Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  The overwhelming priority for my parents, after having grown up in the turmoil of Nazi Germany, was to create a safe and secure environment for their family. They could, of course, have chosen to bring up their sons bilingual in English and German if they had spoken to us in German at home. But in 1950s London, only a few years after the end of the Second World War, speaking the language of Britain’s wartime enemy was the last thing they wanted their sons to be good at. They even spoke to each other only in English – they had, after all, met while serving in the British army, and to have spoken to each other in German then would have been highly ill-advised.

  I did, however, hear German spoken when we visited our elderly relatives – and especially when they visited us at Christmas. There was a Lustig family Christmas tradition, dating back to pre-war Berlin, which my father, probably mainly for the benefit of my grandmother, was determined to observe. A Christmas tree would be bought and decorated, with real candles, not electric lights, and my grandmother, great-aunts Hansi and Ada, and aunt Eva would come to our house on Christmas Eve for the ritual of present-opening and a Christmas meal. When everyone was assembled, fur coats had been taken off, and bags full of presents handed over to my father, we would all be ushered into the back room while my father lit the candles on the tree in the front room and laid out the presents on chairs, a different chair for each member of the family. Then, we would be summoned to make our way into the front room, singing that most German of Christmas carols, ‘O Tannenbaum’, to the same tune as the Red Flag.

  As my brother and I grew up, we began to subvert the ritual by delaying the opening of our own presents until everyone else had opened theirs. It annoyed the elderly relatives, since it somehow destroyed the illusion that we children were overwhelmed with uncontrollable excitement. Excited, us? By the time we reached the age of eleven or twelve, we were far too cool for such nonsense.

  I remember two particular German phrases from my childhood: ‘Er ist tot müde’ (‘He is dead tired’), which is what my mother would say to my father if either my brother or I were misbehaving at bedtime, and ‘Wo ist meine Tasche?’ (‘Where is my handbag?’), which was the cry of our aunts as they gathered their belongings together at the end of a visit. Unfortunately, neither phrase proved particularly useful during my career as a foreign correspondent. But I did manage to pick up a few more words of German along the way, the most useful of which – ‘ein kleines bisschen’ (‘a little bit’) – became my stock response to the question ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ (‘Do you speak German?’)

  I never had the chance to learn German at school, so I got into the habit, if I wanted to say something in German, of trying to imagine hearing my grandmother say it. It was a technique that worked remarkably well, even though she spoke surprisingly good English. My great-aunt Hansi, a large and somewhat forbidding woman with piercing brown eyes who had been a teacher before she left Germany, did try to teach me German for a while, but it was not a success. I think I must have subconsciously adopted my parents’ view that speaking German was not a particularly valuable skill in 1950s London.

  Despite my parents’ best efforts, it was obvious when I started going to school that I came from a somewhat different family background than my schoolmates. One boy delighted in calling me a Nazi, which seemed odd to me even then, since I knew that my family had escaped from the Nazis and regarded them as very nasty people. But the fact that my parents spoke English with an accent was probably more than enough to identify me as a suspicious foreigner.

  My classmates’ favourite pastime in the school playground, when not playing football, was to zoom about, arms outstretched, pretending to be fighter pilots shooting down German warplanes. And their favourite reading material – comics like the Beano, Eagle, and Dandy – often featured wartime storylines in which the Nazi villains were called Fritz, like my father. But even though I was in some senses a child apart, it never bothered me. I was always happier sitting in a classroom with a book than rushing around outside and, as far as I can judge, I suffered no childhood trauma as a result of being the son of refugees.

  What was far more difficult to deal with was the lack of a television at home. How could I discuss the previous evening’s programmes with my schoolmates in the playground if I had not seen them? What did I know of Crackerjack, The Lone Ranger or Robin Hood, unless I had been invited to a friend’s house for tea? The solution I came up with was to develop a skill that proved invaluable in my later career: to be able to talk, apparently knowledgeably, about things that I knew nothing about. I have lost count of the occasions when, as a news broadcaster, I have made use of this skill, perfected in the school playground, to ask questions and participate in conversations from a position of total ignorance.

