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.

Christmas day without my mother: something of a relief

Christmas. So many memories.

Not all of them bad.

The tradition in English-speaking households is to have presents, at least for the kids, on Christmas morning. I’ve no idea who came up with that terrible idea: it means the children are up at 5:00 or 6:00, waking their parents to demand gifts.

My family was no different. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn and find a Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies at the bottom of our beds. That would hold our attention for the best part of two minutes, by which time we would have reached the obligatory mandarin at the bottom, and then we’d take off to wake up the parents and find our “real” presents.

An early foray into empirical experimentation tested his existence

There came a time when I began to suspect that the gifts weren’t really being brought by Father Christmas. But I was a child interested in evidence and prepared to carry out carefully designed experiments to test any hypothesis.

So, one Christmas Eve, I propped a bongo drum between a chair and my bedroom door. The outcome was spectacular. When the door was pushed gently open some time after I’d fallen asleep, the drum fell to the floor, with a highly satisfactory, indeed nearly explosive, noise followed by a volley of cursing. That was not the kind of language I’d expect any saint to use, and the voice was in any case unmistakably my mother’s. That left me freed of an old deception but also, as I discovered in the morning, denied a Christmas stocking.

Danielle is from Alsace, in Eastern France, where they have a different approach. Like so many on the Continent, they celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. The tradition in her village was for a father to take his kids out in the afternoon, so that in his absence the mother would set up and decorate a tree – never done earlier – and assemble presents around it. The kids would be greeted by an apparently magical transformation when they returned.

The family would have their Christmas meal, after which presents would be opened. In the evening, not at the crack of dawn the next day. Indeed, if families go to Midnight Mass – usually held at 10:30 or 11:00 these days, as a more convenient approximation to midnight – the kids get home tired and unlikely to wake up early on Christmas Day. The parents enjoy a lie-in.

That strikes me as far more civilised than the Anglo-Saxon way. I have no idea why English speakers don’t adopt it.

My mother was one who never could. To her, Christmas was a sacred fixture in the Calendar, inextricably linked to the 25th of December. This was a little odd, since she was Jewish and, therefore, technically not expected to celebrate Christmas at all.

That may only further underline the tenuousness of the link between Christmas and Christianity. Today, for all but a diminishing band of true believers, it’s a feast of the family and of commerce, not a celebration of the birth of Christ. There’s no reason why members of other faiths, or none, shouldn’t celebrate it.

This, however, created difficulties. Christmas Day in England is the day when nothing happens. Public transport virtually stops and more or less everywhere is shut. My mother absolutely wanted to go for a meal with us, but there are few restaurants open and the ones that are either offer a special Christmas meal at an eye-wateringly special price, or they’re indifferent places hoping to cash in on the general absence of anywhere to eat out.

Once we ate in a Turkish restaurant opposite the Synagogue. Run by Muslims, it was ironic to see it fill up quickly with Jews, all known to my mother. The spectacle of Jews being served by Muslims on the day of a great Christian festival certainly tickled my sense of irony, which went some way towards making up for the mediocrity of the food.

On another couple of occasions, we went to a Thai restaurant near her home, where the food was frankly even worse than in the Turkish place. It really only had geographic convenience going for it. Our first attempt to eat there was a fiasco, because my mother told us that lunch was being served after 3:00. It was only when we showed up that we discovered that the correct information was that they were serving until 3:00. So we missed out on food altogether.

I could never persuade my mother to have our Christmas meal on the 24th, French style, when there would have been a huge range of restaurants to choose from. It had to be the 25th. To be fair, I suppose she knew that all around her people would be celebrating with family on that day, and she’d have felt miserably lonely if she hadn’t. I sympathise and I’m happy we helped her avoid that fate. But it was exasperating to go out on the hunt, each year, for a restaurant that could accommodate us, serve us a reasonable meal and not require us to take out a new mortgage on our house. A hunt that failed every time.

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. Even so, I often miss the things we did together. When I watch something good on TV, I want to tell her about it. When the Labour Party does something avoidable and self-destructive, I want to bemoan our fate with her. When the kids do something particularly admirable, I want to share the pleasure with her. But the Christmas day meal?

