I Missed the Spring

By Katherine Rubin

The life of London born Kaila is transformed into a roller coaster ride when she is stricken with a mood disorder after her wedding to David, whom she met when working on an Israeli kibbutz after the Six-Days War. She awakens on her bridal bed proclaiming she has conceived the Child of Peace that she is a prophet and privy to the reality of Universal Peace.
After months in a psychiatric hospital suffering from extreme mood swings, David takes his bride home to Israel, a broken vessel on mind-numbing medication to treat manic-depression. Attempted suicides, physical symptoms of depression and delusions of grandeur plague her early years as a new immigrant. She fantasizes that she is destined to become a world-famous writer and usher in the New Era.
During therapy for depression, Kaila becomes aware of suppressed years of childhood spent apart from her parents in the care of hired help. A monster, seen as Amalek (arch enemy of Israel,) tortured and abused her, stamping her innocence into the dust.
By immigrating to Israel, far from her family, the trauma of childhood separation is perpetuated and Kaila is unable to heal. Over the years, visits from her parents and their consequent departures trigger repeated hospitalizations. A therapeutic relationship in the local mental health clinic leads to transference and counter transference with resultant complications.
When David is called up during the Yom Kippur War, Kaila, then at the beginning of her pregnancy, decides that he has been killed and spends months in the psychiatric ward, mourning him. After a slow recovery, her son is born the day David is released from army duty, after six months at the front.
Intermittent, healthy, productive periods follow. For a while, Kaila works as secretary to an export manager then takes a job as assistant to a literary agent. With her love for creative writing, it is a dream position. However, Kaila becomes pressured by the delusion that a tidal wave of books from all over the world, is breaking on Israel’s shore and that she has sole responsibility to ensure they all are translated into Hebrew. She becomes depressed, succumbs again to her prophetic vision and is forced to quit the job she loves.
The arrival in Israel of the Egyptian President, on a peace mission, coincides with the departure of Kaila’s mother after a short visit. When the Heads of State stand to attention for the National Anthems of the two combatant countries, Kaila senses she is personally involved that she has a role to play in the unfolding drama. She is propelled into an unrivalled bout of mania, seeing herself responsible for the Middle East peace process and the dawning of a New Era.
Once more, Kaila experiences the tribulations of a psychiatric hospital. Finally, her symptoms are diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Kaila fears that the medication prescribed to control her condition will ultimately suppress her gift for poetry. Her anxiety proves justified.
For twenty-five years, medications dull her mind and sap her vitality. She does not write one word. Then, miraculously, Kaila experiences a reawakening that she likens to a kiss from a prince. Her son, Shai provides her with a stepping stone to a creative future and thus restores the springtime of her life.
Over the next decade, Kaila becomes a prolific poet and tells her story in verse in a book of poems entitled ‘Back from Beyond,’ about her bipolar disorder, the reawakening and her new-found joy in life, in her loving partner and in nature.
She writes a journal, documenting her daily life and creative work. It soon becomes a means of self analysis, uncovering the horrors of her early years and provides the material for her memoir, I Missed the Spring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Rubin
• Release date: Aug 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301043156

Katherine Rubin

People talk about coming out of the closet, but I literally emerged from a pill box to write this book. In deep despair, with a daily regimen of a dozen pills to combat psychiatric, psychosomatic and age-related conditions, a glimmer of insight led to my first poem, "The Pill Box." I realized that the drugs were suppressing my poetry and the natural rhythm of my daily life.Women performing domestic tasks seemed to have the energetic rhythm of a healthy mind that looks positively to the chores ahead, whereas I was always full of dread. When I dispensed with the pill box and replaced it with daily sport, healthy nutrition and poetry, I finally found my rhythm in the juxtaposition of domestic activity and creative endeavour. For me, the one generates energy for the other. Finally, in my sixties, I reclaimed glowing health, joy and clarity and published four books of poetry. With this book, 'I Missed the Spring,' I am finally telling the story I have always wanted to share.I was born in London in 1947 into an artistic family. My father was a violinist, my paternal grandfather an artist and my maternal grandmother an opera singer. For many years, due to my mood disorder, I had no interest in music, though it was a part of my early years. Recently, I have begun to sing and to play the harp. Enjoying a talent for languages, one of my great joys is translating my poems into other tongues.In 1967 I came to Israel where I met my husband. It took us many years to realise that separation from my parents at an early age, was at the root of my mental illness, a situation which was perpetuated by my settling, far from them in another country.I have been to the other side, peered into the pit of insanity and seen the vacant eyes staring out of the inferno of the mind. I have plumbed the abyss of despair then scaled grassy heights and, for a few precious moments, held the key to the universe.

