by Ian Buruma
Living with domestic help, which was the normal condition of the upper middle class, even in a country cottage, was not without problems. But if the help sometimes got on Win’s nerves, her children were worse. On September 9, she writes that they “are desperately out of hand; I cut no ice at all & I know now that I’ve failed with them. They are all lazy to a degree, even Wendy, and the others are rude and defiant into the bargain. Not one of them is sufficiently public-spirited to wish to do anything for the country . . . I am afraid, having been brought up as they were, with a staff of servants & a nurse & governess, it is too late now to make them anything but soft and selfish.”
If only she could see the end of the world’s miseries, but the news was so grim and The Times was predicting a ten years’ war: “Shall we ever meet again, my dear, or have we had all the life together for which we were destined?”
The refuge from her troubles, her safe haven, as it were, apart from her music, was that most English of institutions, her garden, which she tended with deep devotion. I can still picture her bent over the flowerbeds at St. Mary Woodlands, pruning and hoeing and weeding for hours on end. Even as the news about battlefronts and murderous persecution was getting worse all the time, she still managed to worry about the state of her garden. On July 11, 1941, she writes about the Mount Pleasant garden that “the borders are a riot of colour and the lavender magnificent, but nothing is staked up or properly attended to.” A week later, on the fifteenth, she reports that things are improving in the kitchen garden, but she has not yet had time to tackle the flower garden, which is “a complete shambles.” Gifford will be coming to stay, she writes, and “I don’t know what [he] will think of it.”
Her garden in Hampstead had been affected less by the Blitz, it appears, than by Win’s absence. The German relatives, who lived there through the war, lacked her enthusiasm and diligence in this regard. The sight of the garden in Templewood Avenue, she reports on July 4, 1943, made her “weep with sorrow.” It was so sad “to think that so young and beautiful a garden could revert to such a state in so short a time. No English inhabitants would have allowed it to get like that.”
This might strike one as overwrought, even slightly unhinged in the midst of a war. But the state of Win’s garden, no less than the clothes she wore, or the manners of her children, was of huge importance to her. For it was intimately connected to her perception of her place in the world, and to the way others perceived her. And these others included people from all classes. She would change out of her gardening clothes just to pick someone up at the village station, lest the stationmaster see her in anything but the most respectable attire.
I can’t remember who told us the story of Win’s behavior at some smart dinner party in London. Perhaps it was Win herself. A careless mistake had been made in the kitchen. Instead of a bowl of custard for dessert, Win had been served a bowl of mayonnaise. She finished it up to the last spoonful, without a word of complaint.
On July 17, 1942, Bernard mentions a meeting in Delhi with the Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George VI. It was during a reception for Indian doctors at the residence of the military commander in chief, Archibald Wavell, described by Bernard as a small man with a “tight little mouth.” Bernard is “called up to make conversation with the Duke. He told me that he had lost all his peas and beans with the frost two months ago in England.”
To which Win replies more than a month later, on August 21, “I was amused by your gardening chat with the Duke. Gardening, as I long ago discovered, is the British ‘open sesame’ to all doors & seldom fails in any walk of life.” It was an insight, perhaps, that would not have been put in quite those terms by someone who had never felt the need to open doors, or feared having them closed in her face.
But there was more to the gardening fetish than that. I have already quoted Bernard’s letter about Mount Pleasant being his “idyll” of “home and England.” He elaborates on this theme in a letter sent on March 4, 1943. Inspired by Win’s description of the Kintbury garden and of “glorious Berkshire,” he launches into a romantic rhapsody about their shared country idyll: “I have been in many countries & seen many of the glories of nature with you, beloved. Recently I have become acquainted with some of the beauties of this country here. Somehow, though, nowhere will really ever hold comparison to the simple peaceful loveliness of our English countryside . . . Berkshire. Whenever I write it on your letters it gives me a thrill . . . Darling I am feasting my eyes once again on my loving and gallant little lady with her decks cleared for action in the garden, capacious pockets in her apron, a gardening fork almost as big as herself, great gloves . . . How I would love to see it all again and dig my spade into the good Berkshire soil.” And so on.
