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 His wife, Edith, was much more withdrawn, and Anne felt that her mother did not understand her.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.