Random Memory #8

 In Vienna in the early 1980s my family rented the bottom half of a large two-storeyed villa in Döbling. The villa, painted in Schőnbrunn yellow, had been the childhood home of our landlady, a millionairess in her own right who had married money and, more importantly in Viennese society, married up rather well in terms of the millimetric view of social class that pervades le bon ton  in Vienna. Being freed of the problems of money, she could afford to keep the house and its substantial garden intact (imagine a house in Hampstead with a two-acre garden). The wizened gardener came with the rent, as did a coach-house halfway down the garden, about the size of a semi-detached in Chiswick, wherein the gardener kept his rake and stuff. There were several walnut trees in the garden which I used to harvest out of boredom by hurling heavy bits of wood into the trees, trying not to hit the red squirrel which thought it held domain. The downed walnuts were covered in a green husk, so I had to put them in an annexe of the coach-house to ripen. A month later I went to check on my walnuts to find they were gone. I found the gardener watering one of the rose gardens and asked him what he’d done with the/my walnuts. He told me the millionairess had turned up on a snap inspection of her property and claimed them. 

 My father nicknamed the millionairess "die Gräfin" and my mother, not knowing German, used to refer to her as “die Griffin”.