Almost an Englishman

Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly exotic. The author was born shortly after the end of the first world war in eastern Germany. His mother, Wilhelmine, was the daughter of a Yorkshire clothing manufacturer, memorably called Abimelech Wainwright, and his depressed wife Elizabeth, who appears to have said nothing during the later years of her life. His father, Albrecht von Blumenthal, was the youngest son of a minor noble family. These two divorced, for reasons that will become clear, when Charles (or Wolfgang) was about four.

The question occurs to one, not why Wolf- gang should have changed his name to an English one in the late 1930s, but why he chose the particular names he did. Arnold-Baker seems right for a housemaster at some relatively obscure public school. One sees him as a regular attender at school rugby matches. As for ‘Charles’, in the upper reaches of the social system, as with Charles I, the Young Pretender and the Prince of Wales, it tends to indicate silliness. (Although Dickens and Chaplin were comic they were not silly.) As it turns out, Arnold-Baker was taken over from the somewhat mouse-like solicitor his mother married, and he was called Charles already.

His mother was a monster, whom Balzac would have been happy to appropriate: a termagant, a scold and a shrew, that is to say aggressive, nagging and unpleasantly malicious. What her husband saw in her is hard to fathom from the accompanying photographs.