Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  “What a pity the little Springer girl looks so Jewish,” Mitzi heard one army officer say to another. At eighteen, she married.

  Marrying Mitzi, Eugène Fould (1876–1929) insisted on retaining French nationality but placated Gustav by hyphenating the family surnames.

  Frank Wooster was the illegitimate son of the industrialist Sir Frank Leyland, and the friend Eugène came to regret.

  Born and brought up in Meidling, Poppy stood out for her unusual background, singular prettiness and unaccountable moods.

  Alan and Poppy became engaged in September 1934 at Traunkirchen, a village on a lake in the Tyrol, and married that December.

  Colonel Harry Pryce-Jones ended his military career as Harbinger of the Gentlemen at Arms. He and Granny Vere lived in one of the Grace-and-Favour houses at Windsor Castle.

  Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones’s Royal Welsh Warehouse in Newtown, Montgomery, had 6,000 employees and sold goods by mail order all over the world.

  Alan was at some pains to show the world the face of a dedicated man of letters.

  At Royaumont in the summer of 1960.

  FAR LEFT: Philip Propper; FAR RIGHT: Elly, married to Raymond Bonham-Carter (standing behind her); next to him Elie de Rothschild and then Lily.

  Permission was not forthcoming to dismantle the house or pack up possessions to be sent abroad. The Nazis had wasted no time passing the decrees that enabled them eventually to steal everything owned by Jews. Alan managed to slip into his luggage a very small picture by Rudolf von Alt of the Belvedere, the magnificent palace built by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt for Prince Eugène of Savoy. More dangerous still, at Brüll’s request he agreed to fly home via Berlin in order to smuggle currency. As he describes it in The Bonus of Laughter, he was to meet a German contact at Tempelhof airport and hand over to him all the cash available in the Springer office. Ostensibly the money was to buy Mercedes-Benz patents. What with his anxiety, the size of the package and the flimsiness of its brown paper wrapping, Alan was fortunate to pass undetected. Nothing was ever heard of the German stranger, the money or the patents, and it seems probable that this was extortion on the part of the shadowy Lauf.

  These experiences were not going to prevent Alan from doing as he pleased so long as peace lasted. Austria was now excluded, but other countries had comfortable houses, expensive hotels and sights for him and Poppy to enjoy. Fresh from being an observer at military exercises at Tidworth, Harry had a soldier’s perspective that war with Hitler was ultimately inevitable but he wrote some lines of doggerel that celebrate arrangements to spend the summer in France in the place of the absent Alan and Poppy:

  In August nineteen thirty eight

  From the Duke of York’s through the big main gate

  Went Harry and Vere and Adrian

  Off to the sea at Le Touquet.

  From Montreuil, about half an hour away, I had already arrived at Le Touquet with the nannies and my cousins. We were staying in Paris-Plage, part of the resort with all sorts of facilities right on the beach. One family album has a series of photographs of Granny Vere in an ankle-length dress and waving a parasol above her head as she cavorts on the sand like a commedia dell’arte dancer. Writing from Royaumont, Alan informed them of his “rather bleak visit” to Montreuil. “Mitzi not at all well, and in a bad state of nerves, Frank with a sprained foot: panic about money, etc. None of it, luckily, was directed at us; but I had to hold both their hands a lot, and they were getting on one another’s nerves into the bargain.”

  Royaumont was the setting for domestic drama. The Proppers had decided to part. There had been a scene.

  Everybody said exactly what they thought in no measured terms: that Bubbles was this and this and this; and Eduardo that and that and that! The upshot of it all is that he is leaving for Spain apparently in a week – but only to go to the Ministry at Burgos. I don’t suppose he’ll go in the end. Bubbles has announced suddenly that she will go to Burgos too; but my impression is that he has made up his mind not to cope any more. And she has no mind to make up, as you know! Neither of them speak of all this; and though I lunched with both on the only occasion since that scene on which they have met, neither has told me anything about anything, and I had to be manful indeed to break the silence. It may have crossed Eduardo’s mind that the fact of his wife’s religion can only wreck his career after the war is over; and that there is less and less to hope for from anyone’s efforts except his own. I am very sorry for the poor old thing.

