The Life and Times of Mervyn. S. Kersh

MY DASH

THE YEARS BETWEEN 1924 – 20...
by Mervyn S. Kersh


CONTENTS

Chapter

1 ORIGINS – MY PATERNAL FAMILY
2 ORIGINS - MY MATERNAL FAMILY
3 THE JOINING OF THE FAMILIES
4 MY EARLY YEARS
5 SCHOOL DAYS
6 THE GATHERING CLOUDS
7 THE WAR YEARS
8 MY ARMY DAYS
9 ON ACTIVE SERVICE
10 THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY
11 THE BATTLE FOR GERMANY
12 POST EUROPEAN WAR
13 CIVILIAN LIFE
14 U.S.S.R.
15 U.S.A.
16 PARALLEL LIFE
17 THE PRINTED WORD
18 THE WRITTEN WORD
19 RETIREMENT

MY DASH

B Y MERVYN SYDNEY KERSH
December 1924 - OCTOBER 2007 (so far)

INTRODUCTION

“If” is often claimed to be the shortest word in the English language but one with the greatest meaning. It opens up tremendous possibilities in time and space, but only in the imagination. But there is another character, even shorter which does away with speculation and keeps to facts, to history even if subjective: the character “dash”: a simple, short, horizontal straight line.

In an obituary or on a memorial stone two sets of dates are usually found: the date of a person’s birth and the date of his death. These are connected by a dash representing his life, what he did, what happened to him, how he influenced people and events and what and who influenced him, the good and bad in that “dash”, the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end: in fact, all that, in a minute space of time in terms of the universe, his existence meant to society and mankind during the period that is now simply reduced to a dash. It is, in fact, his own personal universe: it is his eternity.

The purpose of this work is to expand and translate my personal dash, to recall and record my life in the last three-quarters of the 20th century (the 58th century since man asked “why?”) and into the first quarter of the 21st. I hope that it will be of interest to my contemporaries and to help them recall a forgotten world; to my descendents to learn from whence they came and also to social historians of the period. Much is of necessity trivial but perhaps important to paint a backdrop to the greater events. It was of great interest to me to remind myself, to relive, those trivial events, and I hope for forgiveness for that indulgence.

My particular “dash” has involved several strong influences including my grandparents and parents. Judaism and, later, Freemasonry with their strong ethical codes and exhortations to match beliefs with actions by using ritual and ceremony as vehicles to teaching rather than an end in themselves.

In my early teens, political theories also had their influence although it took several decades before I accepted that good intentions cannot be successful without anticipating the faultlines. Consequently, I saw my ideals for mankind crushed under the Soviet tyranny and I had to search to find another more effective way to improve not only the lot of mankind but also mankind itself.

In my over eighty years of experience, I have seen politicians of all stripes claim to be the one who could lead their country to the “New Jerusalem” only to betray their followers by the “ins”: insincerity, indifference, ineptitude, inability and incompetence. I still believe that they started out with good intentions but soon realised that changing man has no magic formula and his nature must be taken into account. People are not equal. Equal opportunity is quite another thing. Cultural evolution is more sure than revolution. Teaching new concepts must be taught from infancy but where are the teachers? And who will teach the teachers?

As idealist revolutions have failed and become distorted one after another, I have concluded that the Jewish teaching of “Do not put your trust in princes” has proved to me to be very apt. Changes in society cannot be imposed; they must begin in oneself, a slow but sure way to spread ideals and a better way of living. Economically, I learned that neither income nor outgoings are the cause of misery: the balancing of them is.

The following is my “dash” as far as I can recall and I apologise for any errors or omissions my memory may have caused. I have tried to follow my own advice but know that that I have largely failed. I know that I have been influenced by events and people. I doubt whether I have influenced events or people despite my lifetime effort.

I thank my wife, Betty, whose memory for dates is phenomenal and far greater than mine for refreshing the places my memory could not reach.

CHAPTER 1
ORIGINS – MY PATERNAL FAMILY
Although I appeared on the scene early on Saturday, 20th December, 1924, I cannot with all honesty say, that I remember very much about the event.

The name Kersh was originally Kershbaum brought by my paternal family which came from Konin in Poland in what had once been part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

My father's parents were Morris and Mindel, who were married in Konin and had one daughter, Esther. After arrival in London, my father, David was born and then three girls, Sadie, Annie and Lily, and another boy, Sidney. Much later, I was to be named after Mindel, my unknown Grandmother who died when my father was only twelve. I have since located her grave in Edmonton. . I do not even know her maiden name. I never heard about their own parents who were left behind in Poland.
And I never thought of asking – until too late.

Morris Kershbaum was a tailor but a bespoke one; he was not very reliable as a businessman because he spent most of his time praying. He also became adept at repairing watches which he relegated to a hobby. Morris and Mindel lived in a crowded house in the East End and had six children. Their mother, my grandmother, Mindel, died in 1903 when David was 12, and the rest of the large family stayed in the East End until they were grown up.

Morris had two brothers who went to the USA instead of UK and although they wrote regularly to each other, when Morris died there was no trace of his brothers’ addresses. They never wrote to query why he had not answered a previous letter and so family contact was lost.

The name and its many spellings and variants is very common in America as I found when I started to try to trace them in the 60’s: far too many to phone each one – and that was just in New York City! I have tried more recently on the internet but with no response.

My father, David, was born in 1891 and became the bread winner whilst his eldest sister, Esther, acted as “mother” to the four younger members of the family as well as, in due course, to her own husband, Sam, and their seven children, and her father Morris in addition.

David went to school until he was 14 but continued at “night school”. He started off as an apprentice in the fur trade making fur coats and collars. In 1919, following the War, he started his own business as a chamber-master (sub-contractor) and later, as a manufacturing furrier. That same year, he was introduced to a young lady called Tillie Solomon. In those early days he picked up French and German from his co-workers and had a good accent and vocabulary in each language as I often heard testified.

David was not called to the services during the first World War as the authorities did not know he existed; unknown to him, his birth was not registered. Experience of Czarist conscription, from which they had, in part, fled, as well as ignorance of the laws here, ensured that it was safer not to be recorded officially. His father was too old at the time to be called up and his brother was too young. It was after the war due to the intense anti-German feelings that he shortened his name to Kersh.



CHAPTER 2
ORIGINS: MY MATERNAL FAMILY
My mother's parents, Isaac Boder and Miriam Slovick, (who later met and married in England) came from a town near Warsaw in Poland, called Plock. They left Poland, unknown to each other, at the age of 16 together with their parents and siblings. Conditions became unbearable due to the Russian random conscription for very long years and even decades, and generally bad conditions There was always an ongoing threat (and not only threats) of pogroms (anti-Semitic victimisation and violent attacks) as well as discrimination in education, residence and promotion against Jews). It was these circumstances which drove many hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave all parts of the Pale (the western parts of the Russian Empire where most Jews were confined), and to seek a decent and safer future, possible even their fortune, in western Europe, Israel and, particularly, the USA.

The Boder and Slovick families went separately to England about 1881 and lived at first in the East End of London.

The Boders were renamed Solomon by the immigration authorities, (but Isaac’s two sons were later to change their names back to Boder). Isaac and Miriam met and were married. A few years later the family moved to Canterbury by which time Isaac and Miriam had three daughters and two sons. The middle daughter, Matilda, (known as Tillie), was born in 1897 and was to become my mother. The elder, Lily, died very young just after her daughter Esme was born, and the younger was my Aunt Betty who married her late sister’s husband, Leonard Cohen, and brought up Esme and, later, their daughter, Sylvia. The young family later settled down in Brixton Hill, south London. Len was the first Barmitzvah boy at Brixton Synagogue where his father was the first Warden. Later, Len became choir master and Hebrew classes teacher and was science teacher at a Jewish school at Heygate Street at the Elephant & Castle. He was well known for his false arm, having lost his in the War, and which he swung to enforce discipline!

The two sons, my uncles Sid and Lou were younger than my Mother and so I remember them well although they were “grown-ups” to me and they must have been in their twenties. Later, Sid married Leah after a series of girl friends and Lou, determined not to be left at home, followed with Debbie. They each had one child, Sheila and Ian, respectively. Debbie was openly and permanently disappointed at Ian being a boy. She dressed him as a girl and kept his hair long and curled. She often reprimanded him for acting like a boy and blamed him for not being a girl. All until well into his childhood. Only eleven years older myself, I was appalled at her conduct and so were my parents who often remonstrated with her but to no avail. There is no love lost even today while she is in her late 90’s.

My grandfather, Isaac, was an outdoor (sub-contracting) tailor making suits for manufacturers to sell in shops all over London.

Of the parents of Miriam and Isaac, I have only a hazy memory and that may have been based on hearsay and old photographs, but I do have a picture in my mind of Edwardian-dressed men and women and a story of one of the men being in the feather business. He owned, or used, a horse and cart to take feathers or eiderdowns to or from Brighton. From records, I found that they all died when I was hardly more then a baby so my memories may have been second-hand.


Isaac had two brothers who lived in Stepney and each had a few sons and I think that there was at least one girl. I never sorted out which children belonged to which father as we only saw them together when we, rarely, visited them. One brother lived in Nicholas Street with a big brewery on the corner. I have a feeling that it was No 2.

These boys, born as Solomon, later changed their names variously, to Sefton, Stanton, Salmon and possible other names. None changed back to Boder as did my uncles. Due to these changes it became almost impossible to trace the genealogy but I did contact one of the next generation through an advertisement, and who now lives very near to me, whose name is Stanton. We have briefly spoken but not met as he did not appear very interested on any such meeting when we spoke on the phone. I sent him the skimpy family information I had and asked him to add to it but I never heard from him.

Miriam had three brothers; Lewis (known as Shear for some reason), Teddy and Harry, and one sister named Katie.

Katie was the black sheep of the family and her name was always uttered – if at all – in hushed tones of disapproval. I was told later that she had run off to Paris to marry a man of whom the family disapproved – presumably a non-Jew. Later she was divorced which provided the third very black mark against her in those days. I remember her at Miriam’s house when she gathered we children in the kitchen away from the adults and amused us. She always called us by a diminutive. Cyril was always Cyrillay and Esme was Esmelay and so on. We were never left alone with her for long: it seemed that our parents feared her influence on us.

Teddy was also rarely mentioned. My grandmother lived for a time as a small child in Canterbury and Teddy made his home there for long after she moved back to London. He too, married “out” and had at least two girls. I knew nothing about that family until, during the War, one of the daughters turned up at Grandma’s in ATS (Women’s Army) uniform and was apparently made welcome. After that we never heard of any of them again.

I did know Harry better as he lived in South London with his wife Sarah Seal. They had two girls and two boys. The first girl retained a mental capacity of a six-year-old throughout her life. We were told that she had been dropped on her head as a baby by a nursemaid but much later I heard that she had been born damaged. Her mother looked after her for decades and, when she was old, her younger sister, Hilda, looked after them both for the rest of their lives in Hadley Wood. The two boys, David and Sidney, both became doctors and we retained occasional contact with them and their wives.

Miriam’s other brother, Lewis/Shear, married another Katie and they had 13 surviving children. They also lived in South London and so most of the family assembled weekly at Brixton Synagogue. Our greater family was the backbone of the synagogue. Lewis had a retail tailoring shop on Brixton Hill and we sometimes popped in there to see the parrot which could say “Hello Gov’nor”. Because the shop was called Simmons, (his wife’s maiden name), he was called Simmons all his life and so were his children. Because of the size of his family we had very many cousins and we shared each other’s functions as the years passed. Of these 13 only Freda still lives – and in Southgate! Two of the girls Tillie and Rae, married two brothers, so Cyril and I are not original in that respect.



CHAPTER 3
The JOINING OF THE TWO FAMILIES
Tillie was also born in the East End of London, but moved when she was three or four to Canterbury. She went to college and trained as a shorthand typist, which was very unusual for a woman, because at that time it was almost only men who worked in offices.

In 1919 she was introduced to David Kersh, and they married that year. David and Tillie had their first child on 30th April 1921 and he was called Cyril. The next year, on the 3rd of October, they had a daughter called Lilian. They then bought, and moved to, a big house very near where Sir Walter Raleigh had once lived, on Brixton Hill, to be near her sister Betty in Fairmount Road, and, her parents in Lambert Road. On 20th December 1924 they had another son called Mervyn, and that was me. Lambert Road was the next turning to us but, due to the lack of a connecting road, we had a fair walk to reach my grandparents and as a young child, it was a very long walk for me. The houses were a mere 100 yards apart but as we were not crows we had to walk the long way.

We used to meet my grandparents to go to Synagogue every Sabbath morning. And we also went to Lambert Road later every Saturday to see the Sabbath out. They had what to us was a big garden which my Grandmother tended, but she forbade us to use a ball in case we damaged any of her carefully nurtured flowers. Like her garden, she herself was always immaculate and stately in her carriage. We saw her as always calm but formidable. I learned later that she was fluent in written Polish and, Yiddish as well as perfect in English. She looked down on Yiddish as a “peasant” language, the tongue of Jews from small villages or shtetls while she was from a town and was educated. Consequently my own parents did not, although they could, speak Yiddish. They reserved it for when they did not want their children to understand what they were saying. We children very rarely heard and so never knew Yiddish.

My Grandmother used to go every other week to Stamford Hill to visit her Cousin Sarah Calmus and always took a gift of food for her. She did this journey by buses until she was in her late eighties. Once, during the Blitz, she was caught out by an air-raid and had to spend the night deep below Bank Station of the Underground as the Thames flood gates were closed. She never made a fuss and shared the station with hundreds of sleepers who had their own bunks for regular sleeping in. She stayed on the platform stairs. I, too was once caught out and the atmosphere was really wonderful. I suppose it was due to the common threat of possible peril.

My mother, and in turn, her children, were brought up to be very “English”. Jews living in east or north London were “foreigners” to them and whenever we visited my father’s family we could see the vast difference in living standards and culture.

My mother tried to bring us up to be Jewish Englishmen rather than English Jews. She extolled the English middle-class virtues of emotional self-control (and concealment), non-violence, verbal and physical. We were to be Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion. Jewishness was to become Judaism only; our religion, not also our nationality. Where Christian Englishmen went to church and observed Christmas and Easter, we would be seen as Jewish Englishmen who went to synagogue and observed Yom Kippur and Pesach. Our Jewishness was to be kept at home or in the synagogue; our Englishness was to be seen in public. The ultimate accolade was to be “accepted” and this was typical of South London Jewry.

The fate of the “accepted” Jews of Germany (Jewish Germans) and the revelation of opportunist rabid anti-Semitism in France and most other European countries, finally shook my mother’s belief in her wishful thinking. Jews will always be a people apart. The very word “Jew” made us cringe instead of proud. We were a people without a country, Christianity mocked us and derided us and we had nowhere to call our home. We could pretend to ourselves, in very generation, that we were “equal but different” but in our hearts we knew that the “others”, our host nations, did not see us in that light. If we were poor, we were despised; if we were rich, we were envied. Either way we were helpless targets of the whims of our fellow citizens.

She abhorred Zionism as alien and was disgusted by the attempts of the Zionist organisations to recruit young Jews to return to the land as peasants. Their posters always depicted a Jew with a farm implement. However, she did perceive that the Jewish Labour Movement was more interested in a socialist state for Jews than a Jewish state. After the re-birth of the State of Israel in 1948, she accepted Zionism as a good thing – but only as a haven for refugees.owever, she did perceive that Jewish Labour movement in the UK


Just as my Grandmother was dominant in her household, my Grandfather was mild and gentle but very hard working. I remember him saying to me, once, “If you want something, you work for it”. No credit for him! No money meant no purchase! He had angina and diabetes. I recall him injecting his thigh with a thick needle and, when we walked out, breaking and breathing a phial of oxygen.

I only remember him losing his temper once: when Cyril said or did something which he should not have. My Grandfather chased Cyril to the end of his garden before calming down. They lived in a big house where the upper part was let off. The ground floor was the living area and also a workshop which was out of bounds to we children even out of working hours. Just the same we did manage to peek in a couple of times to be amazed by the array of sewing machines and pressing equipment and the all-pervading smell of wax. My grandfather made all our suits for Cyril and me for Pesach when
we were young. There was always a coin in one of the pockets and we appreciated that more than the new suit!

CHAPTER 4
MY EARLY YEARS
My eyes were opened in a literal sense on Saturday, 20th December 1924. It was to be a long time before they were open in a figurative sense.

I was brought up alongside my older brother and sister, but I got on better with my sister Lilian in my early years because she was nearer my age. We lived in a nine room house in Trent Road, Brixton Hill, where we all lived until we married, apart from absences during the war period. While I was very young we had a live-in maid and, later, a charwoman whom I do remember and she was very nice. Strangely enough, her name was Mrs Charman! Every house in Trent Road was owner-occupied and kept in a good state of repair.

It was a double-fronted house with two large rooms on the ground floor front. One was the ‘drawing room with gold-upholstered furniture including two kidney-shaped pouffes. These latter were our “magic cars” but we were rarely allowed in that room and then only when we had guests. The other room was the dining-room and contained a large 4 foot-wide table which extended to some 18 feet by a crank handle and the placing in of three leaves. These leaves “lived” behind the leather couch, which matched the chair seats. The table, chairs and large sideboard were all mahogany, and the table had thick protective felt panels which were placed on top during use. This room was used for entertaining, which my parents did quite often and especially for Seder Nights when my Aunt Annie brought her children to join us after a long bus and tram ride from the East End.

Behind the sideboard which faced the windows, was a door which I never saw open. The other side was a large conservatory and was used only as a store room. Access had to be through the garden.

These two large ground floor rooms were divided by the hall with its large hall-stand with a mirror, coat hooks and an umbrella stand. At the end of the hall were the stairs to the upper house and a few steps on the left down to the morning-room and the kitchen which itself led on to the scullery. In the scullery was a larder used in the pre-refrigerator days. The scullery had a large boiler for heating water in which clothes were washed.

It was the morning room which we mainly used. That had a large black range with a fire and oven with a flat surface for heating pans for cooking. The stove had to be lighted with coal or wood and coke and was messy job but it also warmed the room. The room also had high cupboards in the recesses and a small cupboard high up on the facing side. Here cases were kept alongside the Pesach crockery and was difficult to reach. As children, I remember that we rigged up some kind of pulley high up across the room and sent messages to each other pretending to be castaways.

This room was changed in the mid thirties when the range was removed and an open fire installed with a stepped tiled surround in which were mounted an electric panel in each side and one across the top. This was surmounted with a clock. The ceiling was lowered so that the high cupboard was left above it and the furniture changed to a modern style including an armchair in which my father used to fall asleep after dinner on Saturdays. We were allowed to play board games or read but never to speak above a whisper for fear of waking him.

During the fur “season”, which was from August until the Lord Mayer’s Show on 9th November, The trade was very busy with working hours being as long as one could stay awake. For the rest of the year there was no work unless a fur coat manufacturer was prepared to find the money to make stock for the next season or had private customers. Many workers took other jobs out of season. That
was why my father seemed to sleep in the armchair so much after a six or seven-day long week.