  The first evidence of my journalistic ambitions dates back to 1959, when I was still at primary school and was one of four co-editors of the Horsenden Primary School magazine. We asked our fellow pupils to send in contributions for publication, but our editorial included an unmistakable note of disapproval: ‘Some entries, we discovered, were copied and although these were good, we had to reject them as we wanted your own work.’ There is clearly nothing new about the curse of journalistic plagiarism, nor indeed of that other curse, nepotism, since the magazine also included two limericks by my brother and a final story written by me, presumably to fill the blank space on the last page.

  At home, before my arms were long enough to hold the open pages of a broadsheet newspaper, I would kneel on the floor of the living room, with the News Chronicle laid out in front of me, reading the cartoon strips – Colonel Pewter and Tintin – and beginning my descent into a lifelong addiction to news. My parents also bought me a subscription to The Children’s Newspaper, a weekly publication that had been started after the First World War and which at its peak had sold half a million copies a week. As a result, I was in hopeless thrall to newsprint long before I went to secondary school.

  On the first day of the new decade, 1 January 1960, we moved out of London and into a new home in Reading, forty miles to the west. My father had found a new job, working as an accountant for a plastics company, so we upped sticks and settled at 49 Southcote Lane, in a semi-detached house with garage where my parents lived for the next fifty-one years.

  Reading in the 1960s was a staid, unremarkable market town, home to Simonds brewery, Sutton Seeds, and Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory. All have long gone now, but for many years Reading was known principally as the town of beer, bulbs and biscuits. These days it is one of the fastest-growing towns in England, thanks to its proximity to Heathrow airport and its good road and rail links to London. It is also, of course, where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in 1895 for gross indecency, and the site of the remains of Reading Abbey, founded in 1121 by King Henry I, who is buried there.

  The oldest example of written English music, the song ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’, is said to have been composed by a monk in the abbey in or around 1250. It is the earliest known example of both secular and sacred words being used in the same piece of music, but most notable, for those with a taste for vulgarity, is that it contains the earliest documented use of the word ‘fart’: ‘Ewe bleateth after lamb, Calf loweth after cow, Bullock starteth, buck farteth, Merry sing cuckoo!’ Not bad for a thirteenth-century monk.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I sometimes wonder whether first the outer London suburbs and then Reading were perfect places for my parents to bring up their family: slightly dull, but, much more importantly, totally safe. After the traumas of growing up in Nazi Germany and then living through the Second World War, who could blame them for opting for a little less excitement? And, who knows, perhaps a childhood spent cocooned in such a safe environment led to my own decision to flee the nest at the earliest opportunity and seek out a career that certainly never lacked for excitement.

  My father would have liked me to go to Reading School, a highly selective grammar school with a 900-year history and an enviable academic record. (In 2010, it
was named state school of the year by the Sunday Times.) But I did not meet its rigorous entry standards, so I went instead to Stoneham School for Boys, which was certainly less prestigious and was in reality two schools under the same roof: a grammar school and a secondary modern school, each of which tried to pretend that the other did not exist. Grammar school boys had to wear uniforms, whereas secondary modern boys did not. We even had separate staircases and different teachers.

  It was a truly bizarre arrangement, and the school was finally put out of its misery in 1985, when it merged with the neighbouring girls’ school to become Prospect School. Twenty years earlier, I had organised a pupils’ petition calling for just such a merger, although that had little to do with the potential educational benefits and much more to do with teenage boys’ obsession with girls. The headmaster, Dr Smith, was not amused.

  In fact, Stoneham suited me just fine (I was admitted to the grammar school side as I had passed my eleven-plus exam before we moved from London and had already spent one term at Greenford Grammar School). My best subjects were English and French, I played clarinet in the school orchestra, conducted by the music teacher Eric Few, who always had a cigarette dangling from his lower lip during rehearsals, and I took small parts in school plays under the direction of drama teacher Charles Uzell.

