Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [23]
Sometime in the early summer of 1931 it became clear to the adults that the end was close. Gretl must have come to Vienna and stayed there. My mother was transferred to a garden sanatorium in Purkersdorf, just west of Vienna, where I saw her for the last time shortly before going to camp with the Scouts. I can remember nothing of the occasion except how emaciated she looked and that, not knowing what to say or do – there were others present – I glanced out of the window and saw a hawfinch, a small bird with a beak strong enough to crack cherry stones, that I had never seen before and for which I had long been on the lookout. So my last memory of her is not one of grief but of ornithological pleasure.
She died on 12 July 1931. I was fetched from camp. Shortly after the funeral she was buried in the summer heat in the same grave as my father. I left Vienna for good and went to Berlin. From then on Nancy and I were together again, and Sidney, Gretl and their son Peter (then just six) were our family. It was not to be the last death in the family in that decade.
Perhaps this is the moment for some reflections on my mother.
She was the smallest of the three Grün girls, the most intelligent, clearly the most gifted except in joie de vivre. Less pretty and spontaneous than her younger sister, the family beauty Gretl, less rebellious and adventurous than the older Mimi, she was in many ways perhaps the most conventional of the three. Engaged to Percy at the age of eighteen, married earlier than the other two – and according to her letters as a virgin – she returned to Vienna after the war a married woman with one child, and on the verge of expecting another. Her sisters and many of her friends had meanwhile passed through that pressure-cooker of change and emancipation, the war and the era of breakdown and revolution at the end of it, unmarried and unattached. Not that she missed all the war. For a few months, while waiting to go to Switzerland to marry at the British Consulate in Zurich, she worked as a volunteer nurse in a military hospital. There she learned that wounded men could not bear lying on any but the most smoothly laid bedsheets – she later taught me the trick of making such beds – and tried to communicate with a dying Ruthenian soldier by selecting phrases from a volume of what she discovered to be translations of fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm, the German text of which she could easily refer to. Still, life in the colonial society of Alexandria was an exotic, but recognizable version of life in Europe before 1914. Not so life in the Vienna to which she returned after four years’ absence.
In some ways she remained conventional in the pre-1914 Viennese middle-class sense. As I have already said, she found it almost inconceivable to live without servants, and was amazed to discover that in England ladies could both do their own cooking and housework without them and stay ladies. She took it for granted that a married woman must put her interests second to those of husband and children, and was shocked and irritated by her sister Mimi who refused to do so. Not that this made her a particularly successful mother, but then, as my sister and I agreed many years later when comparing notes about our youth, none of the several people who were or acted as our parents was fitted for the job by talent or training. None was very good at it, nor was there any reason why one would expect them to have been. Their parents had not