Tom Stoppard: A Life

PART I

1

First Acts

G:

What’s the first thing you remember?

R:

Oh, let’s see…The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?

G:

No—the first thing you remember.

R:

Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago.

G:

(patient but edged): You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?

R:

Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question.

The first thing he remembers, he thinks, comes from the winter of 1940 or 1941, when he was three or four. There was a man dressed up as a devil with a forked tail who was making the children frightened. They had to promise to be good, and all the children received a present: a tin boat, was it? This would have been St. Nicholas’s Eve, 5 December, when the Czech Santa Claus, Svatý Mikulāš, appears with two figures, an angel who rewards every good boy with favours and a devil who frightens the bad children to make them be good. He was Tomáš, or Tomik, Sträussler. His baby words would have been in his natal language, which he would soon forget. These children were not in Czechoslovakia. They were a little group of exiles, war refugees and survivors, in transit. They were in Singapore; and this is one of his very few memories of being in Singapore. Another was of being on a beach with his family. His father must have been there. But he couldn’t remember his father. He had disappeared from memory.

Children like these from Czechoslovakia were being scattered all over the world—to India, Kenya, Canada, Argentina, the United States, England. History seized them and chucked them about. Their lives would be shaped out of random acts of fate. Language, family, home, histories would survive, or be lost and erased, and sometimes eventually re-found, on the throw of a coin.

When asked, all his life, about his Czech-ness, Tom Stoppard’s answers have varied. When he suddenly became famous in the late 1960s, and all the interviewers asked him about his past, he said he was a bounced Czech. He told them he couldn’t speak Czech and he’d been speaking English for almost as long as he could remember. When the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and his first wife thought he should be taking it more personally, he said that he used to be Czech but he didn’t feel Czech. When he went to Prague in 1977 to do his bit for Charter 77, he felt no identification at all. From then onwards, though, his friendship with Václav Havel, his involvement with human rights causes in Russia and Eastern Europe, his plays on those subjects, and, in the 1990s, his discoveries about his family, and his mother’s death, altered the way he talked about being Czech. In the 2000s, receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Brno, and reminiscing with pride about his parents, he spoke with tender feeling about his origins: I grew up far away, knowing that Moravia was where I come from and where my mother and father came from. In a speech on the stage of the Czech National Theatre, when the Czech Republic entered the European Union in 2004, he talked about his patriotic pride in the Czech flag when I and my elder brother and our mother were still a Czech family far from home. And he ended the speech: Some things are ineradicable. Among these things, too, was his Jewishness, which, he came late to recognise, was also ineradicable.

As with the world histories that encircle and forge the destinies of characters in his plays, plays such as The Coast of Utopia, Rock ’n’ Roll and Leopoldstadt, behind his English life stands the history of Central and Eastern Europe: two hundred years of war, national conflicts, pogroms, exile and shifting borders. The ideological and national forces at work in the course of these centuries—imperialism, Nazism, Communism—also shaped the lives of his ancestors and his family, and composed his ineradicable origins.

The story goes back to territories right in the heart of Europe, the ancient lands of Bohemia (capital, Prague) and Moravia (capital, Brno), bordered by Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Silesia. It goes back to a mixed ancestry of Czechs, Austrians and Germans, with Czech and German speakers living in the same towns, Jews and Catholics often linked in families by marriage. It goes back to generations of hard-working, bourgeois professionals, bringing up their families, keeping the peace, none of them artists or actors or musicians or philosophers, but earning their living on the railways or in shoe factories or in hospitals or schools, moving across borders between Vienna and Prague, Brno and Zlín, the city of Tomáš Sträussler’s birth in 1937.

Tomáš Sträussler’s name would change, and all the names have changed. Bohemia and Moravia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until its demise at the end of the First World War. In 1918, Czechoslovakia became an independent nation under its first president, Tomáš Masaryk. The Austro–Czech borders shifted. Part of Austria became Czech; place names were changed all along the border. When Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, it was renamed The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the German-speaking borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia. When the Communists liberated the region at the end of the Second World War, in 1945—and expelled the minority German population—it became the Czechoslovak Republic. The town of Zlín, in Moravia, was renamed Gottwaldov, after the first Communist president of the Republic. Zlín stayed that way until 1990, after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the fall of Communism in much of Eastern Europe. In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Tom Stoppard’s father, Eugen Sträussler, born in 1908, had a quite common Austrian surname. A well-known early-twentieth-century Austrian neuropathologist, for instance, called Ernst Sträussler (no relation), was born in Moravia and worked in Prague and in Vienna. Eugen’s family, who were all Jewish, similarly crossed borders. His paternal grandparents, Lazar Sträussler and Fani (née Spitzer), and his maternal grandparents, Josef Bechynski and Hermine (née Stein), had a mix of Austrian and Moravian surnames.

Eugen’s father, Julius Sträussler, the son of Lazar and Fani, was born in 1878 in Březové, an ore-mining town in south-eastern Moravia. He worked on the rapidly expanding Austro-Hungarian railway network, and rose to be superintendent. He was, according to his future daughter-in-law, an autocratic and bossy character. He married twice, the second time to Eugen’s mother, Hildegard, daughter of Josef and Hermine Bechynski. They moved between Prague and Podmokly, in the north-west of Bohemia, on the Austrian border, where Eugen was born, and Vienna, where Eugen grew up and where his sister, Edit, was born. Julius Sträussler did his military service for the cause of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 1914 to 1918. (The future president, Masaryk, saw his people answering the call-up in horror, as if going to the slaughter.) Julius survived the war and took his family back to the newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, to live in Brno, on Francouzská Street, and take up the lucrative position of head of the Czechoslovak State Railways. In Brno, Eugen was a student in the newly established Medical Faculty of Masaryk University, and his sister, Edit, met and married Frantisek Hevelka, a law student who, decades later, would become a Judge of the People’s Court in Communist-ruled Brno. She worked in an office and had no children. The young Sträusslers were Czechs of the new, post-imperial, post-war world, full of aspiration and energy.

