The Secrets of the Notebook: A royal love affair and a woman’s quest to uncover her incredible family secret. Eve Haas

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СКАЧАТЬ of others? Was she so fragile she didn’t even make it to the camps? We knew that all food was scarce and she had little money. The pocket-book was only safe because she had passed it to my father before she left Berlin for Czechoslovakia. She need not have done that, she could have held on to it like my mother did. It wouldn’t have been in my hands now if she had. I felt like it had come to me for a reason and I wondered if maybe Anna wanted me to have it eventually. Whatever the truth of it, I owed it to her to find out what lay behind the fairy-tale. My father’s words took on a whole new meaning now. The more I thought about them the more I felt compelled to find out why nothing was written, why nothing existed, and this little pocket-book was all I now had to go on.

      I felt torn in half but unable to talk about my dilemma to anyone. I knew that Ken believed I should obey my father’s wishes and not go hunting for more information, and I didn’t feel I could talk to my sons about it without imposing the same strictures on them that my father had placed on me. It was as if the secret could not be passed on to a new generation without the same strings being attached. My thoughts were in a turmoil as I remembered clearly how both my mother and my father had expressly urged me not to look into the family history and how my Uncle Freddy had repeated the fact that there was nothing more to find. I had never even considered disobeying any instruction that my father gave me in the past. But they were all gone now, I reasoned, all three of them, just like Anna and Charlotte and Emilie, all of whom must have been instructed to guard the family secrets in just the same way, although I couldn’t imagine why that might have been.

      Things were different in Europe from the time when my father first gave me the warning. I had grown used to living a safe and secure life in London, I was not fearful of the consequences of lifting a few stones to see what might lie underneath. It didn’t seem possible to me that there wouldn’t be some clues hidden away somewhere in the files, which would explain what had happened in my family’s past.

      More than a century of European history and upheaval had gone by since the events around the pocket-book had unfurled, surely it was all history now. What harm could possibly come from trying to uncover a few hidden facts, just for the record? I was a mature woman in my forties, I told myself firmly, who was capable of making my own decisions about such things without asking for the permission of my parents. It was the 1970s after all, and we no longer lived in the dangerous times that they had had to endure and that had shaped their characters to make them so cautious about everything. We were living in a safe and tolerant country where freedom of information and freedom of speech were amongst our most prized entitlements. It was time for these secrets to be uncovered and for a light to be shone into the goings on of the Prussian royal family in order to see what had led to their creation.

      I knew absolutely nothing about Prussian history for that period even though it was where my family had sprung from. What sort of life would Emilie have led, having been catapulted right into the heart of such an exalted royal family at such a young age? And what could it have been like for her child to be forced to return after such a life to what appeared to be obscurity? I believed that these women had been ignored and forgotten for long enough. I was indignant on their behalf and felt it was my duty to go looking for them and to tell their stories to the world, if the world was interested in listening. Anna, my grandmother, had almost certainly been murdered by the Nazi killing machine and she, as much as her mother and grandmother, deserved to have her family story told. In one of the last letters my granny wrote to me from Prague she had wished that I would be guided to ‘make the right choices’, and I felt a growing conviction taking hold that this was the right choice. I didn’t exactly know what was guiding me to follow this path, but it felt like it was the spirits of Emilie, Charlotte and Anna.

      It took me a long time to pluck up the courage to break the news of my decision to Ken. I hoped to be able to convince him that once he had more time on his hands it would be fun for him to join me in the hunt. I told myself it would give him something new to focus on, even though I knew in my heart that he had a deep reluctance about going back to anything that was to do with his past, including going to Germany itself. Like me he had been born in Germany and had had a difficult time escaping and getting his family to safety. I knew I was going to have to work hard to find a way of infecting him with my own enthusiasm for the project.

      ‘That diary that I told you about,’ I said, as casually as I could one day. ‘The one that belonged to my great, great grandmother and had that inscription from Prince August in the front.’

      ‘Yes,’ he said, blissfully unaware of what I was leading up to. ‘Of course I remember you talking about it. I have it in my cupboard.’

      ‘I’m going to do some research into it.’

      ‘Into what?’ Ken asked, more interested in reading his newspaper than in listening to whatever I was trying to tell him. ‘Your father said it was futile, didn’t he? That there was nothing else there to be found.’

      ‘I’ve made an appointment for us to meet with an expert from Burke’s Peerage,’ I confessed, hoping that if I said it fast enough he wouldn’t object. ‘Tomorrow.’

      ‘What will that achieve?’ he asked, finally giving up any hope of reading and lowering his paper in order to interrogate me more effectively.

      ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they might be able to confirm if it actually is the Prince’s handwriting in the inscription. And perhaps they could tell us a bit about his life and even something about Emilie. It seems worth a try.’

      ‘Very well,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I just hope you won’t be disappointed, that’s all.’

      I smiled to myself as he disappeared back behind the newspaper. I was sure if I could only find a way of catching his interest he would become as intrigued as I was. He just hadn’t had time to think about it yet. I had called Burke ’s Peerage in the first place because I knew they were the world’s greatest heraldic specialists and experts in the European aristocracy. They had been very helpful and given me the name of their heraldic expert, Jeffrey Finestone. Mustering all my courage, I had then called him.

      ‘I have a diary that once belonged to Prince August of Prussia,’ I said, expecting to have to work hard to convince such a distinguished expert to show an interest, ‘which he has inscribed in his own hand.’

      ‘Prince August?’ he said, the immediate excitement in his voice surprising me. ‘I would love to see that. Do please bring it to show me as soon as possible.’

      We had made a date to meet in his flat, which was not far from us in Hampstead. When the day came we found he had also invited a colleague, David Williamson, to hear my story. Mr Williamson was a man who used to appear on television as an expert in heraldic matters and genealogy; his expertise and knowledge covered handwriting and Prussian history. He said he would be able to give a second opinion and verify whatever might be said or seen. Realising that I was not going to be easily put off from my quest, and probably hoping that the experts would dismiss my foolish fancies out of hand so that he would be able to resume the peaceful retirement he had been looking forward to, Ken agreed to accompany me to the meeting despite his misgivings.

      As soon as we arrived at Mr Finestone’s elegant flat, he took the diary off me the moment we were through the door and sitting down. Turning it reverentially over in his hands he and his colleague squinted at it with barely disguised anticipation.

      ‘Forgive me for being cagey,’ he said, ‘but I have been disappointed so many times before. Would you excuse us for a moment? We just need to check on something.’

      The two of them then disappeared into another room to study the book and confer in private, leaving Ken and me to wait in silence. When they came back in neither man could hide their glee.

      ‘This СКАЧАТЬ