Walter Zuber – Eulogy

Walter was born on 24 May 1926, a few years after his parents married and settled on the Isle of Wight.   Walter’s parents were both Swiss, and worked in the catering industry in England, which is where they met. On the island they ran a well-known Café in Ventnor called the Café Suisse, on the corner of the High Road and Spring Hill, where they served delicious continental style cakes and pastries.  He had a sister, Trudi, and she had a son, Francesco, and I believe they all lived together until Walter left to pursue his career.  At home they spoke Swiss German, and this was Walter’s first language.  Walter told me that during the war, (he would have been about 13 when it started) his parents warned him not to speak Swiss German outside the family, in case he were mistaken for a German national. 
Walter was an intelligent and diligent pupil at school, and he excelled in modern foreign languages.  As he got older, he learned to speak High German, and was fluent in both this and French, and was also able to speak a fair bit of Italian.  Possibly as a result of these skills, he secured employment as a salesperson in the glass industry, securing contracts throughout Europe and beyond.  He travelled extensively, and with his lively wit and engaging conversation, he made many friends throughout the world, many of whom still sent him Christmas cards.
As a newcomer to the island, I first met Walter some four years ago, when I joined a French Conversation group that met weekly in Newport.  Walter told me that he had moved back to the island from the Midlands after his wife died, as his sister Trudi was still living here.  Unfortunately Trudi died a few years after.  Trudi had a son, Francesco, who I believe died tragically in an accident, at the age of 14, so that after the death of his sister, Walter had no family left.
Walter and I struck up a friendship because of our shared love of languages, and when I started running a German group for the U3A, Walter came along to give me moral support, and was an invaluable source of vocabulary and the finer points of grammar.  He had a wicked sense of humour, and told me some risqué jokes in German, that I shan’t reproduce here!  At this time, he was still driving about in his immaculate Mercedes, and would take me about to places of interest, and to various cafés and restaurants that he particularly liked. 
It seemed to me that the Covid lockdown was the beginning of Walter’s loss of independence.  He must have felt very isolated, and friends were shocked by his sudden decision to enter a care home.  He himself said that ten years earlier he would have hated it, but he had come to the conclusion that he could no longer look after himself, and was content to embrace this very different sort of life.  He greatly appreciated everything that was done for him, and predictably, made a lot of friends wherever he went.  He had a special friend whom he met in the Blackwater Care Home, a lady called Freda, with whom, he said, he liked to spar verbally, and they would vie for top place whenever quizzes were held.  Sadly for him, she moved to the mainland to be closer to her daughters, but she asked me to say that Walter is very much in her thoughts: “he was a real gentleman,” she said,  “and he suffered greatly with his ears and his eyes”.
This sums up what a lot of us were aware of.  Walter was always immaculately dressed, unfailingly polite, modest, self-effacing, caring and concerned for others.  Towards the end, a failed eye operation meant that his sight was so bad that he could no longer read, nor send emails.  His hearing was also poor, but he still managed to derive pleasure from watching the television, particularly the concerts of André Rieu, which no doubt reminded him of the heyday of his European adventures.  He never complained of his disabilities or of his increasing infirmity, and always wanted to catch up on current events, national, international and personal.  When I visited, he would sometimes speak to me in French, sometimes in German, and sometimes we would sing some of the old French or German folk songs learned long ago.  It was magic!  His passing has left a huge hole in my life.

Mary Longley, 13/11/2022.