While Eugen was still a medical student, he took holiday jobs as a trainee doctor in the hospital at Zlín, about seventy kilometres away. There, on a skiing trip with some fellow students, he met a beautiful, dark, lively young woman called Marta (or Martha) Becková, who was training as a nurse and doing secretarial work for what she, and everyone else, called The Firm. They were both in their twenties; she was three years younger than him.

The Becks were less well established and comfortably off than the Sträusslers. Like the Sträusslers, they were Jewish Czechs, but they came from a different part of the country, and they made marriages, like many Czechs of the time, which intermixed Jewish and Catholic families. Marta’s father, Rudolf Beck, was a teacher, so the family had to move whenever he was appointed to another school. His parents, Marek and Anna, came from northern Bohemia, on the Sudeten–Czech border, near the town of Ústí, which when the Germans annexed the Sudetenland was renamed Aussig (and was infamous for a massacre of native Germans in 1945, at the end of the war). Rudolf Beck was born in 1874 in a town in the Sudetenland called Lovosice. Both parents died young, and he was brought up by an aunt and had to make his own way. His daughter Marta remembered him as a hard-working, kind and decent man, bringing stacks of marking home every day, smoking his pipe and doing the crossword for relaxation.

His wife, Regina Ornstein, came from a Bohemian family. Her three sisters lived in Prague and after her marriage she would visit them once a year; Marta remembered being told, as a regular item of family gossip, that two of them did not speak to each other for years; they had a cat and spoke to each other via the cat. But the eccentric Prague aunts were living in another world; the Becks hardly ever went there. Between 1898 and 1911, moving between small towns in the heart of Czechoslovakia, they had six children—one son, Ota (or Otto), and five daughters. Marta, born on 11 July 1911 in Rosice, near Brno, was the baby. When Marta was a teenager, the family moved to Zlín. Her mother, Regina, a much more demanding character than Rudolf, dominated the household; she was jealous of her husband, somewhat fussy and over-protective and given to making occasional scenes. By her sixties she was an invalid, suffering from heart disease. But for as long as she could, she worked non-stop, bringing up the children, doing the housework, cooking, and in her spare time reading the papers cover to cover—as her youngest daughter would, all her life.

Marta led a sheltered life, going to a bilingual and then a Czech school before starting work, and always accompanied by her mother as chaperone when she went out to a dance. The expectation was that the girls would live at home and then get married. The eldest, Wilma (or Vilemina), married a country doctor, Antonín, who died young. Berta married a German, Arnošt Kind, but the marriage did not last. Irma married Bartolomei Cekota, who would move his family to Argentina before the war, where he worked for Bata and became an extremely wealthy man. Only Anny, the middle daughter, stayed single.

Eugen kept coming over from Brno to Zlín to see Marta, on free first-class rail tickets provided by his father—who withdrew the favour when he found out his son was going to visit a girlfriend rather than for his medical education. But Marta was accepted by the Sträusslers—Hildegard, Eugen’s mother, was very kind to her. By the time Eugen graduated from Brno, in 1933, they had decided to get married. The custom was that the bride and her family paid for the wedding. Marta and her family were saving like mad, but Eugen knew there would be no dowry. A photograph of Marta in 1927, shown to her younger son many years later, made him understand what her standard of living had been: The fact that my mother was beautiful had escaped me and the realisation was shocking, and then touching when I saw that the dress had obviously been run up at home, and the coat was a poor girl’s best. Unlike many young Czech men of the time, Eugen was marrying for love, not for money. Looking back, she would consider this heroic.

Somehow her parents managed to provide them, as the custom was, with a furnished house, carpets, curtains, everything from the first day, all table and bed-linen hand-embroidered. Eugen got a job with The Firm, as a doctor in the hospital at Zlín, with the aim of becoming a heart and lung specialist. On 23 June 1934, he and Marta were married in Zlín. An enchanting photograph shows a warmly smiling, dark-eyed Marta looking joyously at the camera, wearing a lacy cream suit and jauntily tilted hat, with her husband gazing at her adoringly. He is wearing thick black spectacles and a formal suit, and has dark receding hair, a big toothy smile and huge ears. He looks very young, very intelligent and very much in love.

They settled down to a life in Zlín, living near the river Dřevnice on a pretty, leafy street called Zálešnà III, one of a grid of twelve identical, numbered Zálešnà streets, in a small square red-brick house (number 2619), with a flagstone path running through a little front garden, very like its neighbours, with exactly 193 square feet for a living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and upstairs another 193 square feet for the bedroom. There were minor variations—slightly larger houses for the doctors or managers, houses placed at an angle to each other for privacy and to break up the straight lines. But in each one there was a cellar for storage, a tiny kitchen and living room, two or three small bedrooms on the upper floor, and a garden. The houses were called batovky, because, like almost everything else in Zlín, they belonged to The Firm.

The Firm was the shoe-making company Bata, which owned, built, designed and managed the house, the street, the hospital and the town, and controlled the employment, income and lives of most of Zlín’s inhabitants. The Firm’s policies and administrative decisions dominated the life of the young Sträusslers and would play a part in their children’s journeys into the world, like those two children setting out on their long path in the advertisement of Bata’s English rivals, Start-Rite, with the motto: Children’s Shoes Have Far to Go.

Zlín, since the turn of the century, was Bata. This otherwise unremarkable Moravian town, 250 kilometres south-east of Prague (about four hours on the train), nestled in a deep valley between high hills, with a river running through it, surrounded by farmlands, mountains and forests, and once known mainly for its plum brandy, slivovitz, became the site of a social and industrial project with a global reach, a project which was, in its own way, as ambitious and unremitting as any empire or ideological movement.

