So They Call You Pisher!: A Memoir

7 Great Expectations

In the summer of 1959 we went to Sandsend, near Whitby in North Yorkshire, with the also ex-Communist Flower family. There Harold promised to read us Great Expectations. And so every night he pumped up the Tilly lamp and settled himself on the little camp chair, and we all squeezed into the tent around him as he read.

He had voices for all the characters, Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Pumblechook, Trabb’s boy, Jaggers, Herbert Pocket, Wemmick – all different voices. After each evening’s reading, we would go off and repeat the voices, ‘Give me wittles, boy!’ ‘What larks!’ ‘Beggar him, Estella!’ ‘Don’t know yah!’ ‘How much? Five pounds? Twenty pounds?’

At the time it felt to me like a story with hopes, fears, snobbishness, self-deceit, unrequited love … I got all that. I got that Harold and Mum loved this story, Harold in particular. The way he read it with such passion showed that he loved it more than any of the other hundreds of stories on the shelves at home, more even than the plays at the theatres we went to.

Since then, I’ve come to see why Harold read it to us with such feeling. Like him, Pip doesn’t have a birth father; Pip is attached to a kind and loving father substitute, like Harold to his Zeyde. Perhaps Uncle Pumblechook was like his uncle Leslie Sunshine, turning up at the house, talking big about what he was going to do for him out there in the world?

And who was Miss Havisham if she wasn’t Beatrice Hastings, sitting in her carpeted Belsize Park flat surrounded with mementoes from her time as Modigliani’s lover, who Ma had perhaps thought would see little Harold right in some way or another?

Even the Trabb’s boy scene, when he walks down the street mocking Pip and doing the ‘Don’t know yah’ line, with Pip feeling ashamed: wasn’t that like a story Harold told us about someone called David Greenwood? He always recalled how ashamed he’d felt that when David Greenwood tried to get in touch, after Harold had gone from the East End Foundation School to the posher, Regent’s Street Polytechnic, Harold had ignored his former classmate, who was so poor he had to shlep a wheelbarrow to earn a penny or two.

Was there a Magwitch in Harold’s past? Maybe there were several Magwitches at the Whitechapel Library. Old migrants, sailors from all over the world, who sat in the library to keep warm, talked about ‘the heim’ and politics, and played dominoes. Sometimes one of them would ask the young Harold to help him read something and one or two asked him for a penny for a beigel. Every time I read Great Expectations or see it on TV or at the cinema, it merges so much with Harold and his family that I can’t clearly sort out the differences between what I thought when Harold read it to us, what I’ve thought as his family history emerged, and what I think now. Perhaps all response to books is like this.

Before the end of that holiday, Brian had to head off to France, travelling via home in London, so we took him to Whitby station, waved him off and headed back to the car park. As we got into the car, Mum realised that he hadn’t got his house key. It was in her bag.

Harold said, ‘The train goes to Pickering. I’m sure we could get there before him.’

So we jumped into the car and drove over the moors to Pickering. Totally out of character. Harold transformed himself into a James Bond figure in a car chase. I remembered Miss Goodall had read us The Thirty-Nine Steps and it felt like that, too. Harold put his foot down and we belted along the switchback road over the moors. He asked me to look out for the train. By the time we got to Pickering, the train was in the station. Even more uncharacteristically, Harold jumped out the car and ran up the platform, shouting, ‘Stop the train!’ He found Brian’s compartment and handed over the key.

‘You must have been worried sick,’ Harold said through the window.

‘No,’ said Brian, ‘I was going to ask Mr Townsend to borrow his ladder and climb through the kitchen window.’

All the way back, Harold chuntered on about what was it with Brian? Why was he so bloody egocentric? Over the next few years, I watched and listened while the drive over the moors and ‘Stop the train!’ turned from something-lived into a story-told, and from a story-told into a family legend that visitors to our flat liked listening to. Without knowing it at the time, I was doing my apprenticeship for what I’ve been doing for the last forty years.

With Brian being four years older than me, he was by now on the threshold leading away from home. It felt like he was pulling me over the line with him. Back in London, my old friends Chris and Malcolm both said at different times, when I was over their places, that they had gone with their still-Communist parents on the Aldermaston Marches to ban the bomb for evermore. Now it was coming up to Easter again, and they asked me if this year I was going to march to ban the bomb for evermore too. Mum and Harold were going to the rally on the last day. I said I wanted to go on the whole march, and actually I was going anyway. On my own.

Mum said this was impossible, ‘out of the question’, and made her protest: ‘Where will you stay? You’d have nothing to eat, you don’t know anyone. What would you eat? You’re not going. Harold, say something. He’s too young. Look at him, he’s packing. You can’t go without a spare pair of trousers. How can he carry a bag like that for twenty miles a day? Stop him, Harold.’

