The Love-Charm of Bombs (49 page)

Late on the evening of 19 February, after a rather flat goodbye drink with Sam, Hilde left Vienna for Carinthia, where a crisis was developing for the British in a Jewish refugee camp. These Jews had been rescued from Polish death camps and were now making their way towards Palestine. Crossman, a pro-Zionist Labour MP, was angry with the Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who in the aftermath of war had refused to remove the limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine. He wanted Hilde to expose the difficulties of the Jews and illustrate their need for a new homeland.

Hilde had spent her childhood holidays in the mountains of Carinthia, and this was another act of return. Wrapped in a fur coat, she lay in her sleeping car, leaning out of the open window of the train, smelling the snowy air around the heavy branches of the fir trees, and looking up to the sky, ‘as wide and full of cloudy mountains as the dark plateau below'. She arrived at dawn at Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, where she was taken to the press headquarters in Dellach, driving out of the city on the country roads along the Wörther lake. The press quarters were at the Villa Porsche, an old country house very like the Carinthian hotels Hilde had stayed in as a child. Closing her eyes, feeling the hot tiles against her back, touching the planed wood of the bench with her fingertips and smelling the logs in the fireplace, Hilde was transported back two decades.

 

I am on a winter holiday with my parents and sit here, while they settle into their bedroom, to come down soon for our first country breakfast together. Outside, the snow, the sun, the mountains, the lake are waiting. The times are still friendly. And I am still secure within them.

 

Two days later Hilde reported at one of the five Displaced Persons' camps in Klagenfurt. One in ten people in Carinthia was now a so-called DP and many of these were accused of black market dealings and political activity. Among these, a sizeable proportion were Jews. She was shown around a row of shacks where men, women and children were standing around or leaning ‘in the limp posture of people who expect nothing from the next day'. The commandant of the camp, an enthusiastic British officer, told her that he was surprised by their attitude. He was keen to plant a garden of spring flowers in the camp but the inmates could not be bothered to help him.

Why, Hilde asked in her diary account of Vienna, did these people refuse to return to their homes? ‘Is it fear or idleness, cunning or stupidity?' They did not seem like political conspirators; they were more like tired and mentally lazy people who had got used to their provisional way of life. They had been forced by the Nazis to work hard during the war. Now they had heard about Tito's ‘terror' in Yugoslavia and about the new regime in Poland and were reluctant to return home.

 

Reality has already disappeared once from their lives. Now they have gained the reality of a little shack, an iron stove and regular meals from the store-room that lies on the other side of the clay path. Stubbornly, these uprooted peasants cling to their wretched camp regime, the only regime that has taken on a continued existence for them.

 

After surveying the camp, Hilde was taken to the row of shacks housing the Jewish survivors of ghettos and concentration camps who were waiting to move on to Palestine. Some of the Jews had identified themselves as Polish or Romanian citizens and had been placed with their compatriots, but most had declared themselves homeless and refused to say where they were born. They were now housed together. Outside stood young men in their twenties, unshaven, ‘with a look of wild despair in their eyes and of that physical sturdiness which has enabled them above all others to survive the stone quarry and the torture chamber'. Inside there were women lying down and children running aimlessly around. According to their spokesperson none of them wanted to stay in Europe. ‘Europe is a graveyard, one big graveyard with our mothers, fathers, sisters. For us there is only one country – Palestine.'

Hilde Spiel had mixed feelings about the situation of these Jews. In her article for the
New Statesman
she described their present situation with compassion and horror. ‘These people have no documents other than the blue number tattooed on their arms in Nazi prisons. They are unshaven, tattered, with tired, haunted looks in their eyes.' However, Hilde was not convinced by the claims of the Zionists and was sad that so many Jews would rather move to Palestine than return home. She observed in her diary account that ‘a worldwide Jewish confederation has come into being that did not exist when Hitler determined to destroy them'. The Jews wanting to emigrate to Palestine were aided by the American army, who helped them at different stages of their journey. Hilde felt that the Zionist agitators were denying the reality of the situation and that the Jewish refugees who possessed merely a rucksack of dirty clothing and the recollection of their murdered family did not realise that quite apart from Arab opposition, ‘even with the most modern methods of irrigation and soil cultivation only a fraction of them could hope to settle in Palestine'.

