“Life in parks is more interesting than in the houses of well-situated citizens,” he remarked during his London spell.  Life in the Lakes brought further interests.  “He loved the Lake District,”  Hilde Goldschmidt says.  “It gave him a feeling of shelter and protection, stimulation and peace.”  Millans Park suited Schwitters well.  The cinema was just down the road, and they went at least once a week.  Schwitters would go on ahead to save seats at the front.  Fantasia appealed to him, so did Korda’s Rembrandt; but, of all the films he saw in Ambleside, his favourite was National Velvet, because of Elizabeth Taylor.  On Saturdays, when there were two shows, he went to the first house so that he could have his usual game of chess afterwards.  Wantee used to feel sorry for Harry Bickerstaff.  “If Bicky didn’t come at seven o’clock he’d go down the road in his carpet slippers, knock on the door and stand there with his chessboard in his hand all set out ready to play.  It was his way of saying please.”  If that failed Dr Johnson or the postmaster occasionally obliged with a game.

But some found him rather embarrassing.  Dr Lancaster, who returned to Ambleside in 1946 as Dr Johnson’s partner, tried out his prisoner-of-war-camp German on Schwitters - who was doing his best to forget his native language - and rather reluctantly accepted a painting from him as a token of thanks for professional services rendered.  To him Schwitters’ art was incomprehensible, not to say mad.  As for the artist himself, “He was rather a wily old boy, a bit uncouth in fact.”  Others, trying to be friendly, found themselves stuck for conversation.  Standing outside a pub one day he was asked: “Drink, Mr Schwitters?”  “No.”  “Smoke then?”  “No.”  “What do you do then?“  “I live for love.”  Awkward silence.  “His friendship with me was entirely man to man,”  Harry Bickerstaff says.  “I remember him talking about his youth and what a gay young spark he had been with the ladies and telling me how much he disliked Picasso.  He called him a gangster.  But he didn’t speak to me much about art because I was a complete Philistine in that respect.  I didn’t really see the point of his collages - not that I didn’t like them - but I realised he was doing the work he believed in.  He said, ‘My work will be worth far more in ten years’ time, when I’m dead.”

Occasionally he would give an impromptu performance: a faint reminder to himself of the outrageous Merz recitals he had given years before in Holland and Germany.  Once Hilde Goldschmidt asked him out to the hotel in Langdale where she lived with her mother.  “I will never forget that afternoon.  He pushed a small book in my hands and recited the Ursonata, his poem of sounds.  It was very moving and fascinating how his recital built up from the very lyrical passages to the very dramatic ones.”  He became quite popular in pub circles, good for a laugh anyway, with The Furor of Sneezing, a nasal extravaganza.

By April 1946 he had recovered enough to start thinking ahead.  He applied for British citizenship: this would enable him to come and go, visit Germany perhaps where, he now heard to his delight, there was a chance that his Hanover Merzbau could be salvaged.  The Museum of Modern Art was a possible source of funds to carry this out.  In any case, America attracted him.  “Abstract art rates no more than a question mark here,” he said.  “In America it rates an exclamation mark”  Other refugees, Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, had found a ready welcome and security there.  He began corresponding with Raoul Hausmann, formerly of Berlin Dada, then living, sick, poor and obscure, in Limoges. They made plans for publishing a Merz-Dada magazine, to be called Pin, “the hole people have to creep through in order to see what art is all about,” and in July Schwitters went to London to see E. L. T. Mesens, the surrealist art dealer, hoping he would agree to publish Pin.  Nothing came of this, but Mesens was keen on the idea of him having a one-man exhibition towards the end of the year.

But then, on October 8, 1946, Schwitters fell on the steps of the Central Cafe and broke his leg.  He was taken home and, with great difficulty, manoeuvred upstairs on a stretcher.  He was too ill to be moved to hospital so X-ray equipment was brought from Windermere and rigged up next door where there was electricity.  The London exhibition had to be postponed, but Schwitters gave two Merz recitals at the gallery the following March.  The Pin idea was abandoned.

In some ways the 10 weeks he was laid up turned out to be a productive time.  Wantee put a canvas across the bed so he could paint and sort his collections.  She read fairy tales to him, and Alice in Wonderland; and Dr Johnson called in for an hour or so every day and played chess with him to allow her to get some fresh air.  Schwitters could not be left alone- one afternoon Wantee had left him for a while only to come back to a smell of gas; he had turned the gas on with the end of his stick and had then tried to light the mantle by tossing matches up.  He lay back laughing.  As the autumn turned into the coldest winter in memory, the risk of his catching pneumonia in a room with only a small oil heater became acute.  Dr Johnson told Wantee that she had already given him two extra years of life.  He thought it unlikely he would survive much longer.

© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung

© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung

As it turned out Schwitters got better.  But he never fully recovered.  By the summer of 1947 he had come to accept that time was running out and that his horizons were now fixed between Windermere and Grasmere, Wansfell and the Langdale Pikes.  All thought of America receded.  Then Hilde Goldschmidt introduced him to Harry Pierce, a landscape architect living in virtual retirement in Langdale.  Schwitters painted his portrait seated beside one of his summerhouse sheds, about half a mile from his house at Chapel Style.  He found him sympathetic, for Pierce too had a creative urge bordering on an obsession.  He had bought Cylinders Farm, a stretch of rough pasture and woodland a few years before and with two assistants was planting trees and shrubs from all parts of the world, eucalyptus, rhododendron, weeping acorn, fernbeech; contriving an Eden in the wilderness.  It was a kind of horticultural Merz.

Schwitters described his own work to him.  How he had spent more than 10 years, on and off, building his Merzbau at No. 5 Waldhausenstrasse, cramming it with relics of himself and his friends - Arp, Lissnaky, Malevich, Mondrian; how he had been obliged to ask the tenants on the floor above to move out so he could break through the ceiling and continue instinctively, like a termite, with no end in sight. On June 20, his 60th birthday, he learnt that the New York Museum of Modern Art had awarded him 1000 dollars “to allow him to continue his work, and including such restoration of the Merzbau as is possible.”  By now travel to Hanover or Lysaker (where his second Merzbau was still standing at that lime - it was to be burnt down by playful children in 1951) was out of the question.  However the idea of a third and final Merzbau grew in his mind.

There was a small disused barn in a corner of Cylinders Farm.  Schwitters eyed it speculatively for a while and then persuaded Wantee to ask if he could use it.  When, she told him that Pierce had given him permission Schwitters stood by the barn overcome with joy murmuring: “This is the happiest day of my life.” But before he could set to work he had a haemorrhage and was laid up until well into August.  Then, in Harry Pierce’s words, “he recovered and went to work with feverish energy... his eagerness and enthusiasm got the better of his weakness until it was barely noticeable.”  Materials were whatever he could find, stones from Langdale Beck, bits of wood and oddments lying around the barn and the garden: a cartwheel segment, a china egg, a rubber ball.  Most of the time he worked, with Wantee or on his own, mixing the plaster, laying it on with a table knife to stop up gaps and crannies in the dry-stone wall.  He built up an inner shell using pea sticks, branches and bits of wire for reinforcement and smoothed the completed outcrops.  The barn was dark inside and smelt of earth and damp.

Gradually the relief constructions grew from the wall like exotic fungi, until the topmost part hung over like a great wing, sheltering a clutch of completed details, picked out in green and red.  He placed gentians from the garden in one niche, together with the nozzle from a watering can and a hank of binder twine.  At last, for the first time since he had arrived in Britain, he had built something big and permanent on secure foundations.  Harry Pierce had the barn patched up, given a door and window frames.  “He asked me whether I would preserve what he had done should anything happen to him even if it were unfinished.  He seemed overjoyed when I assured him that I would.” One day Schwitters asked Hilde Goldschmidt to come over.  He wanted to explain his plan to her.  “High up in the wall he wanted a window placed, which was supposed to act both as the sole source of light and as the fulcrum of the whole conception.  From there various strings were spanned throughout the room to indicate how the barn space would be interpreted…It was all so clear in his mind.”

© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung

Then winter set in.  The single oil stove was almost useless and rainwater streamed over the earth floor.  But Schwitters persevered, working an hour or so at a stretch, clad in all the clothes Wantee could muster, his beret clamped down, refusing to be dissuaded.  “I have so little time,” he said.  One afternoon early in December Gwyneth Davis, a painter who lived nearby on the Langdale estate, gave him tea in her caravan.  He was half-frozen and could hardly speak, but as she rubbed his hands he tried to joke about what Wantee would say if she knew he was being entertained in another girl’s apartment.

Inevitably he got bronchitis which turned to pneumonia.  Ernst was summoned.  Schwitters was taken to Kendal Infirmary and died on January 8, 1948.  A couple of days later word came that he could be naturalised British after all.  The Museum of Modern Art suggested he should be buried in the barn.  But Ambleside churchyard seemed the right place.  One of his last pieces of sculpture was placed in the coffin with him.  Quite a few Ambleside people came to the funeral and Mrs Bickerstaff provided tea.  Then his work, bundles of it, was taken away.  Ernst returned to Norway and Wantee went back to London.