The Bata shoe factory began as a cobbler’s workshop in Zlín in the 1880s. Through the next generations of the Bata family, it became a global enterprise and, in its home town of Zlín, a highly controlled community. Bata-isation became, after 1918, a symbol of the new independent Czechoslovakia. Amazingly, it survived two world wars, family feuds, the German occupation and the Communist regime. Tomáš Bata, the cobbler’s son who founded the Bata empire, modelled it on Henry Ford’s assembly-line theory. Everything was geared to speed, productivity, profit and competition. His factory survived the Great War by supplying thousands of boots to the Austro-Hungarian army. His half-brother Jan Antonín, who took over the business in 1932 after Tomáš’s death in an air crash (flying in his own aeroplane from Bata’s own airport), expanded the enterprise to Africa, Canada, France, South America, Singapore, Malaysia and India—where a city called Batanagar was founded. Bata shoes conquer the world, was the message. These Bata outposts would be crucial way-marks in the Stoppard story.

The Bata family ruled with a controlling hand over their workforce. (A satirical account of their Orwellian control is given in Mariusz Szczygieł’s book Gottland, while more hagiographical accounts emphasise the family’s benevolent paternalism.) The town was structured in functional sections: workplace, management, leisure, domestic accommodation, healthcare. As well as providing residential housing for all its employees, much admired by Le Corbusier, it founded schools to train up Batamen and built an eight-storey Community Centre (now the Hotel Moskva), with facilities for sport, chess, dancing and eating, but no alcohol. The kitchens in the Bata houses were designed small, so as to encourage the employees to eat in the communal canteen. There were signs on the walls and fences of Zlín reading our customer—our master. There were also Bata department stores, a movie theatre, the first Czech skyscraper office block, the first Czech escalator, a company savings bank and a hospital. This opened in 1932 under the direction of the enlightened and pioneering Dr. Bohuslav Albert, with 320 beds and jobs for twenty-six doctors. Dr. Albert hired a large number of Jewish doctors, including Eugen Sträussler and his friend Alexander Sanyi Gellert.

Dr. Albert noticed the young Dr. Sträussler’s exceptional qualities, and within four years promoted him as assistant to the head consultant. Others noticed him too. He was a writer and a public speaker as well as a promising doctor. Because he could speak German, he was chosen to give lectures to German-speaking doctors around the country. Between 1934 and 1936, he wrote a number of pieces for the local newspaper, on tuberculosis and its treatment, on visiting the ill, on the workings of the Bata hospital, on sunburn and on sleep. The articles are interested in changing medical practices, and in the way everyday behaviour affects illness. They are commonsensical rather than theoretical, clear-headed and morally sound. On sleep, for instance: "It is important that we realize that the sine qua non of good sleep is good work and that only good work makes good sleep possible…It is not healthy to sleep in underwear worn during the day. Bodily hygiene is a condition of sound sleep…insomnia is relieved by appropriate life-styles…the best therapy for insomnia is orderliness, good will and self-discipline."

He looked after children and delivered babies. (Quite possibly one of these was John Tusa, broadcaster and arts administrator, who was born in the hospital at Zlín in 1936.) He was the doctor the youngest patients asked for when they had measles or such childhood illnesses. He always made them feel that everything would be all right, and he was well remembered by his patients. He brought jollity into the room with him. In his spare time, he relaxed by playing billiards at the hotel in the centre of town, owned by a fellow doctor’s father, Mr. Bájaja. Marta described Eugen, many years later, as not handsome in the conventional way but very charming (she was always fighting off the nurses). He had a first class brain, great modesty and total integrity.

The Sträusslers and the Gellerts were next-door neighbours. Nelly Gellert was Marta’s best friend. They were always dropping in on each other. They went as a foursome to the movies and to dances and Red Cross functions in the Community Centre; their friends would drop in and stay up half the night talking. Another friend of the Gellerts at the hospital, Dr. Friedmann, remembered Marta as a charming woman with a slightly mischievous smile, a melodious voice and a willingness to join in with his schemes for abolishing some of the strict Bata social rules.

The Sträusslers were well off enough to have a car, and went on local excursions with Sanyi and Nelly. Once, Eugen was driving when they had an accident, and Nelly was hurt. As an apology, Eugen and Marta gave Nelly a ring with a pale-blue, local spinel stone, set with clasps. She wore it all her life—and her daughter wears it still.

Marta had two children during these years. Petr Sträussler was born on 21 August 1935. Tomáš Sträussler was born, two years later, on 3 July 1937. Tomáš was circumcised; Petr wasn’t. Nelly had had her daughter Vera two months before. Marta couldn’t breastfeed her second baby, so Nelly acted as a wet nurse and fed him. Tomik and Vera, almost exact contemporaries, were milk brother and sister, and friends in the cradle: their mothers thought they should get married when they grew up. Marta had a girl who lived in to help and to babysit. She was enjoying her life as a wife and mother in her twenties; she remembered those times as blissful.

—

For the Sträusslers and the Gellerts, for the other Jewish doctors working in the Bata hospital, and for hundreds of thousands of other Czechoslovakians, those agreeable, domestic, steady patterns of life were now to be wiped out. There had been anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia, and anxiety in Bata about Hitler’s rise to power for some time, but life had gone on as normal for many people. Then, on 12 March 1938, the Anschluss took place: Nazi Germany invaded Austria. On 29 September 1938, the Munich Agreement permitted the Third Reich’s annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia. On 1 November, German troops occupied the Sudetenland. Large-scale displacements and flights into exile, and the persecution of Jews and Romanis, began. On 15 March 1939, Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Two days before that, Jan Antonín Bata left for America; his nephew, Thomas Bata, was already in Canada, from where he would continue to run the business.

Dr. Albert had seen what was coming. He got a phone call early on the morning of 14 March telling him that the Germans had crossed the border. He immediately called in all the Jewish doctors to his house, and told them they had to get out. His wife was there, and she saw the doctors, all smoking, all sweating with fear. Dr. Albert set himself to save as many of them as he could, making contact with Bata branches all over the world and arranging for a number of his employees to be offered jobs there. On 23 March, Jewish doctors were suspended from practising. Eugen and Sanyi discharged themselves from the hospital. Dr. Albert offered them the chance of a refuge in Singapore or a refuge in Kenya. Who chose which destination first became a matter of family legend. The Gellerts remembered that Eugen didn’t want to go to Kenya, and that Dr. Gellert said that it was all the same to him, he didn’t mind where he went; so he took the Kenya offer, and Eugen took Singapore. The Stoppard family would remember it the other way round, that it was Gellert who definitely didn’t want to go to Singapore, so Eugen agreed to swap with him. In any case—it was a matter of chance.

