Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  Back on board, Bernard attends a Sunday-morning church service, preceded, he writes on April 4, by “the usual short record of church bells broadcast throughout the ship—a pleasant English country sound which I fear will not be heard in reality until Armistice Day.”

  By then, Bernard had clearly received some letters from Win, probably picked up in Cape Town, for there is a slightly mysterious reference in his letter of March 29, which goes, “We left the Sch problem rather in abeyance. If the family are still keen I think they should drop the ch each at a propitious moment.”

  A letter sent by Win on March 3 solves the mystery. While Bernard was being shipped off to God knows where, Win was facing two family problems, one a kind of moral panic about sexual misdeeds, to which I shall return presently, the other to do, yet again, with the family name. In his father’s absence, John had decided that the name sounded too German. Schlesinger was no good for the stage. It would look odd on the cast list of his “theater company.” The “ch” at least should be dropped. Quite what stage name John had in mind is unknown: Slazenger, perhaps, like the sporting goods manufacturer, or Slesinger maybe? Apparently he couldn’t make up his mind. Win, in any case, disapproves: “I don’t want him to get ashamed of his father’s name, and if he ever honours it as much as his father has done he will be lucky. I told John that if his existing name will wreck the ‘company,’ the company will just have to forego his services.”

  That Win, who was usually keener than Bernard to shed the marks of a foreign background, should stand up for the family name might seem unexpected, but her reasons were wholly in character. What mattered most to her was her husband’s honor. Then again, she had not followed her brother Walter’s example in World War I to change Regensburg to Raeburn either. Bernard was more flexible on this vexing aspect of Jewish assimilation.

  The matter of the family name would be batted back and forth in various letters and not really resolved until well into the next year. On June 26, 1942, Bernard writes that “if the children don’t want to be saddled with an Sch, and feel very strongly about it, steps should be taken . . . to alter it. But they should remember that more depends on what sort of people they are and how they behave than on what they are called.”

  The question is finally settled in the spring of 1943. Various people have expressed an opinion, including John’s housemaster at Uppingham, and faithful Sholto, who had by then inherited his father’s title of Lord Amulree. “Re the name,” Win writes on May 23, “we have practically decided to do nothing about it. You have made the name so worthy & well known both in the medical and the military world, that we think it wiser to keep your name. Sholto profoundly disagrees with changing it; he thinks that it shows lack of character.”

  The other problem, about sexual behavior, was a little more dramatic. One might have expected their eldest son’s fondness for dressing up in his mother’s clothes, applying makeup to his sisters, and playing female parts in variety shows to have caused Bernard and Win some concern. The word “pansy” does indeed crop up in various letters describing John’s conduct. But the moral panic in this instance did not involve him, but rather Hans Levy. He had already caused alarm by running away once, supposedly to join his mother, Lotte, in Oxford. And Win had disapproved of his “Boche” table manners. Now he appeared to have got himself into even worse trouble.

  Hans was twelve in 1942. Win worries that he has what she calls, in a letter written on March 2, “a moral defect.” He had written to his mother about being “lovesick.” An “unsavoury episode” had supposedly taken place during the summer holiday between young Hans and an older girl of “unsavoury reputation.” In a letter sent on the twenty-fourth, Bernard is informed that their bachelor friends Gifford and Ben have been consulted and they “take a very serious view of it.” Indeed, they feel strongly that Win should not allow Hans to stay in the house; he would have a corrupting influence on the children. They recommend a child psychiatrist named Dr. Mildred Creak.

  Dr. Creak was a little distracted by other things during her session with Hans, but she did have time to ask whether he was “involved in any homosexual business at school.” A letter of inquiry was sent forthwith to Mr. Harley, the headmaster of Hans’s grammar school. Mr. Harley was not helpful, had “rather reactionary views,” according to Win, was “fed up with refugees” too, but agreed to send the boy for treatment to a Child Guidance Clinic. The doctor at the clinic took one look at him and said, “There is a typical potential pansy boy & homosexual.”

