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1 In My Father's House W HEN i THINK BACK to my childhood I see myself as an only child, accustomed from the beginning to play by myself in my room with my toy soldiers. My mother usually was busy in the kitchen or was reading a book in her sitting room. My father was away at work in the famous Duke August Library in Wolfenbiittel, my home town. On weekends he stayed home studying and writing in what we called thezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB Herrenzimmer, the gentleman's study, which, in our apartment on the Harztorwall, served as our living room as well. I was used to my mother and my father working or reading by themselves alone. I thought everybody did that. So I never felt lonely or forsaken when I played by myself in my room. That was the natural way to spend one's time. When my father was home on weekends he sat in our living room at his desk with books piled all around him. Sheets of white paper were everywhere, between pages and underneath the books. A shiny Continental portable typewriter stood in the middle. Every now and then, after much shuffling of papers and moving of books, he rattled on that machine for three to five minutes, slid its carriage back everytime it pinged a signal, and pulled sheets of paper out at the top whenever he had filled them with rows of letters. The typewriter intrigued me. Though I was forbidden to touch it, I did take it out of its carrying case sometimes when my father was in the library and my mother had gone shopping. I rolled a sheet of paper into it from the top, and pecked at some keys to type my name or some other short word. I kept an ear out for the creaking of the garden gate to close up the typewriter the minute I heard my mother come home. But I was proud of myself that I had been a writer, even if for only a few minutes. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba 3 InzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE My Father's House My mother, though, warned me that my father's work as a scholar was important. I was not to disturb him and ask him to play with me or tell stories about the war. If I wanted to talk to my father, she said, I had to wait until he was ready. So I often sat on the floor, underneath the big living room table, surrounded by some of my toy soldiers and railroad cars, which I had brought from my room in the hope that I might entice my father to play with me. Most of the time he paid no attention to me. Sometimes, however, he would turn around in his chair and look down at me, and I, hoping to snare him, would ask him a question. He usually shook his head, said, "No, no, not now," but then, a few minutes later, he would almost always look again, and I was ready. I pretended there had been an accident on my railroad, a car had tipped over and spilled all the soldiers on the carpet. My father would get up from his desk, walk over, bend and sit down next to me on the rug. Then we fought battles, bombarded my toy soldiers with the pencil stubs my father used to carry in his vest pocket. We had trains collide and used a crane to set the cars back on the rails. That was great fun. I became very excited, so my father said that now the railroad workers had to take their lunch break and the soldiers had to pull back to rest, and we had to pause as well and wait for a while. When my mother then entered the room and saw us sitting on the floor, she smiled and shook her finger at my father. That was the signal for me to load my soldiers on the railroad cars and drive them across the hall into my playroom. I felt very happy. Sometimes, instead of playing with my toy soldiers, my father would sit on the carpet with me and tell me of his life as a soldier during the Great War. He had joined up as a volunteer on the war's first day when he was nineteen years old, and had come back home on its last day as a lieutenant. He had been wounded and had a big hole...

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