Читать книгу The Secrets of the Notebook: A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret - Eve Haas - Страница 11

I WOKE UP on the morning of 1 May 1945, switched on the little wireless in my room as usual and heard the unbelievable news that Hitler was dead. At that moment, as the news sank in, I felt a deep emotional bond with the people of Britain, from Winston Churchill and the King all the way to our neighbours in Hampstead. I felt that I was finally free and the Nazi terror had been destroyed for good, leaving the world a safer and happier place. As far back as I could remember the horrible, threatening figure of Adolf Hitler had darkened my life and suddenly that dark cloud was lifted.

Since 1940 I had been working in the Medici Gallery in Grafton Street, just off Bond Street. I had been in charge of their mail-order business which included supplying the royal family at Buckingham Palace, in particular the old Queen Mary. As well as meeting members of the European royal families I also got to meet other famous names like Winston Churchill’s wife, Clemmie, and the Hollywood star, Danny Kaye. I loved the work and the hardest part of the day was having to make my way home on my own each evening in the blackout.

My relationship with my mother had matured steadily as I had grown up and we had become ever closer, with her treating me as an equal rather than a child. It seemed to me that her character had changed completely once she had become used to English life, and when she no longer had the responsibility and worry of bringing up children. We were becoming more like sisters as the years passed.

My brother Claude was away in the army when my father had told me about the pocket-book, having already been stationed somewhere out in the country. Soon he would become a captain in the Royal Engineers, and would be sent on active service in India, where he remained for the rest of the war. He had studied architecture, following in the footsteps of our distinguished father, and had narrowly missed being interned for the duration of the war as an enemy alien. After the war he followed the family tradition by becoming an architect and in 1950 he emigrated to Toronto, Canada with his new wife Inge, contributing extensively to the building of the city.

By then I had already married. I met Ken Haas for the first time at my cousin Freddie’s 21st birthday party in North London in 1946. Ken had also fled from Germany before the war, just as we had, so we shared many of the same experiences. He had impressed me immediately. He was a powerfully built and athletic man, not tall, but tough both physically and in spirit. He was 38 and I was 21 and I was instantly captivated by his forthright, spontaneous manner. He worked for a family firm of goldbeaters, George M. Whiley, in the West End of London, who made stamping foils. He was a good businessman and as their export director he built the company up over the years, eventually moving it into substantial factory premises in Ruislip.

It was love at first sight and I married Ken in 1948, embarking on a long and happy partnership of more than forty years and producing three healthy sons, Anthony, Timothy and David. Ken was loving and devoted and you certainly could never grow bored in his company. Because of his job he was away travelling, sometimes up to five to six months of every year, which I found hard but in a way perhaps it strengthened our relationship even more. Bringing up three young boys, often on my own, there was little or no time to worry my head with romantic notions about who my ancestors might or might not have been: my attention was fully occupied in dealing with the complications of each day as it came, and planning for our family’s future.

In 1955 tragedy struck my family again. My father, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with cancer. He was just 65 and it seemed too early to lose him. But lose him we did when he died nine months later in March 1956. I was devastated by the loss and I was far from being the only one. He was a greatly loved public figure and many wanted to mourn his passing. Our local paper, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, wrote a headline article announcing his death and the time and place of his funeral. It never occurred to any of us that by doing that they were also advertising the fact that my parents’ flat would be empty for at least a couple of hours while we were all at the crematorium in Golders Green. This allowed plenty of time for thieves to break in and turn out every drawer and cupboard in their search for hidden booty.

It is the cruellest thing to do, to invade the privacy of a family just as they are at their most vulnerable with grief. We walked in from the ceremony, my Uncle Freddy carrying the urn containing my father’s ashes, just wanting to find some peace in which to compose ourselves after the ordeal, only to be confronted with a scene of total devastation. My mother’s look of horror at this invasion of her life, just when she had to get used to the idea of living alone, was heartbreaking.

Believing that she might need someone there to support her, I followed my mother as she ran through to the bedroom, assuming that she wanted to check on some piece of family jewellery that might hold special sentimental value to her. But she seemed to have only one thing in mind as she ignored the clothes and other belongings strewn over the floor and headed for the dressing table. Rummaging through the debris she picked up a white envelope tied up with the green ribbon that I instantly recognised as being the one that held the ancient pocket-book. It was still in the same envelope from which my father had removed it the morning he had shown it to me sixteen years earlier.

‘Thank God,’ she said, holding it to her heart as if that were the only possession that mattered to her in the whole apartment, a last precious piece of my father that she could still cling to now that she no longer had the man himself. Seeing the passion with which she hugged that elegant little book to her heart rekindled the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when my father first dangled that tempting snippet of a story in front of me. I wondered if she might be willing to pass the book on to me now that my father had gone. He had, after all, said that it would be mine.

‘Mother,’ I ventured cautiously, ‘Father said I—’

‘He also said not to go looking, Eve,’ she interrupted me, obviously guessing exactly what I was about to say, quickly composing herself, realising that she had allowed me to see too clearly how important the book was to her.

‘But I—’

‘It’s just a notebook,’ she said, swiftly pushing the envelope back into its hiding place.

‘Mother, please. I’m not a child any more. Why do you keep the book hidden away? What are you afraid of?’

‘I’m afraid of you making a fool of yourself, poking around for answers that can’t be found. The story ended with your grandmother. This talk of your father is upsetting me. Come on, let’s go back to the others.’

Realising this was not the moment to press her, I immediately fell silent, but our voices must have carried further than I realised because a little while later, once we had cleared up the worst of the mess from the robbery, my Uncle Freddy took me to one side and whispered out of my mother’s earshot.