  Mr. Harley then told Win—who was by that stage beside herself with worry—that he no longer approved of the Child Guidance Clinic. It was either that or his grammar school, where he promised to take the boy in hand with “the paste on the pants” method. Win, on reflection, chose to stick with the school, and rather regretted that she had ever consulted Gifford and Ben on the Hans question.

  Bernard only gets wind of the moral panic much later. On June 28, by now posted at the British Military Hospital in Delhi, he declares himself “a little bewildered by all this Child Guidance Clinic treatment.” On the thirtieth he writes entirely sensibly that “Hans’s problems are those mainly of adolescence apparently and will no doubt pass.”

  Hans Levy (RIGHT) in a school production of The Mikado

  Nothing more is heard of the affair after that. Indeed, little Hans would make a full recovery in Win’s estimation. I called Professor “Dick” Levy at his house in Syracuse, New York, to ask him about this episode, wondering if I should even mention it at all, not wishing to cause any distress, even sixty years after the event. He told me he could not remember any of it.

  On February 27, 1944, Win writes that Hans “has grown into such a charming, sensible & quiet lad. He is certainly a case of a brand snatched from the burning,* when you think of the highly strung, noisy, exhibitionist little fellow who came over here 5 years ago. An English boarding school has worked the miracle.”

  It is all rather astonishing to read now. Win’s trust in the English boarding school as the vehicle of salvation is perhaps a bit naïve, considering what went on at English boarding schools, but not at all surprising. And her panic was at least partly due to her having to deal with family crises on her own. Bernard’s quiet wisdom is not unexpected either. What strikes the modern reader as extraordinary, though, is the conclusion drawn even by a prominent child psychiatrist, later well known for her work on autism, that any sign of sexual precociousness would have to be linked to homosexuality. After all, the whole affair was sparked by a story of impropriety with an older girl. That John, in spite of his “pansy” predilections, was above suspicion suggests that many adults had a rather hazy idea of homosexuality. Or maybe there were suspicions, but they were projected onto poor Hans. Or perhaps one form of “perversity” was assumed to be automatically the result of another.*

  I don’t know. But reading about this incident brought to mind a moral panic in my own youth. I was exactly the same age as Hans, at the time of his affair with the older girl, when my father was greatly concerned about my friendship with A., an amiable fellow two years older than myself. We used to go bicycling in the dunes a few miles from our house in The Hague. One day my father took me aside and quizzed me in a rather diffident manner about the nature of my friendship with A.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, “what do you get up to in the dunes?”

  “We go cycling,” I said.

  “Yes, but do you do anything else?

  “Like what?”

  “Play games.”

  “What games?”

  “Like pulling each other’s dicks.”

  I was flabbergasted by this suggestion. So flabbergasted that I put it to A. that we would surely never do any such thing. A. was not too bright, but he knew enough to be deeply offended. I never saw much of him after that.

  Perhaps it was in the way of a small and b
arely conscious act of vengeance that some years later, after having stayed with my uncle John in London, I delighted in irritating my father by mimicking John’s mannerisms. Having been picked up from the ferryboat at Hook of Holland, I would regale my parents in the fruitiest voice I could muster about all the “sweet, sweet people” I had met in London, watching my poor father’s shoulders tense up behind the steering wheel.

  Something had changed in the delicate relations between children and parents since 1942, but perhaps not as much as one might have assumed.

  —

  As reticent as Bernard was about his experiences in the first war, he loved to tell us stories about India, not just about the relative merits of squash courts in ’Pindi or Agra, but the sounds, the sights, the different ways of dressing among Hindus and Muslims, and the pleasure of having a “punkha wallah” provide a cool breeze in the tropical heat by manually working a large fan. However, his nostalgia—“Best since India!” he would shout to amuse us, prompted by a particularly good lunch or the sweet smell of a fine cheroot—was for British India. I asked him once whether he ever wanted to go back. “Not really,” he replied. “Too much has changed since my time.”

