MY mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany five times between my second and twelfth year. Then he died, and we never went again. He owned a big old manor-house at Deisenhofen, ten miles from Munich; by name ‘Laufzorn’, which means ‘Begone, anger!’ Our summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine forests and hot sun, red deer, black and red squirrels, acres of blueberries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms which we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar flowers in the fields – Munich lies high, and outcrops of Alpine flowers occur here and there; a farm with all the usual animals except sheep; drives through the countryside in a brake behind my grandfather’s greys; and bathing in the Isar under a waterfall. The Isar was bright green, and said to be the fastest river of Europe. We used to visit the uncles who kept a peacock farm a few miles away; and a grand-uncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the lakeshore of Tegernsee, where everyone had buttercup-blonde hair; and occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Freifrau Baronin von Aufsess of Aufsess Castle, some hours away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps.
Aufsess, built in the ninth century, stood so remote that it had never been sacked, but remained Aufsess property ever since. To the original building, a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up, a medieval castle had been added. Its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. My Uncle Siegfried showed us children the chapel: its walls hung with enamelled shields of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the noble family into which he had married. He pointed to a stone in the floor which pulled up by a ring, and said: ‘That is the family vault where all Aufsesses go when they die. I’ll be down there one day.’ He scowled comically. (But he got killed in the war as an officer of the Imperial German Staff and, I believe, they never found his body.) Uncle Siegfried had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children saw him on the garden path, eating pebbles. He told us to go away, but of course we stayed, sat down, and tried to eat pebbles too; only to be told very seriously that children should not eat pebbles: we would break our teeth. We agreed, after trying one or two; so he chose us each a pebble which looked just like all the rest, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre. This was on condition that we went away and left him to his picking and crunching. When we returned, later in the day, we searched and searched, but found only the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once let us down in a joke.
Among the castle treasures were a baby’s lace cap that had taken two years to make; and a wine glass which my uncle’s old father had noticed in the Franco-Prussian War standing upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined French village. For dinner, when we went there, we ate some enormous trout. My father, a practised fisherman, asked my uncle in astonishment where they came from. He explained that an underground river welled up close to the castle, and the fish which emerged with it were quite white from the darkness, of extraordinary size, and stone-blind.
They also gave us jam made of wild rose-berries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch’, and showed us an iron chest in a small, thick-walled, white-washed room at the top of the keep – a tremendous chest, twice the size of the door, and obviously made inside the room, which had no windows except arrow-slits. It had two keys, and must have been twelfth- or thirteenth-century work. Tradition ruled that it should never be opened, unless the castle stood in the most extreme danger. The baron held one key; his steward, the other. The chest could be opened only by using both keys, and nobody knew what lay inside; it was even considered unlucky to speculate. Of course, we speculated. It might be gold; more likely a store of corn in sealed jars; or even some sort of weapon – Greek fire, perhaps. From what I know of the Aufsesses and their stewards, it is inconceivable that the chest ever got the better of their curiosity. A ghost walked the castle, the ghost of a former baron known as the ‘Red Knight’; his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase which led to our bedrooms. We slept on feather beds for the first time in our lives.
Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous condition, could not compare in tradition with Aufsess, though it had for a time been a shooting lodge of the Bavarian kings. Still, two ghosts went with the place; the farm labourers used to see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously along without horses and, before the days of motor cars, horrible enough. Not having visited the banqueting hall since childhood, I find it difficult to recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, with stained-glass armorial windows, and bare floorboards furnished only at the four corners with small islands of tables and chairs; swallows had built rows of nests all along the sides of the ceiling. There were roundels of coloured light from the windows, the many-tined stags’ heads (shot by my grandfather) mounted on the walls, swallow-droppings under the nests, and a little harmonium in one corner where we sang German songs. These concentrate my memories of Laufzorn. The bottom storey formed part of the farm. A carriage-drive ran right through it, with a wide, covered courtyard in the centre, where cattle were once driven to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive lay the estate steward’s quarters, on the other the farm servants’ inn and kitchen. In the middle storey lived my grandfather and his family. The top storey was a store for corn, apples, and other farm produce; and up here my cousin Wilhelm – later shot down in an air battle by a schoolfellow of mine – used to lie for hours picking off mice with an air-gun.
