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‘Thank you, Heinrich,’ she replied, trying to disguise her irritation. Heinrich had been flirting with her for months, and it was beginning to grate.
‘Fancy a drink after work? I clock off at ten…’
‘Sorry, Heinrich, not tonight. Got to get back home – the kids will be waiting.’
She smiled and quickly slipped out of the studio, sensing him watching her leave.
Since starting her job for the BBC, Leila had observed an atmosphere of lust among the staff. Perhaps it was the war, and the ever-present threat of death; maybe it was people working long hours and yearning for companionship; or perhaps they just wanted a bit of plain old-fashioned sex. As one of the few women working at Bush House, she was frequently the target of sexual advances. She was neither offended nor flattered. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel the need for affection, or even sex, but in the five the years since Viktor’s death she hadn’t once felt tempted. The truth was she still loved him.
Debating whether to take the tube or the bus home, the decision was made for her when she saw a bus heading north up Holborn. She jumped on board, settled herself in one of the front seats, put her large leather bag on her lap and retrieved the manuscript she was working on. She spent the journey to north London editing, marking the typed pages with a red pencil, until the bus conductor called her stop.
When she had first arrived in the capital, Leila and her two children had lived in a succession of down-at-heel boarding houses. The rooms were always cramped and lacked a kitchen. Instead, meals were taken in a communal dining room, mainly filled with a strange mix of refugees and travelling salesmen. It was a depressing way to live – especially for the children – and Leila had found herself pining for the chalet in the Swiss mountains.
But within two months, her old friend Frances McFadden once again came to the rescue. She travelled to London for a story she was covering for the magazine, and the two friends arranged to meet at a restaurant in Soho. Over lunch, Leila explained her housing crisis, and Frances was shocked.
‘My dear girl, that boarding house sounds positively uncivilised. You can’t stay there another minute. I tell you what, I have a great friend who might need a tenant. He has just inherited a huge pile in Hampstead, and his old house – a charming little cottage overlooking the Heath – is now empty. Let me talk to him and see if he’ll rent it to you.’
‘It sounds very glamorous, but I can’t afford much, Frances. My income can be rather erratic.’
‘Don’t worry. Along with the house, he inherited a small fortune. He’ll probably just be happy knowing that the house is being looked after. Leave it to me.’
Built between the wars, the cottage stood on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Every time Leila approached the white-painted house, with its tiny front garden dominated by a pair of apple trees, she thanked God for the intervention of Frances and her rich friend. The cottage was the perfect home for her little family.
Walking up the garden path, she noticed there were still a few apples clinging to the branches of the trees. Enough to make apple fritters for supper – a traditional German dessert much loved by the children.
She hung up her hat, coat and gas mask on the wooden coat-rack in the hall, and flicked through the mail on the highly polished side table. She had been hoping for a letter from Minki. It had been months since they’d last communicated and Leila was anxious for news about Clara. Not for the first time, Leila found herself grateful to be safely in England with her two healthy children.
‘I’m home,’ she called out.
‘Hi, Mutti,’ Sofia replied. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’
Sofia and Axel were doing their homework sitting at the kitchen table. ‘What a lovely sight,’ said Leila, kissing each one on the top of their head. ‘Good day at school?’
‘Yes, it was all right,’ replied Sofia. Now sixteen, she was studying for her school certificate.
‘You writing an essay?’ asked Leila, peering over her shoulder. Sofia’s neat handwriting spread elegantly across the page.
‘Yes…it’s about the schism in the church under HenryVIII.’
‘Impressive,’ replied Leila, turning her attention to Axel. He was attempting a page of maths, but his exercise book was filled with crossings-out and smudges from his pen. In contrast to Sofia, he struggled with school, preferring to work with his hands, and had turned a small shed in the back garden into a workshop.
‘Mutti…what’s for supper?’ His voice was beginning to break, a process Leila found both fascinating and rather touching.
She kissed the top of his head. ‘Do you know, Axel, that is always the first thing you ask me when I get home. Let’s see, shall we?’ She opened the door to the larder – a tiny windowless room on the north side of the kitchen – and reappeared with a string of sausages and a bag of potatoes. ‘Will this do?’
‘Give those to me,’ said Sofia. ‘I’ll make dinner. I’ve finished my essay and I suspect you have work to do.’
‘You’re such a good girl,’ said Leila, kissing her on the cheek. ‘I do have quite a lot to do, as it happens.’
The cottage was too small for Leila to have a separate office, so she had set up her desk in the window of the sitting room, overlooking the front garden and the Heath beyond. Although the view was totally different, the placement of the desk in the window reminded her of her parents’ apartment in Munich. The great advantage was the quiet – the only sound was the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, and the distant barking of a neighbour’s dog.
She laid the manuscript ofWomen in Nazi Germanyon the desk; the first draft was nearly complete, but it was covered in her red pencil edit marks and would need to be retyped before being sent to the publisher. Most of the book focussed on the years leading up to the outbreak of war, and how Hitler had convinced the people – and women in particular – to support his totalitarian plans. But she had recently been sent more up-to-date information from contacts in Germany, outlining the latest strictures on women’s lives, and was keen to include them.
Leila slipped two pieces of paper into the typewriter with a carbon between, gathered her thoughts and began to write.
In 1933, German women voted for Hitler in their millions, lured by the promise of ‘marriage loans’ and a better quality of life. But those financial incentives came with strings attached – not least the requirement to produce a minimum of four children, and concentrate their efforts on caring for their families. To encourage this behaviour, Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, masterminded a new women’s exhibition in Berlin, in which mothers were held up as the ideal of womanhood. ‘Men make history,’he said in his opening remarks,‘but women raise boys to manhood…’
For several years women were happy to play their part as mothers and homemakers.Butall that changed when the regime took the country to war. With the men fighting at the front, the Nazis now need women back in the workplace. As a result, millions of women, already burdened with numerous children, are also required to work exhausting twelve-hour shifts in armament factories.