Off the morning-room was a door which led straight down to the cellar which had once been a wine-cellar and was equipped with “caves” but no wine! It was dark and sometimes we had mice which our Persian cat, Fluff, took care of. My father also set mouse traps which broke their backs and only he would deal with the result while we hid.

The other stairs led to a lavatory half way up to the first floor bedrooms of which there were three: one was for my parents, one for the three children and, I believe, there was a tenant in the third. As we grew older, Lilian had a curtain rail put round her bed leaving plenty of room for her to dress – and undress.

We had a routine: after the lights were turned out, each would take it in turn to lead the nightly mantra: “good night” (which was repeated by each of us in rotation), “Sleep tight” (repeated again), and “God Bless” again repeated in rotation. After that there was no more talking.

In the mid-thirties, there was a complete change over in the three rooms. Lilian had the mysterious third room to herself, Cyril and I had the left room and my parents took over the larger middle room. Our room had a blue décor, Lilian’s had pink and our parents’ had a pale green, with curtains, eiderdowns and carpets to match Our room also had a gas fire installed to offset the chill of the easterly wind. This sleeping arrangement lasted until we each were married, less the evacuation and service years.

Halfway up from the bedrooms was the bathroom which had a huge geyser to provide hot water and a gas radiator to warm the bathroom. Above that were three attic rooms which were once used by the maid, and later by a tenant. I remember a Mr McDonald who was able to write in minute letters and once showed me a stamp with the “Lord’s Prayer” on it. I could make out the letters with a magnifying glass but did not understand what was written. That was his hobby. Beyond that I do not remember seeing or hearing him.

In my teens, I took over two of the attic rooms as my “den” and did my homework and even worked out a calendar from the Bible dates and ages. I entertained my friends there as well. The stairs did not bother us at that age.

From the kitchen a door led on to the garden. That was only a strip of concrete the width of the house and another strip of earth about four feet wide behind it. It had a lilac tree at one end and a large shed at the other. There was also an “outside” toilet. That garden was my mother’s pride, to plant and tend flowers. Alongside the house, from the garden to the street was our “alley”. This was used to bring things in without going through the house, and later, I used it to house my bicycle after I had built a roof over part of the area. Actually, it was Cyril’s bicycle which he lent to me when he went overseas in the RAF.

If number 48 was my citadel then Trent Road was my world. Starting at the Brixton Hill end, on the corner, was the baker where delicious smells of freshly baking bread greeted my going out and my coming in to Trent Road,

Further up lived an elderly gentleman whom I always greeted as Mr. Loose and enquired after his health. Opposite him was a small Catholic School but we rarely saw many children near it. Halfway up lived an elderly couple whom we got to know through their two Pekingese dogs. Their house was bombed during the Blitz and was replaced by a couple of pre-fabricated houses which lasted many decades although 10 years was the expected life for them. When the house went so did they and their dogs.

We lived round the corner, but just before was number 44, with number 46 just next to us on the corner. Both their gardens backed onto ours and we constantly had to go round to them and ask whether “we could please have our ball back”. Number 46 doubled the height of the wall by a fence so we no longer saw them – or lost our ball. The other house was occupied by the Bristows whom my parents, mostly my mother, as my father was usually at work, sometimes had conversations over the garden wall. But we never entered each other’s homes.

On the other side of us lived a family called Sheinbaum, which led to a not so hilarious nickname.
They came rather late in my young life and the father was the Shamas (beadle) of the Brixton Synagogue in Efra Road. I remember him best for walking round the synagogue during services, putting his finger to his lip and hissing “Sh, sh, please” to anyone who chatted. His wife became crippled by arthritis and Lilian used to go round there most Saturday afternoons and sit with her and chat, do “things” for her or read a book to her.

They had a boy and a girl: he was Issy and she was Renee. Issy was to become Rabbi Cyril Shine and served the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street much later. He was supercilious as a boy and had not changed as a man when we met again decades later.

His sister was different. We used to talk out of the first floor bay windows to each other across the gap between our houses. I even went to the cinema with her and saw Shirley Temple although I gazed more at Renee than at Shirley. At the beginning of the war, she went to Canada, where she later married and I never saw her again.

Two houses further along were the red-headed Venit family who owned a café in Stockwell but that is all I know of them. Except that they were Jewish. They were too old for my interest. Opposite us lived a non-Jewish family named Watsons who had a daughter, Pat, who took Cyril’s fancy but our mother discouraged that going anywhere. Lilian and I used to tease him about her. Lilian had a close school friend, Alma Carley, but my mother warned Lilian not to bring her home as Cyril might become interested as she was a gorgeous red-head. So Lilian had to see Alma outside of home.

On the inside of the corner of the road, were the Jacobs family. I recall the mother, Jinnie and the children, all a little older than us, and they were quite swarthy. They were often referred to as “Chutz” (Outsiders) so they probably originated in Spain before the family fled to Holland to escape the auto-de-fe, burning at the stake, if one didn’t convert to Christianity. Many pretended to convert and became known as Marranos (Secret Jews) or White Cloth Jews who laid a Sabbath table with a white table cloth after drawing the curtains, but after several generations forgot why they maintained that quaint custom. These Jews were regarded by the Protestant Dutch as outsiders but also to the observant Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. These Iberian Jews were Sephardim and were looked down upon by their Eastern, Ashkenazi, brethren. They had fled to many Mediterranean lands - at least those who survived the burning and conversions.

The Jacobs’ sole observance of Judaism was to put a piece of Motzo on the mantle-piece over the fire place at Pesach, so I was told. Needless to say we never went beyond a formal greeting when we met in the street. I recall seeing the youngest boy, Benjamin, in army uniform during the War.

One other non-Jewish boy I befriended lived a few doors lower down the street. We obtained a wooden box and the chassis from a pram and made a sort of go-cart. We tied rope to the front axle so that we could swivel it to steer and took it in turns to push and be pushed. Some times we put a bucket and spade in it and went collecting horse manure from the roads for our gardens. Our friendship ended when he threw some at me but that was just before the war evacuation!

One house half way down the road was very different: all the windows on the ground and first floors were boarded up as was the door which had a postern in it. Rumour had it that there were two women living there and very rarely we could see someone looking out of the attic window.

One exciting day was when my Uncle Sid brought a car – an Austin 10 – home and persuaded my father to buy it. I don’t recall whether he drove it to our house or came with a salesman. My father bought it and the next step was to learn to drive. My parents both took lessons but my father followed instructions from someone who kept saying “come on” as he was reversing. He touched the garage door (a few streets away from our house) and broke the glass windows. He never drove again. My mother persisted and we loved to go for a ride down Kings Avenue which was wide and straight. She soon learned and we were mobile. There was no need for a driving test in those days. We often went to Brighton for the day and were nearly always held up at the level crossing at Crawley before the by-pass was built. My mother, as in everything else, was very capable.

We rarely saw a car in Trent Road apart from ours and couple more in our street. Tricycles with a box body in front were used by the ice-cream man. His was painted blue with the slogan “Stop me and buy one” and he called out “Walls are lovely” as he cycled round the turnings ringing his bell. That was the signal to nag our parents. The other tricycle was that of the delivery boy from the kosher butcher in Brixton, Tasch. My mother would phone him and he would make up and send the order that way.

Carts pulled by a horses were used by the greengrocer, baker, coalman and milkman. The milkman’s horse always seemed to know when to stop at a customer’s house and when to pass a non-customer’s one. All these tradesman called out their wares in a particular way which was probably handed down over the generations. The milkman always yodelled the word “milky”. We children would rush out with a few cubes of sugar and some bread to feed the horses and to stroke them. They usually had nose-bags hanging from their necks and fitted over their noses so that, by lowering the bags to the ground they could eat the contents whenever they stopped. No lunch break for the horses.

We had a telephone but few people yet had one. Or number was Brixton 2415 (Uncle Harry’ number was Brixton 5142). 7140 also sticks in my mind but I cannot remember who had that one. In those days, one lifted the ear piece and would hear a voice say “Operator, number please”. When she was told the required number, she would connect you. Later there were dials to make your own direct connections but you still knew the whereabouts of the person or shop you were telephoning by the exchange letters. The excitement it provided whenever the phone rang for an incoming call!

Shortly before the war my father hired builders to shore up the cellar with steel girders and to fill in the “caves”. These were probably placed to store and keep wine cool in ages past. They were about three or four feet high and extremely deep in the sides of the main cellar. We were always too afraid to explore but they ran the width of the house. My father had electricity installed in the main part and the place was whitewashed and bunks fitted. Candles, matches and torches were supplied and books, a table, chairs and a paraffin heater added. Tins of food were also stored in preparation for the worst. We were ready for anything the Germans could throw at us since even if the house collapsed, the girders would keep us safe, if buried, below it. I was to read many Bettie Wooster and Jeeves books in there. I also kept a detailed record of the time of every air-raid alert and all-clear siren, as my mother had done in the Great War.

At one end was a hole with its cover which had access to the front garden. It was here that the coalman would empty his sacks of shiny black coal. They would wear a shaped hat which continued over the shoulders and down the back so that they could carry these very heavy (1 cwt) sacks on their shoulders. They always swept the loose coal and dust into hole before leaving.

For the renovation of our cellar, all the coal stocks had to be run down and then the place was cleaned out before the builders arrived.

In the event, we used it a lot and felt the explosions as the Germans tried to kill as many people as possible from the air. Once they dropped the biggest land-mine to date in the next turning a mere fifty yards from us. It completely obliterated four houses and left a crater as big as one house. It made our shelter rock like a boat in a storm and we all swayed as in a vehicle which had suddenly stopped and we wondered if the shelter would hold, but it did. We often had neighbours share the shelter with us and on that occasion we had a couple I did not know from a few doors away, who had asked to share our cellar. They lived nearer to the land-mine and lost the front of their house while sheltering safely with us. My swimming teacher, Mr Rome, was sleeping in one of the houses which was hit. He never awoke.

The Germans, tired of bombing military targets, tried to terrorise the population into submission by indiscriminate bombing of cities aiming at civilians. London, Coventry, Liverpool and Exeter were some of these targets as well as towns in the south-east. This plot totally failed as people everywhere rallied behind Churchill instead of demanding surrender. Churchill was a great inspiration and the nation stood firmly behind him.

We had been losing battle after battle; Dunkirk, North Africa and the Mediterranean but negotiation was a dirty word. You cannot negotiate with someone who wants to destroy you. You make peace with an enemy by destroying his capability to kill you. The German sympathisers and the defeatists were swept aside as Churchill took office. We knew that we just had to “stick it out”.

Germany had conquered all Europe except for a pliant Sweden and Switzerland. Spain and Portugal were neutral but pro-German. Italy was an active ally as Hitler tired to reach the oilfields of Iraq and Arabia in the middle east by sweeping through Egypt, Israel and Syria in one enormous sweep while the other hook was to go through Ukraine and Russia, to those of the Caucasus. Then the pincer was to link up.

Egypt, Syria and Iraq were pro-German while in Israel, Arafat’s uncle, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, went to Germany to join Hitler and raise a Moslem army to fight alongside the Germans. Germany reckoned on the Ukraine supplying the food necessary for the Germans and that Britain and possible America, would join him in war on the USSR, or at least remain passive.

Britain was not Sweden or Switzerland and, despite the massive defeats and bombings in addition to the huge losses in men and ships in the convoys bringing us food and fuel from the New World, we kept going. The attack on the Soviet Union on 22nd June 1941, instead of rallying the UK and USA to her side, merely forced communist Russia and the capitalist West to shelve their differences and unite to destroy the far greater evil that was Germany. The Japanese entry on Germany’s side in December 1941 by her perfidious attack on America’s base in Pearl Harbour (while diplomats were still negotiating their differences), brought the USA completely into the World War and the end of the war was ultimately certain as America geared its industrial might for that purpose.

Socially as well as geographically, Esme and Sylvia were very close with Cyril, Lilian and me, and we regularly went to the park, library or cinema together, particularly Sylvia and me as I was only three months older. Esme was only one month older than Cyril with Lilian floating between both pairs. We all also often shared holidays and, as our mothers had many cousins (the Simmons family) there were the greater family celebrations. Grandma’s brother had 13 children and all lived in South London.

One incident I shall never forget. The daughter of one of these cousins was being married and the father of the bride proposed the toast to his daughter. He started well and then switched to telling everyone that she was no beauty but had a good heart. The gasps were very audible and we were all embarrassed, not least the bride. But that was after the war.

My grandmother was tall, upright and smartly dressed into her nineties (she was 96 when she died). She was always perfectly calm and well dressed in the manner of the English. She was religiously strictly observant but not fanatical. This middle line was passed on to her daughters and my father went along with it. As my father loved to say, “Everything in moderation”. The Kersh’s and the Cohens used to meet my grandparents at the corner of Water Lane and walk the rest of the way to the Synagogue in Efra Road every Shabbat, and we also walked homewards together. Grandpa Isaac closed his business before Shabbat every Friday and never worked on Saturdays or the Holy Days. My father, on the other hand, used to work Saturday mornings, when business so dictated.

He worked long hours in the fur season and did very well in the trade as they could afford a motorcar, and, when I was very young, and a maid, which not many people had at the time. We later had a weekly cleaner (a char) whose name was Mrs Charman!

My Uncle Len taught at a Jewish school in the Borough at Heygate Street, and taught boys their Bar Mitzvah portions and Haftorahs. He also was teacher at Religion Classes in Effra Road Synagogue. In addition, he was choir master and a composer for the Synagogue and some of his compositions are still used in other shuls. My father was also involved in synagogue activities, being a Chatan Torah at one stage.

My mother, Tillie, was treasurer of South London WIZO and Secretary of the Brixton Synagogue Ladies’ Guild, using her secretarial skills for meetings and activities as well as typing newsletters. My father was appointed Chatan Torah just after the war and carried the office with dignity for the short period it required.

They both served on the Brixton Philanthropic Society which also arranged an annual Ball. And there was the Brixton Self-denial Fund whose secretary was my Uncle Len, That was to collect and house young refugees from Germany.

The Rabbi at that time was Rabbi Mishcon and the Brixton Synagogue was a place far less extreme that Cockfosters today. He wore the vestments of the Church of England clergy with the cassock and white collar strips hanging down. Compared to present day north London synagogues we were far nearer to the form (but not the content) of the Church. “Dochening” was recited, not chanted, The music was modernised - some by my Uncle Len – and was more western than Slavic. In general, we were more restrained rather then visibly emotional in prayer and more “English” in many ways, not least our dress out of synagogue.

We had a Chazan, the Rev. Morris, and an excellent choir which was conducted by Uncle Len for many years and later, when I joined it, by a Mr Levine and Mr Marcus from outside our community. I stayed until my voice broke at thirteen but I used to sing duets with Tony Jaffe. We were also booked for weddings and we earned a few shillings in that way.

There was a gallery for the women but no Bimah in the middle of the room. That was installed much later and, of course, apart from reducing the number of seats, blocked the view of many of the congregants, thus defeating the declared object of “reading the Law in the midst of the congregation”.

We all had our own seats regularly and the family (males) sat together as did the females members upstairs. Rabbi Mishcon had a son a few years older than me named Victor. He always sat in front of us and when we stood for a prayer, he would put one foot on the seat and spend his time gazing round the gallery. He as quite a good speaker at debates at the clubs and went into politics as well as being a lawyer. He served on, and became, Leader of the London County Council.

Well after the war, he became vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews but when the next elections came round for the Presidency, he was strongly advised to avoid defeat by standing down. He was regarded as an opportunist and as a man without convictions. He tried to become a Labour M.P. but was only offered a constituency in strongly held Conservative seat in Leeds where he stood no chance. In compensation, the Labour Government offered him a Life Peerage. When he married a local girl, a daughter of the richest Jew in the area, we all pitied the girl, Beryl Posnansky – and they later were divorced – a rarity in those days.

The Rabbis’ daughter, Sybil, was my first teacher at the Religion classes and later was to become a close friend of my mother although she was quite a bit younger. In turn, her son, Anthony, became close friend of my sister Lilian.






CHAPTER 5
SCHOOL DAYS
My earliest memory is of when I was five when a School Board man came round saying that I should be at school like my older brother and sister. My mother was saying that I was still a baby, and I remember hiding and crying. Their compromise was that I started school that next spring.

I started at a local Church of England school like my brother and sister. As I was a year older, than most of the other children in my class, instead of sleeping in the afternoons, I would play with plasticine making things like a hose pipe and animals. The teachers taught us to spell by holding up a card with the written words and saying the words like dog, hat, cat or mat. In 1930. I had hardly learned to know the year when it changed to 1931 and I had to start learning again. The mysteries of life had started.

At the great age of seven I passed up to “the big boys” school and schooling really began.

On the way home from school, Cyril and I started what can only be called persecuting the women who lived in the “boarded-up house” in Trent Road. On one occasion we stopped and called out “witches” and threw stones at the boarded windows. When we ventured into the front garden to collect more stones, a woman dashed out and grabbed me and tried to pull me through the door. Cyril came to my rescue and jumped on her back and as she turned to deal with him, I escaped and Cyril managed to run away as well.

When we related our misdeed to my mother, she taught us that it was wrong to taunt or persecute someone just because they were different: we, as Jews, were different from the majority around us and should set an example. The truth of that lesson was brought home soon afterwards when we, in turn, were persecuted as Jews by our schoolmates.

It was in that period that I was seated in the same double desk as Winifred Owen whom I fell for and worshipped. She barely noticed me but that only encouraged me – to no avail! My affection for the Welsh people probably began then.

I attended that school until I was nine, often being ambushed by gangs of our schoolmates and suffering physical attacks frequently after school because I was a Jew, by boys who claimed that I was 2,000 years old and had killed a Jew who was one of their gods. Many times. Cyril came to my rescue. They also often shouted that we should go back to our own country without specifying which they thought it was. This was hurtful for I fully believed that Britain was my country while, in any case, “Palestine” as they called the Land of Israel, was forbidden to us by the British Government. I think it was that that made me interested in Zionism, despite my parents distaste for it. There were only about five Jewish children at the school and we all withdrew for prayers and scripture lessons but through the doors we heard and memorised many of the usual hymns and even the Lord’s Prayer.

To get to the school we had to cross Brixton Hill which was a very busy main road with buses and trams which ran on tracks in the middle of the road.

At first, my mother used to take and collect me but later, Lilian accompanied me. There was usually a policeman on duty to hold up the traffic for people to cross but one day he stood in front of a stationary tram and could not be seen by traffic nearer the kerb. I, not thinking of checking first, walked past the tram into a bus and was knocked off my feet and dragged along underneath until someone managed to inform the driver and stop him. I had meanwhile turned on my back with my feet on the rear axel watching the moving parts as we proceeded about fifty yards. I was completely unhurt but rather dirty and oily and very excited by my adventure, and had to go straight home instead of school.