As it got nearer to the moment of my leaving, Mum carried on in the same vein, while taking care that I had packed enough for the journey. ‘He’s thirteen, Harold. Go next year, wait till next year. They won’t have banned the bomb by then, believe me.’ Then she started handing me food. ‘There’s the chicken. Take the chicken. Harold, get the chicken. If you’re taking a tin of beans, take two.’ And on she swerved between complaint and advice:

‘There’ll be another march. Go on that one. You must keep eating fresh fruit. And you like dates. He’s always liked dates, hasn’t he? Just squeeze them in down the side of the bag. Couldn’t he wait till the last day, when we’ll all be there? We can all go to Trafalgar Square together … Just because it’s Easter doesn’t mean it’s warm. It can snow at Easter. Wear the string vest … Who’s organised the coaches? Do we know these people, Harold? … One orange! Take five. And raisins … He’s thirteen. It’s ridiculous. He can’t go. Keep the chicken wrapped … Phone us if you need more food … Goodbye.’

Once I had joined the march, I found that it was highly organised. There was colour-coding of every demonstrator, so that we could be allotted sleeping quarters in schools and marquees. I was ‘Magenta’. The first stretch of the march took us from the Aldermaston base, where they researched atomic fission, to the town of Reading. At the end of the day I found myself wandering on my own through the back streets in the rain, trying to find the Magenta designated school. By the time I arrived, I was late and I was shoved in an annex. I used my Magenta ticket to get some soup, and then looked at the food that Mum had made sure I took. I started on the whole chicken.

Just then two young women turned up at the hall, causing a sensation. They were like beanpoles, with long blonde hair and tight black jeans, smoking and repeatedly saying ‘Fuck!’ really loudly. I gathered soon enough that one of them was Anthony Greenwood’s daughter. Anthony Greenwood was a Labour MP, one of the leaders of the march, identified by the national papers as a major figure in the evil conspiracy undermining Britain’s defences.

At around ten, the Magenta stewards said that it was lights out so we had better start getting to bed. I got into my sleeping bag on the classroom floor. Then I realised that Greenwood’s daughter and her friend were going to bed down close to me. They had one big bag they were going to get in together. They looked over to me.

‘What are you looking at, boy?’ one of them said, in a loud, Questors’ voice.

‘Nothing. No, I wasn’t looking at anything.’

‘Yes you were. That’s because you’ve never seen a bra, have you, boy?’ one of them said.

I mumbled something.

And then one of them said, ‘We’re going to take our clothes off now, boy, and I bet you’re going to look now, aren’t you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘really I’m not.’

‘But you want to, don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Then they started laughing, got right down into their sleeping bag, giggled and shrieked, and re-emerged with men’s shirts on.

‘Where are you from, boy?’ they said.

‘Pinner.’

‘Are you a socialist?’

‘Yes.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He’s a teacher.’

‘What does your mother do?’

‘She’s a teacher.’

This wasn’t interesting enough, so now they just talked to each other. After a while they called out, ‘Good night, boy.’ They thought that that in itself was a really good joke, and went off into peals of laughter. And we all dozed off.

In the morning there were queues for the toilets, queues for breakfast, queues for washing. I saw Greenwood and her friend walking about in their very short men’s shirts and, as I thought, not wearing anything else. They loved it that everyone was looking at them. But as we all trooped off, I noticed that they got into the back of the truck that was carrying our heavy kitbags on to the next Magenta centre in Slough, twenty miles or so up the road.

I found the march easy enough – a bit like the camping holidays, but with even more Communists, and more different kinds of socialist and left-wingers than I had ever seen in my life. I started collecting leaflets from people and reading about socialist and anarchist and pacifist and revolutionary groups and parties I’d never heard of. As I walked along I studied them, trying to figure out what they were disagreeing about, who betrayed who, and when. Some of the leaflets explained in great detail why they couldn’t support the march: they were there, but against being there. Others explained why they supported it ‘with no illusions’: the first instance in decades to come of being begged to support something ‘with no illusions’.

Suddenly out of the blue, amidst the banners and flags, there was Brian Pearce, the man who’d lived with us a few years earlier. We had lost touch with him since. He had changed a lot. He had swapped his old brown-rimmed glasses for little gold-rimmed ones, and he had grown a little grey goatee beard. His banner said, ‘Nationalise the Arms Industry Now’.

‘Hi Brian,’ I said.

He nodded knowledgeably at me.

I looked at his banner. What did it mean? Why should we nationalise the arms industry? What did that have to do with banning the bomb? I looked back at him. And he went on nodding knowledgeably at me.

Later that day, I walked for a while with Malcolm Aprahamian and his father Francis, the bald Armenian (still Communist). I told Francis that I had met Brian Pearce. He frowned. ‘So clever,’ he said, ‘a great loss.’

I thought he thought that I had said he died. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I saw him.’

‘I know,’ Francis said.

