by Mark Mazower
Today he went straight to the bank manager and then, based on the results of this conversation, we’ll decide what to do. The French are acting so much nobler than my compatriots. We have only a single dream now—that you get naturalized. Recent events in Russia have alienated both the socialists and the conservatives here. It is not clear where Stalin’s policy can lead and an alliance with Hitler is not out of the question. I am so afraid for our folks there …
In the end Heini managed to stay, and his father joined him in England and they moved out of Oakeshott Avenue. But the struggle was coming closer, and I can’t help noticing how when Frouma writes about Heini and the problems he faces it immediately arouses her fears for her own family. “The massacres in Moscow and Spain have alarmed us a lot,” Frouma wrote to her brother in September 1938, “and we are immersed in these concerns at the moment.” And a week or so later: “My kids are quite calm while Maxi and I are, obviously more worried.” Max did not show it directly—perhaps his chronic ill health reflected his anxiety—but Frouma did. As 1939 began, she feared waking up to the sound of German bombs, and found the Londoners’ sangfroid made her more conscious of her own unease: “[It] does not look as if a war can break out any minute. People paint houses, plant flowers and trees and think about vacations and soccer and now about the king’s trip to America.” “For now the sun is shining and airplanes are flying, but they are ours—I would like to think that this nightmare will somehow get resolved without war.”
Both Frouma and Max fretted about their relatives and urged the Toumarkines in Paris to obtain French citizenship. “We are very worried about you and Yasha,” Frouma wrote to her sister. “My God, when will your French realize that their quarrels just play into the hands of the fascists?” Despite her fears she let Dad go to Paris that August. He took his camera and this time he caught the ferry to Dieppe alone; the images in his album are of the last prewar summer: picnicking with Niura in the long grass of the Oise, fishing from the riverbank, playing with the dog. Beauchamp had become an extension of home, a place with its own rituals: the morning coffee on the table in the back garden, or shaving his uncle on the porch outside, something it is hard to imagine his father, who was rarely out of a suit and tie, ever letting him do. He wrote to his mother and reassured her he was having fun: “I haven’t yet made the acquaintance of the boys next door but I caught sight of the smaller one looking at me through a window in their house so I tried to look British which was a rather complicated procedure because I was on hands and knees playing with the kitten.” A few days after, less than a week before the outbreak of the war, he pushed his way onto a crowded boat and made his way back across the Channel, annoyed that Hitler had disturbed his stay and prevented him from getting through either the mystery novels in the living room or the seven bottles of lemonade that his aunt had ordered.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The War
We were once on holiday by the sea in Cornwall, a fairly large clan by now, and Mum and Dad were already grandparents several times over. Dad and I were walking down a dune to the beach behind the others, and I asked him how people had felt when the war ended. Exhausted, he replied, not needing very long to think it over, “We were all exhausted.”
An exhausting experience, and an inexhaustible subject, the war dragged on one way or another for him for more than ten years, and in that time he went from being a schoolboy to being a trained soldier with multiple technical skills who had been through bombing and air raids and knew about weapons and had seen the devastation they caused. In 1937 he was still reading The Modern Boy. By the time he had finished his national service, it was the spring of 1948 and these things were long behind him. The war made him more conscious of his relatives abroad, of his origins, of the differences between him and the more insular men serving with him. But the war also made him more English because he was fighting for his country and sharing in the experiences that bound an entire generation together. Or maybe it would be easier and less misleading to say simply that the war saw him become capable of and primed for certain decisions about the shape of his life to come, decisions that fate was on the whole kind enough to allow to come true.
Thirteen at the time of the Munich crisis, and already as tall as his mother, Dad initially took a boyish view of things, regarding the whole business as a bit of a relief after the unreal peace, and a lot more exciting. War’s imminence meant putting together sheds and chicken coops and measuring vegetable beds and fitting blackout curtains. His practical bent was evident, and his weekly sixpence was disappearing on carpenter’s wrenches and other tools from Woolworths. When it was announced that Anderson corrugated-iron shelters were to be distributed, he took charge of the digging. Max was too old and ill for such exertions, and André was rarely at home, so Dad became the man of the house. Yet he still thought air-raid precautions a great game and became obsessed enough for the same headmaster who had been worried about his political leanings to call him in and suggest he should spend less time digging shelters and more time making friends. It does not seem to have done much good, and as he entered adolescence, he gives the impression of having become more emotionally dependent on his family than before.
For a while it was perhaps understandable if war seemed like a game. Through 1939 Britain remained untouched and so did France. Only in the spring of 1940 did events escalate, as one country after another collapsed in the face of the German advance. But even France’s defeat in June did not dissipate the energy of the times for him. Two days after Dunkirk, Dad wrote to Niura and Yasha—they had already fled Paris—and his letter conveys his excitement: Life is going on “normally” at school, but he and the other boys have formed a firefighting team in case there are air raids. To his delight, his parents had bought him a hand pump for his birthday. And he was happy that someone had moved in next door who put up with his endless discussion of gas masks and bombs. (“The family won’t let me talk!”) The day after Petain announced France’s surrender, this new neighbor came round—he wrote captions for the Daily Sketch—and he and a photographer got Dad to dig a large hole in the back garden and pose for a picture burying his bike under a pile of leaves. With the studied matter-of-factness of an era less easily flustered than ours, the journalist then wrote his piece, “What to Do if This Country Is Invaded,” reminding readers that it was just as important to hide bicycles as cars and passing on other useful bits of official advice: Stay where you are, hide your food, and avoid spreading rumors. Everyone was doing their bit. It was, Dad remembered, “great fun,” almost as though the closer the prospect of a Nazi takeover came, the less serious it seemed, or rather, perhaps, as though the more serious something was, the less one should show it.
