Free Gifts of War by Mackenzie Ford

the idea in the back of his head to emigrate but then he met my mother and she hated the idea. So no move was ever made—my mother is quite unlike you in that respect.”
    Sam smiled. “Go on.”
    So I explained that when my father was about forty-five, and I wasfifteen—as I pieced the story together later
—his
father received an offer from a big conglomerate, an offer that was, as the saying goes, too good to turn down. “Six months later, my grandfather died of a heart attack and my father inherited the money. He stayed on at the firm for a while, although he didn’t need to work, but he gradually lost sympathy with what the conglomerate was doing with the company, and so, around the time I was in Germany, he left.
    “He was, therefore, a bookish man. And he was, I think, more interested in ideas than in people. There were books everywhere in the house and for that reason, among others, he didn’t feel the need—as so many of his friends did—to send his son away to prep school. One effect of this was that Izzy and I had from an early age a life independent of our parents, making us self-reliant. At the same time, we had a content family life. Christmas, Easter, and birthdays were celebrated but not ostentatiously—one gift was enough for anyone, in my parents’ opinion. My sister and I were made to play outdoors in most types of weather but this wasn’t cruel, and when either of us was genuinely ill our parents were very solicitous.
    “I did go away to boarding school when I was thirteen. But even then I didn’t go far off. It was at boarding school that my first interest in Germany began to form. One of my father’s jobs when he was still in publishing was to keep up with German scholarship, which was then the equal of—and in many respects superior to—both British and American scholarship, in history, medicine, engineering, and chemistry, for example. So I always took an interest in the German language, German history, and German science.
    “I’m talking too much,” I said, suddenly noticing that Sam had long finished her lunch, whereas mine was eaten less than halfway through. “Sorry,” I added. “Why don’t you talk for a bit while I attack this fish.”
    “Okay.” She smiled. “If you can run to another shandy.”
    My glass was empty too. I waved to Maude, the waitress, and ordered more drinks.
    “I’ll bet your life was more interesting than mine,” I said.
    She bit her lip, in a way that I had noticed her do before. “Yours sounded idyllic, as family life should be, reserved but content, not disfigured by war. But I’m sure you left out lots of bits that weren’t idyllic.”
    I shrugged, chewing. “Epileptic fits, gypsies, murder—it’s the best I can do.”
    “I’m one of four girls,” she said after a pause. “A family a bit like your vicar’s. I grew up in Bristol. My father was in the merchant navy so he was away a lot. Maybe that’s where I got my wanderlust, but I’m not so sure. When he was home my father drank and we learned to dread it. He hit my mother. She never did anything in retaliation, not then. But one time, when he went back to sea and she knew that he would be away for weeks, if not months, she simply packed up all our things, and we moved out. We lived in a rented, furnished flat, so it wasn’t difficult. She took us to London, where she had a sister—we’re a family of women,” she sighed, with a smile.
    “My mother was a seamstress and so was Ruth, my eldest sister, a good few years older than the rest of us, and they found work easily enough—we other girls were too young. We moved to a flat near my aunt and we were all much happier than we had ever been in Bristol. At weekends, we visited all the museums, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament. Then our mother was taken on as a jacket maker for one of the tailors in Savile Row in the West End—you know, where all the rich people have their clothes made. She used