Frankie and Stankie (19 page)

Dinah's mum, unlike her three brothers, was not a part of the project. Since her separation from Wilhelm and the experience of watching her father embark upon what looked like inescapable decline, she had become much more introspective. Throughout his financial tribulations she had struggled, more than the rest of her siblings, to play interpreter for him and she had found herself ludicrously inadequate. She knew that she would have to improve her English as quickly as possible, and, in the face of her mother's stern disapproval, she had arranged to live in with a pair of elderly English sisters as a sort of au pair and companion: ‘a servant', as her mother so kindly put it.

The elderly sisters instructed Dinah's mum to address them as Miss Connie and Miss Louisa. They had soon become very fond of Marianne and they felt sorry for her misfortune in being so patently un-English. In consequence, they were rigorous in training her up towards English standards of behaviour. They liked to feel they were guiding their protégée in proper English ways.

One day, when Miss Connie had sent Marianne to the post office with a parcel, the clerk had handed her so many stamps that she couldn't fit them on to the front of Miss Connie's parcel without obscuring the address.

‘Shall I shtick some of zese shtamps on to ze backside?' Marianne asked the clerk.

The clerk, a young man, giggled suggestively and made a saucy remark which Marianne, while she understood it in spirit, couldn't really grasp. She promptly returned, with cheeks aflame, to the house of Miss Connie and Miss Louisa, where she described to the ladies what had occurred and asked what she'd said to provoke it.

The two English ladies, having grown up without recourse to a word for the WC, were quite disproportionately shocked. Marianne had disgraced herself. There was no question about it. She had spoken the unmentionable out loud. They at once began to speculate whether Marianne would ever again be fit for polite society. And Dinah's mum, having not much idea that her hosts' manners were out of tune with the times, was more baffled than ever, more mortified by the enormity of her
faux pas
than she had been before she had sought her hosts' guidance.

The Misses Connie and Louisa, while much given to amplifying Marianne's small transgressions, did so always for her edification and moral growth. And, though she found the steady drip of correction lowering to the spirit, she only once lost her temper. This happened on the morning that her mentors accused her of stealing from the cooler. Marianne, they hinted, had stolen the cream.

The English ladies had what Dinah's mum considered one truly disgusting habit. Each day, they saved the wrinkled skin that had formed on the surface of boiled milk and they kept these pickings in the cooler on a saucer until the Sunday morning. Then, for a special treat, they would spread the accumulated wrinklings on their porridge. Dinah's mum had always thought that these little gobs of flayed milk looked repellent, like sweat-soaked rags, but the English ladies referred to them as ‘the cream' and considered them, most mercifully, a delicacy too precious to be shared with those of lower rank in the household.

Then came that Sunday morning when Marianne was sternly summoned from bed and ushered into the drawing room. Miss Connie, as the elder, addressed her first.

‘A certain something beginning with “c” is missing from the larder,' she said. ‘I think you will know what I mean.'

Marianne made no reply as she stared at the sisters in puzzlement. Then Miss Louisa spoke in her turn.

‘You must be honest with us, Marianne,' she said kindly. ‘We do this for your own good. Only be honest with us, my dear, and we're prepared to forgive and forget.'

It was quite a while before Marianne began to catch the sisters' drift, but once she did, she was furious. She was more incensed by the aspersions cast upon her good taste than by those cast upon her sense of honesty.

‘I?' she said. ‘
I
?! Eat zees filsy old rags?
Gott ach Gott! Ich ekel mich!
Never in my life!' She shuddered involuntarily and writhed with disgust.

Displacement and loneliness had by now begun to drive Marianne to a contemplation of the spiritual and this was being helped by the fact that Wilhelm's letters were now few and far between. She began to pore in solitude over The Gospel According to St Luke
and, that same Sunday – the Sunday of the cream – she took herself all on her own to Cape Town's cathedral where, sixty-five years later, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a spirit of ecumenical tolerance, addressed the nation at the memorial service of Joe Slovo, Communist, atheist and liberation hero.

