Not marking a death but celebrating a life

Getting to know my father, in the mid-1950s

It’s a strange sensation to wake up and discover it’s the 24^th of May, as happened to me this morning. Or at least, it has been a little odd for 37 years now (and it amazes me to realise it has been that long). 

It was on that day in 1983 that my father died.

For 35 years, it was particularly difficult because my mother always took it badly. She had the terrible misfortune of being a widow longer than she was married: she survived my father for 35 years, having been married for 32.

Each year, I would ring her and wonder how to broach the subject. Should I bring it up? Should I let her raise it? If I spoke first might I upset her by reminding her, or if I waited to let her mention it, might I upset her by seeming to have forgotten?

Yes. She wasn’t easy, my mother. Many fine and attractive qualities but being simple to know and get along with wasn’t one of them.

I would always suggest to her that we shouldn’t fixate on the 24^th of May, but rather concentrate on the 15^th of September, his birthday, which was always a good day in the family. A day to celebrate rather than a day to mourn. But poor woman, she grieved all the same.

Well, she died nearly two years ago. So this year, I am going to mark the death of my father not with a lament, but with a celebration. A brief overview of his life in photos.

Here he is in his first year. This would have been late 1921 or early 1922.

He was brought up in Brussels, and here he is at four walking up one of the main streets with his mother.

In 1936, he was 15 and in the boy scouts.

By the early 1940s, he was in uniform again, but for war service in the Royal Air Force.

In 1951, he married my mother in Genoa. And why not Genoa? The obvious place to get married, for an Englishman raised in Belgium and who met his wife-to-be in Paris.

They stopped in Nervi, near Genoa, before honeymooning near Naples. He then took up a position he held for sixteen years, at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome (which is where both my brother and I were born).

In 1960, he posed rather well, I think, by the River Congo, while serving with the UN Emergency mission. He returned to that country with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1967, after his stint in Rome.

In 1964, we had a rather good holiday in what was then Yugoslavia, and stopped at various places on the way back to Rome, including Venice where you can see him feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square with my brother.

In 1977, he was approaching retirement, still with the UNDP but at its headquarters in New York.

He retired to France, to Michauroi, a hamlet lost in the countryside of the Charente Department. He loved being there, though he and my mother would also travel to England regularly, staying in a flat they rented in Bromley. Here he is (at right) with my mother (at the back near the centre) and some friends. At that time, he only had two years ahead of him.

He had a rich and varied life and did a lot of things that mattered to him – his war service, his work for the UN in the Congo Emergency, his work on projects for the UNDP. He died far too young, at 61. His style of life had done nothing for his health, however satisfying it was in other ways.

Even if he hadn’t died then, I don’t suppose he would have made it till today. He’d have been rising 99 now. But I still miss him. He was an excellent father and a lot of fun.

Which is what I prefer to mark on the 24^th of May.

Leatrice: a life well-lived, if perhaps not fully

The benefit of dying on your birthday is that the people you leave behind can celebrate your life, on the day you were born, rather than lament your departure, on the day you died. Even though they’re the same day.

My mother Leatrice pulled off that trick. As I pointed out at the time, although she may have been unconscious, she managed to survive until 11 July last year, her 94th birthday. That makes today, which would have been her 95th, a good time to remember her life rather than mark her death.

Leatrice in Italy in about 1964

Last year, I wrote several pieces about her – her childhood in Britain and her adulthood during the war years, her departure from England and her travels eventually leading to meeting my father in Paris, their move to Rome, their time together in Africa and New York, including her degree studies there, and lack, perhaps, of entire fulfilment she had from her life.

I’m not going to pretend that my mother was always easy to be with. She was a difficult mother, as both her sons can testify, and often a prickly friend, as her friends could no doubt confirm.

Should I have tried to do something about her faults while she was alive? Perhaps, but I think it would have precipitated some unpleasant rows and done little good. Is it worth dwelling on them today when it can make no difference at all? No, it isn’t, and I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the varied life she lived, because as most who came into contact with her will gladly point out, it made her excellent company.

