The Spanish fighters who changed my views

After four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was finally liberated by Allied armies on 24 August 1944. Units of the mythic French force, the ‘Deuxième DB’, the Second Armoured Division, led the way into the city. They had raced there to support the population that had risen against the occupying forces.

In the evening, the first half tracks pulled into the square outside the Paris town hall. As in all such units, the vehicles had all been given names by their crews, names that were painted on their sides:

Gudalajara

Brunete

Ebro

Santander

Teruel

If you’re thinking “those don’t sound like French names”, you’d be right. They were great battles of the Spanish Civil War. And the language the crews were talking was Spanish.

These were the men of the ‘Nueve’ (‘nine’ in Spanish), the ninth company of the Deuxième DB, almost exclusively Spanish. Their commander, the French Captain Raymond Dronne, wrote of them later:

The Spaniards fought remarkably. Commanding them is a delicate matter but they have enormous courage and experience of combat.

That ‘delicate’ is a glorious piece of French understatement. It chimes with what Dronne was told when he was first given command:

Everyone’s afraid of them. They’re good soldiers. They won’t give you any problems.

The halftrack Guernica of the Nueve in Paris in 1944

Moving to a new country certainly gives you a new perspective on many things you thought you knew.

For instance, I’ve had to rethink some of the most elementary facts I felt I knew about the Second World War. I’ve long accepted that it didn’t start on 1 September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, as is generally taught in schools. The first shots were fired on 19 September 1931, when Imperial Japanese forces invaded the Chinese territory of Manchuria.

OK, you might think, but that was the Pacific Theatre. In the European theatre, the war started in September 1939, surely? Well, that too is an idea I’ve had to revise, under the gentle guidance of Marisa, a friend we’ve met out here in Spain, who’s frighteningly well-informed on history.

My view was always that the Spanish Civil War, which started in July 1936, was a sort of preamble to the World War. In reality, however, with the Soviet Union supporting the Spanish Republic, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the military uprising that brought Franco to power, it offered a first opportunity for three of the major powers of the coming World War to test each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, indeed, to expose some of their forces to combat.

That feels more like the first Act of the wider war rather than merely a preamble to it.

In any case, it wasn’t just the Germans and Italians, or to a smaller extent the Russians, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War with trained and battle-hardened veterans ready for the next stage of the conflict. There was also quite a lot of the Spanish Republican army. The Republic itself had been defeated and overthrown, but many of the soldiers survived.

Large numbers joined the flood of over 450,000 refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. They rightly feared the retaliation that Franco’s victorious regime would exact from them if they were caught. The regime proved they were right by what it did to those it did in fact catch.

In France conditions were, however, not particularly better. They were held in what the French called “internment camps”, but the Spanish, especially the ones who were there, unequivocally referred to as “concentration camps”. Lack of food, poor sanitation and inadequate housing led to huge numbers of deaths. This was 1939, after all, when France and Britain still hoped that their policy of appeasing Hitler might avoid war. That desire, combined with the xenophobia and right-wing beliefs of a significant current amongst Frenchmen, conspired to ensure the refugees were shockingly badly treated.

Offered the option of returning home, about 100,000 chose to go, mostly women and children. Few of the combatants, understandably, took up that offer, however. Some paraded in front of French officers hoping to be taken into the army, but the generals, who were to be humiliatingly defeated the following year, decided they didn’t need these experienced troops whose political loyalties they weren’t sure of (they were generally left wing, some extremely).

Some 10,000, however, were recruited into the Foreign Legion. And, once war with Germany broke out, others were taken into ‘Foreign Labour Companies’ who were set to work on the Maginot line, the great string of bunkers and fortresses along the border with Germany. Life there was certainly preferable to the camps, though in the end it worked out little better. After defeating France, the Nazi authorities captured many of the Spanish workers. Refusing to treat them as prisoners of war, and working with the Franco government’s agreement, they transferred them to concentration camps. Over 7000 were sent to the Mauthausen camp and fewer than 2500 were released at the end of the war.

Chillingly, some of the survivors later said that their experience in the French camps helped them to prepare for the Nazi ones.

Those who were able to avoid capture, joined the resistance. And among those who had taken part in the fighting, many decided to carry on the battle. One Spaniard in the Foreign Legion, Manuel Fernandez, described his feelings on the defeat of France to a 2017 television documentary:

“It was the greatest disappointment of my life. There were moments when I cried like a child. I’d fled Spain and here I was going to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

One answer was to join General de Gaulle who was setting up Free French forces in London. Of his initial 2000 men, 300 were Spanish.

