The Morning Gift

Miss Maud and Miss Violet Harper had started the Willow Tea Rooms five years earlier when it was discovered that their father, the General, had not been as provident as they had hoped. It was a pretty place on the corner of a small square behind Belsize Lane and they had made it nice with willow-pattern china, dimity curtains and a pottery cat on the windowsill. Reared to regard foreigners as, at best, unfortunate, the ladies had stoutly resisted the demands of the refugees who increasingly thronged the district. The Gloriette in St John’s Wood might serve cakes with outlandish names and slop whipped cream over everything, the proprietors of the Cosmo in Finchley might supply newspapers on sticks and permit talk across the tables, but in the Willow Tea Rooms, the decencies were preserved. Customers were offered scones or sponge fingers and, at lunchtime, scrambled eggs on toast, but nothing ever with a smell - and anyone sitting more than half an hour over coffee, got coughed at, first by Miss Violet, and if this was ineffectual, by the fiercer Miss Maud.

I came across a building with an open door. I went inside. The room was very quiet and full of books. At a desk sat a woman with fair hair and I waited for her to tell me to go away. But she only smiled at me. Then she said: 'Would you like to join the library?'

My English was still poor but I understood her. In particular, I understood the word 'join' which seemed to me to be a word of unsurpassed beauty. I told her that I had no money and she (her name was Miss Pole ) said: 'It is free.'

I joined the library. I did not only join it, I lived in it. I don't really remember when I began to read English as easily as German, but it did not take long. After a few weeks, I got to know the regulars - the tramp with holes in his shoes who came to keep warm and read the Racing News, the woman whose mother-in-law was driving her insane ... and my special friend, Herr Doktor Heller, who was a refugee like I was, only from Berlin, not from Vienna.

Dr Heller came very early in the morning and did not leave until the library closed. He came with a pile of medical books - The Diseases of the Knee, The Malfunctions of the Lymphatic system.The books were in English because this eminent specialist, who had been head of the department of obstetrics in Berlin's most famous maternity hospital, was not allowed to practise medicine in Great Britain without resitting every one of his medical exams in English.

He must have been in his thirties, not able to wander from one language to the other as I could, being a child. Sometimes, I heard him sigh - once I even saw him wipe his eyes as he thought of the hopelessness of his task - and then Miss Pole and I exchanged glances. She was very concerned for him, fetching down the German-English dictionary as soon as he came in. Sometimes, she shut up the library a little later so as to give him more time; he lived in a single, poky room which he could not afford to heat.

It was a stroke of luck - Queen Alice's was the most famous hospital in London with a formidable reputation.

The morning after my daughter's birth, there was a certain stirring in the ward, an air of expectation. The nurses stood up straighter, checked the bedclothes, patted the patients into tidiness. Matron rose from the chair behind her desk. And the procession entered. It was the specialist, the Great Man himself, come to do his morning round. No one will believe me when I describe what went on in those days when the specialist came into the ward. Spotless in his white coat, he was flanked by his registrar, his houseman and at least two students eager for his every word.

The great man moved slowly between the beds. I had determined not to speak to him - it would have been like addressing God - but when he came up to my bed, I couldn't help looking at him very hard, hoping and hoping that he would recognise me. And he did. For a moment, he seemed puzzled and then he smiled. 'My little friend from the library!' he said. And he turned to his retinue and said that I had helped him. That I had encouraged him and given him hope. I had done that!

But there's one more thing to tell. After I was discharged, I took my daughter to visit him and there, behind the teapot in his elegant drawing room, I found a woman who I knew. 'Reader, he'd married her!' He had done this most excellent thing and married Miss Pole.