Endpiece
What a bastard!
Jeffrey Bernard
I loved the bit in the Sunday Times about Hitler's son. You must have read it. A German historian claims to have found Hitler's" son, alive but not too well and living somewhere near the German border in northern France.
Apparently he didn't know he was Hitler's son until 1952 when his mother spilt the beans on her death bed. You'd have thought that a daily glance in the bathroom mirror over the years might have aroused his suspicions, but no. I mean, can you imagine your growing apprehension as you begin to realise there's something familiar about the way your moustache only grows to a width of two inches`and the way that, no matter what conditioners or oriental oils yeti massage methodically into your scalp, your hair remains ominously lank and falls flat to one side of a natural, nay obstinate,. parting?
The point is that even if this son didn't inherit his dad's looks he certainly inherited something because it appears he was an enthusiastic collaborator. In which case I imagine he must be feeling slightly cheated of the childhood and home life that was rightfully his.
You really have to admit it would have been extraordinary. There you are, Hitler's son, playing on the floor with your electric Trix model set of the Hamburger Flyer, when you hear a key slip into the front door lock. Your father, Hitler, is home from a hard day at the office. Has it been a good day, have things gone well on the Western Front or has Goering upset him and put him in a foul mood? Your question is soon answered as Daddy walks into the sitting room and takes a running kick at your train set before sitting down by the fire to remove his jackboots. Your mother makes a signal to you to keep shtum by putting a finger over her lips, and you sit down to a silent dinner—the pudding course of which is a mouthful of carpet. Your only consolation you think, as you're tucked up in bed with your fluffy Dobermann Pinscher and Struwwelpeter, is that you aren't uncle Heinrich's son.
Well anyway, the supposed son, Jean Lorret, is now ready to tell the world about his parentage as he's desperately ill and doesn't expect to live much longer: 'He apparently does not Want to make any money from this startling revelation, but is happy that the world should know that Hitler was not impotent.' I just don't get that bit at all. If Hitler was his father then of course he wasn't impotent. Furthermore, why tell the world because you're ill and don't expect to live much longer? As a matter of fact, I'm desperately well but don't expect tolive much longer, so I feel obliged to investigate my parentage too. I've been You see, I had what we psychiatrists call an unhappy childhood. It is so blotted from my memory that I can remember hardly a thing before 1939 when I was seven. I do remember though my parents drinking vast quantities of sweet lemon tea and playing records of Chaliapin and I distinctly remember a nanny telling me not to go out into the midday sun. I mention George Formby simply because the other day, when I was slightly inebriated, I caught a glimpse of my face in a pub mirror and saw a man — all over a palpable loser — with a vacuous expression on his face as though smiling while drowning.
The trouble is it doesn't stop there just with fathers. For all I know the woman I thought to have been my mother could, possibly, have been my foster-mother. Suppose Virginia Woolf (`The most wonderful person I ever met' — Stephen Spender, Observer) was my real mother? What is to become of me? It's true that I have an uncanny way of finding my way about Bloomsbury and my friends are constantly criticising me for making waves, but we don't really look alike. For one thing my hair is grey and I don't wear it in a bun. On the other hand I do dress just about as badly as the late Hon Dorothy Paget did, and I do have an adventurous spirit which might remind you of Amy Johnson if you knew me.
What I do know is that I'm definitely not German and thank God for it. What an unprofessional lot of chatterboxes those German doctors must be. To harp back to the business of Adolf, a Doctor HansDietrich Roehrs has offered expert advice on Hitler's ability to father a child. 'My knowledge of Hitler's capability to produce children is based on statements made to me personally by medical colleagues at the time.
This means that he was capable not only of having sexual intercourse. but of producing children.' Idle gossip in my opinion although I'm sure that the Germans have ways of making you have sexual intercourse. But then my dad wouldn't have done a thinelike that. considering all the horrific possibilities ever since I read this stuff about Lorret in the Sunday Times and I can tell you I'm not at all pleased with my conjectures to date. There is a bright side, of course, which consists of Bernard Levin, David Frost and Edward Heath all being too young to possibly be my father, but I am desperately worried about the possibilities involving Stalin, George Formby and Noel Coward.
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