My grandmother Flora wasn’t happy. On the morning of the wedding, Grandma said to Mummy: ‘Well, you’ve made your bed and you must lie on it.’ She didn’t like my father, because she felt he thought he was a cut above them socially, but that’s a spiteful thing to say to your daughter on her wedding day. That’s what my grandmother could be like, and yet she was all sweetness and light where I was concerned. She adored me.
Mummy married Daddy and raised her social status in a single stroke, which is what she intended to do. They went to live at my father’s house in Terrace Road, Plaistow, where he was in single-handed practice as a GP. Their household was completed by a wire-haired terrier called Bonny and Daddy’s loyal housekeeper, Miss Shrimpton.
Mummy was the rock in my life. It was not that I didn’t love my father, but he was quiet, and she was not. In some senses, they were incompatible. They came from very different strands of Jewish life. Mummy was the most vivid person I have ever known. She was an overflowing, ebullient, seemingly confident and, if I’m honest (and I must be), slightly vulgar person, while my father was totally buttoned-up, very Presbyterian and hemmed in by all the orthodoxy of Judaism to which his family subscribed. My mother was more of a free spirit: accomplished and brave and fearless.
While undeniably much more like my mother, I remain a strange mixture of them both to this day.
Enter Miriam
Daddy was forty-two when I was born, in 1941. Ruth, my mother, was thirty-seven; they were relatively old to be having a first child. But it was deliberate: most newly married couples try to have children, but for ten years my parents tried not to. It was my mother’s wish. Two of her cousins in South Africa had died in childbirth, and she was terribly afraid it was a family curse and that the same fate would befall her. So, for eleven years after their marriage no child was born. But, eventually, at the beginning of the Blitz, to Mummy’s despair, she conceived. I was told it was the terror of an air raid pounding above the cellar where they were sheltering that allowed Daddy in — and me to be born. Mummy always said that was why I had curly hair. She wanted desperately to have an abortion, but it was against the law and no one would do it. So, she held on to me and never, for the rest of her life, let me go.
It was in early 1941, when Mummy was four months pregnant with me, that my parents were bombed out. Their house in Plaistow had a direct hit. They lost everything. They fled to Oxford, because people said that Oxford would never be bombed. And it never was. Apparently, Hitler had planned that it would be his capital when he won the war, because it was such a beautiful city. The other, more pragmatic, reason why we ended up in Oxford was that their car, a Morris Oxford, was already in a garage there for repair, so they left London on a train and came to Oxford with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They found a room to rent on the Cowley Road for £2/10s (two pounds and ten shillings) a night. That was a lot of money in those days: Oxford people were greedy and exploitative and fleeced the refugees and the people who had to escape from London during the war.
My parents came to Oxford very much as ‘outsiders’, and it has always been an unfriendly city to outsiders. It’s not a warm, welcoming place. It’s a cold, assessing place, and it is also an antisemitic one. As a Jew and a Scotsman with a strong Glaswegian accent, Daddy must have felt especially incongruous.
Eventually, they found a flat in Banbury Road, North Oxford, and I was born on 18 May 1941 in the Elizabeth Nuffield Maternity Home on the corner of Beech Croft Road. It’s now an old people’s home.
The name Miriam means ‘bitter’, ‘star of the sea’ and ‘longed-for child’, but the meanings were immaterial. Mummy named me after her favourite aunt, her mother’s sister — a dark, pretty little woman, who died a widow in 1933. I was a much prized, spoilt, golden child; my parents’ only child, the centre of their worlds. They were determined I should have every advantage they’d been denied. They wanted to make sure I’d be accepted, that no door would be shut to me. And it was a very secure upbringing. I never felt underprivileged. I always felt that I was important, because I was to my parents. Everything I did fascinated them: I always had their undivided attention and their all-consuming, unconditional adoration.
Just the three of us: it was passionate, close, indulgent. Mummy[2] often said, ‘We are a fortress family.’ That was her expression, and I don’t for a second regret my closeness to them because they gave me so much confidence. The umbilical cord was never completely cut, metaphorically speaking: I still feel connected to them long after their deaths.
My earliest memory is of sitting in my pram, sucking my thumb, in the front garden of our flat on Banbury Road. A woman came up and said, ‘If you do that, a bogeyman will cut it off.’ I was only two, but I thought, ‘That woman’s mad. How stupid of her. Of course there isn’t a bogeyman. No one’s coming.’ I was immediately sceptical, and convinced I was right.
Nothing has changed.
I was four when the war ended, in 1945. Mummy decided that Victory in Europe Day must be marked in some way. ‘We’ll make tea and sandwiches for the bus crews,’ she announced. I had no idea what this meant, but I was clearly involved. Trestle tables were set up outside the house and all morning we made sandwiches; Mummy was the best sandwich-maker I’ve ever known. She sliced tomatoes and onions frighteningly thin, but cheese was generously applied. Our home-made gooseberry jam from the garden was spread with cream on delicious scones. The plates were piled high; we had cakes too, bought from the Cadena Cafe in Cornmarket Street, whose patisseries and cream-filled chocolate doughnuts were legendary. She lifted me up to hand the goodies to the conductors and the bus drivers in their cabs. It was a glorious memory; we were released from the horrors of the war and everyone wanted to celebrate.
Mummy composed a song, the ‘Victory Song’. I remember only the first line: ‘Now victory is here…’ One day we went to the New Theatre, and the whole orchestra played her song. Daddy and Mummy and I sat in the front stalls, rigid with pride.
Mummy used to say, ‘You don’t know what life was… what we had before the war.’ That phrase ‘before the war’ implied a kind of paradise time when everything was as it should be. It was clearly a way of life that had disappeared for ever.
We Are a Fortress Family
Our ‘fortress’ was a ground-floor and basement flat on Banbury Road, between Beech Croft Road and Moreton Road. It was awful — very damp and dark; Mummy called it ‘the hovel’. She hated living there and from the moment they moved in, she planned and schemed to get out of it. But Daddy didn’t make enough on his own to rescue them.
In those days, doctors in general practice were paid per capita; leaving Plaistow had meant saying goodbye to a profitable practice. It wasn’t easy to start from scratch. As soon as they arrived in Oxford, Daddy put up his brass plate on the door of the surgery he rented in Cherwell House, a fine Georgian residence backing on to the river at St Clement’s, and hoped that patients would come. Eventually, they did, but then Magdalen College decided to demolish the house (Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire, Pergamon Press, replaced it — a hideous concrete structure). For a while, Daddy had no surgery at all and saw patients at our house, but Mummy fought Magdalen College on his behalf and, after a fierce struggle, secured a small but pleasant property opposite the back door of the college at 4 Longwall Street. That was where Daddy practised medicine until he retired.
2
I would never have said ‘Mum and Dad’ — it was always ‘Mummy and Daddy’. It was North Oxford, you see.