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

Freedom or rootlessness

It was a strange feeling setting the address for my mother’s flat into my car’s GPS for the last time. Even stranger turning up there and seeing it completely bare, just a space to be filled, without any of the jumble that had previously given it character and expressed her own.

They were ambivalent feelings. Once you’ve travelled the same route two or three hundred times, it’s a relief to know you won’t have to do it again. But the sense of relief is tinged by the sadness of the end of an era, when the one person you knew before you were even born has gone for good.

Good to be spared the drive. But I’ll miss the lunches

The death of my mother cut one of only two ties that kept me in Britain. My wife Danielle and I had decided we would, in time, move to Spain for her retirement and the rest of my working life – my job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe and, fortunately, I took the opportunity to take French nationality fifteen years ago, as an insurance policy against Brexit, which already seemed likely all that time ago.

The other tie to Britain was Danielle’s job. By coincidence, she was caught shortly after my mother’s death by the latest wave of redundancies in her company.

It wasn’t a fate unique to herself. A few dozen of her colleagues are also going, and two other companies on her business estate are laying off, while a fourth, from Germany, is moving its entire operation back home. Brexiters are always telling me that leaving the EU would free Britain to forge a powerful new presence on the world stage. If that’s so, it seems that we’re moving a long way back to get a runup to that seductive leap forward.

And that’s before Brexit has even happened.

With Danielle’s redundancy, the last constraint on our leaving has been removed. We’re free now, free to enjoy that freedom of movement that the EU guarantees and Britain, anxious to exclude immigrants, has rejected. Freedom feels good.

But the other side of the coin is a sense of rootlessness. For all its insularity and inclination to look backwards at a distant past that never happened, I liked my country. While my mother was alive, I had family here. While Danielle had her job, we both had livings here. Before Brexit, it kept its xenophobes in check.

Now those factors that formed something of an anchor have gone. Of course, the important thing with an anchor is not simply to drag it and end up adrift in increasingly rough seas. As we prepare for Spain, I like to think that instead we’ve deliberately hauled our anchor up, to set a new and more hopeful course.

After all, Spain is currently showing a much firmer attachment to liberal values than Britain. Spain is taking in migrants rather than leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean. Spain recently brought down an incompetent Conservative government to replace it with a Centre-Left one that might do rather better. A course that leads there strikes me as a good one to follow.

Our first step on that way is to put the house on the market. That, too, is a little ironic. We spent quite a lot just a year ago to make it far more comfortable. We won’t get the money back. We just have to take comfort from our enjoyment of a more pleasant house for the best part of a year. We have a track record of doing that: we spent a small fortune doing up a flat in Germany before moving back to England.

We’re far from alone in deciding that it’s time to move. The ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs have been mushrooming all around our neighbourhood, though more especially in the streets with the cheaper housing. That’s where many immigrants from Poland or Eastern Europe live, and I wonder if it’s they who are going. After all, they can hardly feel entirely at ease in the foreigner-hostile environment Brexit has created.

'For Sale' or 'To Let' all the way down the street

So much property on the market could make selling our place more difficult. And time’s running out. With a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, I can imagine that getting out after next March will prove far more difficult still.

It’s a shame. Britain was fun when it was more open, when so many – never everyone, of course, but many all the same – revelled in its multi-culturalism. It’s sad to see it declining, Trump-like, into a state that prefers walls to bridges. Walls that too many Brits think they can hide behind to keep the world out.

The Brexit illusion from which, sadly, they’re likely to suffer a painful awakening.

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.’

Ashamed to be gay?

Henry Dundas, his long-time friend and political ally, is said to have wagered £500 that William Pitt the Younger never touched a woman.

Pitt did a great many other things. The son of the elder Pitt who had also been Prime Minister, he would be the youngest holder of that office that Britain has ever seen. He came to power at 24. Seventeen years later, when he resigned (temporarily as it turned out), he was still younger than any other British Prime Minister has been on first taking office.

Being Prime Minister was his one driving aspiration. So much so that following his return to power, he would hold it to the grave, dying in office less than two years later. He was still unbearably young, just 46.

What about that business of never touching a woman?

It had seemed at one point that he might. He drew close to the family of his friend and political ally William Eden, Baron Auckland, the nearest neighbour to the country house Pitt then had in Kent. He spent much of his time with the family and in particular in conversation with Auckland’s daughter, Eleanor Eden. The strong attachment between them became so obvious that in 1797 there was widespread talk of a marriage between the Prime Minister and Eleanor.

Eleanor Eden: disappointed
by insurmountable obstacles to her marriage

It seems he suddenly became aware of how committed he was becoming. So he wrote to explain he’d had had no intention of getting in so deep though, this being the late eighteenth century, it wasn’t to Eleanor that he wrote, but to her father.

