It’s not like they’re the first siblings to try and kill each other. Is it?

But for us kids the knowledge of that breach of decorum and of essential values and ethics – far too posh and redolently complex a word to fit within a child’s grasp of the world – simply wasn’t right. One didn’t!

We knew, in an osmotic and hushed instinctive manner, that most of the family was dead, that we few were almost all of what was left of a once rather large and closely knit family. We knew that somehow those who were left were more important, more valuable, for that reason. Even if you couldn’t stand the sight of them you had to put up with them. We knew also that we were guests in a strange land, with strange customs, accepted for the time being but not wholly at home, so whatever else went on we could not be seen to be making any kind of trouble – we washed our dirty linens very much in private to ensure we didn’t trouble the neighbourhood.

Those few who remained were somehow the concentrated essence of family. The family!

That too made us different at school and amongst friends. We had no family extension, no embedness , no context and no real belonging other than that impoverished myth of reality which the survivors invented for us. Where other kids at school might shout “My gran says your auntie’s nothing more than an old slag!” or “Uncle Fred’s a real sweetie” we had almost none of that familiar embeddedness and context. There was no one else; our parents were the entirety of our cultural and social context. Family reality had no shadings of dark and light; no strange or funny insights into alternate views of people and family histories. If parents said it was so; so it was.

We knew too, in a vague and disembodied disconnected way, that both parents had come to the UK from comfortably wealthy middle-class backgrounds, whilst living in a two room top floor cold water walk-up flat didn’t match the expectations or knowledge that went with that mythical family history. We had no way to reconcile the past with the present. What use was it to know of past glories or lost wealth? All it did was to give us a false picture of the world as it was, whilst we children waited in the dreamtime for a fairy godmother to somehow resurrect the wealth and comfortable past that was our birthright. It was a schizophrenic life, a life of pretence and of seeming. Of being somehow other than what we were or what we might be. At the heart of which was that lie of amity and family. We lived in poverty whilst pretending to be wealthy and intellectual: whilst pretending that all was well within the family and attempting present a united happy front in public: living lies is not a good way to get on with neighbours or society around one – and the habit of lying in that way is a hard one to break.

Father grew up with the motor car, almost literally. The year after he was born Gottfried Daimler and Karl Benz were each building their first prototypes, and road testing them just 12 months later. In the year he was born Porsche was a young bohemian teenager becoming entranced with the possibilities of electro-mechanics, much against his father’s wishes, whilst Hans Ledwinka was contemplating new and revolutionary ways to construct carriage bodies.

It was a heady time for industry throughout Europe and Bohemia was thriving at the heart of it, thriving in a way that made it also the industrial and economic engine of the Austrian Empire, as well as one of its artistic centres of excellence. The family’s machine tools were exported all over the world, the linen and glass-cutting businesses were sound and profitable and the family was showing its wares at Leipzig and other trade fairs to great effect. It was the world of the late Victorian entrepreneur: a world of great political upheavals.

On its own this economic resurgence wouldn’t have made much difference to culture and society in the cities of Bohemia and Moravia had it not been for a rising tide of change that had increasingly been sweeping the Empire since the massive military and political setbacks of 1866, which established Prussia as the dominant German nation of central Europe and effectively destroyed the footings of Austrian power south of the Alps. A series of disasters which initiated the collapse of the Empire from within. The subsequent Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the declaration of Empire at Versailles was merely the public seal on that process.

Quietly, in the background, the lessons of ’66 were being learned. Czech nationalism had found its literal and metaphorical strengths and focus through the Solkows which sprang up throughout Bohemia and Moravia in the ’70s, espousing classless Olympian virtues – mens sana in corpore sano. Rowing, running, gymnastics, walking and many other physical activities became legitimate, organised, and above all competitive activities for vast numbers of Czechs. Solkows throughout the region organised marathon events such as inter-city river rowing or multi-peak mountain walking as well as gigantic public gala exhibition events. Prizes were awarded – not just medals but also money and sponsorships – and with them for the first time in modern Europe came seriously professional athletes who earned at least some of their living from sporting activities. Mass gymnastics became popular, not merely for men but also for women – unheard of in “Victorian” Europe. As the movement grew, so the concept was exported: Solkows sprang up abroad, first in neighbouring regions such as Silesia and Bavaria, then slowly over two decades they spread abroad as far as the USA, Canada, Imperial Russia and the UK. The so-called German Gymnasium in London’s Kings Cross was one such.

The Solkows of Bohemia and Moravia found themselves at the heart of the movement for democratic reforms within the Empire, mostly nationalistic in flavour, some purely romantic, some pragmatic, some overtly socialistic in nature – of the people for the people – of and for the community rather than the marxist communist variant of that phrase, some were conservatively royalist – mindful of Bohemia’s strong Imperial past seeking the restoration of Czech monarchy and nobility. Whatever their leanings the Solkows were the future – whether cultural military political or social. This was the Bohemia of Dvorak and Smetana and the breeding ground for Hašek and Kapek and Kafka. Which Solkow you joined defined who you were and what you were in Bohemian society, perhaps more so than any other institutions within the nation at that time.

In this evolutionary hotbed three young brothers grew up learning to compete hard at everything they did, to explore everything, to question everything their elders told them. All play was competition, all competition was play. A favourite and somewhat illicit game of teenagers in Aussig and Prague was to swim the width of the fast-flowing Elbe or Moldau; the challenge was to see who would be swept the least distance downstream in the crossing. Father consistently took second or third place to his younger brothers, but also consistently won their long distance rowing and running challenges and often the gymnastics too. The intellectual and cultural challenges were just as competitive between the three of them: each had their own strengths and weaknesses, all shared many capabilities. It must have been an intimidating and maybe even a threatening environment in which to grow up, with parents who gave no quarter and expected superlative performance in everything they did. One became a research chemist, one an engineer and one an artist; all of them were good at what they did.

Like the railroad alongside it, the road from Prague to Dresden is a river road, paralleling the banks of the Moldau and Elbe rivers. Over the centuries this has been the path of conquest and trade, the Imperial Road from Hamburg and Hanover to the heart of Europe, when Prague was capital of Empire and seat of government. It was also the road to the Battle of White Mountain and the Thirty Years war, when Frederick, the Elector Palatine, and his wife Elizabeth Stewart disturbed and forever shifted the Imperial balance of power during their brief winter moment: who knows what might have happened throughout Europe if they’d won that battle: they came so close. The river road became a high-capacity paved road only with the arrival of motorised transport in the first decade of the 20th century, when lorries began shipping finished goods out of Bohemia. It wasn’t what we now think of as a “drivers road”, but it was the first good road in the region on which drivers could exercise their new motor cars. Inevitably, it became a race track for the local motor-heads. The second road headed south from Prague towards the high mountains and Italy: that was the drivers road. It was a road to challenge the best of the cars and their drivers. In the inter-war years it took at least three days to drive between Prague and Milan or Turin – provided you had at least two drivers to take turns and keep going through the night. Today, with wider better engineered mountain roads and modern cars, we can do it in less than one without needing to change drivers. Or fly in slightly more than an hour.