Mark Glanville - The Goldberg Variations

After the fashion of ‘better’ Germans, Mum’s father had been sent to be educated in England. There he met his gentile wife, ‘the Ethiopian in the fuel supply’ as Dad called her, quoting WC Fields; according to Orthodox Jewish laws of matrilineal descent, she, our only non-Jewish grandparent, was the only one whose status mattered when it came to determining which side of the gentile/Jewish divide we fell. After waiting for him while he was interned on the Isle of Man during the First World War as an enemy alien, my grandmother followed him to Holland, the place of his repatriation, giving birth to my mother in Amsterdam whence they returned to Berlin. They remained there until 1933 when he was granted a visa allowing him to emigrate to England, his reward for the indignity of having to train up a young Nazi journalist on the Berliner Tageblatt. By the time she was twelve, Mum had already worn more suits than Dad would have to wear in his entire life.

While we washed up and dried the dishes, Dad would sing. Like an old-time music-hall performer, he could do a bit of everything.

‘Brian, are you just going to sit there all evening singing songs, or can we have some help?’

‘Sit here, just here all evening singing songs …’

There wasn’t a word, a phrase, a situation that didn’t remind him of some ghastly old number he’d immediately begin to croon.

‘Oh Brian, shut up!’

‘Shut up, that’s how I am without you. Shut up, alone and blue …’

Pavlov’s dog had learned many commands, but his howl was melodious.

‘Where on earth do you get all those dreadful old songs?’

‘I’m a philistinc, mutteler, but a lovable one.’

In the contrast between Mum’s polite, old-fashioned soprano and Dad’s earthy baritone, one heard the difference between the environments that had nurtured them. Snatches of lieder, the German songs Mum had heard as a girl, came to her intermittently, like her reminiscences of 1920s Berlin. Dad’s world was as clear as a photograph, but Mum’s was more like a jigsaw whose pieces she sometimes threw us but which we were never able to complete. There were parts of it we weren’t allowed to see, so the lieder became important, capturing something of the essence of Mum’s background, as songs and jokes did Dad’s. It was practically the only time we heard her use German, a language she claimed, somewhat strangely, she no longer spoke. Mum’s rendition of Schubert’s ‘Heidenroslein’ was my first acquaintance with a composer whose music was always able to take over for me at the point where words could no longer describe feelings. Schubert’s setting matches Goethe’s simple moral tale of a boy who sees, plucks, and is pricked by a beautiful rose, with an even simpler accompaniment, but the painful thorns which so often accompany beauty, wound a vocal line the cheerful accompaniment can never quite heal. It captured the essence of my mother.

For her the kitchen in the basement was less a domain than a prison where three meals had to be prepared each day and served on a table at which the places were always neatly laid – once the washing-up was finished it was usually time to start cooking again. She was never quite alone down there, even when we’d all gone to bed and Dad was off at a football match or upstairs watching Kojak. Something was incarcerated with her that would sometimes vent its frustration by hurling things around and occasionally make an unwelcome appearance; a small child she sometimes mistook for one of us, that only she had ever seen. In time Mum’s poltergeist became Dad’s scapegoat when no one else could be blamed for the not infrequent disappearance of his personal possessions, as if he subconsciously perceived it as the agent of her ill will.

‘There’s no other explanation. It’s been polted,’ he’d complain, though it struck me that the confusion of competing files, bags and newspapers in his study, where items as large as footballs could remain hidden for weeks, was a far more likely explanation. The poltergeist’s unhappy presence somehow reflected her own predicament, tied below stairs. It frightened a couple of au-pairs; one ran up the stairs screaming after a mirror was lifted off its hook and thrown to the floor with a crash. But though we were told it drew on our childish energy, we only saw the effects of its actions once, when a loaf of bread mysteriously rose from the work surface and hovered in mid-air before falling to the floor. Even Dad was upstaged that evening.

I was envious of Mum’s relationship with the poltergeist. It meant she was capable of inhabiting worlds denied the rest of us. I knew Mum had special gifts. She understood the healing qualities of music, when our imaginations had been over-stimulated by tales of entities such as the poltergeist in the basement. Once or twice it appeared in the hall, though that was as far as it went. Something was tying it down, preventing release into the realms she and it would have preferred to inhabit. I guess it came to remind her of that fact, as much as to sympathise with her sense of captivity. Confronted with such a reflection of her own dilemma, no wonder she felt afraid.

There’s no need to be afraid in the hall. You just have to pretend to be the ghost who might meet you there

(from The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud)

‘The main trouble is that he has never really accepted the arrival of the twin brother and sister, who were born when he was two years old. Their birth threw him into turmoil which manifested itself in many obvious and wretched ways. He became and has remained heavily dependent on and involved with me. There is a predilection for sadomasochistic situations and the beginnings of a pleasure in the idea of whipping. Also he shows a potential for pervert tendencies such as a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants. While he tends to be bullying and aggressive at home he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school, and not very popular. In his actual work he is doing well, showing a special interest in History and English.’

Pamela Glanville to Dr Winnicott, letter, 1967.

Early history is the bastard child of personal recollection and other people’s anecdotes. Its objects, like the ghosts and monsters that flit in and out of view in old penny arcade machines, are glimpsed fleetingly. Some, including my own family, employ psychotherapists to bust these machines and compel their images to stay in view long enough to be assessed and analysed. I was sent off to track mine down at eight, when Mum wrote her letter to Dr Winnicott, but I can’t say I came away with a more focused picture of childhood than those who never had the benefits of therapy. To me childhood is still a lost play of which scant tangible evidence remains; fragments quoted by others, discovered on papyrus, inscribed on stone.

An early talkie is probably the oldest piece in my archive. Stripey-uniformed nanny Jeanette buckles my harness abruptly with jolts and bumps and hauls me behind her as she pushes a pram containing my new twin brother and sister towards Kensington Gardens.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! Her hand comes down across the side of my face like a whip: it stings. My check goes warm, almost comfortingly so. I still can’t keep up.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! This one catches me across the side of my head and makes me think about what I’m doing with my feet. Although I try to correct them, I find myself stumbling and tripping. Again and again her hand comes down. Much fainter is the reel of her shoving me against a stone step and smashing my tooth. The incident where she hurled me across the kitchen with such force that I hit the wall, landing half-conscious on the floor is someone else’s first-hand testimony. The cleaning lady witnessed it, but she didn’t want to cause any bother so she didn’t tell Mum. When I told Mum about the regular beatings, nanny Jeanette denied it vehemently and she believed her.