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  The mail service to and from Tangier was normal. From the Minzah, Eduardo wrote to Alan that Jessie had lost a lot of kilos but “is still capable of slapping you or me if we have the bad luck of displeasing our ladies. She was magnificent on the journey when she did everything for the children and Nannie.” David, he says, is “exactly my third child,” and he wonders what Elly will make of it when we have to part. The costs at the Minzah are 1,100 Moroccan francs, and could Alan ask Lord Bute, the owner of the hotel, for a reduction. Then there’s the rent. Eduardo has paid June and July at £16 each, and now Alan should pay August, September and part of October. Would he also please remit to the Bank of British West Africa, 37 Gracechurch Street, expenses of £32 for my journey.

  Now rented by Eduardo, the Villa Ritchie took its name from Anne and Richmond Ritchie who built it. A Victorian literary lady, Anne was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. Their one-time house is on the Marshan, a hill overlooking the town below and with Gibraltar a visible smudge on the far side of the Straits. Two squat pillars enclose the entrance, and a short drive curls up towards the house. Opposite the front door is a wall with a tiled bench built against it. “There’s plenty of room to move about, six bedrooms and three servants’ rooms,” Jessie is quick to tell Poppy, “only one bath and just jugs and basins but that can’t be helped.”

  In my mind, the Moroccan sky is a permanent Prussian blue. Under a copper-bright sun, we go down to the beach. In the garden Muhammad Driss enjoys showing me the lilies and orchids he is growing. The house is cool. Eating at last, we are “like full fed ponies” in Jessie’s expression. Philip goes to the lycée, and a tutor by the name of Isaac Abekassis comes to the house. I play football with boys my age on an open space of the Marshan. These boys have djellabas that flap around their ankles when they run, and heads closely shaved except for a tuft in the middle of the scalp. This, I hear, is for Allah to lift them up to him if he must. After every game, Jessie suspects I will have caught nits, ticks, even lice, and inspects my head minutely. Wearing baboush that are pointed and flat-heeled, neither shoes nor slippers, in goatskin dyed a shiny yellow, I imagine myself properly Moroccan.

  Next door, out of sight behind a high wall is a large forbidden mansion. The owner is a great Berber chieftain, the Glaoui, and if he’s in residence weird music will shatter the silence. Sitting against one of our pillars is the fiqh, an elderly unkempt witch doctor, the soles of her feet dyed orange with henna. She has bangles up her arms. The little footballers stand around while she works her spells, burning feathers and mumbling to herself. Suddenly frightened by a curse, we all run away. One day we are driving through the Petit Socco when an Arab spits at the car, and saliva dribbles down my window. Everyone pretends not to notice. At dawn, Bubbles and Eduardo get me out of bed, and from a seat in the garden we watch British warships passing through the Straits. Dark grey shapes are silhouetted against a light grey background. You’ll never forget it, the grown-ups impress on me.

  In a hectic exchange of telegrams, Bubbles argues that it is better, safer, for me to stay where I am. Poppy presses that we be reunited, though she back-pedals too: “Very worried nothing organized from here, we always insisted David should leave only if the remainder of the journey was fixed and we beg to have instructions about what to do.” “Papers are getting filled up, photos stuck on,” Jessie tells her, “I don’t altogether relish the idea of a long air trip, but if you can you must, and if you must, you can.” Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the Consul in Tangier, and John Mallet, in the Lisbon embassy, were informed. On 3 September Poppy was in a fret, “Have cabled money and tickets Schreiber. Please wire David’s address in Lisbon.” Two days later, “So relieved, no news from Schreiber but everything well organized now, thanks and forgive panic.”

  Years later, I met Mrs Schreiber and was able to thank her for putting up Jessie and me in Lisbon. She was the wife of the air attaché and mother of Mark, afterwards editor of The Economist. Somewhere in Lisbon a toyshop had laid out a battlefield with lead soldiers, guns and tanks and electric lights flashing like explosions. I spent my days spellbound by these war games until Mrs Schreiber saw us off on the plane to Bristol – in 1943 the Germans shot down the flight and the actor Leslie Howard was among those killed. In one hand I gripped my little suitcase and in the other a bunch of bananas, which Jessie warned would be the last I’d see. Not until 1968 did I return to Morocco, this time accompanied by Clarissa. Isaac Abekassis, the former tutor, was almost too frightened to meet us. For him, the stabbing in the street of the rabbi of Tangier was the start of a pogrom and he couldn’t wait to take up a position he’d been offered in the University of Strasbourg. At the Villa Ritchie, I could show Clarissa the pillar where the fiqh had squatted to work her magic. Trespassers, we walked up the drive. Approaching, the gardener came to shoo us out. From some way off, Muhammad Driss recognized me, came running and we were both weeping as we embraced.