What Francis knew (and I barely did) was that Brian Pearce not only left the Communist Party, he had researched the Party in depth, and written in great detail what was wrong with the Party and with the Soviet Union. I learned later that at this precise moment he was a Trotskyist, believing, as Trotsky had, that there was hope that the Soviet Union could be reformed back to the socialist path. Also at this precise moment, there were of course several Trotskyist and sort-of-Trotskyist groups each with their variations on the theme of a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. Brian Pearce at that very moment was moving through the Socialist Labour League (always referred to as ‘the SLL’) on his way to becoming a translator of such things as the transcription of the 1903 Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. This was when the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split in the upstairs room of the Crown and Woolpack pub at the Angel, Islington, London, which at the time of my writing these words is a hairdresser’s called ‘The Chapel’.

Every now and then on the Aldermaston March, the baggage trucks went slowly past us and they were half open at the back. In one of them I saw Anthony Greenwood’s daughter and her friend leaning out over the tailgate and as soon as they saw me, they started screaming and waving, ‘There’s Boy! Hello Boy! Say hello, Boy!’

I waved back.

‘He’s waving!’

‘Boy’s waving.’

The people I was with said, ‘How do you know them?’

I said that I didn’t really, it’s just that I was sleeping with them last night.

‘What?’

‘No, I mean they were in the Magenta school where I was last night.’

‘That’s Anthony Greenwood’s daughter, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said.

This happened several times. Either they were leaning out the back of the truck or, when we arrived at a speech rally on the route, they were hanging off some kind of rig, just where Chris Barber or Humphrey Lyttelton were filling the air with jazz. Somehow even in the middle of a big crowd they could see me, and screamed out, ‘Boy! There’s Boy!’

In Slough, Magenta section were given a giant marquee. Hundreds, if not thousands, of us slept in row upon row. At lights out, a few people were still talking, and there was a bit of shushing, until the great tent fell silent and we dozed off. Then, from nowhere, one lone and very loud voice started doing the monologues from Beyond the Fringe. First Jonathan Miller and the one about the trousers on the train. Then the Alan Bennett vicar one, with ‘Is there a little bit of sardine left in the corner of your life?’ This guy in the marquee, whoever he was, knew them by heart. Then he moved on to the sketches:

‘Goodbye sir. Or is it au revoir?’

‘No Perkins, it’s goodbye.’

He did the intro to Dudley Moore’s song: ‘And the lover bemoans and bemoans and bemoans …’

By the time he was getting into the songs, people were shouting at him to shut up, reminding him that we had a long walk tomorrow, that he was driving them mad. But he didn’t stop; he just went through the whole show in the dark. It was like Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook were there with us in the tent. I thought how incredible it was that a group of performers could make up monologues and sketches, perform them, make a record and then people anywhere and everywhere could repeat them. The guy in the marquee in the dark may have been irritating the hell out of hundreds of people, but he also triggered off in me a yearning to do something like Beyond the Fringe in my own life.

On the March there was always a song, or a slogan being chanted. This, in turn, developed into an ongoing debate about folk songs and the blues.

In our family, this was the year the blues came to Pinner. Some people went over to Ealing to see it played in the Rhythm and Blues Club where Jagger, Jones and the rest were getting together. For me and Brian’s friends it was on LPs, EPs, bootlegged reel-to-reel tapes, and occasional concerts at the Finsbury Park Astoria, the Dominion Tottenham Court Road, the Marquee, Charing Cross Road or the Hammersmith Odeon. We passed names around like secret passwords: Howlin’ Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, Gus Cannon’s Jug Band, Son House, Elmore James, Memphis Minnie, Jimmy Yancey, and the mysterious and incredible Robert Johnson. Some of them dead, some of them disappeared, some of them rediscovered.

It was magical that many of this first generation of blues musicians who wailed out of our record players in our suburban bedrooms, whether from the Mississippi Delta or Chicago, were so out of reach. How had they created this incredible music? What did the words mean? Were they really men and women who were only one or two generations out of slavery?

On the road on the Aldermaston March, however, there was a rumble of debate about what was allowed and what was not. Could white people sing the blues? One row I overheard was about whether people should only sing songs from their own country. Another was about whether it was or was not OK to sing traditional English or Irish or Scots songs with a guitar. Some didn’t give a damn and just sang political songs, Aldermaston songs, parodies of hymns, spirituals, campfire songs, with or without guitars, anything to get us further along the road.

‘I belong to a family, the biggest on earth …’

‘I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside …’

‘If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning …’

‘One more river, and that’s the river of Jordan …’

‘Och Jock, the monster’s in the loch and we’re gonna ban Polaris …’

‘It’s a long way to Aldermaston, it’s a long way to go …’

‘… just like a tree that’s standing by the water, we shall not be moved …’

A guy called George Clark, who had a megaphone, begged, pleaded, cajoled and roared at us to keep going. ‘Tea round the corner,’ he said. It was a lie. And the next time he turned up, we shouted back at him. ‘Lies! It’s all lies!’

More songs, more chants. The ‘out-out-out’ one was getting us down. Someone hollered the name of a politician, or a weapon, and we all responded ‘OUT’, again, ‘OUT’, and a last time followed by ‘OUT, OUT, OUT’.

To make a change, I shouted ‘Way!’ and everyone shouted ‘OUT!’

Again: ‘Way!’ Everyone: ‘OUT!’

