world with a nice line in wit of his own. He was proud of his poetry, prouder than of any of the films he had directed, and much regretted that it was hardly known outside his own country. His wife, Salka, and his children were in California and so not involved in the bust-up in Austria that was taking place at that time, though in Prater Violet Christopher makes Dr Bergmann deeply preoccupied with it. He was not homosexual, nor did he realize that Christopher was until after the film had been finished, though the way Christopher reacted to some of his remarks about sexual habits must have made him a little suspicious. Christopher introduced him to Beatrix, whom he used later in The Passing of the Third Floor Back and also fell in love with. I found him a marvellous conversationalist and a most stimulating companion to be with.
It was in the middle of the film-work that Christopher made another attempt to get Heinz into England. Almost everything went wrong. Heinz had been furnished with letters of invitation from Christopher’s mother and Christopher himself, as well as a respectable sum of money. The letters were not meant to be seen by the immigration officials, but Heinz, driven into a corner by their questioning, produced them: his fatal passport description as Hausdiener was in front of them. Christopher, who had come down to meet the boat with Wystan, was accused of trying to deceive ‘His Majesty’s Immigration Service’ who were not convinced that Heinz intended to work in the Isherwood household, and his own letter to Heinz was described as ‘the sort of letter a man might write to his sweetheart’. In fact, they guessed the score at once, and Heinz was sent back to Germany by the next boat. He could obviously never attempt to land in England again: it was a total disaster.
In his shame and misery Christopher was extremely unwilling to tell his friends about this scene at Harwich, though I feel that he must have written to me in Vienna, however briefly, as I was in a potential situation of the same sort, though it did not come to the boil until a few years later when Hitler annexed Austria to the German Reich. In any case the letter, if it was ever written, has disappeared. Fearing, with all too good reason, that Germany would introduce conscription, Christopher’s basic aim during the next few years was to get Heinz out of Germany and settle with him somewhere beyond the reach of the Nazis. The first stop was Amsterdam. Once he had found a place for Heinz there he became much lighter-hearted, and went back to London and the final stages of the making of the film with a new determination to enjoy them. He felt he was learning an immense amount about the film world that he had always longed to know, and his obsessive war-fears receded into the background for the time being. Only now and then did he worry about Heinz’s isolation, and he tried on one occasion to get me to visit him and report (paying all my expenses), but I couldn’t leave Vienna at that moment, and his anxiety soon subsided.
Once he had rejoined Heinz in Amsterdam, the great debate about plans for where they were to go next - and for longer and further away - began again. Quito? Tahiti? The Seychelles? Tristan da Cunha? They rehearsed them, and many other places, and found objections to them all of one sort or another. In the end they decided to try the Canary Islands; not as far from Europe as Christopher would have liked, but being nearly part of Africa (in spite of belonging to Spain) perhaps remote enough. So, in April, they set sail from Rotterdam and reached Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria. They spent the next weeks in wandering about the islands, and had the luck to find a German consul who was willing to alter the disastrous Hausdiener in Heinz’s passport to Sprachstudent (student of languages). In the end, in June, they chose Tenerife as the most suitable place