In This Dark House

In 1939 the influential architect Berthold Lubetkin abruptly left his thriving career in London and dropped out of sight, moving with his wife to a desolate farm in rural Gloucestershire. Life in the house the Lubetkins named “World’s End” was far from idyllic for their three children. Louise Kehoe and her siblings lived in an atmosphere of oppressive isolation, while their tyrannical father—at times charming and witty but usually a terrorist in a self-styled Stalinist hell—badgered and belittled them during his fits of self-loathing. Even his true identity remained an enigma. That secret was never divulged during her father’s lifetime, but Louise’s quest to unearth its tragic origins—her relentless piecing together of the clues she found after his death—is a remarkable story, written with extraordinary grace, style, and imagination, of an identity and a heritage lost and found.*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD*

“A marvelously lucid account of a savage childhood, and of the family conspiracy that engendered it.”
—Anita Brookner

“Well constructed and beautifully written, [with] an emotional honesty which generates its own kind of lasting truth.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“An astonishing, impossible-to-put-down page-turner of a book! Kehoe’s tale will elicit glimmers of recognition in anyone who has wondered how to go about freeing oneself from the world which begins at home.”
—Daphne Merkin, author of Dreaming of Hitler
 
“At once a memoir and a reminder of how the global and the intensely personal inextricable intertwine. An awesome an exhilarating tale.”
—Carolyn See, author of The Handyman
 
“Eloquent . . . As in the best fiction, the story ultimately makes a scramble of our easy moralizing. This memoir . . . transcends its own form, becoming a testament to the ways in which historical ills sicken the individual soul.”
—NewsdayLOUISE KEHOE is a writer and garden designer who lives in New Hampshire. In This Dark House won the National Jewish Book Award in 1995 and, in the United Kingdom, the Jewish Quarterly–Wingate Prize in 1997.Chapter 2


The dirt road leading to Upper Killington was knee-deep in mud when my parents moved into World’s End in the winter of 1939, and the moving van could not get down to the valley. Instead, it had to be unloaded at the top of the hill and the contents ferried laboriously to the house on a tractor and trailer driven by one of the local farmers, a mountain of a man by the name of Alf Chapel.
 
This was only the first of Alf’s many kindnesses. Alf knew every inch of Upper Killington like the back of his hand: he had been born in the very house in which he was now raising a family of his own, and his father and grandfather had farmed the same land before him. It was extremely rare in those days for ownership of a farm to change other than by family succession, and talk about the newcomers at Upper Killington had long preceded their rather undignified arrival. Alf has heard his fair share of rumors and speculation; sitting around the fire in the pub with the other local farmers he had listened as the gossiped their stories growing taller and taller under the influence of the landlord’s stupefying strong home-brewed cider. But Alf had a level head and a generous heart, and although he was as curious as any as to why a Russian architect and his young wife would want to move to a derelict farm in the heart of rural England, his inclination was to wait and see.
 
He didn’t have long to wait. Talking to my parents as they sat amid the sea of tea chests and cardboard boxes in the empty farmhouse, it rapidly became clear to him that they had bought World’s End on a whim, and that although they were obviously infatuated with the idea of becoming farmers, they knew next to nothing but the blind enthusiasm of the amateur and a twelve-volume encyclopedia of veterinary science, would surely soon have found themselves hopelessly out of their depth.
 
The local farmers were not the only ones to wonder what on earth could have possessed my parents to make them embark on this venture. When my father announced to his partners that his days as an architect were over, and that he and my mother intended to move to Upper Killington without delay and become farmers, they reacted with a mixture of consternation and incredulity. After all, my father, Berthold Lubetkin, then not quite forty, was at the pinnacle of his career, and the avant-garde architectural practice which he had founded shortly after his arrival in England in 1930 had become the talk of London’s artistic and intellectual circles. His colleagues knew him as a man seemingly totally committed to his chosen professional, a passionate idealist and inspired designer whose uncompromising perfectionism, exasperating though it could be, always managed to bring out the very best in those who worked alongside him. And now here he was, on the point of leaving architecture as abruptly as he had arrived, and talking with enormous enthusiasm about becoming a farmer.
 
