The Spectator's Notes | 17 January 2009

Charles Moore’s reflections on the week

Watching the BBC’s excellent dramatisation of Anne Frank’s diary last week, I was struck by the family relationships depicted. They reminded me strongly of another family. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, was the dominant and admired figure in the household. He ran a small business supplying pectin for jam-making, but his intelligence fitted him for greater things which circumstances prevented. He had two daughters, and no sons, and was very ambitious for his younger, livelier daughter, Anne. His wife, Edith, was much more withdrawn, and Anne felt that her mother did not understand her. Anne, though she loved her family, had the self-absorption of the clever teenager. She longed for a different, wider sphere of life, and dreamed of fame as a writer. At much the same time as the Frank girls were growing up in Amsterdam, the Roberts girls in Grantham were doing the same. Alfred Roberts was a small grocer, who had had to leave school at 14, but was highly self-educated. He had no sons, and he poured his intellectual and political ambition into his younger daughter, Margaret. His wife, Beatrice, was a rather disregarded figure in young Margaret’s life, and the two were not close. Though feeling natural piety towards her family, Margaret was determined to look beyond the life of the grocer’s shop, and dreamed of political success in the wider world. The difference in the two stories consisted in the outcome. Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister of Britain. Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Why that difference? Surely it boils down to the difference between a good and a bad political order. If Anne Frank, who was Jewish, had been born in Golders Green, she might now be a distinguished elderly novelist. Perhaps, to coincide with her 80th birthday this year, she would be made Dame Anne Frank by the Queen, whose picture, as a young Princess, Anne pinned on the wall of her hidden attic.