With the job offers in hand, Alexander Gellert went every day to the Gestapo office in Zlín, to get permission to travel. Visas were required for them to get out of the country. The Gestapo office kept telling him to come back the next day. In despair, he gave it up, telling Nelly it was no use. Nelly Gellert got dressed up, went to the office and told the Gestapo officer that she wouldn’t leave until he gave her the permits. The story she would tell her children in the years to come was that the officer was charmed by her and didn’t believe that she could be Jewish; that she told him she was proud to be Jewish, and that she was doing this for the sake of her two-year-old daughter; and that he said it might cost him his job, but he would give her the permits. And then—the heroic story continues—she said that she wouldn’t leave without two more permits, for her friends the Sträusslers and their little boys.

The Gellerts, equipped with their green visas, stamped 5 April 1939 and valid for a month, got out on 19 April and set out for Nairobi. The Sträusslers, leaving behind their family, friends, employment and lifelong habits, like millions of other wartime refugees desperately fleeing Europe, set out on their enormous journey to Singapore—probably via Hungary and Yugoslavia and thence to Genoa. Petr was three and a half; Tomik was eighteen months old. In all, about fifteen of the Bata doctors got out. The others did not.

—

Rock ’n’ Roll, staged in 2006, nearly seventy years after that journey, has as its central character a young man called Jan, who was born in Zlín and whose family left Czechoslovakia before the German occupation because they were Jewish, but returned—to what was then Gottwaldov—in 1948. In the 1960s, Jan has the chance of staying in Cambridge as a student but chooses to go back to Prague under Communism. The play has the vestigial trace of something Stoppard has often thought of writing, an autobiography in a parallel world, in which his family has returned home after the war and he has grown up in Communist Czechoslovakia, through the middle of the twentieth century. In the first draft of the play, Jan was called Tomas, my given name, Stoppard writes, adding, a little doubtfully, which, I suppose, is still my name.

2

In Transit

Did you ever feel like a refugee?

I don’t think one thinks like that at that age. One accepts one’s fate.

I wouldn’t have known the word refugee when I was one…It was just my childhood.

The Czechs from Bata reached the British colony of Singapore in the spring of 1939. A branch of Bata had been set up there in 1930, and a Bata factory was being built. They were housed in the city of Singapore, temporarily, in a semicircular ring of fifteen or so small block-houses, where there were about five other Czech families. In the early days, Marta found it pleasant. Their first experience of the tropical climate, the intense warm heat and greenery of the island, was exciting; the locals were friendly; the food—especially the fruit—was exotic. They had a car, and a daily cleaner from the Bata office, and a kind Malayan ayah who pushed the little boys around in a double cane pushchair and tried to speak Czech to them: Don’t cry! Hurry up, bath-time! After a while the boys went to a nearby English convent kindergarten, travelling by rickshaw. Some letters came through from the families left behind. Marta and Eugen spoke Czech at home, so that was the language the two-to-four-year-old Tomáš first heard and spoke, but he started to pick up some English. The first film he ever saw, Disney’s newly released Pinocchio, was in English. He would always remember Pinocchio’s nose growing like a branch for telling lies, and a bird’s nest on the end of it. There was an English family, the Smiths, living next door, and they went to the open-air swimming club together on Sundays. When Mrs. Smith dropped in, Petr would call out, Mama! Pani Smithova! Eugen had a harder time: the situation at the hospital was difficult, he didn’t like the heat and food, and a stomach ulcer he’d had as a student flared up. But they settled in, and started to look for a house nearer the sea.

In Stoppard’s screenplay for the 1987 film of J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, when Shanghai is falling to the Japanese in 1937, an Englishman at the club advises Jim’s father to get him out somewhere safe: Singapore. The irony was not lost on the screenwriter. The fall of Shanghai was rapidly followed by the invasion of the eastern seaboard of China and of Indo-China, and the relentless advance southward of the Japanese by air, land and sea. On 7 December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The following day they launched air attacks on British airfields in Malaya and Singapore, and Britain and the United States declared war on Japan. On 11 December, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. By the end of 1941, Hong Kong had fallen to the Japanese, the campaign in Burma had begun and Japanese troops were fighting their way down through the jungles of Malaya towards Singapore. In January 1942 the British forces withdrew from Malaya to Singapore, which was heavily bombarded by the Japanese. Every night, the Sträussler family went to a friend’s shelter. The boys would remember hiding under a table covered with blankets while bombs were falling, and the smell of sandbags.

On 8 and 9 February, the Japanese army crossed the Johore straits from the Malayan mainland. The big British naval defences, the long-range guns all pointing out to sea, from where the attack had been envisaged, could not be moved. The airfields and the water reservoirs were taken within days. Many people were killed, many taken prisoner. By the end of the week, on 15 February 1942, Singapore fell and the British general surrendered. The island would be occupied by the Japanese until the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the end of the war.

The official evacuation had got underway in January, in terror and confusion. Most of the women and children had left by the middle of January—and many of the ships they were on, heading for Australia, were bombed—but Marta stayed on as long as she could, hoping they would all be able to leave together. She did not want to travel alone to Australia. But by the end of the month she had to take the children and go. Eugen, who like some other Czechs enlisted in a British volunteer Defence Corps, would follow when he could. She got onto a ship with the children, and he spent about two hours with them and then had to leave.

