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We were the poorest I 85

There was one occasion, it must have been during the school
holidays, when I was going from Canning Town to the Old
Street shop where my father was, and my mother gave me
five shillings to shop at the wholesale market. My father had
left her a note to say, ‘Borrow five shillings from your mother
and give it to Bernard to take to Spitalfields to buy a box of
Granny Smith apples.’ And I handed the note and the money
across to the salesman so they could be delivered to the shop.
When I got to Old Street I told my father that I had
given the note to the salesman. Now he was very, very up-
set. Because if the wholesaler had read ‘borrow five shillings
from your mother’ – well, that would have damaged his cred-
ibility at the market and destroyed his self-respect, which was
just about the only thing he had left. Then I was very upset,
so much so that I walked all the way back to Canning Town,
as I didn’t have the fare money. I remember being in a bit of a
daze.
In fact, my mother had torn that bit off and just given
me the bit saying ‘Granny Smith apples’. But we only found
that out later.

Clara showed characteristic sensitivity when she trimmed
that embarrassing note. Her great gift was for people, keeping them in
the shop and making them welcome – sentiments that came from an
authentic place. ‘She was genuinely interested, liked chatting.’ Unlike
his father, Bernard did not need to add, or, for that matter, himself.
If Clara hungered for friendship, she had little chance to forge
it outside the shop, but perhaps thanks to her the family’s narrow so-
cial circle expanded enough to embrace another Jewish shopkeeping
family. The Ferrers ran a fancy goods and perfumery business on City
Road, just around the corner from their shop – stock with a signifi-
cantly more forgiving shelf life and profit margin than fruit. There
was to be a humiliating period when the Lewises’ takings fell so low
that frequently Lew was reduced to borrowing from the Ferrers just
enough money to buy a couple of boxes of fruit, repaying them that
evening out of the day’s proceeds.

86 I We were the poorest

Yet Lew was not ready to resign himself to poverty. At some
point, to Bernard’s amazement, he gathered the wherewithal to rent
a second shop in Moorgate, a kiosk in an arcade. ‘The idea was my
mother would be in the Old Street shop and he would be in that ar-
cade – go to market early, come back between the two. Where he
got the money for the shop fittings, I don’t know. But he was there
and I would go down after school and relieve him. But it was a disas-
ter. Never worked. Not enough trade. Goodness knows how we got
through it. Must have set him back. But obviously he was still trying.
Don’t forget that he had started with absolutely nothing.’
Once more, Lew possessed nothing beyond the stubborn faith
that, with effort, he could claw his way to a decent livelihood. Bernard
noted another lesson: do not invest in a feeble trading position. But
his father’s determination would prove the most potent legacy of all.

*

On Saturdays, like almost every other day, Clara would work in Old
Street, so Bernard often spent the morning at home, minding Geof-
frey. ‘Not Godfrey, I’ve a feeling my grandmother would have taken
him with her to Rathbone Street market. And I think we would both
go to the store for lunch with her.’ But shopkeeping suited him better
than brother-sitting, and Bernard soon persuaded Fanny to trade Sat-
urday duties with him, allowing him to man the market stall for her.
Having spent so much time at wholesale markets and in his parents’
shops, it must have seemed a natural progression, although it was not
one any of his brothers would make. ‘Godfrey and Geoffrey were still
too young, and David wasn’t interested.’
Fanny’s stall was hardly big business. Just over a metre deep
and about two metres wide, with a roof overhead to keep stock dry
in bad weather, and a paraffin lamp for wintry evenings. She bought
supplies from Gardiner’s, the vast wholesale store that lent its name

