A Prince Among Stones (3 page)

In Paris, my mother's close friends included the Jouves. She had been introduced to Mme Jouve initially. Blanche Jouve was the first woman to gain a degree at the Sorbonne before the First War and had become a psychoanalyst. She had studied with Freud, and she was the French translator of his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
– my father would have loved to have met her. Some Paris friends of my mother's had told her about this marvellous psychoanalyst who could help her with all her problems, not that I think she had any. It was the beginning of that fashionable use of time for people with nothing else to do than to go and talk about themselves for a couple of hours every week.

The Jouves were both great intellectuals, and played a significant part in my life. Her husband, Pierre Jean Jouve, was a poet and a novelist, a very cerebral man. He introduced me to the paintings in the Louvre and how to view them, which consisted of looking carefully at the few that he wanted to see and not looking at anything else; he said that looking at other paintings was tiring and would perhaps diminish our capacity to understand what we had come to see.

Blanche told me stories about her life. All of her male friends from the Sorbonne had been called up to fight in the Great War, and they all wrote her letters back from the front, since she was probably the only girl they knew well. One particular young man wrote a series of astonishing letters and she developed a strong attachment to him because of their content. She said that all these boys had matured very quickly because of the oncoming threat of death. None survived apart from the one to whom she was particularly attached. She was so happy that she was going to see him again after the Armistice in 1918, thinking that she would see the mature man who had written these astonishing letters. Her disappointment was great: she met neither the boy she remembered nor the man she had imagined from his writing. The trauma of his experience at the front had completely changed him out of all recognition; they now had nothing in common.

Mme Jouve was a redoubtable character, made of stern stuff, and lived well into her nineties. In her late eighties, she was living in Paris during
les événements
of May 1968. My friend Jonathan Guinness (now Lord Moyne) still remembers that when I rang her up, worried that her flat was right in the heart of the streets where the riot police and the students were fighting, she was completely unfazed and in fact rather cheered up by all the protests. ‘Cela m'a beaucoup égayée,' she reassured me. ‘What a game old bird she must have been,' he observed.

Through the Jouves we met the composer Darius Milhaud, who was one of the group known as Les Six (Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric were also members), and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the Salvadoran wife of the aviator and writer Antoine, and the mistress of my half-uncle Werner. This social set also included Marie-Laure de Noailles, the doyenne of literary Paris, and Count Etienne de Beaumont, a great party-giver who took enormous pleasure in drawing up the list of people he was
not
going to invite. They would visit my mother in her flat in the rue Guynemer in the 6th arrondissement, alongside the Jardin du Luxembourg, where as a child my nanny would wheel me out for some fresh air.

Isabel Ryan, a South African, who was being treated by Mme Jouve for nervous problems, saw the Jouves as surrogate parents. She remembered travelling with the Jouves and my mother to Sils-Maria in the Engadine valley, near St Moritz in south-east Switzerland. There Isabel and my mother went walking in the countryside in full Tyrolean costume: white blouses, black velvet waistcoats and full skirts. She conjured up a picture of my mother on this promenade. ‘The local country people they met went down on their knees and kissed Bianca's hand. The Treubergs came from Southern Bavaria, not so far away, and the peasants recognised a princess when they saw one. She was very tall and stately with ice-blue eyes and long blonde hair in plaits round her head.'

I was with the Jouves at the outbreak of the Second World War. In August 1939, when I was six, I was staying with them in Mégève, but I don't remember my mother being with us there, although she was certainly with the Jouves when they all went off to Lucerne to see the last great pre-war concert with Toscanini conducting. I heard a report that ‘Bianca was great fun, but did insist on telling Toscanini how to conduct!' The story rang true; my mother saw herself as a literary, artistic, universal aunt and always had enormous reserves of self-confidence.

As war loomed, I was driven with the Jouves from Mégève down to the South of France, where my half-uncle Werner v. Alvensleben – an opponent of Hitler – had taken H. G. Wells' villa, Loupidou, near Grasse. Isabel Ryan was persuaded to drive south – ‘Bianca could persuade people to do anything.'

‘The Jouves had a beautiful new car,' Isabel Ryan recalled, ‘a Talbot with a powerful engine and automatic gear change. Not only was I driving the car but I was also looking after Bianca's son, the young prince Rupert. The boy was in a state of shock without his mother. Kipling came to my aid. I told him
Jungle Stories
.' I remember watching the long lines of refugees walking on the roadside carrying suitcases or pushing carts laden with their belongings on, as the vast and comfortable Talbot drove past. ‘Où est la guerre?' I kept asking.

While that
drôle de guerre
of the first few months after war was declared drifted by, we lived at Loupidou. Much time was spent listening to the wireless. Then in the March or April of 1940 the Jouves departed for Geneva, and my mother also left a little later to visit some friends in England, while I stayed behind in the villa in Grasse with her maid, the cook and the gardener.

It then must have dawned on her that it might be rather dangerous leaving her only child in France during what was quite clearly a difficult time. I didn't realise until many years later that there were friends of my mother's keeping an eye on me from a distance to see that I was all right. From my point of view, there I was, aged six, with the servants and no money to pay any of the household bills. We decided to head for Cannes, and so I, the gardener, the maid, the cook and the cook's little boy, marched into the Hôtel Martinez, which my mother and her circle had much frequented.

I went up to the concierge, whom I had got to know on previous occasions while my mother was chatting with friends. ‘My mother's left us for London,' I announced. ‘I know she's trying to get hold of us; will you find us some rooms?' Proving the golden rule that a concierge truly worthy of the name can make anything happen, he said yes, and managed to contact my mother via Barclays Bank in London to make sure all the bills were paid and that I was swiftly collected by the friends of my mother and taken to Paris.

