I know the pain of being the youngest child
AS I was walking in Highgate Wood recently with my kids, we came across a map. The fiveyear-old examined it carefully and picked out the words, “You Are Here”. He turned to me, looking perplexed. “How does it know?” he asked.
My brain immediately sent me a silent message: “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh, don’t laugh.”
You see, I’m only too aware of what it’s like to be the youngest child, like he is; to have a looser grip on how the world works than the rest of your family, and therefore to suddenly find everyone doubled up with mirth at something you’ve said — leaving you out in the cold, with no idea what just happened.
I clearly remember the sensation of bewilderment and misery from being in this situation, and my son evidently feels the same. If you show any sign of amusement when he says something cute or naive, he immediately bursts into tears and screams, “Don’t laugh at me!”
I have three much older brothers, so I never really stood a chance as a kid of being taken seriously. At around the age of nine, for example, we were sitting having family dinner. I had been to my piano lesson earlier and I remembered that I had a bit of news to impart. “Mummy,” I said. “My teacher wants me to play in the Salzburg Festival.”
My mother looked confused. ‘You mean she wants you to watch the Salzburg Festival?’ she asked.
“No!” I replied impatiently. “She wants me to play in it.”
A lot of discussion followed, with me as utterly convinced that I was right as my mother was that I couldn’t possibly be. Then it occurred to me to go and look in my practice notebook where my piano teacher had written down the details.
I came back to the dinner table. “It’s not the Salzburg Festival,” I said. “It’s the Saltburn Festival.”
The roar of laughter round the room practically lifted the ceiling off. Meanwhile, I just sat there, aware that I should be feeling embarrassed, but not really understanding why.
I was only nine. How was I to know that the Salzburg Festival is a renowned gathering of some of the world’s greatest classical musicians, whereas the Saltburn Festival (Saltburn being a small seaside town near Hartlepool) is not?
It was a good decade before I was able to look back and laugh at the memory — effectively joining the adults in mocking my childhood self.
So I try, I really do try, not to laugh when my kids are amusing without meaning to be. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it when they are.
Malapropisms are a good example. For instance, my little one calls a sieve a “fizz”. So when we are baking he says, “Can I do the fizzing?” If I were a better parent I would correct him, but I know he’ll notice eventually that he’s got it wrong — and in the meantime…it’s funny.
The last time we were getting ready to go away, feeling that it is important to teach the children to be independent, we encouraged them to try packing for themselves. The five-year-old took his job very seriously, putting much thought and effort into filling his Peppa Pig rucksack. When he had finished, he told me what he had packed:
“Binoculars in case I want to go on an adventure; a duck in case I find a river; a tomato in case I want to do pretend eating; and a tiger and a dinosaur in case I need to scare a bad dog or cat.”
We were going to Limmud.
On the one hand, none of these items appeared on the “Things you may need” list in the conference brochure; but on the other hand, who was I to argue with his contingency planning? So I expressed grave admiration for his choices, and then went off to pack some more practical items to bring along as well.
It’s so essential to be able to put up with friendly teasing and, indeed, to know how to laugh at yourself. There is little more off-putting in an adult than the inability to do that. But I think this only applies if you understand why you’re laughing. When everyone laughs at you for something you’ve said and you’re too young to get why it’s funny, you don’t learn anything from that. You just feel rubbish.
Going back 35 years — I won my category at the Saltburn Festival and brought home an eye-wateringly ugly trophy that was so large it would hardly fit through the front door.
This trophy sat resplendent in our living room for the next 12 months till it was time to return it.
Served my family right. It’s hard when you’re the butt of so many jokes
@susanreuben
IHAD NO idea that I had Jewish relatives who died in the Holocaust until just a few years ago. After my mother died in late 2013, my siblings and I began going through family papers, including my grandmother, Maud Russell’s diaries. My father, Maud’s son, had already passed away and the loss of both parents sparked a need to delve into my family history. I immersed myself in the diaries that my grandmother kept from 1937-77, captivated by the rich and active life of a very private woman who knew Matisse, Rex Whistler and Stephen Spender, among others, and was on intimate terms with Ian Fleming.
The fates of my German Jewish relations was the most significant finding of my quest to find out more about my grandmother’s life.
She was the daughter of a wealthy German Jewish stockbroker, Paul Nelke, who immigrated to Britain in the 1880s. Her mother Maria was also German, a Christian, the daughter of Carl Conrad who ran the German mint in Berlin.
My grandmother received an excellent education and went on to become one of the foremost English collectors of modern French art. She was famed for entertaining leading politicians, writers, musicians and artists at Mottisfont Abbey, my grandparents’ 2,000acre estate in Hampshire.
Although born in England and raised in the Church of England, my grandmother was always described as “German Jewish”. This may be because my grandfather Gilbert, a cousin of the Duke of Bedford, liked challenging people’s prejudices. When telling his sisters of his engagement during the First World War he said: “Do not be alarmed when I tell you she is a German Jewess for I know you will like her. The idea of marrying a German in wartime tickles me immensely.”
As a child, I used to ask my father if my grandmother had any Jewish relations in Germany and, if so, what had happened to them in the Second World War. He always changed the subject.
As I grew older I heard stories that she’d helped her relatives flee Germany in the 1930s but they were never confirmed. Although she died in 1982 when I was 20, I never found the moment to ask her directly.
So when I began reading her diaries in April 2014, as a journalist this was one of my main areas of interest.
I was intrigued to read of her visit to Cologne after Kristallnacht in 1938 to see if her relatives needed any help. There was a “Jews Unwelcome” sign on every hotel or café she saw. “I had arrived on the day when all Jews in Germany were ordered to stay indoors between 8am and 8pm so I wondered whether my appearance might arouse comment, but it didn’t,” she wrote in her diary.
I was helped by a family tree of my German Jewish family, made in the late 1930s, found among my father’s papers.
I learnt that my great grandfather Paul had three half-sisters (his father remarried after his own mother died when he was just a few months old). Including their children and grandchildren, I counted 16 relations that I had not known existed.
My grandmother’s diaries relate her efforts to bring her relations to England, using her connections to push through visa applications.
Thanks to her help, seven relations were safely settled in England before war broke out. Her aunt Friederike Franck and cousin Lotte Franck arrived with just 10 days to spare. “Lotte said how wonderful it was to be able to go to a swimming-bath again, meaning that she was free of the restrictions that prevented Jews going to public places,” my grandmother noted.
As I read of their safe passage to England and the subsequent hearings at the Police Court and the Aliens Tribunal, I ticked off the names on the family tree. But there was an entire branch, aunt Agnes Mühsam and her descendants, where the trail ran dry.
My grandmother had obtained visas for Aunt Agnes and her son Hans Werner but they didn’t leave Germany in time and their visas were rescinded by the British government on the outbreak of war. “Tante Agnes Mühsam & her son Hans Werner disappeared from Berlin six or more months ago. Emily’s long lost cousin Esra Like other Jews. They are probably dead,” she bluntly recorded on 20 December 1943.
I found scraps of correspondence and notes to the diaries added after the war confirming that they hadn’t survived but with scant details. Nor did I know what had become of Hans Werner’s sisters Lieselotte Margolin and Ilse Namenyi, and Ilse’s son by her first marriage, Esra Bennathan, who were also listed on the family tree. Esra’s birth date was recorded as 1923 and I started trying to track him down, hoping he was still alive and could tell me his family’s story. I spent many hours in front of the computer searching for Esra. In November 2014 a German who had done research on the wider