Very often Fluff, our Persian cat of my own age, used to follow me to school even across the main road and went home again after leaving me at the gates. He also “collected” me very often at the
right time. He could turn on the kitchen tap for a drink – but he never tuned it off again! He also opened doors outwards by jumping up to reach the handle levers. When he died of sunstroke aged 12 we were very upset, especially Lilian, for weeks.

By the time I was nine, Cyril and I moved to the Jewish school in the Elephant and Castle, where my Uncle Len taught at Heygate Street. At the time it was a highly reputed school until the headmaster retired and was replaced by a Mr Taylor, which was the same year that I joined. The academic level dropped drastically and immediately.

The new head teacher had a habit of walking around the school with his hands in his pockets and kicking a ball in the corridors and classrooms during lessons. He also disapproved of homework, and when my parents sent a note to ask for homework for me before the 11+ examination, I received a slap around the face and was called an impertinent little swine!

My uncle Len taught science and music for which he had degrees but both of which were halted as a career when he lost an arm saving an officer from a German gas attack in the First World War. He used the artificial arm to good effect by swinging it to hit any boys who were naughty in either Classes or school. He became famous for that trick. Alternatively, he pulled us out by our ears!

On my first arrival at the school, I was attacked by the school bully but I was able to beat him and wrestled him until he gave in. After that I was popular. My main achievement was to be voted vice-captain of the football team mainly because my best asset was my fast sprinting speed and could kick with my left foot. Also, my bribes were nearly as great as the boy who bought enough votes to become Captain!

The school was about two and a half miles from home and we travelled by tram and crossed two main roads by foot. Traffic lights were just about being installed by then. I often travelled alone and nobody thought anything of it. There were no queues in those days: it was victory to the strongest and I was nimble and jumped on the trams before they stopped.

My brother, Cyril, and I bought the weekly comics, Hotspur, Wizard, Adventure and Skipper. Once we had read them, I would sell them at a reduced price in school. I also joined the Brixton Company of the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, where I learned, among other things, ju-jitsu and boxing, so from then on I was able to take care of myself. I was brought up in a religious environment, and was in the Shul choir until my voice broke. When I turned 13, I went to Shul every morning before school for which I was paid sixpence a day to make up the Minyan (quorum). I also joined a Jewish youth club where I played table-tennis, chess and billiards and took part in hat debates. I made good friends there. Lilian became chairman of the parallel girls’ club.

My Grandfather Isaac died in December 1936 when I was twelve and my Bar Mitzvah was put back a month to 25 December 1937 and I had to learn another Torah portion. It was celebrated at the Shul hall and I recall dropping my written speech under the table, thanking to my parents and teacher (Uncle Len, who also wrote the speech for me.) When called upon, I could not reach it and had to make one up along the same lines.

Among my presents were a dressing gown and a digital watch (a novelty in those days) which broke down after a few weeks. I was also given five leather-cased shaving sets, four of which we passed on to other unfortunate boys, and one I kept (and much later used in the army). I also had a Monopoly game and a chess set. Those two were perfect presents and I still have them after using them frequently for many years, and later, with my own children.

I had a friend, Leo Thaler, who came from Hungary and he used to play Monopoly with me for hours on end. Once, at a table on the flat roof of his block of flats, a breeze suddenly blue a £5 note away and I had to draw and colour a replacement which is still in the box. I likewise had to substitute a pawn in the chess set when it fell out of its box down a drain in the street. They both still exist.

Leo used to come with us to Brighton on a few of our days out but his family moved to New York and he sent me a picture postcard of the World Trade Fair without an address. That was the last I heard from or of him.

Another friend, Gerry Lewis, had a father who owned a club in Brixton ( it later became the Orange Coach depot). At the back of the premises a false wall swung away at the touch of a button and revealed a gaming casino which I believe, was illegal in those days. I was sworn to secrecy.

We used to help ourselves to packets of cigarettes and matches and on our way to JLB we walked round the back streets of Clapham smoking one after the other, telling each other that we would soon like it. Gerry much later opened a restaurant in Soho where by chance I saw him once but never met him again.

Smoking seemed to be the grown-up thing to do and my father smoked a lot. As soon as I started work at 16 I started to smoke as well. I proudly bought a packet of five Woodbines (the cheapest possible) and smoked at work. One day my mother noticed a packet in my jacket pocket and challenged me about it. About the same time I saw myself in a mirror with a burning plant in my mouth and have never smoked since.

I had another road accident and miraculous escape when, about 10 years old, coming home from school, I looked left and right and then crossed the main road. Meanwhile a lorry had come from round the corner but I did not look again. I walked into its side and was thrown to the ground and spun round by its rear wheel. Had it been the front wheel, my head would have been under the rear wheel. Again, although my leg was numbed, I was unhurt. As it happened I was supposed to go straight to my grandparents because my mother was at my Aunt Betty’s house as she was due to have a baby any moment. (it died not long afterwards). I remember trying to explain to a policeman that I lived at 48 Trent Road, but was going to 50 Lambert Road, and my mother was at 28 Fairmount Road. That really puzzled him. He thought that I was delirious.

After passing the “Eleven Plus” exam, (only two of us out of my whole class did; the rest got the lowest possible grade), I moved in Spring 1936 to a non-Jewish boys’ school called The Reay Central School, where I encountered some anti-Semitism, mainly from one teacher. He refused to call me by my name, insisting on calling me “Heygate”. At first I pretended to not know that he meant me, but since that resulted in the cane, finally I gave up. Discipline was severe and I was frequently caned on the hand or seat for slight infringements. Even if someone talked to me in class, it was I who was punished. Bad behaviour or slovenly dress even outside school was also punishable and prefects were always on the lookout for defaulters. The reputation of the school was paramount but it also taught us manners.

Only serious offenders would be sent to the headmaster, Mr Tasker, for punishment and to have one’s name entered in the “black book” which supposedly would effect our future application for jobs. That was what happened to me in Spring of 1939 in front of the assembled school and soon afterwards we broke up for the Summer holidays and, due to the war, I never returned. The school was evacuated to Reading but I went back to my junior school to be evacuated with my Uncle Len to Tallatan, near Exeter.

One bad memory of The Reay remains which has lasted all my life. One afternoon our French teacher was out of the room and a senior prefect took over. We had to copy some French from our text books My desk was at the back corner with my best friend actually in the corner side of our double desk. We, as did every one else, talked but my line of vision was either down or to my left, away from the class. Suddenly there was a hubbub and it turned out that someone had fired a catapulted paper pellet dipped in ink which had marked the open register on the master’s desk.

There was an enquiry when the master returned and nobody owned up. We all had to write a secret statement of what we had seen, which, in my case was nothing. Somebody wrote that he had seen me pick up paper and fold it to a pellet and that was it. Even my best friend, when questioned, “admitted” that I may have been firing pellets. My denials were ignored and finally, since I was “not gentleman enough” to admit my offence, the whole school was assembled and I was given “six of the best” on my seat and called a liar. My parents’ protest in response brought no doubts to the headmaster’s mind and I got no redress. I lost a good friend that day. I also realised how much I could trust non-Jews when they needed a scapegoat.

Until then, every Friday afternoon I had the job of collecting the three or four younger Jewish lads and shepherding them from school to the synagogue in Efra Road.

Lilian, meanwhile left to attend the Brixton Girls’ Central School in Kennington which was very near The Reay.

In those pre-war years, my Uncle Sid brought home various young ladies whom we assessed, as did Grandma and Grandpa. Both Uncles, Sid and Lou, went on holiday to Belgium and otherwise lived a life which we did not understand. I later found out that both started working life in the fur trade with my father as salesmen but moved on to other things.

After each Sabbath was out we all played cards and draughts with my Grandfather. If we played for “money”, we used buttons supplied from, and returned to, the workshop. To know when the Sabbath ended, we children would go into the garden and look for the first three stars and compete to see who could spot them first. Then we would report back inside and the gas lights would be lighted. I don’t remember my grandparents ever changing over to electricity.

In winter, when the Sabbath ended early, my parents sometimes would go to the cinema. When I went, it was usually in the afternoon and with Sylvia. If it was an “adult” film (“A”) (It may have meant Accompanied), we would wait outside and ask adults about to go in if they would take us in
as their own children. Of course they did and we gave them the money to buy our tickets and we did not even sit with them once inside.

The admission prices at that time were three pence, later to increase to four pence. There were three local cinemas; the Royalty which was merely a hall and sported a film followed by a serial cliff-hanger which ran for about 20 minutes and continued the next nail-biting week. There was the Palladium, near the Town Hall which was more elaborate and cost us four pence. And a little further away, near the library was the Pavilion which was slightly smaller. A few years later an Astoria opened in Brixton and there was great anticipation due to the publicity. It was like a palace and the term “Picture Palace” was well deserved. There were upholstered seats and It had a blue domed ceiling with electric lights which looked like stars. The whole décor was bright, modern and beautiful, We thought that it must be what heaven is like. That was well worth the sixpence required.

The shows began about 2 pm and my grandparents took Sylvia and me about noon and we stood in a queue with our lunch and flask of hot drink. Some people even took folding chairs. The show opened with a “B” film – a lower quality film which we thought was still very good, especially as it had sound. There was a short, live show or music (other than from a gramophone or wireless) from a huge organ which rose out of the orchestra pit. Then a news reel, followed by a cartoon and then the big film. Sometimes there was even a short “documentary” film. In the interval girls with trays hanging in front of them would sell cigarettes, ice cream tubs and chocolates. That all added to the enjoyment and glamour.

It was a very good afternoon’s ( or evening’s) entertainment. I vaguely recall the first talking picture I ever saw. Usually there were captions across the screen depicting the speech while a small three piece orchestra played appropriate mood music. Betty’s future brother-in-law, Sidney, played the cello in one of the cinemas. But that finished as now the actors actually spoke their lines and the background sounds were heard. It was wonderful. It also made musical pictures possible.

I think “Frankenstein” was one of the first talkies I saw and it was with Cyril. It was frightening and Cyril ran out pretending he was not feeling well, so I had to sit alone through it. In those days we chose films because of the actors (“stars”) who played in them. We could rely on a particular type of film from each actor whether romantic, cowboy, squash buckling, sinister or comic and they were our heroes and heroines. They fulfilled our fantasies. Their faces , as were sporting players, were depicted on cigarette cards which were included in every packet, and we collected, swapped and saved them. We even bought albums in which to store and display them. For those with no exchange value we played a flicking game with them.

Most Saturday afternoons we five children met and walked to the library in Brixton and changed our several library books. We checked what films (we called them “pictures”) were showing and perhaps arrange to see one of them later. There were three main circuits, the Gaumont, Odeon and Regal. Each had its own films in all its branches. The smaller cinemas were private and had their own selection, so we had plenty to choose from, especially if we ventured up Brixton Hill to Streatham.

We attended Hebrew Classes every Sunday morning and Tuesday evening. On one Tuesday evening a friend and I went into a new block of flats on our way. We loved to go up and down in the lifts – a novelty. On one occasion, a man chased us and caught just me. I wore glasses at the time and the lenses reflected the light of his torch so I was seen hiding in a doorway while the other boy got away. He was a security man as there had been a lot of burglaries in the block and I became suspect No 1 at the age of about 11. He called the police and I was questioned, searched, and then taken home to my mother. I was reprimanded by both for trespassing but was cleared of theft as the only thing in my pockets when I turned them out was a small toy car.

The other adventure we enjoyed was going to Quinn & Axtens, the main department store in Brixton, and going up and down in the brand new invention: the moving staircase. I had imagined that the whole staircase swung round to different doors but when the miracle reached Brixton, I saw that the stairs carried us up to the top. We went up and down whenever we were near there.

Every year, we Kersh's and our cousins, the Cohen’s, would rent a house in Hove for about five weeks in the summer. My father would come down for the weekends. I also went to JLB camps each year near Deal in Kent where life under canvas was uncertain due to the weather but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was not to last.


CHAPTER 6
THE GATHERING CLOUDS
My father was always politically conscious and interested in what was going on around him. He was a strong believer in non-intrusive government and I can remember listening, fascinated by the conversations he had with my Uncle Len on the Spanish Civil War, Munich, re-armament and general politics of the pre-war days. My uncle was what today would be called a “leftist”. He had a book shelf of books from the “Left Book Club”.

I used to listen to discussions between my Uncle Len and my father. They were usually political and covered the rise of fascism in Italy and then Germany. Mostly I was impressed by the violent intervention of both countries against the Spanish elected government in the so-called Civil War from 1936 to 1939. Guernica became a shorthand word for bombing and “strafing” (machine gunning from the air) of helpless civilians which the Germans did for practice. We all knew that it was practice, but for what? The UK and France, as ever, were “neutral” but set up a blockade of the Spanish coast so that “both sides” would not receive arms. Even to me as a boy, it was obvious that the Spanish rebels under Franco, could still obtain arms by land. The hypocrisy of “even-handedness” existed even then.

Cyril took me to Trafalgar Square demonstrations against Britain’s “neutrality” in the face of aggression, but it did not change British hypocritical attitude and actions. She employs the same policies elsewhere even up to today.

We knew that a wider war was inevitable following Germany’s demands against Czechoslovakia and Britain’s support for Germany. In the cause of “neutrality” and “peace”, the West strongly urged the Czechs to give away their mountainous defensive areas, the Sudetenland, to appease Germany. We joined another demonstration against this appeasement of threats of violence but Germany’s Hitler got his way – and, of course, the weakened Czechoslovakia was overrun six months later. When Prime Minister Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and announced “Peace in our time” we knew that the policy of appeasement had won again and also had made war certain.

Uncle Len was supportive of the Soviet Union which was then defiant of Germany and wanted Britain and France to stand up to their commitments and honour their treaties. My father was more cynical and claimed that the USSR was unreliable. Japan had got away with invading China, Italy had invaded Ethiopia, both used methods of terror against civilians but no action was taken by the “West” as Britain and France, the two world powers, were called. The USA was busy minding its own business with its head in the sands of “Isolationism”. The League of Nations was as useless as the United Nations was to prove much later.

Cyril and I took up Home Nursing and first aid to be prepared for the coming European onslaught by Germany. It did not suit my squeamish nature and after one certificate, I left. Cyril went on and joined the Red Cross. I think that was the reason that Lilian became interested in nursing. They had many gruesome discussions. Following the Japanese invasions of most of her neighbouring countries with no more than an admonition from the West, Germany was encouraged to act in six monthly intervals: Austria, the heartland of Czechoslovakia, followed by the weakened, shrunken rump of Czechoslovakia, and then it was Poland’s turn. The inevitable had happened. If you feed the tiger it will come back for more. That lesson has not even yet been learned by the “West”.

To back up that tactical support for Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism, Britain had a series of “Enquiries” to justify the stopping of Jews returning to their ancient homeland which they called by the anti-Semitic name of “Palestine”. This policy, ended in the 1939 White Paper which virtually stopped all Jews entering the country unless the local Arabs agreed. The buying of land in the Land of Israel was also restricted to 5 per cent. This was at the same time that hundreds of thousands of Jews were trying to flee Europe’s inhospitable countries.

At the Evian conference on refugees held just before the war, no country offered to take in those desperate souls except for the tiniest of numbers. Those who managed to find a ship, set sail only to find that they were not allowed to land anywhere on earth and had to return to the mercy of Hitler.

Britain again completely and openly reneged on her international responsibilities for the Mandate and started the policies which were to last throughout the war and beyond. That policy removed their right to rule “Palestine”; a policy against the Jews and even those pitiful few who survived Hitler’s New Order. They were hounded from pillar to post, confined in new camps called Displaced Persons’ (DP) camps, turned back if caught in their rickety boats if they managed to escape, or even returned to Germany by force. Britain’s Foreign Minister set the tone with his complaint that the desperate Jews in the camps were trying to jump the waiting queues.

The whole force of the British Army in Europe and the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, not to mention the British Army in “Palestine” was used in this War against the Jews. With the proud memory of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and of the millions of Jews who had served anonymously in the Allied armies, it was time to fight openly for ourselves. The brave Irgun Zvai L’eumi, The National Fighting Force fought against the occupying Army on behalf of the Jews in the Land of Israel. The Hagannah, intent solely on defence of kibbutzim against the marauding Arab gangs, alternated between helping the Resistance and betraying them.

The end result was the withdrawal from the Land of Israel by the U.K. and handing the Mandate back to the United Nations to be in May 1947. In a vote in November 1947, showed support for the establishment of a renewed State of Israel, and the Arab states proclaimed that they would invade and destroy it if it declared sovereignty. World War II had ended and the war by the world against the Jews had begun.

In May 1948 the renewed State of Israel was declared – and six Arab states invaded even the minimum territory “approved” by the U.N. Their objective was stated, like Hitler’s, to kill all the Jews by driving survivors into the sea. They lost their was and begged for an Armistice – which, as has happened on each occasion – they reneged when they thought they were recovered enough to try again. My visit there was just before the end of the occupation.









CHAPTER 7
THE WAR YEARS
On 3rd September, 1939, Britain joined in the 2nd World War. The U.K. at last realised that Germany was growing rapidly in strength but the hope had still been that she would attack the USSR. That was physically not possible without Poland under her control. But it was now obvious that Britain’s pretence of believing Hitler’s promises of “no more territorial demands”, had run its course. That wishful thinking was responsible for the betrayal of her Treaty with Czechoslovakia, France and the USSR – all “in the cause of peace”. Words we were to hear again and again for decades later. The lesson has never been learned and is echoed today. “Even-handedness” is still the code word.

Finally, with the invasion of Poland and the Non-aggression Pact with Stalin, even the British government was forced to realise that Germany had to be stopped before the balance of power in Europe was changed for ever in Germany’s favour. It was, of course, too late.

Two days before that British declaration of War, schools in the big cities were evacuated to the “safe” countryside. At the age of 14. I was evacuated to a village called Tallatan near Exeter. I went there with my mother’s sister, my Aunt Betty, and Uncle Len who taught at the evacuated school. That was the reason I had been evacuated with him, as my own school, The Reay, went to Reading but my parents wanted my uncle and aunt to be able to look after me, even though the school was a lower age school and therefore lower for me educationally.

I clearly remember listening to the radio on the morning of Sunday, 3rd September 1939, as the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced that we were at war with Germany. My first instincts were excitement, but I nevertheless knew what the concept of modern war was. I had seen news reels of the German bombing and “strafing” of civilians in Spain and now in Polish towns as the Germans invaded and swept forward.

Whereas Chamberlain had flown in haste to meet “Herr” Hitler , when it came to try to talk to Stalin, Chamberlain took a slow boat – and arrived too late to stop the signing of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR. The studied insult had spurred Stalin on. Poland was partitioned.

It was compulsory at the time for men of 19 to join the forces and was called conscription, but of course I was too young. I liked the life in the country, and was happy that I was with Uncle Len and Aunt Betty and my cousins, Esme and Sylvia as well as the other younger children from the school. We would walk in the fields and help on the farms with the hens, walk to Wimple of cider fame and Ottery St. Mary, and it was also a whole new experience to be away from my parents and siblings. Previously camping with JLB for 10 days each year, had provided the only parting and this was an adventure.

