Index
For Jessica, Candida and Adam, and in memory of Sonia
The Fould-Springer Family Tree
ONE
A Moment in Austria
IN THE FIRST DAYS of January 1953 my mother and I arrived in what was then the isolated village of Seefeld in the Tyrol. Aged thirty-seven, she was returning for the first time since before the war to the country in which she had been born and to which she had a sentimental attachment, perhaps deteriorating into some sort of love-hate relationship. Originally called Thérèse Fould-Springer, she was Poppy to almost everyone who knew her before and after she made her life in England with Alan, my father. Here we were to stay in the Pension Philipp, newly built, and taking its name from the couple who owned and ran this rather modest venture in a post-war Austria still under Allied occupation and unsure of the future. My mother liked the hard-working Frau Philipp. We were there to have a holiday, and especially to ski, before I went back to Eton. An only child, I was sixteen.
My mother’s younger sister Liliane had brought us to Seefeld. She had become familiar with this part of the world because her husband Elie de Rothschild had taken a lease on a shoot belonging to the Saxe-Coburgs. The lodge, a wooden chalet, was at the end of a long and twisty track that reached from the next village of Scharnitz high up into the Karwendel mountains, impassable in winter. Herr Ragg, the head keeper, a stout Father Christmas figure with red cheeks and a white beard, seemed to have survived from Habsburg days. He once corrected Elie for speaking loosely about the Austrian provinces Italy had acquired as spoils after the First War, “Sud Tirol, Herr Baron.” His younger son, Hubert Ragg, was our guide on the slopes, and slightly too insistent about it. A possible champion, he had lost his nerve in a bad fall while racing, and he wanted to hide it.
Aunty Lily, as she was to me, came with her two small children, my cousins Nathaniel and Nelly, and their nanny Miss Sargent from Norfolk. In Paris they lived in the Avenue Marigny, a house inherited from Elie’s father and one of the largest in the entire city, round the corner from the President of France in the Elysée. Thanks to Liliane, they also had a house called La Faisanderie on the Fould-Springer family’s estate at Royaumont near Chantilly. The ensemble of buildings there is one of the showplaces of France. In the thirteenth century, the abbey had been built for the Cistercians by Saint Louis; the church and much else was pulled down during the French revolution, to leave a refectory, halls, and imposing monastic quarters around a cloister. This was the property of our neighbors, the Gouins, whose daughter Marie-Christine was twenty when she too was with our party in the Pension Philipp, so to speak a lifelong honorary member of our family.
On January 12 Poppy wrote to her mother, Mitzi or Mitz to those who had known her in the first part of her life, and Mary to those who had known her afterwards. My grandmother was then in her flat in Paris just behind the Madeleine within walking distance of the Rothschilds in the Avenue Marigny. French was the language in which these two corresponded, with bits of German and English as decoration. Poppy’s excuse for not writing sooner was that she had spent two very bad days, feeling sick with pains in her liver and kidneys. “Naturally my morale responds, each time I feel better I am filled with hope but I must say that I’m beginning to have more than enough of it. If I don’t feel much better I may come back sooner to Paris.” She proposes more consultations with her Paris specialists whom she names, Drs d’Allaines, Mayer, and Camille Dreyfus. The rest of this letter is in quite another mode, cheerfully social, describing the New Year’s Eve she and Alan had just spent with Harry and Rosie d’Avigdor-Goldsmid at Somerhill, their house on the edge of Tonbridge. It was a home from home. Until that year, we had lived in Castle Hill Farm, tenants on their estate. At Fairlawne, a country house a few miles away, lived the racehorse trainer Peter Cazalet, his wife Zara and his son Edward, exactly my age. We visited them. Staying there were Lady Margaret Douglas-Home and two of her children, Fiona and Charlie, two more friends for me. “C’était très gemütlich” Poppy writes in the familiar linguistic mix. She and Alan had completed the upheaval of moving to London and she closes this letter to her mother, “what worries me most in all this is Alan’s agony and exhaustion and I wonder if a radical change and a simpler life might be envisaged.”
The very next day, the 13th, she was writing to Alan. “I know I am more than impossible to live with, but you do know, I hope, how much I appreciate and am grateful to you for all you have always done for me in the past, and alas now I need your unending understanding and thoughtfulness more than ever and I have so little to give in exchange.” This suggests that she was confronting her own mortality quite clearly. Yet she goes on as though in some part of herself plans for the future were still believable, “I must come back to Austria with you, it gives me too much heimweh [homesickness] for the past and all it means to us. Your Pigling [a habitual and mutual borrowing from Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland] who is getting stronger again.”
I knew that Poppy in the previous August had undergone an operation in the American Hospital in Paris but when I went there I was not allowed to enter her room. “You have seen enough doctors,” I wrote to her, adding in schoolboy language that I hoped she “may never again need to see another.” Home again, she was evidently having some unspecified treatment for some unspecified illness. I had observed that often she did not get out of bed in the morning or went back to bed in the afternoon. She and everyone else were studiously silent about the reason for all this, and I was too engrossed in my own life to probe into her health. There were things women kept to themselves out of delicacy, I imagined. Perhaps she was playing up to get sympathy. Poppy was on the best of terms with Camille Dreyfus, a relation of the persecuted Captain Dreyfus. Alarmed because I was a slow grower and nicknamed Little Man at Eton, she had dragged me to see him. I couldn’t take him seriously. Counting my vertebrae, he thought I had one too few – “Mais mon petit, tu es déformé.” Further inspecting my private parts, he said, “Mais mon petit, il faut s’en servir.” Like the others around me, he meant well, but even he held back from telling me that Poppy had cancer. If he also gave her morphine in quantities to put an end to her life, that too was well meant.
Blithely ignorant, I wrote to Alan from the Pension Philipp, “Mummy who has felt ill on and off up to now, has suddenly and completely recovered today, so much so that she went out on Marie-Christine’s skis, just to see what it felt like. We are all naturally very relieved, because it was pointless that she should come to the mountains to be ill.” In her small hasty handwriting Poppy had added in the margin, “I am so happy to be able to tell you that Thank God today I feel quite alright again. It has been so fine and I have been on skis! Not skiing and only five minutes. Your Baba is in grand form and all the others too. We go to watch the stags tomorrow and Elie comes after tomorrow for the week-end.” Lily had a mania for photography, and in that moment out of doors she recorded Poppy wearing an anorak and a woolly pixie bonnet and looking fixedly at the camera as though to stare right through it.
From Seefeld we took a taxi to Innsbruck. We visited the church there and Poppy told me about the great Emperor Maximilian painted in a memorable portrait of majesty by Dürer. At the station, she helped me board the train. A smartly dressed lady in a fur coat emerged from a couchette in the same Pullman carriage, with a companion just behind her. Speaking French, Poppy greeted this lady by name, and was very amused to have caught her out: “The man she’s travelling with isn’t her husband.” She was all laughter as the train pulled away and I had my last sight of her.
In the Pension Philipp after saying goodbye to me, she wrote once more to her mother. This letter is dated January 21. It was high time for her to return to England, she says, but “alas, I feel on the whole not at