Book preview

I Missed the Spring

A Roller Coaster Ride Through A Bipolar Life

by Katherine Rubin

Copyright 2013 Katherine Rubin

Published by Katherine Rubin at Smashwords

Cover Design by Karen Phillips.

The poems that appear in ‘I Missed the Spring’ were first published in ‘Back From Beyond’ by Katherine Rubin (Penn Press UK 2008).

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook my not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

For David

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to my friends: Gill Teicher, Zipporah Porath, Susan Rosenberg, Francoise Weitz, and Margaret Graham for their encouragement and input during the writing of ‘I Missed the Spring,’ and to Reva Mann for her editing skills.

Table of Contents

Prologue

1) Early Days

2) Volunteer Bride

3) Warning Clouds

4) Collapse

5) New Beginning

6) Birth

7) The Rhythm

8) Homecoming

9) Therapy

10) Spring Fever

11) Return to Larchfield

12) House Guests

13) If You Should Not Return

14) Child of Peace

15) Time Out

16) The Mission

17) My Pen Exudes Silence

18) Kiss from a Prince

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

This is the First Book of Kaila, whom the Lord God of Israel set down on Albion’s peaceful shore in the year 1947, after the carnage of World War Two and the Holocaust of the Jewish People.

Her role was to bring into the world the Holy Spirit that God had prepared at the beginning of time and kept in abeyance beneath His Celestial Throne, and to restore to favour the People of Israel that they would be ready, when the time came, to serve as a Light unto the Nations and usher in the New Era of Eternal Life and Everlasting Peace.

For this assignment, Kaila’s spirit had to be refined to a core of steel and, as the Jewish People passed through the fires of Auschwitz before the return to their homeland, so she underwent a private holocaust in a remote, manor house in the English countryside. There, in the guise of a servant, Amalek (arch-enemy of Israel) discovered two small Jewish angels who had escaped the flames. Left in the care of a nursemaid, their parents came to be with them only at the weekends.

Kaila’s life became hellish at the hands of the Devil Incarnate. She was kept apart, in isolation, for days, without food or water, and all manner of stimulus including sexual experiments were carried out on her. Electrodes prodded her awake all through the night.

She was not left to die like the child martyrs in the extermination camps of Europe. Brought back from the brink of death towards the end of every week, she was force-fed and made ready to receive her parents. Such was Amalek’s diabolical skill that Kaila’s parents did not detect signs of abuse; in the same way that a mother is able to live in denial of her husbands’ sexual exploitation of their daughter under her own roof. Kaila was cowed not to reveal her agony by threat of similar abuse to her baby brother.

Although the horrors of her early years were mercifully erased from her conscious mind, the details of Kaila’s ordeal were indelibly engraved in every cell of her body and ripple of her soul. In later years, physical ailments invoked childhood tortures: Kaila was plagued by a chronic bleeding bowel, crippling headaches, inexplicable chills and insomnia. Her recollections of those years focused on the enchanted garden surrounding the Larchfield estate, where she spent her early years. She retained absolute recall of the hues of the myriad flowers, the chirps of birds, the tang of berries, the scents emanating from the rose bower and the breeze caressing her face as she explored Paradise in the grounds of Larchfield. For it was in the midst of Eden that she survived the fires of Hell.

The terrible trauma of childhood and awareness of the enormity of her Mission began to emerge after her wedding to a peer of the Chosen People, whom the Lord selected to love and cherish her. During the four decades that followed, as she battled with bouts of insanity and deep depressions interspersed with periods of prolific creativity, her husband never once failed her.

Though under constant psychiatric care and treated with mind-numbing medication, Kaila conducted the main work of her therapy in volumes of meticulous chronicles that eventually revealed the details of her sojourn in the nether-world and her true assignments.

This then, is the first book of Kaila.