We were the poorest I 87

to Gardiner’s Corner at the top of the Commercial Road, a junction
widely regarded as the gateway to the East End.
Once Bernard accompanied her to Gardiner’s to help her cart
back the merchandise to her store. ‘It was just like any other shop, but
much bigger. Counters all around, no self-service, the stock displayed
on shelves, all sorts of menswear. Whatever you wanted you asked for
and the staff would fetch it.’ If the lad had any inkling that clothing
would one day make his fortune, this trip triggered no Damascene
revelation. Far from it; he could not have been more bored. Even if
clothes had interested him at the time, the thick woollen men’s socks,
vests and sturdy bib-and-braces dungarees that Fanny sold were about
as far removed from anyone’s idea of fashion as you could get. Yes, the
dungarees might be denim, but this was long before the 1950s, when
Levi’s jeans and rock and roll transformed this hardworking fabric of
the labouring class into the acme of cool youth.
Fanny never paid Bernard a farthing for his time, but as far as
he was concerned, peddling her wares brought its own reward. With
theft a perpetual worry ‘you had to keep your eyes on everything all
the time’. As his sharp gaze roamed the theatre of the marketplace he
became familiar with its colourful cast of characters, and, like a young
anthropologist, he revelled in the show, especially the tricks that some
of the shadier operators used to turn their trade.

I remember watching the people who would attract a crowd
around them and sell. The false medicines, the snake-oil
salesmen.
They would get people in the crowd to act for them.
First the chap would pitch-up. And you would see them –
different people, different Saturdays, but you would get to
recognise them after a while, posing as strangers. So the chap
would put something out in front of them and start talking,
attract a crowd around him, and then there would be the
plant – when the man starts to sell there had to be somebody
to start the buying off. And observing this, I got to under-
stand – well, everything.

88 I We were the poorest

By ‘everything’ he meant the whole dance of retail: supply,
demand and how to massage its most important element, the cus-
tomers. But although he learned plenty about the scams that oiled
the wheels of a 1930s marketplace, he never encountered outright
thuggery, no matter that Britain’s economy was entrenched in deep
recession. ‘Back then even crooks usually had some sort of a sense
of honour. They wouldn’t hurt women or children, and I never felt
threatened.’
In short, he was street savvy well before his teens. ‘It’s an
instinctive understanding – of the way your world works. You un-
derstand that you’re dealing with your customer, competitors and
the merchandise. It’s a good grounding.’ And now he had found his
ground he was very much a boy in a hurry – quite literally, from the
age of twelve, after he laid his hands on a pair of roller skates that he
strapped over his shoes. ‘I went absolutely everywhere on them. It was
lovely, taking off to the stall on a Saturday.’ The only exception being
his journey to school, a rather more sedate trip by bus.
Despite seeing his parents a fair amount during the week and
living in such a crowded home, there was ample scope for Bernard to
acquire the habit of solitude as he whizzed about on his skates. Often
he would return home on a Saturday evening to find himself in an
empty house, and would listen to the radio in the sitting room, wait-
ing for Fanny to come back and give him supper – in the dark if the
electricity meter had run out of money (he never had a coin himself).
Then the rest of the family drifted in, gathering to enjoy shows like In
Town Tonight.
Isolation did not dull his love of sport. ‘I got hold of a tennis
racquet, it must have belonged to an uncle, and it was distorted, with a
kink at the end, but I still played using it. I remember that racquet ab-
solutely vividly. It could be last year – not three-quarters of a century
ago. And I had a tennis ball – I would always carry a ball, you know, to

We were the poorest I 89

play by myself. I’d go round the corner from my grandmother’s house
where there was a side wall, and I’d bang that tennis ball against it for
ages at a time. I remember it vividly: there was the ball, the wall and
the cobbled road.’
Of all the house’s residents, none was so isolated as Fanny’s
husband, Harry Smitzer. Only one Lewis, Godfrey, enjoyed anything
approaching a relationship with the ‘old man’. ‘Sometimes he would
give me a ha’penny for very cheap cigarettes, Weights. I remember a
packet of five was two pence, so if the shop sold them individually
they would get two and a half pence – he sent me out to get them,’
said Godfrey. ‘But I had the feeling my grandmother wasn’t very hap-
py with him at all. He had a lady friend and he didn’t work.’ Bernard,
whose memory stretched back further than his brother’s, disagreed.
‘He went off every day to a clothing factory making waistcoats.’
No moment would be so indicative of Smitzer’s lowly status
in the household as the manner of his leaving it. ‘One morning my
grandmother woke up and there he was, dead next to her. We all went
off to school as usual and someone got in touch with his sister, who
lived in the East End, to make the funeral arrangements. It was left to
her to deal with him,’ said Bernard. ‘It was a different sort of marriage.
Must have been, mustn’t it? His death didn’t mean that much to us.
We were subdued but I don’t remember that there was a sense of grief.
I don’t remember a funeral.’
Fanny may not have lamented her loss with any show of cere-
mony. Nevertheless, she took pains to ensure that her grandsons kept
up their religious observance, escorting them to Barking Synagogue
with one or two aunts and uncles on high days and holy days. Ber-
nard’s recollection of these trips blurred into generalised scenes: of
people in prayer shawls, speaking in Hebrew that was to him, despite
the best endeavours of JFS, largely gibberish. But one occasion etched
itself on his consciousness. He was standing outside the synagogue