Both sides of her family were Jewish. Her mother’s side was reasonably well off, as her father had been a skilled artisan (he made shoe uppers for people with damaged feet). Her father, on the other hand, had been born into terrible, grinding poverty. The evening meal was a loaf of bread for the boys, half a loaf for the girls, and they had soup once a week, on Friday night, at the Sabbath. The tragedy was the day that his father returned home, tipped out the contents of the cauldron because it was where the family washed as well, and only realised afterwards that he’d just thrown away the soup.

My mother’s father set out to make sure that he would never suffer such poverty again nor inflict it on his family. He became a typographer, and a good one. Later in life, he was able to look at a picture and say how many ink colours would be needed to print from it, and therefore estimate any job. 

Inevitably, he gravitated towards Sales.

Long before that, however, he had been drawn to the left. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison as a conscientious objector, in excellent company including Bertrand Russel’s. Meanwhile, the woman who was to become his wife had moved further left still, into the new Communist Party of Great Britain. He never joined but he attended some meetings, and it was seeing her chair one that attracted him to her.

At that time, she was recovering from the terrible blow of losing her fiancé, who had survived the War but had died in the flu epidemic that followed. She agreed to marry my grandfather but it was a stormy engagement, which she broke off at least once.

My mother was born in the poor Jewish East End of London, on 11 July 1924. From there, the family moved to Stamford Hill, where a slightly more prosperous Jewish community lived. From there, they went to Hampstead Garden Suburb, not the wealthiest Jewish area but not far from one of them, at Golders Green. Here my grandfather bought his first, and only, house, clearing the mortgage in just two years. That was where my mother grew up.

She went to a school whose praises she sang throughout her life, Henrietta Barnet, even though she was unhappy with the passive anti-Semitism: Jewish students were excused Christian activities, but nothing else was laid on for them, so they spent the time kicking their heels in a separate room and getting royally bored.

It was worse when she took a job with Barnet Council where, she said, the anti-Semitism was active and vicious. What made the job still worse was that she had hoped to go to Art College, but the family decided that wasn’t possible, and she went to work instead.

She flirted briefly with Communism but eventually joined the Labour Party, for which she went to work eventually, in a post shared between the Party and one of its think tanks, the Fabian Society. That’s where she was for the Second World War, and she stayed around long enough to witness Clement Attlee’s triumphant election at the head of Labour’s first majority government.

But the girl from middle class Jewish London had had enough of that world. She wanted out. In 1948, she went to Paris on what would eventually be nearly four decades of residence abroad. 

In Paris she eventually found a job in UNESCO. It was there that she met a colleague, a young financial expert who’d served the war in the Royal Air Force; in 1951, they married. Oddly, the married in Genoa as they were travelling to Rome, my father having moved from one UN agency, UNESCO, to another, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquartered in the Italian capital.

My brother and I were both born and had our early schooling there. But then our parents moved to what was then called the Zaïre, today the Democratic Republic of Congo, when my father, frustrated after fifteen years without promotion, suffered for our sakes, moved to another agency, the UN Development Programme. My brother and I went to boarding school in England, and stayed there when my parents moved again to New York.

That was where my mother at last realised her ambition and had a university education. She graduated with the equivalent of a first-class degree – Summa Cum Laude – and was admitted, in what she always felt was one of her most significant achievements, to the top academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.

Leatrice, at the front, with Leonard to her left
In retirement in France in 1982, the year before he died

When my father retired, they came back to Europe, buying a house in the French countryside and renting a flat in Bromley, outer London, so they could split their time between the two countries. But my father only managed six years of retirement before dying in 1983. That’s when my mother decided that she’d travelled enough and would return to England.

However, she chose a city with which she had previously had no contact, much against the advice of many of her friends. “Who do you know in Oxford? You’ve no roots in the place. You’ll be lonely.”

She wasn’t. She took a course in Oxford history and qualified as a city guide. It gave her a circle of friends, many of whom attended her funeral, and a job she loved and continued with, well, rather longer than her health really allowed.