One more time: ‘Way!’ Everyone: ‘OUT! OUT! OUT!’

I found myself walking along with two Indian guys, who took it on themselves to explain imperialism to me. They gave me a book list – word of mouth, not on paper. I remembered how Harold had described him and Brian Pearce sitting in the University College ‘Refec’ (cafeteria) in 1938, listening to Krishna Menon and Pandit Nehru tell them that independence wasn’t far away. These guys warned me that I shouldn’t have faith in the Labour Party, it was ‘fatally compromised by imperialism’ and always would be.

We arrived at Turnham Green and the group I was with now, mostly made up of my brother Brian’s friends, said, ‘Why don’t we go to the Partisan?’

‘Yeah, let’s go to the Partisan.’

‘What’s the Partisan?’ I said.

‘A cafe in Soho.’

We queued for some time but got in, and someone said, ‘Have the Spaghetti Bolognese.’

I had it. My first Spaghetti Bolognese.

That night I went home, and Mum and Harold said that Francis Aprahamian had thanked them very much for the chicken. He said that chicken had fed the whole of the Aldermaston march. Connie’s chicken became North London Aldermaston folklore.

‘Did you eat the beans?’ she asked me.

I said that I did eat the beans, but there was food at all the stopping points.

‘And the dried fruit?’

And the dried fruit, Mum.

They wanted to come with me to the march on the last day, but by now I was joining Brian on the threshold out and wasn’t keen on them being there at all. Rather than walk with them, I preferred the image of myself reporting back to them about the people, leaflets and talk.

On that final day’s walk into Central London, I got in with someone who objected to the Communists being there. ‘Fatally compromised,’ he said. This ‘fatally compromised’ thing seemed to be some kind of killer put-down, which demolished everything. ‘They think the Russian bomb is OK, so how can they just object to the British bomb? The point is, no bomb is OK. If they object to the British bomb but don’t object to the Russian bomb, the press can make out that we’re here just to get Britain to be weaker in the face of what we think is the “good” Russian bomb, see? We’re compromised by letting them come on the march.’ He said there was going to be a split over this. I also got a leaflet that laid out a plan for Britain to become neutral. No need to be aligned with either Russia or America, it said.

And then I did bump into Mum and Harold after all. Mum said she’d noticed that the Quakers wore sensible shoes, very sensible shoes. Harold said that it was all bloody marvellous. The last time he had seen a march as big as this was the one for the Second Front (World War Two stuff I had heard about many times, so I didn’t need to ask ‘What Second Front?’). Maybe this march was bigger than the Second Front one. At Trafalgar Square we all sang along with Canon Collins, ‘Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder’, to the tune of a hymn. It was like a huge Ban-the-Bomb school assembly.

When I got back to school after the Easter break, the kids in my class asked me about the march. I could see that for some of them, this was like I had done some majorly risky thing, that their parents would never have let them do. I was, after all, just a third-former, not quite fourteen. The only other people from school who went on the march were Brian and Brian’s friends, but they were in the sixth form or had just left school on the way to university.

One girl wanted to argue with me about it: the bomb kept us safe, she said. In order to counter her I tried to remember what it said in the leaflets I had picked up along the route. I recalled one of them saying, why couldn’t Britain be a neutral country? and tried this out on her. I had a feeling that it was the first time I’d looked to somewhere other than the Daily Worker, Mum or Harold for political ideas.

Ever since Harold had read us Great Expectations, in the back of my mind was the idea that one of the things we do when we grow up is ‘make our way in the world’. On this Aldermaston March and subsequent ones, I had a sense that this was, in its own fashion, how I was ‘making my way in the world’.

One morning it was announced out of the blue that Mum’s brother Ronnie was getting married. It was ‘out of the blue’ because Mum hadn’t ever said that something was cooking, or that Ronnie had met someone. The consensus was that he never would. Not so: he had got engaged to a chemistry teacher, and we were all going to meet her in Kingsbury. Kingsbury? That was over our way, in the suburbs, where Harold had taught and where I had learned how to swim.

Within seconds of meeting the chemistry teacher and her family, we gathered that from now on things with Ronnie were going to be frum (observant): a religious wedding at a synagogue, kosher catering – the whole thing. I had been in a synagogue before. When I was seven a boy had come up to me in the playground and said, ‘You’re Jewish. My Mum says you’re Jewish and that you should come to Hebrew classes.’ I went home and said, ‘Peter Kellner says that I should go to Hebrew classes. His mum runs them in the old church in Marsh Lane.’

‘Very well,’ Mum said.

So I went to the old church and Mrs Kellner started to teach me Hebrew. I remember very clearly how she taught us the sound of two of the letters that looked a little bit like a seven. One has a dot above the seven, the other has a dot in the middle of the down stroke.

‘How do you tell the difference?’ I asked.

She said, ‘When a football lands on your head, you say “Oh!”, when a football lands in your tummy, you say, “Oooh!” That’s the difference.’

I enjoyed the Hebrew lessons, and I liked Mrs Kellner very much. And for two or three Sundays I went with Peter Kellner to the synagogue.