1) Early Days

State of Israel is born (Jerusalem Post, May 16th 1948)

I was born at Westminster hospital in London, on 17th September 1947. My father was thirty-eight years old at my birth and I was his pride and joy. On November 29th, my parents held a large party in Larchfield, their country estate in Bedfordshire, to celebrate my birth. On that same day, in Flushing Meadow, a UN resolution approved the partition of Palestine, which meant for the Jews all over the world, the fulfilment of a two-thousand –year-old dream. My mother would often relate how, at one stage, my father lifted me high in the air declaring:

We have double cause for rejoicing. In Jerusalem they are dancing in the street, singing David Melech Yisrael, chai chai vekayam (David, King of Israel lives.) Our little Kaila is born to the reality of a homeland for the Jewish People, a haven for the survivors of the German death camps. May our little girl go forth into life as a proud, free Jewish citizen, never to know the horrors of a Holocaust.

Little did he imagine then, that I would undergo a private holocaust in glorious Larchfield and that twenty years later, I would enter Jerusalem, on the day of its reunification, become a citizen of the State of Israel and, in my sixties, conceive the grandest of visions with regard to my destiny vis-à-vis the Jewish People.

My first year was spent with adoring parents in the little flat in Chelsea and long weekends at the country estate with doting grandparents, uncles, aunts and friends of the family. They sat in deck chairs beneath the tulip tree on the huge expanse of lawn and I was passed from one loving lap to the next until I came to rest on a rug on the grass next to my dog Bluey, otherwise known as the Blue Prince of Marlowe.

My life changed with the birth of my brother, Paul, when I was one and a half years old. It became crowded in the little apartment in Chelsea, which was, in fact, my father’s bachelor flat and did not have the facilities for two small children. After a year of enduring cramped conditions, a decision was made whereby my brother and I would go to live at Larchfield with a nanny and the servants who ran the house and my mother would stay in Chelsea with my father, whose business was there. They planned to spend every weekend with us and meanwhile to look for a suitable house in town. They did not foresee that it would take five years nor did they imagine that I would need a lifetime to recover from those years of separation and the horrors that took place in Larchfield.

The approach to the manor house was dominated by a huge chestnut tree, and spread beneath it, in spring, a carpet of yellow daffodils and mauve crocuses. In the woods, encircling the property, bluebells, cyclamen and countless other wild flowers tangled riotously.

Set in the middle of a large expanse of closely cropped lawn, pinkish lilies floated in the brackish water of an ornamental pond. The lawn was flanked by wide flowerbeds planted with geraniums bordered by lacy, white flowers. The grass itself was a floral playground: we held buttercups under each other’s chins to see the yellow reflected and wound daisy chains around our chubby wrists.

Behind the house, flowers were grown to adorn the mansion and the family’s homes in town: crisp crinkled carnations like a ballerina’s tutu, and the smaller pinks, showy red and white peonies, stocks and hollyhocks with their clusters of flowers growing on a long stem and snapdragons, with which we played like children everywhere. Once, the gardener gave me a packet of seeds and a tiny plot that I tended daily after kindergarten. All the magnificent flowers on the Larchfield estate couldn’t compare to my own little patch of pink and blue cornflowers.

I have never, since, tasted apples like the ones in Larchfield’s orchard. Until this day, whenever I take the first bite out of a green apple, my taste buds half expect to relive the flavour of the fruit of my childhood. Peaches and plums, too, hung heavy on the bough and a whole area was set aside for berries: raspberries and strawberries, gooseberries and blackberries. But for me, one fruit had no compare: the tiny wild strawberries that hid in the rockery at the bottom of the vegetable garden.

Larchfield grew all its own vegetables. My favourite snack was a carrot: I loved pulling the curly, green top from the earth, washing away the soil under the tap of the iron sink in the garden shed, then biting into the crisp orange root.

In the leafy branches of the ancient oak, the productive chestnut and the larches from which the estate took its name, a symphony of birds chorused joyously: crows, pigeons, thrushes and my favourite robin red-breasts. At dawn, the woodpecker would tap at the tulip tree beneath our nursery window, the loneliest sound in the world.

My father named me Kaila after his beloved mother, a gentle, cultured lady from Berlin who played the piano and wrote beautiful poetry. She was run over by a horse and carriage, and died tragically when my father was seventeen years old. I always felt that this was the event that touched him most in his life.

