Memoirs of a Most Fortunate Man
1. Introduction
Octogenarian has always seemed such an august term with which to adorn a person. Yet, having been granted that status for the major part of a decade, I remain the person I have always been: ten years older, of course, but, I fear, not much wiser. Nevertheless, I must confess I am privileged to have lived this long, to have reached this high plateau in life. Indeed, I have been altogether fortunate, most fortunate…
Still the person I have always been? Yes, I think so. A man never quite at ease; a man always searching for peace of mind; a man always seeking a comfortable interaction with others – others who are often found to be equally ill at ease.
Above all, I retain that insatiable urge to seek out the difference, to study the habits and idiosyncrasies of others. I have always loved watching people. From earliest childhood, the movements and mannerisms of people have unfailingly fascinated me.
As I grew into manhood, I began to realise that, regardless of how different people may appear: for example, in skin colour or body shape; in living conditions and habits; in traditions and in customs; we are all alike, nevertheless. We all experience the same feelings of joy or despair, of selfishness or charity, of contentment or dissatisfaction, of success or of failure.
For many years, I travelled a great deal and studied people all over the world. I met people with unknown languages, peculiar manners of expression, strange customs and different skin colours. Yet, wherever I found myself, no matter how diverse the lifestyle, the habits, or the appearance, I found that, if I took the trouble to communicate properly, all people responded. They all had the same aches and desires. They all felt just as deeply; they all hurt just as easily; they were all just as quickly made happy or made sad.
Nowadays, however, the younger generations live, for the most part, in a quite different world from me.
For most of my life, the average person in Great Britain went to school, found a job, married and bred a family. Then, as years passed, the ageing married couple would look on proudly as their children’s lives followed a similar pattern (hopefully with an equal or better job!).
Since the turn of the century, however, there has been a profound change. Global warming, the advances of modern science, and a coronavirus pandemic have affected dramatically not only the state of the world, but the very way of life of the ordinary man.
Neither marriage nor the traditional family unit are considered sacrosanct, or even necessary, to modern generations. Now, in this digital age, the age of self-belief and self-promotion, the age of A.I., people of my era can only stare in open-mouthed astonishment at what is regarded as a normal way of life.
That is not a rant from a grumpy old man. It is an objective comment on life and on change.
* * *
As it happens, my own life was never quite that of the average man. I have led an interesting life. On the pages that follow will be found memories of times past and memoirs of events recalled. Some are fragmented chronological memories, others vivid reminiscences.
The joyous recollections of the thirty-seven years of bliss spent with my beloved muse, Suzi, have been carefully recorded; but I have also written, with what I hope is complete honesty, of the years of pain and stress that preceded that remarkable union.
My first marriage, in 1967, was an ill-judged commitment that poisoned the lives of both parties for seventeen long, sterile years. An unqualified failure, it was an unsuitable union, weakly managed, and endured by both parties for far too long.
When the agony of those years was finally ended, I experienced a fleeting sense of liberation, a feeling that quickly passed. What was left was an emotional void. My business became my life. On most days, for twenty-four hours a day, I ate, slept, and worked.
Then, in one remarkable click of the camera of life, a miracle occurred. I was dragged, in an instant, from the depths of apathy. Cupid’s arrow, fired by the glance of a beautiful woman, pierced my heart. In that magical moment I found true love.
That glance was from Suzi Venus. Her smile brought life back to me. Suzi became my wife, my inspiration, and the constant object of my love for the next thirty-seven years. If my first marriage had been an unqualified failure, the second was its ultimate antithesis. It was an unqualified success. Indeed, on that remarkable evening in Harrogate, two tortured souls found true love and peace of mind.
Suzi was a talented artist and she was quick to recognise the talent of others. She re-kindled my long-buried poetic instincts and caused me to create again. Soon after we married, she signed me into a creative writing group. She believed it would give me relief from the stresses of running a chemical company in the late 1980s.
Thereafter, Suzi became the first reader and the sternest critic of everything I wrote. Nothing was presented to a publisher unless it had my wife’s nod.
On Saturday, 4th February 2023, Suzi died. That day, the day my beloved ceased to smile, was the blackest day of my life. I became enveloped in a nimbutic cloud of self-pity. I wept daily for my loss. I still weep for her – with age, tears fall more easily. But my tears are no longer of self-pity. I have come to accept that sadness and loss are the lot of the old.
I also understand that one must not remain sad. Suzi taught me to laugh again; I have a duty to shine her light upon the world. My home is kept bright with flowers in memory of her beautiful smile, the smile that tells me I have to keep writing.
