The Colour of Sunlight

Eva Ibbotson’s The Morning Gift (1993) opens in Vienna, the author’s birthplace, sweepingly evoked as a city of dramatic turns of history, of music, psychoanalysis and intellectual brilliance, and comes to rest at last on the Berger family, part Jewish, part Catholic, living ‘on the first floor of a massive apartment house built round a courtyard with a chestnut tree’.

Kurt Berger is Professor of Vertebrate Zoology, director of the Natural History Museum and a government adviser. His sweet-natured wife Leonie, ‘descended from prosperous Moravian wool merchants’, brings domestic happiness to her brilliant husband. Also sharing the apartment are her widowed Uncle Mishak and his unmarried sister Hilda, an anthropologist. After long childless years an adored baby daughter arrives. A bright, musical, engaging child, with hair ‘the colour of sunlight’, Ruth attends the English School, knows every corner of the Natural History Museum and in her teens forms a passionate attachment to Heini, her cousin by marriage, a young Hungarian with a glittering future as a concert pianist. Every summer the family retreats from the city to a lakeside house in Grundlsee. Here, in 1930, they are joined by a visitor, Professor Berger’s protégé, Quinton Somerville. At 23 he is older than Ruth and Heini by several years, but very young to have achieved so much. Already he has a reputation as an outstanding palaeontologist who, while still at Cambridge, took part in an expedition to the giant reptile beds of Tanganyika. Subsequent research into the origins of early man has plunged him into the Missing Link controversy. Berger had met him at a conference, invited him to give the annual lecture to the Viennese Palaeontology Society where he’d made a huge impression, and then introduced him to the family. Now, in the long summer holiday, they get to know him better. Quinton – or Quin, as he soon becomes – is the kind of Englishman the Bergers haven’t come across before: clever, courteous, kind and crumpled, with ‘a face that looked as if it needed ironing’, and strong liberal values. He’s an only child with a tragic background: a mother who died in childbirth and a father killed in the First World War. Brought up by nannies and a fearsome grandfather on the family estate in Northumberland, he had had as an imaginary boyhood companion a brontosaurus. Now, with a flat in Chelsea – and the family butler to run things – he is set to pursue an outstanding academic career. On this break in Austria he fits in well, mildly intrigued by pigtailed Ruth with her innocence, her unexpected reading – it includes Krafft-Ebing – and her hero-worship of Heini. Back in Vienna, everyone comes to see him off, imploring him to return. By the time he does so, it is 1938, Vienna is an occupied city and the Nazis are in power. The Bergers have fled to London, Heini is in Budapest, and Ruth, in a terrible mix-up over her papers, has been left behind. Quin finds her hiding in the Natural History Museum, horribly at risk and planning a madcap escape through Switzerland. Like W. H. Auden, who in real life married Thomas Mann’s daughter to get her out of Nazi Germany, Quinton offers the one solution: an arranged marriage. Filled with doubt – she is betrothed to Heini, is she not? – Ruth accepts on condition that it be kept completely secret and that they divorce as soon as she arrives in London. It is agreed. They have a bleak little ceremony in the British Consulate, now housed in a hut. But Quin, rich and generous, gives Ruth one taste of luxury and happiness: a wedding night on the Orient Express. After an exquisite supper she retires to their compartment and he stands outside in the corridor. In sudden terror she wakes to find the train has stopped with a jolt and she hears footsteps and loud voices: the Nazis have come for her, they will take her back! She rushes out in her nightgown and into the safety of Quin’s suddenly outstretched arms. The moment ignites their first misunderstanding: does he think she has thrown herself at him? Does she honestly think he would take advantage? A brief quarrel ensues after which she returns angrily to their compartment, waking to find Quin stretched out on the other bed, calmly watching the sunrise. The journey ends at Calais, where they say goodbye. Quin, by now Professor of Vertebrate Zoology at Thameside University, returns to his post and visits his solicitor to set divorce in motion but finds that it may be tricky. Ruth is rapturously reunited with her family, now living in exiled poverty in Belsize Park. And here the real drama begins. Like the Bergers (and like her contemporary, the German-Jewish writer Judith Kerr), Eva Ibbotson and her family fled to England when the Nazis came to power. She married, had four children, and wrote many novels for children and adults, winning awards for both, including the Smarties prize for Journey to the River Sea (2001) and the Romantic Novelists’ Association prize for Magic Flutes (1982). I was alerted to her last year by one of those ‘Rereading’ columns, where I learned that when stuck in her writing she often introduced an aunt. Often stuck myself, I thought this a brilliant idea and with high expectations bought The Morning Gift. I confess to an initial disappointment: I thought the first chapter too light, too sweeping. Persuaded by my husband to give it another go, I read the next chapter, was hooked, then swept away. This is a perfectly plotted romance, with the shadow of war and a wild romantic setting – Northumberland, gloriously evoked. It is contrasted with shabby Belsize Park, with its boarding-houses, tearooms and park benches where lonely exiles pass the hours; contrasted, too, with the rivalries and anxieties of university life. Quin and Ruth are two strong, original and utterly engaging central characters whose feelings are blighted by misunderstandings and reversals. Ambitious, self-seeking or thoroughly unpleasant rivals get their comeuppance and a cast of sympathetic minor characters at length find their own kinds of happiness. And yes, there is an aunt: tweedy Frances Somerville who, on the death of the fearsome grandfather, came to run the Bowmont estate in Quin’s later childhood and now lives in horrified anticipation of his one day making it over to the National Trust. She’s terrific and, as with a gloomy psychoanalyst in Belsize Park, her hour will come. And yes, its tone is light, and often drily funny, but beneath it is a solid bedrock of knowledge lightly worn: Ibbotson is convincing on the smallest details of vertebrate and marine zoology; on music, good food and wine. But her themes are serious: as war approaches, the Viennese in England come up against anti-Semitism – not least from Aunt Frances, though she redeems herself entirely. Quin himself is a serious, principled, even noble character, quietly finding employment for exiled academics and musicians, ready to die for his country and carrying all his life a sense of guilt that his birth caused his mother’s death. The novel belongs to him and to Ruth: Ruth whose sunlit hair is now tawny and full of captivating tendrils; Ruth working all hours as a waitress in the Willow Tea Rooms and all hours as a Zoology student at Thameside, where her marriage to the revered professor must never be revealed; Ruth sharing her notes and sandwiches with a less gifted friend and reciting Goethe to the lonely laboratory sheep. ‘It’s a bit sad,’ she tells the bemused academics who overhear her, ‘but I suppose great poems always are and it’s a very rural sort of sadness with mountains and birdsong and peace.’ It’s Ruth who discovers she adores the Northumbrian sea, who almost drowns trying to save a puppy and who thinks Quin’s fury is because he really doesn’t like her. What is a morning gift? I will only say that it is the cause of an almost fatal misunderstanding between these two people fighting so hard not to fall in love. I will add that the ending made me cry both times I read it. The Pan paperback edition tells me that in 2007 it was published by Picador as a Young Adult book, which perhaps accounts for the light touch and soft focus on dark subjects. But it made this old adult very happy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Sue Gee 2025