Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen

      Yet I have experienced reparation if not salvation in my life, for which I am deeply grateful. Australia saved me from a life of squalor and misery. Escaping to Melbourne after completing the school-leaving exam was my path to freedom. It was a complicated escape, difficult to arrange. I had in fact planned to return to America where I’d spent a year as an exchange student when I was sixteen. Having passed the US College Board Aptitude Test, I assumed all I had to do was enrol at a university. But when the enrolment form required my parents’ signature acknowledging they would cover medical expenses in case of their son’s illness or other emergencies, they refused to do so.

      The year before I completed grammar school had been a particularly difficult time. For five years my mother had forced me to become her housekeeper after my older brother had left home, while Claus was attending his boarding school for the deaf in Schleswig and my afterthought sister played in the backyard and on the street. I was given a tiny attic four floors above our apartment. A window looked out over the roofs of the old part of town and in the distance I could see the harbour. I didn’t mind being separated from the rest of the family. We were hardly ever together, and three rooms of the spacious apartment were still occupied by refugees. The problem with the attic was rising damp. I’d covered the walls with what I considered to be avant-garde patterned wallpaper (black with white Picasso-like designs), but it didn’t take long before it began to hang limp. If being sent to the loft was meant to be one more punishment, I didn’t mind. After I had sung in La Bohème at Flensburg’s Civic Theatre the attic retained its artistic ambience despite the drooping wallpaper. On clear winter nights the snowy roofs below lit up under the pale glow of a full moon. I would sit at the window for hours listening to jazz on BFN and Danish radio stations, cooking up plans of escape.

      School was a kind of getaway, at least for a few hours, a break into regimented normality. But as a teenager I remained the domestic prisoner of my mother. If anything, her hatred of me deepened. Throughout my childhood and adolescence she never expressed any affection towards me, either verbal or physical. I’d long ago given up trying to find out what it was that made me so repellent to her. I only knew it was prompted by a deep-seated aversion she would not or could not reveal. When I finally discovered what it was I lived far away from her. I’m grateful for that because I don’t know how we could have faced each other. As so often, life took care of things impossible to handle before the time was right. But the non-relationship I had with my mother haunted me long after she died.

      I saw my father at night. My parents lived what could be called a parallel existence under the cover of marriage. I never saw them touching, let alone being loving to each other. Neither my mother nor my father ever embraced or kissed me. First I thought that was the Nordic way. In Northern Europe people didn’t hug and kiss each other so much. Mediterranean people were considered unhygienic because they constantly touched each other. But I saw how my mother showed real affection to her other sons and daughter. My self-esteem sank lower and lower until I began to suffer from chronic depression, a condition diagnosed by my mother as adolescent obstinacy. Apart from school I was isolated from social contact and any form of personal intimacy.

      There was something else. A couple of salesmen visiting my mother’s chemist shop requested her son’s company, usually in seedy hotel rooms. Another man visited him in his attic and afterwards rewarded him with opera tickets. During the warmer months someone else took him to St Mary’s Woods or the cemetery. When it was over he was told to pass on his regards to his mother.

      Why did he never defend himself? When his mother hit him in the face with heavy cooking spoons and other utensils, marking his face for weeks, people began to ask questions. Why did he never hit back?

      I can’t answer that. All I know is I planned to escape. It would take time and have to remain a secret. Should my intentions become known, they’d be thwarted as before.

      Six months before the end of my last school year things came to a head. I was to undergo a medical examination for military service. One of the members of the Recruiting Board was my father. His eldest son had already been declared able-bodied and served in the engineer troops of the new German army. As my younger brother could not be considered fit for service it was important I should pass the exam ‘with flying colours’. Anything else would be a humiliation for my father, a point he made to me one night when I was washing up in the kitchen. I followed his implied order and not only passed, but volunteered for an extended three-year term in the air force. The immediate consequence was heartfelt congratulations all round. Colleagues on the Recruiting Board shook my father’s hand, and I was patted on my back as I left. What I remember most is the painful moment when I had to appear stark naked in front of my father. It wasn’t just that I was ashamed. It was more that I couldn’t help wondering what the man who didn’t show affection and never touched his child may have felt at that moment.

      It reminded me of another unsettling confrontation I’d had many years earlier. Having been classified as undernourished and suffering from anaemia, I was asked to attend my hometown’s Public Health Office. At barely fourteen and in the light of my experience with men, I was apprehensive to go there alone for a medical examination conducted by strangers. My fear was alleviated somewhat when a receptionist informed me a Dr Jürgensen was going to look at me. At that time the prospect of being examined by my absent father seemed funny. Nevertheless, it was a nervous kind of amusement. As a result of my medical test with his namesake, it was recommended I be sent for six weeks