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?

They order these things better in the US. Or possibly not

It is said that at its foundation, it was hoped that Canada would combine French culture, with the British political system and American knowhow. Unfortunately, the country has managed to bring together American culture, the French political system and British knowhow.

Ah, American knowhow. The country’s celebrated for it. As well as its culture of service. And generally it fully deserves both reputations. But, as I discovered on this trip across the pond, not always. 

Imagine, for instance, an increasingly cashless society. Even the smallest purchases can be made by card. An ice cream, a taxi, a meal. So much more convenient than having to carry cash, which you can do nothing about if it’s stolen, and which supports a whole parallel economy evading tax. Clearly the way to go in the future.

But that’s not the States. That’s Sweden. I made the mistake of drawing out a little Swedish cash on an early trip to the country and two years on it’s still just burning a hole in my wallet.

In the US, on the other hand, I went to one restaurant which refused to take anything but cash. A fine restaurant but just what are they up to? Back in England, that kind of behaviour would excite suspicions of money laundering.

Then there was the Café that claimed it took cards, until it came to paying.

“I’m so sorry, our card machine is down,” they sorrowfully announced. Though I’m not sure the sorrow was authentic. Fortunately, there was an ATM nearby; less fortunately, it was one of those that indulges in the scandalous practice of charging you for access to your own money.

But it wasn’t either of those experiences that provided me the most powerful insight into the occasional technological and service blips in US life.

I had to get from New York to Austin, in Texas. And things weren’t looking good. A major snowstorm had been threatened for the North Eastern states. There were snowploughs travelling up and down the streets. The buses even had snow chains on their back tyres.

Would my plane take off at all? These were anxious moments.

It was with some relief that I discovered that the weather forecast had been less than accurate, at least for New York. A friend suggested that this might be an effect of the partial government shutdown – staff were perhaps not turning up at the meteorological service. I can just imagine juniors who’ve missed a pay cheque getting together in the office and saying, “hey, let’s give the New Yorkers a shock, shall we?”

New York. At the time the worst snow was forecast

I travelled out to the airport feeling superior to my colleagues stuck in Boston. This is a bad frame of mind. I try not to be superstitious but I can’t help a slight queasiness when I get a little too cocksure. That strikes me as a bit of a lightning conductor for bad Karma.

And so it proved.

As we were boarding, the pilot announced that he wanted us in our seats fast as we needed to be moving away from the stand by eight o’clock. And we rose to the occasion. We were all seated in minutes, well before his deadline. 

At which point, he sat on the stand for a further 25 minutes.

Eventually, he began to taxi towards the runway. In, I’d have to say, rather a lackadaisical way. There were frequent stops, as though the plane was running out of breath. The engines frequently whined, as though trying to reach high speed, while in fact moving at what felt more like a walking pace.

In time, however, we reached the runway. Or rather, not in time. The pilot came back on the PA system.

“We tried our best,” he told us, never a statement that encourages listeners to expect a happy continuation, “but we’re one minute too late. We can’t now get to Austin within the maximum flying time permitted. We have to go back and wait for a new crew.”

Which we duly did. Waiting with different degrees of patience in the terminal building for a further four hours. We took off at 2:00 in the morning, six hours late – a delay significantly longer than the flight itself.

For someone who travels by air a lot in Europe, this came as a disagreeable reminder of times gone by. It’s been many years since I experienced such a delay on a flight, except for circumstances well beyond the control of the airlines – terrible weather or someone flying a drone near the airport, for instance.

We tried to get rest on the flight. Which put me in mind of a line from Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day:

Sleeping on planes – you know. Ruins the complexion. From the inside.

Somehow, that sentiment seems to encapsulate things perfectly. Sleeping on a flight just gnaws away at you, and it is indeed from deep inside you. Not a comfortable way to spend time.

And not the most glowing tribute to the levels of service provided by a US airline.

Still, it was only a discomfort. And a useful object lesson in the fact that it isn’t just severe weather that disrupts air travel but human ineptitude – in this case, running services on far too tight a margin for safety – can be just as lamentable. 

And it even happens in the US.

But I’m not complaining. I don’t live in Yemen, or Syria, or Venezuela. I know nothing of real suffering. What I went through was an inconvenience not a tragedy. Besides, it was a pleasantly ironic insight into things transatlantic.

So, if anything, I’m grateful…

Another homecoming abroad

One of the things I like about my job is that it gets me to places I like. In particular, it has taken to two cities that I hadn’t seen for decades but which are deeply rooted in my life.

The first was Rome, where I was born. And now it’s New York, where my parents lived from 1969 to 1977. If you add up all my visits to them over that time, it comes to pretty much two years. So, just as when I went to Rome for the first for a couple of decades and felt as though I’d come home, so returning to New York – or rather, Manhattan – was like a homecoming, though I’d not been back for 24 years.

My hotel, the Free Hand, is on Lexington Avenue. I was a little sad to see that the avenue, which used to be full of shops selling exotic spices or clothes of the kaftan variety, was now much more staid and duller. But the hotel itself was almost as surprising for its fidelity to that tradition, with its dimly-lit idiosyncratic decor and its colourful rooms offering Argan-based shower gels and shampoos.

The Free Hand hotel - very Lexington Avenue. In the old sense

Just being in the city was an odd sensation. I knew my way around. I went straight to the Caffe Reggio, haunt of my adolescence, for breakfast with a friend. She wanted to go to the 9/11 museum, so I led the way there too. I spent the day wandering the streets, without ever having the sense of not knowing where I was or how to get where I was going.

It was like slipping a comfortable old glove on and enjoying the sensation.