Not so much.

Ah, the tradition. The joy. The terrible food.
Have a great Christmas, everyone. Christian or not

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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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.

A neat circularity: saying farewell to my mother on her birthday

On Tuesday 5 June, my mother and I did something that had become a custom we both enjoyed. We went for lunch in her favourite Oxford restaurant.

She wasn’t well, but then she hadn’t been well or even pain-free for some decades. So I stopped outside the restaurant and helped her out of the car. But from there she walked to the door, her hand on my arm but nonetheless under her own power.

At lunch, we chatted about many things. The forthcoming visit of Donald Trump to the UK. The sad prospects of Brexit. A few questions of history – her lifelong fascination. I asked her about a biography of the Duke of Wellington I was about to read: she told me she rated the author and had enjoyed that particular biography.

There were occasional gaps. It is part of family lore that her father’s birthday wasn’t the day he was born. His parents, Russian Jewish immigrants unfamiliar with the process, hadn’t registered the birth on time and gave a later date. The tale she remembered, though she couldn’t recall either the actual or the official birthday. All in all, it was a pleasant moment. What I didn’t know was that it would be the last such conversation we would have and the last lunch we’d go out to together.

Some months ago my mother’s much-loved handbag had given up the ghost. That at least solved the issue of what we would buy her for next birthday on 11 July, her 94th. I had intended to bring pictures of the various bags from which she could choose to our lunch, but had forgotten. ‘Next time,’ I thought, not realising that there would be no next time.

Just two days later, we had a message from a friend to say that she seemed to be deteriorating badly and appeared confused. And on the Friday, another friend who’d been helping her for years, took her out for her last shopping trip – the last act of her semi-independent living. Our friend phoned after that excursion to tell us it was time to come over to see her.

Well, we didn’t go at once. It was perhaps difficult for us to grasp how unwell she was becoming. But later in the evening it became inescapable. She’d fallen and an ambulance was in attendance. The paramedics took her into hospital and we travelled over to see her in her ward.

Over the next few days, she seemed to make some improvement. She was sent to an intermediate care facility. We visited her there and took her out for a stroll around the garden in a wheelchair. She did indeed seem to be improving, with odd flashes of her sometimes fiery character from the past.

‘Residents aren’t allowed to eat their lunch in the garden,’ a care assistant told us.

‘What utter rubbish,’ my mother told us, in what was very much her style.

My mother on her last garden stroll
Enjoying the company of Toffee the toy poodle 

The improvement, though, was temporary. She was back in hospital within two days, and another attempt to send her back to the intermediate care facility lasted barely twenty-four hours. On the longest day of the year, she went back to hospital finally and definitively.

We saw her on a memorable Saturday with one of our sons and his fiancée. She was delighted, full of cordiality, smiling and wishing them well on their forthcoming marriage, though only in broken sentences and a tone barely above a whisper. The couple gave her an invitation to the wedding, though no one expected she’d attend, but the gesture seemed to please her too.

Two days later, my brother and I visited her and again her pleasure was clear.

Others came to see her. Old friends. Many members of the Oxford Jewish Community who’d taken her to their hearts and did all they could for her, including the friend who’d taken her on that last shopping trip.

But then finally she slipped into unconsciousness. My brother, who lives in Paris but spent a week in Oxford so that he could visit her regularly and we could go on holiday for a few days, had the first of the calls suggesting it was time to come in and say goodbye. I had two others after our return. Finally, my wife and I, came to stay in Oxford in our turn so we could spend more time with her.

Saying goodbye was by then little more than a figure of speech. I felt it was on the last two occasions we’d seen her, with our son and his fiancée or with my brother, that we’d said farewell. But something in there soldiered on – my mother had always been immensely strong within her ill health, and that strength kept her going.

Until the 11th of July, her 94th birthday. She’d brought her life round in full circle to her birthday. There was no handbag, sadly, but there was a quiet closure. As the evening drew in, she peacefully slipped away. She had been provided with astoundingly good, profoundly gentle, humane care, so that at her end she was painless for the first time for many years.

