Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  After his death from a heart attack in April 1938, and then Kristallnacht a few months later, she and her mother decided that they would have to try to leave Germany. They both applied for visas to the US, but the waiting list was so long that my mother also applied to come to the UK on her own as a domestic servant. (Their richer friends were buying forged visas for countries in South America, an option that was not available to my cash-strapped mother and grandmother.) A cousin of her father’s, who was already living in London, found some friends who said they would be prepared to employ my mother as a domestic, and she duly got her visa.

  To pay for her ticket to England, her mother sold a large Persian rug and a set of coffee cups. She also managed to provide my mother with twenty pairs of stockings, ten tubes of toothpaste and ten bars of soap so that she would not have to waste money buying them in England. Passage was booked on the SS Washington and, like my father, my mother sailed from Hamburg to Southampton via Le Havre.

  Years later, she wrote:

  I was quite looking forward to it; I liked the idea of leaving Germany, I liked adventure, and the whole thing didn’t worry me one bit … The first thing I did on the boat was buy some lipstick, because my mother had never allowed me to wear it. It was a wonderful feeling; I felt free.17

  She was eighteen years old and never saw her mother again.

  I think of my parents’ stories every time I read of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled from countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea. Each one of them, and each one of their children, will have similar tales to tell, and when I look at their faces on the TV news, it is easy for me to imagine that I am looking at the faces of my own parents.

  My father and mother could not have been more different: my father tall and slim, thoughtful, cautious and happiest when either listening to classical music or playing his beloved cello; my mother short and round, cheerful, gregarious and happiest when surrounded by family, friends and food. Yet they were happily married for sixty-seven years, until my mother’s death in 2013, just a few weeks before her ninety-second birthday.

  They were married in a civil ceremony in Hampstead Town Hall on 6 June 1945, exactly twelve months after the D-Day landings. My father had been reluctant to splash out on a wedding reception, but my mother, typically, had insisted. He also saw no need for anyone to take photographs to mark the occasion (‘too bourgeois’, apparently), but, again, my mother insisted. She bought a new dress to wear on her wedding day, but my father was still in the army, so he wore his uniform. They invited about thirty friends and relatives to a small party in the house where my mother had lived during the war; the wedding cake was made by my father’s eldest sister, using powdered egg and powdered milk, all that was available.

  Their army friends had clubbed together to buy them a radio as a wedding present, so perhaps it was then that the seeds of my future career were sown. The honeymoon was a week in Cornwall, where it rained the entire time. Five weeks later, my father was posted to Germany, and my mother was left behind to find their first marital home.

  In bomb-shattered London, with just £25 to her name and a weekly wage of £4.50 as an office supervisor, it was a huge challenge. In later life, she recalled: ‘For the only time in my life, I really felt suicidal.’ Eventually, she found a two-bedroom flat in a mansion block, Elmhurst Mansions, in Edgeley Road, just off Clapham High Street in south London. ‘It was filthy dirty, completely unfurnished, and the kitchen was full of mouldy food. There were cockroaches crawling around, and the bath was in an indescribable condition, but despite all that, I felt I could deal with it.’18

  The rent was £1.25 a week, and under the post-war rationing system then in force, she was allocated coupons that would enable her to buy enough furniture for just one room. She bought two armchairs (they were both still in use seventy years later), a sideboard, also still in use, a table and four chairs. She also found a lodger to help with the rent: a wartime friend, Elizabeth (Beth) Rees-Mogg, elder sister of William, later Lord, Rees-Mogg, who went on to become editor of The Times, chairman of the Arts Council and vice-chairman of the BBC.

  When my father left the army the following year, he had to find a job. He had no qualifications and no experience that was likely to be of any use to potential employers. My mother was working in what was then the temporary headquarters of the United Nations in London; when it moved to New York, she joined the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, which dealt with the hundreds of thousands of people throughout Europe who had lost their homes in the war and were now on their way to Canada, the US and Australia.

  Both my father’s parents, Franz and Rose, survived the war: they escaped from Germany to Italy in 1940 and managed to make their way to Portugal, where they lived with one of their daughters and her Portuguese husband. In December 1946, they moved to London, but my grandfather collapsed as soon as he got to my parents’ flat and never fully recovered. He died the following May at the age of seventy-four. My grandmother outlived him by thirty-five years and died just nine days after her ninety-eighth birthday.*

  Before the First World War, my grandfather Lustig had been a moderately successful businessman, but after the war, during which he served in a field artillery unit, he became a sales representative for bicycle manufacturers, a job that he eventually lost after Kristallnacht in 1938. His great passions were music and writing: he enjoyed writing poetry, often humorous ditties for family occasions, and would probably have been amused that both his British grandsons ended up in the words business: my brother in publishing and me in journalism. My father remembers playing piano duets with him as a child, and being taken to concerts; music played an important part in Lustig family life, and my father continues to play the cello even in his nineties.

