Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [17]
‘Something has broken inside me,’ she wrote to her sister in the first letter after his death.
I can’t write about it yet. You can imagine how every cross word and every unkind thought now cuts through me like a knife. That ‘never again’, Gretl! What wouldn’t I do now, and what would I have done before, if I had known this would happen … If at least he had been ill for only one day, I could have nursed him and been loving to him again … At least I was there and he didn’t have to die alone.
It was no consolation.
Within two and a half years she was dead also, at the age of thirty-six. I have always assumed that her many self-lacerating, underdressed visits to his grave in the harsh winter months after his death contributed to the lung disease which killed her.
It is not surprising that her self-control frayed and snapped in those appalling months – far less surprising than the fact that, by superhuman efforts, she managed to conceal the situation from her children. Times had never been good since the first years when the young couple had arrived from Egypt with a modest reserve of hard and stable pounds sterling in an Austria sliding into hyperinflation. I have no idea how my father expected or hoped to earn his living in a country whose language he never learned to speak well. Indeed, I have no idea how he had earned his living before he went to Egypt, where a presentable and well-spoken, intelligent but not too intellectual man in his twenties, with a rather impressive record as a sportsman, would have no trouble in finding a job in some shipping or trading office in the large colony of British expats. Perhaps he expected to find similar help as an Englishman in Vienna, although the expatriate colony here was small (even if it had given birth to several of Vienna’s football teams). All I know for certain is that he ordered notepaper headed. ‘L. Percy Hobsbawn, Vienna. Tel. Ad. ‘‘Hobby’’. Tel. Nr… …’. For a brief moment in 1920 my mother reported to her sister that she had servants in the plural: a cook and a maid (who disappeared almost immediately).
From then on it was downhill all the way. From the Seutter Villa we moved into a distinctly more modest flat in a neighbouring suburb, Ober St Veit. From the mid-twenties the family seems to have constantly lived from hand to mouth, barely knowing where the money for the daily expenses would come from. That, I suspect, is why my mother began seriously to try to earn money from her writing, working increasingly long hours with increasing intensity. Still, whatever her literary work contributed to the family income, in the course of 1928 the situation became increasingly catastrophic. By late 1928 the landlord had given us notice. We had to negotiate to avoid the gas being cut off. Two days before Christmas my mother wrote to her sister: ‘It’s Friday and I haven’t bought a single present yet. If Percy doesn’t bring any money tomorrow, I don’t know what I shall do.’
The new year had brought no respite. Three days before my father’s death she complained to her sister that things were getting worse by the day, the rent and phone bill were unpaid, and ‘I usually don’t even have a Schilling in the house’ and she still had no idea where the family would live when the notice to quit expired. Such was the situation when my father went out for the last time. And now he was dead. He was buried a few days later in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery of Vienna. All I can remember of his death was a dark night when my sister and I were moved, half asleep, from our room to our parents’ bedroom to be vaguely told that something terrible