Uncle Rudolf by Paul Bailey

Author:Paul Bailey [Paul Bailey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007397440
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

On my happiest days, in those first years in England, I realized that I belonged to, and was the centre of, an unusual family. I had no mother and father – according to my uncle, they were lost or in hiding somewhere, but I did have a solicitous uncle (the word ‘solicitous’ is especially applicable); I had the doting Annie, who baked me cakes when I was well and nursed me with delicious soups and broths when I was sickly; and there was Teddy Grubb, with his card tricks that mystified a gullible boy and still mystify his fond remembrancer, and Charlie the chauffeur, whose Cockney accent he encouraged and dared me to mimic as he drove me through the city streets and down the narrow country lanes that led to Uncle Rudolf’s Sussex home.

The wakeful Andrew Peters thrived in their company. They were united in a conspiracy to keep the poor little exile happy, and their every plan was successful. What a charmed decade or so that was – the more charmed when I recall the wartime blackout, with Annie making sure that not even the faintest chink of light could be seen through the windows, and the German bombs that seemed to be coming nearer and nearer with each new raid. It was charmed, too, despite my brief separation from Uncle Rudolf – the most degrading week of his entire life, he would tell me later – for by then I was in the relative safety of the countryside and free to play in the garden and roam in the surrounding fields. (He made fun of the white hairs that had suddenly sprouted on his temples, saying they were the inevitable consequences of growing old. He was forty-three.) My life at the grammar school was charmed as well, though I was terrified of being hit by a cricket ball in that most incomprehensible of games, with its terminology that sounded, and sounds, sublimely ridiculous. I learned English poems by heart, and acted as Florizel in a truncated version of The Winter’s Tale, my brown-skinned Perdita a boy named Peter Long, and passed all my exams with ‘flying colours’. I excelled in English, French and History and was never less than my uncle’s pride. When my classmates asked where my parents were I repeated that they were lost or in hiding, and said I was unhappy that they did not know of my progress.

Charlie was the first conspirator to leave us. Maurice’s imprisonment and despairing death – ‘He wasted away, as if of his own accord’ – caused him to suffer, and not endure, a grief he thought could be assuaged with gin, which he drank neat, at all hours. Uncle Rudolf was powerless to help or save him. He disappeared one day in the spring of 1949, leaving the car keys in an envelope with the message ‘Goodbye and thank you very much, Mr Rudolf.’ Nothing more. My uncle contacted his acquaintances, and even visited Maurice’s mother; he

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