That was just one of her circles of friends. She had a French conversation class. She would go to the theatre or the Ashmolean museum with other groups. She remained an active member of the Labour Party right to the end, the activity only limited by her health. Indeed, the Labour Party was a home to her as it turned out to be for me which is why neither she, who had suffered anti-Semitism, nor I could understand how the modern Labour Party could fail to rid itself of that toxin.

She loved Oxford and was happy there. Or as happy as she could be. I believe, as I’ve said before, that she was cheated of something for which she was eminently suited: a career of her own, perhaps in the academic world. I think the loss of that opportunity meant she could never be entirely fulfilled.

Her health too let her down, though perhaps not quite as badly as she often thought – and said. Her constitution was clearly much better than she allowed as she was still able to live a reasonably independent life up to just a few weeks before her death.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life, though, was the loss of my father. She was a widow longer than she was a wife. And he had been a remarkable support to her.

Leatrice on her last garden stroll,
less than a month before she died
She enjoyed having Toffee on her lap

Still. Despite increasing ill health, her missed opportunity, and a long widowhood, she had a remarkably varied and rich life. Not entirely fulfilled but certainly well-filled with wonderful experiences.

That’s something to celebrate. If you knew her, please join me in raising a glass to her memory. Or you could raise that glass even if you didn’t know her: what’s wrong in celebrating a life well-lived, even you never met the person who lived it?

That scrapbook reminder of an assassination

The other day I came across a scrapbook that I started at the start of the sixties. It was proudly marked ‘File = 1’. Number 1. Clearly, I’d resolved to make this the first in a series of documents that would track my passage through life. But, alas, my character is one that views resolutions, like rules, as made to be broken. File 1 remains to this day the only one created.

First step in a lifelong commitment to documentation
which never reached the second step

At that time, my father was in an administrative position with the United Nations. More specifically, he was in finance. Those were the days when you could still get jobs without a degree. In the years when many today would be studying, my father was helping to fight a war instead, and he never did go to university. He learned accounting on the job, working his way from position to position until he gravitated into the UN, first with UNESCO in Paris and later with the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in Rome.

That was where my brother and I were born and eventually started our schooling. Which explains why when I started my first, and ultimately only, scrapbook it was inside an exercise book from the English school in Rome, St George’s.

It was an extraordinary place. It was run by a character who’d been a housemaster at Harrow School, one of the great British ‘public’ schools – i.e. hugely privileged, exclusive private schools. He brought with him all the wonderful sense of entitlement and snobbishness such an institution breeds. It was touch and go whether my brother and I would be admitted, because my father was a Professional grade 3 in the UN and, as a general rule, the school took only children whose parents were at grade 5 or above.

Certainly, being in the school was a wonderful lesson in reward being entirely unrelated to merit. I fell out pretty badly with the authorities there. I assign my lack of ability in football to having missed all sport sessions at a critical time, because I was on detention every single Wednesday afternoon for two years. Indeed, the school briefly made me a fan of corporal punishment: this was the day when the head called me in to his study to tell me I had achieved a unique distinction.

“Out of a school of 500 pupils, you are the only one on detention this week.”

Imagine my pride.

But he hadn’t finished.

“I have no intention of keeping a teacher back to supervise you, so instead I’m going to cane you.”

What relief! My heart sang for joy. I took six strokes of his cane and – at last – could join my class on the playing fields.

As for my father, he too had fallen out with those in authority. His boss loathed him and denied him promotion for fifteen years, a fate he put up with exasperation but stoically, in order to guarantee us a minimum of stability. He then transferred to the United Nations Development Programme, where he was promoted three times in little more than the same number of years, so he ended his career at pretty much the level he would have reached had he been granted some reasonable promotions over his time in Rome.

Sadly, however, while he was able to get into the finance and accounting world without either a degree or an appropriate qualification, he was never able to get out of it. Organisations always need people who’ll keep an eye on the money, and it was known that Leonard Beeson was good at it. Wherever he went, he was cheated of his ambition to move into the running of aid programmes, and found himself spending most of his times with the account books. In the Congo, then called the Zaïre, he did get a programme or two to run, but his main task was still looking after the money.