  Among my earliest memories is lying in bed after supper listening to the sound of a string quartet wafting upstairs from the front living room, and when my brother and I were growing up, we were often expected to demonstrate our prowess on the piano or recorder at family parties. If nothing else, the tradition served as an invaluable training in how to put on a show, something that broadcasters need to master even if they are in the news business. By the time I reached my teens, I preferred to perform with words rather than music, so I devised ‘comedy’ items modelled on whichever comedian was being featured on the radio at the time. One Christmas, I decided to write a parody of a BBC radio news bulletin, in which each news item featured a different member of the family. The shape of things to come…

  Bearsted Memorial Hospital, where I was born, had been founded in the late nineteenth century in the East End of London as a place where Orthodox Jewish women could give birth. It was not the obvious place for my mother to choose, because, as she recalled much later: ‘I’d become very anti-Jewish because of everything that had happened [in Nazi Germany], so I just wanted to cut myself off from Judaism.’19

  As I was due to be born by Caesarean section, my mother was told that she could choose, a few days either side of her due date, the exact date of my birth. Although throughout the war she had not known what fate had befallen her own mother, by the time of my birth, she knew that she had perished in the Holocaust. So she chose her mother’s date of birth to be mine as well, a decision that was to create an immensely powerful bond across the generations when, more than sixty years later, I stood on the exact spot where my grandmother had been murdered.

  Fathers were not expected to play any role during childbirth in the 1940s, so my father went to work as normal on the day that I was due to be delivered, and was informed by phone of my eventual safe arrival. It was only at the end of his working day that he made his way to the hospital to meet me for the first time.

  Three days later, my father’s older brother, my uncle Ted, wrote to him from the US, where he had settled after leaving Germany. The letter came to light only recently, but it was remarkably prescient. After congratulating my parents on the birth of their first child, he wrote: ‘If he grows up to b
e an asker of questions, he will be, indeed, one of the rare men who may find an answer here and there. Let him be an asker-of-questions. That is my wish for him.’

  I had been a journalist for many years when I first saw that letter, and both my uncle and my parents had forgotten all about it. I still think it is extraordinary that, almost like a fairy godfather, he had peered into my future and somehow divined the path that my life would take. Although he and I lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I always felt extremely close to him and I am still close to my three American cousins. And I can think of no better epitaph than ‘He was an asker of questions.’

  My lifelong obsession with questions seems to have started at a very early age. In a letter written shortly after my third birthday, my mother reported:

  Robin talks such a lot now that it often gets a bit too much for us. And the questions!!! The other day he saw a photo of a candidate in the general election and wanted a full explanation. When I said that there were things he did not understand yet, he said: ‘But I am a big boy now, and I want to know everything.’

  I still feel the same way.

  My first childhood home was in a London suburb so anonymous that I am still not quite sure exactly what to call it. The postal address was Greenford, Middlesex, the telephone exchange was Wembley and the nearest Tube station was Sudbury Town. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from Ruislip Gardens, immortalised by John Betjeman in his poem ‘Middlesex’: ‘Gaily into Ruislip Gardens / Runs the red electric train / With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s / Daintily alights Elaine.’

  My parents had paid £2,100 for a three-bedroomed terraced house at 73 Drew Gardens. It was conveniently close to the green open space of Horsenden Hill, which soars to a mighty 280 feet above sea level, and where evidence has been found of Iron Age settlements. Of more interest to me as I grew up was the golf course, and the trees that surrounded it, where lost balls could be retrieved by eagle-eyed young boys and then sold back to golfers in the clubhouse. Our home was also only about a fifteen-minute walk from where my grandmother was living, with her sister and eldest daughter, so it was, for my parents, a very suitable house in which to raise their family.

  North Greenford, which is probably the most accurate name for the area, will never win any prizes for architectural distinction. It was developed, like so many London suburbs, between the two world wars, and time has not been kind to it. Gentrification has passed it by, and in the streets around Drew Gardens some houses are now boarded up. Others look as if they have had little care devoted to them since I was growing up there more than fifty years ago. Nearly all the front gardens have been paved over to provide off-street parking.

  My father’s first job after leaving the army was in the offices of the Anglo-Palestine Yearbook, a publication that gathered together all the essential facts and figures that might have been of interest to companies thinking of doing business in Palestine, which was still, until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, ruled by Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. It was a job that was clearly going nowhere, so he started looking around for something more promising.

  Educated, intelligent young man (27), just demobbed, wants progressive job. 3 years’ resp. work Mil. Intelligence. Organ. and admin. experience, used working on own initiative and responsibility. Bilingual English/German. Good knowledge general office routine and typing. Wide interests. Reliable and eager worker. Any offers?

  So what exactly had been his ‘resp. work Mil. Intelligence’? It was so secret that not until the 1970s did he tell anyone, including his own family, what he had been doing in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. (My mother, of course, already knew, because she had worked in the same unit.) My father had been a ‘secret listener’, eavesdropping on German prisoners of war as they spoke to each other unguardedly in their bugged prison cells. Microphones were concealed in the cells’ light fittings, and teams of native German speakers, most of them refugees, worked in shifts to listen to what they told each other and activate recording devices whenever they discussed matters that might be of interest to British military intelligence.