Alternatively, those who were in the Foreign Legion could cross the Mediterranean with their units. In North Africa, however, they were under the orders of the government in Vichy, a puppet regime of the Nazis, set up after the defeat of France. There they were left to wonder how they’d managed to escape Franco, only to find themselves in a military unit whose orders were dictated by a government collaborating with Franco’s most powerful ally, Hitler.

It would take over two years. Though then things would change dramatically.

But more of that in another post. Just click here...

The joy of the self-deprecating smile

There’s something exceptionally attractive about self-deprecating humour.

That’s true even if we sense that behind it is something of a disguised boast – you know, “look at how self-deprecating I can be”. Did you see the pictures of Boris Johnson hanging from a zip wire? What might have been seen as a PR disaster was something he worked for all it was worth. “Look what fun I am,” he seemed to be saying, “happy even if I look the buffoon. I’m obviously the kind of fine fellow you want running the country, because someone you can share a laugh with is bound to be on your side.”

Look what fun!

Despite such self-serving examples, self-deprecation remains welcome. That’s particularly so in a world dominated by figures that take themselves far too damned seriously and who are far too damned inclined, with little justification, to think themselves good at what they do.

Did that immediately bring to your mind an image of the present tenant of the White House? It should have.

A few weeks ago, Trump was swift to claim success for a visit he made to the Centers for Disease Control, as part of his then non-campaign against Coronavirus:

“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Trump fascinating his hosts at the CDC with his scientific insights

While I think it would have been great if he’d done pretty well anything rather than run for President, I’m far from convinced that medical or scientific research would have suited him. Let’s not forget that this was the man who thought that Coronavirus was like the flu, and now thinks he’d be doing well if he kept US deaths to within 100,000.

As for his ‘natural ability’, it clearly doesn’t extend to being able to laugh at himself. He leaves it to the rest of us to laugh at him, although our laughter’s never wholehearted – we laugh more at how bad the joke is than at the joke itself.

Fortunately, there are examples of Americans who are, or were, much better able to laugh at themselves.

William Seward

William Henry Seward was a remarkable American politician from the nineteenth century, a rival for the presidency to Abraham Lincoln though he ended up serving him, with outstanding loyalty and ability, as Secretary of State. As a young man, he was less than effective as a public speaker, something he needed to correct, not only for his later career in politics but even for his first choice of profession, as a lawyer.

This was brought home to him painfully when he joined a group of trainee lawyers in New York that would conduct mock trials in front an audience who would evaluate their performances. Time and again, despite all the effort he put into writing his quite brilliant briefs, he would find himself winning less applause than one of his friends who seemed able to outperform him with ease.

The friend pointed out that it was nothing to do with what Seward said, and all about how he said it. He suggested they swap briefs for the next competition, which they duly did.

Seward delivered his friend’s argument with all the skill he could muster, to only mediocre results. Then his friend delivered Seward’s own argument, and according to Seward himself, the applause could have been heard all the way down Broadway.

A useful lesson. And a pleasure to me that it was Seward himself who later had fun retelling the story.

It reminded me of an anecdote of my mother’s.

She found the atmosphere in Britain in 1940 deeply depressing. Life was becoming highly restricted, a little like today with Coronavirus. After the surrender of France and with Hitler apparently unstoppable on the Continent, the future looked bleak for the country. It was badly in need of something to raise its spirits.

In these circumstances, the writer, singer and actor Noel Coward stepped forward. He persuaded a group of friends to come together to put on a variety show at ‘Underneath the Arches’, a club that was, indeed, underneath the arches behind Charing Cross Station. I went there myself a few years back and, for all I know, it’s still there today.

Noel Coward.
Not always the best at delivering the great songs he wrote

For that show, Coward wrote all the songs but had them all performed by his friends, except or one, which he did himself. To his disappointment, while all the others were well received by audiences, his and only his song flopped night after night. Until he developed a cough and sore throat and had to ask someone else to step in for him.

Yes, you guessed it. His replacement sang the same song to huge success.

Noel Coward decided that his rather special style of singing wasn’t as widely appreciated as he had hoped. It was better for him to write the songs than perform them. A bitter lesson but a useful one, and a story he retold in his autobiography.

Self-deprecation at its best. The genuine kind. Such a refreshing change.

A detail underlining tragedy. But with a smile

It’s going to take me months, if not years, to finish going through my late parents’ papers. But however long the task may be, it’s alleviated by some of the findings I make. Sometimes, they’re amusing, sometimes more serious, and the best are both.

As I’ve mentioned before, my father, Leonard, served in the Royal Air Force in World War 2. One trace of this service that I recently discovered in his papers was a card prepared to help airmen escape capture if they were shot down over Nazi-occupied territory and, somehow, managed to survive.