90 I We were the poorest

with David amid a thicket of boys around their age. His brother must
have been thirteen or fourteen, Bernard thought, because he was
wearing long trousers while Bernard was in shorts, and suddenly he
noticed that the bottom of David’s trousers was worn through. ‘No-
body else had ragged trousers. I realised we were the poorest.’
Godfrey had another curious memory from this time of re-
ceiving an amazing gift from his father for his fifth birthday, in May
1938: a brand new tricycle. ‘It cost £3 and it had white tyres and to me
it was better than a Rolls-Royce. It was the most wondrous thing. I’ve
wondered often since then how he found the money.’
Financially illogical as the gift would have been, there was a
powerful reason why Lew felt impelled to such a grand gesture. For
the second time in the boy’s brief life, the family had very nearly lost
Godfrey.
The drama began in high jinks. ‘I remember dancing on the
table with Godfrey in Canning Town,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Then he slipped
and bashed his head on the sewing machine. Then Godfrey got ill and
I always connected this with the accident and felt guilty.’
When the fever took hold, both of the younger boys were at
home with Fanny, Clara having already left to go to work at the shop.
Godfrey’s decline must have been rapid and terrifying, because Fanny
was moved to send a friend off to call a doctor to the house – a rare
and costly step in the days before the National Health Service. When
the doctor finally turned up, unable to make sense of the boy’s symp-
toms, he brushed off her concerns and left.
Fortunately she had a mind of her own and, heedless of the
expense, she did a remarkable thing and summoned a second doctor.
By the time he arrived she was frantic. But when she let slip that an-
other doctor had already visited, he walked out without so much as
examining the boy. ‘He thought it was unethical or something,’ said
Geoffrey. Or perhaps he trusted his fellow physician more than a dis-

We were the poorest I 91

traught woman babbling in broken English. Geoffrey watched, terri-
fied, as she pursued the doctor into the street, begging him to return.
To her great credit she succeeded, because her terror turned out to be
justified. Godfrey was diagnosed with meningitis, and the prognosis
was dreadful. As far as everyone knew, he was dying.
With all possible haste, the doctor arranged to transport the
boy to the London Hospital in Whitechapel. He might as well have
been carried off to the moon as far as his brothers were concerned.
‘My mother would go to see him at the hospital every day on the way
to the shop. But we never went. Hospitals were not quite so amenable
with their visiting policy back then, I think.’ All the brothers could do
was to fret, and, in Geoffrey’s case, feel guilty.
Several weeks later Geoffrey was with his father in the Old
Street shop when Clara rushed back from the hospital, elated. ‘He
had turned the corner, he was recovering!’ In due course Godfrey re-
turned to Canning Town, although once back on his feet, he never en-
tirely cast off the metaphorical cotton wool. ‘When he came home he
was very precious, very looked after.’ During his recuperation God-
frey had a tender moment with Clara, walking in Canning Town. ‘I
remember holding her hand, asking how old she was. Thirty-three,
she said. She was a very, very gentle, loving mother.’
If Clara and Lew ached to move somewhere cleaner and freer,
they had little choice but to stay put. And despite many drawbacks,
there were advantages to living in the protective embrace of extend-
ed family, above and beyond spreading the burdens of childcare. For
instance, when Godfrey was well enough to attend school, it turned
out to be a mixed blessing. ‘I remember children calling me names,
coming home, yet again, throwing things at me.’ Hearing of this, it
was not his overworked parents but Aunt Lily who stepped in. ‘She
went to school to tell the teachers off because kids were starting with
me.’