There were also three young Jewish boys, two of whom were brothers, living with us in the cottage. They had just escaped from Germany on the Kindertransport. Britain had finally allowed 10,000 Jewish children to enter the UK provided that their parents did not come as well. The parents, of course, were later killed by the Germans in the Holocaust. These three boys aged seven to ten could not speak any English, I tried to teach them a little and they taught me some German.

My family had rented a flat in Torquay at the start of the war but returned to London within a couple of months as the “phoney War” brought no air raids and I, of course, went back with them. But in the Autumn of 1940, the Germans began their bombing of military and then civilian targets in what was called the Blitz.

This was the preparation for the invasion of Britain. Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France had already fallen in one swoop. A large part of the British Expeditionary Force in France had managed to be evacuated from Dunkirk by small boats under German air fire. Britain was to be next and there was talk of making peace The difficult, but successful, Royal Air Force defence was called the Battle for Britain.

It was then that my mother had an operation and was told to leave London. This time we went to Exeter itself where my parents rented a new house. The garden’s fine lawn was quickly removed and I planted various vegetables to ensure a supply. “Dig for Victory” was the nation’s slogan and we followed it. My brother, Cyril found a job as a baker’s rounds man on a three-wheeled motor cycle with a body. I went out with him a few times to help deliver bread. My father stayed in London and Cyril soon joined him there, working, both of them coming to Exeter only once a month for the week-end.

While my parents were looking for a suitable house to rent, we stayed with Aunt Betty and her family. It was crowded and uncomfortable but it could not be helped. It was made worse by the repeated questions by my aunt as to when we would find a house of our own. After a few weeks, we moved excitedly and we were all relieved not to be so ungraciously welcomed by my mother’s sister in wartime in her state of health.

I was unable to find a job until the moment I was eligible for unemployment pay (the “dole”) as soon as I reached the age of 16. I found a job as a temporary postman at Christmas. It involved getting up at 4 am., going to the St. Thomas Sorting Office and going with a postman-driver round the country areas emptying the pillar boxes, using a huge ring of keys. Needless to say, that was in snow. I enjoyed that but it was only for the Christmas rush.

I then got a job in a war factory making sheet metal fuel tanks for trainer Oxford Aircraft. I had to join the trade union – The Amalgamated Union of Sheet Metal Workers and Braziers - and was often called a communist for my views. I soon thought that perhaps I actually was a communist and read more about communism from the Communist Bookshop in Exeter. I soon joined the local branch and was being taught to speak at street corners. I was very inspired by Stalin’s (or was it Lenin’s) purported exhortation on the purpose of life (“Man’s greatest possession is life and since he has it live but once, he should so live that dying he could say, ‘All my life and all my strength were given to the greatest cause in the world; the liberation of mankind’”).

We had many debates on how we should respond to the war. The Soviet Union was neutral and veered towards Germany with whom they had a non-aggression pact and had then jointly partitioned Poland. Oil and wheat were also sold to Germany. On the other hand, the UK and France had had a treaty with the USSR and had broken it over Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party of Britain was therefore officially against the “Capitalist War” and did not support Britain’s belated effort.

I, on the other hand. saw the greater picture and wanted to support the war effort at least until Germany was destroyed. They wanted a go-slow in the factories but I urged my fellow workers (I was only 16 at the time) to work harder and faster for that effort. When a strike was called, it was I - and I alone – who went round the factory calling on the workers to return and not waste valuable time because our airmen were waiting for every ‘plane….The strike lasted one hour and collapsed. Despite that, I was elected to the Devon and Cornwall District Committee of the CPGB and was about to be a delegate to the London Congress in May 1940. The election was performed at a hastily convened meeting where the only name recommended was mine. I believe that any other possible candidates were not informed of the meeting in time. I was flattered but was worried by the unanimity.

I liked Exeter. While walking down the High Road I always was greeted by people I knew. Once a complete stranger stopped me and asked if I was related to Lilian Kersh as I looked like her. It was in the Jewish Club that I was asked to debate the value of the Atlantic Declaration issued jointly after their ocean meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill. That was my first public debate. It was there also, that Esme met her husband to be, Len Glynn, a member of a local family.

When the Germans bombed the “Open City” of Exeter, in May 1942, damaging the house we were living in, my mother decided to return to London. If we were to be bombed, it may as well be in London. By that time, my brother had signed up for the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Lilian volunteered to train as a nurse and lived in the Stepney Jewish Hospital where she was training in London. Cyril, who had been trained in the Red Cross and had served in the Blitz, had joined the RAFVR was now called up to serve in the RAF in its Medical section. The calling up age was now lowered to 18.

I resigned from the Communist Party in disagreement with its war view and also because I was a Zionist and put that before communism. They regarded Zionism as bourgeois and I claimed that Internationalism can only come about through co-operating national movements, not negating them. I did not attend the London Congress and never had contact with Party again. I was also disgusted at its sudden volte face when it supported the war only after the Germans invaded their ally, the USSR in June 1941. I nevertheless, remained a communist in thought and ideology. I followed the war in the East very closely and enjoyed drawing detailed maps of the region and plotting the movement of the front lines. Six months later Japan made a surprise attack on the American 6th Fleet in the Pacific and we had a new ally: the USA, but the Germans now had almost all of Europe and the Japanese had conquered a huge tract of Asia, pushing Britain and France out of their colonies..

Now back in London, I met a friend who had resumed his education and urged me to do so too. I had a job at a plastics factory making plastic objects in moulds. The firm later became very big but then the Managing Director suggested that I resumed my education again and the firm would sponsor me at University if I took a science degree and promised to work for them afterwards. So in September, 1942, still not 18, I went to the City of London College in Stukley Street, cycling to High Holborn every day, and was there six months until I was due to be called up. My parents were extremely upset and tried to get me a postponement until after the exam due in June 1943. This was rejected, but I heard nothing until after I sat my Matriculation Exam (belatedly and hurriedly). Nevertheless only a few days after that sitting, I received my calling-up papers stating that I must report to a barracks in Lanark, near Glasgow on 17th June 1943. My war had begun at last.


CHAPTER 8
ARMY DAYS
Thus began my military career. I wanted to join the air force, like Cyril before me, as I preferred the uniform and there were better living conditions, but as he was abroad at the time, he could not “claim” me and I had to enter the army about which I knew nothing. I underwent intensive training for six weeks where I was taught basic military life. I enjoyed it despite the June snow in Lanarkshire. My training since I was eleven in the Jewish Lads’ Brigade had prepared me for marching, rifle drill, map-reading, boxing, physical training (I had been on a course as a PT Instructor in the JLB) and general discipline. It was suggested that I apply for WASB (War Army Selection Board) for consideration for a commission. I rejected it out of political conviction of class loyalty. I soon regretted that decision.

At the end of that primary training the whole intake were assembled on the parade ground – about 1000 of us. Our names and numbers were called out and we went to a marker as directed. My marker turned out to be for the Ordnance Corps, something of which I had never heard. During the training we had had various aptitude tests and interviews to find out what we were best suited for and as I had a hobby of drawing maps for the purpose of following the front line advances and retreats, I half expected to be chosen for the Ordinance Survey section of the Royal Engineers (my eyesight ruled me out of an infantry unit). It seemed that somebody could not spell and, on enquiry, I found that it was too late for me to be changed. So, stores it was to be.

I was sent to a Clerks’ and Storemen’s School in Saltburn-on-sea in Yorkshire for four weeks and we lived in a converted hotel on the sea front. I passed that test with 98 percent and was sent on leave with orders to report to a Motor-Cycle unit in Birstall near Leeds afterwards. The leave went far too quickly.

At my first new unit which was small, my new Commanding Officer, Lt. Loose, was very informal. When he saw my home address, he told me that his grandfather lived in Trent Road and did I know him. As it happened, I did, though only slightly, and from then on we were buddies.

Our job was to receive new motor cycles and despatch them to various units by lorries (now to be known as trucks). This gave me my first opportunity to ride a bike up and down the high street. They were small Velocets with 300 hp to giant Indians with 1200 hp.

I lived on chips from the local shop and enjoyed local dances. It was very rural life. I also had my Aunt Sarah’s brother-in-law living in Leeds and that family really made me at home. I ate (frequently and in large amounts) as often as I could get to nearby Leeds and one of the daughters tried (in vain) to teach me to dance. Another was an ardent communist and we had long discussions and, later, correspondence, which lasted until I was in France and we then lost touch. We met again many years later at a family function but we both had changed very much by then.

I was soon sent to nearby Dewsbury for a Class II course for two weeks but, I later learned, I was given a class I paper to sit, by mistake, but as I had passed that with 90 odd percent they let it stand and my pay increased to a that of a First Class Tradesman - in record time as six months gap was officially required between each upgrade.



CHAPTER 9
ON ACTIVE SERVICE
I returned to my unit and it was soon to be that I was told to report to 11 Advanced Ordnance Depot in Quernmore Park in Lancashire for the formation of an overseas company for the invasion of Europe. I, who had long been in favour (an “Agitator”) of the second front in Western Europe, was delighted. On December 7th, I made the train journey across the Pennines to my new location only to be greeted as soon as I had unpacked, with the observation that I was not yet 19 and I had to be that age to qualify for overseas service – even though I was not going overseas immediately. I crawled back to Birstall to sit out the two weeks until my birthday on the 20th Dec. I then repeated my journey noticing the bill-board hoardings which read “Is your journey really necessary?”

Being December, the weather was very cold indeed and we were in a former park with trodden snow and slush everywhere. We – others were joining us daily – lived in corrugated zinc huts called Nissan with a central fire giving off terrific heat but only within a yard and up the chimney pipe. Since we had to go some distance to the dining mess I rarely took off my greatcoat. We all worked at our various jobs within our host unit as we were being formed from scratch as 17 Transit Vehicle Park, 17 Advanced Ordnance Depot. They were responsible for our administration which included guard duties, fire-picket duties, leaves and passes at week-ends.

In charge of all this was a Regimental Sergeant Major nicknamed “Tojo” as he resembled the Japanese Prime Minister, who took a dislike to me from the start. I was on guard duty or fire-picket patrol or mess duties almost every night and week-ends. When I finally made a protest, I was told that my selection was “purely at random”. I was sure that it was anti-Semitic for there could be no other reason, and was very miserable. I could do nothing about it except desert, which I did seriously consider. But since my Company was for the Second Front, and since that could not be put off for much longer as the Soviets were at last advancing having destroyed or captured the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, I reasoned that the Western Allies would want to be in force in central Europe before the Soviets. I decided to stick it out.

The whole camp had been a private estate and once surrounded by iron railings with gates at one end. These had all been requisitioned for the war effort and so the park was open except for two ornamental gates. It was officially assumed that any stray Germans trying to sabotage our depot would surreptitiously enter through the gates and not through the open perimeter of the park! The guard was there to prevent such a formal entry!

One early morning on guard duty in the only sentry box I ever saw, I waited in vain for my relief to arrive from the guardroom and fell asleep upright. At that very moment, the Duty Officer came round to inspect the guard and found me in dereliction of my duty by sleeping. The guard commander was also arrested for sleeping and thereby not seeing that I was relieved on due time and we were brought before the C.O. in the morning. The guard commander was let off as he had been working for far longer than regulations allowed. I was told that I was a disgrace to my uniform, my unit and myself as I was on active service even if not yet overseas. In the 1914/18 War I would have been shot! I managed to point out the futility of the whole exercise . I was sentenced to three days under close arrest which meant being confined to the main Guard Room and escorted to meals with an armed guard. And loss of pay for the three days. I survived that ordeal. I also got on well with the C.O., Major Lee, after that.

On the few occasions when I was able to go to Lancaster, I visited the Church of Scotland Canteen to get some (a lot) sandwiches to eat and went to the only cinema for warmth. Unfortunately, the “liberty truck” which took us and picked us up for return, always left town at 11 pm – and the film always ended at 11.15 pm so we either missed the end of the film or we missed the truck in which case we had to run the three miles back to camp to be there before midnight.

But the day came, after nearly three months , in early spring 1944, when we moved to Shropshire. At last we were functioning as a self-supporting, independent unit. There was a Jewish Club in the local town of Wellington and hospitality was marvellous. My parents even came down to see me and stayed a few days and I began to enjoy life again. We knew that D-Day was drawing closer.

We had learned with frustration of the amazing resistance by the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the might of the German army and air force. They lost in the end but their fight against the Germans inspired every Jew – and others – in the world. This was the first massive resistance in Europe and lasted much longer than the German High Command anticipated – especially from Jews. If the birth of a renewed Jewish State took place in 1948, then the conception of that State took place in Warsaw. It was time that I played my part in that renewal. I was impatient. As the Soviet Foreign Minister had said something like: “Do not wait until the last button is sewn on the last uniform before you open the Second Front”. Nevertheless, we did wait until everything was in order so that there would not be failure when we did land in western Europe. There was no room for another Dunkirk.

The day came at the end of May that we again moved: this time to Sussex at Billingshurst which was in the Concentration Area. Here we were in tents but the weather was much warmer by then. Within a few days we were told that we were no longer able to leave the camp or use a telephone. All letters out were censored. D-Day was very close. My cousin Esme was due to be married on 4th June and I realised that even if we were still in Sussex, I could not attend. I managed to get out a coded message that I could not be there but that was all. My family guessed the reason.

We were given the Order of Battle at the beginning of June so I knew that I was to cross on D+3 to wherever we were going. All the beaches had code names and sections of each beach had another so I knew where, in relation to others, we were to land but, of course had no idea where the beaches or coast were.

My 17 Transit Vehicle Park, the advance company of 17 Advanced Ordnance Depot, handled every possible vehicle from tanks and 48-wheel tank-transporters to folding bicycles. My job as Technical Clark was to ensure that we never ran out of pre-ordained quantities of any single vehicle. We used a system of stock control which was used by Littlewoods for their thousands of stock items. It was all done by hand entries on cards called Visidex. As forward fighting units lost vehicles, we replaced them and ordered more back up stocks from the rear depots in the U.K. At first this was ad hock but we soon became organised. Other parts of 17 AOD dealt with the thousands of spare parts for all these types and makes of vehicles.

Our senior N.C.O. was a man called Turner. His rank (in the RAOC alone for historic reasons) was Sub-Conductor. He had been a bus conductor in civilian life so the title was often deliberately confused. He once called me into his little office and demanded to know why the men called me Mr Kersh when I was only a private, while they did not call him Mr Turner when they should have. I diplomatically said that I suppose that it was matter of respect. He just accepted that without apparently realising the inference.

My close friend, Jack Cotter, ran the Administration Office while the Officers were dealing with the 200 drivers who made up 17 TVP. and their discipline, pay, training and welfare. Jack was a Welsh nationalist and we had many discussions about Wales and Israel and we also used to sing a lot as he (also?) had a good voice. We taught each other our own songs. I loved his Welsh lilt and recall him whenever I hear that lilt from other people. I only saw him once after the war. I located him from his description of the quarry he had worked in as transport manager and stayed with him overnight but by then he was married and we had little in common any more. I also befriended a young Lieutenant and we had many discussions on many levels. He was in charge of the Tech (nical) Office.

The Commanding Officer of 17 AOD, Colonel Gore, assembled the 800 of us one day and told us that ten officers and men had been chosen for the first reconnaissance group, landing on D-Day. They were to be one of each rank with himself included. The only private was a cook. My Lieutenant friend was among them. We heard the news by radio of the early D-Day landings and we packed up and were ready to leave within an hour. In the event, a torpedo hit the 10-man advance party and nine were all killed while below decks. Only Colonel Gore, who was on deck, survived and was picked up and taken back to Britain where he asked us for volunteers for the next landing wave. He wanted 40 men. They were to be the first Ordnance Corps soldiers to land in Normandy.

The loss of these officers meant that both the General Administrative Office and the Technical Office were “leaderless” and Jack Cotter took charge of the one while I took charge of the other. We still won the war.

There are two great fundamental lessons in life that I have learned: never to volunteer and always to be cautious. The first I learned early in my army life, the other much later in civilian Masonic life. Nevertheless, I am still always proud to recall that I was the very first to step one pace forward that day. As a fervent agitator for a Second Front in the west, and as a Jew I really had no choice. But not before I had written to the new widow of my friend. Colonel Gore (later Brigadier) was later to be court-martialled for gun-running for the Haganah after the war.

As we travelled in convoy down to Gosport, the roads were clear but the roadsides were filled with people calling out blessings and good wishes as “Good Luck”. In some places they were completely silent. It was all very moving for us including the not knowing what would happen when we landed. We had no idea of what had already happened in Normandy. I was proud to be a part of the BLA, the British Liberation Army, later to be changed to the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).

We arrived at Gosport and parked in side streets where housewives poured non-stop drinks for us. We were on rations of meat-and-vegetable soup in cans followed by tinned peaches and tea. The soup I could not touch, not being kosher, but I enjoyed the peaches and ignored the tea.

Just before we left Billingshurst, our Captain had to go to London to collect some secret documents. He went by motor cycle but foolishly stopped on the way back at a café for lunch, leaving the briefcase with the documents in the pannier bag on the bike – and the bike was stolen. He was put on a charge and kept under close arrest being under armed guard at all times awaiting court-martial.. He did not cross over with us.

He was replaced with an infantry Officer named Capt. Baldwin who knew less than nothing about our work. He said that he would leave everything on the technical side to me. At Gosport he soon noticed that I was not eating the soup and he sent for me to his HQ which was the back of a lorry. There I stood while he spoke about putting me on a charge for wilfully rendering myself unfit for active service overseas. I spent one hour standing in front of him explaining about the laws of Kashrut and finally convinced him about my zeal for being part of the Second Front. That clinched the matter and I was not charged after all. I never saw him again.

We received some “Occupation” money and post cards to post on arrival in France to say that we were safe and well. We were also given our emergency rations which were mainly white chocolate and a little Tommy Stove and matches with a sort of phosphorous disc to heat our mess tins. We were given a copy of Eisenhower’s pep talk and then Montgomery’s inspiring message and they worked – for me, anyway.

Impatiently, I watched the landing craft and other ships in the port waiting for their turn to sail. That night was our turn and we boarded as directed by the Navy. We were part of history at last.


CHAPTER 10
THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY
We were directly under 2nd Army HQ but primarily serviced the 50th Highland Division of 30 Corps. We had proudly sewn on our 2nd Army shoulder flashes some time earlier. Montgomery was our direct boss and we had complete faith in him and his ability.

Due to the 24-hour postponement of D-Day because of the stormy weather, we were waiting in Gosport sleeping wherever we could in or under our trucks. Finally, we received, with trepidation, the news that we were at last going across to join in the offensive on Germany’s Second Front.

