A Traitor to Memory

To me she said, “I hope you've got your gum boots with you.” I smiled but made no reply, instead taking myself to the Granddad Room and closing the door behind me.

I don't frequent this spot very often. It makes me uneasy to surround myself with such overwhelming evidence of my father's devotion to his father. I suppose I think that Dad's fervour for his father's memory is somewhat misguided. True, Granddad survived a prison camp, countless deprivations, forced labour, torture, and conditions suited more to an animal than a man, but he ruled my father's life with derision—if not with an iron fist—both before and after the war, and I have never been able to understand why Dad clings to his memory instead of burying him once and for all. It was because of Granddad, after all, that our lives were defined as they were in Kensington Square: Dad's superhuman employment history was because Granddad could not support himself, his own wife, and their standard of living; Mother's going out to work—despite having given birth to a handicapped child—was because the income Dad brought in to care for his own parents and the house and my music and my education was not sufficient; my own pursuit of music was encouraged and supported financially in the first place because Granddad decreed it would be so … And on top of all this always I can hear Granddad's accusation: Freaks, Dick! You produce nothing but freaks.

So within the room, I avoided the display of Granddad memorabilia. I went instead to the desk from which Dad had taken the picture of Katja Wolff and Sonia, and I opened the first of its drawers, which was filled to the top with papers and folders.

What were you looking for? you ask me.

Something to make me certain about what happened. Because I'm not certain, Dr. Rose, and with every piece of information I dig up, I find myself becoming that much less certain.

I've remembered something about my parents and Katja Wolff. It's been triggered by my conversation with Sarah-Jane Beckett and by what followed my conversation, which was those additional hours in the Press Association library. I found a diagram among those cuttings, Dr. Rose, a drawing of sorts that showed the previously healed injuries that Sonia had sustained over time. There was a fractured clavicle. A dislocated hip. An index finger had healed from a break, and a wrist showed evidence of a hairline fracture. I felt nausea overcome me when I read all this. In my mind one question rang out: How could Sonia have been injured by Katja—by anyone—without the rest of us knowing that something had happened to her?

The papers said that under cross-examination, the prosecution's expert witness—a physician specialising in child abuse cases—admitted that an infant's bones, more easily given to fractures, are also more easily given to healing from those fractures without the intervention of a doctor. He admitted that, as he was not a specialist in the skeletal anomalies of the Down's Syndrome child, he could not deny that the fractures and dislocations that Sonia had sustained might have been connected to her disability. But under re-examination by the prosecution, he drove home the point that was central to his testimony: A child whose body is undergoing trauma is going to react to that trauma. For that reaction to go unnoticed and for that trauma to go untreated, someone is being derelict in his duty.

And still Katja Wolff said nothing. Given an opportunity to rise to her own defence—even to talk about Sonia's condition, her operations, and all the attendant problems she had that made her difficult and fussy and a source of nearly constant and inconsolable crying—Katja Wolff remained silent in the dock as the prosecutor for the Crown savaged her “callous indifference to the suffering of a child,” her “single-minded self-interest,” and “the animosity that had sprung up between the German and her employer.”





And that's when I remembered, Dr. Rose.

We're having breakfast, which we eat in the kitchen and not the dining room. Only the four of us are present: Dad, my mother, Sonia, and I. I'm playing with my Weetabix, lining up slices of banana like cargo on a barge despite having been told to eat it and not to play, and Sonia is sitting in her high chair while Mother spoons baby food into her mouth.

Mother says, “We can't keep putting up with this, Richard,” and I look up from my Weetabix barge because I think she's cross that I'm still not eating and I think I'm about to be scolded. But Mother continues. “She was out till half past one again. We gave her a curfew, and if she can't adhere to it—”





“She has to have some evenings off,” Dad says.

“But not the following morning as well. We did have an agreement, Richard.”





And I understand from this that Katja is meant to be with us at breakfast, is meant to be feeding Sonia. She has failed to get up and go to my sister, so Mother is doing Katja's job.

“We're paying her to care for the baby,” Mother says. “Not to go dancing, not to go to the cinema, not to watch television, and certainly not to advance her love life under our roof.”