Talking about the Congo brings me back to my scrapbook.

The Congo was the scene of a major emergency in 1960. The UN sent troops to quell a civil war and large numbers of civilians to put in place a full programme of support and aid. Volunteers were called for and Leonard Beeson was one of just three from the FAO headquarters in Rome. As a married man, he was only required to serve nine months (it was eighteen for those without a family). My mother took it badly, but he felt that it was a duty to step forward when the organisation that paid him needed help dealing with an emergency.

My father's friend
As it turned out, a dead man walking

He took plenty of photos and some of them I included in my scrapbook. One that has always stuck in my memory was of a young man in a security guard’s uniform. My father liked him and took pleasure chatting with him. But then he was sent as a guard on a plane taking the UN Secretary General of the time, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, to Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The plane never made it and an outstanding Secretary General was killed, along with everyone else on the plane, including my father’s friend.

That event was back in the news a few weeks ago, when it was finally confirmed that, as had long been suspected, the plane had been deliberately shot down by a Belgian pilot working as a mercenary.

Dag Hammarskjöld
Iconic Secretary General assassinated in 1961.
Along with my father's friend

It was odd to read that story and remember my father’s time in the Congo. It sent me back to my scrapbook and to that photo. I’m glad I still have it and that, even if I couldn’t make it last, I stuck to my resolution long enough to produce one scrapbook at least.

Allowing me to write this post, as a bit of a tribute to my father, the UN security guard who became his friend, and of course to Hammarsköld, probably the best Secretary General the UN has had.

Leatrice: leaving Britain, entering marriage, living with an empty nest

Having only travelled out of Britain once in her life, and at three so she retained no memory of it later, my mother Leatrice set out to get to know the world better just as soon as the Second World War ended and peacetime made it possible.

It wasn’t easy at first. Her first trip, to Switzerland in 1947, was a shoestring affair, only made possible because accommodation was provided by a socialist youth organisation. But she loved it, right from her entry onto Swiss territory: she had breakfast in the restaurant at Basel station and was bowled over by the quantities of fresh-baked bread and, above all, the heaps of butter, an extraordinary luxury for someone from ration-bound Britain.

Clearly, she enjoyed the experience, because by 1948 she had gone a step further and moved out of the country altogether, to settle in Paris where she found a job with UNESCO. It was there, as I described last time, that she met the man who would become my father, attracted by her first glimpse of him in the form of a sighting of his silk socks.

But 1948 was also the year of a trip that she would remember as magical. She travelled to a UNESCO conference in Beirut, at a time when it was regarded as the Paris of the Mediterranean. It was a land of beaches and mountains, where skiers starting a run could look down towards swimmers in the sea, where history breathed everywhere and cultures coexisted, if not in harmony, at least without conflict.

Leatrice, third from left, in Beirut in 1948

She loved the visit. Throughout her life, she spoke in wonderment of the place, a wonderment tinged with horror at what Lebanon became later, as peace and pleasure gave way to blood and brutality.

1948 saw her launched into a series of adventures. The stay-at-home Englishwoman set out on a voyage of discovery. Or rather two, as her exploration of new countries was intertwined with her exploration of a new relationship, as she and my father got to know each other more intimately. For instance, it’s hard to imagine a more romantic setting than Capri and that’s where they went in 1949.

Leatrice in Capri (or nearby)

Their exploration of each other led in 1951 to their launching themselves into the 32-year long adventure of their marriage. That too was linked with travel: their wedding was in Genoa, as they travelled towards Rome where my father was taking up a post with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, another agency of the United Nations, like UNESCO.

That led to a further adventure, of the type that rather restricts other kinds: they launched into parenthood. Their ability to travel at will was hampered by my arrival in 1953 and my brother’s in 1956.

Still, we had good times. There were several summers in succession in Porto Ercole in Tuscany, now a major and fashionable seaside resort, then a small and isolated fishing village, with glorious beaches nearby – kilometre after kilometre of golden sand with barely a person on it.