92 I We were the poorest

Seen from the perspective of history, these abusive children’s
hateful words appear like stray sparks, spat from a volcano that was
about to erupt. Everywhere, tensions were rising in anticipation of
war, and increasingly anti-Semitism was becoming normalised, in
Britain as elsewhere. As abuse of Jews lost its shock value, through
repetition, through speeches by the likes of Oswald Mosley, through
news reports of events at home and abroad, the hatred entered public
discourse, less and less often couched in shadowy innuendos than the
sort of overt slurs, such as ‘Jew Boy’, to which Bernard was already
numbed.
At that time every child in London had good reason to feel
afraid. Dread of an increasingly bellicose Germany abated slightly
at the end of September 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain joined other foreign powers in signing the Munich
Agreement, which permitted Germany to annex the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia without reprisals. But this act of appeasement pro-
vided no more than a shabby reprieve as German aggression contin-
ued to intensify. Come November the newspapers were plastered with
stories about Kristallnacht, the devastating, co-ordinated destruction
of Jewish citizens’ property throughout Germany.
Lew and Clara were careful not to talk about these events in
front of their boys. Perhaps it was one of the topics they discussed in
Yiddish. Still, there was ‘recognition and acceptance’ that anti-Semi-
tism was getting worse, said Bernard, and as a now devoted reader of
the Daily Mirror he knew enough about it to form his own opinions.
What a time for a Jewish boy to become a young man. But if Bernard
and David’s adolescence furnished them with a painful education in
hard work and the perils of business, it was buttressed by a profound
sense of family loyalty. Their next lessons would be about courage,
seizing chances and taking risks.

7

War

One day Lew took Bernard aside and asked him to take care of Geof-
frey. This exchange puzzled Bernard for years afterwards. ‘We were
at the Old Street shop, I can remember that, but I don’t know why he
said it. He didn’t say it about Godfrey.’

Bernard came to believe the conversation indicated that their
father ‘felt Geoffrey needed in a way looking after’ – even more so
than the family’s designated invalid, his ebullient baby brother. The
deep impression that the request left on him is telling. It represents
the symbolic moment when Lew handed on the baton; ever after-
wards Bernard would feel duty bound to play a father’s part and tak-
ing care of the family was at its heart.

But imagine that the conversation took place some time late
in the summer of 1939, and then Lew’s request makes a little more
sense. Because on 15 March 1939 Germany had invaded Czechoslo-
vakia, extinguishing the last hope that conflict between Britain and
Germany could be avoided.

Now in his forties, but with the health of a far older man, Lew
knew that he would not be called to fight again. Still, he could not
avoid being separated from his family, as London started planning
Operation Pied Piper to send its children to the countryside in what
was destined to be the greatest evacuation ever seen.

Nobody at 99 Victoria Dock Road questioned the wisdom of
dispatching the boys to rural safety, away from the nightmarish wait
for the arrival of Nazi bombs, rumoured to be laden with poisonous
gas. It was thought best to split the brothers into pairs. ‘David, being
the oldest, would look after the youngest. You can see why they did

94 I War

that. So Godfrey went with David and Geoffrey came with me.’ Surely
this is what prompted Lew to ask Bernard to look after Geoffrey. It
was a father’s counsel to his departing son.

On Friday 1 September, the day that Germany invaded Po-
land, the exodus commenced. David and Godfrey made their way to
David’s grammar school in Plaistow, beginning a journey that would
end with a family in Weymouth, and their brothers trundled off to
the Jewish Free School. ‘We just went to the school and then off, the
whole class, probably to Liverpool Street Station.’ If Lew or Clara wept
at their sons’ departure, Bernard was too keyed up to notice. ‘I don’t
remember a tearful farewell. Probably excitement – it was an adven-
ture.’

Geoffrey and Bernard alighted from their train in the cathe-
dral city of Ely, Cambridgeshire, and clambered into a waiting bus,
which dropped them at a village called Sutton, seven miles to the west.
They filed into the village hall to watch and wait as child after child
left with strangers, until their turn came and a Mr and Mrs Blinch led
them off to their temporary home.

Two days later came the sombre moment. ‘I was walking along
the village street,’ said Bernard, ‘looking around at the countryside,
when I heard the sirens going. And that was the war being declared.
September the third.’ The following morning he and Geoffrey became
pupils at their new school in the village. Few familiar faces greeted
them. ‘There weren’t very many of us from the Jewish Free School,
the school was obviously split up, and Sutton was a very small village.
There could have been maybe half a dozen of us.’

