The car waiting outside was not ours. Neither would the private railway
compartment be.
Both belonged to our neighbour. I sometimes wonder what happened to dear, fat Mrs. Rosenberg, shunned by all but us. Back home, perhaps, to Germany, and her wealthy husband's factories, when the war came? Perhaps. A German was never really welcome among the better people of Manchester Square. Though now, of course, a Jew, even a German one, is as unwelcome in Berlin as they would be in the Russia of fifty years ago.
To go to America was, Aunt Edith had cried, as she came in for the pounce, a great opportunity. To go there as a guest, of one of New York's greatest bank managers (my great uncle, Frederick Gordon, manager of the Fifth Avenue branch of Barclay's Bank), would surely spell success.
Success, of course, being marriage.
So many novels nowadays, get it all wrong. Naturally, they have to do something to keep people's spirits up in time of war, but they seem to think that all women of my class and generation yearned escape from the confines of arranged and restrictive marriages – a frivolous fiction. Au contraire - we did not. Yearn for escape? We learned, instead, to embrace. To accept our fate, our lot, and be happy and thankful.
I left Manchester Square with everything I had left in the world – a substantial amount - packed into a large black leather handbag from my school days, a pair of suitcases, and a sponge bag. Everything else, crushed into a hideous collection of mismatched and battered trunks, which has been sent ahead of me to Southampton by freight train the week before.
Southampton was my choice. Aunt Edith, old dear, had been adamant I should travel with Cunard, but Cunard meant the best of British. British crew, British décor, British passengers – the inevitable bore with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the last half-century of Lords, his wife, the fleshy woman with such an eye.
And perhaps more rationally (how we girls were encouraged to think rationally then!), Cunard also meant Liverpool, and Liverpool meant dirt and grime and hours on some grotty extra-urban slow train.
So Southampton and, more joyously for me, the Titanic, it was. My choice, and my savings that procured me the hideously expensive stateroom.
I do not recall whether it was sunny that day. The chauffeur placed a rug over my knee, and without a second glance, we set off for the station. I left Manchester Square, and London, for the last time, or so I thought, without a single look backwards at the settle, gentle life I was abandoning. Tea at the Savoy on my birthday, the patronage of poor neglected, socially inept old Mrs. Rosenberg (so different from clever English Aunt Edith, who knew all!), with her chauffeur and automobile, her pots of money and season ticket to the opera – all this, but her inability to procure an invitation to any halfway decent event in London.
So very different from Aunt Edith, whose terraced house's upper bedrooms dated from the middle of the last century, whose old-fangled bath spouted erratic gushes of boiling water from a geyser, who was the last of the old school, the poor gentlewoman, whose financial situation dipped and rose yearly as her assets fell irrevocably, in whose secret shame her great niece, myself, was embroiled when she became her companion at the tender age of sixteen – too young for London. Could it have spoiled me?
Aunt Edith was the last of a dying clan – those who had the breeding, but didn't have the wealth. In the aftermath of that industrialist society, money beat manners, hands down.
I had only one regret. As we passed a station, I recalled Aunt Edith cautioning me against its associated moral filth, and I found myself very much wishing I'd ridden the tube.
Aunt Edith was to accompany me to Queenstown. She had, she said, always wanted to see the Ireland of her youth, where her parents kept a country house, which they had shut up and sold when she was ten, and she had not yet returned. She would, she said, spend a pleasant night's stay in Queenstown, and buy all her lace to bring back to the dressmaker, and to make up into charity bazaar contributions, and presents for everyone for Christmas. And perhaps, she added tentatively as we boarded the train at Waterloo, enough to darn some nice new antimacassars for the drawing room.
Southampton has never, to my knowledge, been a particularly inspiring place. But it was that day.
Considering the ship was carrying nowhere near its full complement of passengers, an unusually vast crowd had turned up to see the ship off.
"Workers' wives, I expect", sniffed Aunt Edith from her corner seat. "After all, this ship's keeping them in work, despite the miners."
Aunt Edith, being elderly and somewhat prone to paranoia, was suspicious of the miner's strike which had, she breathed shakily, almost ruined her darling niece's plans. Though, naturally, had I travelled with Cunard...
The ship was huge and lovely, and everything one expected. When I mull over it, it must have been sunny, for how else could the white paintwork of the upper decks gleam so terribly brightly?
In these days of identity cards, it is pleasant to recall a time when one could, with a wave of a daintily gloved hand and a silently spoken assurance ("Yes, I am a person of quality. I am a lady, you may bow and scrape – please do".)
