When I was a child, the word orphan always had a capital O. It was a terrible word, like the beginning of a horror story. Or the end of one. How my mother came to be an orphan was the first true story I remember hearing. I was six. I was in bed, and my mother had just kissed me goodnight. I don’t know why I suddenly chose that moment to ask her how her parents died.She told me that her father died of heart failure when she was nine. He was a Moroccan merchant and the family was living in Tangier. After his death my British grandmother Gertrude and her four children returned to London.
“So how did your mother die?” I had seen photos of her draped in shawls. She was dark, Jewish, aristocratic looking: like my Moroccan grandfather, she seemed to come from another stratosphere to the dreary one that we inhabited, with its village chip shop and its clanging Middle England bells.
“She jumped off a cliff in Switzerland,” said my mother. “When I was ten. On our summer holiday.” It was dark, so I couldn’t see her face as she said it. But I remember the sharp twang of surprise I felt, and the long patch of silence.
“Why?” I asked eventually.
“She’d been looking for my older brother Leslie. He was 19. They’d had a row and he stormed off and he didn’t come back. They sent out search parties for him, but they couldn’t find him. After three days she went out looking on her own. And the next day they found her body. She had committed suicide.”
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To commit suicide: not just a new verb, but a new concept for a six-year-old. To kill yourself on purpose. On holiday.
“What happened when Leslie came back?”
“He didn’t. No one knows what happened to him. He was just — gone.”
A 19-year-old, lost for ever in the mountains? A desperate mother, found dead at the bottom of a cliff? The story was so shocking, so odd, that it didn’t sink in all at once. I tried to imagine Switzerland, a vertiginous landscape of cliffs that lured you to the brink, and mountains that swallowed young men alive. It belonged to a storybook. A bad Gothic storybook, where the illustrations were all skewed and the stories were the wrong shape and didn’t have proper endings.
The unfinished, unfinishable nature of the tragedy — two members of a family lost within the space of four days — cast a shadow over my mother’s life and that of her remaining brothers. My mother’s belief that her mother had killed herself dragged her down, as did the mysterious loss of Leslie. In a secondary way it haunted me, too — but it was only after I had children myself that I began to question my mother’s interpretation of the events that took place on the Frohnalpstock, a 6,000ft (1,830m)peak near Brunnen, in the summer of 1937, and to realise that the suicide theory was hers alone. After all, what mother would give up the hunt for her missing son, and throw herself off a 200ft precipice? The psychology didn’t add up.
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Far more likely, surely, that my grandmother simply slipped and fell? I wondered, too, about the nature of the row that had led to Leslie’s disappearance. My mother can’t remember what it was about. Or, indeed, whether there really was a row. “But he was always walking off,” she remembers. “He was like that.”
It was assumed that it was into the mountains that Leslie walked. It was there, in any case, that they concentrated the search when he failed to return. This much is known: that police from nearby Morschach hunted for him with dogs for three days: that on the fourth day the weather turned bad and the search was temporarily called off; that my grandmother, distraught, insisted on going out looking for Leslie anyway. She took her 18-year-old son Michael with her, and they searched fruitlessly. After some time she told him to go back to the hotel and wait for her there. She would join him. But she never did: 12 hours after leaving the hotel she was found with a broken neck. A week later police gave up the search for Leslie. His body — if there was one — was never found.
After the tragedy Michael studied medicine and then joined the Army, while my mother and her younger brother David went to live with Gertrude’s brother Fred and his wife Dorothy in Somerset. The couple, who were elderly and childless, firmly dissuaded them from mentioning their mother’s death and Leslie’s disappearance. The taboo lasted, and took hold, and it deepened my mother’s conviction that her mother’s death was suicide. “It was easier not to talk about it,” she recalls. “I connived in the indifference. It was just easier to forget. And then the war broke out and — well, everyone was suffering, weren’t they?”
If he were alive, Leslie would be in his late eighties now.
Michael, the last person who might have held a clue to the mystery, went to his grave refusing to speak about what happened. “It was a total taboo,” remembers his youngest child, Sally. “We just knew we weren’t allowed to ask Dad about his mother and Leslie, so we didn’t.”
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After the war, Michael worked as a doctor; for years, he treated people with Hansen’s disease — then known as leprosy — in Nigeria, where he was converted to Christianity by missionaries. He got married and had eight children. Family lore held that he had had one set of children for himself, and another for his missing brother.
My mother never told a single schoolfriend about what had happened until she was 15 and met another girl who had also lost her mother. She went to university, had a career and in her late twenties met my Danish father — who had also been orphaned young.
David’s story was different. Aged seven at the time of the tragedy, he reacted as young boys sometimes do when their mothers die: he lost nearly all memory of her, and of his whole life before her death. But it hit him later. As an adult, he spent years in analysis trying to remember some of what had been erased. But he never succeeded.
Several years ago, David, wanting to recover at least a fragment of memory, went to Switzerland to look for clues. The Palace Hotel where the family had stayed had been pulled down. He met an old man in the mountains who remembered that there had been a holiday tragedy on the Frohnalpstock back in the 1930s. But there were no revelations.
The novelist in me has many theories about what might have happened, some of them quite lurid. You can fall off a cliff, and you can jump — but you can also be pushed. Why was Leslie never seen again? Could he have met my grandmother in the mountains, had another row, and murdered her? Or driven her to such a state of despair that she . . . ?
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Or perhaps, less melodramatically, Leslie never stormed off into the mountains in the first place. Or if he did, he didn’t stay there. Maybe instead, he went to nearby Lausanne. And then, in a café a few days later, he read of his mother’s death in the newspaper, blamed himself and could never face the family again. To me, this seems the most likely theory.
When I put this to my mother, she looks uneasy. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”
“But why were you so sure it was suicide?”
“Well, I just assumed that’s what had happened,” says my mother. “It made sense to me. She must have been distraught. And nobody told me it wasn’t suicide. Nobody told me anything.”
Nobody told anyone anything. It wasn’t just the family, I think: it was the era in which they lived. They didn’t have therapists. They had stiff upper lips. “But don’t you agree now, looking at the facts, that it’s much more likely that she just slipped and fell?”
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“I suppose so. I don’t know.” She doesn’t look convinced. “Losing Leslie was worse in a way, than losing my mother,” she says suddenly. “It set up a permanent uncertainty. I’d be looking at men all the time, in the Underground, or in the street, and thinking: suppose that’s him?”
“How long did you go on doing that for?”
She pauses for a moment, and then says: “I suppose I never really stopped.”
Liz Jensen’s new novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, is published by Bloomsbury next week.
A stage adaptation of Jensen’s novel War Crimes for the Home is showing at the Oxford House Theatre in Bethnal Green, London E2 (020-7749 1164), until June 26