Letter 15

Oct 10 1932 – Berlin-Charlottenburg

I’ve just got back from the British Embassy where to my huge excitement and embarrassment I had to swear on oath on a bible. I’ve never don’t this before, and I think next time I shall say I am a conscientious objector. It was all about my income tax return, so lets hope it was worth it.

I have been having a time of it in Berlin! Mummy has a passion for cinemas and mokke cake – but she hasn’t a passion for Nazis. Not she! And last Sunday – all innocent of everything – I took her out to see Sans Souci and landed her into the thick of a Hitler Jugend Tag in Potsdam. But let me tell you n the privacy of a letter, that Hitler nearly made me a convert. And why? All because most of the Nazis were about 10 years old and all of them were pale, tired and limping. “They ought to be in bed, poor lambs!” and, then, to crown it all a grown-up Nazi (he must have been at least 18 ears old) caught her eye and they both grinned. In the end she decided that they had all been coerced, so Hitler that Ogre Hitler (and as if all the little Nazis didn’t love marching round in brown uniforms under the admiring eyes of large crowds) lost a potential convert.

Since then we have simply been marching from relative to relative, leaving cards. One of them took us to the zoo where I lost my heart to the sea elephant. You know, Russell, I’m not sure that I wouldn’t like one even better than a Saint Bernard. How? Says you, have we improved our minds? Well, on Sunday morning we went to see the Pergamon Museum and Nefertiti. She’s a beautiful woman for you! And then we walked up and down Kurfurstendamn till 7.30 and bedtime. (We go horribly early, and the camp bed I bought for 11/6 in the Army & Navy Stores sways if I move and sometimes disintegrates) And today, as I say, I went to the British Embassy. And although I have walked Mummy from Halensee to Potsdamer Platz and Unter den Linden she still doesn’t know her way home from KaDeWe though we go for lunch there practically every blessed day. Also she has been nearly run over about ten times. This week we are going to bring to a climax by having dinner in Café Waverland, the most famous café in Berlin and no place for pure minded girls. And on Sunday I shall be left alone to enjoy a Furtwangler Symphony concert and my usual routine. Mummy returns to England and a bedridden mother. Such is life.