He was the middle son of three boys. They all adored their sweet-tempered mother and feared their authoritarian father, an artist from Vienna. Samples of his work can be seen on a mural in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna and on the walls of my home. He made a good living from his art and when he died he left a house in the City of London, worth a considerable fortune. The last time I saw my grandfather was on his deathbed. He held my hand, repeatedly murmuring ‘Kaila.’ I strongly resembled my grandmother who had been dead for thirty years, and I sensed he was talking to her.

My father was born exactly one year after his elder brother and their lives were inextricably interwoven until my father died in 1986. My grandfather saw to it that they had an education rich in art and music. My father became a first violinist in a London orchestra while my uncle was the pianist in the same orchestra. In the 1930’s, together, they opened an antique gallery in Chelsea.

During World War Two, the brothers were too old to be called up for active service and joined the Metropolitan Police Force. Family lore has it that they shared a uniform and had to rush it to each other after a shift, not a problem as they lived in the same apartment building. It is told that my father, somewhat of a ladies’ man, once went up to an apartment to tell a young woman to close her blackout curtain and did not appear till morning.

During this time my father and my uncle juggled three demanding occupations: their musical careers, running the gallery and serving as policemen while the Germans bombed London ruthlessly.

Eventually the war ended and they turned in their uniform. Their musical careers also came to a close, though music always remained a major pleasure for them and their families. Until this day, whenever I hear a violin concerto, I see my father before me with a bashful look of pure pleasure on his face as his bow moves deftly across the strings.

Sharing their lives as they did, in 1945 the two brothers bought, jointly, a beautiful Queen Ann manor house adjacent to the village of Larchfield in Bedfordshire, whilst retaining their small apartments in Chelsea.

Running the antique gallery became their chief occupation and the means of their livelihood. My uncle took the dominant role and later became chairman of the International Organization of Art Dealers, while my father stayed in the background, performing the more mundane tasks involved in running the gallery and supporting his brother in his distinguished career. Father was a modest man, quiet, unassuming and seemingly slightly depressed, dominated not only by his brother but later by my flamboyant mother.

When my father was twenty years old, my grandfather married again, this time the sister of my maternal grandmother. My father’s new stepmother was extremely sociable and artistic and had a wide circle of friends. Her house was always full of interesting people. However this marriage was tragic. There were two children, half-sister and half-brother to my father. The daughter was stricken with polio at the age of twelve and after months in an iron lung, spent the rest of her life in a wheel chair, almost totally paralyzed. The son died at the age of twenty-two, riddled with cancer. Their mother died an untimely death of breast cancer. These tragedies made a marked impression on my early years.

My maternal grandfather was born in Brody, Austro-Hungary. His parents died when he was in his teens and in order to avoid conscription into the army he slipped away and came to London where his brother was already established in a jewellery and watch- repairing business. In 1900 he married his first wife who bore him four children. Two years after she died, my grandfather married again, the sister of my father’s stepmother. She was already in her thirties and he was most disapproving when she became pregnant but despite his objection, my mother came into the world. Thus my parents’ families became entwined, an extended clan, and shared their tragedies and joys.

A much-loved story of my childhood tells of a dinner party at my mother’s house, to which my father, aged twenty-seven, came with his fiancée. If someone at the table had said to my father: You are not going to marry that lovely young woman; you will marry that plain, plump ten-year old child, it would have sounded implausible, but so it was. He waited ten more years to marry and after an engagement of only six weeks, my parents were wed on July 4th 1946 when my mother was twenty years old. I was born one year later.

My mother was young and immature and followed the lead of my father, eighteen years her senior. It is the only way I can comprehend the decision to leave me and my baby brother with caretakers, thereby forfeiting the joy of participating in our early years and causing us unbearable pain and trauma. Didn’t they worry about us, miss us terribly? In later years, they were warm, nurturing parents, which makes it all the more difficult to fathom their abandonment. The only recollection I have of their weekend visits is of the four of us (my mother, father, Paul and I) cuddling up in their four-poster bed on a Sunday morning. I can see it even now. It must have represented for me, as a small child, moments of snugness and well-being in the midst of the horror of separation.