Hilde had always been ambivalent about her own Jewishness. On her mother's side she came from a family of assimilated Jews who were proud to be culturally more Austrian than Jewish. She was angry, now, that the Nazis and the Zionists had combined to create renewed segregation, and that countries like Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia were doing so little to encourage Jews to return. If plans had been devised for the restitution of these Jews in their original home countries, many more might have stayed. In Vienna, where the situation was better, only a quarter of the Jewish population had expressed a wish to emigrate to Palestine. However, given her grandmother's death and her parents' narrow escape, Hilde did have some personal investment in the Jewish plight. She, like Peter, had been impatient with her grandmother, who had behaved with culpable innocence, going shopping at the forbidden time, reprimanding the laundress for starching a delicate tablecloth and generally regarding the new regime as an insubordinate uprising which could be countered by stubborn resistance. In the end Hilde responded to the post-war situation with anxious uncertainty, stating that ‘a solution must be found while it can still be carried out and before the situation gets irretrievably out of hand'.

Hilde remained in Carinthia for a few more days, sightseeing in Italy and exploring the Carinthian Alps where she had spent her childhood holidays. Here she mourned her father once again. Climbing up a winding path to the peak of a mountain, smelling the Alpine moss and resinous bark, she was aware that she was surrounded by her father's favourite climate: ‘the ozone that he sniffed with the same delight in the mountains as in the laboratory, whose floor shook under the dynamo'. In the mountains, more than in the city, her return had become a homecoming. ‘I seem to sense his presence.'

On 24 February Hilde went back to Vienna, where she had a fortnight to say goodbye to her friends. She spent this time with the English, visiting artists' studios and dancing in Kinsky's, the officers' club. She recorded in her autobiography that ‘with my most faithful escort, Sam, an intimate little drama came about'. He was, she writes, ‘no ladies' man and was now at the mercy of contradictory feelings'. There is no record of what Sam was asking for or what exactly ensued. Perhaps Sam was too earnest to accept Hilde's sense that one man or woman was not enough for a lifetime and wanted their relationship to be formalised. Perhaps he had his own commitments at home. Either way, on 7 March Hilde returned to London, where she was met by Peter at the airport and found that he was looking pale and strained and was in a bad mood.

Hilde was pleased to be reunited with her children but felt restless, wanting to dash off again. While in Vienna she had written to Peter that it was a ‘most dreary thought to have to go back to England where, as I read, fats are being reduced and bread about to be rationed, to a life of tedium and boredom, when I could pull my weight this way or the other, and do some work as well as you.' She was sure that he would regret letting her go, now that she had seen what life could be like when it was filled with real things instead of merely the planning of meals. ‘I'm sick, sick, of a housewife's life. That doesn't mean that I'm not going back to it meekly, because it's my duty, and I asked for it, anyway. But it's a terrible sacrifice all the same.' Now she found that the housewife's life was indeed as depressing as she had feared, not least because she and Peter spent their time quarrelling before he escaped back to Germany on 11 March.

Initially, Peter was stationed in Buende, where he was bored and lonely. ‘A dozen times each day I ask myself why in hell I had to come out here when I had a warm room, a comfortable bed, a good writing desk, all my books, good lighting, a sweet wife and children at home,' he complained to Hilde, who was glad to be missed although the order of his desires was hardly flattering. And he did not ask her to come and join him. He was sure that she would hate it there; it was even worse than Wimbledon; there was only one ‘stinking little cinema'. Hilde was not convinced. She was fed up with Wimbledon. Flesch had invited her to the theatre to see a premiere of Sean O'Casey's
Red Roses for Me
but otherwise she had seen no one except her mother and children.