And so, where to start? I suppose, as the cliché suggests, at the beginning. But then, there have been so many beginnings…
My first career, begun in 1957, was in the retail conglomerate, Great Universal Stores. Their five year management training course was designed to teach me a sound understanding of the basic precepts of business: of bookkeeping, stock control, and sales promotion – and of man management.
Significantly, it also brought me into contact with a wide range of ordinary working people living within twenty miles of the department store. I met and established close relationships with many families, visiting them in their homes each week, people striving to make ends meet in the London of the 1950s.
These, our customers, were a fascinating cross-section of the remarkable agglomeration of humanity that made up the population of London. There were old-established families, both high-born and low, many claiming residence in the area for many centuries. But there were also first, second, or third generation immigrant families from all over the world filling the busy streets of Stepney and Whitechapel.
Many people, at that time, were still tormented by memories of the terrors of World War II. Many families were scarred from the loss of loved ones killed fighting the Nazi Axis. Others, innocents, had been struck down at their place of daily work. In street after street, large extended families could be found crowded into a few rooms, a consequence of the reduction to dust and rubble of thousands of homes during the war.
I had lived through those years of conflict from the age of four until I was ten. Indeed, my father had been in the army for five years from 1941. World War Ⅱ remained as vivid in my own memory as it did in the memory of my customers.
And so, this selection of memoirs will begin at the beginning, with my recollections of those earliest years.
Memoirs of a Most Fortunate Man
2. A World War II Childhood
I was born to Jewish parents living in a tiny, rented terrace house on the London/Essex border in April 1936, just three and a half years before the outbreak of the Second World War.
My memories of the house and those pre-war years are extremely sketchy, but I do clearly recall carrying home an Easter egg from Mrs C’s sweetshop, around the corner in Romford Road. The shopkeeper was known to me only as Mrs C. Shaped like a barrel, she had a big round face and a warm motherly smile. The egg was in a ceramic yellow eggcup held by a white rabbit. I carried it in outstretched arms all the way home (not much more than a hundred yards, but a memorable distance for an undersized three-year-old carrying a precious cargo).
The house to which I carried that egg no longer stands. It was completely destroyed just a few years later by a German buzz-bomb. Fortunately for us, we had already moved out. I happened to pass the site a year or so after the bomb had fallen and stared open-mouthed at the bed of weeds populating the rubble of what had been our living space, and at the jagged edges of wall protruding from the houses on each side. The two adjacent houses were still standing and occupied. The bomb had cleanly removed that one house, our home, from the middle of the terrace.
In September 1940, having already conquered France, Belgium, and Holland, Adolf Hitler became frustrated by his Luftwaffe’s failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. He decided to bring the British to heel with a prolonged bombardment of almost continuous air raids, principally upon London, the capital, but also on other cities.
The Blitz, that terrifying period from September 1940 to May 1941, burned images into my brain as a child, images that remain with me to this day. I still see the piercing searchlight beams crisscrossing the night sky, the accompanying starbursts of shells from anti-aircraft guns, and the tracer lines from the aircraft overhead. I still smell the acrid smoke of war. I shall never forget those terrifying nightly firework displays.
My usual view of hostilities was that of a bewildered, pyjama-clad four-year-old. It was a view gathered en route to or from Uncle Fred’s Anderson shelter, a sight inevitably accompanied by the constant deafening thunder of ack-ack guns and the earth-shaking booms of exploding bombs.
From January 1941, my brother and I had a short break from the blitz. We were suddenly evacuated to a blacksmith’s cottage in the wilds of north Oxfordshire. The evacuation was deemed necessary because our mother had been taken ill and was undergoing serious surgery in hospital.
The details of most of that stay have long since vanished from my memory, although I retain mental pictures, blurred images, of rural scenes, of the staircase in the blacksmith’s cottage, of the lanes of the countryside. Two separate happenings, though, have remained clearly imprinted deep within me. First, there was the horse.
I clearly remember the morning I was hoisted by the blacksmith, a big strong man, onto the back of a huge, freshly re-shoed black horse standing in his yard. He boasted that the stallion was eighteen hands high. I remember sitting up there, utterly petrified. I was small for my age and I cannot recall whether I screamed, burst into tears, or just froze.
I suspect I simply shivered with fear; I recall the experience only as one of utter terror. Whatever specifically occurred that morning, the consequence has been that I have never again, in the eighty-something years since, attempted to mount a horse.