  Visiting Pokvár six months after his wedding, he had told his parents that he was contemplating “early retirement into an eccentric Hungarian country life.” On the last day of July 1938 Alan and Poppy drove off to Hungary in a Daimler that Mitzi put at their disposal. For Poppy, Hungary meant time out of life, with villagers who kissed your hand, gypsy music, shoots with lunch served in a tent specially put up for an hour or two in a convenient field. Accompanying the guns, Poppy one day had said, “Ich habe zu viel geschiessen” – that is shit instead of shot – and was surprised to be offered boiled rice at dinner. A postcard home makes a good story of losing the way to Pokvár in the dark without having the language to ask for directions. Standing on the running board, three gypsies eventually escorted them home on a back road across fields and ditches.

  Pokvár is hidden away in a landscape of deep forests, a place of fantasy, the house that a Central European under the influence of Walter Scott might have built. The entrance hall and wooden staircase leading up to a gallery has a baronial feel. The setting and the immemorial way of life captured Alan’s imagination. The prose with which he evokes Pokvár in his diary is so observant and lush that it is possible to miss the sense of regret that all this is too good to last much longer. The park there, he begins, is very shady and green.

  One has to walk warily, because someone is always on the verge of dropping his (or more likely her) hoe and coming to kiss one’s hand; if not, a house servant is creeping along the shrubberies waiting for a chance to carry something. And suddenly the paths debouch into an acacia forest, or a vast open golden prairie, or a great muddy enclosure full of geese, with white glittering cottages, like pieces of sugar and huge white barns all round out of which the peasants stare, with the sightless stare of magnificent respectfulness, or an occasional hand-kissing. The air smells like a spicy exhilarating cupboard. The corn is stacked into broad cathedrals, the colour of no natural thing except golden hair; the whole country drips biblically with fatness. And in a few yards the house is always invisible. But once in sight again, how welcoming! The absurd central block ends in a dazzling stepped pediment, built over a big canopied entrance. The windows have round tops and carved corbels, with stucco eyebrows on the first floor. At one end, there is a round battlemented tower like a sand-mould. All blindingly white.

  Lovingly he picks out the “ugly and delightful things” furnishing the interior of the house. Large double doors led from his room into Poppy’s. The furniture was in an old-fashioned rustic style. On account of the heat, the windows were shuttered all day. “I can see nothing, but the sounds are violent and odd. Carriages drive past … there is a great deal of shouting, punishing, crackling of whips, rattling of heavy axles, clopping of horses, and childish singing, going on all evening.”

  Callers include “the Verwalter [manager] of one place or another who arrives with tuberoses wrapped up in ribbon; the postman who bows and walks out backwards; the forester, the secretary, the Gestutmeister [director of the stud] who expects monetary orders – it contrasts so oddly with my letters, which tell me that if I sent out even £20 of cheques in England they will probably be returned by the bank!” In this idyllic setting for his own writing, he was reading Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune, Georges Bernanos’s recently published polemic that did much to turn public opinion against Franco’s Falange; and on top of it all trying to learn Italian.

  At the Lesvár stud were nine brood mares, three yearlings and a number of foals. Mitzi, they learnt, was putting more ho
rses into training. In front of stable hands shoo’ing the horses through their paces, “We looked as wise as we could.” Driving through Kapuvár on a Sunday, they admired people who had put on national costume for the church service and were now filling the main square, women to one side, men to the other. Out sightseeing, they found the great palace of Esterháza closed except for the stables. “I have never seen any harness rooms of such size and splendour,” Alan enthused. In another part of the building, even more praiseworthy, were “some forty carriages, carrioles, victorias, coupés, landaus, goat-carriages … the 1866 coach lined with yellow watered silk … the cream landau which the Regent uses when he comes.” Esztergom is the seat of the Catholic Church in Hungary, and the 900th anniversary of St Stephen, the country’s founder-king, was being celebrated there. Alan and Poppy stayed to witness the arrival of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent of Hungary with a part to play on the European stage. A huge crowd had assembled, with a guard of honour and a cordon of girls marshaled by nuns. “Officers in magnificent hussar uniforms with moustaches like a child’s harrow, and expressions of the most bellicose order, drove up in taxis. The Cardinal came out by a side door, surrounded by bishops in full fig. At last the Regent, of course in Admiral’s uniform, very spry and contented, drove up to the National Hymn and walked along the lines.”

