Bernelle The Fun Palace

An Autobiography
1. Auflage 1996
ISBN: 978-1-84351-329-2
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Agnes Bernelle, one of Ireland's best-loved stage performers, was born Agnes Bernauer in Berlin in 1923, the daughter of a renowned Jewish-Hungarian theatre impresario. In this sparkling, intimate memoir she recounts her early years in Germany, her family's flight to London after Hitler came to power, her anti-Nazi broadcasts to the land of her birth, her turbulent loves and family life and the blossoming of her career in film and theatre - from wartime refugee cabaret to the West End. In 1943 she married Irish Spitfire pilot Desmond Leslie, cousin to Winston Churchill, on the first day of peace. Inventive and resourceful, Agnes performed impromptu cabaret in Barcelona, befriended cat burglars, summered in Cannes and received the affections of, among others, Claus von Bulow and King Farouk. In 1956 she became the first 'non-stationary nude' in London theatre. Her original satirical cabaret, based around the work of Brecht and Weil, became the first solo show at Peter Cook's Establishment in Soho, and later had a three week run in the West End. In 1963 Agnes and Desmond moved finally to Ireland, where they found themselves facing into a troubled decade.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bernelle, Agnes

Leseproben

I

It’s curious—but I never could remember leaving Berlin.

I can’t remember what time of day it was, or from which station we left—for surely we left from some railway station, one didn’t fly much in 1936—and did we take much luggage, and who came to see us off? How did we feel as we settled down in the railway compartment when the guard’s whistle made us into exiles with one sharp blast?

And yet I can recall almost everything else about that journey. The ship tossing and shaking us across the sea towards England, the immigration authorities at Harwich early next morning checking and rechecking our entry visas. My first English breakfast on my first English train. I can see it all even now, from the small glacé cherry on my first dining-car grapefruit, to the large sooty roof of Liverpool Street Station. I shall never forget arriving in London—but I never could remember leaving Berlin.

I was born there in 1923. My layette cost my parents several million Deutsch Mark, not because they were millionaires, though at that time they might well have been, but because I arrived in the middle of the Big Inflation, when banknotes issued in the morning weren’t worth the paper they were printed on by the afternoon, and my father, who owned and ran several theatres in Berlin, paid his employees in groceries collected at dawn from the city markets. It was an uneasy lull between world wars, marked by the collapse of the German Empire, the hasty establishment of the Weimar Republic, and the abortive Spartacist uprising.

Of course, I knew nothing about all that as I slept in my frilly cot in our apartment in Schöneberg, a residential district of Berlin much celebrated in song, which featured in one of my father’s musicals, Maytime.

We lived in a house overlooking the Viktoria Luise Platz—a small, pretty square which was not square at all, but round, and was, for a long time, the outside world for me. Unlike the private squares in English cities it had no railings, and was freely accessible to children less rich, and less protected, than I was. They swarmed all over it, playing hopscotch, cops and robbers and marbles. I envied them. I envied them their marbles in particular, and since I could afford to buy them rather than to win them from the other children, they became the currency by which I bought my way into their company.

We occupied only one floor of the house we lived in, which was not unusual then in Berlin. The residential houses were large and ornate, with massive entrance doors which, not like our own, were often flanked by caryatids, groaning under the weight of first-floor balconies. Our house had a lofty entrance hall with checkerboard marble tiles and a huge gilded mirror on each side. A long narrow corridor ran the length of the twelve rooms we occupied on the first floor. It was perfect for bicycling from my bedroom at one end to my playroom at the other. The bedrooms all had tiled stoves in the corners, which my parents had left standing, even though central heating had long since been installed.

The reception rooms could be made into one large continuous area by sliding their connecting doors into the wall, which was great for parties. The oval drawing-room had six tall windows, and after the many winter colds I caught during my over-heated childhood, my mother would muffle me up to my eyeballs, my hands in woollen mittens, my legs in itchy leggings, open all six windows wide, and take me for walks around the grand piano. I hated to be so mollycoddled and longed to be down in the square making snowmen with the local kids.

Apart from such minor irritations I think I was happy most of the time. I had been a late and much wanted child, and my parents could afford to deny me very little. Until I was three I had a pretty nurse called Ettie, whose cornflower-blue eyes regarded me with uncritical affection. I became used to being doted on, and to having my own way in everything. If I didn’t want to walk home from the park, I would sit on the pavement and howl. If I didn’t want my mother to go out in the evening, I would try to grab and tear her dress when she came to kiss me goodnight. If I didn’t want to eat my spinach, I would bring my fist down hard and make it fly all over the room, protesting loudly that I didn’t know right from wrong yet, and therefore should not be punished. In truth, I was a monster.