Then, on a sunny morning, the other occasion that I remember, we all went for a walk. ‘We’ were my brother Joe, our cousin Alfie, who had been placed in a farm in the same village, and myself. We had followed a path through fields outside the village when we came to a point where we needed to cross a small stream.
The stream was narrow enough that Alfie, aged eight, and six-year-old Joe were able to stride across; but it was a bit too wide for me, a diminutive four-year-old, to manage. After a brief pause, the older two concluded that they could lift me across. Halfway over, they dropped me into the stream.
I cannot say what punishment was suffered by them at the hands of the blacksmith’s wife, but I do remember the scolding I received from her. She pulled my wet clothes from me and dumped them on the kitchen floor, then she scrubbed and angrily towelled my puny body, cursing me the whole time for my stupidity.
The stay in Oxfordshire lasted only three months. When mother recovered her health sufficiently to visit in the spring, she looked at –sniffed at –the squalor in which we were living, and had us uplifted the same day, back to the house in Grays, Essex, to which we had moved in September 1939.
Much though we were pleased to be home and a family again, Mum’s health was still poor. Within a few months, she was taken back into hospital. This time, however, Joe and I were placed in safe, loving lodgings with our parents’ sisters’ families. The war, it was decided, was less of a risk to our health than life in the country!
I was back with Auntie Millie and Uncle Fred, and the Anderson shelter. Their house had an outside toilet and a small garden. A six feet high mesh fence prevented accidental access to the main East Coast railway line which lay beyond the fence, between the house and the City of London Cemetery. I remember the thrill I got when passengers waved to me through the windows of passing trains. I would always enthusiastically wave back at them.
All my grandparents had died before I was old enough to know them and I suppose Millie and Fred became surrogate grandparents. I loved them dearly. Auntie Millie was the least extrovert of that family, a quiet, efficient, extremely loving and lovable woman. She was my dad’s eldest sister, some fourteen years older than he. Dad was much closer in age to her eldest son. They had three sons, all of whom were serving in the armed forces. The eldest was in the army, in the Intelligence Corps. The other two were both in the Royal Air Force, one an electronic engineer and the other, the youngest of the trio, a flyer, a navigator.
Auntie Millie played the piano whenever there was a family gathering at their house, at Christmas or for birthdays or any other celebratory occasion. She would sit at the piano to accompany all the various family members, who took turns to sing their party pieces or to lead the family in chorus. At such times, the house would be crowded with her siblings and spouses, nephews and nieces, cousins and aunts,. It seemed to me, who happily joined in the choruses as I learned them, that the family were always singing – or playing cards, or arguing.
Once our mother was finally out of hospital, and we had all survived the blitz undamaged, we lived through the next four years of the war more or less untroubled in Grays. Occasional air raids persisted, but they rarely caused more than a little excitement.
Everyone had been issued with gas masks at the beginning of the war. They were most unpleasant to wear but, fortunately, the need to wear them arose rarely. When it did, it was invariably only a practice routine to keep us prepared.
* * *
In September 1941, my father was called up into the army. From then, with a couple of notable exceptions, we saw very little of him until the war was over. While he was in England, he did appear on leave occasionally, usually without warning, until 1944. Then he was posted to Italy, where remained until demobilisation early in 1946.
The first of the two notable exceptions occurred, if I recall correctly, in the summer of 1942. Dad was posted for a short time to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. He arranged for Mum, Joe and I to enjoy a week’s holiday near him at Newport, the island’s main town.
As with our evacuation, two moments stand out in my memory from that trip. Firstly, at Carisbrooke, standing with my brother outside the door to the kitchens of the castle, eating a plate of hot cheese straws that my father had produced from within the building. They were scrumptious. I had never tasted cheese straws before.
While we were there, a summer fair was in full swing on a green in Newport. My brother and I made as many visits as possible to put pennies in one of a line of slot machines to watch ‘What the butler saw!’ For the life of me, I cannot recall what it was he saw, but I do remember we returned several times to those slot machines.
Dad’s next leave came, I think, in the August of 1943. He had been posted to Sussex, and he took me, during the school holidays, to spend a week with a farm worker and his wife in a cottage in the wilds of Sussex. It was near Ardingly, between Haywards Heath and East Grinstead.
They were kind, homely people and the trip was a much happier one than my evacuation to Oxfordshire had been. I cannot recall details, but I do vaguely remember going with the farmworker’s wife to the market in a nearby town on a green and white motor coach. The weather was fine all week and I can remember leaning against the post of a five bar gate, daydreaming. The memories of that week, though vague, remain warm.
