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?

Parting of the ways with my oldest friend

The one benefit of a boarding school, from a kid’s point of view, is that you’re with your friends all the time. They’re within walking distance. There’s none of that phoning their parents to check whether they can come over and establishing when is convenient for both families. You just pop round, convenient or not.

The first step, of course, is to make some friends at the school.

Fortunately, when I showed up at the boarding school I attended – Dartington, now sadly closed – I found myself quickly thrown into the company of one boy of my age. In fact, he was a couple of months younger, which was a shock to me: I was used to being the youngest in my group. He also had a name that struck me as weirdly spelled: Alasdhair (pronounced Alastair).

We had a number of interests as well as our relatively young age in common. We both liked languages, for instance, and we shared an interest, passing as it turned out, in physics. However, it was neither of those things that first formed a bond between us.

One of my earliest memories of Alasdhair was cycling with him to a poetically named village near the school, Landscove. Isn’t that evocative? Coves are things you get on the coast. What’s one like when it’s inland?

It turns out, nothing special. Landscove is in Devon which is known for its hills. That made it a struggle to get there on our bikes. It was little reward for the effort to discover that it was a pretty little village but with nothing to distinguish it from any of the others around.

Alasdhair was fortunate in having his mother, Barbara, and sister, the equally strangely-spelled Shellagh (pronounced Sheila), living at the school. Shellagh and Barbara were as charming and fun as Alasdhair and it was balm to my soul to be adopted by them. They offered me a welcome which I’m sure I outstayed by repeatedly visiting their flat in the evenings to enjoy the atmosphere of family life while away from mine.

But inevitably I spent most time with Alasdhair himself. We listened to comedy radio programmes, in particular I’m sorry I’ll read that again, featuring the team that went on to launch Monty Python along with the one that launched another TV programme, The Goodies. We cultivated our taste for science too, notably by stealing rather a lot of wire at one point, laying it around the roofs of the school and using it to run an illicit radio station. Fortunately, we were caught before we ran out of enthusiasm for becoming DJs.

We also tried fermenting potato juice and then breaking into the chemistry lab where we tried to distil the product into vodka. Our pains yielded a lot of broken lab equipment and a tasteless, murky liquid with absolutely no intoxicating effect.

What else did we do? We walked on Dartmoor until our feet felt like lead. We bored our contemporaries by talking about relativity theory without understanding it. We maintained a friendly rivalry over linguistic ability, which I probably edged over him in French, but he won hands down overall by also learning German.

I don’t want to give the impression that we lived in each other’s pockets, because we certainly didn’t. We each had our own circle of friends, his significantly larger than mine; our orbits simply intersected more often than most and we had too much in common not to keep gravitating towards each other.

After school, we kept up our bond by making for London to study Physics. We both got involved with the radical left and took our eyes off the study ball with the result that neither of us covered ourselves in academic glory, though he got closer to it than I did. We lived with some other friends in glorious squalor, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of the unfashionable east of the city. We even took in a group of young West Indians we met locally, which led to some interesting and colourful experiences, not always with the most successful of outcomes.

After college, our ways parted, as he made for the States and I stayed in Europe. Even so, we spoke or wrote from time to time and met occasionally. We went skiing together, with the woman, Danielle, who became my wife and another who didn’t become his, and we spent time together in Danielle’s home region of Alsace, enjoying the life, the food and the drink of the three countries that join there, France, Germany and Switzerland.

We met in England too. On one occasion he, his first wife and I met in Oxford for a picnic. We started by shopping for delicacies – smoked salmon and smoked ham, melon, salads, French bread, white wine – after which we faced a characteristically English mishap, when the heavens opened and threw down a deluge which looked apt to drown us.

Fortunately, we found a gloriously English solution. In South Parks Road there is a cricket ground with a graceful wooden pavilion and, in those days, the grounds weren’t fenced off from the road. We repaired (quickly) to the terrace of the pavilion and found all we needed: a table and benches under shelter. The picnic was all the more memorable for taking place within a metre or two of dense downpour from which we were fully protected.

In later years, I was sorry to hear that his marriage had ended, but delighted by the pride he took in his children’s progress and the joy that gave him. I was pleased too by his second marriage, to Becky Villarreal, an event I know brought him solace in what turned out to be the last few months of his life.

For he remarried not long after learning that he was suffering from stage 4 cancer, the disease that had much earlier killed his mother. Cancer has no stage 5, unless we use that term for death. Even so, his doctors held out a meagre hope of giving him another year or two of life.

It really was a meagre hope and on 4 November, it ran out.