People crowded onto any ship that was there, each of them packed with a thousand or two thousand refugees. On 30 and 31 January, the Empress of Japan, Duchess of Bedford, West Point and Wakefield were among the ships that got out. The Empress (renamed Empress of Scotland on her journey) took seventeen hundred evacuees—including Marta and the boys—to Colombo. Their ship, like others, got off to a slow start. The evacuation ships would pull away from the docks, which were being bombed and shelled, wait for several days to avoid the bombs, return for more passengers, wait to form a convoy, locate the minefields and wait again for the tide. The journey was memorably horrible. There was great fear, and great anxiety about the men left behind. There wasn’t enough to eat, the cabins were overcrowded, children were always getting lost, and people slept on mattresses on the deck. At Colombo, there was utter confusion. People were being pushed onto the decks of other ships, with mattresses, not knowing where the ships were going to. Marta and the boys were put off one ship and put on another. Half of her luggage got lost on the dock, including a bag with photographs and personal documents from home. Then she found that the American ship they were on wasn’t going to Australia but to India. One of her worst moments, when the tragedy of it all struck home, was when she was giving the boys a bath. (Tomik noticed how the soap wouldn’t lather, because it was sea water.) Nelly Gellert had given the boys two little St. Christopher medallions to wear round their necks, engraved with their names. Marta hung them on a hook in the bathroom and forgot them, and when she went back for them, they had disappeared. She cried and cried. The boys never forgot it.

In Singapore, in the week of the invasion, there was chaos. Thousands were milling around on the docks, while bombs and shells were falling, all struggling to push onto the boats. Allied ships were being blown up in minefields. Eugen was wounded while on guard duty and spent a few days in hospital. On 13 February, he and another Czech went to see his English friend Leslie Smith and asked him—he was the manager of a firm making navigational instruments—if he could get them out. Smith took them down to the docks and persuaded the captain of one of the ships to take them. They all shook hands, and that was the last he saw of them. There was a large group of ships assembling to leave as a convoy, and many of them were attacked. In 1999, Stoppard met Leslie Smith, then ninety, and was told that his father’s ship had been bombed and sunk in the strait between Sumatra and the island of Bangka, trying to get to Australia. The Vyner Brooke, a merchant ship hastily requisitioned and terribly overcrowded, with many doctors and nurses on board, was bombed and sunk at 2 p.m. on 14 February 1942, in the Bangka Strait. Those who weren’t killed on board and jumped or fell into the sea were strafed and killed in the water. Another, much smaller ship, carrying some of the Czech Bata employees, the SS Redang, was attacked on 13 February, about fifty miles from the Berhala Strait, which separates the islands of Sumatra and Singkep in the South China Sea. Most passengers were killed; a few survivors reached the coast of Sumatra by lifeboat, but were later taken prisoner. Eugen was killed on one of these two ships.

On 14 February, Marta and her sons arrived in India, and docked at Bombay. Petr, who was six and a half, remembered his mother weeping, all through one evening, after they arrived. Tomik, two years younger, would not remember the arrival.

—

In the next four years, the family would move across India six or seven times. There were other survivors from Bata and to an extent they kept together, without feeling especially welcomed or at home. Bata looked after its own, up to a point, but, as Marta said, They really did not know what to do with us apart from thinking that they had to keep us all together. The main Bata headquarters in India was a huge factory at Batanagar, south of Calcutta (now Kolkata). But there were other outposts of Bata across India. In the first winter the family went to Naini Tal and then, because it was so bitterly cold, to Lahore, in the Punjab, still under British rule. A Bata outlet opened there in 1942, the year they arrived. It was dusty and wretched and full of flies and mosquitoes. For Marta it was all nightmarish. After a couple of months they retraced the enormous journey to the hill station of Naini Tal, at the foot of the Himalayas. Once the summer capital of the North-Western Province, Naini Tal is a beautiful place, set high among wooded hills, with a deep-green volcanic lake, and an extinct volcano. The family shared a big house with other Czech wives and children and ate together in a canteen, and the boys went, as boarders, to a Roman Catholic convent school, St. Mary’s, founded in the 1870s, where most of the pupils were girls. It was very strict and very clean. They were taught in English, and they spoke English.

The Bata group were beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Some of the women wanted to leave, and in all this time there was no news of their husbands, while the Red Cross and the Czech Consul in Calcutta were trying to find out what had happened to them. It was just a matter of waiting and waiting. After a year or so, Marta, by now ill and depressed and bored, all the joyousness gone out of her, took her boys to Darjeeling, in West Bengal, fourteen hundred kilometres and several days’ journey eastwards. In Darjeeling there was a Bata shoe shop which needed a manager. I learned for about two weeks to know one end of a shoe from another, she remembered, and then was put in charge. Her bookkeeping was not up to much and the staff probably took advantage of this. But the Nepali salesman, Mr. Singh, was helpful, and his wife knitted winter woollies for the boys to wear at school. She introduced a chiropody corner, and made a success of the job. The shop was right at the heart of the town, next to the popular Keventer’s Milk Bar, looking out onto a busy street.

The boys had liked Naini Tal, but they adapted, as children mostly do under such circumstances. Darjeeling in the 1940s was a lively place. Its setting is dramatic, seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas, reached from the plains of northern India by train, or up a switchback mountain road. Steep wooded canyons, tiny villages clinging to the edge of the road, vertiginously sloping tea plantations, drop away from the town. Densely green in summer with mountain flowers and towering pines, firs and cedars, it is bitter and icy in winter. From the upper square, Chowrasta, where the people congregate to sit and talk and children take pony rides, and from the Mall, the pedestrian circuit round the top of the town, where monkeys scamper alongside the walkers, there is a view of one of the world’s highest mountains, Kanchenjunga (or Khangchendzonga), with the Himalayan range stretching out on either side of it. For days on end the mountains pretend not to be there, concealed by thick swathes of mist rolling across the deep valleys. And then they emerge, distant, gigantic, glistening, unbelievable. Very often, Stoppard wrote, returning in 1991, a belt of mist lifts the mountains off the earth. They float in the sky, infinitely far off and yet sharply detailed, massive yet ethereal, lit like theatre, so ageless and permanent as to make history trivial. It is perhaps the most mesmerising view of the earth from anywhere on the earth.