‘Come round to my house tomorrow and I’ll show you something.’

That night I stayed with my mother in the flat, not wanting to leave her on her own after a day of so much emotional turmoil. It would be terrible for her to be lying awake on her own, listening to every sound, wondering if the thieves were returning, thinking about my father and the years that now stretched ahead without him. I wanted her to know that I would always be there for her when she needed me. The following day, unable to suppress my curiosity a moment longer, I took a train to Norbury in South London to visit Uncle Freddy.

‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ he said, once he was certain I was comfortable, almost nonchalantly handing me a miniature painting of a pretty, auburn-haired young girl. She was wearing a formal red dress that showed off her shoulders despite an attempt by the artist to hide them with an artfully placed gossamer-like white shawl. This was such a profound moment for me after so many years of allowing myself to indulge in occasional romantic daydreams, before forcing myself to pushing those thoughts out of my mind in case they encouraged me to make a stand and try to get to the bottom of my family mystery once and for all. As I stared at the picture, mesmerised by her beauty, it felt as if Emilie were beckoning me into her life. Her soulful eyes stared directly at me from the tiny picture frame, a slight smile playing on her delicate lips, giving her an innocent, questioning look.

‘That’s her,’ he said, seeing my gaze locking on to Emilie’s face.

I could never have imagined what a powerful effect that tiny portrait would have on me. In that instant I knew that this girl wouldn’t be easy to let go, not easy at all. Uncle Freddy had lost me for a while but after a few moments my attention returned to the room and I became aware of what he was telling me.

‘This is Emilie Gottschalk. She was your great, great grandmother, the one to whom Prince August wrote the dedication in the notebook that your mother has.’

I remembered my father mentioning that his brother had a portrait of Emilie, but actually seeing this pretty little face peeking out at me suddenly revived all the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when he first told me the story.

‘What do we know about her?’ I asked, hypnotised by the sight of this young woman who was my direct ancestor and who had lived at the very heart of the Prussian Court at a time when it was central to European history.

‘All we know is that she was young when she met the Prince, only fifteen years old. He on the other hand was in his fifties by then and was already an enormously wealthy, powerful and famous man. Despite the age gap it was a great love match. They stayed together for eleven years until he died. We believe she was the daughter of a Jewish tailor and we know that she and the Prince had a daughter, Charlotte, who was my mother’s mother. Your father and I knew our grandmother Charlotte in our childhood, and she used to tell us things, dropping tiny hints that we never really understood. But that is all we know and it is just not possible to find out any more.’

It sounded like the perfect fairy tale, the simple young tailor’s daughter who captured the heart of a great prince, like a sort of Prussian Pygmalion, but I couldn’t understand why everyone in the family kept stressing that these few facts were all that was known about the story. Surely a real-life fairy tale like this would have been talked about and written about in court papers of the time, and in history books ever since.

‘Is that really all we know?’ I asked, still without taking my eyes off her young face.

‘We do have this,’ he went on, passing me an elderly sepia photograph of another woman, middle-aged and stately of build, dressed like Queen Victoria. ‘This is Charlotte, Emilie’s daughter, and Anna’s mother. She was my grandmother and your great grandmother.’

I felt a catch in my throat as I tried to speak, remembering my grandmother again, who I had last seen waving to me and my brother on that railway platform in Prague. The photograph seemed to revive all the nightmares and fears I was storing at the back of my mind.

Uncle Freddy was gazing at the picture with the same intensity that I was. ‘Charlotte once said to your father, when he was still quite small, “I am really a Duchess, you know, and I only ever travel anywhere first class.” And we both heard her talk about memories from when she was very little, when she told us she used to play wild games on the floor of a grand room somewhere in Berlin, with her father who was “a great prince”. She kept saying that “her whole life had changed completely” when she was five, but that was all she would ever tell us. If we tried to question her any further she would fall silent, almost as though, even as an older woman, she was still very reluctant to say more, or as if she didn’t really know herself what had happened between her parents when she was a small child.’

I went back to staring at the portrait, imagining the young girl sitting for the artist, trying to take in the fact that I was viewing the result of his handiwork more than 140 years after his brush strokes had dried. I was secretly hoping that if I stared hard enough at her face, Emilie’s spirit might reveal some clues as to what had happened to her and the other members of her family that could have led to Anna’s final predicament in Prague, whatever that might have been.

‘What about the rest of the Gottschalks?’ I asked, trying to piece the whole story together in my head and make sense of it. ‘Where is the family? What about their other descendants?’

‘They don’t exist,’ Uncle Freddy said. ‘When Charlotte married their name completely disappeared.’

‘Didn’t anyone think that was a bit strange?’

He shrugged. ‘There wasn’t much we could do about it. There are no records, no papers. There is just this picture and the pocket-book which my brother received. A lot of Jewish families have disappeared in Europe over the last century for one reason or another.’

I left Uncle Freddy’s house that day feeling inspired. Now I had a clear picture of Emilie in my head and I knew for certain that she had existed. I also knew that she and Prince August had been devoted to one another and lived together for eleven years until his death, but frustratingly that was all I knew. It was another unfinished family story, like the mystery of what might have happened to Granny Anna. Again I went back to my normal daily life, allowing the tale of August and Emilie to slip to the back of my mind. If my parents and my uncle were all in agreement that the story should be allowed to rest then who was I to argue with them? I certainly didn’t want to upset my mother by going against her wishes. From time to time I would remember the story, but over the coming years I was too busy being a wife and mother to give too much thought to an event that had taken place more than a century before.