It is hard to imagine, reading these bursts of sentiment about the earth of home, that Bernard and Win had lived for most of their lives in Northwest London. Bernard had spent less than two years altogether in Berkshire. The quest for a safe haven explains his feelings to some degree. Similarly lyrical passages occur in his letters about Hohfluh, the Swiss village, and the Hotel Wagram in Paris. Still, I think the paeans to the Berkshire soil were about more than a sense of security; they expressed a desire to be embedded in the idyll, proof, contrary to what some bigots believe, that no one clings more tenaciously to newly planted roots than the patriotic immigrant or his offspring, on condition, of course, that they feel accepted.
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Ten days after Bernard wrote his love letter to the Berkshire countryside from the British Military Hospital in Delhi, the roughly forty-five thousand Jews of Salonika, where Bernard had been stationed in the previous war, were being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most were gassed as soon as they arrived. By the time his letter reached Win, the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto had begun. But by then, millions of European Jews had already been slaughtered, machine-gunned into slimy pits, or gassed in the main killing centers in Poland. Many people, including Jews who spent the war in relative safety in Britain or the United States, would claim after the war that they hadn’t known how bad things had been. Perhaps for most people it was beyond their imagination. Win was not one of those people.
Her letter of September 28, 1942, begins in a normal manner, informing Bernard about the Christmas presents on the way to him in Delhi, a pipe he had asked for, packed along with ten volumes of Charles Dickens. Roger’s progress at his prep school is mentioned, how well he was doing at sports and his keenness as a cricketer. A weekend visit to Mount Pleasant by Gifford is announced; she hopes he won’t be too frightfully bored by her company and expects him to help her in the garden. She is rehearsing Bach’s Peasant Cantata with Gerald Finzi’s chamber orchestra for a concert.
This is how the letter ends: “Such terribly sad news comes from Holland and Germany. You have probably heard that Bernard Schuster, his wife & Steffi’s son* have been deported, & that nothing is known of them. Today Lotte Levy* writes that her poor mother, who has been a frail invalid for years, has been deported from Germany (that probably means gassed or shot!). Edith Rosenzweig’s mother has met a similar fate. Lotte’s sister & brother-in-law have recently ‘died’ in concentration camp.”
Bernard does not receive this letter until the end of December. There is no comment on the horrifying news. What could he possibly say? Instead, on December 24, he tries to imagine being at home: “Christmas Eve & my thoughts are with you all at Kintbury where great preparations must be in progress. I can picture the decorations round the walls probably left to John’s tender care again, trays to prepare, stockings to fill, last minute cards to be despatched & all the rest of the paraphernalia associated with this annual festivity. How I would like to mount my Grane & appear among you as a surprise in time for that very early morning call of the children on Christmas day.”
The only eccentric detail in this sentimental Christmas card imagery is the mention of Grane, the horse ridden by Brünnhilde into the flames in Wagner’s Twili
ght of the Gods. But for Bernard, this was not peculiar at all; Wagner’s Ring was as close to his Jewish heart as Christmas Eve, perhaps even more so. Both Bernard and Win were keen to distance themselves from their German family origins. But music was different—when the Bayreuth Festival, so deeply tainted not only by Wagner’s own anti-Semitism but by Hitler’s frequent attendance, was resumed in the early 1950s, the entire Schlesinger family traveled there to celebrate the rebirth of Wagner’s Teutonic shrine.
While having a German background had been a clear liability in World War I, being Jewish was obviously a more sensitive issue in World War II. It made Bernard and Win more ferociously anti-German. But it also complicated the ways in which they saw, or chose to declare, their place in the world. Bernard’s attitude was best summed up in a letter sent from Northern Ireland on September 7, 1941: “Acting on the principle that one should let people get to know you first & then, if you get on with them, to do one’s racial apostolic act, I enlightened the Martins the other night and early morning during a long and earnest conversation over a protracted cup of tea.”