  Bernard’s views on India and Indians, especially in the early stages of his stay there, were conventional for an Englishman of his class. On December 13, 1942, he writes from the British Military Hospital in Delhi, “The average Indian has a child’s mentality. I find the best way to get on with them is to treat them with a mixture of strictness aggravated occasionally with a tempestuous outburst, with a degree of encouragement & whenever possible with a twinkle, as most of them have a childlike sense of humour.”

  Like most Europeans who held positions of paternalistic authority in the colonies, Bernard didn’t quite realize that the “child’s mentality,” the offended sulks, the playing dumb, were the natural reflexes of colonized people everywhere, the small covert acts of resistance that mitigate the sense of humiliation.

  Bernard in Delhi

  The spicy curries served in the houses of Indian colleagues late in the evening, after endless rounds of drinks, he found “interesting” but bad for his digestion. Indian music, he declares on June 19, “which brays forth in demi semi tones when I switch on the wireless just leaves me cold.” And some of the Indian customs he finds quite baffling. On June 30, in the same letter where he talks about Hans and his adolescent problems, he describes treating the wife of his “bearer,” a Muslim, for a rash on her arm: “She is in strict purdah & was clad in a curious hooded gown with only two little peepholes for her eyes. As she had a rash on her face as well, I told him I could not prescribe without seeing the lesions there. So she was told to come out from her extraordinary garment & a rather grubby but fairly young apparition appeared in the light of day. Aren’t their habits curious?”

  It is easy to see Bernard as a somewhat Blimpish figure, adopting all the mannerisms and attitudes of the colonial overlords, but he was a little more complicated than that. Although convinced of the British duty to see to the welfare of the benighted Indian who was as yet incapable of taking care of himself, he had a sharp eye for the theatrical aspects of the imperial ethos.

  On July 6, 1942, Bernard has just been to a reception given by the viceroy to celebrate the independence of the United States, which seems a very strange thing to do in the heart of the British Empire. The viceroy at the time was Lord Linlithgow, a deeply reactionary figure who did his utmost to stifle any Indian demands for independence. But no doubt the celebration of American independence was a way to be nice to the much-needed Yankee allies, adding one more absurdity to a rich supply of late imperial farces. The celebration was at the viceregal house in New Delhi, in Bernard’s words “a vast edifice built in light terracotta and white stone with a high round black dome affair on top. The building is well-proportioned and fits in well with all the rest of the official New Delhi designed by Lutyens, although I must confess it has a certain Wembley Exhibition* air about it . . . Everything is built on a vast scale no doubt to impress the Oriental mind.” A buffet was laid out in a room with “portraits of all the past Viceroys, mostly painted by Oswald Birley, but one or two by de Laszlo. That of Reading was I thought the most striking.”

  It is interesting that he would say that. Lord Reading, depicted in all his imperial pomp by Philip de László, a Hungarian-born Jewish society painter in England, was the first and only Jewish viceroy of India. His name was Rufus Isaacs, described by his great-grandson Simon Isaacs as “a liberal Jew” who “was more English than he was Jewish.”

  This was not quite Bernard’s milieu; he would have found it pretentious. The picture of Lord Reading looking very lordly in his long-legged cream-colored trousers and wearing the light blue velvet cape of the Grand Master of the Star of India reminded me of a much earlier letter from Bernard, which I neglected to quote. It was written on September 21, 1924, when he was scouting around southern England with his medical superiors for a suitable place to establish a convalescent home. They go around various grand country houses and are received by the owners for tea. Bernard describes entering a vast oak-paneled hall, just the sort of place one would have found de László portraits hanging on the wall. He writes to Win, “This is Captain so & so, may I introduce you to Lady Thingamebob—you know the style and I felt like the arch villain in a modern shilling shocker.”

