Another major internment camp was at Huyton outside Liverpool, where an unfinished housing estate had been turned into dispiriting billets with no furniture or bedding and nothing but straw sacks to sleep on. It was here that Otto eventually arrived, not as a detainee but as a member of the Pioneer Corps, sent there for three months' basic training.
The opportunity to join the British Army by way of the Pioneer Corps was offered generally to young refugees after August 1940, and taken up by some 2,000, who saw it as a chance to join the war against the Nazis though not, strictly speaking, to fight, since the Pioneer Corps was non-combatant, being effectively the labour force for the Royal Engineers. By this point in late 1940 there was a steady trickle of releases from internment which accelerated until by the middle of 1941 most had been allowed to leave the camps, and some of those sent overseas were permitted to return.
The foreigners in the Pioneer Corps were kept together, segregated from the native recruits, men considered for various reasons unsuitable for active army service. Most of the foreign element would have far outstripped them in capability, to put it baldly. Otto Kun helped to build an ordnance depot near Bicester, in Oxfordshire: he was a navvy on a building site.
Not for long. By 1943 the chance was offered to volunteer for a fighting regiment and thus Otto crossed the Channel in the second wave of the D-Day landings, driving a truck and then a tank in the 7th Armoured Division. He ceased to be Otto Kun and became Douglas Kane. The War Office recommended to Jewish refugees in the army that they should change their names in case they were taken prisoner. The form of Otto's reincarnation seems to have been owed half to my aunt, who suggested a list of names beginning with K, and half to his own admiration for Melvyn Douglas, a popular Hollywood film star of the day.
Otto / Douglas advanced with the British forces through Belgium and into Germany to Hamburg, and served with the Intelligence Corps in the immediate post-war period. He then went into civilian life and a career in the motor industry, eventually establishing his own extremely successful business.
Otto was one of the millions of young Europeans whose lives were entirely directed by the fact of the Third Reich. History had him by the scruff of the neck. Fifty thousand refugees from the Reich (10,000 of them children) entered Britain between 1933 and 1939, along with another 6,000 from Czechoslovakia. Initially, it was only the relatively prosperous and well-connected who applied for entrance, enabling the British Government to adopt a liberal attitude, but as Nazi persecution intensified the numbers grew. In 1937 several thousand were allowed in, rather defensively described as ‘desirable, industrious, intelligent persons’ – clearly there was already official nervousness about the prospect of popular resentment of a potential influx. Unemployment was high; this country was already overpopulated and did not have a tradition of immigration. In fact, an insurance policy of sorts was already in place in that every refugee admitted had to be able to name a sponsor providing a financial guarantee. This meant in effect that the only successful applicants were those with friends or relatives in Britain, or those selected by the various refugee organizations active during those years. It was not so much a lottery as a system favouring those able to establish some sort of connection.
There was a certain rationale to the early refusal to give financial assistance to refugees. A blanket provision of resources by the host country could simply be an encouragement to the Reich authorities to strip those in flight of all their wealth even more thoroughly than they were already doing. It was in one sense an attempt – if not very successful – to persuade Germany to permit an orderly migration.
Back then, no one would have believed that the final development of Nazi persecution would be annihilation. Britain's pre-war response to the refugee problem may have been tardy and sometimes confused but it does not compare badly with that of other countries: 136,000 went to the United States, but the quota system continued to be strictly applied, even after the Anschluss, with no special relaxation for German and Austrian applicants. Knowing what we now know, the entire exodus seems pitiful in the face of what was to come.
By the summer of 1939 the most compelling kind of refugees were children. Some were already orphaned or homeless. In many more cases, desperate Jewish parents were trying to get their families to safety even if they themselves would be unable to go with them. The Movement for the Care of Children from Germany was formed in November 1938, a response to Kristallnacht. The Kindertransport began soon after, the first consignment of 320 arriving at Harwich on 2 December. Where possible, children were sponsored by relatives or friends; the majority were guaranteed by the organization itself or locally established committees.
There are many testimonies to this bleak experience. The successive waves of children were held in reception centres initially until more permanent arrangements could be made – bewildered, frightened, separated from their parents. Karen Gershon's synthesis of recollections, We Came as Children, is starkly revealing: to read it is to hear dozens of individual voices, creating a tapestry of misery, fortitude, outrage and adaptability. For what shines out is the individuality of each response. All that these children had in common was the refugee experience itself; each dealt with it in their own way. A few were crushed by it, warped for the rest of their lives. Others absorbed their plight, coped, and reinvented themselves. Each and every one, though, must have known that they were now a special order of person: ‘I am still a refugee because my roots are where I am not.’
Anyone who is a parent thinks too of those who watched their children go:
From behind the sealed windows I saw my parents again, rigid and unsmiling like two statues, for the last time ever. I was sixteen years old.
I remember the station and everyone was crying and I did not know why. I was seven years old.
… the last I ever saw of her was in the Berlin street, outside the friends' house, walking backward along the pavement to get a last look at me, until she rounded the corner and we were parted.
