Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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War, emigration and some fine silk socks

In 1940, my father, Leonard, volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. At his interview, a Wing Commander looked at his application and asked what must have seemed to him to be the crucial question.

‘So, young man, you were born in London, but moved to Brussels at six weeks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And why did you do that?’

My father was English to his fingertips, even though he spent his childhood in Brussels and spoke French like a native – indeed, it became the preferred language of communication between him and his four siblings.

He left Brussels with his mother, on the last train before the German army moved in.

‘It was just as well we caught the last train,’ he told me, ‘the one before was strafed by German fighters and a lot of the passengers were killed.’

He arrived by boat in Portsmouth.

‘It was great to see all the warships in the port, lined up and sleek in their battleship grey. It made me feel that we weren’t defenceless, that I was home and among powerful friends.’

This was the start of the only extended period he was to live in England: from 1940 until he was demobilised in 1946. When he headed back to Francophone territory, specifically Paris.

Propping up a wheel of his bomber
- Leonard while doing his bit in WW2

My mother, Leatrice, on the other hand, had only been out of the country once in her life, on a family holiday in France. When she was three.

She was still in her late teens when war broke out. She spent one term away from London and the dangers of bombing, at a school in Windermere in England’s North West. She hated being away from home and decided she preferred to risk the bombs and came back. That occasionally meant cowering with her mother in the broom cupboard under the stairs until the all clear had sounded.

‘Under the stairs was the safest place. When you saw bombed-out houses, the stairs would often still be standing. But it was horrible crouching in there in the dark.’

No bombs fell in their neighbourhood anyway, in Hampstead Garden Suburb in outer North London, home for many Jews who’d made enough to be comfortable, though not quite enough to join their wealthier co-religionists in nearby Golders Green.

As the war went on, both my parents became blasé about the bombs.

‘I hated shelters,’ my father told me, ‘the atmosphere was dank and full of fear. So, when I was on leave in London, I just stayed up above and watched the raids. Once, I was walking home with a packet of eggs – precious at the time – and I could hear the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells falling back to earth and tinkling on the ground all around me. All I could think of was how to keep my eggs safe.’

My mother even played a memorable tennis game with a friend, ignoring the air raid warnings, only to discover when they’d finished and climbed to the top of the hill where they could see the view, that the whole of the City of London was ablaze.

On leaving school, she took a shorthand course and went to work for Finchley Council, in North London.

‘The anti-Semitism was unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get out.’

Always a sympathiser of the political left, her next job was with Albert Inkpin, formerly the first general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When they met he’d been demoted to running the Friends of the Soviet Union. She helped him with its paper, Russia Today. The publication recounted the glorious achievements in the Soviet Union and the triumphant advance of the working class everywhere under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. In other words, it was a propaganda sheet. If it existed today, we’d call what it purveyed fake news.

Come to think of it, it does exist today and that’s exactly what it purveys.

My mother found the diet there a little too rich. She moved on to an organisation that was more congenial to her, the venerable social democratic movement –Inkpin might have described it as bourgeois liberal – the Fabian Society. She worked half time for the Society and half time for one of its leaders, the Labour MP John Parker.

One of her more vivid memories was of lying in the grass in St James’s Park, between the government offices in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace, watching German V1 flying bombs coming over.

‘You listened for the motor to cut. If it did when the bomb was close, it might drop straight out of the sky towards you. I once heard a V1 motor cut while I was in a Lyons Corner House restaurant. All the clients, including me, flung ourselves to the ground under the glass-topped table – hardly likely to give us much protection. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t hit us.’

The V1 'doodlebug'
The time to get really worried was when the engine stopped

She stayed in the job after the war. That meant she was there on an evening in 1946 where a diminutive, humble figure walked through a crowd of Labour staff members in the Headquarters building, with only a smile and an occasional wave in an acknowledgement when they stood to give him an ovation. The man was Clement Attlee, and the staff had just had the confirmation he would be the next Prime Minister, having beaten the legendary and apparently unbeatable Winston Churchill. He would be one of Britain’s most effective Prime Ministers.

My mother hankered, however, to get away. She found an ill-paid job in Paris and moved there. She didn’t realise it, but it would be the last time she lived in England for four decades.

Meanwhile, my father had started working with a British railway body and had done well. So well, indeed, that his boss called him in one day to congratulate him on winning a more senior appointment back in Britain.

‘But… I didn’t apply for the job,’ my father told him.

‘No. I put in the application for you. And you’ve won! It’s a great honour.’

‘Maybe. But it’s not a job I want.’

He eventually gravitated to working with UNESCO, based in Paris. He was young, well-paid with few responsibilities. He indulged in some luxuries, one of which was silk socks. In all the time I knew him, I never saw him in silk socks, which is perhaps a measure of what it cost him to accommodate my brother and me.

Meanwhile my mother moved on from the ill-paid job and joined the UNESCO typing pool –not the most fulfilling work but it allowed her to live far more richly than she ever had before.

One day she was invited to a party with a bunch of her colleagues and found herself on the floor with her back against a sofa, on which a young man was sitting. What she saw of him first was, of course, his shoes and his socks.

‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘you’re wearing silk socks with little clocks going up the sides.’

‘Yes,’ he said. Thus they took the first step towards a life containing my brother and me, and far more cotton than silk.