The Royal Receptionist

My father’s office in Hamburg was in the former Gestapo HQ.  It was the North German Station of MI6 and of course I never actually got inside his office, only to a small reception area which, I remember, had a two-way mirror. When he came to collect me he would say ‘Ah, I see we have you in the interrogation chamber’.
But before I could even get that far I had to approach a sort of cinema-style ticket booth with bars separating any visitor from Vera, the multilingual receptionist. Her full name was Princess Vera Constantinovna (Romanov) and she was a great-granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I, the last Tsar of Russia. My father had previously worked for an organization which screened the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons left in post-war Europe. When he moved across to Intelligence he took Vera with him. She was always very nice to me. At Christmas she received masses of greetings cards, many from other European royalty such as Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, the King of the Belgians and others. She would pass them to me through the bars of her little keep so I could see the royal signatures.

When I next visited my father’s office in the summer vacation I found that she had gone, moved to Paris so my father said, where she was looked after by the Russian Orthodox Church. Later I heard that she moved to New York and worked for the Tolstoy Foundation.
I remember my father saying that Vera was the last surviving member of the Romanov family who could remember Imperial Russia. And she was my friend.

Parquet and Piano

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With the huge unemployment in postwar Germany our large house in Hamburg, which had been requisitioned from the family of a German admiral, was well staffed. In the basement was Willi and his family. He was the hausmeister (janitor), as well as the stoker of the boiler, who had been a merchant seaman. Upstairs were a live-in maid and a cleaning lady who came each day, and a nanny for my baby brother. The live-in maid was blond, buxom, Hannelore, a simple country girl from East Prussia, who spoke no English. In contrast, Clara the cleaner was an intense, well-educated woman in her twenties. Amongst her duties was the weekly chore of cleaning the beautiful oak parquet flooring. This entailed slipping an abrasive wire pad beneath one shoe and then slowly working her way to and fro over the intricately patterned wood blocks until all scuff marks were removed.
Half way through her first day Clara threw an almighty tantrum, screaming and cursing and finally burst into tears before she ran off and hid in the toilet. When she finally reappeared she apologized, saying that she was not a cleaner but a concert pianist, but had to do something to help feed the family.
My mother, the headmistress at the International School and experienced in dealing with outbursts in many tongues, quietly led her to the Admiral’s Bechstein grand and suggested she play something. From then on each afternoon, after some token cleaning, the ballroom in the house echoed to Chopin and Liszt.

Decadent Sardines

One of the things my father’s MI6 office in Hamburg contained was a stash of Nazi era films – some were feature films with anti-semitic overtones, and others were directed by Leni Riefenstahl such as the Nuremburg Rally. In addition to these were a number of short propaganda documentaries highlighting the depravity and decadence of the USA. All were banned and forbidden to be shown to the German public.

The monthly film evening for this secret fraternity took place at a special cinema in the centre of the city at the Gansemarkt, opposite the old UFA (Universum Film Co) studios. The program would start with a few Nazi shorts, and then lead on to the main film. It was the shorts that I liked best as they showed everything from Harlem jazz clubs to naked women wrestling in rings filled with sardines. As they groped at one another and slipped and fell, the women swiftly became covered in tiny fish scales so that soon they were just a shimmering blur of silver as they writhed in front of the frenzied crowd.