It was only in August, when his form master took Dad and some boys from school to Kent to help bring in the harvest, that he came face-to-face for the first time with the reality of death. The weather was hot and they had ended up at a farm near Biggin Hill, which happened to be the site of a major RAF base that guarded the southeast of England and the approaches to London. After several days of making sheaves of corn and sleeping at night on the bare floor of a laborer’s cottage, they were given Sunday off. It was the start of the Battle of Britain and there was a dogfight overhead, a distant display of bravado high above them, but as they watched it ended abruptly with the German plane plummeting with a “great howling noise,” machine guns firing, the pilot dead. Bullets hit the roadway, the boys dived into the ditches on either side. There was an immense explosion and falling debris, and then a cap fluttered down—a moment he never forgot.
From the slopes of Highgate, he saw the skyline of the city sprout the paraphernalia of air defense—gun emplacements, fire-watch posts, and the barrage balloons that flew overhead from moorings on the Heath, like a scene out of his beloved H. G. Wells. Night after night, the residents of 20 Oakeshott Avenue tracked the German squadrons flying in, the red glow of the flames and the smoke as bombs fell across the Thames valley and large sw
athes of the city were destroyed. The northern suburbs were not immune and several bombs fell close to the house. When the alarm went off, they were supposed to make their way in the dark to the Anderson shelter in the garden. But it was damp and claustrophobic, the two pairs of steel bunk beds took up all the space, and after a mouse made an appearance, Frouma refused to go back, so they set up camp chairs in the tiny downstairs cloakroom, trying to ignore the blasts that made the entire house shake. Small incendiary devices lit up the night and one burned a hole in the garden fence. Another came through the roof of their house in the course of a particularly fierce raid, and it was after that that his parents decided that London had become too dangerous for him. Because the headmaster refused to evacuate University College School—his reaction to the warning sirens was to herd the boys down to the cellars—Dad was sent to the west of England to continue his schooling.
To the end of his life, Dad had a capacity for solitude. He did not mind his own company, and while he was by no means a solitary person, he was often happiest when others were nearby but not on top of him—gardening, perhaps, offered the ideal relationship to the world, or reading in an armchair or in the bath, or, of an evening, holing up in his shed from which he would generally return to the house with a slight air of reluctance. Even in hospital, in the last few months, one would come into the ward and find him reading. He did not usually need people around him for distraction, could seem slightly abstracted in company, and was known to fall asleep in the presence of guests at his own dinner table. When he awoke—or was woken—he was always quietly but spectacularly unregretful. He avoided parties and was not one to hold forth, or to put a high premium on being entertaining.
Growing up in Oakeshott Avenue with older parents had provided lessons in the pleasures of his own company, since André had left the house and Ira was nearly ten years older. As a dutiful son much of his social life was spent accompanying his mother to see her friends, a world of sweets and conversations in Russian with Mrs. Koldofsky and those other ladies whose faces were increasingly lined by hardship and widowhood.
Now, evacuated from London at the age of fifteen, he was to encounter a more intense kind of isolation. He had transferred to the Regent Street Polytechnic School, which had left its peacetime premises in central London and relocated to Minehead in Somerset, a normally sleepy coastal town now crowded with evacuees and soldiers. The school prided itself on its technical orientation but what it did best was to mold boys from middle-class backgrounds to fill the middle-management positions of the British Empire. By the time he got there, they were already disappearing into the armed forces, and the first deaths—two Old Boys, pilots in the RAF—were posted in the school newspaper.
In the winter of 1940, Dad arrived on the train from London, accompanied by both parents. With their help, he found lodgings with a family of bridge-playing fanatics called the Newmans, who lived in a gloomy late-Victorian place on one of the roads leading west out of the town. It was cold and the snow on the hills was deeper than he had ever seen. Dad, who knew from his own experience what it was to have boarders disrupt the domestic routine, was now a boarder himself. One sure sign of his sense of being on his own is that when his parents left, he began to keep a diary, something that was to become a lifetime habit. His 1941 Schoolboy Diary, filled with useful information about logarithms and cricket and the British Empire, had been given to him by his mother, and it became a kind of surrogate companion, an effort to exert some measure of control over his new life in its unfamiliar setting.