  On 10 September 1941, I met my parents again. With painful self-awareness heightened by literary skill, Alan wrote up the moment.

  I showed the constable my war office pass and he agreed to let me on to the aerodrome. “But who,” he asked, “is this young lady? Is she your daughter?” Poppy was wearing her W.V. S. [Women’s Voluntary Service] uniform and looked, in fact, about twelve, which made it all the stranger that we should really be going to pick up David, after so many false starts. We waited for an hour in a cautious waiting-room; modern and antiseptic; built to face the wrong way (for security); built for tea and the Sketch as a balance to nerves. Chintz and sycamore. When I’m waiting for something anxiously I can’t talk. I want to be part of the furniture, a bracket for a newspaper. “Talk to me,” Poppy kept saying, and I couldn’t. People rushed in and out, slamming the door. We stood on the grass verge outside the open window, while an engine in the shops made an unbearable noise. At last someone said, “Here comes the little boy,” and David ran round the corner, just as when I last saw him asleep at Montreuil on New Year’s Eve 1939, only a little larger and speaking with a French accent. He buried his head in our arms, not so much shy as recollecting his courage; then took me off, as if nothing had happened, to look at an aeroplane. We came back to London … [sic] and when I think of Bristol, it is I who am shy, who concentrates on the Clifton terraces and the chapter-house – almost, it oddly seems, from laziness. Do other people spend as much of their time avoiding emotions? I live in them so vigorously that they become an imposition, and a kind of wooden silence my refuge. Now, having David, my self-preservation instinct is to read the paper, in order to avoid the wonder of having him in the room, of enjoying him.

  In a crowded carriage of the train to London I sat next to Jessie and wondered what this man and woman opposite had to do with me, and why we weren’t speaking. They wouldn’t know about my yellow baboush and the little pigskin suitcase that had come the whole way with me. Bananas were unobtainable in the war and I was conscious that everyone setting eyes on the bunch I was carrying threw me a special look.

  The Pretender to the French throne, the Comte de Paris, was living with his family at Larache and saw a lot of Eduardo and Bubbles. In a murky incident in Algeria, a young Royalist, Bonnier de la Chapelle, murdered the collaborator Admiral Darlan, was caught and executed. Eduardo was in touch with influential Americans, for instance the diplomat Robert Murphy and Kenneth Pendar, the agent charged with keeping the Moroccan elite from going over to Hitler. Demarçay, the French Consul in Tangier, was a Gaullist, and when the battleship Repulse sailed from Gibraltar only to be sunk in the Far East, he had rolled in despair on the drawing-room floor of the Villa Ritchie. Our family doctors were Lucia and Federico Bedarida, Italian Jews who had fled Mussolini. (My daughter Candida married Owen Mostyn-Owen, whose maternal grandmother was the sister of Lucia. After the 1973 war, Lucia, a widow by then, had to flee again and so we met up after half a century in a chain of events a novelist would not dare invent.)

  I had already left by the time
Lily and Max arrived and settled in with their sister and brother-in-law. They had been exposed a great deal more than most people to the reality and consequences of Nazism. Yet in 1942 they chose to return to the Villa Les Oeillets. In reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa on 8 November 1942, the Germans occupied Vichy France. Caught in a trap, more tens of thousands of Jews were then deported. In all probability, their Austrian background would have sealed the fate of Lily and Max. At the very last minute, Eduardo cabled false papers to be collected at the PLM hotel in Marseilles. A faithful family chauffeur, François Boyer, drove them from Cannes. Typical of Lily, she noted he was “very bon genre” (turned out like a gentleman), with his bowler hat and a magnificent pair of gloves, one finger filled with gold coins. German soldiers were already at the station. Max knew a passageway into the hotel. The concierge handed them the papers, they returned to the station and boarded the train. In a third-class compartment they found Iya, the Russian-born wife of Sir Robert Abdy, a rich English dilettante, also leaving for Spain. Hours passed before the train finally started; there was nothing to eat; they spent the night in a grim hotel at Cerbère, the frontier town. But they were out once more.