  On August 1, 1942, a month after attending the viceroy’s reception to celebrate American independence, and a week before the Indian Congress Party began its Quit India rebellion against the British Raj, Bernard has dinner with an Indian surgeon at the Indian Military Hospital. Bernard writes, “After a while he thawed somewhat and although not anti-British he opened his heart about the colour question. His life had certainly been complicated by his having married an English wife from whom he is now divorced. It was an interesting session.”

  Quite where Bernard stood in this matter is unclear. I know that he had been skeptical about mixed marriages. When one of the hostel children, Lore Feig, decided to marry a Parsi after the war, Bernard advised her against it, not because he disapproved of Parsis, but because he feared that social complications made such marriages too risky. He didn’t object, so far as I know, to his daughter marrying my father, who was from a Protestant family, but perhaps in his eyes a marriage between Europeans did not count as mixed. His mother, known to me as Great Grandma, worried a little about having a Dutchman in the family, since he might, she worried, have had a drop of “Indonesian blood.”

  The Anglo-Russian philosopher Isaiah Berlin liked to tell a story about the distinguished British historian Lewis Namier, born in Russia as Ludwik Niemirowski. Sometime in the 1930s, a visitor from Nazi Germany held forth at an Oxford dinner about the validity of German territorial demands in Europe, which he compared to the righteousness of the British Empire, whereupon Namier growled, “We Jews and other colored peoples think otherwise,” and stomped out.

  I’m not sure what Bernard would have made of Namier’s remark. I doubt very much that he would have ranked himself among the colored peoples, but the vulnerability of his own status in British society and his basic humanity shielded him from the contempt that some of his British cohorts felt for the people they still, however tenuously, continued to rule. He often felt that Indian politeness put European “boorishness” to shame. To which Win replies on December 1, 1943, “That feeling of boorishness, in the face of fine manners and ceremony towards guests of the Indians, I remember so well in my relations with Kamala Sircar at college. She always seemed far too gentle and delicate in her manners for the rough and ready methods of the undergrads.”

  While Bernard was sending Win accounts of his encounters with Indians, she was fretting about her domestic problems. Life in the English countryside was made difficult by strict rations of petrol and food. On March 4, when Bernard was still on board his ship, she writes about the various disasters in the Far East: “Singapore gone, the
Dutch East Indies practically finished, alas, after their brave fight . . . Things indeed look depressing at the moment.” She then goes into a long description of the garden at Mount Pleasant, the fate of the vegetables, the pea seeds, the state of the apple orchard, and the latest cut in food rations. She “tactfully” suggested to Laura “how we could harbour our resources here and there against the approaching lean times.” This apparently angered Laura, who seemed to regard it as Win’s personal meanness. “Really,” Win declares, “some of the working classes have no idea of sacrifice or war effort at all.”

  Then there was Hall, the gardener, who was lazy and often obstructive, according to Win. Indeed, she writes on September 13 that “he has become Bolshy,* and told Laura, in Hilary’s hearing, that he hoped when the revolution came the rich would be shot up!!”

  Laura at Mount Pleasant

  Such outbursts were rare, however. On the whole Win’s relations with the “working classes” in her employment were warm, even intimate in the way class relations based on mutual dependence often were. The same letter, quoted above, about the politesse of her Indian friend at Oxford, rather gushes about the staff. Laura, she writes, “is a treasure & she lives with her whole being for us & our children. Her thoughts are continually with you & she is as excited as I am when news comes from you . . . She is looking after me most tenderly & devotedly, and what I should do without her, I don’t know. She has drawn Mr. May and Mrs. Tuttle into the family devotion, so that Mr. May refers to me as ‘our missus.’”

  Mr. “Bill” May is only a name to me. Laura was evidently keen on him, but he died young in a car crash. Mrs. Tuttle, who did the cleaning, I do remember as a thin and very old woman with one dark brown tooth left in her mouth. We would visit her from time to time at a tiny cottage near Newbury where she lived alone in Dickensian squalor. We never stayed for long.