Although on the surface he was quick to settle in, or doing his best to make it seem so, underneath he must have been finding it hard. One evening he was making his way home in the blackout through the backstreets of the town when he stopped for a moment to look up at the stars, which seemed very bright, and as he set off again, he suddenly realized that his usually infallible sense of direction had deserted him and he had no idea which way to go. He experienced a feeling of complete disorientation for the first and possibly only time in his life, and a panic took hold of him which he still remembered many years later as like “being in a forest and not knowing which way to go.” Perhaps it is not coincidental that a man who was given to taking holidays in the places he had first visited as a child, never showed, to my knowledge, the slightest interest in returning to Minehead. Along with Yorkshire and his time in Germany doing national service, Minehead was a setting that defined much of his experience of the 1940s, and none of the three were places he wanted to share with us.
The school was his third in five years and it did not help that he was a year younger than most of the boys in his class because he had taken his exams early. There was a new form to be assigned to, and a new set of customs and habits, those invisible intimidating codes that English schools seem designed to impose: Elgar on the gramophone before assembly; watching the other boys head off to chapel on Sundays; house games. Dad’s house was Kerridge-Swan, a name emblematic in its obscurity; he rose to become subprefect. There were occasional stately visits from the eighty-four-year-old chairman of governors, the fabulously named Sir Kynaston Studd, a former lord mayor of London, a devout Christian, and once a world-class cricketer whom some still remembered for the time back in 1882 that he and his two brothers, the so-called “set of Studds,” had helped Cambridge University to a famous defeat over the all-conquering Australians. Cricket was big at the school as a result; so was Freemasonry. Studd was a leading Freemason; many of the masters belonged and quite a few boys later joined too. I find it hard to think of anything Dad would have found more alienating.
He now had to get on with a different set of boys, most of whom had come up together through the school over the past few years. For anyone as immersed in his home and family as he was, it cannot have been easy. At one Sunday service in March 1941, already “saddened by memories of France,” he noted in his diary that he felt from the others “a curious feeling towards me.” He wrote no more about this and never mentioned it again so it is hard to say what he was alluding to—being Jewish, having foreign parents, or something else entirely? What did bring him together with the others was walking, cycling, and above all politics. The immediate future for his generation could not have been more uncertain but beyond it, and maybe as some kind of substitute for thinking too much about their own personal destinies, was the future of their country. A debating society of earnest sixth formers met in the Methodist Hall and Dad became a stalwart. He chaired one or two meetings and spoke about his vision of the ideal state; a boy named Coleman gave “an impassioned denunciation” of German fascism, and there was an argument over whether Britain and Russia were democracies.
In his new wool suit, polished shoes, and dark striped school tie, a heavy greatcoat protecting him against the harsh Somerset winter—he looks serious, no longer exactly a boy. He joined the Air Cadets and acquired a uniform and got his first basic training in Morse code. There was shooting practice in the local quarry. A future airman was the part he imagined for himself, and he visited the local RAF base and carefully noted in his diary the Beauforts, Mosquitoes, and Lancasters flying over the Bristol Channel. The Luftwaffe came across the estuary from time to time and hit the towns of south Wales—the antiaircraft guns could easily be heard—but no bombs dropped on Minehead. Butlins, a harbinger of a new future had they but known it, was quiet and guarded by concrete bunkers and pillboxes. Only the Rex and the Regal provided Hollywood glamour at the gray English seaside.
Beyond the hills that guarded the town, the moors beckoned. Across England, the war was unleashing an extraordinary process of national rediscovery and self-romanticization, a collective effort of imagination and cultural creativity that was visible everywhere from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to the paintings of Eric Ravilious. In Minehead these London boys discovered the “country scene,” and the school magazine filled up with essays on hawking and timber-felling, bluebells and the beauties of the West Country. It was at this time that Dad’s own deep but
rarely articulated sensitivity to the English landscape blossomed, his liking for its fields, hedges, hills, and villages humanized by history and settlement and cultivation. For the first and perhaps the only time in his life, he expressed himself in verse. “Carrier Pigeons,” a poem by “W. MAZOWER, L6. Arts,” sees birds as the war’s true heroes, English heroes from the dales of the heartland, calm intermediaries, succoring and homing, with the courage not of those who fight but of those who carry words and save the day, in a long line of the generations that have fought for the nation’s liberty.
It was perhaps a compensation, this meditation on the outward view, for some inner turmoil. When I asked him once near the end of his life if he had been unhappy in Minehead, he had said not. And when I persisted, asking him whether he had been happy, his response was that he had enjoyed the countryside, that he was a keen cyclist. The landscape suffuses the pages of his diary, and the quiet of Selworthy Beacon and the natural world move through these months in counterpoint with the war’s advance into the Far East. He walked and biked along the coastal road, often with classmates, sharing the cake that Frouma sent regularly from home. It is a spectacular setting, along the edge of Exmoor, with the yellow gorse flowering into the spring and the hills cut by some surprisingly steep wooded valleys, but it can also be bleak and chilled by the winds coming in off the Bristol Channel. Two years later, when he was already up at Balliol College but thinking back to Minehead, he copied out an extract from John Keble’s classic of nineteenth-century devotional verse, The Christian Year. What spoke to him in Keble’s lines was certainly not their religious dimension but the connection they drew between the experience of wandering, the promise of England, and a certain modesty of ambition—not grand vistas but homely scenes and simple views, the ground underfoot.