  One production daringly included girls from the neighbouring school: it was Lady Precious Stream, by the Chinese writer S. I. Hsiung, which had had hugely successful runs in both London and New York in the 1930s and had gained a reputation as one of the most performed plays in the world. The leading role was taken by a girl called Angela Pearson, who later became much better known as the Conservative minister Angela Browning, now Baroness Browning of Whimple. Some years after I had started working for the BBC, and had interviewed her several times, she noticed my name in an old school programme and made the connection. We had a nostalgic lunch to mark the coincidence.

  It was while I was at Stoneham School that I first developed a serious interest in politics. It began when I started to sell ladybird lapel pins on behalf of the Pestalozzi Children’s Village charity, which helped children who had become orphans or refugees during the Second World War. (It still offers scholarships to young people from some of the world’s poorest countries, and its logo is still a ladybird.)

  From selling ladybirds, I soon moved on to selling CND badges, as Reading is only ten miles from Aldermaston, where the UK’s nuclear warheads were manufactured, and in the 1960s the campaign for nuclear disarmament was a local as well as a national issue. Every Easter, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston protest marchers would pass by the end of our road on their way to or from London, and before long I was joining them.

  But, as Isaac Newton discovered, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and soon my CND badges were being challenged in the school playground by badges bearing the symbol of the League of Empire Loyalists, a far-right group that eventually became the National Front. Unsurprisingly, the school quickly banned the wearing of all political symbols on school uniforms; equally unsurprisingly, we found a way to get round the ban by wearing our badges on the insides of our blazer lapels and displaying them surreptitiously when no teacher was in sight.

  At the time of the 1964 general election, which came after thirteen years of uninterrupted Conservative rule, the school held a mock election of its own. I stood as a candidate for the Communist Party, much to the disapproval of my father, who assumed, no doubt correctly, that my candidacy would immediately lead to the opening of an MI5 file about me. (Although I did not know it at the time, my father had himself showed an interest in the Communist Party in 1943, which had brought him to the attention of a certain Sergeant Eric Hobsbawm, who was stationed in the same army barracks in Wiltshire.)‡ I came a respectable third in the school election, behind Labour and the Conservatives but ahead of the Liberals.

  Inevitably, I was also a keen member of the school debating society, and I still have my notes from a debate in 1965 in which I spoke in favour of abolishing the death penalty for murder. I ended my speech with the words: ‘Every person who votes against the abolition of capital punishment shares part of the responsibility for every subsequent execution – and I will be much happier in the knowledge that I, for one, am without that burden.’ I was sixteen years old.

  There were several areas of school life for which I was grievously ill-suited. I could neither draw nor paint, nor could I wield a chisel or a saw to create anything recognisable in woodwork. On the sports field, I was a complete disaster and I hated cross-country running more than anything in the world. I was also the school’s most unpopular cricketer, as I was a left-handed batsman (I do everything else right-handed), which meant that when it was my turn to bat, the fielders all had to be repositioned accordingly. As I was then usually bowled out with the first ball, they stayed in their new positions for no more than a few seconds before having to return to where they had been just moments before.

  It is no wonder that I was designated team scorer and, for a time, I became surprisingly proficient in the arcane science of cricket scoring, which consists of a bewildering variety of hieroglyphs entered into a complex series of tables and charts. My preference, though, was to escape to the school library, where I would very happily re-cover damaged books with adhesive plastic, or classify new acquisitions according to the Dewey classification system (100 for philosophy and psychology, 200 for religion, 300 for social sciences…)

  For a politically obsessed teenager, which I soon became, the early 1960s were an era dominated by fear of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 brought the world perilously close to the edge, and on the day when a Soviet tanker was due to reach the naval blockade that had been put in place by the US off the Cuban coast, I remember coming out of school at 4 p.m. and looking up into the sky to see if there was any sign of a mushroom cloud signifying a Soviet nuclear strike on Aldermaston. The fear was very real.