Many evacuees would return with horror stories of their
hosts, but in the Blinches Bernard and Geoffrey had found a haven
with two thoroughly good souls. ‘They were farmers, Methodists, but
their farm was elsewhere, and their house was opposite the Methodist
church on the corner of the high street. We went to chapel every week

War I 95

– might have been twice on a Sunday.’ Although zealous proponents
of their religion, and an older couple to boot, the Blinches were nei-
ther strict nor starchy. Better yet, their son Edgar lived nearby with
his family, including a daughter, Olive, who was a little younger than
Bernard.

A large, double-fronted, dark brick Victorian house with an
entrance hall, the Blinches’ house was quite a contrast to Canning
Town. The boys’ bedroom, at the rear, overlooked an orchard in the
garden. ‘We shared a bedroom and a bed – Geoffrey on the left side
and I was on the right.’

‘We had a playroom in a stable, which was nice,’ said Geof-
frey. Yet while the Blinches seemed comfortably off, Bernard did not
remember ‘feeling like it was more grand than our home or anything
like that’.

There was little contact with their brothers in Weymouth. ‘I
think David and I occasionally exchanged letters but not regularly.’
But, far from homesick, Bernard enjoyed himself. It must have helped
that since the age of ten or eleven he had longed to go to boarding
school, having read about it in novels such as Kipling’s Stalky & Co.,
and this was as close to it as he could get. He was not expected to muck
in at the farm, so instead of rolling up his sleeves, immersing himself
in work as he would normally, he enjoyed unprecedented time for re-
flection, taking great pleasure in roaming the open green countryside.

Unlike at home, there was a broad selection of books on the
Blinches’ shelves, and when he was not outside Bernard would bury
himself in a novel, making his first forays into adult fiction. One
standout was a Victorian bestseller, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and
the Hearth. ‘I read that all the time and I remember at a meal the lady
said, “You shouldn’t read that at the table.” Quite right too. But it was
a surprise to me and I was embarrassed and put it away.’ No doubt
there had been little scope for polite family meals, or even space for

96 I War

everyone to sit around the dinner table at Canning Town.
Reade’s novel portrayed the imagined life of Erasmus’s par-

ents, a sad tale and something of a polemic against the misery that
Catholicism inflicted in the Middle Ages. As far as Bernard was con-
cerned, with his interest in Judaism already on the wane, ‘It was an-
other nail in the coffin for religion.’

Back in London, no sooner had the boys left than Lew and
Clara moved their bed and sofa out of Fanny’s house and back across
the East End to the fruit shop in Old Street – not to the lice-ridden
basement, but to the stock room behind the shop. It can hardly have
been a comfortable set-up, and how sorely they must have missed
their boys, but one can also imagine Lew’s relief, finally released from
the daily anguish of facing his in-laws, and with his beloved Clara all
to himself at last. For the first time in their married life the couple
lived alone together. It was not to last long.

In February 1940 Bernard turned fourteen. Legally entitled
to leave school, he did so immediately, without a qualification to
his name, and travelled straight back to London. Perhaps he had no
choice but to leave Sutton once he ceased to be a schoolboy, perhaps
he was bored, but as a result, sensitive Geoffrey was left on his own.
Meanwhile Bernard, Lew and Clara were crammed together once
more. ‘I slept on the sofa, which was in the same room as their bed.
That must have gone on for a while.’

This was not the only incursion on Lew and Clara’s indepen-
dence. As rationing kicked in, stock for the shop grew increasingly
hard to come by. To survive the family required something novel: a
regular wage. So, ignoring his exhaustion and the perennial racking
cough, Lew found a job driving ambulances. ‘It would have started
while I was evacuated,’ explained Bernard. ‘They started the ARP, Air
Raid Precautions, and they needed people, and he needed a job to
supplement the family income. So there was the shop and the job so I

War I 97

think we were a little better off. The salary was three pounds and five
shillings a week, a low-ish wage, but I do remember that the people
who worked in our greengrocer shop in Harringay got two pounds
seven and six a week.’