We also travelled many times to England, later several times to France, and on one memorable occasion to what was then called Yugoslavia, not yet ravaged by secession and civil war. A memorable moment on a French trip came when we shot across the border into Spain, just for a day: Franco was still in power, at the head of the last Fascist regime in Europe, and we weren’t going to make an extended visit but, shamefacedly, felt we could get away with a day trip.

Day trip to Spain
Leatrice with my brother Nicky on the left
and me on the right

If my mother had a major disappointment in her life, it was being denied post-school education, partly because she belonged to a generation in which it was offered to few women, partly because she turned eighteen at a time when Britain was at its lowest point in the war.

Much later, she was able to fulfil her aspiration to study, but even while we were children, she hankered for an intellectual life. She belonged to a historical society in Rome. And when we went on holiday, usually camping, we seldom stopped anywhere for more than two or three days so that my brother and I could indulge our taste for swimming or playing on beaches, but would move on quickly to yet another town of historical significance and with wonderful churches.

‘Oh, no, not another church!’ became a bit of a refrain from the back seat of the car.

On the other hand, we were two of the laziest kids imaginable. For some reason, my father didn’t believe in making his sons help him, instead hoping that we would spontaneously volunteer to assist in pitching our tents. Never happened. We would sit, often in the car, reading (no computer games then) until he’d finished.

Honestly, I have no idea why he put up with it.

This life continued into the 1960s, when my father returned home one evening and announced that he had volunteered to join the United Nations special mission in the Congo. The country had sunk into civil war after independence from Belgium, and now the UN was putting in both military forces and civilian support to try to pacify the country and help it emerge onto a pathway to development.

As a married man, he was assigned to a nine-month posting (unmarried staff did eighteen). My mother never fully forgave him for taking it without even discussing it with her, but in his view it was his duty to step forward to the UN’s support when it was in its greatest need. As a result, she had to cope with two kids alone for nine months, and it was no easy task.

The posting would eventually lead to another major change. In 1966, after thirteen years under a boss who treated him with contempt, and with his career at a standstill, he could take no more of it. When the United Nations Development Programme, yet another UN agency, asked him to go back to the Congo as one of its staff, with a double promotion, my parents decided he should. In consultation with each other, this time.

At that point, they decided that our educational needs would be better served at a boarding school in England. Our lives under a single roof were about to end. From now on, my mother would be seeing her sons only in the school holidays. She’d be sharing an empty nest with our father for eight months of the year.

Another phase was starting. In a new country. On a new continent. And with a different home life.

Africa, land of dreams where even nightmares can be fun

Isn’t it great when things happen just as you’d expect them to? Even if the events themselves are far from pleasurable.

At the back end of the sixties, my parents were living in what had once been the Congo, was the Zaïre then, and today has reverted to being the Congo again (the one wittily referred to as the ‘Democratic Republic’). They took my brother and me for a Christmas holiday in the bush, and as we drove at nightfall into a market town which, it turned out, the President of the Republic was visiting the next day, we were arrested by trigger-happy, drunken soldiers. Or perhaps it was the police. The town had been taken over by detachments from both forces, they were much the worse for drink, they were armed and loathed each other, so they were generating the kind of atmosphere that would make a meeting of Sarah Palin supporters look tame.

The rifles across the bonnet of our Land Rover might have been the start of something classically African with an ugly ending involving bodies in a ditch, although generally that’s the kind of thing that happens to locals rather than to European visitors. In any case, things weren’t quite as nasty in the Congo then as now, and in the end it only took the half bottle of whisky that reduced our sentry to maudlin complaints about the difficulties that beset his life and a few dollars that made them easier to contemplate, to persuade him to turn his back and let us drive away.

Now fast forward over four decades and our recent trip to the Gambia. We decided to visit a game reserve in Senegal, partly to see some impressive animals – and there were a few – partly to tick another box: ‘Senegal – been there’. Unfortunately, although those of us who had British passports had no trouble, three of us were travelling on French papers and for some reason the Gambians have it in for the French. Odd, isn’t it? I mean, the Brits were the colonial power. Why the special aversion towards the colonialists of the country next door?