  To the end of their lives, they were unable to put into words that they had been dicing with death. They believed people like them were essentially immune to persecution and murder. Bad things were what happened to the poor, to Jews unable to call on lawyers and bankers. They couldn’t imagine that the Germans and a good many French made no such distinctions about Jews and were determined to kill off the lot. The belief that their primary identity was French had put their lives at risk for no purpose. After Max and Lily had returned safely to Tangier, Poppy’s letter to them on 4 December 1942 began, “It’s too wonderful and moving to know that at last you are all re-united, although waiting to have details is making us ill.” In a separate letter with a Bletchley postmark and the censor’s tape on the envelope as usual, Alan said that he had been following their emotions and anxieties closely, and “after all you have been through, words fail.” Bubbles took a vow that if we all survived the war she would convert to Catholicism – and so she did.

  FOURTEEN

  War in Kent

  NOW THAT YORK GATE had been destroyed, we had to find somewhere to live. Rockley Manor is a handsome eighteenth-century house at the foot of the Wiltshire Downs. Mary Loder and her mother, Lady Wakehurst, were living there. Strongly built and rather plain, Mary Loder shared her life with a graphic designer, Mildred Farrer, also rather plain but mousy. In my bedroom I read for the first time a book in English and ran downstairs to the library to test out whether this new trick would allow me to read that day’s Times.

  Alan was working in the War Office and found a flat within walking distance in Athenaeum Court, a modern block in Piccadilly. We moved. At night, the air raid siren was so loud that it seemed indoors. We put clothes on and gathered in one room. Poppy refused to go into the shelter, saying that it was better to be killed outright than trapped and buried alive. She would open all the windows as a precaution against blast, and we would sit waiting. At last the searchlights began to probe the night sky, and we could see each other silhouetted in grainy intermittent flashes as memorable as the ghostly half-light under a mosquito net in Tangier. As the raid got under way, the beams of the searchlights criss-crossed high overhead in the form of letters, a v or an x or a w. This much steadier illumination gave Jessie’s white hair the look of a turban.

  I cannot be sure exactly how long Harold Acton stayed in the flat. Much too well-mannered to do anything that might offend his host and hostess, he too would sit by the open window. Bald and sinuous in his movements, Harold had spent so long in Peking that he had come almost to impersonate a Confucian sage. To pass the time, he taught us Chinese, and we would have to repeat delicate sounds against the uproar outside. The searchlights sometimes pinpointed a bomber, though cloud or smoke might quickly obscure it again. Anti-aircraft guns or bombs falling close shook the building. Never perturbed, Harold kept up the exaggerated tones that were such a distinctive feature of his personality. Later in life, I would greet him with a Chinese phrase from our bombardment tutorials and he might do a reprise of one of the Chinese songs he had sung for us.

  Poppy and Alan lost no time getting out of Athenaeum Court and into Castle Hill Farm. “This pretty new mousetrap of Pigling,” Poppy described it in a letter to Alan. “I feel that wherever and whatever happens we can and will be happy and this house has already got a stimmung of gemütlichkeit [a cosy atmosphere]. I thank God for being so very kind to us: our Baba back and a new house is, I suppose, a unique cause of happiness in this horrible year.”

  The house and farm belonged to the Somerhill estate, one of the largest in Kent, consisting of the huge and historic Jacobean mansion and some thousands of acres midway between Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. Somerhill belonged to Sir Henry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, otherwise Harry, baronet, member of Parliament, bullion broker, master of foxhounds, high sheriff, at that time a soldier commanding his regiment, and at all times one of the most eminent Jews in the country and one of the most generous of men. Harry had friends who were aesthetes like Alan, and Alan had friends who were influential like Harry. Large and slightly ungainly, he had an occasional impediment in his speech, especially when he was amused. Somerhill was a sort of architectural complement to his character, with varied rooms of all sizes, an immense entrance hall, a ground floor library that ran from the front of the house to the back, the cosy Justice Room, a dining room seating twenty-four, a courtyard and whole wings with stable and garages to explore. I was to see Harry brought home from Normandy, badly wounded and almost mummified with bandages. To me, he was one of the men who won the war. “Pas mal,” Poppy wrote to Aline de Gunzbourg then in New York when Harry received the M.C. to add to his D.S.O.