For the first time since he had been demobbed in 1918, Lew
was answering somebody else’s orders. You might picture a tired man
behind the steering wheel of a vehicle hurtling past smoking craters,
siren wailing, flashing blue light on the roof, but the reality was differ-
ent. In those days the word ambulance enjoyed the broadest possible
interpretation, and could designate more or less any type of vehicle.
Many were large cars that were now required for war service. Even
if these vehicles were to have had a blue light, it could not have been
used during blackout – nobody wanted to make the German bomb-
ers’ job any easier.

Still, there would have been a certain glamour to Lew’s job, es-
pecially for a car-mad lad like Bernard. Petrol was the first commod-
ity to be rationed after Britain declared war and from 1942 onwards
the government banned its sale for private use; only people with a
special permit for work deemed essential to the war effort could buy
fuel. Car manufacturing itself had ground to a halt long before that.
Bernard vividly remembered watching venerable Victorian wrought-
iron railings being ripped out of pavements, their metal seized to be
melted down for manufacturing into the munitions, tanks, ships and
planes that were vital to keep Britain in the war business.

As an ambulance driver Lew was required to be permanent-
ly on standby, no matter how tired or sick he might be. ‘My mother
would be in the shop, he would go to the market and also do the am-
bulance – nights, days, shifts. A lot of it involved just sitting around
until you were called – but you always had to be available.’

‘I remember being very lonely. There was no school, no other
people, no children to speak to, just the shop. I joined the local library

98 I War

in Shoreditch and read enormous amounts, borrowing books contin-
uously, reading in the shop, on the bus.’ His voracious literary appetite
never extended to poetry, or to writing a diary. ‘I wasn’t interested in
recording, I was interested in doing.’ Wandering about the city was his
other main source of entertainment.

Bleak, bordering on bankrupt, London still offered a few good
times. ‘On one occasion, on a nice day in Old Street my father took me
up to Hyde Park. I remember sitting there on the bank, overlooking
the Serpentine.’ But what made this event memorable to Bernard was
that it was an exception. Leisure remained a luxury; going to market,
doing what needed to be done, was the rule.

On 10 May 1940, after losing a vote of confidence in the House
of Commons, Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill,
the first Lord of the Admiralty and a celebrated orator, as well as op-
ponent of the policy of appeasement, was called to replace him as
Prime Minister. By now the British people desperately needed to
hear fighting talk. That same day German forces invaded France, Bel-
gium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The Battle of France ended
a fortnight later, leaving large numbers of British, Belgian, Canadian
and French troops cut off by the German army. On 26 May, Britain
launched Operation Dynamo, sending an armada of civilian boats,
from tugs to fishing boats to gin palaces, across the English Channel
to scoop up the soldiers stranded around Dunkirk. On 4 June, thanks
to favourable weather conditions, the rescue was complete. Like mil-
lions of others, Bernard, Lew and Clara gathered around their radio
to hear Churchill’s defiant exhortation to ‘fight them on the beaches’.

‘It’s difficult to describe quite the effect that it had on the
country,’ said Bernard. ‘Suddenly war became real, the threat of inva-
sion was very, very real. Without the support of America, which was
somewhat less than wholehearted, we were completely on our own.
Under Chamberlain it seemed to be a very tepid war effort but when

War I 99

Churchill came in he seemed to be completely different, invigorated.
You then had a leader who you thought could marshal the country.
We are now going to do it!’ The family harboured no illusions as to
what was at stake. ‘If we were occupied we knew the Jews were fin-
ished.’ If Bernard wanted to learn about determination, he could not
have lived at a more propitious moment.

Times may have been tough but at least the family were poised
to reclaim another of their own. That summer David sat his final
grammar school examinations in Weymouth then he too left, at the
advanced age of sixteen, and returned to London, bringing little God-
frey with him. Godfrey, still at school, was then sent on to join Geof-
frey in Sutton. Indeed, he would not retain a single memory of Lew
as a shopkeeper. ‘All I knew was father driving ambulances, but he
would go to the market in the morning. Our mother was in the shop.’

By twenty-first-century standards it seems absurd that such
self-evidently bright boys as David and Bernard should have left
school so young. But as Bernard said, ‘You just did. In those days con-
ventional schooling ended when you were fourteen years old, with
the minority at grammar school leaving two years later at sixteen, af-
ter taking the matric or school certificate. There must have been a
very small sixth form and some boys stayed on. But few people went
to university.’