That was precisely as she would have wanted it.

If there was anything she dreaded, it was a terrible, slow decline in a nursing home, becoming an increasing burden on others. She was spared all that, with a final illness that lasted just over a month after her independent living ended. Far too short to be a burden, but long enough us to say our farewells.

There was a neatness to the way she went, and a circularity to her dying on her birthday which would, I suspect, have pleased her. I don’t know if she was conscious of it or did it deliberately, but it felt intentional.

It’s easy to imagine her laughing, to herself and with us, and saying ‘see – I knew how to make a good exit, didn’t I?’

Sixty years ago

The NHS at 70. And my mother at nearly 94.

The NHS celebrated its 70th birthday last week. And my mother is due to celebrate her 94th this coming week.

The two aren’t unrelated.

My mother is part of a diminishing band of people born before Britain had its National Health Service. Indeed, she played a peripheral role in its creation. She reached adulthood during the Second World War, and decided to throw her lot in with the Labour Party which, at the time, had never formed a government with a parliamentary majority.

It must have been a challenging time to be with Labour. Under the leadership of its first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, the party had entered a coalition government with the Conservatives. That action was widely perceived as a betrayal. The punishment had been dramatic, rather as with the Liberal Democrats when they betrayed their voters in the same way nearly 80 years later: Labour had been reduced to a rump in parliament.

By the time my mother became involved, it had increased its number of MPs substantially, but still had only a third the force the Conservatives could muster. And it was back in coalition again. This time, however, that step was widely seen as a proof of statesmanship, since the country was at war. Indeed, the Labour leader Clement Attlee had played a significant role in making sure that the Conservatives would have to select Churchill, and not one of the appeasers of Hitler, to lead any government he would join.

My mother, as I mentioned recently, took a job as secretary to a Labour MP and the reformist Fabian Society. That too was was a challenge: in those pre-#MeToo days, young women were simply warned to be careful with some of their bosses, who were of course almost exclusively men. 

‘Careful, that one has wandering hands,’ they’d be told.

The onus would be on the women to avoid the hands, rather than on the men to withdraw them. It will probably come as no surprise that some of those who couldn’t control their urges had control of significant departments of state.

In her work, my mother wasn’t at the centre of power, but she was on the edges of that centre. She saw how Labour worked with the Conservatives towards victory in the war. And then she was actively involved in the campaign for victory in the peace. At the 1945 election Attlee’s Labour finally won a parliamentary majority, in a landslide victory over Churchill’s Conservatives.

It was that government which launched the NHS in 1948.

Health Minister Aneurin Bevan visiting a patient in Trafford, Manchester
on the first day of the NHS, 5 July 1948

Unfortunately, that’s not the only link between my mother and the health service. She has been occupying a bed in one of the great teaching hospitals of the NHS for two weeks now with no sign of her being discharged. She is unresponsive, spends most of her time asleep and, even when she does open her eyes, seems not to recognise any of us, relatives or friends, who come to visit her.

It was only three weeks ago that I had lunch with her for the last time, in her favourite Oxford restaurant. We both knew she was getting weaker, that she was spending an increasing proportion of her time asleep, that she was losing some of the acuteness of her conversation. But a real exchange was still possible: she and I talked about her favourite subject, history, and also about politics and the fact that Labour is again in a difficult state today.

Yet it was only days later that she started the precipitous decline that led to her present condition. Will she recover? Who knows. At the moment there’s little sign of it. My wife and I took our youngest son and his fiancée over to see her two weeks ago, and then she was alert enough to recognise us all and to wish the engaged couple well with their wedding, even though she was already having trouble finishing some of her sentences. I saw her again with my brother a few days later, and sentences seemed beyond her reach, though at least there was still recognition.

Today, that too has gone. I can’t help feeling that I’ve said goodbye to her already, in those earlier visits. Physically, she survives and continues to eat and drink a little, but my mother, the sharp, sometimes exasperating, but always intellectually bright woman I’ve known for 65 years, is already gone. Or at least away, with no certainty she’ll come back.

