Home again, and giving thanks for Britain

We’re home from a fortnight in the UK. My wife and I took Heloise and my wife’s mother with us on the trip; for the latter two, it was their first visit to Britain. (Our daughter was in my wife’s tummy when we were in Europe last summer, but no passport was required at that point.) The ratio of three adults to one infant is a good one for travel, and we’re blessed with a daughter who is an easy flyer. (I’m proud to say that the Cabin Service Director on our BA flight to Heathrow called her “the little angel” as we got ready to deplane.)

I took everyone to visit Kingston Lisle, the tiny Oxfordshire village in the Vail of the White Horse where my father grew up. We knelt at the graves of my paternal grandparents (noting that we need to hire someone to redo the headstones), stayed at a glorious hotel in nearby Great Milton, and enjoyed the Cotswolds before heading on to Carmarthenshire, Devon, and Cumbria. We took my English nephew to see his hometown side, Exeter City, play their first home match of the season. And we finished the trip in the glorious Lake District, which was the only place where we dealt with rain.

My father, born in Vienna and, from the age of three, raised as a war refugee in England, had four children. My younger brother decided years ago that he felt more at home in Britain than in America; he and his family make their home in Exeter, where my brother is now associate professor of English. My two nephews and my niece are growing up with Devonian accents; they are culturally English. My sister Elizabeth lived and worked in Britain for nearly a decade before returning home two years ago; my youngest sister and I have never lived for any great length of time in the UK, but visit regularly. All four of us have two passports; each of us feels a different degree of connection to that “green and pleasant land.”

My love for Britain isn’t rooted in ethnic heritage; on my mother’s side, I’ve got some ancestors from that sceptered isle, but far more from the continent. The love I have is rooted in many things, but perhaps most plainly in my family’s history. My paternal grandmother, Elisabeth von Schuh, was born in Vienna to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father; her husband, Georg Schwitzer (the spelling would later be changed) was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism when he married. My father was uncircumcised and baptized, but was ethnically 3/4ths Jewish; that latter fact would have meant a death sentence for him and the rest of the family following Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938. My grandfather, a gentle physician, wasn’t eager to leave; like many, he thought things wouldn’t “get that bad” for Viennese Jews (who were used to anti-Semitism as a political prop.) My late grandmother knew better, and she explored every avenue she could to get the family out.

It was Great Britain that welcomed in my father’s family. Not the USA (my grandmother tried that option). Not France (lucky, too, given what would happen to French Jews during the war.) The only door that opened was for Britain, which was willing to take certain Jewish professionals, especially doctors. The family escaped just before the outbreak of World War Two, and after a brief period in London, settled in what was then Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire, in a place called Fawler Manor just outside of Kingston Lisle. Though my grandfather was briefly interned as an enemy alien, he was eventually released and allowed to practice medicine. While my grandmother and her children stayed in the south, he went to work as the staff doctor at the refinery in Ellesmere Port, Lancashire — where he would die in a car accident in 1947.

It was the English who cared for my family before, during, and after the Second World War. My father left England at 24 to go to graduate school at Berkeley, but England never left him. The fundamental decency of that culture stayed with him all his life. He lived 47 years in the USA, but never got an American passport — he only wanted one citizenship, that of the one country that had opened its door and saved his family from the worst mass murder in human history. His California-born children all got their UK passports as soon as they could, and we all use them with varying frequency; we honor our father and we honor the land that became his home.

It was the British (the Scots are as British as any) who gave the Lockerbie bomber his compassionate release this week. Whether it was deserved in this case is debatable, but it is worth noting that compassionate release for the terminally ill is far more common in the United Kingdom than in the States (or anywhere else I know of). While the American attitude tends to be “let the man rot”, or more commonly, “fry his ass”, the attitude of at least a plurality of Britons is far more humane. And I see a direct link between the compassionate release of Abdelbaset al Mograhi this week and the compassionate welcome my father’s family received nearly seven decades ago. My family were escapees from mass murder rather than agents thereof, but the decency that undergirds the very existence of the concept of compassionate release was the same impulse that saved my father’s life.

Could I live in Britain? Perhaps. Not in London, which I find delightful but exhausting. To quote Cerys Matthews, the sublime and lovely Welsh pop star for whom my daughter is only partly named, “I come alive/outside the M25″ (the ring road around the capital.) I love the northeast, particularly Durham and Northumbria, but my brother’s location in the southwest makes a good case for a second home there. But perhaps, like my Dad, I am destined to spend the majority of my life in the once Golden State, making regular visits to somewhere greener, somewhere wetter, somewhere somehow just a bit kinder.

In any case, it’s good to be back. More blogging to come soon.