Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

I never believed that I should actually break down. Suddenly I found that everything was too much for me and my doctors ordered me to a nursing home which was not a very usual thing in those days. People were usually ill in their own homes, but the doctors thought I would be tempted to work and worry if I was at home.8

After three weeks’ treatment she had made no progress. Moreover she was homesick for America and her own family in Chicago. So with her husband and children she sailed to the States for the best part of a year in the hope this would restore her health:

being ill, I thought that the maid I engaged would be able to cope with everything on the journey, but she was seasick all the time and could do nothing for the children. They got completely out of hand.… They used to climb every ladder they could see, climb on the Bridge and bother the captain. Then they would overeat and be sick all over me.9

In Chicago, the children were looked after by their grandmother while their parents toured America. The trip helped The Meteor and when she returned to London she resumed her charitable works. ‘I did much more than before,’ she ominously recorded.

She suffered a more serious and protracted breakdown in 1903, when Gluck was eight and her brother seven. Of this attack Gluck’s brother wrote:

Of the nature of the illness which struck my mother when I was seven I was never given any details, but I think it must have been some kind of nervous breakdown. It necessitated her entry into a nursing home and that was followed by a very long convalescence abroad and our removal from the house in Compayne Gardens, to which we never returned. The pilgrimage in search of her recovery involved much travelling in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and of course it precluded the possibility of my sister and me having any early education in England.10

The ‘pilgrimage’ for health, which lasted some years, took them to Heidelberg, where The Meteor was nursed in a convent. The children lived in a villa in the grounds of the Europäischerhof Hotel, were cared for by their maternal grandparents and went to school in the town. Already fluent in French, from having been taught by a Swiss governess in London, there they learned German too. But it must have been disconcerting for small children, coming from a close-knit Jewish family, to have their home closed up, be separated from their father, see their mother languishing in a convent with some strange affliction of the spirit and have a new language and customs to learn.

When they returned to London the family moved to a large house in Avenue Road, in St John’s Wood, on the edge of Regent’s Park. This was to become their settled family home. The years from 1908 saw the consolidation of The Family’s business success. Gluck went to a Dame School in Swiss Cottage and in 1910, when she was fifteen, to St Paul’s Girls’ School, in Hammersmith. She maintained that she learned nothing worthwhile and that her only education came from ‘omnivorous reading’. None the less she got form prizes and special prizes for drawing and painting each year she was there. She was described as ‘a most energetic member’ of the Drawing Club. Her work was included in a Royal Drawing Society exhibition in 1913 – she was awarded a silver star – and in a Congress on the Teaching of Drawing at Dresden. She was commended by her form mistress Miss Volkhovsky for her ‘extremely good work in all subjects’, and described as ‘a responsible and very reliable member of her Form’.

Five years later, in 1918, when she was calling herself ‘Peter’, smoking a pipe given to her by her brother who was serving as an army officer in Italy, living with the first of her lady loves and wearing outlandish clothes, the Paulinas had their eyes opened as to whom she more truthfully felt herself to be. She wrote to Louis:

Tonight I got into the train with about a million St Paul’s girls. One or two knew me by sight.… Those who didn’t know were not long left in doubt and the result was such a babble that I was glad to leave the train …

I am flourishing in a new garb. Intensely exciting. Everybody likes it. It is all black though I can wear a coloured tie if I like and consists of a long black coat, like a bluecoat boy’s with a narrow dark leather belt. It was designed by yours truly and carried out by a mad dressmaker. Utterly loony. She thought I was mad and I was damn certain that she was mad – Still she was very clever and very cheap and as it was an experiment I am glad it turned out so well. It is most old masterish in effect and very dignified and distinguished looking. Rather like a Catholic priest. I hope you will like it because I intend to wear that sort of thing always.11

While at school Gluck oscillated between art and music as a career. She had a fine contralto voice and ‘cared greatly for music, especially Lieder and early Italian and French songs’. Her singing teacher was impressed enough to offer to continue teaching her free of charge, rather than see her give up singing – and the musical training at St Paul’s was good. Gustav Holst was director of music there. In her extravagant manner Gluck liked to tell of the inspirational flash that determined her choice of future:

I was very torn between the two arts, but my fate was settled in a dramatic way at the first pupils’ concert at the Wigmore Hall. After receiving most encouraging applause I determined to choose a singer’s life. While waiting for my next appearance I looked at the rows of photographs of famous musicians lining the