  There were three locations where these ‘secret listeners’ worked: Trent Park, in Enfield, north London; and Latimer House and Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire. The full value of the work that was done there – including some of the earliest intelligence on the Germans’ development of the V-1 flying bombs, or doodlebugs, which were an early form of cruise missile, and the V-2 long-range guided missiles – was revealed only when the transcripts of the bugged conversations were declassified in the late 1990s and later written about.20 My father then found himself very much in demand by television documentary-makers to talk about his work, as one of the very few ‘secret listeners’ still alive.

  His second job once he had left the army was as an invoice clerk at Cahn and Bendit, a company that dealt in accessories for ladies’ handbags, at a starting salary of £7 per week. He also went to evening classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London (now the University of Westminster) to gain a qualification that would enable him to work as a company secretary. Having left Germany with just a school-leaving certificate, he knew that he needed some kind of professional qualification, which he duly obtained in 1950.

  My father’s modest salary was not enough to pay the mortgage, so my mother did typing jobs at home in the evenings, and they took in lodgers who lived in the small bedroom at the top of the stairs. Even fifty years later, my mother remembered each of them by name: Mrs Barnes, who worked in a local bus garage and went to the cinema every evening; Mr Cole, who went ballroom dancing every night and always left his shoes at the bottom of the stairs so as not to disturb the rest of the household when he came home late; and Mr Mirza, from Pakistan, who burnt incense which made the whole house smell.

  Money was always tight: my father also went to woodwork evening classes so that he could learn to make some basic furniture for the family home, and in later years he remembered agonising over whether he could afford to buy a new paintbrush when a room needed redecorating. Fortunately, my mother had a well-off cousin who had settled in California and who used to send boxes of hand-me-down children’s clothes; her own son was just a few months older than I was, and I still remember the excitement when the boxes were delivered. For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of a pair of dark blue skiing trousers that I especially treasured, even though I never once went skiing.

  These days, we post-war baby boomers are held responsible for most of the world’s ills, but my memories of life as a child in post-war Britain are not of a life of luxury. Some foods were still rationed for several years after I was born, and I remember going to pick up the government-issue concentrated orange juice that was meant to reduce malnutrition among post-war toddlers. I also remember the coal being delivered to our house in huge sacks, and the milk that was delivered in pint bottles by horse-drawn cart (on Saturdays I was sometimes allowed to ride on the horse, Molly, as she made her way down our street). With no central heating, we would often wake up on a bitterly cold winter morning to find our bedroom windows encrusted with ice. On the inside.

  None of this is meant to sound as if I endured a Dickensian childhood of misery and deprivation, because nothing could be further from the truth. For my parents, though, those early years were a struggle, as they were for millions of other people in the immediate post-war years. They had few friends and little time for a social life. As refugees, they had only a limited network of friends and relatives to fall back on when help was needed, although both my grandmother and my aunt Eva, who was fifteen years older than my father, were usually on hand for occasional babysitting duties.

  My grandmother was sixty-four when I was born, and she told me many years later that her hope had been that she would live long enough to see me go to school. In fact, she saw me go on from school to university, and then get married and have a child. She died just five weeks after my son Josh, her first great-grandchild, was
born.

  I was, by all accounts, a serious child, never happier than when I had my head buried in a book – or asking questions. My father got into the habit of bringing home library books every week in an attempt to feed my curiosity, and soon every birthday and Christmas would be marked by another volume of the Oxford Children’s Encyclopaedia.

  My parents did not approve of television, so there was no TV set at home. There was a Grundig radio in the corner of the living room, which would be switched on for the BBC Home Service news at eight o’clock in the morning and six o’clock in the evening.† Comedy shows – The Navy Lark, The Clitheroe Kid, The Men from the Ministry – were tolerated if not exactly approved of. Piano practice was compulsory. As we grew older, my brother and I took up the violin and clarinet respectively; he became a professional-standard violinist, while I preferred to nestle unobtrusively in the back of the woodwind section of the local youth orchestra.

  My mother had an enormous capacity for fun and liked nothing more than to make her children laugh with silly invented words and stories. One of my earliest memories is of clutching my stomach in pain and complaining: ‘You make me laugh too much.’ My father was good at making things and had infinite patience. On Saturday mornings, he would cycle to the baker’s to buy bread and, until I grew too big, I was allowed to go with him, sitting on a special child’s saddle attached to his crossbar, with his chin resting on the top of my head and the wind blowing in my face.

  In July 1951, I received a postcard from my mother, who was in hospital. ‘Now at last we have got our baby. His name is Stephen and you must try to learn to say “Stephen” before we come home. He is still very small and I still have to stay in hospital to look after him for a few days.’ When it was time for them to come home, my father and I went to collect them, and our journey back by taxi is my earliest memory. It was two months before my third birthday.