IV
My mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany five times between my second and twelfth year. After this he died and we never went again. He had a big old manor-house ten miles from Munich; it was called ‘Laufzorn,’ which means ‘Begone, care!’ Our summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine forests and hot sun, red deer and black and red squirrels, acres of blue-berries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms that we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar flowers in the fields—Munich is high up and there are outcrops of Alpine flowers here and there—and the farm with all the usual animals except sheep, and drives through the countryside in a brake behind my grandfather’s greys. And bathing in the Iser under a waterfall; the Iser was bright green and said to be the fastest river in Europe. We used to visit the uncles who had a peacock farm a few miles away, and a granduncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the lakeshore of Tegensee, where every one had buttercup-blonde hair. And occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived some hours away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps, in Aufsess Castle.
This castle was a wonder; it was built in the ninth century and had been in the von Aufsess family ever since. The original building was a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up. A medieval castle had been added. Aufsess was so remote that it had never been sacked, and its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. Each baron added to the treasure and none took away. My Uncle Siegfried was the heir. He showed us children the chapel with its walls hung with enamelled shields of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the family into which he married. These families were always noble. He pointed to a stone in the floor which pulled up by a ring and said: ‘That is the family vault where all we Aufsesses go when we die. I’ll go there one day.’ He scowled comically. (But he was killed in the war as an officer of the Imperial German Staff and I believe that they never found his body.) He had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children found him on the pebbled garden path, eating the pebbles. He told us to go away, but, of course, we would not. We sat down and tried to eat pebbles too. He told us very seriously that eating pebbles was not a thing for children to do; we should break our teeth. We agreed after trying one or two; so to get rid of us he found us each a pebble which looked just like all the other pebbles, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre. But this was only on condition that we went away and left him to his picking and crunching. When we came back later in the day we searched and searched, but only found the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once let us down in a joke.
Among the treasures of the castle were a baby’s lace cap that had taken two years to make, and a wine glass that my uncle’s old father, the reigning baron, had found in the Franco-Prussian War standing upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined village. For dinner when we were there we had enormous trout. My father, who was a fisherman, was astonished and asked the baron how they came to be that size. The baron said that there was an underground river that welled up close to the castle and the fish that came out with it were quite white from the darkness, of enormous size and stone-blind. They also gave us jam, made of wild roseberries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch.’
The most remarkable thing in the castle was an iron chest in a small thick-walled white-washed room at the top of the keep. It was a huge chest, twice the size of the door, and had obviously been made inside the room—there were no windows but arrow-slits. It had two keys. I could not say what its date was, but I recall it as twelfth or thirteenth century work. There was a tradition that it should never be opened unless the castle were in the most extreme danger. One key was held by the baron and one by the steward; I believe the stewardship was a hereditary office. The chest could only be opened by using both keys, and nobody knew what was inside; it was even considered unlucky to speculate. Of course we speculated. It might be gold, more likely it was 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. The castle ghost was that of a former baron known as the Red Knight; his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase that took us to our bedrooms. We slept for the first time in our lives on feather beds.
Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous state, had nothing to compare with the Aufsess tradition, though it had for a time been a shooting-lodge of the kings of Bavaria. Still, there were two ghosts that went with the place; the farm labourers used to see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously along without any horses, and before the days of motor-cars this was frightening enough. And the banqueting hall was magnificent. I have not been there since I was a child, so it is impossible for me to recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, and its bare boards were only furnished at the four corners with little islands of tables and chairs. The windows were of stained glass, and there were swallows’ nests all along where the walls joined the ceiling. Roundels of coloured light from the stained-glass windows, the many-tined stags’ heads (that my grandfather had shot) mounted on the wall, swallow-droppings on the floor under the nests and a little harmonium in one corner where we sang German songs; these concentrate my memories of Laufzorn. It was in three divisions. The bottom storey was part of the farm. A carriage-drive went right through it, and there was also a wide, covered courtyard—originally these had served for driving the cattle to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive was 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-place for corn and apples and other farm produce. It was up here that my cousin Wilhelm, who was killed in an air-fight during the war, used to lie for hours shooting mice with an air-gun. (I learned that he was shot down by a schoolfellow of mine.)