Darjeeling had kept its nineteenth-century colonial function as a hill station and a rest and recuperation sanatorium for the troops and the governing classes of the British Raj, and drew its prosperity from the tea plantations. In wartime it was a recruiting centre for the British Gurkha regiments. It was famous, then as now, for the narrow-gauge steam railway or Toy Train, which puffed its way on its astonishing journey of eight or nine hours up and down from Siliguri, labouring round the bends, warning off animals and walkers with a screaming whistle, stopping often for water, sometimes breaking down en route. In the early 1940s the town was heaving with British and American soldiers and sailors, alongside its usual mixture of inhabitants—Nepalese, Tibetans, Chinese, Anglo-Indians. Stoppard would remember Tibetan traders in the narrow street going up past the Bata shop and the Planters’ Club to Chowrasta. American and British soldiers stayed in the big hotels, like the Mount Everest, and packed out the Gymkhana Club, the Chinese restaurants and the Capitol Cinema (next to the shop where Tomik bought his copies of the Dandy and the Beano). Outside the town there were the dak bungalows, built for the tea planters and the colonial summer visitors, and the summer palaces of the maharajahs. Something of those memories of pre-Independence India would get into In the Native State, his radio play of 1991, and its stage version of 1995, Indian Ink.

Darjeeling had a number of rather grand public schools, the most famous of which was St. Paul’s, modelled on the English system and founded by missionaries. The Sträussler boys went to a not-so-grand co-educational American Methodist missionary school, Mount Hermon, founded in 1895 by a headmistress from a Calcutta school. It had first opened in a house in the middle of Darjeeling called Arcadia. It took pupils from all over the world and from all denominations, and—unlike the English schools—included baseball in its sports. By 1943, when the Sträusslers arrived, it had taken over an estate belonging to the Lebong Tea Company, a group of solid grey buildings built four-square around a quadrangle, at North Point on the Lebong Road, on the outskirts of Darjeeling. From the windows was the view of Kanchenjunga. One of the day girls who went there in the 1950s would remember her mother telling her to be home before the mountains turned pink.

They were boarders, and slept in the small boys’ dormitory, nearest to the Matron. (As the boys at Mount Hermon got older, their dormitories got further away from the girls’.) The iron beds had stretched interlocking springs and the boys used to bounce up and down on them like trampolines. One boy kept them awake with nightly stories of his secret life as a fighter pilot with the American Air Force. But this was not Tomáš. He was a well-behaved little boy, eager to learn, not interestingly naughty or extroverted, though talkative, with curly hair, big eyes, a Czech accent, an enormous smile and an affectionate nature. He was besotted with the Matron’s daughter:

We smallest boys lived in two dormitories at the end of the corridor, and on hair-wash nights we congregated in the larger one to have our hair dried by Matron or by her daughter. The smell of damp hair cooking in the blast of an electric dryer is still a Proustian trigger for pleasurable and disturbing emotions. I received a letter from the Matron’s daughter a few years ago—You won’t remember me but, etc.—and I wrote back, Not only do I remember you, I was madly in love with you, and never heard from her again.

The school motto was Non Scholae Sed Vitae Discimus: We do not learn for school, but for life. Round the buildings were engraved the words Character, Faithfulness, Godliness, Trust and Loyalty. The day started early, with a six-thirty breakfast, and religious assembly taken by the chaplain. The younger boys had a break in the morning, with milk, and a rest upstairs in the dormitories after lunch. They wore a blue school uniform with a striped tie. Discipline was firm—no running or shouting in the corridors—but not harsh. The smaller children got away with sliding down the banisters. There was no corporal punishment. Many of the children were far from home or separated from their parents (though quite a few of the parents lived in Darjeeling), and the school’s aim was to be a home from home and to make them feel safe.

Most weekends, Marta would come to see them, walking down the zigzagging Lebong Road from the centre of Darjeeling, bringing food parcels and treats. On Sunday afternoons, the boys would sit on a bench under a large and particularly splendid fir tree, looking up the long track down which their mother would eventually be seen coming to visit them. In the distance they couldn’t tell if it was her; but it was always her in the end, and they would run to meet her, bring her back to the bench and unpack the packages she had brought. While they were waiting, they carved their initials in the tree. For many years Stoppard wanted to go back to see if the bench, the tree and his initials were still there. When he did return, in 1991, he found that the tree had been chopped down long ago.

It was a comfort to Marta that both the boys were doing well at school. T. Sträussler’s school report, aged seven, in November 1944, put him tenth in a class of thirty and marked him as Good, Very Good or Excellent in all topics: Excellent in Literature, and Very Good in Dictation and Arithmetic. He played the triangle in the school band. He liked books, and he and his mother had a shared fantasy of opening a bookshop together—a rival to the famous Oxford Book Store on Chowrasta.

Their home was Minto Villa, on Auckland Road, a grey house with pillars. (Later they moved to a big solid apricot-coloured mansion called Struan Lodge.) At home, Tomáš used to hang around outside the gateway of Minto Villa, hoping to see American soldiers go by. They seemed to him debonair, romantic and stylish, and they dominated his memories of Darjeeling: meeting with easy manners his request for Any gum, chum?, coming into the school sports ground to play baseball, showing him how to aim his toy revolver or getting out of the train to make a snowball for him when, on their very first journey to Darjeeling, the train broke down above the snow-line—the first sight of snow he would remember. Writing a screenplay for a film about an American bodyguard in the early 1980s, he noted: When I was a boy in India, Americans were glamorous.

In retrospect, life at Minto Villa and Mount Hermon seemed familiar and safe, a lost domain of uninterrupted happiness. That generalised memory of happiness centred on a particular remembered moment, "a day when I was walking along the corridor which led from the door to the playground, trailing a finger along a raised edge on the wall, and it suddenly came upon me that everything was all right, and would always be all right."