We embarked at night and slept – if we could – anywhere we could find a space with all our gear on and our rifles in our hands: (“A soldier’s best friend”, we had been told frequently). After the tragic incident of our own men before us, I decided to sleep on deck under the stars. By dawn we could see that there were boats and ships as far as the horizon, almost crowded together. While we all made an easy target, we also provided cover for each other, and we knew that somewhere there were planes watching over us, and submarines in the sea checking for the enemy. Huge naval ships were also visible in the distance

It took us 14 hours to cross and one of the sailors told me that we were adrift to the west a little. Nevertheless we reached the Normandy beach intended which was codenamed Gold Beach. It was the western end of the British line next to the Americans at Omaha Beach. They had suffered enormous casualties being unable to get beyond the beach for safer ground, but the British had cleared the cliffs and when I landed we merely had to ride up the ramp road to the top.

I made sure that I was in a Bren-Gun Carrier which we had waterproofed before leaving England. We landed close to the beach and drove through shallow water and up the sand without my getting my feet wet. At the top of the cliff ramp, in Port-en-Bessin, the villagers cheered us and offered us glasses of wine and flowers as we slowly moved ahead. There were snipers (German or French) firing at us from different directions so I kept my head down and declined the possibly poisoned wine.

Jack Cotter and I left the main reconnaissance group to find suitable accommodation for our drivers while we looked for suitable office accommodation - and found a lovely chateau. We had to wait while the Royal Engineers searched the building and its outhouses for booby-traps – there had been many found elsewhere in pianos and lavatory seats and apparently harmless pens and the like. It had been the HQ of the 21st SS Panzer Division and at least I secured a detailed German map.

Just as we were given the all-clear, a Brigadier General arrived on the scene and declared his intention of commandeering the chateau for his infantry battalion. I pointed out, most respectfully, that it had already been taken for our lot but he was a Brigadier and I was a private and so he won. Having lost a few hours that way, we were rather late to grab anything else suitable in the area and we had to sleep under our lorry that night. The next day we sectioned off some fields which had deep ditches and made a ”home” for ourselves lined with tarpaulins. When the others arrived they had to accept what we had for the moment – which lasted quite a few days.

We never saw a German plane during the day, but at night, they came over bombing and machine-gunning but this got less each night. By then the front was about twelve miles inland and Bayeux was liberated.

As we became more organised we learned that there was to be a Jewish Service in Bayeux for Rosh Hashanah and all Jewish personnel who could be spared could attend. I made myself ‘spare’ and walked through the countryside in deep white dust which had followed the deep grey mud during the rains. I passed many dead horses and cattle, killed in the fighting.

After a few miles I was in the huge hall where the service was starting. It was taken by Senior Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Dr. Louis Rabinowitz, who conducted a short and very moving service and delivered an excellent and topical address. In the middle he was interrupted by a commotion at the door. It turned out that a couple of civilians had arrived who had been in hiding for years until they learned with incredulity that a Jewish service was being held and that there were so many Allied Jewish servicemen mainly from Britain, USA, and Canada. They spoke in Yiddish and this was translated to the hundreds of servicemen from the several allied countries. They received a tremendous cheer and we all were very overcome. Many soldiers met old friends from back home and a tremendous atmosphere was engendered.

Jewish military services were rarely more than an hour and to the point with no repetition or Chazanut. They were inspiring – a clear message for civilian services which was completely lost after the war. When obtaining exemption from Church Services, I was usually put on kitchen chores – spud-bashing - for the same period.

We soon moved forward as the line hardened. Infantry and other units sent men to collect various vehicles and we were able to supply them. When the Mulberry Harbour was erected to enable ships to unload without tenders, more vehicles arrived and Jack Cotter stayed on the beach seeing to them there before sending them on to me by our 200 drivers. I had to start booking them in and booking them out to various units, organising parking places and re-ordering. Our drivers brought them to me from the coast.

Our drivers were a low intellect lot whose vocabulary was limited to very few words, and their conversations were also very limited to a couple of subjects. I really had very little to do with any of them other than was absolutely necessary.

It was during this period that I started to drive. I had no civilian licence or even an army one but I soon learned on the job. At one stage, for a couple of weeks, I was seconded to a REME unit where vehicles were being repaired, in order to set up a control system since the turn round was very slow. Mainly I recorded vehicles in and out daily, which encouraged them to speed up their work. I found a staff car which had only a broken light, and practiced around the countryside in and out of gates etc… I then graduated to double-declutch trucks and lorries and jeeps! It was hit and miss but I never hit anything!! If I ruined any gearboxes or hit anything, it was the right place to be. But I didn’t.

It was also during this waiting and preparing time for the break out of Normandy that I was on guard one day in an empty field in France. Empty, that is, except for one artillery gun which I was supposed to be guarding. It was very hot and I relaxed by putting down my rifle and myself to sun bathe. Suddenly a motor cyclist drove up to me by which time I had gathered my wits and my rifle but too late. I was asked what I was supposed to be doing and I explained in four awed words: guarding this gun, Sir. He replied that I could not be very effective without my rifle at the ready to which I had no option but to agree.

I had already realised that the officer on the bike wore a beret with two cap badges and sported a scarf flying from his neck. That could only be Field Marshall Montgomery but without any retinue.
He saluted me informally, adding “Carry on, soldier” and sped off somewhere. I never heard any more about it but nor could I tell anyone at the time. That was my only meeting with Monty.

CHAPTER 11
THE BATTLE FOR GERMANY
Before the breakout of the Normandy beachhead on 18th August, we witnessed the American bombing of Caen and it was like a heavy rainfall. Nothing could or did survive such a blanket attack. Unfortunately it also killed Allied troops (later to be described as “friendly fire”). It closed the Falaise gap which captured large numbers of German troops and opened the way to the rest of France – and on to Germany.

Being only a few miles behind the front at any time, we often heard the rumble of artillery and the clump of bombs. We could never be sure who was at the receiving end but we just hoped that it was the Germans. At one time in France, we had just dug a ten foot square hole about three foot deep over which canvas was to be erected as our home for a while. We received a signal that a troop of German Tiger tanks were approaching us about ten miles away. We packed our equipment and personal things very quickly indeed and climbed into our vehicles for a fast retreat (“withdrawal”) westwards. The tanks had a new armour plating which was impervious to anything the allies had as shells: they just bounced off. Our rifles were less than useless! The Tigers were destroyed before they reach our “home” but only by rockets which were the first time the RAF had used any. Relief all round.

As we were a vehicle company, I always travelled by vehicle and accumulated personal possession which I was able to take with me. I even made a wooden bed frame and “sprung” it with crossed webbing covered by a straw palliasse. That went with me until I lost my unit. I also accumulated books from home and from Zionist organisations and started to study Hebrew and even Esperanto by correspondence courses. My frequent moves soon made this impracticable.

The army supplied Education Corps Officers who were supposed to explain political events and war aims. Those I heard were hopeless and constantly annoyed me by their references to “the other side” or “Gerry” when referring to the most evil and dangerous people of all time. Hardly inspiring. So I took over - unofficially of course - and produced a large map on a board of the western and eastern fronts and with coloured pins and string, and marked the changing fortunes of the war fronts. I gave to followers, commentaries of what was happening and the importance of those events as I saw them, militarily and politically. My following grew so I must have been better than the official educators’ current affairs voluntary sessions. I believe that I instilled an understanding that we were involved in more than a game between two sides. I later learned that I had been recorded as a “political agitator” for my pains, but I may have even speeded the end of the war!.

Meanwhile, following XXX Corps, we moved up through Caen to Lisieux and then to a Chateau in Amiens before going to Calais, the first port of worth in our hands. There I conducted convoys up to Blankenburg by using a jeep in the hot months of August and September. My job was to ensure that the vehicles kept the required distance between them (in case of enemy air attack) and didn’t fall behind. All had to travel at the speed of the slowest vehicle. That I really enjoyed; racing up and down the column of 20 to 30 vehicles.

I also met a local girl who worked at the Blankenburg Casino – which had become the NAFFI canteen - with whom I spent some time and had only her photo and name and that she lived near an airfield, when I had to move on. Later, when I returned to the area, I tried to find her by showing the photo and finally someone knew her. But the flame had gone out by then. Good-bye Madeleine Vershleist.

At Liseux, I had met a girl at a local dance put on in honour of the liberators, but although I saw her often, her mother never was further than five yards behind us. The mother, who always wore black and a head scarf, asked me on one occasion if my intentions were honourable and I had to say that I would return to Britain once the war was over. That ended that romance.

It was in Amiens that an older woman teacher befriended me and invited me to eat dinner with her the next week. I accepted but dreaded the food. I had told her that I was vegetarian but when I arrived, she had obtained a black market chicken for me, no doubt at considerable cost, and it was embarrassing to explain and insist that I would prefer a boiled egg. She told me how the RAF had precision-bombed an SS Prison wall in the town so that the political prisoners could escape. The British refused to take that action at the Concentration camps or the railways supplying them with Jews.

In each place my conversations were in French. A Liverpool friend and I used to go into the Normandy farms to buy eggs and milk which I cooked on the tiny emergency stove we carried. These became my main diet together with the porridge, boiled potatoes, bread and cocoa from the mobile kitchen. I also received food parcels from my mother. We always spent hours talking to the villagers to practice our French. Off duty we also spoke only French to each other and although we had nobody to check our grammar and vocabulary, we became fairly proficient. I found an abandoned Camembert factory with a huge amount of cheese stored. Unfortunately it had all gone off and stank so I had to bury the lot I had secured.

In France, once, while guarding a huge pile of 50-gallon jerry-cans of petrol, I was approached by a Frenchman who wanted to buy some petrol from me for his car – petrol was strictly rationed for civilians – and I told him to return later. Meanwhile I put water into an empty can and sold him that. I never found out how far he drove with water his tank. We needed the petrol for the war effort although I heard of other soldiers who had actually sold petrol on the black market to Frenchmen. My brother-in-law–to be , Jack, was a merchant seaman and risked (and almost lost) his life to bring petrol across the Atlantic for the War effort. I was not about to waste it on civilian use.

At Calais, Jack and I found a brick house and made ourselves comfortable in a shared room for a while there. He saw to the unloading of vehicles from the docks and I chaperoned convoys up to Blankenburg in my jeep. It was not strictly speaking, my jeep but my Major Lee’s jeep which I borrowed without bothering him about it. It so happened that he needed it suddenly while I was miles away with it and so he found out. He reprimanded me and pointed out that I did not even have a driving license. But he let me use it often after that – provided I asked first.

Later in the year, at Blankenburg, I used to walk along the sea front in shirt-sleeves despite the cold. I must have been very fit in those days.

We moved on after a while from France we went through Belgium to Boom, near Antwerp, which was a key port and we were in a college and used its grounds for our massive vehicle park. .

I volunteered to take part in my first convoy to drive a 3-ton truck. It was raining heavily and as we passed through Charleleroi, I turned too quickly and skidded onto the pavement and managed to control the vehicle along the pavement between the shops and the lampposts before getting back on the road. I had a DUKW on board,( an amphibious vehicle used for taking goods and personnel direct from ship to inshore land centres and now, for crossing rivers), which was not tied firmly and it had swung while I was turning causing me to lose control on the wet road. By the time I had recovered both the vehicle and myself, the convoy had vanished and, as I had joined it only at the last moment, had no idea where they were headed. I had no choice but to return to base in ignominy!

I had earlier taken the opportunity to race others in tracked personnel carriers and to try tuning on the smallest circle. That led to my shedding a track. I hated the armoured cars and tanks which gave me claustrophobia as there was almost no room to move my legs with a sort of tube space only.
At the other extreme, I, as a non-driver, loved driving the huge 48-wheeled tank transporters around the vehicle park.
There I met my first civilian Jews who had been hidden for years like those in Bayeux
It was also in Antwerp that I first saw two black-hatted Jews and stopped them. They had a similar story of hiding in a room for four years until liberation. Non-Jews hid them and shared their meagre rations with the two. As they spoke a little English, I was able to explain what was happening in the world and in Belgium in particular which relaxed them. Conversation was limited due to my not speaking Yiddish but we gelled just the same. Hugging spoke louder than words The whole idea of Jewish soldiers in the Allied armies amazed them, just as I was amazed when I saw the first Jewish Brigade soldiers later, with their Magen David shoulder flashes, marching in Holland.

While I was returning from a 48 hour leave in Brussels, we heard of the German counter-attack called the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans threw everything they still had in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Americans to the south and the British to the north. They hoped to capture Antwerp and deny us its port facilities. Some of the Germans, at least, wore British or American uniforms to confuse the Allies and, at Christmas, while the Americans were partying (drunk) and off-guard, smashed through with tanks. They went about twenty miles before the Allies realised what had happened and reorganised under Montgomery. They were stopped and, in fact ran out of petrol for their tanks. Surrounded and cut off, Germans were surrendering everywhere, and, on my return to the coast, saw one British jeep with only a driver which had picked up about eight Germans who, although still armed, were his prisoners.

When we left Boom the very first Buzz Bomb (V1 rocket) was fired by the Germans and passed over us. We had no idea what it was until we heard that others had landed in Kent. Our College had also been hit by the enemy. We had left just in time.

We next stopped in Holland for a while in Nijmegen near the German frontier. We lived in a former old-age home built in 1939. The French Canadians had been there for a short while and had stripped all woodwork and doors and frames for firewood, and amused themselves by firing in the air and generally terrifying the local population. For a week or so I cycled to the former frontier and enjoyed the idea of a defeated Germany just ahead. A notice warned us that we were approaching enemy territory. A wonderful feeling! This idyll was as the Allies regrouped and re-supplied for the push into Germany itself.

When we had arrived and took over the Old Age Home as it had once been, we had had to clean the walls which the Canadians had used as toilets. The locals kept well clear of us believing that we, too, were drunken savages. At this stage, Kesselring surrendered Italy to the Allies and we thought that
the war was over. The Dutch took no chances and kept out of our sight. But the war continued as the Allies crossed the Rhine into Germany, the heartland of Evil.

During my travels through France, Belgium and Holland I met many civilians who told us of life under the German occupation. The Germans tried to woo the Flemish people and the Dutch at first, as Nordic brothers, while the French were regarded as enemies. That policy was not without success as Flemish volunteer units were formed to fight alongside the Germans at least on the Soviet front where the German losses were enormous. Spanish, Hungarian and Rumanian divisions were also formed to help the Germans maintain their bestial rule of Europe. When we spoke of liberating the French, Belgians and Dutch peoples, that is exactly what we did. Our Civil Administration Officials helped restore civil and economic life to the towns and villages and left then to deal with their own traitors. Soon we were regarded as friends instead of as just different conquerors.

At this stage, I had to go into a military hospital for an ear infection for a few days but during that time my unit moved to Hamburg and I was left behind. I also lost all my personal possessions although months later most were sent on to my home. Instead of re-joining them, I was sent on 21th April1945, to Celle, near Hannover to a former SS barracks to wait to be collected. The holding unit helped and fed the Polish girls who had been slave labourers of the Germans in the local salt mines.

By the 5th May 1945, I had been in Celle (near Belsen) waiting for an anti-gas unit to pick me up and take me with them to Berlin to dispose in the Baltic Sea, Germany’s poison gas arsenal. But they failed to collect me. They did not know where I was and I did not know which unit was supposed to collect me. They went to Berlin without me. I was very much looking forward to going to Berlin as a victor.
And also to meeting the Red Army.

I spent most of my time with ex-Bergen-Belsen inmates at Hannover Railway Station where many hundreds of Jewish survivors were gathering from Belsen Concentration Camp hoping to hear news of, or even meet a relative or friend who had survived German rule. I gathered food, mostly chocolate, which I exchanged for my cigarette ration (as I usually did) and collected even more donations in chocolate. These I took to the station to give out. I later learned that chocolate was probably the worst food to give starving people!

I talked to many of them in a mixture of English, French and a little Yiddish or German. They were all determined to go to Eretz Israel where they would rebuild the Jewish State and control their own destiny. Only one man I met said that he wanted to go to South America and become a Catholic so that his future children and grandchildren would not be persecuted as he was.

In England, a prominent Jewess told the Press and a Committee of Inquiry that the surviving Jews wanted to return to their country of origin. I found not one Jew who wanted to return to Poland, France, Germany or any other country in Europe. They were Jews and wanted to live in a Jewish state. She was obviously afraid that her own “loyalty” to Britain would be under scrutiny if she admitted that Jews were a nation and not only a religion Not even her own very weak religion.

I had a small metal lapel Zionist flag (later to be the official Flag of the State of Israel) which I always wore with pride and which did not go unnoticed by the Germans or their victims.

Also, I met many “loose” (lost their units) dishevelled German soldiers as I had in each country, and prisoners who were on their way to POW camps. The Master Race looked quite different from the newsreels of them goose-stepping all over Europe. I quite enjoyed telling them that I was Jewish and would say 'Ich bin eine Jude' meaning 'I'm a Jew' which seemed to shake their belief that Jews never fought and were cowards. They all replied that they loved Jews, loved the British, loved Americans
and they hated the Russians, and I could imagine them saying exactly the opposite when captured on the Soviet front.

I was also approached by Germans who offered their “sisters” in exchange for cigarettes or chocolate but apart from my revulsion of Germans generally, and the moral implications in particular, I did not trust my life in the home of a German. I declined each time. Nevertheless, there was a time when I was walking along a quiet road with two other British soldiers whom I hardly knew, when we saw two German girls and they decided to rape them. I was stunned for a moment and then found myself fighting my comrades on behalf of an unknown German girl. I fought them off long enough for the girls to run away and then faced the wrath of my comrades who succumbed to a lecture on international relations.

Meanwhile my old CO, Colonel, now Brigadier, Gore, had requested the War Office to post me back to his command to prepare to be the first Advanced Ordnance Depot to land in Japan. To have had that honour in Normandy had been wonderful, but in Japan…? But I was not asked my opinion! He “volunteered” for me on my behalf!

During my overseas service all mail was subject to local censorship at random and again subject to random checks at base. By the time I returned home I realised that every one of mine had been opened and read by the censor at base. I had numbered them and asked my father to keep them for me as kind of diary. I still have not read them as my then naivety embarrassed me when I opened the first one and stopped me in my tracks. So much for “random”.

I was given a train warrant and left Celle and Belsen behind me. I travelled on a sealed train for 30 hours non-stop to Bruges Reinforcement Holding Unit and during that time the carriage was my whole world. It was a far cry from the days when I was unofficial informant for my Company to keep them abreast of the world news and the movement of the fronts lines. A sort of Political Commissar.

It was only when we detrained on 9th May in Bruges that I learned that the War was over – at least in Europe. I had missed VE-Day. The 1,000 year Reich had collapsed after 12 years of wreaking mayhem in Europe, causing the deaths of some 30 million people and displacing many more millions.

From Bruges I returned to Britain by ferry and went to Bicester Reinforcement Holding Unit. While there I was selected to represent the British-Jewish forces, once to the funeral of Chief Rabbi Hertz and again to a Moral Leadership Course. The funeral service was at St. Johns Wood and that was the first time I had seen Hassidim, at least in their regalia.