When I was eight, I moved back to London to live with my parents. Returned to the arms of my mother, born anew, my first memory of myself was as I walked up to my bedroom at the top of the Georgian town house. Something about the steep stairs filled me with dread.

My new bedroom was painted in eggshell blue and must have been well-designed for it delighted me as an eight-year old and still suited me perfectly when I left it as a bride, days before my twenty-second birthday. There was plenty of cupboard space and bookshelves, a glass cabinet for my collection of foreign dolls and a decorative shelf for the glass animals. My mother had even provided a kidney-shaped dressing table with a flowered pink chintz skirt to match the curtains. I shared the top floor with my brother and the live-in maid, who was usually an au-pair girl from some European country.

At that time, I was a slight child, yet I began to put on weight and within a year of coming back to live with my mother, I was obese. This was due partly to my mother’s need to overfeed me, as if to provide second nurturing and partly due to my insecurities, resulting from our lengthy separation. I became very clingy, filled with anxiety when my mother was out of my sight.

My mother enrolled me in a school in Fulham, of which she had fond memories, having been evacuated there in the war. However, it was in an impoverished part of London and most of the girls spoke with a Cockney accent. They made fun of me, not only because I was overweight but also on account of my ‘posh’ enunciation. They would imitate the way I talked and ask me about ‘Daddy’s yacht.’ (He didn’t have one.) In the six years I spent at the school, I dared bring only one girl to my elegant home: a girl from Baghdad, whom I met in Jewish prayers.

There were six hundred girls in the school of whom only half a dozen were Jewish. We were excused from prayers in the assembly hall and gathered in a classroom where a senior pupil would supervise the saying of ‘Shema Israel.’ This was new to me. During the years in the country, I must have been instructed to kneel by my bed before sleep and to say the Lord’s Prayer for now it became a ritual to say both, every night, not feeling fully protected unless both were word perfect.

At the end of the year our small group joined the general assembly for prize-giving. I can see myself dressed in a navy skirt with pale blue blouse and striped tie and remember how inspiring it was to sing, in the cavernous hall, the hymn by William Blake about Jerusalem in England.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the Holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen.

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark satanic mills

Despite the hostility towards me at school, I did well in my lessons, excelling in languages, especially Latin, which compensated for my consistent failure in mathematics. My Iraqi friend became the closest girlfriend I ever had and we passed our teen years together. Providently, she lived round the corner from my house in the smart Borough of Kensington. Our families had nothing in common: my parents were both born in Britain and hers newly arrived from Iraq, but our friendship overcame all disparity.

It wasn’t till I was about thirteen and went on a diet that, as my mother put it, the ugly duckling turned into a swan. I don’t know how to explain my metamorphosis. It was as if I made a miraculous recovery from my traumatic childhood and shed my insecurities and many extra pounds to become an attractive, poised young woman and an excellent student. Like all teenage girls, my interest turned to clothes, make-up and boys. A small photograph sums up that time: my best friend, Stella, petite and dark, and me, tall and fair, in identical negligees standing on a rumpled mattress on the floor during one of our sleepovers. We practiced applying Cleopatra make-up, which suited her, not me, gossiped until the early hours about boys and always in the background– the chansons of Charles Aznavour.

Stella confided in me that when she fondled herself she would fantasize about the French singer and he would make her feel soft and sexy. It was then that I realized that something was very wrong with me, that I was not like other young girls. The fantasies which aroused my awakening body were violent scenarios of rape by Nazi soldiers, gold buttons flashing and swastikas prominent on their armbands.

It wasn’t until many years later, that I made the connection between my brutal fantasies and the torture and abuse in Larchfield but in the intervening years, I lived with guilt, shame and puzzlement

I fell in love, for the first time, with a boy who lived across the road. He was typically English, blond with blue eyes and very good looking except for a slightly weak chin. We became inseparable, meeting almost every day after school, sometimes going to one of the beautiful parks in the neighbourhood (Holland Park, or Kensington Gardens). Once, sitting with him on a park bench, I must have laughed out loud because he suddenly looked horrified and said; You’ve have a filling in your tooth and I always thought you were perfect. Nobody, since, has ever considered me flawless. For most of my life, I have been plagued with anxieties and mood problems, whose impression overrode my efforts for an outward show.