All right, that was, in comparison with their life before Darjeeling, a turmoil of uprootings, and of dimly remembered chaos and fear. He was six, seven, eight; he was being looked after; he felt secure; he took every day as it came. He had no imaginary idea of another possible life, and he was not worrying about what had happened to his father, or what would happen to them next. But on one of his returns to India, in old age, asked about that vividly remembered moment, he supposed there must also have been some underlying anxiety.

For Marta, nothing was stable, anything could happen to them, and the worrying never stopped. Quite soon after they moved to Darjeeling, she was advised to go to the Czech Consul in Calcutta to get what information they had. She was told that as many civilian Czechs as possible had been accounted for, and that Eugen Sträussler was amongst those missing, presumed lost. She knew no details then of how he died, but may have learned them later from survivors from Singapore, though she never passed them on to the boys. She returned to Darjeeling the next day, but said nothing to them, feeling that they had enough to cope with. A habit of protecting them through her silence had begun. Some time later, perhaps fearing that she would upset the boys with her own emotions, perhaps unable to bear to give them the final news, she asked a woman friend to tell them (in English) that their father was dead. They were taken for a walk, carefully given the information, and on their return found their mother waiting teary-eyed and anxious to see how they had taken it. Tomáš took it well: that is, he felt almost nothing. I felt the significance of the occasion, he would recall, but not the loss.

—

In the school holidays, there were visits to other places in Northern India like Lucknow or Cawnpore (now Kanpur). Marta once took them to a rajah’s palace. An attractive young widow in her thirties, she made friends, and wanted to enjoy herself if she could, even though her life felt, to her, uncertain and provisional. For a while she was seeing someone called Rudi, a Czech or a German, who ran Pliva’s, a Darjeeling restaurant (later renamed Glenary’s). Then a Czech girlfriend came to stay, who had a contact with a Chinese-American woman whose husband was in the army. Marta and this woman became friends, and she invited Marta to a celebratory dinner in the Mount Everest Hotel when her husband came home on leave. One of the other guests was Major Kenneth Stoppard, who was in service with the army in New Delhi and was on leave in Darjeeling for a fortnight.

After the dinner party, in those two weeks, he came to the Bata shop every day and took Marta out to lunch, and he bombarded her with flowers and chocolates. It sounds like love at first sight. He went with her on one of her Sunday visits to the school, and thought her sons were decent boys. The rapid courtship went on at a crazy pace, she remembered, for some months, while Major Stoppard shuttled back and forth between New Delhi and Darjeeling. A lieutenant-commander who also used the Jodhpur Officers’ Mess in New Delhi in 1944 and 1945 remembered how Ken would often talk of a young woman, whom he referred to affectionately as Bobby, living in Darjeeling with two sons. He said that after the war was over he hoped they would get married.

Stoppard was a handsome, clean-cut Englishman, with a passion for fly-fishing and a strong commitment to King and Country. His family—a mother and a sister—were based in Nottinghamshire; his father had died when he was young. His mother ran a dressmaker’s business in Retford. Before the war he had been a sales rep for a steel company. Early on in the war he had been in China, and had plans to get into reconstruction work when the war ended, either with the construction company Balfour Beattie in China or with Firth-Brown steel agents in Bombay.

Ken Stoppard rushed Marta off her feet, with a forceful set of moves which set the terms of their future life together. From Delhi, he sent her a telegram asking her to marry him. He was due to go back to China, but he went to his colonel and asked for forty-eight hours’ leave to get married. Then he followed up his telegram with a phone call, telling Marta he had got the weekend leave so they could be married. According to her, she said, No, we’re not, what are you talking about? He told her he would be court-martialled if he went back unmarried. She had no time to think and no one to consult. I had to decide on my own what I thought would be best for us. It was wartime, a time of rapid changes and choices, her fortune was completely uncertain, she was widowed, she had lost her family. Here, out of the blue, was a good-looking, fit, competent Englishman with prospects, an army officer, who had fallen for her and who liked her boys, and seemed to have the decisiveness and energy to take care of them all. Without telling the boys, or anyone in the shop, and missing her Sunday visit to the school, she got on the train from Darjeeling and travelled all day (a six-hundred-kilometre journey) to marry Major Stoppard in St. Andrew’s Church, Calcutta, on 25 November 1945.

For years afterwards, she would feel guilty about not having told the boys in advance. But they took it just as the next thing in their lives. They had a new stepfather, who played games and ran races with them and whom they called Daddy or Father. Eventually his younger stepson settled for Dad in his letters home, though Peter remembered that Ken thought Dad was vulgar. Ken decided that he wouldn’t stay abroad but would take them all to England. Perhaps Marta had asked him to do this; perhaps it was a condition of the marriage. England was the ultimate desirable place, the place everybody would want to go to if only they were allowed to. They left Darjeeling for Delhi. Next they went to the army transit camp of Deolali (where the long wait to embark could drive you doolally), and then boarded ship for England.

After he was grown up, Peter found it hard to understand why Kenneth Stoppard had married his mother. Peter and his brother both came to see their stepfather as a bitter, disappointed man, bigoted, xenophobic and anti-Semitic. He became the sales manager of a company manufacturing machine tools. He bullied their mother, was often bad-tempered and had to be placated. Peter thought that Ken’s father’s early death, and his poorly rewarded army service, had blighted him, and that he spent the rest of his life feeling that he should have been treated better by the world. Why would such a man marry a Jewish widow with two small children? As adults, their sense of him did not take into account what he might have felt for her, and what he might have been like when he first met her.

Why she married him, though, was not hard to understand. He represented safety and control. From now on he would make the decisions. And because of his overriding Englishness, from now on she would speak only English, play down her Czech history, discount her Jewishness and keep quiet about the past. If she knew, by the time she left India, what had happened to her family, she said nothing.

