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?