Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [49]
Unlike her, I had no real reason for blaming them. On the contrary, they struck me not as tyrannical but, as I wrote shortly before my eighteenth birthday, as ‘tragic’. I saw them, especially Gretl, as the victims of the decline and disintegration of the old conventions that had determined the relations between the generations. The Victorian rules about bringing up children were dead. They had been tough on the children – though probably not unacceptable to most – but a great prop for parents. Now nothing filled this gap. Paradoxically I came to analogous conclusions as my sister from the opposite point of view. The future should not bring a society without accepted rules and a firm structure of expectations. ‘The socialist state,’ I told my diary, ‘must and will create a new socialist convention which will get rid of the disadvantages of the old conventions while maintaining their advantages.’ One might even say that I developed the instincts of a Tory communist, unlike the rebels and revolutionaries drawn to their cause by the dream of total freedom for the individual, a society without rules.
I liked my aunt Gretl enormously, and developed a deep respect for her common sense. What is less usual between parents and touchy teenagers, I liked to talk to her about the problems of life, and parts of my reading. Furthermore, I took her opinions seriously, even on such subjects as sex and love, of which I knew nothing. However, obviously, she could not replace my mother.6 As I passed people in the street, I would sometimes stare, shut my eyes for a moment and say to myself, ‘he or she has eyes like Mama’.7 The youngest, prettiest and socially the most successful of the Grün girls, cherished by both her sisters, and the only one never to have had to earn a living, Gretl faced the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of her life and family – and there were plenty – armed with charm, sympathy, an inborn sensibleness and a notable lack of self-pity. ‘Sidney won’t believe it, he is always the optimist,’ she wrote in a brief note to her sister, as she waited for the operation to remove from her stomach a suddenly discovered tumour ‘as big as a fist’, a few months before I was due to go up to Cambridge. She was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. She took things as they came, and she knew, in this instance correctly, that what might come tomorrow was death. Sidney took me to see her corpse in bed in the old Hampstead General Hospital. I pass the site, now the car park of the Royal Free Hospital, most days on my way to and from Belsize Park. Hers was the first dead body I had ever seen.
I am not sure that I respected Sidney. I did not want to be like him. Indeed I was embarrassed by, and contemptuous of, his self-pity, his temperamental instability, those characteristic swings from outbursts of rage to effusive sentimentality and back again, the one an expression of impotence, the other a cry for help. As we both had the well-developed sense of confrontation (i.e. contrariness) so often found within Jewish families, our conversations at home tended to be loud, dramatic and often absurd. I think he was absolute hell for Nancy, especially after Gretl’s death deprived him of ballast. Fortunately I was by then that much older, and knew myself to be on the verge of independence. And yet, I remember him intensely and with pleasure. We talked, especially in Paris, and on the long journeys when I acted as his chauffeur – for after a year we were prosperous enough to buy a car, which I learned to drive, just in time