Most of my problems in life stem from the day that as a seven year old that my uncle persuaded me that Hitler had a daughter called Linda who lived in Hamburg. Linda Hitler he informed me with a wild-eyed whisper lived on Schopenstehl Strasse and was a rather plain-looking young girl who worked at a pastry chef in one of the more up-market hotels that had survived an apocalypse of bombing during WWII.
Well, it was not actually the process of persuasion that convinced me of the existence of Ms. Linda Hitler, after all I was seven and he was thirty something, but it was his fervor that did it.
My uncle was a sort of hero to me, a family black sheep whose penchant for outraging the family never missed its mark. A racing car driver of some repute he would sweep in from the darkest corners of Europe laden with expensive gifts and entertain us with tales of his numerous affairs with exotic women and his latest escapades with the Carrabineri in Rome. He wore a black US air force leather ?bomber? jacket, white scarf and had a gold tooth that glistens menacingly in the gloom of our farmhouse. He looked like Burt Lancaster on amphetamines, frantic, excited and as handsome as any movie star. My sister would sit on his knee and sniff his succulent French after-shave like a cat on the trail of tuna while he drained every bottle of wine in the house. Rumor had it that as a young man he had bedded Mussolini?s mistress. Though my mother was convinced of this rumor, my father just rolled his eyes cynically when he heard the oft-repeated tale and grunted his disdain.
I went to school the following day and told my best friend, Keith L***** about the existence of Linda Hitler. I was amazed that he believed me without any need for cross-examination, but he too had met my uncle and was unlikely to question anything that he had to say. My uncle had at one stage managed to find a horde of defused grenades in France and smuggled them to the UK and gave them to me as a gift. I handed them out like toffee at my school as I had more than I needed but soon the Headmaster put an end to it all, so Mon Oncle had great credibility to tribes in short trousers. By the end of the day Keith and I had managed to persuade at least seven other class members of the reality of Linda Hitler. My uncle had started a cult.
I was called into the Headmaster?s office at the close of school, not an uncommon event for me, and he questioned me sternly about this ?Linda Hitler nonsense?. He looked very much like a tortoise and had a strange way of pushing his chin out and his head forward when he was trying to appear malevolent which did not help at all. Of course I put up a spirited defense, so bold in my belief that at one stage I actually noticed that his normally dead eyes widened, especially when he learned that Linda Hitler was actually a pastry chef with an overdrawn bank account.
The result of this meeting however, was that I had to take home a letter to my parents in which the headmaster expressed a deep concern for my mental health and asked to meet with them. As a matter of urgency.
What has this to do with the JW?s? Well, if I can summon up the energy for Part II, all will be revealed
HS