Emy Bertele v. Grenadenberg and Colin Everard

Emy Bertele von Grenadenberg (*Vienna 6.3.1932, †Vienna 18.12.2023) was the second of seven children born to Marceline Mautner v. Markhof and Hans Bertele v. Grenadenberg. Together with her parents and her siblings Otto, Marceline “Marcy” (wedded McMichael), Hans, Elisabeth “Lisl” (wedded Naqvi), Ursula “Ucki” (wedded de Allendesalazar) and Ulrich “Uly”, she moved to England in 1947. On September 27, 1958, she married the Englishman Colin Everard (*London 14.11.1930) in Nairobi, whom she had previously met on the way to Tyrol. Their marriage produced four daughters. After the death of her parents, they moved into the “Corti apartment” on the third floor of Franziskanerplatz, the apartment that had once been the home of Gertrude and Egon Conte Corti.

MEMORIES FROM UCKI TO HER SISTER EMY, Madrid, March 7, 2025

I only met my sister Emy in England in mid-August 1947, when I was already five and a half years old – and she was sixteen. A fortnight earlier, she had already travelled there with our father to help him with the final preparations for the whole family’s move from Austria (except for our youngest brother Uly, who was to stay in Gaaden). She was the second oldest of the children and was already an extremely responsible girl back then. So, together with Baba (as we called our father), she stood at the train station in London in the evening to pick us all up. Sister Liesl and I were kindly supposed to be taken in by a foster family for the first few weeks in order to ease the burden of a large family for Mum at the beginning. Liesl accepted the impending separation without grumbling, but I burst into tears at the prospect and resisted it tooth and nail. After all, I had only recently got to know my parents and siblings (I had spent the first few years of my life in good hands in Gaaden, with my dear granny).

So we arrived at our new house in Purley at night. And so began my life with Emy, to whom I was assigned as her ‘room child’. She was given the task of looking after me and guiding me. She was my ‘roommate’, as it was called. We shared the pretty, bright room on the top floor, which looked out onto the garden, onto a large ornamental cherry tree that always blossomed so beautifully in spring, completely covered in white flowers. We had the best view. From then on, Emy looked after me with enormous love for several years and this forged a bond of everlasting love – and gratitude on my part – between us.

The workload for mum was always enormous, but Emy was there to help her with everything, which was a truly admirable achievement. About three weeks after our arrival, school started in September. All four of us girls went to the same convent school, St Anne’s. Emy and Marci went to the Grammar School, Liesl and I to the Primary School. Emy went straight into the third class and graduated with honours after just two years. She then went on to Kings College/London on a scholarship, where she began her studies with zoology and then specialised in entomology – the study of insects (more on this later).

In England in the post-war years, there was strict rationing, sometimes until 1955. We only ate meat once a week, on Sundays. Mummy was sent paprika from Vienna and she often made potato goulash and added bacon rinds to improve the flavour. Emy liked to make “Guglhupf”, always with just one egg. And as there was often something to celebrate at home (in addition to the church feast days, there were also the birthdays and name days of extended family), she always conjured up some kind of pastry, as if by a true miracle, despite the scarcity of ingredients.

After a year and a half, little Uly was also brought to England by a young Styrian woman who was supposed to act as a housekeeper and nanny. But she was no good for either of them and soon left us again. So Emy still had a lot of work to do. She also had a sizeable flower bed to look after in the garden.

She also had a fantastic command of the art of sewing. She could make a dress for Liesl or me in just one afternoon. Something that I could never understand when I later started sewing myself and attended a course at Singer. I well remember a light turquoise-green taffeta dress with ruffles that she sewed for me for a children’s party and many other everyday dresses.

When Emy started studying at Kings College, she travelled to London by train every morning and came back in the late afternoon. She once used some of her first scholarship money to buy me a silver chain bracelet, which I still treasure to this day and which is now adorned with lots of little charms.

When our eldest brother Otto got married and moved out, Emy took over his beautiful room with access to the large terrace overlooking the back of our garden. Like all the rooms in this Victorian house, each room had its own fireplace. As the central heating, which was installed later, did not work, the fireplace in the living room was heated on Sundays. In the kitchen and dining room there were permanent coke burners. I fetched coal from the cellar for Emy’s little fireplace, made chips, dragged everything upstairs, stoked it up and then sat in the warmth, as it was cold and damp upstairs in the room I now shared with Liesl. In Emy’s room was also her record player, on which I liked to listen to her records.

She devoted herself very intensively to the study of entomology. She enjoyed taking part in study trips, was sociable and made nice new friends among the students and elsewhere. One year she had started studying the dreaded desert locusts, which cause such devastating damage, especially in Africa. As far as I remember, Emy once came home at the end of one of the summer terms with a very large, rather flat cardboard box. Inside was a lone giant grasshopper. However, its colour was not brown-beige like the desert insect, but a monochrome green like that of an unripe lemon. We were all amazed. Emy put the box in the dark guest room opposite mine. So it fell to me to feed the insect. As I was already cutting grass for our rabbits twice a day with a sickle, the grasshopper also got some of it. I don’t think it survived for very long under my care, but I can’t remember the exact circumstances.

