A Small Person Far Away. Judith Kerr
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placards.
“It must be Hungary again,” said Anna. “I saw a procession in Hyde Park this morning.”
At that moment the crowd slowed to a stop, and simultaneously a noisy party emerged from a pub nearby, causing a congestion. One of them, a large drunken looking woman, almost tripped and swore loudly.
“What the hell’s this then?” she said, and another member of the group answered, “Bloody Hungary.”
A placard bearer near Anna, an elderly man in dark clothes, mistook this exchange for interest in his cause and turned towards them. “The Russians kill our people,” he explained with difficulty in a thick accent. “Many hundreds die each day. Please the English to help us…”
The woman stared incredulously. “Think we want another war?” she shouted. “I’m not having anyone drop bombs on my kids just for a lot of bloody foreigners!”
Just then the crowd began to move again and a gap opened between Anna and the kerb. “Come on,” said Richard and pushed her through. They ran across Notting Hill Gate in the increasingly heavy rain, then zig-zagged through dark side streets on the other side until they were standing outside a tall terraced house and Richard was ringing the bell. She only had time to take in an overgrown front garden with what looked like a pram under a tarpaulin, when the door was opened by a slight, pretty woman with untidy fair hair.
“Richard!” she cried. “And you must be Anna. I’m Elizabeth. How lovely – we’ve been longing to see you.”
She led the way through the narrow hall, edging with practised ease round a large balding teddy and a scooter leaning against the wall.
“Did you get caught up in the procession?” she called back as they followed her up the narrow stairs. “They’ve been demonstrating outside the Russian Embassy all day. Poor souls, much good may it do them.”
She suddenly darted sideways into a kitchen festooned with washing, where a small boy was eating cornflakes with a guinea pig squatting next to his dish.
“James thinks no one is going to lift a finger to help them. He thinks it’s Munich all over again,” she said as Anna and Richard caught up with her and, almost in the same breath to the little boy, “Darling, you won’t forget to put Patricia back in her cage, will you. Remember how upset you were when Daddy nearly trod on her.”
In the momentary silence while she snatched some ice cubes from the refrigerator into a glass bowl, the sound of two recorders, each playing a different tune and interspersed with wild childish giggles, drifted down from somewhere above.
“I’m afraid the girls are not really musical,” she said and added, “Of course no one wants a third world war.”
As they followed her out of the kitchen, Anna saw that the guinea pig was now slurping up cornflakes, its front paws in the dish, and the small boy called after them, “It wasn’t Patricia’s fault. Daddy should have looked!”
In the L-shaped drawing room next door James Dillon was waiting for them, his Roman emperor’s face incongruous above the old sweater he was wearing instead of his usual BBC pinstripes. He kissed Anna and put an arm round Richard’s shoulders, and when they were all settled with drinks, raised his glass.
“To you,” he said. “To Richard’s new serial which I’m sure will be as good as his first and to Anna’s new job.”
This was the cue she had nervously been waiting for. She said quickly, “I’m afraid I may not be able to start straight away,” and explained about Mama’s illness. The Dillons were immediately full of sympathy. James told her not to worry and to take as much time off as she liked and Elizabeth said, how awful for her but nowadays with penicillin pneumonia wasn’t nearly as serious as it used to be. Then she said, “But whatever is your mother doing in Berlin?”
James said, “It’s where you came from, isn’t it?” and Anna explained that Mama was translating documents for the American Occupation Force and that, yes, she and her family had lived in Berlin until they had had to flee from the Nazis when she was nine.
“I didn’t see any horrors,” she said quickly, alarmed by more sympathy in Elizabeth’s eyes. “My parents got us out before any of it happened. In fact, my brother and I rather enjoyed it. We lived in Switzerland and in France before we came here and we really liked all the different schools and different languages. But of course it was very hard for my parents, especially my father being a writer.”
“Terrible.” James shook his head, and Elizabeth asked, “And where is your father now?”
“Oh,” said Anna, “he died soon after the war.” She felt suddenly dangerously exposed. Something was rising up inside her and she began to talk very fast so as to keep it under. “He died in Hamburg,” she almost gabbled. “Actually it was very strange because he’d never been back to Germany since we left. But the British Control Commission asked him to write about the German theatre which was just starting up again. He’d been famous as a drama critic before Hitler, you see, and I think it was supposed to be good for German morale.”
She paused, but the Dillons were both looking at her, absorbed in the story, and she had to continue.
“They flew him over – he’d never flown, but he loved it. I don’t think he knew quite what to expect when he got there, but when he stepped off the plane, there were reporters and photographers waiting for him. And then a great lunch with speeches, and a tour of the city. And when he walked into the theatre that evening the audience stood up and applauded. I suppose it was all too much for him. Anyway—” She glanced at Richard, suddenly horribly unsure if she could go on. “He had a stroke and died a few weeks later. My mother was with him, but we… my brother and I…”
Richard put his hand over hers and said, “I’ve always been so sorry that I never knew him. Or read him. It seems he’s untranslatable,” and the Dillons, after James had refilled her glass, tactfully embarked on a discussion of translations in general and that of a recent French play in particular.
She was grateful for Richard’s hand and for not having to talk. She had not expected to be so upset. After all it had happened years ago. It was the thought of how it had happened, of course. She remembered Papa’s coffin draped with the Union Jack. Common practice, they had said for a British subject dying abroad. It had seemed strange, for Papa had never managed to speak English properly and had been a British subject only for the last year of his life. Then the icy hall where the German musicians had played Beethoven’s Seventh which Papa had loved so much, and the British soldiers who, together with Max and a local newspaperman, had helped to carry his coffin.
As Papa had planned.
If Mama died, it wouldn’t be like that. Anyway, Mama couldn’t die. She was too strong. Anna suddenly remembered with total clarity how Mama had looked when she and Max had arrived, stunned, in Hamburg.
“Bitte etwas Tee.” Tea in the hotel bedroom, the only warm place in the devastated city. Mama saying, “There is something I must tell you about Papa.”
As though anything else could possibly matter, Anna thought, apart from the fact that Papa was dead. Then Mama talking about how Papa had failed to recover from the effects of the stroke. But they knew that already. Something about German doctors. How you could get anything for a packet of cigarettes. What?? Anna had thought. What??
“He was paralysed and in pain. He felt he could no longer think as clearly as he wished. I’d always promised to help him if that happened.”
The sharp intake of breath from Max beside her. Mama’s eyes shifting minutely towards him.
“So I did what he asked. I helped him.”
She had said it in such matter of fact tones that even then Anna had not immediately understood.
“It was what he wanted.” Mama had stared at them both, white faced and steely.
Max had said in a forlorn voice, “But we never said