Bavarian food had a richness and spiciness that we always missed on our return to England. We liked the rye bread, the dark pine-honey, the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice and the help of snow stored during the winter in an ice-house, my grandfather’s venison, the honey cakes, the pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different kinds of mushrooms. Also the pretzels, the carrots cooked in sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blueberries. In the orchard, close to the house, we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were also rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes in the garden. The estate, despite the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, his liberalism, and his experiments in modern agricultural methods, remained feudalistic. The poor, sweaty, savage-looking farm servants, who talked a dialect we could not understand, frightened us. They ranked lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians, settled about half a mile from the house, whom my grandfather had imported as cheap labour for his brick factory – we associated them in our minds with ‘the gipsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day and made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards – when milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burned, and we complained – ‘Those poor Italians in your grandfather’s brick yard used to burn their polenta on purpose, sometimes, just for a change of flavour.’
Beyond the farm buildings at Laufzorn lay a large pond, fringed with irises and full of carp; my uncles netted it every three or four years. Once we watched the fun, and shouted when we saw the net pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with wriggling carp, and a big pike threshed about among them. I waded in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on their tails before they would leave go. The farm labourers grew wildly excited; one of them gutted a fish with his thumb, and ate it raw. I also remember the truck line between the railway station, two miles away, and the brick yard. Since the land had a fall of perhaps one in a hundred between the factory and the station, the Italians used to load their trucks with bricks; then a squad of them would give the trucks a hard shove and run along the line pushing for twenty or thirty yards; after which the trucks sailed off all by themselves towards the station.
We were allowed to climb up into the rafters of the big hay barn, and jump down into the springy hay; we gradually increased the height of the jumps. It was exciting to feel our insides left behind us in the air. Once we visited the Laufzorn cellar, not the ordinary beer cellar, but another into which one descended from the courtyard – quite dark except for a little slit window. A huge heap of potatoes lay on the floor; to get to the light, they had put out a twisted mass of long white feelers. In one corner was a dark hole closed by a gate: a secret passage from the house to a ruined monastery, a mile away – so we were told. My uncles had once been down some distance, but the air got bad and they came back; the gate had been put up to prevent anyone else trying it and never returning. Come to think of it, they were probably teasing us, and the hole led to the bottom of the garde-robe – which is a polite name for a medieval earth-closet.
When we drove out beside my grandfather, he was acclaimed with ‘Grüss Gott, Herr Professor!’ by the principal personages of each village we went through. It always had a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley, and a tall Maypole, banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national colours. Apple and pear trees lined every road. The idea of these unguarded public fruit-trees astonished us. We could not understand why any fruit remained on them. On Wimbledon Common even the horse-chestnut trees were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the chestnuts ripened, and in defiance of an energetic common-keeper. What we least liked in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with their realistic blood and wounds, and the ex-voto pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning for anguish among high red and yellow flames. Though taught to believe in Hell, we did not like to be reminded of it.
Munich we found sinister – disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke, and intense sounds of eating in the restaurants; the hotly dressed, enormously stout population in trams and trains; the ferocious officials. Then the terrifying Morgue, which children were not allowed to visit. Any notable who died was taken to the Morgue, they told us, and put in a chair, to sit in state for a day or two. If a general, he had his uniform on; or if a burgomaster’s wife, she had on her silks and jewels. Strings were tied to their fingers, and the slightest movement of a single string would ring a great bell, in case any life remained in the corpse after all. I have never verified the truth of this, but it was true enough to me. When my grandfather died, about a year after our last visit, I pictured him in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, his morning coat, his striped trousers, his decorations, and his stethoscope. And perhaps, I thought, a silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside him. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive; but knowing himself dead.
The headmaster of Rokeby school who caned me for forgetting my gymnastic shoes loved German culture, and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it stood to my credit that I could speak German and had visited Germany. At my other preparatory schools this German connexion seemed something at least excusable, and perhaps even interesting. Only at Charterhouse did it rank as a social offence. My history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, until just before the end of the war, when I began to think for myself, is a forced rejection of the German in me. I used to insist indignantly on being Irish, and took my self-protective stand on the technical point that solely the father’s nationality counted. Of course, I also accepted the whole patriarchal system of things, convinced of the natural supremacy of male over female. My mother took the ‘love, honour, and obey’ contract literally; my sisters were brought up to wish themselves boys, to be shocked at the idea of woman’s suffrage, and not to expect so expensive an education as their brothers. The final decision in any domestic matter always rested with my father. My mother would say: ‘If two ride together, one must ride behind.’
We children did not talk German well; our genders and minor parts of speech were shaky, and we never learned to read Gothic characters or script. Yet we had the sense of German so strongly that I feel I know German far better than French, though able to read French almost as fast as I can read English, and German only very painfully and slowly, with the help of a dictionary. I use different parts of my mind for the two languages. French is a surface acquirement which I could forget quite easily if I had no reason to speak it every now and then.