The Moral Leadership Course was under the auspices of the Forces but were run by each religion.
I attended the Jewish one held in London – and was stationed at home! It covered Jewish history, organisations, institutions and Jewish ethics.

Among my class was Sir Keith Joseph, later to be a senior advisor to Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. He appeared to be strongly anti-Zionist and disruptive and was asked to leave the class by Chaplain Rabbi Brodie (later to be Chief Rabbi). I still have a photo of all the class.



CHAPTER 12
POST EUROPEAN WAR
It was during my three month preparation in England for the invasion of Japan that the Japanese learned of my imminent arrival and surrendered in August 1945. That left me – and the War Office - at a loss, so they diverted me to Egypt in March 1946. As the war was over, I did not mind a little exploration at the country’s expense, where, with breaks for official and unofficial leaves in Israel, I spent the remainder of my army career. My preference also stopped me seeing the relics of ancient Egypt.

I met Harold Kirk on Oxford Station platform and we remained close friends from then on. We went to Egypt together and to Tel-el-Kebir where we had to stand for hours in the terrific heat of the desert in full thick khaki uniforms buttoned up at the neck at the slope arms in order acclimatise ourselves. Men dropped like flies and I thought that this was not for me. Harold Kirk had flat feet and was excused. I found a Jewish “Palestinian” doctor due to be demobilised any day, and when I asked for a chit to be excused parades, he did one better and wrote one excusing me from standing!

We both went to a unit in Cairo at the Citadel, called Central Ordnance Provision Office (COPO) Middle East. On the way, in a truck, our driver hit a tricycle and immediately a huge crowd gathered, shouting and gesticulating in a threatening manner although nobody was hurt..

I jumped down, hoping to quieten things with shouting that (I was not an enemy) but a Jew. To my surprise, that did not have the affect I expected and the crowd surged towards me. I hastily clambered back on to the truck and told the driver to move off quickly!,

As it happened, with much publicity, the British Army was soon about to depart from Egypt’s Canal Zone and all British personnel marched out of Cairo with cameras filming away, and much ceremony. As soon as the media had gone away, we had to return to our Citadel and other places in Cairo and continue as before!

We had absolutely no work to do there and I read a lot. This lasted for several weeks before Harold Kirk and I were back to Tel-el-Kebir which was the largest ordnance depot in the world covering 40 square miles. Here he became personal secretary to an officer and was promoted to sergeant and so we could not even eat or live together. It was from here that I controlled the supply of all military vehicle spare parts in Iraq and East Africa as well as Egypt and Israel.

For this job, I had two days training because the WO in charge of 36 civilian male clerks and six ATS girls, was arrested for selling lorry loads of spares – together with the lorries – to Arabs. He had his own plane out of the proceeds and that gave him away. The corporal next in line was a “Palestinian” Jew, meaning and he could not be given promotion for that reason, so I was put in charge. This I enjoyed and I worked hard. Harry and I went to Cairo almost every week-end (about 60 miles away) and played table tennis most of the day at the YMCA where I also had virtually my only meal of the week - salad.

There were also two Jewish clubs run by the wealthy Jews of Cairo for Allied servicemen. At one of these (where I could eat food) I met a school friend of mine, Cyril Matterman, whom I used to take to Shul on Friday afternoons. He was now a military policeman but even off duty and in a Jewish club he seriously threatened to put me on a charge if I did not do up my top button. That is what the army did to him.

Food had always been a problem for me in the Army but in Egypt I could not even eat the eggs which were not TB free, or the milk which held goodness knows what. The vegetables were grown even in the Dead City which was a huge cemetery where many hundreds of otherwise homeless Arab families lived amongst the graves. Since Moslems bury their dead only three feet down, the stench was horrific when the prevailing wind was blowing. Which was often. Even water melons were pumped full of water to enlarge them for market. The water came from the Sweet Water Canal which was alive with worms since the Canal was used as their toilet and washroom as well as supplying cooking and drinking water for the Arabs and their skinny animals with whom they shared a mud hut.

I could not eat anything that was not supplied by the NAFFI and imported. Not surprisingly, although very fit, I went down to 7 stone while out there. Officially we were forbidden to be anywhere other than in a vehicle along the Canal – and with good reason.

Almost as soon as I arrived at the Cairo unit, I contracted dysentery and was sent to a military hospital just outside Cairo. While lying there, feeling weak and sorry for myself, I saw a figure at the other end of an immense ward: it was Cyril who had hitch-hiked by air from Iraq to see me before being demobilised in the UK. We had corresponded but not met for three and a half years – before I joined the Army. Somehow I immediately recovered my strength and discharged myself, went to my unit and managed to get a leave pass to which I was not entitled for another six months. This was possible only due to the chaos in the Orderly Room with personnel leaving and others coming. We went to Israel. It was Pesach Chol Hamoed and we got a lift in the back of a small truck and bounced across the Sinai Desert for many, many hours.

Arriving in Tel Aviv we went to a restaurant and prepared to order a good Pesach meal. The waiter offered us the menu and asked quite seriously whether we wanted matzo or bread with our pork schnitzel. We stared at him with shock before recovering enough to walk out wondering if we had arrived in the Land of Israel. But we found a British-subsidised Kosher restaurant and made up for the first disaster. We learned not to judge a restaurant by its presence in Israel.

We had a wonderful three weeks holiday although my pass was for two weeks. One day we and two girls were sitting on a park bench talking when two Special Branch Officers came along. They were armed and we were not. They started to taunt and insult us and tried to get us to stand up like men and fight them. Cyril had to be restrained as otherwise, I am certain, they would have simply shot us “in self-defence” as had happened so often elsewhere. We also knew of a young boy taken by the British police out of a cinema and was next seen decapitated on the railway line. No action was ever undertaken to find the murderers.

Cyril had to go back to Iraq and then to England and home!

There was a partial railway strike on so I reported at the closed Haifa station every day and got my pass stamped “Unable to Travel” by the Military Police.

I stayed on until I ran out of money but at one time I was in Tel-Aviv which was out-of-bounds to British troops not on duty there, and I was picked up by the Military Police and taken to Sarafand Military Camp. My pay book and pass were taken from me at the gate and I was left to fend for myself. I watched and waited until the guard was changed at the gates and then I walked in and told the new guard that I had to pick up my papers. They were given to me and I never ran so fast until I caught a bus to a Kibbutz where I was put up for three days. I repaid my hosts by picking oranges.

When I did return to my unit I was told that I should have gone to Tel Aviv station where the trains were running, not to Haifa where they were not! I lost three days pay! The war being over in Europe with the destruction of Germany, and the Far East war finished, I had little interest in staying in the Army especially as that Army was now at war against the Jews in the Land of Israel. My father was trying get me out on the grounds that he was not well enough to manage his business by himself and needed me home. That speeded things up a little.

I worked hard and as there was little by way of entertainment in Tel-el-Kebir, I worked long hours. And I was promoted to Corporal.

By October I applied for Jewish New Year leave to go to Eretz Israel and, together with Harold Kirk and about fifty other Jewish servicemen, we caught the train. We were forbidden to wear civilian clothes and were not allowed to carry arms while all non-Jewish servicemen had to.

The train was stopped on the border at Rafah and we were roughly turned off the train and our luggage was thrown off after us. We were searched and so was the train. We guessed that this was for arms for the Jewish National Organisation, the Irgun Zvai L’eumi, the Underground Army which was fighting the British Army occupation of the Land of Israel. They found neither arms nor hidden “illegal” immigrants, but when we arrived at Tel-Aviv about a dozen civilians left the train surreptitiously and were quickly spiritedly away. I don’t know how they remained concealed during the train search.

Through a hospitality group we were allocated families to live with. “My” family’s children refused to speak English so I began to learn Hebrew the hard way. They took us to the Dead Sea and other places and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Once, during a “screening” of an area in Tel Aviv, I was “identified” as a known terrorist and pulled aboard a lorry by British soldiers. My declaration that I was a British soldier made no difference: to them: I was a Jew and we were enemies at war.

By using my knowledge of Ju-Jitsu I managed to release the hold on my hair and jumped from the lorry. I was immediately carried away by the cheering crowd as a hero. I then had to rescue Harold whom the same crowd thought was the enemy. We were both wearing khaki shorts and shirts which could be either military or civilian clothing.

On another occasion, Harold Kirk and I arrived back at our camp and Harold went to the toilets as I went indoors. After a while I realised that he had not returned and I went to look for him. He was all but unconscious on the ground having been severely beaten up by our comrades because he was a Jew. It was nothing he said or did, but what he was. It was reported but nothing was done: no enquiry, no questions asked. The matter was simply noted and ignored.

On the day that I returned to my unit I found that I was promoted to Sergeant but before I could sew on my stripes, another order came ordering me to report for posting to England the next day. My officer, a young simpleton called Lt. Morrison, said that had I not been a political agitator (whether Zionist or Communist, I still do not know) I would have been promoted much earlier as my work had been noted. He gave me a reference stating how smartly I dressed at all times!!!

I left for Port Said where I loaded myself up with as much tinned fruit as I could carry and left for France by sea, leaving Harry and others behind, most of them never to see again. I crossed France by train and the Channel by ferry and arrived earlier than I had told my parents. When I arrived at the door they had my aunts and uncles round and they were all shocked at my appearance. I was very dark from the Egyptian sun and very, very thin – seven stone - but I also had never felt fitter.

After a two-week leave I had to report to Bicester for demobilisation and a civilian suit. It took me a long time to rid myself of the feeling that I was breaking some trivial military rule. It was January 1947 and I was out of the Army at last. But what lay ahead?


CHAPTER 13
CIVILIAN LIFE
I, as a 22 year old, needed a job in 1947, so I went straight into the fur trade to work for my father. That was to be a temporary solution while I looked for something I preferred. My parents wanted me to apply for a teachers’ crash course which was being offered by the Government but, being short-sighted, I wanted to start to earn money and not be dependent on them. I also did not want to study.
Cyril learned pattern cutting at evening classes, loved the fur trade and was good at it.

I wrote applications to all the leading multiples for training as manager. All replied – if they did at all - that I was too old although I had explained that I had been in the Army. I did not get one interview. Littlewoods, Marks & Spencer, British Home Stores and others wanted a very young malleable man to teach. I was too old at 22. My army period meant nothing to them. I stayed with my father for far longer than I intended.

At this stage Cyril was invited to a party at the New Year by the daughter of friends of my parent’s at their home and, as I had answered the phone, I too, was invited. At this party I met Betty who was a friend of the hostess, Joan Benjamin. She was draped in an armchair looking exhausted. I asked her to partner me in charades and soon discovered that we worked within twenty yards of each other. I asked her phone number but it took me a few weeks before I asked her out. Then we started going out together.

One day, I was going to a charity ball organised by my parents in Brixton Shul and I invited Betty. She asked if she could bring her twin sister and I agreed and told Cyril who said that he was not going to be stuck with her for the evening. When I met them I did not believe that they were even sisters, let alone twins but we went to the hall and Cyril did stick with Esther all evening – and liked it.

In the summer, we four went with my parents to Switzerland for a holiday. My parents had been there the previous year when we had found that my father could not get a passport because he had no birth certificate. We also found that he was not even registered as having been born. His school had been bombed so there were no records of his attendance and after a lot of investigation, we found a woman who had been at my father’s Brith Milah when he was eight days old. She swore an affidavit and this was accepted and the passport was at last issued.

Following this trip the following year Cyril and Esther became engaged and we soon followed. They were married in June 1949 and we were in October. We lived with Betty’s mother in Notting Hill for 18 months before buying a house in Osidge Lane, Southgate. They lived in a flat in Notting Hill for a year longer before following us to Osidge Lane.

The local Notting Hill newspaper printed the story of twins becoming engaged to two brothers and the “London Star” followed it up and took photos of us in Regents Park which they also published.

Lilian, too had married Jack Sireling who had served as a merchant seaman and had been on rescue work at Dunkirk earlier. He had later been torpedoed in the Atlantic and rescued with burns but continued till the end of the war. Betty’s brother had also been torpedoed and lost at sea.

Cyril and Esta were married in the Brixton Shul followed by dinner in the hall in June when it was blazing hot and we had to keep running out for more cold drinks to cool our guests. We were married at the same place at the end of October in freezing weather and when the heating system in the Shul hall had broken down. We had to send out for a lot more strong drinks to warm up our guests!

Cyril and Esta went to Sardinia for their honeymoon and we went to Paris and Nice for ours. Betty caught ‘flu’ and had to go to bed in our lovely hotel. I found a Kosher restaurant and brought back bottles of hot chicken soup to speed her recovery. She had to have a doctor and we promised to pay via a friend of his in London on our return. The British Consul refused to loan us money for his bill and for continuing our room at the hotel. The hotel acknowledged our plight by reducing our room to a well under a pound a night.

This trouble arose because under the British Labour government there were rationing, shortages and controls of everything. They had decreed that nobody could take abroad more than £35 each per year and that was to include fares paid for in the UK.

At the hotel, a waiter had approached me to say that he recognised me from the few weeks he had stayed with my parents just before the war as a child on the Kindertransport: the 10,000 Jewish children allowed into Britain on condition that no adults came with them. Almost all the parents were killed by the Germans. This boy stayed with us until a hostel was opened for some of them in Croydon. Amazingly he recognised me.

For the first eighteen months of our marriage, Betty and I lived with her mother in Notting Hill Gate. We finally bought a house in Southgate to be near her sister, Rae in Cockfosters. We bought number 60 Osidge Lane and a year later Cyril moved from their flat to number 20 Osidge lane. They moved to Cockfosters in 1950 and we followed in 1966 – but to a different road. As it happened, purely by chance, our houses backed on so the gardens became a short cut. We still both live there.

By then, Cyril set had set up a workshop in Soho making expensive furs as a chambermaster. I tried making and then selling my father’s coats but did not do all that well. The government kept increasing Purchase Tax until it reached 105 percent on furs, even the working-class woman’s fur coat, which we made, and finally, with existing orders cancelled, it was time to call it a day. After 36 years my father had to close. Cyril moved into our premises and took over for his own business.

For a few weeks I tried selling various things such as educational books door to door which I did well but it meant no evenings or weekends to myself. After a little while I found a job as a trainee manager with Wallis Costumiers. I was first at Wood Green and was then sent to Halifax in Yorkshire. My first managerial shop was in Market Street, Manchester but the pay was very low. By that time I had Lynne (1953) and now Hilary (1955) and to be so far away was a blow. In order to save money, I
slept in the shop and on Saturday night I travelled by train when I had a travel voucher from the firm, and then hitch-hiked from Euston to Southgate.

Whenever I asked for a liveable wage, I was told to “pull in your belt”. One day, I found an old box in a cupboard in the shop and in it was a sheet of paper showing the takings for the previous years, week by week for comparison.. Since my “spiff” was based on a turnover increase on the previous year’s corresponding week, I rarely earned anything in addition to my weekly £6 flat pay. The target was supplied by Head Office. Now, with the sheet showing entirely different figures for the previous years, I realised that I had indeed increased the takings and was being “done” by the firm.

I did a stint as holiday relief for the manager in Oxford Street and then stood in at the Lewisham shop, but the only permanent shop offered was to be in Sutton, Surrey – the opposite side of London and I declined and reluctantly resigned.

It was fate that just then, Cyril showed me a few square inches of cloth shown to him by a skin merchant and that looked like real fur. I liked the feel and look and asked him to make up three coats. The next question was how to make the cloth into coats but we finally persuaded the staff to machine it like fur and we progressed. My brother-in-law, Jack, had to come in to set the example to show that it was possible to sew the cloth on a fur machine and reluctantly our machinists followed. We also persuaded the cloth manufacturers to rubberise the back of the cloth to stop it stretching. I took the samples to Harrods, Wallis and other leading stores and multiples and the orders piled up.

Cyril arranged for an actor to introduce models wearing our coats to appear on the new ITV. This was the first time advertisements were being shown and a huge impression was made. The owner of a very large retail chain of fashion shops, Morrisons and Paiges, saw the advertisement and phoned for a meeting. He placed an order and always referred to me as his “blue-eyed boy” (I have brown eyes!). His buyer was Conrad Morris and he ordered very many coats – particularly the Azure Blue colour. They were our best customer and deliveries were round the corner in Tottenham Court Road.
I opened accounts with nearly all the best stores in the UK. and enjoyed the reception I received whenever I called. Agents, everywhere also did good business. We were going places.


CHAPTER 14
USSR
Sales soared for 1956 and doubled in 1957 and I set up agents all over the country and also on the Continent. We sold coats to Aden despite an Arab boycott of Jewish-made goods, and even though I refused to sign a certificate that no Jews were employed in our firm at any level and that no parts came from Jewish firms. The biggest coup was to sell fake-fur coats to the USSR. After many letters to the different constituent republics, I was invited to bring samples to Moscow with less than a week’s notice. Cyril came with but we had no idea of what cloths they liked or even what sizes their women were. We had many adventures on the way.

We could not go by road as the roads were icy. Our samples were too bulky to go by air so we had to settle for rail. The British customs officials sealed each of the 24 sample coats and we rented two wardrobes and got as far as The Hook of Holland. Here the Dutch customs refused to recognise the British seals and, on the station we had to battle in order to get them to relent and let us heave the wardrobes on to the luggage wagon at the rear of the trans-continental train. This we did just as it was already moving .

We travelled across Holland and West Germany. In East Germany there was no food on the train, only black tea. We passed through Poland with bread thrown in and then at 3 am we reached the then Soviet border at Brest-Litovsk. Cyril and I took it in turns to stay awake each night in case the luggage wagon was unhooked at any of the frontiers. At Brest-Litovsk we had to leave the train at 3 am and waited in a heated waiting room while the wheel bogies were changed for the wider Soviet tracks. This was done outside the station so it was impossible to see what was happening to our luggage wagon and our precious samples.

We met the Soviet Minister for Trade who was also on the train having just signed a Trade Treaty with the U.K. I asked him, jokingly, to be our agent in the USSR. He replied, also jokingly, that he would love to and gave me his card. We were re-assured that all would be well and although we achieved our objective, we never knew whether or not he had used his influence in our favour. We finally got under way with tea being brought round every hour and plenty of bread of all kinds and piled up plates of butter. The train had a constant temperature of 23 degrees the whole journey.

We reached Moscow and found that the wagon was missing from the end of the train but were unable to complain to anybody because the whole railway staff was crowded round an office with a radio blaring out news. We found out it was the one hour that Uri Gagarin was the first man in space and we heard his voice from up there. As he landed somewhere in Kazakhstan, millions of people in Moscow filled the streets with banners and pictures, all in their party, factory, shop or office groups an what was described to us as a “spontaneous” demonstration of Soviet superiority in space.

Later, our wagon did arrive and we found our wardrobes, but we had the problem of how to get them to the Raznoexport building in a country without free enterprise. That was solved by hiring a taxi-lorry! We saw it loaded on and made our own way by foot. By the time we pushed our way through the vast crowds and found our destination, our coats had been unloaded and were hanging in a room where the coats of our competitors were also hanging, each with the price showing. This gave us a good clue as to the competition which was from all over the world and we adjusted our prices accordingly.