As she entered, the congregation rose and immediately began to sing what Marianne thought of as the German national anthem. For an instant her spirit soared as she contemplated the marvel of the congregation's bursting into song like that – and all just for her.

It was ‘Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him', being sung to the tune of
‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser
', an anthem Josef Haydn wrote after hearing a rendering of ‘God Save the King' during his visit to London in 1797. And it was hardly Haydn's fault that his effort should have turned out so much better than its English model; nor that, at that particular historical moment, the tune should have been highjacked to serve the purposes of Hitler's Third Reich.

When Marianne decided to pay Wilhelm a visit, she docked in Hamburg in the rain. Her first impression, after the balmy climate of the Cape, was of grey winter washing hanging in the grey back yards of even greyer tenement houses. Her second impression was of the ever-present tramp of soldiers' boots. Wilhelm, when she met up with him, was inexplicably edgy and sometimes openly hostile. The occasions on which he agreed to see her were almost invariably
à trois
, since he was frequently accompanied by a female person whom Marianne, in later years, always referred to as a mannequin.

The mannequin was given to expensive dress – a fact that Wilhelm saw fit to use as the opportunity to find fault with Marianne's clothes. Marianne was hurt by this, hurt and bruised by such a change in the man she had assumed that she would one day marry. But Wilhelm was not only punishing her for having left him and gone away. What she couldn't then know – because his pride would not allow him to admit to it – was that his family had fallen on hard times. His father the judge had been dismissed from his post for refusing to join the Nazi Party and had taken to heavy drinking. His mother, Tante Berthe, with her two boys to educate, had begun selling hen's eggs, door to door, in a basket strapped to her back. When the time came for Marianne to return to Cape Town, she and Wilhelm didn't even say goodbye.

And just before she made that ignominious escape, Marianne
paid a pre-arranged visit to the Berlin offices of the accountant ‘friend' who had been appointed to deal with the disposal of the Jacobsens' remaining property. The interview there was dispiriting. The accountant had sent her his assistant who was oddly shifty and uninformed. The ledgers were not to hand. The kitty appeared to be empty for reasons that didn't make sense. In short, the news was not good. The weeks on the boat were hard for Marianne and, though a pleasant young doctor took her up and pleaded with her to marry him, she was too much a girl with a broken heart to be disposed towards romance.

Back in Cape Town, she found fresh disasters. The market garden had collapsed in total failure. The flowers were lovely but none of the Jacobsens had the first clue about techniques of selling. They couldn't communicate with middlemen and the flowers were left rotting by the roadside. And not only did they get stung by their own bees, but Frau Jacobsen had discovered an allergy she never knew she had. She had almost died of bee-stings. None of them had ever known what it felt like not to have money – and, by now, in addition, they had debts.

Jurgen and Heinrich were no longer in Cape Town. The former, having suddenly turned his back on school, had gone off, in his sister's absence, to work in a Transvaal mine. Heinrich, meanwhile, having given up thoughts of publishing, had got himself employment as an export clerk for an electrical goods manufacturer in Johannesburg. So two of Marianne's three brothers had already become what they were destined to remain for all of their working lives: a blue- and a white-collar worker.

Only Otto had been strong enough to keep his eye on the ball.

‘I'm sick of all this,' he told his sister. ‘It's pathetic. It's a mess. I'm going back to Germany to finish my degree.'

‘Don't,' his sister said. ‘Please, Otto, don't.'

‘I'll come back, don't you worry,' he said. ‘I'm beginning to like it here. But when I do I'll be qualified. I'll be good for a decent job.'

Otto had made enquiries about taking up his studies locally, but had been floored by the same bone-headed bureaucracy that had already done for his father. ‘Have you got a Matric?' had always been the pertinent refrain. Matric meant Matriculation Certificate, which was the local school-leavers' exam. The
Abitur
plus two years at the university in Berlin evidently counted for nothing. Albert
Einstein without a Matric would have been sent to the back of the class.

All the same, Marianne tried begging her brother not to go.