She wrote back, telling Peter that she thought that Smollett was much happier since returning to Vienna and suggesting that they should follow his example. Peter replied that it would be a mistake. ‘Our stakes in England are too high. I have invested too much and would really have to write off an enormous potential capital.' He was getting older and the younger generation was catching up, but he was convinced that he could still make it. A few days later he reported that he was now having a very happy time in Berlin and had ‘fallen in love a little bit with a very charming girl' called Barbara Ward, who he was taking to the opera on Saturday. She was petite and very pretty, though her legs were not especially desirable. ‘Also to my delight I've found out that she isn't quite as clever as I thought she was but says silly things occasionally.' Hilde wept with rage and replied with a furious tirade, blaming him for her current loneliness and isolation and complaining that he had only helped to arrange her trip to Austria in order to keep her quiet.

Peter responded in turn that Hilde's letter had made him unspeakably angry. ‘You have set yourself up in Wimbledon, all heated up in furious resentment, spitting poison, and demanding, demanding, demanding – a whole lot of things that are all contradictory.' She was so self-righteous that she was treating him like a slave who simply needed shouting at. Hilde had complained that she was thrown on her own resources and regretted marrying him at all. ‘I have never said that you must stay in Wimbledon,' he retorted angrily; ‘I'm quite as sick of it as you.' He would take a house in town or farm the children out as she wished. He was even willing to come back and spend every evening in the flat with his ‘beloved little muffins' if she would like a year of freedom and independence. ‘And if', he added magnanimously, ‘you want to go away altogether, again I would say: Mummi darling, it is your own life and I will do everything so that you can live it. I know the price you have been paying these last few years, and I know that it is a heavy one.' For his part he regretted mentioning Barbara Ward; it was merely a joke, and the trip to the opera had not occurred. ‘I really saw her only once, during lunch time with six or seven others . . . So much for my love affairs. But it just shows in what a terrible state of nerves you must have worked yourself for this innocent and silly remark to have made such a disastrous effect upon you.'

Hilde did not reply to this letter, and Peter's missives became increasingly plaintive. ‘I feel very suspended and unhappy,' he wrote on 10 April, wondering if he should come home at once. On 13 April he received an envelope from her enclosing bills and clippings but no letter. ‘I must assume that this is meant to provoke, meant to hurt. It does. Are the children all right?' Finally, she relented. ‘Of course, I still think you wrote up that girl affair in a thoughtless mood,' she replied, not quite believing his protestations. ‘If there's one thing a woman hates it's to be made the confidante of her husband. You may not believe me, but I'd far rather you'd gone to bed with her and not told me, than to have written about something that didn't even materialise.' Hilde was becoming infuriated with his confessions of minor infidelities which seemed designed to provoke jealousy, using honesty as a pretext for selfishness. She knew that she could not be the only woman in his life. She would not dream of denying him a privilege that she might want to have herself (and had indeed already had). What she minded was the breaking of the taboos she would describe in
Lisa's Room
.
He had said the wrong thing, play-acted when candour was called for, and deliberately hurt her ‘in cold blood'. ‘Thank God,' Peter wrote back. ‘I was getting very seriously worried lest we had really drifted apart in such a way that drastic action was needed to restore the front line. But we are still speaking the same language, my Mummi dear, and that is really all that matters.' Meanwhile he had read her Vienna article in the
New Statesman
and hoped she would not mind his saying that ‘it wasn't quite as smooth and faultless as it could have been, if we had gone over it together for half an hour'. She should try writing shorter sentences. Normal relations had resumed.

It was becoming clear that Hilde and Peter's marriage would only survive if they could both decamp from Wimbledon together, either to Europe or to a more settled domestic life in central London. That summer, they debated whether to stay in England or to move to Germany. ‘I have one firm conviction and that is that from the point of view of a full, animated, amusing life there is nothing like being in the Army of Occupation,' Hilde had written to Peter from Vienna on 7 February. ‘Darling, there's nothing I adore more than a Foreign Correspondent's life,' she added a week later. On 10 February she had suggested rather wildly to Peter that they should buy a house in Buende and criss-cross their way across Europe in a car. ‘This is such a fascinating time, perhaps the only time we've got before the atom bomb, and we must see and do and write and talk as much as we can, in fact, make the most out of it.'