My parents had no option but to retire Ettie, who promptly replaced me with an illegitimate child of her own. They brought in a strict governess; she arrived in a green hat and was called Fräulein Basner. From the beginning I detested her.

One of my most vivid memories is of her first evening with us. Through two translucent glass panels in my bedroom door I could see the shadowy figure of Fräulein Basner unpacking her clothes and hanging them in a closet outside. I was standing up in my cot, howling for her to come back in and read me another story. She took absolutely no notice.

A picture of my older brother on his pony was hanging above my bed, and now whenever I come across it in an old photograph album I know again the awful frustration and rage I felt so many years ago when I turned my tear-stained face to it in noisy supplication. I don’t know if I really expected Emmerich to get off his horse and help me to attract Fräulein Basner’s attention, but she did not respond to my yells, and so began the taming of this particular shrew.

Although at the very beginning she was nearly dismissed for spanking me, Fräulein Basner stayed with us until I was too old to have a nanny. We soon became devoted to each other, and the formal ‘Fräulein Basner’ became the more affectionate ‘Bäschen’. When she left us, at the age of fifty, she would not look after any other children. Instead she advertised for a husband, and married a trombone player from the Potsdam Municipal Orchestra. We danced at her wedding, and lost touch with her when the war came.

In 1954, when I went back to Berlin for the first time, I got a message across to East Berlin where I had been told she was living. Returning late from a visit to the theatre, I found Bäschen sitting in the lounge of my hotel with a basket of eggs on her lap. She had been waiting there for many hours. How she got across that border I never found out. We had a tearful reunion, and I invited her for a proper meal, but she had to get ‘across’ before midnight, and only took the time to tidy my room in the hotel before she left. I never saw her again.

Christmas was always a great event in my parents’ house. All our extended family and many of our friends would come for dinner.

A tall tree was put up in the drawing-room, with real candles and a great deal of angel hair (lametta) hanging from its branches in long swathes of silver. Around the room were small tables stacked with presents for everyone and on every table was a plate of goodies: nuts, raisins, honey cake and marzipan.

I was usually too excited to sit obediently through Christmas dinner, which we had on Christmas Eve, as is the custom in Central Europe. We had carp with parsley sauce, or goose with chestnut stuffing, and a sweet made of poppy seeds—which I hated. After the grown-ups’ coffee and brandy, the long-awaited moment came at last. My mother disappeared behind the double doors, which had hidden the drawing-room all day, and the sounds of ‘Stille Nacht’ came wafting through from our hand-cranked gramophone. The doors opened slowly and we rushed in to find our presents.

One particular Christmas I made straight for the tree, for underneath its branches I could see a wondrous object: a miniature Citroën complete with headlamps, indicator, number-plates and fat rubber tyres. I jumped into it and grabbed the steering wheel. In vain I looked for the ignition key.

‘How do you start the engine?’ I asked anxiously.

‘You don’t, Mädichen,’ said Uncle Carl Meinhard, whose present it was. ‘You have to pedal it.’

Pedal! I had to pedal it!!! I didn’t even try.

My parents were embarrassed. Carl Meinhard was my father’s partner, and a very generous man. He had had this tiny Mercedes specially built for me in the Citroën factory, a replica of their latest model, no less.

‘Aren’t you going to say thank you to Uncle Carl?’

I hesitated for only a moment, then went to my table, took a marzipan orange and handed it to Uncle Carl.

‘Thank you,’ I said in measured tones.

‘Well thank you, my dear,’ said Uncle Carl, ‘but look here, this isn’t a real orange.’

‘It isn’t a real car either,’ I replied.

I am told I would never play with it, and eventually it was given away.

When I was five, my parents put me into a small Montessori school in the Palais Goldsmith-Rothschild on Unter Den Linden. This school had been started privately by the Baroness Rothschild to prevent her children from having to go to ‘common’ schools, and coming into contact with ‘common’ germs. Her family paediatrician, who was also ours, had selected a small group of sufficiently ‘germ-free’ tots of whom I was one, which suited my doting parents.

Each morning I was driven to school in a black limousine by a chauffeur in a smart, buttoned tunic, knee-breeches and a peaked cap. I fondly believed that the car belonged to my father, whereas it really was the property of the chauffeur. This was no affectation on my father’s part. He needed a car and a driver in his busy life, but owning a car privately was not yet in fashion in Berlin in the twenties.

In the Montessori school I quickly learnt to...