Gerda Mayer

Gerda Kamilla Mayer (9 June 1927 – 15 July 2021) was an English poet. Born to a Jewish family in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, she escaped to England from Prague in 1939, aged eleven, on a Kindertransport flight organised by Trevor Chadwick. Having composed her first poem, in German, at the age of four, she continued her education in Dorset and Surrey and began writing poetry in English. She has published several volumes of verse and her poems have appeared in many anthologies. She has been described by Carol Ann Duffy as a fine poet "who should be better known."

Early life Mayer was born in 1927 in Karlovy Vary, a spa city in the then mostly German-speaking Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia. Her father, Arnold Stein, had a small shop in the town selling ladies' coats and dresses, and her mother Erna (née Eisenberger) owned a knitwear business there. Mayer had an elder half-sister Johanna from her mother's previous marriage to Hans Trávníček, a Roman Catholic. As a last resort, in February 1939 her father made a direct approach to Trevor Chadwick, an Englishman who was organising the Prague end of an operation to rescue children at risk from the Nazis.

This rescue operation was part of a wider project set up in October 1938 by Doreen Warriner, with later assistance from the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), aimed initially at helping exiled anti-Nazi Sudeten leaders to escape the country. He remained in Prague until June 1939 and organised a number of Kindertransport trains, working in partnership with Winton at the London end. The dedication in Mayer's 1988 collection A Heartache of Grass is "to the memory of Muriel Chadwick and her son Trevor Chadwick to whom I owe my preservation".

Mayer's father Arnold was sent to the Nisko concentration camp in Poland in 1939. He escaped and made his way to Soviet-occupied Lemberg/Lwów, joining Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern Front. His last letter to his daughter was written in June 1940. Her mother Erna was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in October 1942, and then the following year to Auschwitz where she too died. Mayer's half-sister Johanna was half-Jewish and survived the war, working as a bank clerk in Prague. Chadwick had remained with the main group and the following day set out again for Prague, which was now under Nazi occupation.

Although Mayer generally had a good relationship with her guarantor, Muriel Chadwick, they were not particularly close and in 1940 she was enrolled at a boarding school in Swanage. Here her native language meant she was wrongly perceived to be German and she was then teased by the other pupils. Three of Mayer's favourite teachers there, Dr Lion (head teacher), Dr Emmy Wolff (German language and literature) and Dr. Luise Leven (music) are celebrated in her poem "A Lion, a Wolf and a Fox". Mayer finished her schooling at Stoatley Rough in 1944 aged seventeen and joined her guarantor, who by then was living at Stratford-upon-Avon. He too had come to England in 1939 as a refugee, in his case from Vienna. He served in the British Army between 1940 and 1946 and then worked as an office manager. In 1960 he set up his own import business, where Mayer helped with clerical tasks whilst working on her poems.

Gerda Mayer died on 15 July 2021.

Poetry

Much of Gerda Mayer's poetry draws on the trauma of her uprooting and loss of family in 1939, but her creativity was apparent many years before that. In fact her first poem was composed when she was just four years old and was recorded by her father in a Babys Tagebuch (German equivalent of "Baby Diary"), a journal he had kept from her birth until her departure from Prague that year. Further collections were published including two for children, with many poems written specifically for that audience, and 2013 saw a selection of her poems translated into Norwegian. In 2005 her Prague Winter was published, a short account in prose and poetry of the events leading to Mayer's departure from Prague, and the people she left behind. On BBC radio she has featured in episodes of Poetry Now (1987) and Time for Verse (1990), when Carol Ann Duffy presented poems written and read by Mayer.

Mayer's most powerful poems speak of loss and longing, and express a deep sadness. The poet Elaine Feinstein for example observed in a 1996 review that "most readers ... will have paused over that poignant poem, 'Make Believe, in which Mayer imagines her father alive again. There is a wistfulness, too, when she writes about the countryside (of both her native and adoptive lands). These poems rarely fall into the trap of self-pity, though Mayer can veer in that direction when writing about the minor disappointments of life. In the poems "My Aunt Selfpity" and "Selfpity Again" she first identifies, then renounces, her dependence on that negative emotion to inspire her, though she also fears that without it her poems would be "bland and blank".

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Works

Collections 1970: Oddments, (self-published) 1972: Gerda Mayer's Library Folder (illustrated by Deirdre Farrell), All In (Nina Steane) 1973: Poet Tree Centaur: A Walthamstow Group Anthology (edited by Gerda Mayer), Oddments 1975: Treble Poets 2 (Florence Elon, Daniel Halpern, Gerda Mayer), Chatto & Windus 1980: Monkey on the Analyst's Couch, Ceolfrith Press (a Poetry Book Society recommendation) 1985: March Postman, Priapus Press 1988: A Heartache of Grass, Peterloo Poets 1995: Time Watching, Hearing Eye 1999: Bernini's Cat: New and Selected Poems, IRON Press 2003: Hop Pickers' Holiday, The Happy Dragons Press 2013: Alle Blad Har Mist Sitt Tre (All the Leaves have Lost their Trees), Nordsjoforlaget (Norwegian translation by Odveig Klyve)

Collections for children 1978: The Knockabout Show, Chatto & Windus 1984: The Candy-Floss Tree (Norman Nicholson, Gerda Mayer, Frank Flynn), Oxford University Press

Autobiography 2005: Prague Winter, Hearing Eye