Pining for the West

I didn’t even realise that this book existed before I spotted it in the Oxfam bookshop in Stockbridge, Edinburgh, but I pounced on it nevertheless as I’m trying to work my way through everything by von Arnim. Unfortunately I don’t think this is an easy one for people to obtain because it doesn’t seem to have been reprinted. My copy is a 1934 edition.

The first twenty-five pages or so are about how terrible it is that Lady Midhurst is inflicting gooseberries on her guests at every meal during the weekend and I really thought that it wasn’t a great opening for a book but things improved greatly after that.

Lady Midhurst is a very wealthy widow who is famous for her hospitality to the right sort of people. Her philandering husband sickened her and put her off that sort of thing (that was a whisper) for life. So any whiff of scandal about a person meant that they were dropped by Lady Midhurst.

Her husband had been killed during the last year of the Great War and since then Andrew Leigh had helped and advised her in the running of her finances. He had been with her husband during the war and had been regarded as a close family friend for years. As a young officer in the army Andrew hadn’t expected to survive and so he seized the chance to marry a very beautiful 17 year old called Rosie whilst on leave. It was only later that he discovered that Rosie was completely empty headed and self-centred and well, it has to be said, not quite the same class as him. Rosie’s mother is living with them and she directs Rosie’s life for her. Rosie and her mother are only interested in money and clothes and looking beautiful, unfortunately Andrew doesn’t have much money.

Lady Midhurst has a young daughter called Lady Terence (strange name for a girl) and Terry has been in love with Andrew ever since she was very young. So it’s a bit of a personal disaster, given her mother’s high moral attitude to life.

In the end I really enjoyed it, it has humorous moments as well as serious ones. There is a German Count in it who has designs on Lady Terence because he knows that she and her mother are extremely wealthy. I thought it might interest people to read this extract.

What he wanted – and he considered it did him credit, – was to ask, of her mother, Terry’s hand in marriage.

Not many men, he felt, would be willing to do this at such a moment, especially not many of the gentlemen of Germany, where, since the advent to power of their great new Leader, much store was set by female virtue. And he asked nothing in return, either for all he was bestowing – an ancestry completely Jewless, a name written in glorious blood across the pages of Prussian history, a career which ran no risk of ever being interrupted by concentration camps, because only a fool these days was going to hold any opinions except those he was told to …

It makes all those people that I remember seeing on various BBC history programmes in the 1970s, who professed complete ignorance of concentration camps which were only half a mile away from their home seem even more ridiculous now.

This book was published just one year after Hitler came to power in Germany and von Arnim was already mentioning concentration camps. At that stage they wouldn’t have been the death camps which we think of today, but that wasn’t long in coming.