It can hardy, I think, be necessary to say that the time I have passed among your family has led to my forming sentiments of very real attachment towards them all, and of much more than attachment towards one whom I need not name. Nor should I do justice to my own feelings, or explain myself as firmly as I think I ought to do, if I did not own that every hour of my acquaintance with the person to whom you will easily conceive I refer has served to augment and confirm that impression; in short, has convinced me that whoever may have the good fortune ever to be united to her is destined to more than his share of human happiness.

Whether, at any rate, I could have had any ground to hope that such might have been my lot, I am in no degree entitled to guess. I have to reproach myself for ever having indulged the idea on my own part as far as I have done without asking myself carefully and early enough what were the difficulties in the way of tis being realised. I have suffered myself to overlook them too long, but having now at length reflected as fully and as calmly as I am able on every circumstance that ought to come under my consideration (at least as much for her sake as for my own), I am compelled to say that I find the obstacles to it decisive and insurmountable.

Pitt never explained what the obstacles were, which strikes me as significant enough in itself. The collapse of the hopes for the match must, however, have helped Dundas win his wager, if anyone accepted it: it seems unlikely that Pitt ever did touch a woman, in the sense Dundas intended.

Curiously, one man famously did touch Pitt. William Hague has written a great biography of Pitt, proving that it’s possible to be an infuriating Tory politician (at one time leader of his party, as it happens) but be good historian and, even more important, a fine writer too. As Hague explains, a protégé of Pitt’s and future Prime Minister himself, George Canning, ‘had once even been seen to touch Pitt on the shoulder, an action unthinkable to the majority of MPs.’

Later on, Pitt played a significant role in making Canning’s marriage possible and acted as one of the witnesses to it. But, as Hague again tells us:

He seemed to behave bizarrely at Canning’s wedding on 8 July, although he should have found it a joyous occasion, having encouraged the match, bringing Canning and his bride Joan Scott together at Walmer, and giving Caning promotion [in government] so that he was better provided for. […] At the ceremony Pitt seemed too nervous to sign the register, suggesting that he was either distressed, ill, or much influenced by alcohol.

Distressed? That seems distinctly plausible. If Pitt had feelings for Canning that he couldn’t avow, helping fix up his marriage would have been an obvious stratagem. But, obvious or not, the stratagem might very well not have protected him from feelings of unbearable sorrow and disappointment when the event took place.

Hague is careful not to assert more than the record can confirm. At one point he suggests that an answer to mystery of Pitt’s behaviour may have been…

…that Pitt had homosexual leanings but suppressed any urge to act on them for the sake of his ambitions. Social attitudes were more hostile to such tendencies in the late eighteenth century than they are today, or had been only a few decades before. It is possible that the suppression of private feelings added to Pitt’s apparent aloofness and his dedication to work.

The record certainly provides no confirmation:

We have no sure evidence that Pitt was homosexual: no surviving letter or diary of any of his friends gives any hint of it, no enemy directly alleged it even after his death. Nevertheless, there was a good deal of innuendo and gossip.

Pitt was a remarkable man. In purely practical terms, he had a remarkable career and achieved far more than most politicians manage.

But isn’t it intriguing to think that behind all that success there may have lurked a tragic, unavowable and insatiated longing?

Is Labour really anti-Semitic?

There was a time when to be a British Jew was virtually tantamount to being a Labour Party supporter.

That was the case of the Jewish side of my family. My mother was an active Labourite, working as a secretary to a Labour MP during the Second World War, and true to that loyalty right up to her death at 94 two weeks ago.

Like her, I’ve never voted for any other party, and remain a member to this day.

That makes it sad to see that a breach has opened up between Jews and the Labour Party today. A personal sadness for myself. But also ultimately for the Labour Party itself.

The current conflict focuses on Labour’s refusal to adopt in its entirety the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA). Or rather, not to accept all the accompanying examples.

Three Jewish papers express their anger at Labour's stance

As it happens, the IHRA’s text is weakly drafted and open to multiple interpretations. Take this suggested example of anti-Semitism:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

The Labour leadership objects to it because they see it as limiting the freedom to criticise the state of Israel. However, I see no basis for saying it prevents anyone saying that when the Israeli government reduces the rights of its Arab citizens. Nor does it prevent anyone arguing that by doing so, the Israeli government and many citizens are displaying racist attitudes. As they are.

Indeed, it does not even prevent anyone arguing, as I do, that setting up the state of Israel was an error. It has always struck me as way for Americans and Europeans to salve their consciences over Europe’s failure to learn to iive with its Jews. In effect, we said ‘we can’t learn to live with you, so go away and set up your own country, even at the cost of the people living there today.’

Today, though, it’s far too late. The state of Israel exists and is home to about 6.5m Jews. That’s a reality with which anyone trying to argue about Middle East politics simply has to come to terms.

What is it about that example that annoys the Labour leadership? What argument do they feel it limits their right to express? Do they want to protect the freedom to argue that the Jewish population of Israel has no right to self-determination?

Let’s see where that argument would lead in practice. If that population has no right to self-determination, Israel has no right to exist. If it has no right to exist, then it’s legitimate to use force to bring it to an end. And what would happen to the Jews in the region? We would be backing a policy of ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Is that a position anyone in Labour really wants to take? I can’t imagine a more clearly anti-Semitic stance.