Thankfully, Lew, Clara and Bernard had recently moved into
the ground floor flat of a house on Kyverdale Road in Stamford Hill,
a peaceful suburb in north London. They took over the flat from their
trusty friends, the Ferrers. Modest as it was, it represented a signifi-
cant improvement on what they had been used to, with two bedrooms
at the front, a small sitting room and kitchen to the rear, a cellar in
which to store coal, and a small backyard. ‘The bath was on the top
floor – we shared it with the other people in the flat upstairs,’ recalled
Bernard. ‘It operated with a gas geyser boiler. You had to put money

100 I War

in the slot meter, operate the geyser, turn on the water and then sud-
denly, whoosh, the gas lights itself, you get hot water out.’ Amid these
comforts, war was never far from their minds. Lew pinned a world
map on the living room wall and would mark the latest Allied gains
and losses upon it.

Even with Lew’s ARP wage, the family barely scraped by. The
older brothers urgently needed to start earning too, but war put paid
to David’s ambition to be a political reporter. ‘The U-boat campaign
was on and newspapers were only four to six pages long, so there was
no call for hacks,’ he remembered. Ever the pragmatist, he elected to
do something at the opposite end of the excitement spectrum. ‘I de-
cided to become an accountant.’ Perhaps his uncle Jack, a bookkeeper
at a butcher’s, inspired him. In any case, David was determined to go
one better and secure formal professional qualifications.

He took his allotted goal extremely seriously, starting at the
bottom as errand boy at Layton-Bennett, Billingham and Co., an ac-
countancy firm based on London Wall in the City, very near the fruit
shop, and he brought home one pound, two shillings and sixpence a
week. Outside office hours, he embarked on a correspondence course,
studying at night, at weekends, worming his way through page after
dessicated page, whenever a spare moment could be pressed into ser-
vice.

Lew and Clara may have welcomed Bernard’s help at Old
Street, but not so much that they were ready to sit back and watch him
turn into a lost boy. At their suggestion, that September he signed up
to a full-time course in radio engineering at the Music Trades School
on the Holloway Road, part of the Northern Polytechnic Institute,
which was then the centre of Britain’s piano-making and radio indus-
try.

It was my father’s idea. ‘You need to learn a trade,’ he said.
I can remember the words like a mantra: ‘something to fall

War I 101

back on’, ‘learn a trade’. Because my father could do nothing
but run a business, a fruit shop. And when he got to a posi-
tion that your shop is taking no money and there was no in-
come and the bailiffs were coming to take your furniture and
you’ve got nothing to keep your family on, you couldn’t get a
job. But if you had a skill, or what was called in those days a
trade, then you had something to fall back on. And radio was
the coming thing. It was not just that it was cutting edge: at
the end of the day you could have a radio shop, as radio shops
also did repairs. You could be a skilled worker.

Bernard did not invest a great deal in this map for his future.
So much was up in the air with the war, he could be forgiven for having
his head in the clouds. On 10 July the Battle of Britain was unleashed,
as the Nazi air force began waging a bombing campaign designed
to bully Britain into negotiating a peaceful settlement. London was
about to witness the world’s first extended military effort conduct-
ed entirely in the skies, as the RAF sparred and skirmished with the
Luftwaffe in a series of engagements that would give way eventually to
the horrors of the Blitz. To Bernard, these aerial dogfights were utterly
gripping, and like many boys, he began to idolise the RAF heroes.
‘You would look up at the sky and sometimes see the planes up there.
But you couldn’t tell which one was what, not from that distance.’

Neither could you always hang around outside, gawping. ‘I
remember going into the bomb shelter at the Northern Polytechnic
during an air raid – we were all in there together. It was like a room,
made of concrete, maybe it was outside the building. But I remember
sitting with my book, Gone with the Wind, being absorbed in it. It
made a great impression on me. It ends with Scarlett O’Hara having
to look after her family. And, well, the idea, “tomorrow is another
day, you can start again” – that showed me determination.’ But as for
non-fictional friends at the poly, he could not remember making one.

The radio course brought him one other unprecedented expe-

102 I War

rience: interesting lessons. Admittedly, there were only a few of them.
Overall, the kindest term Bernard could find to describe the educa-
tion that he received there was ‘peculiar’. ‘Many of the regular teachers
were in the armed services at this time and what were left were not
the best. The teaching at the poly was absolutely abysmal but I used to
get textbooks and teach myself.’ Once again, he became his own best
tutor, curious, diligent, eager to master every subject that interested
him.