When I was about sixteen, my girlfriend introduced me to her cousin, recently arrived from Baghdad. He was my first serious relationship. My parents had reservations about this boy and called him the camel driver because of his origin. However, I fell madly in love with him. He was not handsome, being rather short and having marked Semitic features but he had a magnetism that was hard to resist.

He went away to boarding school and I conducted my first real correspondence with him. There was a popular song at the time: I’ll send you all my love, every day in a letter, sealed with a kiss. Whenever I hear that song I think back to that summer of infatuation and the piles of his letters tied up with pink ribbon.

In the school holidays there were parties with his numerous relatives. He seemed delighted to show me off – his blond British girlfriend- and I was happy to be with him. Although he seemed sophisticated and I was very drawn to him, my virtue was in no danger because he considered me an innocent young Jewish girl and he did not take our physical relationship very far. This was fortunate because, though it appeared that I had overcome my traumatic early years, it was my sexuality that was most affected by the shadow cast by Larchfield. However, it was with him, once kissing in the back of a taxi, that I felt, for a moment, the melting moisture of desire, a sensation so extraordinary I never forgot it, for it never really returned, despite a loving marriage, until I was in my fifties.

At seventeen I attended a private tutorial college where I studied European languages. My professor of German and English literature was a plump, bald, unassuming man with extraordinary eyes: he had one blue and one brown and probably for that reason he avoided a direct gaze. He once told me that he had been among the liberators of Bergen Belsen and that he had never really recovered from that experience.

He received his students in the basement in a glass-fronted cubicle, which looked out on the boys’ study. On the day in question we were working on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I was aware that two of the students were staring at me and became flustered and lost my concentration.

The two young men approached me later, in recess. They introduced themselves as brothers; they were both blond, but there the similarity ended. The younger one was short and slight with a face like an angel; a romantic figure. His brother was very tall and broad. He appeared to be slightly balding and I realized he was older than most of the other students. He had a most commanding attitude and, later I learned they were from an aristocratic family in Munich; he was in fact a Count.

Coming straight to the point, the big man invited me out for dinner the following Saturday night. A look passed between the boy, nicknamed Baby, and me. He had wanted to ask me for a date and we were probably more compatible but big brother had taken charge.

It was early summer. I wore a black sleeveless dress with a light white coat. My hair was very long and hung down my back. He picked me up in a taxi and took me back to his mews house off Eaton Square. Apologizing, he said he had to make a phone call to Germany before we went to dinner. I was extremely uneasy, as I had never gone out with such a worldly young man and refused to part with my coat. Eventually, he called another taxi and we drove to a restaurant in the London Hilton.

He was charming, very attentive and most sophisticated. I was drawn into his spell, despite myself. His brother, who had captured my imagination, seemed like a young boy compared to this exciting man. Our dates consisted of dinners in expensive restaurants, dancing in popular nightclubs where I mingled with such stars of the sixties, as Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and the super model Twiggy; long walks in Hyde Park in the moonlight and lingering kisses in taxicabs. He was very respectful of me because in his world there were only good girls and bad girls. I can’t remember if we spoke English or German but I wrote him an essay in German about one of our dates and he said I had invented a new compound word.

My parents disapproved of this relationship with a German young man and called him the Kraut. I was insistent that one couldn’t blame the young people for the sins of their fathers and saw it almost as a crusade to date a young German. Later, I followed up with a sojourn in Germany. At that time in my life, there appeared to be no trace of the Larchfield experience in my psyche. On the contrary, I was searching for reconciliation with the children of the nation who had perpetrated the Holocaust.

I spent that summer in Rome, looking after the children of clients of my father’s antique gallery. They lived in a street off the Piazza di Spagna and my count arranged to meet me on the Spanish Steps on a certain day in August but he never came.

However, in the autumn, on my way to the Goethe Institute near Rosenheim, he picked me up at Munchen railway station and took me for lunch at his mansion on the Maximilian Strasse before returning me to the train. I had the feeling that I would never see him again and, indeed, I never did.

My decision to spend some time in Germany at the Goethe Institute to improve my language set in motion an acrimonious dispute with my favourite Uncle Walter. He wasn’t a real uncle. My family adopted him during the war. He had been a high court judge in Germany before Hitler came to power. In his position, he was among the first to comprehend what was about to happen and had made a speedy departure from Germany. He was adamant. I should not go. He had never