There were five of us – the youngest was not yet two and I was fourteen. We had relations in England and my mother travelled back and forth, rather like a mother-cat transferring her kittens, and parked us wherever she could.
Childhood is itself a continuous process of adaptation and expedient reaction. Given that, the child refugee has a certain advantage over the adult: they retain the capacity to confront extraordinary circumstances with a degree of inborn resilience. Through all the homesickness and wretchedness this stoicism of childhood is apparent in many of the survivors' accounts. Above all, it shows in the ready absorption of a new language. A few of the children clung doggedly and defiantly to German:
I consciously kept my mother-tongue, with the result that I never completely lost my accent in English.
But most moved with ease into another language:
I had forgotten all German by the time I was twelve.
I had to re-learn much of my German when I got a job as translator – my vocabulary was that of a child of eleven.
My German isn't very good… The only thing I still do is I count in German.
Sometimes, there is a glimpse into the tragic dislocation of family life effected by the cultural shift:
During the war my granny spent some time with us but it made me unhappy – I had completely dropped German and couldn't converse with her. I could understand every word but was too stubborn and self-conscious to speak it.
When I found after the war that my mother was alive and I started writing to her, I could hardly remember any German and we just wrote to each other now and again.
The refugee and the immigrant are not one and the same, but the situations merge, and provide one of the great human themes of the twentieth century – that of those displaced in time and space. It is the most plangent literary material of our times. From those who have written so vitally about exile in childhood there comes this image of an unreachable past, a perfect and inviolate other world suspended forever within
the mind. Eva Hoffman, who went to Canada from her native Poland at the age of fourteen, has called it ‘an elsewhere’, the lost existence that is nevertheless continually present. That seminal record of childhood, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, evokes an experience of patrician family life in pre-revolutionary Russia that is the more potent, and the more defiant, in that the historical events that brought it to an end are barely mentioned. Private life is made to float free of public issues. And that is an accurate reflection of how such things appear to the children concerned; just as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill childhood seems at the time to be directed by irrational and unquestionable adult concerns, so the experience of the child at the mercy of the times remains immediate and personal. It is only much later that the dark forces at work become apparent.
We all of us carry through life a kaleidoscopic vision of childhood – a myriad frozen moments. But for those who have known ‘an elsewhere’ the quality of those moments is different, along with the nature of that other self. I remember an Italian professor of English who told me that he had emigrated with his parents to Italy from Hungary when a small child: ‘Somewhere inside me there is a little Hungarian,’ he said. And at once I saw him as though with an invisible shadow, a mysteriously alien and unquenchable alter ego. When this sense of the shadow presence of other worlds is extended to entire groups and societies the boundaries of time and space seem unreliable. The villages of Bangladesh are shimmering just beyond the pavements of Tower Hamlets, just as once the shtetls of Eastern Europe bustled and chattered in the same few acres of London. I can look around at my fellow passengers on a London bus and fancy that half the globe is compressed into that space: private, inaccessible and indestructible.
If I had to select one great fictional creation of the immigrant experience it would probably be Willa Cather's My Ántonia. Set in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century, it is the great American novel of the pioneering experience, but through its central character and her parents it brilliantly exposes the contrasting possible reactions to immigrant status within one family. The Shimerda family have arrived on the desolate Nebraska prairie from Bohemia, parents and five children, powered by the peasant mother's greed for the promised land. During their first winter of cold, isolation and deprivation, the father commits suicide, desolate for his native Europe and knowing that he can never make peace with this alien place. But he knows too that it is his children – above all his bright bold Antonia – who can sink roots and make a future. Unable to speak more than a few words of English, he presses a book with two alphabets – English and Bohemian – into the hands of a kindly neighbour and beseeches her: ‘Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Ántonia!’ He has seen that language is the key to survival – language and the ability to identify with a new culture. And Ántonia does indeed survive, battling her way through disadvantage to a settled and secure life, mother to a new generation. She is a symbol of the peculiar tenacity and resilience of the European immigrant in America, but she represents too the flexibility and pragmatism of youth as against the cultural rigidity of an older generation. There must be many child immigrants who could identify with Ántonia, rolling up her sleeves to harvest the prairie, robustly negotiating her way into a new society. But retaining always an otherness, that sense of private connection with another time and place.
Flight and dispossession. Set against the eternal stasis of Golsoncott, such traumas seemed entirely incongruous. But a landscape is defined by those who have walked it; a house is given resonance by its inhabitants. When I came to know Golsoncott, the stories of Mary Britnieva and of Otto Kun had become a part of family legend, woven into the complex texture of the place. There was the desk in the study at which Mary had sat while writing her books; when you knew that, the room took on a new significance, packed with event, a silent witness to war and revolution. The curious accord between the two families persisted long into the adult lives of Tsapik and Maria, both of them pitching back at intervals to Golsoncott for periods of rest and solace, heralded by frantic telegrams and phone calls. Just as their mother's experiences had blown a sharp wind of early twentieth-century reality into the calm of Golsoncott, so the children served up occasional reminders of frenetic lifestyles beyond. My grandmother relished this. She had not the slightest desire to live other than the way in which she did, but the occasional whiff of a breezier climate was invigorating.
