Uncle Marne

One never knew when Uncle Marne would turn up on our doorstep, but when he did it was greeted with squeals of delight from us children. Every child needs an uncle like him.

This was a view not shared by our mother, who did not like uninvited guests in general and our unruly uncle in particular. This was at least partly because he invariably had a very much younger woman in tow and never the same one he was with before. The precise nature of their relationship was only to be guessed at when they arrived but usually during the visit it became clear that they were much more than just friends.

For us children, uninitiated in the seamier side of life, it only added to his attraction, but I can now well understand why this was another reason why my parents found his occasional visits difficult. My father said he could remember Uncle Marne’s wife, Matilde, who had died years before. He said she was always very much in his shadow.

Actually, Uncle Marne was not an uncle at all. He was, I now know, a second cousin of my father, but ‘uncle’ he was called and always remained. Nor was any part of his real name ‘Marne’. Family history research reveals that his name was Leopold Feisich. Be that as may, he was always known as Uncle Marne to us: he had been born in 1914 on the date of that first world war battle.

He was tall and languid, and always arrived, summer or winter, wearing a black cloak-like coat giving him the appearance of a wizard. This was emphasised by his extraordinary hooked nose: one of those facial features one can never quite stop oneself staring at, time and time again. Apart from a different female companion, with whom I now understand he was perhaps only briefly romantically involved, he would present mother with an extravagantly showy bunch of flowers, which did not cut much ice as far as she was concerned, and a bottle of some rather obscure, dark central European wine which, he assured my father, was “far better than anything French and can only be found if you really know where to look”.

Mother, always polite but never terribly subtle, was rather hopeless at hiding her true feelings, but this never put the family visitor off. It did, inevitably, create a chill which Marne’s companions must have found much more difficult. Father was a different matter. He was charmed by Marne’s women and was quite disposed to flirting with them himself: a trait which often led to some parental conflict after Marne had left.

We children, the three of us, were of one mind. Marne’s fantastic stories, told with considerable animation, had us entranced. It was quite likely that they involved supernatural powers, strange places which would not be found on any map, and even animals never found in any zoo. I have a suspicion that the stories of his exploits which he told our parents were sometimes of a similarly fanciful nature.  And if not telling us a story, he would conjure out of nowhere some small exotic object which, by sleight-of-hand, would then disappear, only to be rediscovered behind the ear of one of my younger brothers.  Being the eldest, he treated me with a degree of respect, flattering me with knowledge, responsibilities and maturity which we both knew to be something of a stretch! It was, in a way, our private joke.

“I hear from your Latin teacher, who is a special friend, that you have made exceptional progress”, he might say, though he would have no idea whether my school even taught Latin. My brothers would look at me with considerable respect. But it was yet another flight of fancy which could bring that hardly discernible fleeting frown to my mother’s face, quickly replaced by her expression of passive, mild pleasure which she worked so hard to present, hiding her ever-present irritation.

Unscheduled though his visits a were, mother would always manage to produce a special dinner for our visitors and usually we three boys were allowed to stay up, too. On one such occasion, when siting at table and presented with melon and ham as a starter, Uncle Marne’s young lady blushed and, in a whisper, declared that she was a vegetarian. Mother somehow managed to cope serenely with the challenge, even finding a single plate of an alternative to the roast chicken main course. Thereafter she was careful to quiz the companions on any dietary issues before she retired to the kitchen to do her own version of magic. It did draw them briefly into some sort of conversation, for they almost always seemed to regard us all as far too unfamiliar to engage with.

Cosette was an exception. A little older than some of Uncle Marne’s other ‘companions’ she showed no hesitation in telling us: “Leo and I are living together and we plan to get married”. To the obvious annoyance of her partner, she followed this with more detail of their relationship than was necessary. They left without staying for dinner. The wedding never took place.

As we boys grew older, Uncle Marne’s visits became rarer. He sent me a card for my sixteenth birthday with a letter inside, written in a hard-to-decipher scribble. Apparently, he had moved abroad, a fact which was news to my parents, too. He never usually sent cards, birthday or Christmas. And he enclosed no address. Even when in Britain, his address had been something of a mystery, and we had never visited him, only the other way around. Probably that was the way he liked it. 

At some stage he must surely have died, for otherwise he would now be 110 years old, but there has been no way of contacting him for very many years. It sometimes feels like he never really existed except in our imaginations.