When Bubbe and Zeyde came over, Zeyde couldn’t believe it. He laughed and laughed. ‘Michael’s going to cheder!’ (Hebrew classes, pronounced ‘kayder’). I guess the bitter arguments about religion from before the war turned my cheder outings into a joke.

Once the Hebrew class went on an outing to Chessington Zoo. The mothers of the cheder kids said that we could all go off on our own, and meet up by the entrance at four o’ clock. At least, that’s how I heard it, so I did just that. I loved the zoo, but when I got back at four o’clock they came running towards me, shouting ‘Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you for hours!’

I reminded them that they’d said we could go off on our own. So I had. And they started shouting all over again: ‘You weren’t supposed to wander off on your own! You were supposed to be in your group. Everyone else was in their group. You were the only one not in your group. Just think: you’ve ruined everyone’s afternoon.’

I was furious. As far as I knew they hadn’t said anything about groups. I never went back to Hebrew Classes.

Years later I asked Harold, ‘Why did you let me go to cheder? You disagreed with that sort of thing.’

‘You said you wanted to,’ he said.

Back to 1960: Ronnie’s wedding was going to be the gantse magilla, Harold said – the full thing. However, the day didn’t go entirely smoothly.

At the service, Harold had one job: he had to stand one side of Ronnie, while the bride’s brother stood the other side. He then had to pass the ring to Ronnie. The day was hot, and sweltering under the khuppe, the canopy where a Jewish wedding ceremony takes place. It was the big moment: Ronnie stepped forward, Harold started to give him the ring and Ronnie fainted. He gave way at the knees.

Bubbe – who saw the world as a series of crises – cried out from her wheelchair. Someone rushed over to console her. The rabbi seemed worried about how the service could carry on. Harold and Ronnie’s brother-in-law improvised. They picked Ronnie up and propped him between them for the rest of the ceremony. As Harold put it, he was ‘out of it’ for the whole thing. Afterwards, Bubbe was inconsolable about Ronnie: ‘It was a lovely wedding. A lovely wedding. Such a shame he missed it.’

Then we went to the poshest place I had ever been to. It was somewhere in the West End, in an underground banqueting hall. You couldn’t tell from the front, though. It was just a door on the street. But inside there were mirrors and chandeliers and hundreds of guests, people from the bride’s side I hadn’t seen before, of course. The room also filled with people from Bubbe and Zeyde’s side I had never seen before either. Great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins and second cousins: Isakofskys and Goldmans. The only ones I knew were Zeyde’s brother, Hymie, and his wife, who lived in Hackney a few houses away from Bubbe and Zeyde.

One of these relations looked different to the others. She was related to Bubbe, but wasn’t wearing the sort of clothes that everyone else was wearing. She had a red scarf on her head and large gold hoops in her ears. Mum told me who she was, but sadly I’ve forgotten. Afterwards Mum said, ‘See, I always told you. There’s gypsy in me.’

After the wedding, we visited Ronnie and his new wife in their new home in Kingsbury. The house was like all the houses my friends from school lived in. Harold said that the cheese cake was the best cheese cake he had ever tasted, real cheese cake, not that ‘strange confection’ you can buy in supermarkets these days. And then it stopped: we didn’t see them anymore. Bubbe died, then Zeyde. Mum went to the funerals, saying that she preferred it if I didn’t come.

Reading and rereading the leaflets I picked up at Aldermaston, I gathered there was an outfit called the Young Socialists who met upstairs in the Railway Tavern, Wealdstone. I decided to go. There, we sat on stacking chairs and I listened in silence as the others talked about Gaitskell and Greenwood. Gaitskell had lost the vote, then he won the vote. Greenwood had lost the vote but he was running again, and we had to support Greenwood.

I realised very quickly that people were talking in shorthand – which was fine, Mum and Harold did the same. Names of people stood for a set of beliefs or ideas, and if you weren’t tuned in, you could get lost very quickly.

Greenwood I knew. Well, I didn’t actually know him, but I had seen him at the head of the Aldermaston March, and of course I knew his daughter. Well, again, I didn’t exactly know her, but there had been the whole ‘Boy!’ thing.

Some people in the room were for Greenwood, some for Gaitskell. Some Young Socialists were young. Some were old. I recognised one of them: Dave, who had been a school friend of Brian’s. He was very intense in those days, walked fast down school corridors looking at the floor, with his hair bouncing on the top of his head in time with his walk. Now as he debated he grew more agitated.

I had seen him getting agitated before. When he was a prefect in the sixth form he had put me on detention. I had thought, how daft is this? You might be over our house later, and we’ll be sitting round the table, Mum will have put a gigantic bit of cheese on the table, a loaf of bread and a jar of pickle and a fruit cake, and it’ll be all ‘Can you pass me the butter?’ Brian liked him. Dave stood as the school Labour candidate in the school General Election of 1959, and Brian had been his ‘agent’.