Aunt Edith and I took to the gangplank, and boarded.
Both belonged to our neighbour. I sometimes wonder what happened to dear, fat Mrs. Rosenberg, shunned by all but us. Back home, perhaps, to Germany, and her wealthy husband's factories, when the war came? Perhaps. A German was never really welcome among the better people of Manchester Square. Though now, of course, a Jew, even a German one, is as unwelcome in Berlin as they would be in the Russia of fifty years ago.
To go to America was, Aunt Edith had cried, as she came in for the pounce, a great opportunity. To go there as a guest, of one of New York's greatest bank managers (my great uncle, Frederick Gordon, manager of the Fifth Avenue branch of Barclay's Bank), would surely spell success.
Success, of course, being marriage.
So many novels nowadays, get it all wrong. Naturally, they have to do something to keep people's spirits up in time of war, but they seem to think that all women of my class and generation yearned escape from the confines of arranged and restrictive marriages – a frivolous fiction. Au contraire - we did not. Yearn for escape? We learned, instead, to embrace. To accept our fate, our lot, and be happy and thankful.
I left Manchester Square with everything I had left in the world – a substantial amount - packed into a large black leather handbag from my school days, a pair of suitcases, and a sponge bag. Everything else, crushed into a hideous collection of mismatched and battered trunks, which has been sent ahead of me to Southampton by freight train the week before.
Southampton was my choice. Aunt Edith, old dear, had been adamant I should travel with Cunard, but Cunard meant the best of British. British crew, British décor, British passengers – the inevitable bore with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the last half-century of Lords, his wife, the fleshy woman with such an eye.
And perhaps more rationally (how we girls were encouraged to think rationally then!), Cunard also meant Liverpool, and Liverpool meant dirt and grime and hours on some grotty extra-urban slow train.
So Southampton and, more joyously for me, the Titanic, it was. My choice, and my savings that procured me the hideously expensive stateroom.
I do not recall whether it was sunny that day. The chauffeur placed a rug over my knee, and without a second glance, we set off for the station. I left Manchester Square, and London, for the last time, or so I thought, without a single look backwards at the settle, gentle life I was abandoning. Tea at the Savoy on my birthday, the patronage of poor neglected, socially inept old Mrs. Rosenberg (so different from clever English Aunt Edith, who knew all!), with her chauffeur and automobile, her pots of money and season ticket to the opera – all this, but her inability to procure an invitation to any halfway decent event in London.
So very different from Aunt Edith, whose terraced house's upper bedrooms dated from the middle of the last century, whose old-fangled bath spouted erratic gushes of boiling water from a geyser, who was the last of the old school, the poor gentlewoman, whose financial situation dipped and rose yearly as her assets fell irrevocably, in whose secret shame her great niece, myself, was embroiled when she became her companion at the tender age of sixteen – too young for London. Could it have spoiled me?
Aunt Edith was the last of a dying clan – those who had the breeding, but didn't have the wealth. In the aftermath of that industrialist society, money beat manners, hands down.
I had only one regret. As we passed a station, I recalled Aunt Edith cautioning me against its associated moral filth, and I found myself very much wishing I'd ridden the tube.
Aunt Edith was to accompany me to Queenstown. She had, she said, always wanted to see the Ireland of her youth, where her parents kept a country house, which they had shut up and sold when she was ten, and she had not yet returned. She would, she said, spend a pleasant night's stay in Queenstown, and buy all her lace to bring back to the dressmaker, and to make up into charity bazaar contributions, and presents for everyone for Christmas. And perhaps, she added tentatively as we boarded the train at Waterloo, enough to darn some nice new antimacassars for the drawing room.
Southampton has never, to my knowledge, been a particularly inspiring place. But it was that day.
Considering the ship was carrying nowhere near its full complement of passengers, an unusually vast crowd had turned up to see the ship off.
"Workers' wives, I expect", sniffed Aunt Edith from her corner seat. "After all, this ship's keeping them in work, despite the miners."
Aunt Edith, being elderly and somewhat prone to paranoia, was suspicious of the miner's strike which had, she breathed shakily, almost ruined her darling niece's plans. Though, naturally, had I travelled with Cunard...
The ship was huge and lovely, and everything one expected. When I mull over it, it must have been sunny, for how else could the white paintwork of the upper decks gleam so terribly brightly?
In these days of identity cards, it is pleasant to recall a time when one could, with a wave of a daintily gloved hand and a silently spoken assurance ("Yes, I am a person of quality. I am a lady, you may bow and scrape – please do".)
Aunt Edith and I took to the gangplank, and boarded.