The best part of Germany was the food. There was a richness and spiciness about it that we missed in England. We liked the rye bread, the black honey (black, I believe, because it came from the combs of the previous year), the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice, and the venison, and the honey cakes, and the pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different sorts of mushrooms. And the bretzels, and carrots cooked with sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blue-berries. There was an orchard close to the house, and we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. The estate, in spite of the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, and his liberalism and experiments in modern agricultural methods, was still feudalistic. The farm servants, because they talked a dialect that we could not understand and because they were Catholics and poor and sweaty and savage-looking, frightened us. They were lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians settled about half a mile from the house, imported from Italy by my grandfather as cheap labour for his brick-making factory, we associated them in our minds with the ‘gypsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day; he made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards (when a milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burnt and we complained about it), ‘Those poor Italians at the factory used to burn their polenta on purpose sometimes just for a change of flavour.’
There were other unusual things at Laufzorn. There was a large pond full of carp; it was netted every three or four years. The last year we were there we were allowed to help. It was good to see the net pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with wriggling carp, and a big pike was threshing about among them. I was allowed to wade in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on them to make them leave go. I do not remember that it hurt much. The farm labourers were excited, and one of them, called The Jackal, gutted a fish with his thumbs and ate it raw. And there was the truck line between the railway station, two miles away, and the brick-yard. There was a fall of perhaps one in a hundred from the factory to the station. The Italians used to load up the trucks with bricks, and a squad of them would give the trucks a hard push and run along the track pushing for about twenty or thirty yards; and then the trucks used to sail off all by themselves to the station. There was a big hay-barn where we were allowed to climb up on the rafters 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. Then the cellar, not the ordinary beer cellar, but another that you went down into from the courtyard. It was quite dark there except for a little slit-window; and there was a heap of potatoes on the floor. To get to the light they had put out long white feelers—a twisted mass. In one corner there was a dark hole closed by a gate: it was a secret passage out of the house to a ruined monastery, a mile or two away. My uncles had once been down some way, but the air got bad and they had to come back. The gate had been put up to prevent anyone else trying it and being overcome.
When we drove out with my grandfather he was acclaimed by the principal personages of every village we went through. At each village there was a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley and always a tall Maypole banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national colours. The roads were lined with fruit trees. The idea of these unguarded public fruit trees astonished us. We could not understand why there was any fruit left on them. Even the horse-chestnut trees on Wimbledon Common were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the chestnuts were ripe and in defiance of an energetic common keeper. The only things that we could not quite get accustomed to in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and the ex-voto pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames. We had been taught to believe in hell, but did not like to be reminded of it. Munich we found sinister—disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke and intense sounds of eating, the hotly dressed, enormously stout population in the trams and trains, the ferocious officials, the wanton crowds at the art shops and picture galleries. Then there was the Morgue. We were not allowed inside because we were children, but it was bad enough to be told about it. Any notable who died was taken to the Morgue and put in a chair, sitting in state for a day or two, and if he was a general he had his uniform on, or if she was a burgomaster’s wife she had on her silks and jewels; and strings were tied to their fingers and the slightest movement of one of the strings would ring a great bell, in case there was any life left in the corpse after all. I have never verified the truth of all this, but it was true enough to me. When my grandfather died about a year after our last visit I thought of him there in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, and his morning coat and striped trousers and his decorations and his stethoscope, and perhaps, I thought, his silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside the chair. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive but knowing himself dead.
The headmaster who caned me on the hand was a lover of German culture, and impressed this feeling on the school, so that it was to my credit that I could speak German and had been to Germany. At my other preparatory schools this German connection was regarded as something at least excusable and perhaps even interesting. It was not until I went to Charterhouse that I was made to see it as a social offence. My history from the age of fourteen, when I went to Charterhouse, to just before the end of the war, when I began to realize things better, was a forced rejection of the German in me. In all that first period I used to insist indignantly that I was Irish and deliberately cultivate Irish sentiment. I took my self-protective stand on the technical point that it was the father’s nationality that counted. Of course I also accepted the whole patriarchal system of things. It is difficult now to recall how completely I believed in the natural supremacy of male over female. I never heard it even questioned until I met Nancy, when I was about twenty-two, towards the end of the war. The surprising sense of ease that I got from her frank statement of equality between the sexes was among my chief reasons for liking her. My mother had always taken 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 as 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.’ Nancy’s crude summary, ‘God is a man, so it must be all rot,’ took a load off my shoulders.
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 feel of German so strongly that I would say now that I know German far better than French, though I can read French almost as fast as I can read English and can only read a German book 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 and I could forget it quite easily if I had no reason to use it every now and then.