The room above the stables in which Otto Kun had spent those months of 1940 fell into disuse soon after. For fifty years it was a pigeon roost, taken over by the flock of white fantails introduced by my grandmother, which had fraternized with the local pigeon population and ended up as speckled hybrids. A few years ago I climbed the collapsing staircase, negotiated the layers of guano and found a rusty iron bedstead. The fifteen-year-old Viennese boy must have lain there, thinking in another language, his head full of images far removed from west Somerset, hearing the same peaceable pigeon rumblings that I heard still. Once again, the place had its secret eloquence, if you knew how to listen: the pigeons were overlaid by darker sounds. And Otto himself, as Douglas Kane, remained in contact with the family for the rest of his life.
The Cedar of Lebanon and Erigeron karvinskianus
Landscape is silent until you unlock the codes. The English landscape with its fields and hedges is just an agreeable and apparently arbitrary patchwork of shape and colour until you know something of its private language. But when those undulations become ridge and furrow, when that die-straight hedgerow is an enclosure boundary, when those lumps and bumps are a deserted medieval village, then the whole place speaks. Cities likewise: brick, stone and glass are merely that until they can be sorted into a chronology, until you know what came before what, until that scrap of wall is sited in its distant century and the curve of that street explained by vanished circumstances.
Gardens, most of all, need interpretation. Stepping out of the veranda door at Golsoncott you looked down into the rose garden and thence beyond its parapet to the sloping lawn below the grass terrace. The great cedar of Lebanon presided over the lawn, which rolled down to the ha-ha. Beyond that, pasture separated the garden proper from the woodland-stream garden and the orchard. Depending on the time of year, you were delighted by the huge pink camellia beside the veranda, the wisteria that draped the house itself, the Erigeron karvinskianus that gushed from the walls of the rose garden, the regale lilies, the crimson leaves of Vitis coignetiae. If you knew something of garden history you would note the influence of William Robinson (that cedar of Lebanon, the considered but informal effect) and of Gertrude Jekyll (the sunken rose garden with its drystone walls and wide curved stone seat, its lily pond and sundial). Essence of Englishness, you would think, the English garden.
Not so at all. The garden is a cacophony. It is polyglot. It is a global reference system. In fact there is hardly anything here that is English, except for the good offices of Mr Robinson and Miss Jekyll, along with the yew, the primroses, the snowdrops and a handful of other plants.
When I was six I sat in the rose garden making a daisy-chain. It was September 1939. We were living in interesting times, but I was not aware of that. My companion that day was Margaret Reed, also six, whose parents, Tom and Edith, worked at Golsoncott. A photograph shows us brandishing our daisy-chains, looking rather pleased with ourselves. We are sitting amidst the foaming multitude of the pink and white erigeron and our satisfaction is entirely justified. E. karvinskianus does not lend itself to daisy-chain-making. It does not have the thick fleshy stem of a meadow daisy but a thin wiry one which requires very precise application of the thumbnail in order to split it effectively. I can recover the experience to this day, the frustration as the thin green wire broke, time after time. E. karvinskianus is very much a Gertrude Jekyll planting, almost a Jekyll hallmark, you could say, sparkling down from walls in Jekyll gardens like Hestercombe, softening the hard landscaping and serving as a backdrop to a planting of lilies or groupings of Jekyll silver foliage plants. My grandmother woul
d have taken note, poring over her copy of Home and Garden, and hence the plant's pervasive presence at Golsoncott.
An addiction to gardening is, in my view, genetic and in our family runs down the female line. It is now unto the fourth generation, with my daughter Josephine outstripping her forebears by achieving professional qualifications as a garden designer. For me, the most vivid memory shards of childhood have gardens as settings. Those distant, hazy visions of Golsoncott: the black wriggle of tadpoles on water-lily stems, scarlet fuchsia bells, lavender bushes taller than myself. The garden outside Cairo in which I grew up: great eucalyptus trees, plumbago, morning glory, poinsettias. The Alexandria villa gardens in which my parents and I summered: zinnias, bougainvillaea and resident chameleons. And at the heart of it all sit E. karvinskianus and the rose garden, where it now seems that the fervour all began.
The family's gardens reflect a hundred years of garden taste. My grandmother's first garden at St Albans had long walks with clipped hedges, island beds in which standard roses were underplanted with white alyssum, formal rose plantings and lawns. By the time she got to Golsoncott, Robinson and Jekyll had stepped in: no more bedding out, with roses as the central feature of a paved and sunken garden brilliant with primroses and jonquils in spring; elsewhere there are informal Robinsonian walks, swathes of snowdrops and bluebells, a tumbling-stream garden with bulrushes and yellow flag irises.