  This Grand Tour took in Brno and Prague, then Zagreb where they bought “some wonderful clothes from peasants in the market,” and on down the Dalmatian coast to enter Italy at Fiume. Their objective was the Villa San Carlo at Lerici, the isolated spot in the Gulf of Spezia where Shelley had set sail in a storm and drowned. On arrival, they had no less than twelve suitcases to unpack. Kenneth Rae came to stay and Conradine Hobhouse, “with whom we spend our whole days lying on the flat rocks and tumbling about in a warm sea.” Distinguished people to be visited included the artist Aubrey Waterfield in the Fortezza at Aulla. At Lerici were Percy Lubbock and his wife Lady Sybil – he was the author of The Craft of Fiction, a book influenced by his friend Henry James, and she was the mother of Iris Origo by a previous husband. “I liked Lady Sybil very much,” Alan described to Vere an afternoon with the Lubbocks, “and he sent messages to Daddy, on the strength of knowing him at Eton. ‘Very neat-looking, I remember,’ he said.”

  Alan and Poppy had spent a week in the Villa San Carlo when on 15 September Neville Chamberlain undertook his first flight to meet Hitler, and the Munich crisis began. War looked probable and sometimes certain. “Freddy dangerously ill,” ran the telegram Kenneth Rae had received from a friend in London, code that they were to return home at once. They went to ask advice from the British Consul in Spezia, “A mild, flowerless, un-watered bit of a man,” he knew less than they did. Telephoned, Vere told them that war was indeed imminent. The Speech further spelt the end of peace – as if to exorcise Hitler, Alan capitalized key euphemisms for him: “It was pretty frightening to hear the Voice last night in this remote little town, booming over the wireless from the bay, which is full of cafés. Nobody understood a word of course; and nobody seemed to care much.”

  Returning to Royaumont, they found themselves trying on gas-masks in the drawing room. Hitler would surely put the democracies before a fait accompli, “and everyone will say that any humiliation is better than war.” Alan told himself that he would probably not be killed in war, he had already enlisted in the Intelligence Service and “they will probably think I speak better Czech than I do.” There was no war, then, no honour, no peace, “yet we are all passionately relieved.” We would not be selling York Gate and moving to New Mexico for ever, as he had fantasized. “Bubbles is back, in a great state of nerves,” was the latest news there. “Eduardo has left the house for good, and set up at the hotel in Paris – so altogether disharmony reigns unchallenged.”

  “France and England have been worse than useless since 1938,” is one of several combative entries in Mitzi’s diaries. She followed the build-up to war closely, yet changed little or nothing in her way of life. In mid-July 1938 she and Frank stayed with friends, Guido and Pat Accame near Castiglione della Pescaia. Italy, she found, was “hysterical and miserable.” In spite of the talk of war, they decided they would drive through Germany for their usual summer month in Czech resorts. Harlé the chauffeur and Robert the valet were to accompany them. At the frontier on August 12, she says, she flirted with “a very good-looking S.S. officer,” who against orders let her keep her jewels and stamped the box with a swastika. At the pension in Freudenstadt were “three non-Aryans,” and in the evening one of them did not return; the police arrived instead. In Heidelberg a cousin Max Springer, his wife and twin boys had been trying to leave for South America and she had arranged the necessary funding. Their contact in the bank said to Frank, “never believe anything said against our Führer.” Frank’s retort was, “What about these famous camps?” “Not a word of truth.” The bank manager then explained that the money could be handed over only in Switzerland. Caught in any such transaction in Germany, the cousin was certain to disappear.

  The German-Czech frontier was a formality. From Marienbad, they went on to Karlsbad where Pokorny was waiting for them. On the 22nd Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten German leader and agitator, arrived “amid great shouting of Sieg Heil and arms stretched out in welcome. All the local people are, pockets, hearts and souls, pro-German.” The time for Hungary seems to be coming, she noted. After a stopover in Prague, Mitzi and Frank went on to Brno. There in the course of dinner with Melczinsky, the agent from Bucşani, they listened to Hitler’s speech. “One could not call it speaking, it was yelling, so much so that the windows rattled … no one seemed interested in the least.” Max was shooting at Pokvár; she booked tickets for his immediate return to Paris, but he paid no attention. In spite of apprehensions, they were already in Hungary when news came through on September 14 that Chamberlain was to fly to see Hitler. “It is glorious to be English!” Hungarians, she wrote quite unselfconsciously, “all are radiant when they see an Englishwoman in a Rolls, talking Hungarian.”

