Paula Neumann

Else Steinhardt (seated) and Paula Neumann (standing)

The first time we met Auntie Paula was at the Munich Olympics. Grandpa had decided to work for Bernard Moteur in Munich, where Heini lived, and so when we went to stay with them we could visit them all.

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Granny and Grandpa's flat was decorated in exactly the same way as their Meudon flat - with the same clocks and paintings that are now spread over four houses.

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It was an overly ordered environment, and then Paula arrived and put it right. The oppression lifted and the fun started. Paula's hair was white and piled up high. Her feelings showed on her face. She was about 60 but in fact she was really the same age as us. Granny would get irritated by the noise and scold us, and her harsh words would include Paula - which made Paula laugh.

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We played a memory game together cities of the world and as we played she would exclaim joyfully, every time she matched a pair of cards. But she was especially happy to see Montevideo because she said she would have loved to see it. So she would shout:"Montevideeeeooo!" every time the card turned up. If I ever go to Uruguay I will have to shout "Montevedeeooo!" as I get off the plane in her memory.

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Grandpa decided we should go down to see Salzburg and the Austrian lakes. He took us in his swish new blue Passat. We stopped at a little Bavarian restaurant on the way to Austria where they served wild boar in a wild mushroom sauce with potatoes and sauerkraut. It was delicious and fatty, and smelled musky.

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Crossing into Austria we got out and went for a walk in the mountains up to a viewing point and grandpa told us about how picking wild strawberries and mushrooms were a national Austrian obsession. At certain times of the year, everyone would go into the mountains and hunt for either wild strawberries or mushrooms and it was a treacherous double dealing leisure activity with everyone trying to put each other off the scent. We found a few wild strawberries ourselves. They were really were really very sweet.

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Every year grandpa would get a letter of invitation to his school reunions from his former classmates, which he would refuse to read. The photos show that Grandpa might even have played hockey for Austria. Perhaps the letters were from his hockey friends. Grandpa had many friends. Eric, Paula's brother, said that he would always remember Richard as the active young man at the centre of a large group of friends. Grandpa didn't want to see them ever again because he suspected what they might all have been up to during the war.

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We went down to Unterach and swam in the Attersee. The Atersee was formed from glacial meltwater and so it was freezing and it stayed that way despite the sun. But we were assured that it was fine to swim in and that we would get used to it. We splashed into the lake and the water was so cold it burned and the best feeling of all was coming out and feeling the blast of warm summer air.

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Paula and mom and granny would shout in sympathy as we come out of the cold water and I think only mom got into that lake a couple of times and went: "Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!" as she swam in small circles dark blue grey water.

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I left to go to boarding school with mom and the twins stayed on for a bit and went to the Beckenbauer football school for a while and grandpa to them took then to some of the Olympic events.

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Mom took me to Peckham to stay at the Levy's house and I think we were very close at that time - just me and mom. Most of the time she was taking me shopping for school uniforms, but some of the time we watched the Olympics together and together we tidied up the Levy's very messy terraced house.

At school I couldn't fly home every holiday and so I either stayed with Paula or the Levy's. Paula lived in Dorset square and had the key to the private Garden in front and sometimes we sat in the private garden and she would ask me what I was reading, because I read a lot, and because I had not really spoken to anyone about books at school and because she seemed so familiar and because she was so loving, I poured out all my thoughts and fantasies on time travel and space travel and the like to Paula. No one else took the time to listen to me. She must have been very bored, but she seemed fascinated and so I responded.

Paula's companion was a little yellow and blue canary which she kept in the kitchen. Sometimes she would let it out and it would fly around as we drank tea. And we would talk about everything and she told me about how there were indeed men who loved her and she had loved men, but that as she had to look after her mother and her mother was very possessive she lost her opportunities to marry.

There were hats, exotic feathered hats, in various states of fabrication in the formal dark living room. We never sat in it. That must have been where her mother sat. In the living room there were big cases full of porcelain and silver objects and probably all the things you would have seen in an in-between the wars Viennese house.

"We weren't very well-off." she said, "Your grandfather's family was better off."

"My father was a socialist. He was on the left and I remember looking out of the window with him at the demonstrations in the streets below while he told me what was happening. I remember how we saw the fascists marching. My father told me about them. He was against them. We saw what they did. I was scared."

Paula made hats for elderly well-off rich women, that was the way she supplemented her income. Her rent was fixed because she had been in the flat since the early thirties and had the right to stay there. She also had a little pension and her brother Eric Neumann supported her. Later we went to see Eric once in the countryside in England somewhere.

I remember the route to Paula's house so well. It was the only time I travelled on the Bakerloo line to Bakerloo Street and then past Tussaud's and the Observatory to Dorset Square. She used to share wonderful cake with me every time I came and she was a wonderful auntie. I remember once she took me to a famous cafeteria in Regent's Street and bought me a lovely cake and tea and they seemed to know her quite well. She was enthusiastic about sweet things.

When I was difficult teenager I told her about the young women I loved and she listened to me. I told her about Nicky in particular - because I was still in love with Nicky - and it was than she confessed whe hadn't much experience in love and told me about how she had had to abandon love in order to look after her mom.

Paula was a fixture in our family life. And then we got a message from Eric that she had had a stroke and I went to see her while I was studying for my degree and she said. Phil, it's terrible.

"When I eat chocolate it tastes like I am eating wax. I have no taste at all. The doctors say I will get it back slowly, but really. It's terrible."

The way she said "terrible" sounded like a distorted echo of the way she shouted

"Montivideo!"

Then, the last time I visited her she said.

"Phil, I have something serious to tell you. I am a fraud. I am not your real auntie. I was Richard's cousin."

And I told her that it made absolutely no difference and that I loved her as my auntie Paula. She seemed upset. In the end I don't think she told me all that she would have liked to tell me at that point, because I was upset that she was upset.

But she did say: "I was very close to your auntie Else. We were very close and that's why Richard has always kept in touch with me and introduced me as your auntie. But I am not."

I think what she would have told me, (a conclusion I reach after doing a little research), was that Else had come to stay with her cousin and best friend in London to escape the Nazis in France, but that Else was so suffocated by Paula's domineering mother, that she decided to go back to Paris instead. Because, as my grandfather said in his letters, no-one expected the war situation to last more than a few months.

I neglected Paula in her last month. I didn't go to see her. I heard that she was getting better and I called her and heard that she had her taste back.

I said to myself: "Next week, next week, next week." and then I heard from my parents that she had died.

Going through granny's photos two years ago I found pictures of Else and Paula together. They look like a very happy-go-lucky brace of friends. Else is blond and Paula is dark and they are laughing in every photo. I can't help feeling that had I ever known auntie Else then she would have been a kind of twin to Paula and just as much fun. And Elsa was a reasonably well known opera singer too, so she would have added much to the fun.

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[Just found a wierd connection with a Paula Neumann taken from Prague to Thereseinstadt, just as my Great Grandmother Regine Neumann was, but that the composer Richard Strauss tried to rescue this other Paula Neumann. ]