In the Railway Tavern meeting, the Greenwood vs Gaitskell argument went on for a while, until suddenly Dave stood up and said that the branch had been infiltrated by Trotskyists from the SLL. There was some hissing but Dave carried on, getting red in the face and his hair bouncing as it did when he walked down the school corridor and gave me a detention. He said there was no place for the SLL in the Labour Party, so the vote we were about to take was invalid.

Because at this stage I hadn’t mapped Brian Pearce’s road through Trotskyism, I whispered to the person next to me, ‘Who are the SLL?’

‘Socialist Labour League.’

It answered everything and nothing. Were they in the room? If so, which ones? And if they were in the room, should they have been in the room? If they shouldn’t have been in the room, why were they in the room? I didn’t know anyone to ask apart from Dave, but he was busy speaking and, anyway, he was pretending he didn’t know me.

At this point, things got complicated because Dave said they had to vote on whether there should be a vote, because, he claimed, there were people present who shouldn’t vote. People went over to the person chairing the meeting and whispered in his ear. The chairman then said that Dave could move an amendment. Dave said he didn’t want to move an amendment, we needed to move to the vote. Someone said, ‘Which vote?’

A guy stood up and said that we were all grown-ups – which wasn’t strictly true, or if it was it shouldn’t have been, because this was a meeting of the Young Socialists, not the Grown-Up Socialists. In the end there was a vote in favour of Greenwood, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. I didn’t know who was going to be told about the vote, nor whether any of these votes were going to go to Greenwood or not.

At the end, I got up to leave and two people came rushing towards me with a newspaper, which I bought, and they said they hadn’t seen me at the branch before. Was I new to politics? I said I wasn’t, and they said OK. I slipped away, and would have been interested in talking to Dave but he’d slipped away even quicker.

I decided not to go back to the Young Socialists. Dave went on to be famous, influential and much-loved, especially when talking about the environment. I suspect he didn’t go to many more Young Socialist meetings either.

I did continue going on demos: anti-apartheid marches, and one at the US airbase in Ruislip, and then, when the Committee of 100 and Bertrand Russell announced that they were going to sit down in Whitehall in protest against a US submarine coming to Scotland, I went with Mart and we sat down. However, I got up when the police announced that they would start arresting us: I lost my nerve, and walked to the pavement. In the end, the police didn’t arrest anyone that day, so afterwards I felt I had let people down by getting up.

By now Harold was teaching at a training college in West London. He had a whole new set of stories to tell: there was the time he was sitting eating lunch and the lecturer next to him was in full flow talking about someone he didn’t like, and referred to this person as ‘the nasty little Jew’, and then he noticed that Harold was sitting there and the lecturer stopped talking.

When Harold got to the end of this story, I said to him, ‘What did you say?’

‘I asked him if there were any other kinds of little Jews,’ he said.

The scope of our parents’ friendships was widening. Students and teachers started coming over, and some would stay at our flat over a whole weekend. I loved this. I stayed up late at night with them talking and arguing. My favourite was Bertrand, the French ‘assistant’. He wore thick dark-green glasses, had dark eyes, very tanned skin, a black chin-strap beard and a straight fringe. He loved to hear stories about my friends at school, and he told us stories about his parents and the village he came from in the Ardèche. He was desperate for me to teach him swear words, and we spent hours turning words from one language into literal but meaningless words in the other.

He had picked up that in the nineteenth century, street kids were ‘urchins’, so we started to talk about children as ‘oursins’ even though it means sea-urchins and only sea-urchins in French. Soon our word for my friends and me was the oursins.

In the end Bertrand said that we should come out and camp at the camping in his village. He said there were loads of things to explore. ‘You people like the walking and the hiking and there are the caves and the rivers where you can swim, it will be formi (great), and it will be full of oursins that you can play about with.’

So that summer Brian, Mum and Harold and I went to Laurac in the Ardèche and camped in the municipal campsite, in the middle of the village, next to a viaduct and a concrete swimming pool full of dark green water. Brian went off for two weeks camp-hiking with some friends, while Harold and I spent hours playing quoits. He complained that it was so hot he could only eat yoghurt. I practised underwater swimming in the pool that was growing darker and darker by the day. No one else swam in it. They said that seeing me slip beneath the surface, disappear completely, and re-emerge at the other end, was unnerving.

Harold started reading bits from the usual array of guidebooks he bought for our holidays, and told us that the region was famous for chestnuts and silk worms. The chestnuts are turned into purée and the silk was woven by the silk weavers of Lyon, who were, he said, revolutionaries. He suddenly remembered the song from his Yves Montand record of French traditional songs about les pauvres canuts (the poor silk-weavers), and walked about being Yves Montand, singing ‘Qu’est-ce qui passe ici si tard? Compagnons de la Marjolaine …’

One night Bertrand said that they were going to show a Brigitte Bardot film in the village. When we arrived at the place, it turned out to be in an open courtyard, with washing lines loaded with shirts, pants and trousers running to and fro between the houses. Someone had set up a projector at one end and was showing the film on an old whitewashed wall at the other end. People of all ages gathered, ancient grannies dressed in black, children playing in the dust, couples, old guys drinking.