It makes no difference that Israel, while asserting the Jewish right to self-determination denies it to the Palestinians. The bad behaviour of the Israeli government does not justify Labour backing the use of violence against Israel’s citizens.

Another IHRA example of anti-Semitism to which Labour leaders object reads:

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Again, what right are they trying to uphold? Comparisons with the Nazis are the most facile and futile of arguments. Unless a government has deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, the comparison is false. Injustice, collective punishments or excessive force against civilians are shameful crimes that Israel has committed, but so have the US and Britain. Perhaps a parallel with them would make more sense than a comparison with the Nazis.

In any case, why would Labour pay a high political price just to allow some of its members to make so lazy and intellectually weak a case?

Because the price is high. Had Labour simply adopted the full IHRA definition and examples, it would have won itself some credit with the Jewish community. It would have undermined the opponents who are now making mileage from the accusations of anti-Semitism. Instead, they have handed their enemies a weapon they could hardly have hoped for in their wildest dreams.

There is, however, another explanation. I’m afraid things turn a bit ugly at this point.

It could be argued that this is all about too little. There are only around a quarter of a million Jews in Britain. Labour could win every single Jewish vote and fail to win an election, or it could lose every single one and still get in.

Besides, though I don’t have statistical evidence for it, my persona experience suggests that British Jews have moved to the right since my mother was young. Like many immigrant communities, they started out on the left while they were poor and oppressed. But as they became prosperous and assimilated, many drifted rightwards.

So maybe there aren’t many votes for Labour to win among the Jewish. How much do they matter to figures in the leadership who suspect them anyway, because of their sympathy for Israel?

The people who matter much more are those traditional Labour voters who, out of xenophobia and delusion that Brexit would benefit them, went over to the far right. That’s why we have the paradox of figures on the left sharing a platform with the hardest nationalists, notably veteran left winger Kate Hoey posing for photo opportunities with Nigel Farage, then leader of the crypto-fascist United Kingdom Independence Party.

After all, there are several million of those voters.

The calculus is easy to follow. On the other hand, many of us in Labour would like to see it being a little more principled than that.

A party that cosies up to the hard right but can’t will make no concessions to show some respect for Jews? That’s not the party my mother and her friends backed in the forties.

How I wish we could get that party back.

The banality of death

They tell you about death as dire but inevitable, a dread we all must face.

They tell you about death as bereavement and loss, as a pain to suffer and mourn.

They don’t tell you about death as an endless procession of bureaucratic tasks, turning a moment of sorrow into a litany of monotonous administrative chores.

Take arranging a funeral.

Is there going to be a service? If so, who will conduct it? Does the crematorium have a slot available (my mother had asked to be cremated) at the same time as the celebrant (he was about to go on leave)?

What style of coffin did we want (given that it was going to be burned…)? What colour of flowers? How should the press announcement be worded? How about the Order of Service booklet – which should contain what photos, to represent 94 years of life in just five images?

Then there’s the will. The lawyer was kind enough to phone me.

‘You need to contact your mother’s bank.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to contact the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to make arrangements for the cremation.’

‘Done.’

Have you noticed how helpful lawyers are? How they’re happy to provide all the advice you could possibly need and more? At £280 an hour, wouldn’t you be?

But the worst bit is clearing the flat. My mother was living in sheltered accommodation, in what was in effect just a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. But it never ceases to amaze me just how much someone can cram into a small space if they really set their mind to it.

Trolley load after trolley load of books went down to the charity shop. Great piles of clothes. Bits of bric-a-brac. And that’s without counting the items of furniture which the organisation that runs the place has decided to keep.

Or, come to that, the bits and pieces my brother and I simply couldn’t bring ourselves to part with. I came home with my car full. But not just of those objects – above all, what I had was boxes and boxes of photos and correspondence, not just my mother’s, but my father’s, even my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s.

Leonard, my father, amateur writer who generated another

Strangely, both my maternal grandmother and my father were keen amateur writers, as I am. I now have a box file labelled in my mother’s hand as her mother’s writings, as I have another of my father’s. My grandmother’s papers included several sealed envelopes marked ‘Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience, and read them. Your relative had a questing mind, and a certain literary facility.’

Well, I shall be the first to fulfil that wish since she died. I shall break the seals on those envelopes. That will be a time of some emotion. I’ll have a reminder that death is about loss and bereavement and not just about a banal and tedious bureaucratic process.

Sadly, before I can get around to that, I still have to get through some correspondence with the public authorities, a meeting with a lawyer at £280 an hour, to say nothing of dealing with any outstanding payments due for utilities, phones or, indeed, funeral services.

It’ll be a poignant moment when I can turn my attention to my grandmother’s writing. And my father’s. But oh, what a relief that will be.

Yetta Bannister, a while before she became my grandmother
An amateur writer in the making