  On a Sunday, Jessie would take me to tea at Somerhill. The park had a private nine-hole golf course, a herd of Jerseys and a prisoner of war camp, the huts symmetrical behind barbed wire. We’d walk past one of the lodges, where the drive was closed off by an iron chain on which swung a board with the prohibition, “È vietato ingresso.” The Italian prisoners in fact seemed to go where they liked, singing as they marched down the road and worked in the fields. One of them gave Poppy a ring he had made out of a sardine tin.

  In Harry’s absence, Somerhill was in the hands of Rosie, his wife. She had the stylised beautician’s looks that society ladies copied from film stars of the period: white face, red pursed lips, hair with a permanent curl. There was no holding her back; she did as she pleased. During the battle of Britain, she had lain out of doors on a rug watching through field glasses the dog-fights overhead. The butler brought out martinis. Almost to the end of her life Rosie would tease me because she had first known me speaking with a French accent.

  It was possible to be lost up the stairs and along the corridors on the way to the nursery. Sarah and Chloe were a few years younger than me, and their nanny was no match for Jessie. When she was not being observed, and as though we were still at the Villa Les Oeillets, Jessie took a bottle out of her bag and filled it with milk from the Jerseys in the park. If Goldsmid can have it, she’d say, why can’t my boy? Besides, they don’t miss it.

  Castle Hill was cheerful and unpretentious, white clapboard at the front, brick at the back. You came out of the porch on to an uneven path across scrawny grass within a picket fence. Ground elder had invaded the flowerbeds, and grubbing out its spaghetti-like roots pre-occupied Poppy. On the other side of the fence a duck-pond glistened with greenish scum. The oast house was full of mysterious sacks that were never shifted, and in the cowsheds Mr Carter, the nearest neighbour, milked the herd and churned butter of a yellow so deep it was almost orange. The name of his bull was William III, which I misread as William ill.

  To the right of the porch was an extension. Alan’s Bechstein stood in the room downstairs, and on the floor above Jessie and I shared a bedroom. More lawn reached towards t
he wall of a granary, and beyond in an open field was the cottage of Mr and Mrs Brown and their tomboy daughter. At the top of the hill beyond the Browns’ cottage lived Mr Hickmott, a quiet and respectable man of a certain age who had some business to do with the nearby timber yard. His daughter Frieda, quiet and respectable and spinsterish, walked down the road every morning to help Jessie in the house.

  On the sixth step of the narrow stairs (and never any other) Nikki the Maltese terrier lay like a ball of fluffy wool. Floors were uneven, latches didn’t close properly, the bathroom had to be shared but there was an outdoor privy as well. A dusty semi-secret backstairs led from my parents’ bedroom down to the kitchen. What looked like a cupboard door opened on to stairs up to a tiny bedroom in the attic, also dusty. Rescued from York Gate, grand French furniture originally from Royaumont looked incongruous in this setting. Surfaces were crammed with bric-a-brac, a Russian silver cigarette case, vases, odds and ends of porcelain, little boxes in gilt and semi-precious stones, ornaments and trinkets, bibelots, statuettes, framed photographs, keepsakes, the fruit of innumerable hours spent in junkshops. On Poppy’s bedside table was a tiny pig in gold, an even smaller gold mouse, a scaled-down gold basket holding jewelled flowers. In his dressing room Alan had a collection of figurines including soldiers in silver about an inch high, and a tiny silver coach and horses. Within the turbulent real world outside was a miniaturised make-believe world of their own. The window there was too wide for black-out material, so Alan commissioned Martin Battersby to paint on a board of the right size a romanticised picture of Traunkirchen where he and Poppy had become engaged. One of my jobs was to fit the board in place at nightfall.

  I was expected to bicycle with my mother to Tonbridge for the groceries. It was downhill all the way, but we’d push our bicycles and full saddle-bags uphill in a race to see who was first to pass the Somerhill lodge with the Vietato Ingresso sign. Sometimes we’d come home to find the postman had delivered a letter or a parcel from Mitzi in Montreal. For days at a time, these might remain on a table in the entrance. She missed her family, she’d say, but didn’t want to know what a wonderful time her mother and Frank were having with no idea how we were living. In the parcels were clothes and shoes destined for me but too large even for Mr Carter, or tins of food and glass jars of cooking fat that stood untouched on shelves in the pantry.