Our opposite numbers were three young girls who described themselves as. “The Buyer of Fashion and Cement for the USSR”, an “Engineer” and an “ Interpreter”. It was very strictly business with breaks for them to consult their “clients”. This lasted a few days while we walked in the pot-holed snow-covered, streets and saw elderly women doing very hard work. We explored, or phoned instructions to our brother-in-law who was managing our factory. Meanwhile, we had no idea of sizes or quantities and with expensive cloth the sizes mattered but we could not persuade them to guide us. We haggled on prices and on the number of stitches per inch which was far fewer than we normally actually used! Each movement in price had to be referred to their “clients” while we in turn phoned and haggled with our suppliers in England and France and Germany. This was for the cloth, the lining, the trimmings and the outdoor workers, for we guessed that the size of the orders would be larger than UK buyers placed and we would need outdoor contractors to help us to meet deadlines.

Previously in our Regent Street showroom we had sold coats to individuals from Soviet trade or cultural delegations and the coats they selected were sizes 18 or 20. We made a calculation that our order would be for those large sizes. Despite that, the women we saw in the Moscow streets were no different from those in London in size but we had to assume the larger sizes.

When we were told that we had a few days to wait for the next session, we asked the Intourist girl at our Hotel Ukraine for a permit go to Zhitomir, where – although we did not say this – our mother-in-law’s brothers and sisters and their families lived. We merely said that that was where our family had originated and we would like to see the town. The answer came back that “the police say “Niet””.

Somebody overheard my protestations that in Britain the police were not our masters but our servants, and whispered that we should apply the next day to go to Kiev when a different official would be on duty. This we did and the answer was favourable. We then had to notify our relatives (about 60 miles west) that we would be in Kiev at the National Hotel and we casually hopped on a plane and arrived in Kiev to be greeted by the local Intourist (controllers of the movements of foreigners) and told that they had changed our hotel. More panic. It was hot in Kiev and even before Cyril went to the new hotel we were accosted in the street with people asking to buy our suits. We arranged that I wait behind at the original hotel for our relatives to contact us. Thus passed the first afternoon and evening.

By 10 pm I gave up and went to the second Hotel leaving word. Within half-an-hour a woman cleaner sidled into our room and we were regaled for an hour in Yiddish about her “mann” who was dead. We gathered that he had been killed in a labour camp by the regime, but little else. As the conversation was one-sided and was accompanied by sobs, we had to put up with her tears until she recovered herself and only then did we learn that the family would see us in the morning – the only words we understood. She left us.

In the morning, true to her word, first one, then at intervals, four other adults and three children sidled into our room surreptitiously with a finger to their lips not to speak. They searched the flowers, the light fittings, the table, the bathroom toilet and every crevasse in the suite before a word was said. We had to accept that whether there was really cause for fear of microphones or not, our Jewish guests were certain that there might be and were afraid. It was only then that they introduced themselves as our mother-in-law’s family. They only spoke in Yiddish which we did not know but, by a miracle, I found myself using phrases and odd words enough to understand the gist and to convey our thoughts. It was all more emotion than exchange of ideas. They had entered the hotel through the staff entrance with the help of the woman we had seen the night before. They were very poorly dressed.

When I suggested that we go outside to photograph them, there was horror on their faces and they firmly refused but did not say why. We could guess the reason. We did pressure the youngest brother (probably about 45) to go downstairs but he walked ahead, away from us, turned and walked past us and back into the hotel without acknowledging us while we filmed him. We promised to write to them.

There was also a clothing factory where we had looked through the window expecting to see the workers working like Stakhanovites (work heroes) for the Soviet State and the public good. Actually one was doing another’s hair and another was painting her nails while others talked. It was not a break for some were actually working – although at a slow pace. It was all these practical experiences that turned me away from Soviet communism for good.

My mother-in-law had been long corresponding with her brother in Yiddish but when she died I continued the letter writing in English and then to her daughter, Luba, after he died. The letters were in Ukrainian and mainly about aches and pains with no opinions on anything and mine had to be also on that level for their sake. Their letters were all unsealed and I suppose mine, too, were opened before delivery. Many of them now live in Israel and I still write or email the younger generation as the older folks died off. In that long correspondence I talked about Dora being in Israel – later, I just mentioned Dora “where she lives” – and suggested that they too, move there if they could get a Soviet permit to leave. Luba always said that she liked her home town but her son was learning to drive for when they moved. Still later, she wrote that she, her husband, Boris, their son and his wife, Anna and two sons and the son-in-law’s parents were all going to Israel! After years of fear they were writing openly! The Soviet prison was opening its doors to Jews to leave at last.

I contacted someone in Israel who was helping in the movement of masses of Soviet Jews to Israel and got one to meet Luba’s group from the plane from Hungary (The Soviets still did not allow direct flights), and take them to a good apartment in Ariel. In the event, he missed them but they found people who had left before them and they went to Rishon-le-Zion instead. They settled in easily although it took them a year to get their furniture and work-tools out of a crate in Haifa. Now, with e-mailing, I write to the grandson and he replies (in broken English).

Once back in Moscow, we had to pick up new samples from the airport 40 miles away, and we went by underground but found that the beautiful subway ended far from the airport and that we would have to go back to Moscow and take a bus. This was annoying but we asked some youngsters in the street and they told us (in perfect English as all youngsters seemed to speak) that there was a helicopter field behind a hedge so we went in there and were denied a flight. We then demanded, as State Guests, a lift to the airport. We showed our invitation to go to Moscow and they immediately radioed someone and a helicopter appeared from the sky and we boarded.

On the short journey I filmed the white fir trees below us which surrounded all Moscow, and a young girl warned us to stop with a “niet foto”. We complied, but once we arrived at the airport, we climbed to the top of the building and, with people walking about, we filmed the airfield itself with its civilian planes and military planes all round the perimeter. No one stopped us or seemed to care. However, when we returned to England, we found that our films were very faint and assume that they had been exposed to light in our absence from our hotel room.

We had also found time one Saturday to go to one of the three main synagogues. We entered and sat among the congregation until the Shamash (beadle) offered us a place at the front. We, humbly said we were alright where we were, but we were then grabbed and dragged away from the “people” and pushed into the second row of pews. No argument!

During the service, which was very noisy so that the Rabbi and Cantor had to use a microphone system to be heard, men sidled up to the row behind us and whispered in desperation “did we know so-and-so in Manchester” and the like. Of course we did not and we had to disappoint them as they wanted news of people and relatives from whom they had been cut off for forty years.

In the front pew was the Second Secretary of the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, a son of a former Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett. He managed to talk to us and inform us that in the two years he had been in Moscow, not one Soviet Jew had spoken to him out of fear of being arrested as a foreign spy. After the service, the congregation of old men and very young children – teen-agers were strongly discouraged to enter houses of worship as decadent – gathered round us as they recalled their early education in German, French and English as well as Russian and Yiddish. Even then they thought that anti-Semitism was everywhere as bad as in Russia. We put them right. They told us that the Shamash was a KGB spy who made a report on anyone who spoke to a foreign Jew. We told them about our relatives in Zhitomir and they said we should send a telegram. Secrecy went hand in hand with openness, it seemed. Once outside the building they no longer acknowledged us as we passed them talking in groups.

Also we spoke to Victor Hochhauser, the British Jewish impresario, who told us where to find him later that day - and we did. He too confirmed that he had to tread very carefully as, although he was
the leading British agent for Soviet musicians and ballet stars for the UK, he was always being watched.

We saw the Daily Worker, the London Communist newspaper, (the only British paper allowed in) and learned that another firm, a shoe firm in Coventry had had all its shoe order sent back due to an alleged fault. They went bankrupt.

With that thought very much in mind we continued our negotiations in Moscow.

We made a practice of asking anyone we thought might be Jewish the way to anywhere. They all spoke normally until we said that beside being British we were Jews. At that juncture, every time, they stopped escorting us to our pretended destination and said Shalom and disappeared very quickly. On one occasion in Kiev, a young man we stopped with the same story of being lost, conversed generally for a few moments and admitted that he was Jewish, as had the others, but when we said we, too, were Jewish, he raised his voice so that anyone within a mile could hear, and said how well Jews were treated in the Soviet Union. He, too, then walked quickly away from us.

Our stay in the USSR was three weeks with daily sessions except for the one break mentioned above. We had frequently to phone home for business reasons as well as personal – Betty was expecting a baby in mid-May. We always phoned from public boxes away from the hotel in case we were being bugged. Whenever we wanted to roam in our free time, we were accompanied by different Intourist guides.

Once, on a general tour of the city, our young student escort proudly pointed out a huge statue of a man swinging a hammer to bend a sword. We got out of the car to inspect it and she translated the caption which was “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”. That was Soviet philosophy, she said! I asked her where the quotation came from but she did not know. She would not believe me when I quoted Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible which she had never read but condemned just the same. Perhaps, just perhaps, this encounter made her think about actually reading what she had been taught was outdated nonsense.

The value of the contract was huge and the coat sizes ordered were also huge: sizes up to 26! Only the delivery starting time was small. We were to be paid monthly. That way we knew that we could “only” lose one month’s delivery if they rejected or cancelled.

We had hoped to able to see the massive May Day Parade on 1st May but our negotiations ended the day before and deliveries had to be made monthly on the 15th, the first being on 15th May!!! Each coat had to be individually packed in a cardboard box and tied with string and then delivered to the docks. Another problem to be sorted out.

Cyril went into another room at the buying organisation, Raznoexport to sign the contract with the interpreter, leaving me with the non-English speakers who promptly spoke fluent and well-accented English to me. When I wondered aloud why they had needed an interpreter when they could speak English, they said that it was a rule. The third girl obviously was to keep an eye on any corruption. We also realised that the others had heard and understood every word Cyril and I had exchanged while we were leaning towards them and away from the other girl to avoiding being overheard by the interpreter.

We politely asked them “out” for one evening and the Buyer said she would rather stay home with her husband. As she was not wearing a ring I assumed she was single. I suggested that she ask her husband if he would mind. Back came the retort that Soviet women are free and do not have to ask their husband’s permission! She added, for good measure, that rings are a symbol of ownership! We did not broach any personal matters again.

Speed was essential and with no time to waste we had to leave before the Parade. We had given some of our samples to our relatives who later wrote that they had sold them. The others we left at Raznoexport to be sent on to us by ship but when three months later they arrived they were screwed up and fit only for the dustbin. They cannot be pressed. Two weeks after we returned, David was born and named after my father who had died a year earlier.

We kept to our schedule but the Soviet ships which were to pick up the deliveries on the 15th of each month often did not appear in London until the end of the month and telegrams were sent back and forth and through the Trade Offices on Highgate West Hill. But we completed it all and were paid on time. There was only one complaint: one of their staff had burnt a coat with an iron; would we credit them with 10 shillings (fifty pence). Ridiculous, but we agreed without hesitation in order to keep good will.

As it happened there was no good will as we would have had to start again in competition for the next year. We decided that the risk was too great.




CHAPTER 15
USA
We also found a wholesale buyer in the USA – or really he found us - and large deliveries went there by air, hanging on coat rails. We insisted that all payments had to be by Letter of Credit. I soon went to New York to open the market there but somehow our buyer , Stanley Greenberg, had heard and insisted that all sales go through him or else he would not buy anything more from us. He also knew many of the big retail buyers and would prevent them buying direct from us. For our part, we knew that he had been talking to other manufacturers in London and telling them where we got our cloth and trimmings etc. so we had to listen to him or lose him. We had to accept his argument. He did, in fact, order at least once from someone else, using our suppliers.

In New York, he invited me out to dinner one evening at an expensive restaurant and as we finished, he excused himself and left me to pay the bill!

We had already checked him out through a credit company and found that he was a multi-millionaire. We bore that in mind when the only time we relented was when our buyer had a heart attack in London and asked us to send on his latest order and he would pay when he returned to the USA. “ I won’t hoit you boys” as he loved to say. Only when he was back home with the goods in his possession did he knock us down to 50 percent which we ungraciously accepted as we had no choice.

I told his wife what I wished for him and a few weeks later he had a fatal heart attack which ended the matter.

By this time a few other firms were making “simulation furs” or “fur fabric “ coats or fake-furs or fun-furs as they were variously becoming known and the prices were being cut right down. Our supplier, who had agreed to sell us their whole output of this cloth, shortened the pile depth a fraction and sold to other firms at a lower price. The same name applied but we added “Super” to the Dynel name, but the hay-day was over.

There was the occasion when we incurred a bad debt and we accepted a load of new clothing and shoes from the retailer as payment. To turn them into cash we had to rent a shop which we did in Hounslow and employ a manager to run it. It was opened by the two popular comedians Mike and Bernie Winters. It turned out to be the wrong end of the High Street and we spent far too much on shop-fittings but we kept going by buying more fashion goods until we sold the business to the manager, Michael Price.

Twice during our fur fabric life, I had my car broken into while on a parking meter outside the BBC in Portland Place. On the first occasion, a girl in the BBC saw two young men break my window and open the door and pull coats out and transfer them to their own car which was parked double. She called the police who were too late, having gone to Portman Street. However they said that they could guess who the thieves were and arrested two young men who still had the coats in a warehouse. I attended the trial and was a witness but the two just kept grinning at me. They were finally sentenced to an extremely short prison stay. We did not see the coats again after the trial.

The second break-in was in the same place about six months later but nobody was arrested although the police thought that it probably was the same gang. Presumably the coats bought indemnity.

We were also approached by Avraham Shapira, an enormous Israeli with huge carpet factories and other interests in Israel which he exported round the world. He flew in to discuss with us a project for the joint opening of a fur fabric coat factory in Israel. We met at a kosher restaurant to suit his time schedule and he plonked his stomach on the table. Cyril dealt with the financial side of the proposed new business and the practicalities of setting up a factory and training workers. We discussed a name and chose “Sharon” and a logo. He would find a factory for us and Cyril would equip it and Cyril and I would run it in turns. We met in London twice and Cyril flew to meet him in Israel once. Many other points were discussed but in the end we decided that it was impractical to run a business from the UK and also to be away from home for months at a time. The project fell through. Shapira later became the leader of the Aguda Party in Israel’s Knesset. He died aged 70 in 2000.



CHAPTER 16
PARALLEL LIFE
During the immediate post-war years, I joined the South London branch of the Young People’s Committee of the Jewish National Fund (YPC) and soon became Branch Chairman and then sat on the National Council. One of the more controversial meetings I organised was a debate with the head of the PLO in London, Edward Atiya. He accepted, we drew up posters and it was to be at my house.

The Zionist Organisation of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, in the person of Dr Landau, heard about it and requested a meeting with me in order to cancel the debate. I knew my facts and insisted on going ahead. To a crowd of about 60 crammed into our two front rooms in Trent Road and in the dividing hall, we held our debate and politeness ruled the day. At the vote at the end, I won handsomely – not least because the audience was Jewish but also because Atiya’s propositions and “history” were fantasy – sheer lies. He lived on to become Arafat’s “Ambassador” to GB.

I also formed, later, the North London Representative Council for Israel. I contacted every Jewish organisation, club, synagogue north of the Thames and persuaded them to join and send representatives to our Council meetings. Altogether we represented 8,000 people from Ealing to Ilford and north to Luton. I listed these organisations on our heading paper to make it look formidable. When I wrote to the media, at least, I had some weight behind me. Dr C.A. Smith, a non-Jewish fervent Zionist, became vice-chairman and Cyril became Secretary. As is the way, in due course, enthusiasm waned since it was only I who was using the Council, and the organisations’ delegates stopped attending Council and the idea fell away but it did work for quite a while.

I also joined Dr. C.A. Smith on his Enfield Anglo-Israeli Friendship League for which he worked literally non-stop. Some of the speakers we brought in were Michael Portillo, our local MP, and the Duke of Devonshire who came back to my house afterwards, only to be cornered by my sister-in-law, Sandra, so that nobody, let alone me, could speak to him or rescue him. The meetings we organised in a church hall attracted large numbers usually greatly exceeding a hundred people, Jews and non-Jews.

During these years I was repeatedly elected to represent the Shul on the Board of Deputies on which I served for well over twenty years. I sat on both the Israel Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee. I lectured on Zionism and Israel for the Education & Publicity Committee under the very able control of Dr Meir Domnitz and Geoffrey Stalbow, to dozens of non-Jewish audiences all over the Home Counties during the sixties onwards.

At one reception at Hampton Court Palace I was introduced to Prince Charles by the BoD President Lionel Koplewitz. The Prince asked me where I lived and I told him “Cockfosters” to which he replied that he had never heard of it. I explained that it was at the beginning of the Piccadilly line and suggested that when he was next on the train that he continue to Cockfosters and call in. He said that he would do that but he never has.

This was in parallel with being on the Southgate Executive Committee of the Association of Jewish Ex-servicemen & Women for decades – and still am as vice-chairman, membership officer and editor – and sitting on the similar committees of HQ. I represented the Branch on the United Nations Association, a support organisation for the UNO, but I came not to praise the UN but to bury it. I spoke at their annual conferences and was a lone voice in opposing condemnation of Israel for whatever it did or did not do. I defended the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel when the motion on the table was to condemn Egyptian President Sadat for having any dealings (other than war) with Israel. This was to an audience of over 800 people – and I won the debate; the motion was overturned. There was also an occasion when the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim addressed a conference – and, of course, criticised Israel. I was able to tell him what I thought of his attitude to world peace - and that was before his Nazi past came to light.

Similarly I once told Foreign Minister David Steele to read something about history before opening his mouth on the Middle East, just as I did to Douglas Hurd. Lord Carrington offered his hand once when leaving the hall but I pointedly refused to shake his blood-soaked hand and told him so. I have never seen a man blanch so much and so quickly. The anti-semitism was so entrenched throughout the UNA – as well as the UNO – that I finally gave up and left the Association. It was the same bias in the Foreign Office.

At a two-way TV “meeting” I spoke to Shimon Peres – the man who has never been elected as Prime Minister but inveigled his way into high office just the same. It was he who met with the PLO when such meetings were illegal and started handing over of parts of Eretz Israel under the cover of the Oslo Accord, which was opposed, but later sanctioned, by Rabin as Prime Minister. At our “meeting”, I told him what I thought of his activities and he evaded a straight reply. The only reason I do not want Echud Olmert to resign as Prime Minister is that Peres would take over.

On the other hand I got on well with Shlomo Argov, the Israeli outspoken Ambassador to Britain until the time when he was shot by Arabs in London. He was a wonderful personality.

I was invited to join Herut in the UK and ended up as National Vice-chairman for a year. I started, designed and wrote, edited and printed their monthly newsletter, The “Zionist Standard” for a few years until there was no money available to cover the costs.

Also I was in the B’nai B’rith in Southgate and became President for two years and served on its council until it closed due to the increasing fees at Head Office. Some of us still meet twice a month at our houses for current affairs discussions or coffee but under a different name.

