A Prince Among Stones Read Free Page A

was, on the whole, a happy childhood? If so, mark A. Or an unhappy one? If so, mark B.
    I have to say that I quite enjoyed being an only child (which was the third question . . .). It meant that I became grown up at a very early age, and was treated as an adult. Blissfully unaware that my parents were separated, I never felt I had an unhappy childhood, even though I was not brought up by my father – but then in those days, of course, so many people, at least in the world I was born into, were not brought up by their parents. They were looked after by nannies and then either sent away to school or tutored at home. When my old nanny died, my mother’s maid took care of me, but I still spent plenty of time in my mother’s company.
    Because she was a sculptor, I was raised in a world where art and literature were the most important things. She really only liked literary and artistic people. There were telephone calls at all hours of the day and night, visitors, dinner parties. It was definitely an artistic milieu, since she moved to Paris after she split up with my father and lived there with her older brother.
    She was very sad that I was born on 24 August, because it meant I was, just, a Virgo, and she desperately wanted me to have been born a couple of days earlier so I could have been a Leo, like her brother, to whom she was devoted. But it didn’t happen, quite luckily perhaps, as her brother was an absolutely archetypal black sheep of the family. He was Count Franz Ferdinard Fischler von Treuberg, known to everyone as Bubi.
    During the war, Uncle Bubi went initially to Portugal. We heard from him periodically via Barclays Bank in London. Since he was fond of overspending, there was always considerable worry about how Uncle Bubi was managing. Somehow he did. He left Portugal and returned to Germany where, towards the end of the war, he found himself in Buchenwald – he had always been conspicuously anti-Nazi – being marched out of his cell into an interview room where sat three highly decorated generals.
    When he was alone with them they told him that they were going to use what remained of their power to save him, since they had all been friends of his father, my maternal grandfather. The only way they could do this was to sentence him to death, have him released into their custody and move him out of the camp in one of their military transports to Berlin where they would deposit him with friends.
    Bubi and my mother’s father – although his connections had saved Bubi’s life – had unfortunately been very extravagant and been obliged to sell off the family’s wonderful Schloss and 5,000-hectare estate in Bavaria, which had been given to my great-great-great grandfather, a Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, as a dowry for his daughter, in 1806.
    My mother’s father had both wildly overspent and been poorly advised. The factors who managed estates were renowned for siphoning off funds for their own benefit. Naturally they encouraged their employers in their financial ignorance. This was exacerbated by my grandfather’s love of horses: he used to take them to race in different countries at great expense, but none were good enough to win a major race. My mother told me she remembered her father getting a coach and horses ready to be driven into Munich at a time when the motor car was already common. Such unnecessary expenditure was indicative of his fin d’époque mentality.
    The lovely Schloss Holzen (which is between Augsburg and Munich) was sold in the late 1920s. It was acquired by Franciscan nuns, and my grandfather retained the right to live in a little house nearby for the rest of his life. He used to join in their Offices every day since he loved chanting the Office and became a Dominican Tertiary.
    I wanted to go and meet him after the war, once travelling to Germany started to become a little easier, but he died shortly before I was finally able to make the