Anyway, the French passport holders had had to get themselves visas, at the last moment, before we even set out for the Gambia. And at the border, we ran into difficulties again.

‘I’m afraid your visas are for a single visit,’ said the grey-clad corporal behind the desk, ‘if I stamp your passports now to authorise your exit from the Gambia, you’ll have to buy new visas on the way back. At 350 Dalassis.’ Mental calculators went to work, contents of wallets were brought to mind. Yes, three times 350 – we could do that. We’d come this far, we’d go ahead.

The cynical among us thought ‘yep, this is Africa. You can fix anything with a few banknotes.’ For a moment I felt a burst of superiority because we don’t have that kind of corruption in Western Europe, but then it occurred to me that at least African corruption is democratic: we can all practice it, whereas in Britain you can buy the whole government, but only if you own a bank or a major company.

We visited the game park, we returned to the border. Our little corporal in grey had been replaced by a large sergeant in khaki.

‘Ah, yes, my colleague talked about you. He made a mistake. A big mistake. As of January the first, the price for the visa has gone up.’ Why wasn’t I surprised? ‘It’s now a thousand Dalassis.’

Now that wasn’t so funny, even though it’s actually only £25. The problem was that we didn’t have the cash with us. Besides, I don’t mind being bent, but I dislike being chiselled. We all burst into protest.

‘But if we’d known we wouldn’t have gone...’

‘We don’t have the money...’

‘It was your colleague who told us...’

The colleague reappeared. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said, ‘it was my mistake. Just wait here. I’ll go and see my manager.’

He reappeared a few minutes later. He sat and the desk and changed an entry in a hand-written ledger.

‘It was our fault. This time you will pay nothing.’

‘We want you to come back,’ explained the sergeant, ‘so even though it was you Westerners who invented visas and charges, we will waive the payment on this occasion. But next time be more careful.’

‘Next time,’ I said, ‘we’ll come to the Gambia and stay in the Gambia.’ The sergeant liked this idea, and suddenly everyone was laughing and smiling.

‘I want to give you a kiss,’ said Danielle to the corporal.

There was a horrified silence followed by pandemonium. The corporal was trying to back his chair through the wall, giggling hysterically as he tried to keep away from Danielle who had come round to his side of the desk. The sergeant was guffawing; then he issued an urgent instruction:

‘No, no, wait,’ and turning to another policeman, he said, ‘don’t let him go,’ pointing to the corporal.

He positively ran out of the room, showing a surprising turn of speed, as big men sometimes do. He returned with another corporal only slightly smaller than him, and in the same dun-coloured uniform.

‘Now kiss him,’ he announced. The chaos started again, with the sergeant and his corporal applauding loudly. Danielle got behind her target and planted a kiss on the top of his head.




Kissing the corporal: an unusual brush with African bureaucracy

And so our gloriously African brush with authority ended without our having to pay anything, after all, and with laughter all round. Because this was the Gambia, and not Rwanda or Eastern Congo, and Gambians, as they never tire of telling you, think that it’s ‘nice to be nice.’

Postscript

The Gambia is basically just a strip of land round a river. We had taken the ferry across on the outward journey; on the return, that would have meant a long wait. So we took one of the open, wooden boats that many Gambians use instead.

They often talk about ‘dancing boats’, meaning that they tip alarmingly to one side or the other at the slightest provocation, but ‘never capsize’, or so they claim. We noticed that a great many Gambians were determined to wait for the next ferry, even for an hour or more, rather than entrust their lives to those boats. Since we've returned, Danielle's turned up any number of blogs warning people never, at any cost, to take these boats.

A dancing boat seen from the ferry

It’s true that on the other side, our boat hit the pier and got caught on a sandbank – we had to help get it off by tipping it from one side to the other, and were nearly precipitated into the water for our pains. But hey, the weather was lovely, the water was calm, and the boat did at least provide life jackets. Not enough to go round, and the flotation material had mostly rotted away, and you couldn’t close them anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

And in any case we made it. And enjoyed chatting to the people round us. And having another fine African experience.