Alasdhair Campbell, 1953-2016
in Dartington Hall Gardens, one of his favourite places

Of all friends with whom I still maintained contact, Alasdhair was the one I’d known well longest. Though the contact was more tenuous in later years, it had never been broken; but because it was tenuous, its ending feels all the more unreal. I certainly haven’t accepted it yet, and still expect to write to him or hear from him at any time.

It’s a particularly strong feeling when I visit Oxford, as I still do frequently, and see the cricket ground and its pavilion. That leaves me smiling with pleasure at the memory of our picnic and ruefully at the fence that prevents any repetition of it. I feel it too whenever I travel by air, as it reminds me of the many long journeys Alasdhair used to take for work and which he would commentate on facebook. Indeed, it is on a plane that I’m writing this testimonial now.

Odd that he’s not around any more. Terribly unfair. And poignantly sad.

A funny way to celebrate Christmas. Or perhaps not? Plus: a Christian story

Merry Christmas to you all.

We’ve just got back from Oxford, where we had Christmas lunch with my mother and brother. Not at home, you understand: at ninety my mother rightly feels she can put behind her all the labour and heartache of the preparation of a massive lunch.

No, we went to a restaurant that proudly proclaims itself to be open every day of the year. Having spent a long time looking, let me assure you there aren’t many places that can say the same.

Al-Shami: open 365 days
Except in leap years

Al-Shami is a Lebanese place. It’s sat right opposite the Oxford Synagogue. Indeed, it was members of the Jewish community, in which my mother has been active these last few years, who recommended it to us. They live, it seems, by their recommendations because, as lunch rolled on, more and more members of the community turned up for their own lunches.

So we enjoyed Tabbouleh and Sujuq, Shawarma Lahme and Daoud Basha, without necessarily knowing what they were, and capped it all off with one of those dishes which seem to be mostly cream, at the mere sight of which one’s tongue salivates and one’s arteries fur. All with a splendid view of the Synagogue across the street and the chatter of cheerful Jewish voices all around.

It struck me as perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate Christmas. But then again: Levantine cooking while surrounded by Jews? Perhaps that’s rather more appropriate a way to mark the birth of Jesus than what we generally do.

The Oxford Synagogue, opposite Al-Shami
An appropriate view on a day dedicated to a Nazarene Rabbi?

Postscript: Just to mark the season – a story to illustrate the Christian message at its best (hope you’re listening David Cameron, with Christian values always in your mouth, never in your deeds).

This story was told us by friends from Dublin, dating back to the time they still lived two or three decades ago.

A friend of theirs was in deep trouble. Recently abandoned by her husband, she’d been left with two kids and no means to finance her mortgage, on which she was now three or four months in arrears and with the bank beginning to threaten foreclosure.

There was a knock on her door and her heart sank still further when she realised she was being visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses. They began to talk to her about their beliefs, and hers, until one of them suddenly interrupted the flow.

“You seem very unhappy,” he said.

“I have my problems,” she curtly replied.

“Can we come in, have a cup of tea, and talk about them?” 

She let them in and made the tea. Then, to her surprise, she found herself unburdening herself of all her problems, to these two complete strangers. They listened politely without making any judgement or offering any advice. They even asked the extent of her arrears and, again to her surprise, she told them.

They left soon after but were back on her doorstep the following day. She let them in and made tea again.

“We’ve brought this for you,” one of them said.

“This” was a cheque. For the full amount of the mortgage arrears.

Her first reaction was overwhelming relief. Out of nowhere had come a solution to her immediate problems. With that money, she could rise above her difficulties, rebuild energy and morale, and work on a future for herself and her kids – as, indeed, she later did.

But then a terrible thought occurred to her. What would they expect in return?

“I don’t plan to convert, you know,” she said, “I’m not attracted by your movement. Why, I don’t even like having Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep.”

“You’ll never see us again,” they told her.

And she never did.

Dessert at Al-Shami
Great substitute for Christmas Pudding
Less appreciated by my vascular system

Oxford: a different take on time and a surprising profession

Language is such a rich tool. It allows us to say so many things we mean. And so many things we don’t mean at all.

Our visit to Oxford yesterday added two more examples to my collection of fine signs to amuse the palette of the connoisseur.

Merton College is one of the world’s great seats of learning, so it was intriguing to see how they chose to keep their back gates clear:

So just how much time is there?

Merton’s intellectual power is such that I can’t rule out that they might have been thinking of time-dilation as expounded by Einstein, but my simpler mind is still having trouble imagining a time not covered by the 24 hours.

Tired by the intellectual strain of coping with Merton concepts, we made for a pub. But there too, Oxford being what it is, we were introduced to another interesting and unfamiliar idea.

Don't they get emotionally involved with pies they hand rear?

What kind of training do you need to learn to rear pork pies? And how dangerous is it to the hands? When the pies are young and lively, do they ever nip a finger?