  My literary influences during my adolescence encouraged a somewhat bleak outlook on life. I read Jean-Paul Sartre (The Age of Reason, which portrays the human condition in a deeply unflattering light, was a particular influence) and Albert Camus; I also ploughed my way through Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. My musical tastes tended towards Joan Baez and protest folk, although I was, of course, as caught up in Beatlemania as everyone else of my generation. (I am happy to admit that meeting and interviewing Paul McCartney thirty-five years later was one of the most rewarding moments of my entire journalistic career, as well as being the only occasion on which my then teenage children were seriously impressed by what I did for a living.) The acquisition of a second-hand transistor radio, complete with earpiece, meant that I could listen in secret to the commercial pop music station Radio Luxembourg late at night, with the radio concealed beneath my bedclothes. (BBC Radio 1 was introduced only in 1967, as a direct response to both Radio Luxembourg and the pirate radio stations that had sprung up, broadcasting from ships moored offshore.)

  I had one teacher who was a major influence on my later life: Gwyn Evans, a ruddy-faced Welshman of pronounced left-wing views. He had twinkly blue eyes and a love of mischief, and although his official job was to teach French, he also taught me a great deal more. I somehow doubt that he would get away today with the lively political discussions that he encouraged while supposedly teaching us the finer points of French grammar. In a letter written in 1965, I described him as ‘a convinced Communist’ and said: ‘Due to his influence, I fear I am developing rather extremist views, proof of which is my new nickname among my school-pals: “little red Robin”.’

  For my last two years at school, Gwyn Evans also taught me Spanish and, as only one other boy was interested in learning it, we had what in effect were private lessons that enabled us to reach A-level standard from scratch in just two years. My fellow pupil, Richard House, went on to become a teacher of French and Spanish in the United States, while my first two overseas postings as a foreign corresponden
t were to Spain and France. Both of us owed our entire adult careers to this one, outstanding teacher.

  My first unaccompanied foreign trip was in March 1964, when at the age of fifteen I was dispatched to spend the Easter holiday with a family in rural France to improve my French. It was an ambitious journey: first the flight to Le Bourget, then a coach to the main airline terminal at Les Invalides, a Metro to the Gare de Lyons, and finally a train to Moulins, about 125 miles north of Lyon. Waiting to meet me at the station were M. Pisano, who worked at the local Simca tractor factory, and his son Serge, who was my own age and my designated playmate for the duration. Mme Pisano was a schoolteacher, and the family was completed by eighteen-year-old Monique, who took pity on me and repeated everything that was said to me slowly so that I might have some chance of understanding, and Daniel, aged eight, with whom I would spend many happy hours reading Tintin comic books.

  My letters home suggest that my adventurous spirit was already well developed. The weather was foul for most of my stay, and Serge and I had little in common, yet I plainly enjoyed myself thoroughly. A high point was my introduction to French cuisine: in one letter, I reported: ‘On Easter Sunday, we had a gorgeous lunch with pigeon, two white wines and one red. There was one white wine for the hors d’oeuvres, a different one for the salad, red for the pigeon, then white again for the cheese.’

  My French improved dramatically – how could it not? – and by the time I returned home, I had fallen hopelessly in love with travel. I still feel the same unique mix of apprehension and anticipation that I felt on that first overseas adventure: apprehension that something will go horribly wrong, and anticipation at venturing into the unknown. No matter how meticulous the preparations – my hosts in France had thoughtfully sent me a copy of the French teen magazine Salut les copains to hold under my arm as I got off the train so that they would recognise me – disaster can never be ruled out. The pulse quickens, and the hands go clammy: even after all these years, there is still no agony to compare with the wait at an airport luggage collection carousel or at a passport control booth without a visa.