‘You'll walk right into a war,' she said. ‘The streets are full of soldiers.'

‘Oh blah,' Otto said. ‘You're just like the old ones. War-war-war and look at them now. I'm telling you, there'll never be a war.'

Otto, it seemed, had already made his plans and had booked his return passage. In fact, he had booked two. As a person who was never reticent with women, Otto, in his sister's absence, had fixed on the girl whom he meant to marry. The marriage date has been fixed for four weeks' time and the girl was already learning German in readiness for the adventure.

Now that there were only three of them, the remaining Cape Town Jacobsens took modest lodgings in town and began to think the unthinkable. Marianne would have to go out to work – Marianne who was qualified for nothing except possibly to give piano lessons, but the family no longer had a piano. That night, Marianne tossed and turned. Then she hit upon a plan. She would approach the German Consulate for advice on employment opportunities for foreign nationals with nice-girl manners, no certificates and distinctly so-so English. Her clothes, she could see without Wilhelm's assistance, were beginning to look a little tired, but, next day, she made the best of her appearance and entered the building bravely.

The Consul himself was courteous and attentive, and he was generous with his time. He offered her a cigarette and got her to talk expansively about herself. His coffee was the best she'd tasted in years and his kindness loosened her tongue. By the time Marianne was ready to leave, he had heard all about the Friesian Island flood and the rosebuds that she used to paint on white Rosenthal china. He'd heard about the Oranjesicht house and the market garden and about Otto's return to Berlin. His response was to offer her a job.

‘I'd like you to be my secretary,' he said. ‘Can you start tomorrow?'

‘I?' she said. ‘But I can't type. Forgive me, but I've never touched a typewriter.' Ditto, drafted a memo. Ditto, filed a document. Ditto, taken a letter.

The Consul was undeterred. ‘A girl like you,' he said. ‘You will learn. Of course you will, my dear.'

So Marianne landed a job for which her evident genetic attributes had made her highly suitable. To be sure it had had little to do with her secretarial skills. She became personal secretary to the German Consul, a somewhat half-hearted career Nazi who loved her in a fatherly way, and called her by a pet name. Jacobina. He was wholly indifferent to her political views, which he understood to be vaguely formulated and divergent from the current orthodoxy of the Reich. But this was Cape Town, after all. It wasn't Berlin or Munich – and the tramp of soldiers' boots was still very far away. Jacobina was always an asset at the Consulate cocktail parties, even if her punctuation left much to be desired.

‘Jacobina,' he would say indulgently. ‘You scatter always ze commas in my letters just like ze salt,
nicht wahr?
'

Meanwhile, Jacobina had learned to drive a car and she'd designed herself some wonderful clothes, because she went to all the Consulate parties. Yet during office hours she found herself not only typing the Consul's letters – always with two fingers as she scattered her somewhat random commas and stops. She soon found herself dealing with more and more supplicant German-Jewish families who were beginning to appear off boats.

By coincidence, at just this time, Marianne's ageing father had been in receipt of a letter. It had come from the Reich and was offering him, in fulsome terms, a well-paid job back in Berlin as a designer of aeroplane hangars. And if it was immediately clear to him why the Reich, at that moment, should be needing quite so many new aeroplane hangars, he no longer allowed himself to dwell on the matter, nor to express his misgivings.

‘It will be for a few months only,' he said to his wife. ‘Just these few months and I'll come back to you.
Liebling
, you will once again have money. This will be necessary,
nicht wahr?
'

Now that there were just two of them, the remaining Cape Town Jacobsens were able to live like gentlewomen. Marianne and her mother moved into a pleasant residential hotel on one of Cape Town's many charming white beaches, where Frau Jacobsen, at last, adjusted happily to Cape Town life and set about training the servants to take her tea-time orders in German. She resisted, at first, when her lonely husband wrote and pleaded with her to come
and join him – ‘Just for a visit,' he said. But then, being a woman of her time, however reluctantly, she complied.

‘It's just for a visit, Marianne,' she said. ‘Don't worry. I will soon be back.'