Airmen, phrases for the escape of,

It was marked ‘Not to be Produced in Public’. Clearly, this was sensitive material. Someone had decided that it was important for the general public in Britain not to know that the German for “I am in a hurry” could be “Ich habe es eilig”.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a situation in which a British airman would have used that expression. Faced with a platoon of German soldiers, he would have explained “I’d love to stay and chat but…” and pulling out his escape card, added “ich habe es eilig”. I suspect one of his captors might have replied, “oh, don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of time. You’re our guest now.”

Perhaps the top levels of the RAF thought that it would be harmful to civilian morale to know that their airmen might ever find themselves in such a situation in the first place. Presumably, they assumed that Brits were too short of imagination to guess that RAF crews faced any risk of being shot down or captured. Seeing the escape card might have created panic among them.

That strikes me as pretty farfetched. It would be like believing that a majority of British voters could be fooled by shifty politicians into swallowing the patently preposterous proposition that they might be better off outside the European Union. Can you imagine that ever happening?

I also liked the fact that the card provides translations for the expression “Will you please get me a third class ticket to…” which the RAF rendered in French as “Voulez-vous me prendre un billet de troisième classe pour… s’il vous plait”

Get out of Nazi Europe free card

You’ve got to admire the thriftiness of the air force, haven’t you? Even for an airman on the run from Nazi forces, their men were expected to travel economically. I can just picture an airmen who somehow managed to dodge the German troops across half of Europe and then smuggle himself across the Channel to England being hauled in for a grilling by an irate squadron leader in Finance.

“What’s this in your expenses claim? You travelled from Düsseldorf to Brussels in second class? You know the rules. Only third-class travel’s authorised. You’ll have to pay the balance out of your own pocket, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps the US air force was more generous. Maybe they were taught to ask for first-class tickets for officers and second-class tickets for the others.

Still, the card doesn’t only evoke amusement. After all, the mere fact that it was produced underlines the danger airmen faced. Within Bomber Command, for instance, for every 100 who served, 45 were killed, 6 were seriously wounded and 8 were captured. Only 41 out of every 100 escaped any of those fates.

Leonard was among those shot down. But that happened in September 1944, when Allied forces already controlled a great part of Western Europe. So when his plane was hit, on the way back from dropping supplies to the paratroops caught at Arnhem in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden (made all the more infamous by the film A Bridge Too Far), the pilot was able to keep it in the air until well behind the Allied lines. As a result, instead of being captured they were simply evacuated to Brussels.

There Leonard had a wonderful time. He had no need of the silly phrase card. He’d spent his childhood in the city and spoke a beautiful, fluent French. Fortunately, the RAF had had the foresight to provide airmen not just with useless lists of phrases but also with escape currency to spend if they were shot down (presumably so they could buy third-class rail tickets). Leonard enjoyed himself immensely spending his escape money in the city of his childhood, before being shipped back to England and the rest of the war.

Ah, well. Even when I try to get serious about my father’s war, I notice the story ends up light-hearted. I think that was something of a hallmark of that generation. They’d seen things that weren’t that edifying and saw no benefit in reliving the horror. Instead, they focused on the things that made them laugh, and finished conversations about the war on a smile.

Which strikes me as a good note on which to end this blog post too.

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

The other Grandfather

As I’ve said before, one of my grandfathers was Nat Bannister, a Jew, a lithographer, and a radical at least in his early days. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison rather than fight in the First World War.

And then there was my other grandfather. He was far more conventional and definitely not Jewish. I knew him less well, but that makes tracking him down all the more interesting.

He was the son of Mary (or possibly Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson. Since there's a lot of name-sharing to come, let me make it clear at once that Alfred (without a ‘Leonard’ to his name) was my great-grandfather, my father’s paternal grandfather. I think I would have liked him. The photo I have of him shows him with a winning smile, I find, and though I know this was a studio portrait, I like to think it reveals something of the man within.

Mary (or Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson
My great-grandmother and great-grandfather

My great-grandfather had an ingenious idea. Britain, when he was a young man, prohibited the importation of live cattle. So Alfred moved to Brussels. He imported cattle from Argentina to Belgium, had them slaughtered there and then re-exported the carcasses for the British butcher’s trade. He did well at it until, sadly, the law in Britain changed and live cattle were allowed directly into the country.

It’s always dangerous to build a business on the current state of any law. It can be changed so easily…

Alfred died in 1903, before he’d even reached the age of 40. That left his elder son, Leonard Alfred, then just 15, as head of the family, still living in Brussels. A huge burden for a mere boy to take on, especially as his mother, grief-stricken, was unable to help.