Thereafter I travelled to London by plane, alone, which still sounds extraordinary, even now as I write it, but since I was so young it seemed quite normal to me at the time. By the time I was collected it was May 1940, and I believe I was on the very last plane of civil passengers to fly out of Paris to England before the French capital fell.

When she got to London my mother had found a flat in St James's Street, just above Boodle's Club, but before I could get too comfortable the bombs of the Blitz began to fall and I was sent off again, to stay with Madge Molyneux Seel, an old friend of my mother's, in Buckinghamshire. My mother had met Madge on a visit to England when she was sixteen, and Madge later came to stay with her in a flat in Florence.

The flat was run by Riccardo, an extremely able Florentine butler. Madge said to my mother, ‘Bianca, you're being robbed blind by Riccardo. You must let me run the shopping. It's absolutely absurd.' My mother said, ‘I'm sure it's not true, but if you want to I will tell Riccardo that you are now running the shopping, not that you can speak Italian.' When Madge left, Riccardo said to my mother, ‘Come into the pantry.' As he opened the door, there was a pile of banknotes on the table. ‘This is what I managed to get away from Miss Seel.' Madge  would have overspent or been shortchanged by the local suppliers so Riccardo had intervened to make sure my mother did not lose out. And he gave all the money back to her.

Madge and my mother had remained great friends. And so I was dumped with Madge and her husband, Hans-Jürgen Roeber. Hans-Jürgen was a good-looking young Berliner who had been employed as a lutenist for my uncle Hubertus. There was a story that one day my uncle came home unexpectedly early on a wintry day of filthy Berlin rain to find – equally unexpectedly – good-looking Hans-Jürgen in bed with his wife, my aunt Helga.

Aunt Helga thought quickly. ‘Oh, darling,' she smiled, ‘I asked Hans-Jürgen to get into bed because it is so
cold outside.' My uncle, being a man of overwhelming vanity, did not query that. He thought it was quite natural. But I think he
was
disturbed when the lutenist was enticed into marriage with this rather nice English woman called Madge.

Madge paid for Hans-Jürgen to have advanced music lessons, and he became a conductor – I remember seeing him conduct at the Wigmore Hall. He played the violin and piano, and as a small child I delighted in living in their house in the country and listening to him practise nearly all the time. I came to love music as a result of hearing him rehearsing every day. I had discovered a cupboard just next to his practice room, and I would secrete myself in there with a book, enjoying the triple pleasure of reading the book, hearing the violin, and, perhaps the greatest thrill, being hidden.

My mother visited on and off for the odd night or so, but most of the time I was looked after by Madge's old nanny, who seemed to me to be ancient, but was probably no more than sixty. Meanwhile my father was working for the Ministry of Information on short public information films, including
The Five-Inch Bather
in which the actor Richard Massingham extolled the virtues of water rationing.

Shortly after I got to the country I went to the local village school for a very short time and then was sent to a boarding school, and so my war passed far more pleasantly than it might have done given that my family name was German, which during the war was a heavy burden. I forgot my German, and I called myself simply Rupert or Rupert L. I never gave my surname. I had mixed emotions about being in England while England was at war with Germany, until my parents had explained the reasons to me. The strangeness of it all is exemplified by a display case in my library which contains my grandfather's Iron Cross and other medals and my wife's grandfather's DSO and decorations side by side.

My father had been naturalised as a British subject in 1936 – when Germany started its new federal existence in the 1950s both he and I were issued German passports, and I had to make a choice between British and Germany nationality. I chose to be British, since that was where I lived. But there was one difficult moment when I was eighteen or so and I was in danger of being called up by both the German army and the British army, and then by the Spanish army as well by virtue of having been born in Majorca.

However, during the war, in the countryside away from the bombs falling on London, and too young to worry about call-ups, I had a really rather agreeable time. Despite my parents' separation, escaping from France in the nick of time, my German family name and a somewhat itinerant existence – all of which typified the dangers and the changes of that period – I had, oddly enough, been rather lucky. I was never disturbed by this tremendous transience. I am sure that was a help in later life, when I was part of rock'n'roll's touring circus, because I was able psychologically to cope with the incessant round of different countries, people and mores. It had been the way I was brought up.

All of my early life had a twofold effect on me. I emerged from that upbringing with the strong sense of family history and lineage and
tenue
which my father had instilled in me. As I was their only child, I was
‘the lineage' that would carry on from him. At fifteen, I once asked my mother, ‘What do you think the definition is of an aristocrat? I think it's pre-eminence mellowed by time.' ‘Rubbish!' she said. ‘It's responsibility for everyone taken for granted.'

I was also aware of the fact that we had no money. There was clearly some money to fund my parents' life, but I was not sure whether that had been borrowed from other people, or provided as bank overdrafts; by and large it was funded by selling objects, which offered a dwindling resource. Luckily credit was much easier to secure in those days. My mother had no idea about money, and my father had precious little more.

‘I was not frightened by the whole concept of money,' he later wrote. ‘In the formative years of my childhood and youth, I had lived in a world separated by tradition and privilege as effectively from the world “outside” – the world of professions, commerce, ambitions and struggle – as a medieval castle by its ramparts and moats. I had lived in complete security. It turned out to be a sham security, for, as I was to learn even before I reached adulthood, this world of castles, coaches, horses, liveried servants, gamekeepers, French governesses, tutors, in which I spent my childhood, was based on very weak financial foundations. The whole elaborate, yet so deceptive, edifice crumbled into dust after the First World War.

‘Real or sham, justified or not, the material security of those early years gave me a carefree and detached outlook on life and the material concerns of life, with consequences, both beneficial and bad.' This, he said, had enabled him to face adversity of every kind ‘with a high degree of equanimity'.