skirt and jacket buttoned very snug against her trim, voluptuous figure. Her hat was pinned with waterproof cover against the winter wet. I pulled away from Hamilton and dashed across the road. I wanted to be with my mother, wanted to be as close as I could; I suppose what I really wanted was to climb back up inside her and hide from the rainy world. Funny how children know when things have changed, changed utterly. Even when she saw me running toward her, her face remained strangely expressionless. Probably she was still in shock. She was holding an umbrella, tightly furled, but still managed to hold her arms open wide, and I flew into them, then both of us were crying—that is my memory of it anyway. It’s possible there had never been such a display of emotion in the rainy, tightly furled streets of Shanklin village. But we were foreigners, after all.
My father’s life was spared. He was not to be tried as a spy. He was no longer threatened with execution. Perhaps it had been a matter of enough weeks passing and tempers cooling before the Special Branch detectives and MI5 men recognized that Buck Lange was exactly who he claimed to be: a racing skipper with a pair of excellent Leitz binoculars and a keen professional interest in how efficiently certain yachts were being sailed.
They weren’t setting him free, however. He wasn’t coming back to us. As a German male of military age, he was to be interned for the duration. In February 1915 my father was transported to Scotland and spent the rest of that winter aboard the hulk of an old ship moored in the Firth of Forth, with three hundred German and Austrian internees.
In September 1915 most of them were dispatched to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. But men with British wives, a category that included my father—Ireland was still British—were shipped south, to a camp that had been established at Alexandra Palace, a commercial exhibition hall on a windswept hill in north London.
Eilín said we must go to be near him. So we packed our belongings and left my birthplace, the green lanes, and the isle, and went up to London.
1938
The Delphi-Palast still offered a tea dance on Saturday afternoons. Otto Kermbach’s orchestra was rarely very interesting or stimulating, but the Delphi was only a five-minute walk from Karin’s building on the Giesebrechtstraße. Kermbach’s boys played commercial Viennese swing. Coy music, sweet as Viennese pastry, loaded with cream and chocolate.
In that bourgeois part of town the dance palaces were trying their hardest to adapt to the new Germany, which wasn’t so new after five years. Managers and orchestra leaders were wary of the police, especially Sicherheitsdienst, SD, Himmler’s secret policemen, who people belie
ved were everywhere, even if they weren’t. If anyone tried to jitterbug, Kermbach would have stopped his players immediately, herded everyone out, and closed and locked the doors. One Saturday we’d seen a uniformed SS man dancing with a pretty girl at the Delphi. We left immediately. But on my next visit to Berlin we went back.
Bed to bath to the tea dance at the Delphi-Palast: that was our Saturday afternoon ritual in Berlin, and we seemed to require ritual to ease us into the darkness and excitement of our Berlin evenings. The hottest Kansas City–style music was too much to absorb when emotions were still raw from sex. And anyway, that sort of playing could only be found late at night, and never in a sedate quarter like Charlottenburg.
So we started with Otto Kermbach’s maudlin arrangements and moved on, searching out the Kansas City sound we really needed. And that particular night we were fortunate. We hit the right spots at the right time, each club smaller than the one before, at each one the riffing and jitterbugging fiercer, more sexual. Our last stop was a blind pig, an illegal venue. By day it was a car-repair shop in the suburb of Wedding. The concrete floor was greasy, there was an aroma of gasoline, and six young musicians took turns on extended solos that sounded to me like sharp signals of distrust for every aspect of the “Fatherland spirit” that was alive in our daytime Germany. The Kansas City sound, that 4/4 beat, was packed with disrespect; it embodied loathing for every aspect of the regime.
I had been studying faces in the crowd, trying to spot police informers, watchers, but finally gave it up, not caring.
The best jazz was hard and alive. Transformation—that’s the business of music, is it not? Being with Karin Weinbrenner in a joint like that after midnight, I felt vulnerable and powerful all at once—proud of my daring, my sense for rhythm, my ear for the best playing, my beautiful, caustic jazz sensibility. To hear such intense music in such strange surroundings was like sucking down a draft of pure courage. Which can be toxic, like anything taken pure.
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