Tales of Innocence and Experience
by Eva Figes Bloomsbury
£12.99

AS you grow older, distant memories become less distant. If they are painful memories, the past can be almost too much to bear. For a writer, the solution may be to lay the ghosts with a memoir. But for Eva Figes the answer was not so simple.

She is best known as a distinguished novelist and as the author of the feminist classic, Patriarchal Attitudes. Now, by delving into her own past, she has produced a book that can be read as a novel or as a fragment of autobiography. Rather than write about the Holocaust she has eased the pain of the past by interweaving it with the contented present, and with the device of reading fairy tales to her granddaughter.

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales are very grim,” she writes. “There are happy endings tagged on, but those children – like Hansel and Gretel – are never the same when they come out of the forest. I have had a happy life, but there are scars.”

Much of her happiness now involves her four grandchildren. Each of her children, Kate and Orlando – both writers – has two daughters. Being a grandmother has proved an unalloyed joy. “Having a grandchild,” Figes has written, “is like being in love.” But at the same time it was a rite of passage. Growing old and becoming a grandmother brought back the pain of losing her own beloved grandmother. “My granddaughters know now that my grandparents were killed – but no details,” she says.
How do you tell young children that their great-grandparents were exterminated in a Nazi death-camp? How do you tell them that when you were their age, living a privileged life in 1930s’ Berlin, that your idyllic childhood was as shattered as the windows lying in fragments on the pavement outside your home?

“After Kristallnacht my mother told me the shopkeepers had done it so that they could put in new windows,” she continues. “When I saw them sweeping it up, that seemed logical. But I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t go to school any more, why my nursemaid was silent when I asked about the jack boots and brown shirts and swastikas in a shop window, why we were suddenly hustled into the nursery and made to sing loudly – I know now it was to drown the sound of storm-troopers parading outside.”

She describes it as a conspiracy of silence, even though she now keeps her own silence. She knows that although her grandchildren will one day have to learn about their appalling history she must protect their innocence a little longer.

As to the adult deceits of her own childhood, she is torn. The resentment is still there. “I had no ideas why all our furniture was packed into wooden crates, or why my father disappeared. I learned later that he was in Dachau. My mother used to say: ‘Daddy is away on business.’ She got him out of the camp by paying a retired army officer, and we came to West Hampsteads.”

In a book full of poignant images one of the most heartbreaking is of the family’s first Easter in London, of Eva Figes’ father, just out of the concentration camp, emaciated, his head shaved, trying to organise an Easter egg hunt on Hampstead Heath for her and her little brother. She was six years old, and saw through his determined jollity and felt she was “too old for this charade”.

Her beloved father, in gratitude to Britain for giving his family sanctuary, joined the British army. She was left with her mother whose bitterness and anger manifested itself in cruelty towards her daughter. “I would, in today’s climate, be classified as an abused child,” she writes.
She was, however, an outstandingly clever child, and found refuge in school and learning. She got away from her mother by marrying young. The marriage did not last, but she had her children and her work, her growing reputation as a writer and as an important woman in the literary world.

For the past 40 years she has lived in a light, airy flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead, where her grandchildren are now frequent visitors. At 71, she says that these children have brought with them a rejuvenating glow. The pain of the loss of her own grandparents stirs from time to time, but, she says, with an unexpected sense of healing. “I sometimes feel as if my grandmother’s spirit were sitting on my shoulder, watching me play her role, saying ‘it’s all right now dear’.”
The innocence of the title of her book is in the figure of her golden-haired granddaughter.

The narrator/Figes is the voice of experience. The little girl sits on her knee, and they talk, and the relationship is sweet. The stories they listen to together show that the world is an ugly and dangerous place, and that the magic of childhood has to go. But despite the harshness of the grandmother’s memories and of the folklore, it is the voice of optimism, and Eva Figes’ ghosts have been laid.

“It helps me to feel that whatever my grandparents suffered, they knew I was safe. One of my granddaughters, who is now 12, said to me, ‘If you hadn’t survived, we wouldn’t be here.’ That’s the real happy ending, that all those people I love are here.”