—

While Eugen and Marta were together in Singapore, Eugen’s parents, Julius and Hildegard Sträussler, both in their sixties, were evicted from their house in Brno and, early in 1941, were put on the transport of Moravian Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp at Terezin. On 9 January 1942, a month before their son Eugen’s death, they were transported to the ghetto in Riga, in Latvia, where they died. The following year, Eugen’s grandmother, Hildegard’s mother, Hermine Bechynski, died at Terezin, aged eighty-two. Eugen’s married sister, Edit, was transported to Terezin in 1945, but survived and returned to Brno. In 1944, Marta’s parents, Rudolf Beck, aged seventy, and Regina, a chronic invalid at sixty-nine, died at Auschwitz. So did two of her four sisters, Wilma and Berta. They had married Gentiles, but that had not saved them. Berta Kindová’s son, Sascha (Saša), was sixteen, a Bata apprentice, when the Germans came. She wrote instructions for whoever could look after him, went into a church and approached two strangers, a married couple. She asked them to take her son, and they did so. A few days later, she was put on the transport. Saša survived the war. Anny, the unmarried sister, died in Riga. Marta’s brother, Ota, survived and lived on in Brno; her sister Irma, with her husband, Bartolomei Cekota, had gone to Argentina. It is not certain when Marta learned of the fate of her parents, her three sisters and her in-laws. She was certainly told at some time; Berta’s fostered son and Wilma’s children knew the facts, and so did Irma. But Marta never told her sons, either that she was Jewish or that most of her family had perished in the Holocaust. They would find out, very much later.

—

The Stoppards left India at the beginning of 1946. Marta—now Mrs. Bobby Stoppard—was thirty-five, Peter was ten, Tom was eight. It was their third marathon sea journey in seven years. Just as they had narrowly escaped the Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia and the Japanese atrocities in Singapore, they left India before the violence, mass displacement and loss of life which accompanied independence and Partition, they avoided a post-war return to Czechoslovakia under Communism and they arrived in England after the end of the wartime bombing. With good reason did Stoppard come to think of himself, in this historical context, as a lucky man, leading a charmed life. The luck of the draw, the road not taken, the alternative possible path to the one chosen, was not something he thought about as a child. But it came to haunt him as an adult. What would that other Tom have been, the one who didn’t become an Englishman?

Soon after they arrived, deed polls authorising a change of name were made out. Petr became Peter Stoppard; Tomáš, or Tomik, became Thomas, or Tom, Stoppard. (His mother went on calling him Tommy.) They were from now on to be English schoolboys. Ken, their legal guardian, would say to Tom, in later moments of hostility: Don’t you realise I made you British? The boys weren’t naturalised as British subjects, though, perhaps through an oversight. Peter was surprised when, years later, in the late 1950s or early ’60s, the local policeman came to see him where he was living in Bristol to inform him that he was an alien. He was shocked to discover he was still Czech, and organised his naturalisation papers at once. Tom Stoppard’s own naturalisation certificate wasn’t issued until 22 February 1960, when he was registered as from Czechoslovakia, living in Bristol. Neither of them had a birth certificate, but Marta’s Czech passport, with their names and dates of birth, was accepted in lieu when their names were changed and, much later, when their naturalisation was formalised.

Their long journey to England, unlike their journey from Singapore to India, was made without disturbance or confusion, on a British troopship. Peter vividly remembered going through the Suez Canal, the passageway to the West. They arrived in England, docking at Southampton, on 14 February 1946, the same day they had reached India four years before. It was freezing; Tom’s feet were so cold that he cried. Bomb damage was everywhere. They were going to Nottinghamshire by train. Peter was amazed to be on a train with no bunk-bed, where you sat up. Their destination was Retford, where they were to stay with Ken’s widowed mother, Alice, and his sister, Muriel. Always he would remember, with a kind of nostalgia and intensity, the strangeness of those first weeks in England. Marta was extremely apprehensive, but the Stoppard family was kind to her. The war was over. She had brought her boys to a safe haven.

3

Englishness

Jenkins

(to Gale): …And it was all pasture land then, you know. On long summer evenings when we were all in bed and almost asleep, we’d hear the farmer’s boy on the hill, calling the cattle home. Singing them home…God, yes.

Marks

(loudly, independently): Happiest days of my life, to coin a phrase!

The Stoppard boys were sent to boarding school soon after they arrived in England. Kenneth used a contact in Retford, who knew the headmaster, to get them into the Dolphin School. This was a boys’ preparatory school run by Charles Roach, a South African Rhodes Scholar, son of the Bishop of Natal, and later by his son Peter. The school had moved during the war, for safety, from just outside Newark to Okeover Hall, near Ashbourne, on the border of Staffordshire and Derbyshire. Bobby, let alone the boys, had no say in the matter, it was all settled for them. But, as she said to them, much later: How could I have asked you if you wanted to go there, knowing that there was no alternative? Luckily it worked out all right.

The school did work out all right. It was a humane, easy-going, though not outstanding, English prep school. This was what it advertised:

The Dolphin School, C. G. Roach, Head. Prepares boys for the Public Schools and the Royal Navy. Boys go to bed in relays starting at 7 p.m. The youngest boys sleep in a dormitory next door to the Matron. Domestic and feeding arrangements are under the direct control of Mrs. Roach…a well balanced diet…The milk is TB tested. All boys are given some nourishment between games and afternoon school.

Stoppard Two, with his brother, Stoppard One, settled into the routine of classes and games, in what he would describe as a somewhat decaying stately home. Okeover Hall was a splendid mid-eighteenth-century Palladian house with three wings (a fourth had been demolished), an imposing stable block, an ivy-covered church and landscaped grounds sloping away to farmland beyond. This landscape immediately became, and would always be, at the heart of Stoppard’s strong feeling for England. It provided a romantic introduction to his new country. In that first summer and in the legendarily cold, snowy winter of 1946–47 that followed, Okeover Hall was just paradise. The small boys went to bed when it was still light, and out of the dormitory window on the first floor was the rather unkempt garden, leading to a ha-ha, and beyond that the farmer’s fields. In the long, long summer evenings, as the light was dimming outside the windows, the farmer’s boy would yodel—half-sing, half-call—the herd of