The film was Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (The Night Heaven Fell), and people carried on talking and messing about even after it started: the storyline was that a young handsome bloke was having a thing with a married woman, and ended up killing her husband. But instead of staying with that woman he starts up with Brigitte Bardot, which involves them lying on a beach and her taking all her clothes off; all this projected on the old wall in front of the washing with the ancient grannies dressed in black, the kids playing in the dust and the old guys drinking. As this sort of thing (I mean Bardot taking her clothes off) didn’t happen in English cinemas – not even in films that you had to climb through the window to see – I was first of all amazed by Brigitte Bardot and then amazed that there was no reaction in the courtyard. The audience went on watching, chatting and playing. I felt a little embarrassed that Mum and Harold were watching nearby, with Bertrand. I thought they might be embarrassed that I would be embarrassed. But after it was over, Harold was killing himself laughing over some other moment in the film altogether, when the husband furiously calls the young bloke ‘une ordure’ –‘scum’. With a long-extended last syllable, orduuuuure, it became his favourite term of joke-abuse for the next forty years.

After that Bertrand told me that the Laurac fête was coming and between me and him, he was very interested in the oiseaux (another literalist gag like oursins, oiseau meaning bird). Over the next day the bunting went up. A team of men shouted and swore at each other as they put up the platform. The bars filled up, and old ladies sat at the tables overlooking the square as folks arrived. A band of accordion players and guitarists played a kind of music I hadn’t ever heard before – jazzy, folksy, jiggy – and people danced and clapped. Bertrand said that I should dance too. I said I can’t, and don’t. He was appalled. He disappeared from sight.

The next day, Mum said that she was really fed up with Bertrand. He and his brother sponged off their mother, she said. The poor woman did all the shopping, cooking and cleaning, while they just sat about drinking. And on the night of the fête he was running after girls at least ten years younger than him.

‘He’s a superannuated teenager,’ Harold said.

Bertrand was fast shrinking into a non-person. Brian knew about this process: he had spotted a pattern. There were people who our parents were dead keen on at first, until all of a sudden something happened or something was said and they became non-people. Brian was right. After the fête, Bertrand was never seen again.

Before his exit, he told us about les gourdes. These were pools in the rivers where you could swim. They were deep and cold, and I started swimming underwater across these too. I had read Jacques Cousteau’s Silent World and was fascinated by underwaterness. Any water as big or as deep as a pool or a river gave me an urge to get in, to plunge under the surface. I didn’t have goggles but I loved staring into the foggy space there. Maybe I’d skip being an actor, or a Beyond the Fringe-type comedian; I would become an aqualung-ist, gliding about on the sea bottom a hundred feet down …

Some French kids my age came to the gourde that we went to, and one of the boys in their group, holidaying at a Colonie de Vacances, had the underwater bug too. I got the impression that I was being set up for a challenge – and took it. Soon we were diving in and swimming to and fro underwater in the gourde.

While we mucked around, Mum and Harold talked to their moniteur or supervisor, called Maurice. The kids were all from Lyon, he told them, the children of workers at a big chemical plant. Harold was excited to hear that workers in France had won these Colonies as part of their labour conditions. After all, the workers’ annual holiday didn’t match the school holiday, so the Colonies offered a refuge for their children … or was it more than that? Something educational?

After a day or two of these swims at the gourde, Harold said that he had been speaking to Maurice, who he had discovered was a teacher and a Communist, and they’d arranged for me to stay at the Colonie for the last few days of our holiday. I couldn’t understand how, given that they’d left the Communist Party (and given how irritated he was, say, with Malc’s mother Peggy for ‘talking like a gramophone record’), someone like Maurice could appear like an instant hero of progress and socialism.

Despite being younger, I was in a tent with boys of fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. I quickly understood that far from being the happy-go-lucky group they appeared to be at the gourde, they were deeply into being pissed off. For a start, they had to spend the afternoons making ‘lavender bottles’: going into the fields, picking lavender, bringing it back, cutting it into lengths, bunching it, bending back small groups of stems and plaiting red ribbons through them. I joined in. We made hundreds. Then there was the float, a giant swan assembled from thousands of white paper roses. Each rose you constructed by cutting a strip of paper, cutting slits into it, scraping the paper so that it curled and then rolling it round so that it looked like a rose.

Lavender bottles and paper roses took hours; but rebellion was in the air. It was led by a tiny guy who hadn’t grown, called Ben Zizi. His parents were Algerian, and he was not only a leader, he was a comedian. He had perfected take-offs of French or American pop stars, where he would strike a pose, run his hand through his hair and flop his hands about as if he was rocking the joint. His big mate, Gaudemarre, seemed much too old to be at a Colonie. He looked like the old-style Teddy Boys I had seen on the streets when I was six or seven: greased-back hair, quiff at the front flopping forward. The enemy was Blanchard, who Ben Zizi, Gaudemarre and the rest despised because they said he was a mouchard, spying on them and snitching to Maurice.

