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and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash
of colour. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things
so deeply that they could wound her.
Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. ‘I fell in love with her the first time I saw her
play,’ Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact most people who’d
heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but
ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her
twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of deep
depression that she suffered throughout her life.
I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement.
After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had
helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken
a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighbourhoods that Ruth’s
parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and wellrespected
performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after
Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.
In the summer of 2003, John and I made our first visit together to his parents’ home in Birmingham.
I found Ruth and Nicholas charming and welcoming. Their contrasting personalities intrigued me.
Nicholas was a big, warm-hearted man with a kindly, relaxed manner, which had won him many
friends amongst his patients during his years as a GP. His bonhomie was the opposite of Ruth’s
nervous disposition, but she welcomed me cautiously.
Ruth’s mother and father both died in 2004, and she took it hard. As a tribute to them, she
preserved many of their traditions long after their deaths. Lotte Stern had kept a special white
tablecloth just for making the delicate strudel pastry that she took much pride in. Ruth kept the
tablecloth, and more than once made what we called ‘Lotte’s strudel’ with Ben, asking him to stir the
filling while she showed him the methods she used to stretch and roll the wafer-thin pastry.
In fact it was the tiny Benedict Finch, only 6lb 13oz when he was born in July 2004, who brought
Ruth back to us after her parents’ death. She adored him instantly, she opened her arms to him and
never wanted to let him go, and to all of our surprise, she included me in that embrace. Right after
Ben’s birth, she came to stay and she helped me through the difficult first weeks and months, and then
she never stopped helping. She became a companion to me, a friend and a wonderful grandmother to
Ben.
John told me a story about Ruth once. It was a rare confidence about his childhood that he told me
just after I’d met her. I think he wanted to explain her to me. It was a story that showed her darkness
and her light.
When John was about nine years old, he’d gone to see Ruth after school. It was during one of her
periods of depression, and he was ushered quietly into her darkened bedroom to show her a prize that
he’d won that day.
Ruth examined his certificate, and then propped it up on her bedside table. She patted the bed
beside her. It was a rare invitation and John sat down carefully, desperate not to break the moment,
daring to do nothing more than glance around the room, which the drawn curtains had given a
chiaroscuro quality, so it felt to him as if he and his mother were drawn characters in a children’s
book.
‘Where I am weak,’ she said to him that afternoon, ‘you can be strong. Like your father.’
She held his hand tenderly, examining with the tips of her fingers each of his. He remembered that