He rose to the task and saw to the education of his three surviving siblings (one brother had died at age eight, some five years earlier). Though he didn’t believe in too much education, especially for women: his sister Irene told me many years later that she had hoped to go to university, but he had peremptorily forbidden her doing so. A university education? Unnecessary for a woman, he told her.

‘His decisions were final,’ she explained. ‘There was no appeal.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Artillery
and his sister Irene Beeson, cheated of university

When grandfather Nat was in gaol for refusing to fight in the Great War, grandfather Leonard was in the Artillery, serving at the front in France. He was injured twice, once by gas. Yep. You know all the fuss our Western powers make, rightly, about the use of gas as weapons? It was, of course, our ancestors in those Western Powers who first made indiscriminate use of them in World War 1.

The second injury was from shrapnel, and he carried bits of it until his death. Surgeons decided that they couldn’t extract some fragments from his hand, so it kept slowly closing on him for the rest of his life. Keen golfer that he was, in his latter years he had to push the handle of his club into the affected hand because it could no longer open to receive it the usual way.

My father told me that Leonard Alfred’s wife came to visit him in hospital after one of his injuries. She was certain that he had lost a leg, and refused to believe him when he said he hadn’t, thinking he was merely trying to comfort her. Eventually, he had to pull the hospital bed sheets back to reveal two intact, working legs before he could convince her.

She was Eleanor Eileen, whose father was Serbian. He claimed to be a Prince related to the Serbian royal family, although most of us think he was probably a waiter who felt life might treat him better in Britain.

Leonard and Eleanor had to leave Brussels when the German Army invaded Belgium, but they were back there after the war and busied themselves raising a family of three boys and two girls. The last of the boys was called Leonard Alfred though, to distinguish him from his father, they tacked on a Malcolm as his third forename; Leonard Alfred Malcolm Beeson would eventually be my father and my brother’s.

Sadly for Leonard Alfred and his family, having had to flee Brussels once ahead of the Germans in World War 1, they had to do the same all over again in 1940, when World War 2 moved from its ‘phony war’ stage to something much hotter. So unlikely did it seem that things would turn so nasty, that Leonard had gone to England for a golfing weekend in May, only to find himself stranded there with only the clothes in his cae (and presumably his clubs) when Hitler’s troops moved in and Brussels fell again.

Eleanor Eileen Beeson
at 34 rue du Japon, Brussels in about 1936

My father had to get out with his mother on the last train before the Germans arrived. They packed as much as they could, but that wasn’t a lot. Their bags were in the taxi waiting to take them to the station for, I repeat, the last train out when my grandmother suddenly cried out for them to wait. She rushed back into the house and came out with the dustbins. Presumably, she didn’t want to find the house smelling of rubbish when they returned.

They did make it back, after the war, and there certainly wasn’t any rubbish in the house. In fact, there was nothing at all. The place had been completely looted while they were away.

My father was pleased they caught the last train.

‘The second-to-last train was strafed by German fighters,’ he told me, ‘and there were a lot of casualties on board.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Fleet Air Arm

My father never understood how this happened, but Leonard Alfred Beeson, with his artillery background, somehow managed to join the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2. That’s the air branch of the navy. He was 52 in 1940 so he was in an administrative position, but had plenty to do. When my father visited him on his air base in Scotland, he found that he’d laid out a nine-hole golf course on a patch of waste ground at the back of the aerodrome.

In their hurry to get out of the house in Brussels, one of the belongings my grandmother and my father left behind was my grandfather’s manuscript of the great book he’d written. Its subject? The solution of the ‘Jewish Problem’.

As kids, my brother and I saw little of our paternal grandparents. Certainly far less than of our maternal ones. It may be that they weren’t that interested in their grandchildren; they may have seen just as little of my cousins. But might it have been because my father had contributed to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by marrying a Jew?

Who knows? There’s certainly no way of finding out now. Leonard Alfred died in 1967, Eleanor Eileen in 1971.

All I know is that when a non-Jew, particularly in that era, proposed solutions to the ‘Jewish Problem’, they were seldom of a kind to bring much comfort to the Jews…

Still, I suppose it’s sad his book was lost, a tragedy I’m told he always felt. Sad, for him I mean. I’m not sure it was such a loss for the rest of us.

LAM Beeson, my father, with his mother Eleanor and his father LA Beeson
The warrior torch handed on a generation.
By sheer good luck it didn’t reach me

Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

War record

Flying log entries

20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.

Those terse words are a flying log entry by the man, then 23 and a navigator in the Royal Air Force, who would later become my father.