During the seventies, a mysterious voice spoke to me on the phone and asked if I would be prepared to go to the USSR and meet some of the refusniks, Jews who had applied to leave the USSR and had been refused permission. Some of them had been sent to camps or prison for daring to apply. Many more lost their education or jobs. I said that I would think about it for a day or two as I did not know what was expected of me, but my “ben Jacob” never phoned again so nothing resulted.

On another occasion in 1978, I, amongst others, was asked to answer “176 Questions From Moscow” on Judaism in simple terms for secret distribution among the Soviet Jews. I did this as I saw fit and not according to strict orthodoxy, and was later thanked for my “excellent effort”. I never heard any more. I never found out why 176 questions or who commissioned the work but I still have a copy.

In 1971, my mother, Matilda, died of cancer, while Lilian, my sister, who had already been suffering from cancer, and was also in hospital, eventually died a few months later, leaving three young children.

Just prior to Lilian’s death, I was invited to a subsidised course in Israel run by the British Aliyah Movement. I accepted and went with Harry Goldman. We went on an intensive tour and series of lectures and met interesting people. I was chosen by General Uzi Narkis to represent the group in the final summing up. He was the soldier who led the army to the Western Wall in 1967. After the official course ended but before our few extra days were over that I had a telegram to say that Lilian had died and I rushed everywhere to get my flight brought forward to be in time for the funeral, (leaving the rest of the party in Israel for a few more days). Nobody seemed interested to put themselves out. Finally in desperation, I approached Uzi Narkis and he promised to get me on a plane that day even if it meant using his own plane. He succeeded and I returned in time for the delayed funeral.

A massive fire destroyed (melted) the main factory in Dover which lost us orders and customers. At the same time another company began offering fake furs to stores on Sale-or-Return. We had to follow suite. The following year, a robbery at our showroom during our Shiva week, removed our stock once again and we were in trouble. We had scores of accounts of substance by then but we were losing them steadily. Cyril, went into “property” and I did a little research into the new “instant” printing which involved using litho machines and plates instead of setting type. I had often suffered the long waits for printing work to be done and here was a quick way of keeping customers happy. From just photo-copying I decided to go into printing. Instant printing was done in high street shops.

During this between time, I found an outlet for fur fabric cloth in long strips of different widths. I knew a supplier so all I had to do was to take the frames of cloth home, use the (covered and clean) garage floor and to cut the fabric with a Stanley knife in to the required widths and then deliver. Sometime they wanted the whole frame so I did not even have to unload at home first; just load it on at A and drive the few hundred yards to B. But sooner or later the fashion had to change and collars were sold ready made so the market dried up. It was good while it lasted.


CHAPTER 17
THE PRINTED WORD
I used the showroom for an “instant” printing shop under the name of “The Copy Shop”, a name thought up by David. I bought a litho printing machine and equipment, a better photo-copier and some finishing equipment and started learning on the job, by experiment and by phone directions from the Machine makers. I had to find, and find quickly, supplies of paper, chemicals and plates as well as staff. For work that I could not do, I had to find trade suppliers and deal with them for different kinds of jobs. “Instant” applied to learning as much as to the printing. But I loved it, even occasionally working through the weekend, day and night, only sleeping on the floor for a short break during Saturday night to finish an urgent job.

I found time to write a series of booklets on aspects of Israel’s politics, and also printed leaflets for the Student Anti-Soviet Campaign for the rescue of Jews from the USSR.

Either during or immediately after the Yom Kippur war when Syria and Egypt co-ordinated a surprise attack on the holiest of Jewish Holy Days, I was caught in a traffic jam in Portland Place and a car behind me kept touching my rear bumper. Finally I got out and asked what the driver thought he was doing but his door swung open and I only remember lying on the ground being kicked in the face and body. As I struggled to get up I was struck again. My nose was pouring with blood which was all over my clothes and the driver managed to drive away without anyone in the 50-odd crowd stopping him at any stage. Someone had called an ambulance and when it arrived, I was taken to hospital had three stitches to my nose and held overnight to test for concussion.

Someone parked my car but nobody had taken the car number of the attacker. I explained to the police what had happened and remembered that an Arab in full head gear was sitting beside the driver who was white. Later. I recalled that I had a sticker on my windscreen with “support Israel” on it. That may well have been the motive and the police believe that the driver had used a cosh on me even before he got out of the car. I had a large lump on my head to prove it. I had an assistant at the time and phoned him to lock up the shop.

During this period, a contact, an engineer, introduced me to a Nigerian Government Minister who wanted a lot of printing for a Presidential campaign. I very diffidently told him that I wanted to be paid in advance as his country had a history of coups. He replied that if he paid in advance, I might fall dead. I told him that that was far less likely and he stormed out of the room. My contact, who was present was furious with me for being impolite to a government minister of Nigeria. However, the next day, he sent for me again and was very affable and, more importantly, he agreed my terms to pay as went along but in advance at each stage. Payment was to be from a Swiss account in London in cash. The total order was £80,000. I carried out my commitment until the bank told me that there were no more funds in the Swiss bank. I had nearly completed the election stickers and posters etc but I stopped there and then. The Minister did not refill the Swiss account but I did not lose a penny. Shagari was elected President and the Minister added a couple more Ministries to his name. Six months later there was military coup and both were kept for years under house arrest. Our family celebrated the big order and also that I had escaped unscathed.

Not so luckily, my solicitor, Barry Karsberg, introduced me to two other clients of his who were about to form a company to exploit offshore oil. One was an oil engineer and one had vast sum of money tied up in the USA which he was fighting the IRS to bring to Britain. I was to be the Company Secretary and my salary was agreed and the company formed and registered at Companies House with Barry as one of our four directors. Stationery was printed and we applied for tendering for certain plots round the U.K. coast. We were only held up by the delay in freeing the money from the USA as their was a dispute with their Inland Revenue Service. Meanwhile we diversified into salvage work but did not actually start.

The next thing I knew was the UK Inland Revenue demanding £4,000 from me as Company Secretary and Director for profits made that year. Since we had not started trading there could not be any trading profit and I investigated my colleagues. The oilman was genuine but the millionaire was a little round the bend and was never going to get large sums (he spoke of £3 million) even if he ever owned it. He was living in a bed-sit. I wrote my resignation from the company, notified Companies House, back-dated it a few weeks, and was out. Barry did the same and the whole episode ended.
How a profit was made, I still do not know, nor who paid the tax on it. Dashed hopes.

I was not so unscathed in a different way. My friend and solicitor, Barry Karsberg phoned me at 8 am one morning and asked whether I could lend him £10,000 for three days. He was in a fix but could not raise the money himself by 11 am. I said that I would go to his legal practice office in Old Bond Street and talk to him. I did that and finally I was persuaded to make the loan but I myself could not raise it by 11am. I phoned Betty and asked her to meet me at her Building Society branch in the West End with her pass book. When she arrived, I explained what had happened and that I wished to help
Barry as he had introduced me several times to good propositions – though all had failed to materialise. Betty was against lending such a large sum and then Barry joined us in a wild state . Looking at him should have put us off but we – or I – made the excuse that he was very agitated as time was passing his declared deadline for some deal.

Eventually we both talked Betty into signing a Building Society cheque (which cannot be cancelled) and gave it to Barry who just ran off with it after giving us a signed note confirming the 3-day loan and personal and professional guarantee. We had made the cheque out to his firm. Within a few minutes we both regretted giving the cheque but could not stop it, so we went to his office and Barry had been in and gone out. His partner laughed at our story, told us that Barry was bankrupt and that he, the partner had paid the cheque into their clients’ account and withdrawn the same amount in cash which he had given to Barry. Barry had already telegraphed it abroad to someone. He laughed again and left the premises with us standing there.

I followed up the case and Barry told me that he had invested in a building project with two partners in that business. They had withdrawn at different stages leaving him with sole responsibility for the finances for the work in hand. He had not covered himself and much of the materials had been removed and builders unpaid. He was now responsible for their payment and the suppliers’ debts.

He had then compounded matters by becoming involved in large sums of money changing currencies which, to me, sounded like laundering money although it was called arbitrage. He had paid it to someone in Lichtenstein and it was now on its way to Switzerland via Italy. He had needed the £10,000 for extra fees. I checked his phone list and there was indeed such a man as he named. I even phoned and spoke to him at a hotel in Switzerland and he assured me that all was going well, but the next day the contact had vanished and so had the money, some £1 million pounds.

Barry was formally declared bankrupt and his house that he was living in and another one he was about to move into, both with mortgages, were now repossessed. He could no longer act as a solicitor and left the firm which he had founded and built up. He had spent his profit before he had seen it.

I contacted the Ombudsman for the Law Society as money in a client’s account could not be removed without written consent of the client. I claimed against the firm and the partner. They did not respond. I appealed to the Legal Ombudsman and she came from Scotland to interview me and finally gave her finding in my favour and gave the firm 28 days to pay me in full. On the 27th day, he appealed and the whole process had to be gone through again. Once again the finding was in my favour with another 28 days to pay. This time, on the 27th day, the partner applied for a Judicial Review which delayed matters for another few months. The Ombudsman was written a brief letter telling her that her office had no authority to enforce her findings. She showed me the letter and accepted with regret that that was the case. She could strongly recommend but not enforce a decision. To go to Court would cost a lot of money and a solicitor was more likely to win in a Court than an outsider such as I. I decided to drop the matter. I still feel that Barry was a victim rather than a perpetrator although it started with greed. I cannot hold it against him having seen his own downfall. I took the money from my business to pay back Betty and left myself with little working capital. When the landlord tripled the rent soon after these events, I had to give up the premises and continued trading from home but without a shop front it was a losing battle.

I then met a Trevor Bull – or that was the name he gave me. He had offices in Holloway and a spare room I could have if I would do all his printing. He sold videos and now printing for retailers by sending salesmen door-to-door and at low prices. He showed me his sales ledger with good sales showing but no proof of genuine sales or payments. I agreed to try it out and paid him £2,000 for the use of the office. I got that money back by the print sales and then I decided that I could not trust him. Betty and Lynne both distrusted him so I made enquiries and found that his name was not Bull, that his very pallid complexion was not from being at sea for a long time, and that his “wife” was not his wife.

The final straw was when he made an appointment with a bank to get an overdraft for a building he wanted us to buy jointly on my accounts and his. I noticed, although the bank manager did not, that his were unaudited and then I refused to go ahead. His accountant was a friend of his and the accounts were fictional. He lived in a council flat with a woman whom he wanted to install in the new building “for security” reasons. This time I was not to be taken in although my daughter and wife thought that I would risk money. I left the office and any connection with Bull. I later learned that he then approached another printer with the same deal. I found out who it was and went to warn him but he thought I was just jealous. He lost £5,000. It was the police who told me that Trevor Bull had spent a long time in prison for fraud and false pretences but under different names.


CHAPTER 18
THE WRITTEN WORD
Just after this, I was approached by well-known people with money to launch a new monthly, then two-weekly, newspaper, the Jewish Herald. It was to be a paid three-days-a-week job, editing it while the founders who had also put money into the venture, produced it and saw to the advertising. But the days and hours kept extending until it took over my life.

During the time I edited and wrote for this newspaper, I met and interviewed many famous Rabbis including the Chief Rabbi before he took office. I suffered people such as Ken Livingstone whose interview I taped with his knowledge and still have in my possession. On the positive side I met several prominent British people such as Dr Schneier Levenberg, Sir Rhodes Boyson, Greville Janner, Lord Nicholas Bethell and John Marshall. I also met future Israeli leaders like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Bibi Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, all actual or future prime ministers, and Moshe Katzav, a future President of Israel. I met Moshe Ahrens and Natan Sharansky and visited institutions and schools and attended functions. After a year, although I loved it, I just had to resign in order to return to my printing business which I had been neglecting, in order to earn a living. The pay for three-days-a-week was not enough to support me if my own business was going down hill.

One of my bosses, lost his mother, and I went to the funeral. She turned out to have been an old girl-friend of mine from just after the war. Her name had changed on marriage from Hamper to Woolf and her son of course had that name, so I did not connect him with her. A small world.

I continued to write a regular syndicated column for the Jewish Telegraph (of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool) and the then South African Jewish Herald. They were given the headings of “Kersh’s Corner” and Kersh’s Column”. For a spell I presented the daily newspapers on Spectrum Radio.
Printing did quite well and I enjoyed it for some years until the landlords trebled the rent and that finished it. I retired in 1982.

I tried to Launch another paper with a Yiddish language back page but of all the 30 people I got to attend the first meeting, none was willing to raise funds. All said they would be interested once there was a “dummy”, which, itself. costs money. I let it die.

A friend had already launched a colour paper openly Zionist and it ran for months but needed cash injection.. The Israelis placed an order for a certain number of copies as a base but refused to provide funds. Similarly, wealthy people in the UK refused to “waste money on putting Israel’s case”. My argument that prevention was better than a cure made no impression. War might be avoided if Israel could win supporters in high places – people who knew nothing of the truth about the Arabs and Israel. The Arabs did realise the importance of putting their (false) case and did so with huge amounts of money. That is why there is so much anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism throughout the world and in important places. My friend drowned in Israel after his last rebuff. Accident or suicide?

Cyril had gone into property and we went our separate ways. He had moved to Cockfosters and we followed in 1966. By chance our gardens backed on to each other so we had a short cut.

His daughter, Geraldine, married and went to live in Manchester where she had four girls. His two sons are still unmarried and live in London. David is also still single . Hilary married Alan Driver and have one son, Mark, and a daughter, Julie. Lynne has a daughter, Daliany who has had ME. since she was sixteen in 1997, and because Lynne has had to be a full-time carer, her husband left home and is now divorced. All three live within a half-hour drive from us and each other.

During these years, Betty found many good holidays for us She found bargains everywhere. We went to Jerusalem in the Plaza, Netanya in the Four Seasons, in Majorca, Tenerife, and Malta as well as, later on, cruises in the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Our best and latest cruise was in the Queen Mary II in the Caribbean. That was sheer luxury.

In our younger days with young children, we had driven to Spain, Italy, Switzerland and France and found small places overnight or camped with our tent. In time the children went their own way and package holidays began so that flight was cheaper than driving. Life wasn’t easy but it was good.


CHAPTER 19
RETIREMENT
Retirement did not mean doing nothing – simply working without being paid for it. Cyril and I were both active in Southgate Branch of AJEX. Cyril has been Branch Secretary for many years and has been joint-chairman. I have long been on the Executive Committee and am now also Editor, Membership Officer and Vice-chairman. We have both sat on Head Quarters Committees. We are both Freemasons and Past Masters. We both have been First Principals of Mandate Chapter, myself twice. Cyril was Treasurer of Chapter for several years These days we are not in office but occasionally I have delivered one of the ceremonial lectures or stand in for an absent Officer.

Quite a lot of my time now is taken up on the computer, writing e-mails and reading others’. I also use it to keep the records of over 300 AJEX Branch members. I love reading ancient history and, more recently, about the Jewish origins of Christianity before Paul, which obviously covers the end of the Second Temple Judaism. Biblical history and archaeology are other deep interests of mine. All in all, there is never enough time for me. And “bored” is a word which I have never understood.

Betty continued to work until our first child, Lynne, was born in 1953 and saw to Hilary in 1955 and then David in 1961. When he was old enough, she went back to work, mostly temporary jobs which she enjoyed for the variety of people all of whom got on well with her. She has worked for such firms as RIBA and British Waterways as well as for several charity organisations. Quite a few of these “temporary” jobs lasted months as they seemed loathe to part with her. Her last job was with Cohen Arnold, a well-known firm of accountants in Regent Street.

During her 10-year stint there, her sister, Dora, in Israel died and she went to Haifa to the funeral with the other sisters. With the funeral over, she had to stay on to see to Dora’s affairs and so was away for two weeks altogether. I kept them abreast of her developments. On her return, instead of the traditional greeting of “Wish you long life”, she was accused of taking a holiday! She had kept in touch with them and so had I but they refused to believe the reasons for going or staying on. They also resented, so they claimed, that she chose her real holiday times to fit in with my one-man business rather than their big business. They tried to make her resign by not giving her any work to do and saying that nobody there liked her.

She came straight to me and I saw through their game and sent her back to work. They said that they had none for her so she just sat there prepared and willing to work and stuck it out every day. It was Arnold Cohen who finally sacked her. Then my solicitors went for them for “constructive dismissal” – and won. They had done the same with other employees – usually for no reason except to change staff – probably at a lower salary. After that 10 years and the unpleasant end to it, she retired except for one more job till the boss fled to Ireland in debt. She finished up with work in a charity shop until that closed.

I had a heart attack in 1996 but needed no surgery. Many pills later, I now find that I need an aotic-valve replacement and a by-pass and am due for that on 30th October {Our 58th Wedding Anniversary!}. My angina does not really bother me too much but I am told that if I neglect the operation, I may not get any warning. Who am I to argue?

Betty, meanwhile, successfully had a new knee last year and has now had the other one replaced successfully. May that be the last of hospitals and surgery for us both.

Now I edit and write newsletters for the local branch of AJEX (Association for Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women), and, until it ceased, for Southgate Lodge of Bnai Brith, of which I had earlier been president for two years. I have also been a Freemason for almost 50 years and continue to attend meetings of Mandate Lodge of which I am a Past Master, and Mandate Chapter which has elected me First Principal twice.

At 82 I try to enjoy a “quiet” life, tapping away on my computer, reading, a bit of easy gardening and checking what children and my three grandchildren, Daliany (25), Mark (20) and Julie (18) are doing. The little housework I do, I hate but have no choice! I still seem to be as busy as always. AJEX takes up a little more of my time.

Over the decades I have had some excellent holidays, usually organised by Betty, including, last year, a Cruise on the Queen Mary II. My fervent hope is still to visit Israel – everywhere – before it is too late. Too late for me as well as too late for the country.

I have seen the last three-quarters of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. There has been an endless and rapid change in technology but not in morality. I am reminded of a ship, ever going onwards, seemingly with purpose but without a rudder while carrying passengers oblivious of their inevitable fate, wherever the elements take it.

My 82 years have made me witness to that lack of development in mankind despite the giving of the basic rules of civilisation some 3,000 years ago. I suppose that 3,000 years is but 300 centuries and 1,200 generations!

My bitterest times were Cyril’s eldest and brilliant son, Colin, died at the age of 23. Then Lilian’s fatal illness and, overlapping, my mother’s also. Although I was not so close to my father, his death was a blow to me and it took a long time before I stopped saying “I must tell/ask Dad” (as happened to each of them). We had worked together, as well as lived together, so I suppose that was natural.

Those have come and gone and nothing now can change them. The remaining wound, which is still open is Daliany, who has had ME. since she was 16 – ten years ago - and her life, and Lynne’s with it, is "on hold" although the years are passing. For Betty and me, helplessness and frustration is the prime emotion.


With my forthcoming surgery successfully over and with Betty’s full recovery, we should soon be in good shape to tackle our new life. Let’s hope that that new life will be worth living and my Dash postponed.

MSK
1/10/2007