The workers started their protest by slowing down the output of lavender bottles and white roses. In response Maurice delivered a long lecture. He said that they were a bunch of je m’en foutistes (don’t-give-a-shit-ists). He was amazed and disgusted. Did they have any idea of what their parents had been through, the sacrifices and dangers they had experienced? And how hard they had fought to win the right for their children to attend a Colonie de Vacances? ‘And now all you’re doing is sitting around moaning.’

Back in the tent, Ben Zizi said that they were going to go on strike; was I with them or against them? This was tough. For a start, could you strike against a Communist? And then, I was a guest. How could I strike against somewhere that had invited me to stay?

They went on strike. No more lavender bottles. No more paper roses. Mouchard went off and talked to Maurice. I sat with the workers.

Then Madame Goetschy, the camp director, came to the tent and she gave a long speech too. She was not much taller than Ben Zizi, and wore plastic sandals and a black swimming costume all day and every day. In fact, I got the impression that everyone had come to this Colonie with one swimming costume, one T-shirt, one pair of plastic sandals and one pair of flip-flops. Neither plastic sandals nor flip-flops had arrived in Pinner yet.

Madame Goetschy was less confrontational than Maurice, who sat in the camp office fuming. Madame struck a deal: we would put on a play for the younger (and seemingly tiny) kids at the Colonie. Maurice was hauled back and he proposed that it should be Don Quichotte (Don Quixote).

Maurice explained that the only props would be stuff that we could find around the camp: brooms, colanders, plates, soap containers and the like.

They put Don Quichotte on at night, lit by the outside bulkhead light and lanterns, next to a big fig tree, while the cicadas chirped from the trees further off. Mum and Harold came. Don Quichotte (played by a guy who looked like Jacques Tati) charged to and fro on his broomstick. My striped towel was part of his outfit, and he wore a colander for a helmet. Ben Zizi was Sancho Panza. The little ones squealed and screamed.

Afterwards Harold said that it was bloody terrific. He said it was one of the best bits of theatre he had ever seen. And Brechtian. Mum loved it too, and said how magical it looked with the lanterns, sitting out, and all the children laughing so much.

‘Maurice is one in a million,’ Harold said, ‘and what a rapport he’s got with them.’

‘Mm,’ I said.

I didn’t tell him about the strike.

The next day, on the way back to England, we stopped by a river and I jumped in. A girl was there with her grandmother. She jumped in too. As we swam in the river she started talking to me. When we got out, we sat and talked in French; her grandmother said that she should ask me for my address. So I gave it to her. She gave me hers. Mum asked me if I wanted to stay longer. Did it seem like I wanted to stay longer? I said, no, that was fine. A month or so later, I got a postcard and on the card it said (in French), ‘Sun, water, an hour by the river …’ and a signature.

I tried to imagine cards and letters between us in the future, stretching away over months, and I thought how she would want to come and stay with us and wasn’t our family too odd for people like her to come and stay, she wouldn’t like it, and I would have to stay with her and her grandmother, and I didn’t know what to say on a card or a letter anyway. But then, wasn’t she dark and beautiful? Yes, she was … but was that enough? Were looks like hers reason enough to write? Oh, hang on, what if it was just a tease? I didn’t like it that it was her grandmother who got her to ask for my address. For days and weeks after, I tormented myself over whether I would or wouldn’t write, and the moment where the grandmother got her to ask for my address kept bothering me.

It reminded me of how in Great Expectations Miss Havisham sits behind Estella, telling her how to treat Pip.

I didn’t write back.

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My father Harold’s mother and father, Rose Hyams and Morris Rosen.

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Morris in a garden in the US in the 1940s.

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Rose on the SS President Harding, 1922, returning from the US to live in England with (from left) Harold’s sister Sylvia, brother Wallace, and Harold.

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My mother, Connie Isakofsky, and Harold.

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Harold in his US Army uniform (1945–1947).

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Connie, aged seventeen.

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Harold and Connie getting married with Rose on Harold’s right and ‘the Westons’ on his left.

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Harold, top left, with one of his classes at Greenford County School in the early 1950s.

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Harold in his US Army jeep in Germany.

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Tyneholme Nursery

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Seventh from left on the back row: me. Fourth from left: Mrs Gallagher. Fifth from right: Hornby Teacher.

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Miss Goodall’s Class, West Lodge Primary, Pinner, 1955/56. I’m at the very back. Brian Harrison is in the second row of desks from left, 3 desks back, on the left.

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Me, aged 7.

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Harold and me at Butler’s Farm, Skenfrith, Monmouthshire.

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Malcolm Aprahamian and me at a Woodcraft Folk Camp, in the Mendips, Somerset.

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Unter den Linden, Berlin 1957, Mum and me with the ‘Hitler’ woman on Mum’s right and the woman’s friend.

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Len Goldman and me.

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The International school. Top left, Peter Wright; my mother wearing scarf with Dorothy Diamond to her right; second to Mum’s left, Len Goldman; possibly John Holly below Len. Rose Betts is five people to Mum’s right.

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