All the time I was learning – and I loved it – about British business and the men in it, about the people in the pubs and nightclubs, about British decency and neighbourliness, and about the greatest of British traits – the understatement!
I relate here a particularly good example of the last mentioned.
I spent a weekend with a friend at a flying-club. We drank a great deal of beer and I got to know the man who was the secretary of the club. One Sunday morning I took my hangover for a walk and ran into him. Would I like to do a little flying with him? I certainly would.
As we were walking towards a Tiger Moth, I asked him how much flying he had done? ‘Eighteen hours solo,’ he told me. Not much, I thought, but enough for a harmless circuit over the aerodrome. We had been flying for ten minutes when his voice came over the intercom: ‘I say, old boy, do you mind if I try a loop?’ We were 2,000 feet up, without a ladder. I gulped. ‘Of course not,’ I replied, ‘please do.’ For the next five minutes, while we climbed to 5,000 feet, my life passed before my eyes in the proverbial manner. Then I heard him say, ‘Here we go!’ We went. There was the sky where the earth ought to have been and ground where I expected to see clouds. He did half a dozen loops and a spin before making a perfect landing. The only thing that had been trying was the understatement.
Back in London, my boarding house, the Raeburn Club, turned out to be a winner. It was full of amusing people and was run by a man called Dudley Hodgeson who became a close friend during our joint pursuit of a lovely Swedish girl named Marianne Cornelius. She had been sent to the Raeburn by a friend of Dudley’s and loved the place, although she could have afforded to stay at the Savoy.
Dudley and I had simultaneously become infatuated with the lady. She wanted some excitement, so we took her night clubbing every night. Dudley and I always said goodnight to her at her bedroom door. Feeling more and more exhausted – physically and financially – and getting nowhere – except in each other’s way. Dudley, whose working hours were more regular than mine, finally conceded. The next night, Marianne and I went out alone, returning in the early hours. I was invited into her room.
I finally held her in my arms. Then the telephone rang. No, it wasn’t Dudley, it was Marianne’s mother calling from Sweden. When the call finished, everything that had risen to the occasion had irretrievably fallen down on the job. I slunk off to my lonely digs and the following night Dudley was ‘in’.
Soon afterwards however Marianne’s even more beautiful seventeen-year-old sister turned up and we four – Marianne with Dudley and me with Ulla – went to Paris for the weekend. The price was something like £13 for the round trip including the sleeper train and a night in a nice hotel. Unfortunately, Ulla became pregnant immediately and returned to Sweden for operational reasons, followed soon after by Marianne – Dudley and I were glad to be able to ‘rest up’.
My love life became intolerably dull, being limited, I don’t remember why, to a member of the Jewish faith who was married to someone in the garment trade. I was in love with Maditta. I met a well-known lady expert on contraception[2] at a cocktail party and asked her, as a poor conversation piece, about the safest method for preventing pregnancy. ‘Young man,’ she said, audible for miles, ‘you must wear a preservative and use one of my cubes. You must practice coitus interruptus and drink a glass of water.’ ‘A glass of water?’ I wanted to know ‘when? Before or after?’ ‘Instead, you fool, instead,’ she thundered as she left me standing there, looking every inch a fool and red in the face. I realised then that cocktail party conversations are an art.
13. INSULTING THE FUEHRER
EARLY IN 1938 HUMPHREY SYKES got stuck with a sandpit. It was the only tangible thing he managed to extract from the assets of a bankrupt cousin to whom he had lent money. A few days before Humphrey was due to leave for Cape Canaveral he handed me a map with a cross marking the location of the sandpit and said, ‘I think it isn’t much more than a hole in the ground. You had better find out if we ought to fill that in or dig deeper… and you had better become a director of the company’.[1]
For the lack of something better to do I consulted an encyclopaedia. Under ‘sand’ I made a startling discovery – it was not only used for making mortar and pits in children’s playgrounds, it was also used for making glass. There was a glass industry in England, according to the encyclopaedia, which obtained its sand supplies from Belgium and Holland where the right kind of sand was lying about the beaches.
At that point I stopped reading and started thinking. If war came, and I was sure it would, those sand supplies from the continent would surely be cut off. If any of the sand in our hole in the ground could be used for glassmaking we were in business. An analysis proved that it could be used after some rather expensive treatment, so we started pestering the bottle makers for contracts. They told us to go home as the continental sand was much cheaper, and better. War? There wasn’t going to be one. However, we got into our stride and when things began to look black in 1939, our hole in the ground became quite a busy place.
There then arrived a letter from Sykes who was busy making big deals in Florida, telling me that his American friends were offering me a job over there and that they were expecting me to arrive sometime during 1939. Humphrey however had some misgivings with regard to my German nationality, there was going to be some considerable involvement of the US Government in Canaveral and Humphrey felt it best that I did not turn up there as a German! I had already tried, and failed, to find some trace of my father’s British citizenship; although I did discover he and my mother had been married in England.
‘You will be better off as a stateless person,’ said Humphrey in his letter, ‘and I have found out that there is a way to accelerate the cancellation of your German citizenship. You can, so I am told, work it by abusing the German Government on German soil. In other words, go and insult Hitler in the German Embassy in London. But you’d better contact… first, he’s a high-ranking official in Scotland Yard and is a good friend of mine. Perhaps he’ll take the necessary steps to prevent the Germans from becoming a nuisance.’
Up until that time I had heard nothing about the loss of my German citizenship from Germany, although this would certainly follow in the case of anyone who had ‘quit’ the Third Reich under a self-made cloud. However, there were so many of us the Reichsanzeiger (the official gazette) was lagging behind in publishing names – a necessary prerequisite for being ‘ausgebuergert’ (de-citizenized.)
I had heard from a lawyer friend in Germany that all my traceable assets had been confiscated and that the money my father had left to me in trust had been blocked. That money vanished together with the executor, a Jewish Berlin lawyer. No trace was ever found of either him or the capital, consequently my debts exceeded my assets. I could not have cared less. (Many years later Maditta told me that she had been forced to pay some of my debts, but it was really her father the Baron’s money and she considered the losses to be a minor evil in the face of everything else that had been done to us.)