March 15 939: Hella Pick CBE arrives in Britain from Vienna on a Kindertransport:

I can still see myself arriving at Liverpool Street Station & being picked up. That I can remember. But I can’t remember much about the journey. Just a blank. It’s shocking. It shocks me. But it also saved me from thinking about it too much. I can’t remember my emotions. The only English I knew was ‘Goodbye’ so I said “Goodbye” to the family who picked me up. 

A very nice house in West Hampstead. They had 3 children. They put me to school in London straight away. I don’t remember much about the school at all. But at the end of the first term, I found a school certificate: I was speaking English, obviously doing all right. But I wasn’t there long because then summer holidays & then off I went to the Lake District to be with my mother.

Hella's mother arrived in Britain on a domestic permit in June 1939.

Obviously huge relief. I was so lucky. She found a job with the Chorleys who wanted someone who knew how to bake Austrian cakes. Theo Chorley became the last hereditary peer to be created in this country. I’m very, very friendly with all their children.

Hella's parents divorced when she was 3. Her father remarried & emigrated to the US.

I really hardly ever knew my father. The Board of Deputies for a time, tried to get my father to make some financial contribution.He adamantly refused to get involved. He never wanted to do anything for me.

My mother adapted well. She learnt English very rapidly. I have memories of the Lake District partly because there are photographs. I was happy walking & swimming & playing with the other children. Just having a normal child’s life. Then war broke out & the Chorleys had to go back to London. My mother had to find another job. She found this job with a family who were very comfortably off. Had a lovely house. But treated her throughout the war as just their cook.

I had to go into the house by the back door. If I wanted to swim in the lake, I had to make sure than nobody else was using the garden or was swimming. This sort of thing. It made it hard for me to bring my school friends. Only the very closest friends could be told the circumstances that I was living in. Which, you know, created—well, I don’t know how much a problem it was. 

I had two or three very close friends who certainly did come. But it was a curious life for a small child. On the one hand to be going to a school where most of the children came from well-off established families & then going home through their back door. 

And we were ranked as enemy aliens. For instance, if I had school friends who lived on the other side of Lake Windermere which was in what was then Lancashire. Lancashire was a protected area: it had a prisoner-of-war camp. I—theoretically—had to ask permission from the police to go across the lake. But in fact, what we did was to row across the lake without permission. But things like that for a small child were odd experiences.

I went a lot to a lovely village called Grasmere in the Lake District & became friends with one of the Lake artists called Heaton Cooper & his wife, a sculptress. They became my anchor, the absolute firmament in my life. They gave me stability which nothing else gave me.

I absolutely refused to speak German. If my mother spoke a word of German on a street I would just scream at her & say, 'Speak English!' Then I had a male teacher I totally fell in love with, at the age of 13. And he said to me, 'German is your mother tongue. You’ve just got to speak German.' He forced me again to confront German.