And yet their sense of solidarity with other Jews did not entirely dispel certain prejudices they had absorbed from the world they had chosen to live in. Win wrote on October 13, 1941, that “personally” she was “happy & equally at home in the company of any human being, be he duke or railway porter.” This was true up to a point. It was perhaps even truer of Bernard, but when it came to Jews, they had their own ideas on how people ought to behave. Or put it this way: they were easily embarrassed by Jews, perhaps in the way upper-middle-class people are often pained to see their less refined compatriots disporting themselves in tourist spots.
In August 1943, Win takes a train back to Kintbury from a family holiday in Wales. After a change of trains at Birmingham, she writes on September 1 that they shared a compartment “with a very Jewish-looking gentleman & his wife. He was a barrister who knew Walter quite well. He was rather typical of his race, with the oriental disdain of women’s intellect. He offered Roger his newspaper—being the only man in the carriage besides himself, as he put it, and he addressed all his more intelligent conversation to Roger, reserving poor jokes for the mere females.”
I am sure he was insufferable, but “rather typical of his race” is a strange thing to say, especially at a time of murderous persecution. Win’s remark dropped in a letter on October 4 is even more revealing. Vera Baer, one of the hostel children, had sent Win a letter, “enclosing a charming little photograph of herself. She has grown into a very pretty young girl, without a trace of 45 or German.” Without a trace of 45? This was more than Win could say of herself, or indeed any of her kin. More than once, she frets about my mother Wendy’s perfectly respectable Jewish nose. A minimum of 45, combined with a thorough “de-Germanization,” was clearly essential to gain her approval.
Bernard comes across some “45s” in India too. At the military club in Agra, in September 1943, he dines with the Holmans, “forty-five, he with Australian antecedents & she with I should think Polish or Russian.” Dr. Holman did rather well in the Burma campaign and “got a mention for it.” Bernard certainly approves of this. Holman, he writes, is “a good type of 45,” a “Maccabean” even. Besides these martial qualities, he “is a man of ambition & ideas rather typical of his race.” That expression again. I’m not quite sure what he means, but I have a suspicion it is not wholly positive.
Reading on, in the correspondence of 1944, the question of Dr. Holman’s ideas becomes, like Alice’s experiences in Wonderland, “curiouser and curiouser.” Holman, Bernard writes on August 10, 1944, “is a small man with big ideas for future generations and seriously wants his wife to have a selected child via the Eugenic Society.” This from a Jew at the time of the Shoah! Bernard: “I think he is mad & she likewise for even attempting to agree.”
Indeed, but eugenics, typical of the Jewish race?
A year later, on December 12, 1944, Bernard writes about dining in the company of Indian medical officers and one specialist “who is a pleasant & knowledgeable German refugee, now a captain in the RAMC by the name of Habisch—shades of the Ring. He is one of the best types, quiet and a credit to his race, inspiring confidence in these rather ultra English military men whose regiments he has to doctor.”
Quiet, not too openly Jewish, with military backbone, able to reassure the ultra-Englishmen—these were the cardinal virtues. And Bernard, though loud of voice (but not of manner), and not at all without ambition for himself or his family, including his grandchildren, certainly managed to live up to the second requirement. He was a Maccabean to the core.
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After more than a year of living apart on different continents, certain worries started to creep into the correspondence, despite the constant expressions of their deepest devotion to one another. Win was still in her midforties, but she was concerned about getting old while Bernard was “gallivanting” or “swanning” about, as she put it more than once. Would she still be attractive to him when they were finally reunited? Or would their vastly different experiences make them drift apart?