So I’m not sure whether she’ll see her 94th birthday. She may survive until it happens, but is it really a birthday if one isn’t conscious of it? All that kind of thing, I fear, is behind us.

The story is not without its more comforting side. She is in no pain. She is being looked after by a group of people, both physicians and nurses, who strike me as highly committed and professional but, above all, humane and focused on helping people. My mother has been in pain for many years; I’m glad to say that she seems now to be out of all pain and at peace.

For that I’m deeply grateful. And all the more so because at no point has anyone asked for any kind of payment for all this. The fundamental principle of the NHS, still one of the best-loved institutions in Britain, remains: as when the Attlee government founded it, the NHS prides itself on being free at the point of care. You need help? They provide it. And no one asks for a credit card first.

The great old NHS that my mother worked to make possible keeps doing what it does best: looking after patients as well and as kindly as it can. And today it’s doing it for her.

My mother in happier times with, I believe, my brother

Warm memories of hard times

It’s a pleasure to write this post in the dining room at Basel railway station in Switzerland, a setting of some historical importance for my family.

Basel station dining room: tasteful, pleasant, even luxurious
Now as it was 70 years ago

1946 was a hard year for Britain. The Second World War finished the country as a world power. By loading itself with debt and throwing all its resources into the fight, along with quite a few from its imperial possessions, the country managed to defend its home soil against Nazi Germany. It couldn’t go over to the offensive without support from the US. There was no question of its playing a significant role in the Pacific Theatre. That lack of strength and its crippling debts would spell the end of the empire in the first couple of decades after the war, a time when the country would also awaken to a sense that it should perhaps be less concerned with playing the world power, and focus instead on internal justice and opportunity.

That’s a lesson the nation could do well to learn again, in the face of the great power nostalgia that expressed itself in the Brexit vote. Why, Prime Minister Theresa May even suggests Britain can be a truly global player, a notion which would be amusingly quaint if it weren’t also a toxic delusion.

One of the organisations that was trying to improve internal conditions back in 1946, was the Fabian Society, one of the founding organisations of the British Labour Party.

“You didn’t work for the Fabian Society,” says my mother, who did, “if you wanted to make money. You did it for the principle.”

Bankrupt Britain was living with rationing. You could go abroad, but couldn’t take more than £10 with you. That’s the equivalent of nearly £400 today, hardly a princely sum – a yearly membership at Trump’s golf club in Scotland costs six times more. On a Fabian Society salary, however, even scraping together £10 wasn’t easy. To enjoy a foreign holiday, only the second in her life – the first had been nineteen years earlier, when she was three – my mother had to find an inexpensive option.

Fortunately, she had a German friend also working for the Fabians. The friend’s mother had managed to get out of Germany with her daughter during the Nazi period, after having spent some time producing clandestine opposition publications. The daughter reckoned she could sleep anywhere, having got used to being put to bed in cellars with the press clattering in the background.

Her friend told my mother about an organisation that was helping Germans trying to put themselves back together after the Hitler regime – Jews in some cases, but generally any Socialists, Communists, or others who’d opposed the Nazis and had suffered mental or physical injuries from which they needed to recover. The organisation had an Alpine chalet in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking Swiss canton. Whenever there were spare places, they could be made available to Fabians who wanted a holiday at reasonable cost.

It turned out to be one of my mother’s best holidays, one she remembers with pleasure and in detail seventy years on.

One of the key moments came after an overnight train journey down to Basel, her first stop in Switzerland. While they waited for the train out, they repaired to the station dining room for breakfast. Where, to use an anachronistic expression, they had their minds blown.

“The piles of fine white bread!” she tells me, “the heaps of butter! The jam! The coffee with creamy milk swimming in it!”

Bankrupt Britain, cold and with food rationed, could offer nothing to rival it. This, for the generation whose youth had been broken by the war, was luxury.

No wonder she remembers it so fondly to this day. So should we, who take such riches for granted. To say nothing of the international collaboration that guarantees the peace on which they rest.