  Every September brought them to Venice, and a world crisis was not about to interfere with Mitzi’s schedule. “Felt a lump in my throat saying goodbye to Pokorny,” was a rare concession of hers to reality. “What I want to know so badly is: are we going to be Hungarian or Slovaks.” Pokorny was left to deal with this question upon which a large portion of her fortune depended. “Accord at Munich! Peace! It all seems too wonderful after having been too awful. Even if Hitler has had it all his own way what does it matter, compared to the end of our world.” Through ill will, as her prejudice would have it, Edvard Beneš and the Czechs had brought this disaster on themselves.

  Most of the French, she wrote regretfully, felt ashamed at abandoning Czechoslovakia. Back in Paris, she lunched at Maxim’s with Paul Goldschmidt and agreed with his view that it was mostly Jews who deplored Munich. Every passing week brought news that raised her Jewish anxiety. After Christmas at Royaumont, she and Frank retreated to Montreuil for the New Year 1939. There, on 31 January, she listened on the radio to Hitler’s speech that evening in the Reichstag. This was his most overt challenge to the world, and in particular to Jews, foreshadowing the Holocaust. “What hate of the Jews,” Mitzi wrote, “but very true much of what he says. He wants Germany for the Germans, and if the Jews are as wonderful as the other nations say they are, how very queer the other nations are not delighted to take them in, but on the contrary do not let them in. He says that war is wanted by Jews alone and predicts it would be their end. That last part is also true. I think anti-Semitism can be seen growing in every country.”

  She had heard how wretched life in Vienna was from Clarice, wife of Alphonse Rothschild whose brother Louis had been in the hands of the Vienna Gestapo since the Anschluss. The Gestapo now made a move against Mitzi. “The Waisenhaus in Vienna has been taken. We get nothing for the house or for all that is in it, nothing for the ground it stands on! And so the robbing goes on. As the house etc belonged to a Jewish charity and was no
t in our name we can do nothing.” (Early in 1939 the Gestapo closed the Waisenhaus, and most of the boys were murdered in Auschwitz. One survivor has been traced to an old peoples’ home in Haifa. That April, the Stillhaltekommissar set up by the Nazis to control all institutions took over the orphanage and transferred it to the IKG, the German acronym for the Jewish Community Organisation which had to do as it was ordered. The building was immediately valued at 300,000 Reichsmarks. On 14 April the orphanage became a hospital for the elderly. The IKG was obliged to submit to the Gestapo lists of all the Jews in Vienna. In 1942, the list for the former orphanage shows 138 women and two men. They were all deported to Auschwitz, 44 of them on Transport 29. The director Dr Ludwig Margulies was deported to Theresienstadt where he died. Compelled to accept about half the recent Gestapo valuation, the IKG in September sold the empty building to the city of Vienna for 155,700 Reichsmarks. Expert profiteers from mass-murder, the Viennese authorities after the war haggled over restitution to the IKG, making sure to keep possession of the orphanage, knocking it down and building profitable condominiums in the grounds where it had stood. Asked to pay Frau Margulies a pension out of the money received from the developed Waisenhaus property, the authorities decided that they had no contractual obligation and refused.)

  On the face of it, Alan’s prewar travels might well have been on behalf of the Intelligence Service. Questioned, he was always vague. If he was going on Mitzi’s business, she said that she had begged him not to go to Vienna for fear of what the Austrians might do to him. On 7 March 1939 he was in Berlin, giving dinner to Pokorny and Dr Pietsch, a lawyer who may or may not have had something to do with Geutebruch. Next day Prague, with a Teplà board meeting: “a ridiculous scene, the English poet among Central European businessmen, declining enormous cigars, and lolling in a deep leather chair.” “Juden raus” was chalked on walls everywhere, and there was a dreadful air of expectancy. Alan is no fool, Mitzi wrote, yet Prague gave him the impression that the Czechs were more anti-German than ever. “Under Hitler all goes so shockingly that what is true one minute is an old story the next.” In fact when he went to dine at Meidling the main change was that the house was now unheated. Giving him tea, Tante Bébé, the last family member still in Vienna, was in floods of tears. An atmosphere of complaint was everywhere: “It was like watching the thunder roll round an empty desolate plain.”