Earlier this month listeners to Radio 4 heard the perhaps unexpected sound of an Englishwoman singing the Horst Wessel Lied, the marching song of the Third Reich. Margaret Budd was one of the interviewees featured in Dancing with the Devil, a documentary about well-born teenage girls who had been sent to Germany to learn the language at the time of Hitler’s rise to power.
It was characteristic of her that she should have shown the good manners to accede to her interviewer’s mischievous request that she sing the tune, and that at 92 her voice and memory should seem that of someone decades younger. For Margaret Budd was not one’s conventional idea of a nonagenarian, and she was not without a streak of mischief herself. The Horst Wessel Lied was something of a party piece, and accompanied by two other witnesses to the 1930s, Deborah Duchess of Devonshire and Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, she had even treated the bar at the Royal Opera House to a rendition.
That her time in Germany should have been deeply felt and keenly remembered was not surprising given that, unlike most of the others in the programme, her family was not especially well-off and thus experiences of other places not the norm. Like her contemporaries, however, she had no apprehension when in Freiburg in 1935 that within five years the Nazis would plunge the world into war. Instead her impressions were those that one might expect of a naive and pretty 18-year old given free rein for the first time.
Germany to her was “like a fairyland”, and her weekends were spent on sight-seeing trips to villages such as Obersalzberg, then not synonymous with Hitler’s Berghof. Only in retrospect did the training organisations for boys and girls appear at all sinister, while notices forbidding “Jews” from municipal swimming pools puzzled someone who had been brought up in Aryan Lancashire.
Her only direct exposure to the systems of control being developed by the regime came when she had one schnapps too many while out for the evening with a Luftwaffe officer, and told him that Britain was far more powerful than Germany. When she returned to the house of the professor with whom she was staying the Gestapo arrived. They searched her belongings for evidence of espionage, and became very excited at finding a notebook containing German names with crosses beside them. They turned out, however, not to be the list of Margaret Budd’s agents, but of the boys she fancied.
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She was born Margaret Patricia Cross in Blackburn in 1917. Her father died when she was still a child, and she and her sister were raised by their mother who, unusually for the time, had read anthropology at Oxford and supervised the children’s education. At the start of the Second World War, she married George Budd, then a pilot flying Bristol Blenheims with 604 Squadron. In lieu of a honeymoon they had tea at the Ritz, as he had a sortie to make later that day. They lived in Belgravia, where she did work for the Red Cross, and as the physicist Derek Jackson — the husband of Pamela Mitford — was serving in the same squadron as George Budd, she was soon drawn into that fabled family’s circle.
Indeed, her special talent was for friendship. Never unkind or spiteful, and discreet when necessary, she was cheerful, bright-eyed and broad-minded. Her own matrimonial arrangements were somewhat unorthodox — “Marriage is for grown-ups” was her advice. It was a sorrow to her that she never had children, but one consolation was a retreat near Málaga that she had for many years.
In later life, she lived in Chelsea, making new friends among the lodgers that she took in, among them the current Black Rod. Into her nineties, she remained ebullient, elegant and exceptionally young at heart, interested in all and happiest hearing their news over a glass of amontillado. When she recently suffered a burglary, she scoffed at the suggestion that she attend counselling sessions to enable her to cope with her supposed trauma.
Wing Commander Budd predeceased her.
Margaret Budd, student in Germany in the 1930s, was born on July 13, 1917. She died on June 12, 2010, aged 92