But discontent was in his nature: regardless of how much success and acclaim he won for his work, it never seemed to satisfy him for long. The meandering path which had brought him to England bore witness to the restlessness of his spirit. He had gone from the wealth and comfort of his childhood in imperial Russia to an impoverished, bohemian studenthood in Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin; he had known the anonymity and bewilderment of the newly arrived immigrant, struggling to gain a toehold in an unfamiliar culture; he had mastered five languages, and had learned to bend them to his wit and his will like a native. His intellectual capacity was prodigious: he hungered for new places, new challenges, conquered them quickly and longed to move one.
 
That same restlessness had been evident in his behavior toward women, and he had earned himself a reputation as something of a philanderer. Handsome, cosmopolitan and brilliantly funny, women were naturally drawn to him, and he to them—but he shunned commitment like the plague. My mother, Margaret Church, was only nineteen when she met him. She was then a student at England’s most prestigious architectural school, and she had gone to an interview for a summer job at my father’s practice. Her youth and beauty elicited a predictable reaction from my father, who set his sights on her at once. She never stood a chance.
 
She was the youngest of three girls born into a wealthy English family. Her father had been killed in the First World War, while she was still only a baby, and she had no memory of him. Nevertheless, she felt the lack of a father keenly, and grew up revering him: all her life she kept a faded photograph of him in his army uniform, and it was precious to her. Tucked into one corner of the battered antique silver frame there was a tiny photograph of his gravestone—one of thousands upon thousands of identical white marble monuments marching forever in step across the haunted, windswept fields of northern France. With a magnifying glass one could just make out the inscription on the headstone: “Captain Harold Church, Oxon & Bucks Light Infantry. Somme, July 1st, 1916,” and then the epitaph: “Onward Christian Soldier.” Such was her pride in her dead father that as a child she was unshakably convinced that the Lord’s Prayer opened with the words “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be Thy Name.” It had to come as both a shock and a disappointment that the official version was addressed to someone else entirely.
 
My father, almost twice her age, so accomplished, so handsome and so mesmerizingly strong-willed, must have seemed to her the personification of the father she had never had, and her devotion to him was immediate, unwavering and lifelong. She deferred to him in all things, believing his to be the better mind and the sounder judgment, even when her intuition, he conscience and he abundant common sense told her otherwise. When he encouraged her to give up her studies and come to work for him she hardly thought twice, even though her place at architecture school had been hard-won. (She had been the youngest student ever to be admitted there, and one of the very first women.) And when he invited her to leave the London flat she shared with her sisters and move in with him, she did so without a second’s hesitation.
 
For the next four years that defied convention by living as man and wife when they were nothing of the sort, an arrangement that scandalized her mother, who, herself the very soul of propriety, was horrified that her daughter could see fit to jeopardize the good name of the family by living in sin—and to make matters worse, the man was a foreigner. She must have lived in dread of the announcement of a pregnancy—but she needn’t have worried: in this matter, at least, she and my father were entirely in accord, although for vastly different reasons. My father’s fear of parenthood had nothing whatever to do with questions of legitimacy or decorum: he simply did not want to be tied down. For despite his sincere and unprecedentedly deep feelings for my mother, he remained restive and rootless at heart; a baby would impede his mobility, restrict his choices and impose its need on him; becoming a father would be profoundly inconvenient.
 
But birth control in those days was unreliable at best, and while my mother did what she could to dodge pregnancy, it seemed as though fate had cast his ineluctably as a mother. During the four years of their unofficial marriage, she became pregnant several times, and although she wanted very much to have the babies, my father insisted categorically on her getting rid of them. Abortions back then were illegal, extremely difficult to obtain and terrifyingly unsafe, but my father was adamant, and my mother, scared stiff of losing the man she loved so much, obediently ended each of her pregnancies under circumstances which, for the rest of her life, she remained deeply reluctant to discuss.
 
By 1939, perhaps stampeded by the general nervousness which pervade those ominous months before war broke out, and maybe influenced, also, by the desirability of acquiring British nationality and the right to reside permanently in England, my father decided he was at last ready to make a formal commitment to my mother. Since they were both atheists, they shunned a traditional wedding, choosing instead to solemnize their marriage in a strictly secular ceremony. On a stubbornly rainy late spring day they entered the registrar’s office at Chelsea Town Hall, emerging as man and wife not many minute later, to walk a gauntlet of their friends and architectural colleagues, each of whom held a T square aloft in a parody of the crossed swords of a military guard of honor.