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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Without any warning, after June 1942, there were no more letters. As each day passed I became more frozen with fear and more inconsolable. We were left with nothing but silence and not knowing, which made space for the darkest imaginings to invade our thoughts and dreams. We all pretended to hope for a while that it was just the war interrupting the postal services, including the Red Cross’s, but in our hearts I think we realised that something much worse had probably befallen her, although none of us wanted to put our fears into words and risk making them feel more real. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so helpless. I wanted to do something, to talk to my father or my mother but I knew I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been any use anyway because they didn’t know any more than I did.
Although I was fearful for Anna, I was also consoled because I knew my father felt the same way. He must have been tortured all through this very difficult time by Anna’s fate, just as I was. I knew that he worried about her every minute of every hour of every day, wondering if she was alive or dead, fearing that she might even at this moment be being arrested by the Nazis or suffering unknown horrors in Auschwitz. Even when her letters and postcards had been arriving they were taking so long to travel between countries it was impossible to tell if something awful had happened to her in the meantime. Part of him must have desperately wanted to hear her voice and see her face again, while the other part must have been telling him to be thankful that we were all safely in England. Such thoughts must have made him feel like he was being torn in two by his conflicting loyalties to his mother and his past, and his responsibility to my mother and me and our lives in war-torn London.
I WOKE UP on the morning of 1 May 1945, switched on the little wireless in my room as usual and heard the unbelievable news that Hitler was dead. At that moment, as the news sank in, I felt a deep emotional bond with the people of Britain, from Winston Churchill and the King all the way to our neighbours in Hampstead. I felt that I was finally free and the Nazi terror had been destroyed for good, leaving the world a safer and happier place. As far back as I could remember the horrible, threatening figure of Adolf Hitler had darkened my life and suddenly that dark cloud was lifted.
Since 1940 I had been working in the Medici Gallery in Grafton Street, just off Bond Street. I had been in charge of their mail-order business which included supplying the royal family at Buckingham Palace, in particular the old Queen Mary. As well as meeting members of the European royal families I also got to meet other famous names like Winston Churchill’s wife, Clemmie, and the Hollywood star, Danny Kaye. I loved the work and the hardest part of the day was having to make my way home on my own each evening in the blackout.
My relationship with my mother had matured steadily as I had grown up and we had become ever closer, with her treating me as an equal rather than a child. It seemed to me that her character had changed completely once she had become used to English life, and when she no longer had the responsibility and worry of bringing up children. We were becoming more like sisters as the years passed.
My brother Claude was away in the army when my father had told me about the pocket-book, having already been stationed somewhere out in the country. Soon he would become a captain in the Royal Engineers, and would be sent on active service in India, where he remained for the rest of the war. He had studied architecture, following in the footsteps of our distinguished father, and had narrowly missed being interned for the duration of the war as an enemy alien. After the war he followed the family tradition by becoming an architect and in 1950 he emigrated to Toronto, Canada with his new wife Inge, contributing extensively to the building of the city.
By then I had already married. I met Ken Haas for the first time at my cousin Freddie’s 21st birthday party in North London in 1946. Ken had also fled from Germany before the war, just as we had, so we shared many of the same experiences. He had impressed me immediately. He was a powerfully built and athletic man, not tall, but tough both physically and in spirit. He was 38 and I was 21 and I was instantly captivated by his forthright, spontaneous manner. He worked for a family firm of goldbeaters, George M. Whiley, in the West End of London, who made stamping foils. He was a good businessman and as their export director he built the company up over the years, eventually moving it into substantial factory premises in Ruislip.
It was love at first sight and I married Ken in 1948, embarking on a long and happy partnership of more than forty years and producing three healthy sons, Anthony, Timothy and David. Ken was loving and devoted and you certainly could never grow bored in his company. Because of his job he was away travelling, sometimes up to five to six months of every year, which I found hard but in a way perhaps it strengthened our relationship even more. Bringing up three young boys, often on my own, there was little or no time to worry my head with romantic notions about who my ancestors might or might not have been: my attention was fully occupied in dealing with the complications of each day as it came, and planning for our family’s future.
In 1955 tragedy struck my family again. My father, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with cancer. He was just 65 and it seemed too early to lose him. But lose him we did when he died nine months later in March 1956. I was devastated by the loss and I was far from being the only one. He was a greatly loved public figure and many wanted to mourn his passing. Our local paper, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, wrote a headline article announcing his death and the time and place of his funeral. It never occurred to any of us that by doing that they were also advertising the fact that my parents’ flat would be empty for at least a couple of hours while we were all at the crematorium in Golders Green. This allowed plenty of time for thieves to break in and turn out every drawer and cupboard in their search for hidden booty.
It is the cruellest thing to do, to invade the privacy of a family just as they are at their most vulnerable with grief. We walked in from the ceremony, my Uncle Freddy carrying the urn containing my father’s ashes, just wanting to find some peace in which to compose ourselves after the ordeal, only to be confronted with a scene of total devastation. My mother’s look of horror at this invasion of her life, just when she had to get used to the idea of living alone, was heartbreaking.
Believing that she might need someone there to support her, I followed my mother as she ran through to the bedroom, assuming that she wanted to check on some piece of family jewellery that might hold special sentimental value to her. But she seemed to have only one thing in mind as she ignored the clothes and other belongings strewn over the floor and headed for the dressing table. Rummaging through the debris she picked up a white envelope tied up with the green ribbon that I instantly recognised as being the one that held the ancient pocket-book. It was still in the same envelope from which my father had removed it the morning he had shown it to me sixteen years earlier.
‘Thank God,’ she said, holding it to her heart as if that were the only possession that mattered to her in the whole apartment, a last precious piece of my father that she could still cling to now that she no longer had the man himself. Seeing the passion with which she hugged that elegant little book to her heart rekindled the curiosity I had felt as a young girl when my father first dangled that tempting snippet of a story in front of me. I wondered if she might be willing to pass the book on to me now that my father had gone. He had, after all, said that it would be mine.
‘Mother,’ I ventured cautiously, ‘Father said I—’
‘He СКАЧАТЬ