It was also a pleasure to chat with some of the locals. I’d forgotten how easy it is to get into conversation with strangers in New York. Three young men were having a discussion about whether or not it was legitimate to hit a brother (well, one brother was telling the other, ‘stop hitting your brother’). Having a brother myself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to join in, pointing out there seems little point in having a brother at all if you can’t hit him. However, we established that there had to be limits, and breaking a brother’s nose and leaving him bleeding on the ground was perhaps going just a little too far.

No one confirmed it, but I think the young man who raised this particular issue was the younger brother and had suffered just that fate. Certainly, the other brother was looking defensive, suggesting that his conscience wasn’t entirely clear.

We also came across a woman with a woolly hat to which she’d stuck a label with the single word ‘Impeach’. We had a brief exchange about just who she had in mind for impeachment, in the course of which neither of us felt any need to mention his illustrious name. Illustrious, that is, in the sense of notorious.

In the evening, I visited friends for dinner and went by boat. That was a new and breathtaking experience. The lighted skyline along the riverside provided a spectacular view so, like a child with a packet of sweets (or maybe I should say candy), I stayed up on deck watching it the whole time, so I turned up enchanted but frozen.

Manhattan skyline (with the Empire State Building in the background)
from the East River at night

At dinner, one of my friends pointed out that she felt that the Brexit process – which, apparently, many are following with fascination, and horror, over here – had only one benefit: at least Brits like me could hardly turn up in the US and poke fun at the country for its Trumpisation. It was a question of pots and kettles.

‘You have the advantage over us,’ I said, ‘you could get rid of Trump in 2020. We shall be stuck with Brexit for at least a generation.’

To my surprise, she replied, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen.’

An interesting point of view. It would make some sense: since there’s clearly no majority for any Brexit formula, the logical conclusion would be to drop Brexit altogether. Someone on Twitter told me recently to cut the ‘whataboutery’ (whatever that means) because the ultimate principle is simple: ‘Out is Out’.

One of the most comical aspects of Brexitism is its capacity to reduce complex issues to such simplicity. I did point out to him that if there are several doorways to choose from, and no agreement on which to use, it’s hard to leave even something as simple as a room, however much out may simply mean out.

Still, it makes little difference that cancelling Brexit would be a logical outcome. Experience so far suggests that no presumption of logic can be made about the process. And I’m not quite sure how the cancellation would happen. Neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn wants to be the leader who tells the electorate ‘we’re dropping the policy you voted for back in 2016’.

Still, there are moves towards first blocking a no-deal exit, and then perhaps to a second referendum that might, just might, put an end to the whole sorry business. It’s encouraging to have crossed the wide Atlantic to hear people who believe that it may yet happen.

In the meantime, it’s been a joy to be back in a city that feels as familiar to me as it’s full of surprises.

You don’t have to be Orpheus to descend to Hell, you just need a ticket

Most major cities pride themselves on putting in underground railway systems.

Odd, really, since when you plunge into any of them they generally turn out to be pretty ghastly places. They show how right most religions are to place Hell underground.

The London tube is one of the worst. It always seems to be horribly crowded.

Now I know it’s a bit of a paradox to say that. I mean, if I weren’t there to experience how crowded it was, it would be marginally less crowded. But like most others, I suspect, I view myself and anyone with me as travellers, and everyone else as a crowd.

Even without the crowd, the tube is painful. It’s hot and clammy and claustrophobic, partly no doubt because it’s really squeezed into its tunnels: there are often only inches between the edge of tube cars and the tunnel side.

The London Tube: no margin for comfort

Still, in being uncomfortable, the London underground’s no worse than most others.

For instance, I’m always amazed that people write in such flattering terms about the New York subway. It’s always struck me as desperately old-fashioned, noisy and bone-rattling. Badly out of place in the home of technological innovation.

As for the Paris metro, it’s particularly dismal. First of all, it stinks. I don’t know whether it’s burning brake pads or what, but the smell is one of the most unpleasant I’ve come across in any city’s underground system. Everyone always looks absolutely miserable too; again, I realise that I’m guilty of some kind of solipsism here: I regard all the others as being miserable, and making me miserable by contagion, but I appreciate that others might see things the other way round.

Occasionally, underground systems can be quite interesting. For instance, before the wall came down, the Berlin U-Bahn had quite a few ‘ghost stations’. These were closed stops on the eastern side of the wall, their names still in Gothic script from the thirties, no adverts up on the wall or the tattered remnants of posters decades old, dim lighting, armed police on the platforms making absolutely certain that no-one got off the trains from the west or, more important, tried to get on.

Ghost station on the U-Bahn in the bad old days.
Fascinating but spooky

That was pretty spooky and interesting, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

In fact, the only metro system that I’ve been on recently and found relatively tolerable is the one in Madrid. It’s one of the more modern ones, so that’s perhaps not so surprising, but it does show that things could be less awful.

What makes the Madrid metro more attractive? There really is space in the tunnels around the carriages, and the carriages themselves are wider. Stretch out on the London tube, and even I with my short little legs am practically touching the passenger opposite. In Madrid there’s space between the rows to fit in people, legs, luggage, whatever.

Madrid Metro: room to breathe. Until it fills up at least

The greater width and the clearance in the tunnels makes the whole system much airier and fresher. That’s helped by air conditioning which is actually switched on from time to time. And they even have mobile signal down in the tunnels.

It still isn’t exactly fun, particularly when the carriages fill. But it’s a lot better than Paris or London.

Still, to be fair to poor old London, at least the tube does have a couple of jokes associated with it.

‘Do you know the way to Turnham Green?’ is one. The answer is, of course, ‘Leave ’em out in the rain.’

And the classic ‘Is this Cockfosters?’ to which the answer is ‘well, it’s certainly not mine.’

And the tone of that joke probably reflects pretty accurately the quality of the experience of travelling on the system.

Unusual passenger in Madrid