In a letter from Mount Pleasant on October 25, 1942, Win reminds him of the “hayricks, all neatly thatched,” of “the fields glowing from an extra rich green from the moisture,” of “the hedges full of berries,” of “the hips and haws, & shiny black privet and dogwood—And there is your Berkshire for you!” Inside the same envelope was a photograph of her, taken by Laura. She is standing in the garden, smiling, a shovel in her left hand, a dog at her feet. “Not very beautiful,” she writes, “but I’m afraid it’s what I look like now.” She has let her hair grow “as being more becoming to a rapidly ageing matron.” Darling, she continues, “when you take me in your arms again for the first time, I feel that I should then perhaps rejuvenate a little again, from the feeling of your warm love. Now I always feel half starved, and that is a bad & unbecoming condition.”
Win at Mount Pleasant
A month before this, on September 23, things looked even grimmer; a rare note of recrimination darkens her prose, as though her feeling of abandonment were Bernard’s fault: “I find it hard to write now, as there is no response from you at all, & I feel you have lost interest in us here, & we have begun to lose touch already . . . I feel terribly alone in the world now; there is plenty of work and responsibility, but seldom a change or a gay moment . . . You managed to write daily to your parents in the last war because they demanded it from you; I demand nothing, but my request is much more modest than that, & I think even more important.”
She had to wait at least three months for an answer, even though a few airgraphs would have got through in the meantime. He received her letter only on December 2 and writes back the next day, from Delhi: “I can understand your sense of desolation & apprehension at our apparent endless separation & the prospect of your having to deal with your ever increasing domestic and family problems unaided. Added to that you feared I was forgetting you . . . You must never let such a thought ever worry you again. You & your life & our home & our family are constantly on my mind.”
Bernard feels guilty about his “relatively comfortable existence” compared to her “very largely drab life.” He thinks it is “all wrong.” He “should be stuck somewhere in the desert in the middle of things and then our respective jobs and enforced separated mode of existence would again be in the right perspective.”
Instead, he is often stuck in Delhi or Agra, dealing with the administration and inspection of Indian and British military hospitals, playing squash, dining at the club, riding in the early mornings, attending dances, acting as father confessor to the unhappy wives of military and medical colleagues. Here in front of me are the photographs of his children holding their various musical instruments, in leather frames stuck together like a concertina that could be unfolded and proudly displayed on the mantelpiece of his office. Bernard would later describe them as “the straight and narrow,�
� supposed to keep him from the natural temptations that would afflict any man condemned to be on his own, or indeed any small community of bored expatriates stranded far from home.
There is no evidence that Bernard ever strayed from the straight and narrow himself. To describe his enforced bachelor life, he fell back on his usual metaphors drawn from literature and Wagner’s operas. Rudyard Kipling had always been one of his favorite authors. My own potential enjoyment of Kipling was hampered for life ever since Bernard insisted on reading his stories to me when I was too young to appreciate them. Even The Jungle Book failed to pique my interest when I was five or six. In the summer of 1943, Bernard had decided to reread Kim “in the light of what I’ve seen now in this country,” as well as Plain Tales from the Hills, featuring, among other memorable characters, Mrs. Hauksbee, who chewed on her riding whip when she was thinking.
On June 13, 1943, from the Akbar Barracks in Agra, Bernard writes, “Here I should judge that general morals have changed little since the days of Mrs. Hawksby [sic]. I never cease to wonder & shudder a little at the entanglements matrimonial and otherwise that go on out here—a bad place for a Parsifalian lad like myself, but have no fear—no Kundrys for me—just my own beloved Win to look up to. I am glad I love you so much—it makes life so very much easier.”
Kundry was the wild and tormented woman of mystery sent to seduce the pure naïve Parsifal and divert him from redeeming the knights of the holy grail. The notion of Bernard as the pure Parsifal saving the grail from which Christ sipped at the Last Supper is interesting. At the same time, it would have astonished him to hear that Kundry, according to some commentators, was an anti-Semitic caricature of the Jewish seductress. Bernard’s Wagnerian imagination was a bit like his (and Win’s) English patriotism: they chose to see what they saw, and ignored the disturbing bits.