In retrospect, Emy’s interest and fondness for grasshoppers can be seen as a fateful omen, as a few years later she married Colin Everard, the ‘grasshopper hunter’, as he was called at home, much to everyone’s amusement.

Emy completed her studies at Kings College with an ‘Upper Second’, the second highest honour in the league table. However, in England this was by no means a career springboard for a particularly talented academic. So what became of Emy? She became a secretary at the London branch of DuPont de Nemours.

Emy was very pretty, had inherited her mum’s beautiful legs and a good figure, which tended to be a little plump. She and Marci were always busy slimming down for a while. Emy had a bright laugh, was blessed with a lot of sex appeal and was highly attractive to men. She had many ‘boy-friends’ and was herself very fond of her boss for some time. Her parents once sent Emy and Marci to the Viennese carnival and Mum’s two youngest brothers (Peter and Bili) took very kindly to them.

Last year, when it was still customary for Queen Elisabeth to receive the season’s debutantes, Emy was also presented to the Queen at the glittering traditional event, thanks to the support of the then Austrian ambassador Johannes Schwarzenberg, Emy was also presented to the Queen on the occasion of the glittering traditional event.

When Emy was already at Dupont, she took a holiday once in February to meet her friend Almuth for skiing in Kitzbühel. Baba accompanied her to the station and bought her a few of the classic English magazines for the journey to distract her. Emy placed them on the bench in the compartment and chatted with Baba outside on the platform until shortly before departure. When she returned to the compartment, a young man was now sitting there, eagerly reading her magazines: ‘How is it that you allow yourself to simply appropriate my magazine?’ she said in a rather brusque tone. Emy got her magazine back, the train departed and it soon emerged that the young man, who introduced himself as Colin Everard, was also going on a skiing holiday to Austria – to neighbouring Fieberbrunn. This skiing holiday in Kitzbühel was to lay the foundation for two love stories, as Uncle Peter Mautner Markhof was also there at the same time and fell in love with Emy’s beautiful German girlfriend Almuth…

Colin had a long holiday from his work in East Africa and came to visit us in Purley. He told us in detail about his work, which consisted of exterminating the periodically invading giant desert locusts that caused so much damage and hunger and misery for the population. In all seriousness, Colin never got rid of the name ‘the locust hunter’.

Emy and Colin married at the end of September 1958 in Nairobi. They then climbed Mount Kilimanjaro on their honeymoon. The first of their four daughters was born in England the following year, two months prematurely. In a hospital close to where we lived in Purley. Little Emy’ weighed barely 11/2 kilos at birth and stayed in the incubator for a long time, and Emy stayed in hospital with her. I was still at school at the time and when Colin, whose parents lived in North London, came round, it was often my job to look after him. I almost always prepared him sausages, the famous ‘Walls Pork Sausages’, which were one of his favourite dishes and didn’t require any great cooking skills from me.

When both Emys were finally discharged from hospital, they were soon on their way to Nairobi, where Colin was already eagerly awaiting them. Emy and Colin were to have three more girls before they left Africa for good. Several years in Montreal/Canada followed before they settled in Franziskanerplatz, in the former Corti flat, after Colin’s retirement. This was where Mum and Baba had spent their beautiful and happy last twenty years.

Shortly before Montreal, Emy and Colin had visited me and José Manuel in Washington DC for Christmas. Their youngest daughter was still a baby at the time. We had a great time together. In February, we took a Greyhound bus up to Canada and visited them in their still provisional flat. The two older girls then spent their summer holidays with us. Then, the following year, again in February, we travelled to Montreal again, our last visit before José Manuel’s transfer to Stockholm. On this visit, Emy was, as always, the most loving and caring sister. Also the best housewife imaginable. She gave us a marvellous dinner with nice, interesting friends. It was quite warm by local standards those days. There was a thaw and almost no snow. José Manuel had casually, rather jokingly said to Emy on one of those days: ‘Too bad about the weather. I would have loved to experience a blizzard.’ That same evening, around midnight, we were already in bed and had switched off the light, Emy came rushing in to us in her nightdress and shouted in great excitement: ‘José, a blizzard, a blizzard!!!’ And indeed, it was a wild, wild blizzard, but it didn’t even last five minutes. We couldn’t stop laughing and I’ll never forget that moment.

Later, when Emy and Colin had moved into the flat on Franziskanerplatz, they always invited us to stay with them when we came to Vienna. There are so many wonderful memories associated with my dear sister that will stay with me forever.

From the age of 24, Colin Everard was responsible for leading teams in north-east Africa to combat desert locust infestations. He worked with Desert Locust Control in the Horn of Africa, Kenya, then Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Uganda. As head of operations, he was responsible for the strategic planning and management of campaigns to combat the huge invasions of desert locusts in order to protect the region’s agriculture and livestock. He was then employed by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) as a technical expert to oversee 75 international aviation safety projects in Asia. Colin was honoured with the ICAO’s coveted Gold Award. He has lived in seven countries and travelled to more than fifty around the world on business.

He has written about his numerous impressions and experiences in several books – most recently in his final work ‘Stories of Other Worlds’, which he dedicated to his beloved Emy. The book presentation, which was attended by friends and family from all over the world, took place on 23 January 2025 at the Vienna Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Colin Everard at the presentation of his book ‘Stories of Other Worlds’, 23 January 2025, Ritz Carlton Vienna