It took a while for my father to tell us about his eighteenth mission. Perhaps at first he felt we were too young. Perhaps it took time before he could talk about it in a matter-of-fact way, even make light of it. But eventually he did.

20 September was the fourth day of the disastrous military enterprise known as Operation Market Garden, a fictionalised version of which appeared in the film A Bridge Too Far. The brainchild of British Field Marshall Montgomery, its aim was to drop paratroops at three points the furthest of which would be at Arnhem with its bridge across the Rhine. Seizing that bridge would open the road into Germany for Allied forces.

The success of the mission depended on ground forces advancing at speed towards the three airborne drops. Unfortunately, planners had seriously underestimated the strength of German forces near Arnhem, and hopelessly overestimated the quality of the road the army would have to move along to relieve the paratroops.

Ultimately, the British airborne troops would suffer terrible losses and few of the survivors would escape capture.

My father was serving with 196 squadron of the RAF, which specialised in airborne troop operations. He was already out on the first day, 17 September:

No. 16. Operation Holland: 1 Horsa Glider: Flak damage

The gliders the squadron was towing, he told me, were carrying anti-tank shells.

‘Unfused?’ he asked a glider pilot.

‘Oh, no, there’s no time to fuse them on the ground. We carry them fused.’

It gave my father great respect for the glider pilots to learn that. One bullet in their load would precipitate a massive explosion, that would certainly kill the pilot. It might, indeed, do no good at all to the towing plane too.

As the log entry shows, my father’s plane was hit by flak – anti-aircraft fire – even on that first mission, but not so seriously as to cause serious damage. He was out on the second day too and suffered no damage. It was beginning to feel like an easy run. The squadron had received a new draft of ground engineers, and a bunch of them asked to come out with the planes since it was all proving so easy. That was strictly against regulations, but they flew out anyway – and very few of them came back.

Then came day 3. The 20th of September.

It was on the return flight that my father’s plane flew over a hospital, clearly marked with red crosses. He saw a skylight begin to open in the roof.

‘Oh, oh,’ he thought, ‘that doesn’t look good.’

A few seconds later anti-aircraft shells were flying towards them. He watched as they began to punch holes in a wing, each hit a little closer to the fuselage where he and the rest of the crew were sitting. They were able to fly out of range before any fatal damage was done to them, but the engines then began to fail, one by one. Once three had stopped and they were down to one, the pilot announced that they weren’t going to get home and that he was going to crash land instead.

The RAF didn’t have enough flying crew, so many had to play more than one role. My father, as well as his principal role as navigator was technically co-pilot as well. He asked the pilot whether he’d like him in the co-pilot’s seat to help with the landing, but the pilot said he could manage and asked him to go back and sit with the crew.

They sat in the main body of the plane, their backs against the sides, their feet braced against each other’s.

The pilot landed in a field, without the undercarriage down. The plane skidded across the rough ground and the stress broke the fuselage open, so stones and dust and bits of vegetation showered the men inside.

Finally, the plane came to a halt and my father went forward to see how the pilot was doing. He found him unhurt, but he plane had hit a tree at the end of its wild rid, and the trunk had cut the co-pilot’s seat in two. Had the pilot accepted my father’s offer of help, he would certainly have been killed and I would not now be writing this account.

‘Crash landed Alost Belgium’ the log book reads. Alost was well behind the Allied lines, so there was no risk of being captured by German forces. Instead, a British jeep turned up soon after to investigate the crash, and the crew was shipped off to hospital in Brussels.

They’d all survived. All but one was unhurt. ‘B/A wounded’ my father recorded in his log book. The reality was rather starker than that.

During the time the plane had been losing power and altitude, the pilot asked my father to go forward to the gondola where the bomb aimer, who doubled as the forward gunner, lay during missions. A shell had exploded near his position and blown him, from his prone position, to sitting upright against the steps that led into the gondola. His head was a mass of blood.

My father sat on the top steps with the injured man’s head between his knees. British aircrew wore leather helmets which could be peeled off. My father started on the grisly task.

‘I froze at one point. I was seized by an irrational fear that if I got his helmet off, his head would fall apart.’

It didn’t. But the bomb aimer eventually lost his sight.

A young airman in the making

On 20 September 1944, my father had been 23 for just five days. The bomb aimer was probably about the same age, perhaps even younger. The loss of his sight, and the threat to the lives of the entire crew, was caused by fire from a gun doubtless manned by men as young as they were.

No wonder European countries decided after the war that it was time to set up a union that might prevent young people ever being called to do that to each other again.

Strange to think that so much is hiding behind the laconic message: ‘20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.’

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.

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.