At least the poly’s classes were taught in smaller groups than at
JFS. As well as engineering and piano tuning, he also took a revelatory
course in economics. ‘I’d never encountered that before. Why I stud-
ied economics, why it was one of the subjects, I haven’t the faintest
idea. But I am glad that I did.’ These classes were ‘very, very elemen-
tary, and no more than one hour a week’. Yet for a young man who
since childhood had been dealing with markets – the dance of goods,
money and human behaviour – standing back and bringing intellec-
tual rigour to the topic was ‘like a window opening – totally different
to history, geography, English, arithmetic’.

One lesson in particular lingered:

The economics teacher was talking about exporting and im-
porting, and what happens if they’re out of balance. It seems
to be a good thing if you’re exporting more than you’re im-
porting – the balance is in your favour – but then he said, ‘If
it’s the other way round, what are you worried about?’ The
conventional position would be to be concerned. But he said
it’s the other people that have got to be worried. ‘You’re get-
ting your goods in. Fine.’
And I think this might have implanted the habit of
questioning things, I realised you don’t have to accept things
at face value. Although the teacher had not got things quite
right, as I learned much later.

In fact the teacher’s attitude foretold quite accurately Britain’s
economic future as a country of consumers rather than producers – a

War I 103

future that Bernard and his brothers would help to facilitate. But at
that point the most important legacy of this lesson was to seed a life-
long scepticism. From this time onwards Bernard would always pre-
fer to interrogate received ideas, drilling into the founding assump-
tions before building up his knowledge – often at a level of detail that
many would find bewildering. ‘I can deal with things much better if
I comprehend the basic principles. I have to understand why. I have
difficulty accepting “This is the way it is.”’

Unfortunately, the radio course itself failed to snare his imag-
ination. ‘I never got on with it, it didn’t interest me.’ As a result, Ber-
nard would never be the man to turn to if you wanted a radio fixed.
On the plus side, he learned how to tune a piano, and uncovered a
hitherto unsuspected talent. ‘What I was very good at was engineer-
ing drawing, using a set square, not freehand. Very precise. It involves
working things out, dimensions and so forth, so that what you are
designing can be made and will do the job. For some reason I was
special at that.’

Like David, by now he had set his sights on something more
than a trade: he craved that lofty thing, a profession, and decided he
would become an engineer. Before he could be eligible to study for
a national certificate in engineering he needed to gain a mathemat-
ics qualification at the required standard, equal to that of a grammar
school leaver. ‘I carried maths books around perpetually. Read it on
the bus, read it at lunchtime. My weekends were based on studying
in one form or the other. I remember working very hard at Poly too.
I would always eat two round rolls and two slices of Dairylea cheese
for lunch, and sit there, teaching myself algebra, poring over it and
poring over it.’

This dream sprang less from a passion for mechanics than ne-
cessity. ‘I was aware I had to earn a living, to avoid my parents’ situ-
ation. Seeing the tremendous change in our lifestyle – we had gone

104 I War

from being quite middle class to having absolutely nothing. You can
imagine how terrible it was for my father. He hauled himself up. The
first of his family to do it, from – you know, his father when he came
across was a pedlar, a hawker, I suppose with a basket in his hand.
And in Harrow, he had his shop, a car, a lorry, staff living in. And then
it came down to avoiding the bailiffs. But I don’t remember feeling
humiliation. There was this family togetherness, pulling together.’

His can-do spirit encapsulated the ethos of their times – a
spirit that was about to intensify, because on 7 September 1940 the
Luftwaffe brought Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) to London. The aim was
to terrorise civilians, although the effect was more complicated, as
daily life acquired a surreal, almost thrilling dimension. Bernard re-
membered walking back from the cinema at night, because during air
raids buses usually stopped running. ‘You could see the searchlights
trying to find the enemy bombers. And what you worried about was
getting hit by the shrapnel from bombs and anti-aircraft shells when
they exploded.’ He was less frightened than fascinated. ‘I remember
picking up bits of shrapnel off the street, little fragments of metal the
size of a small nut, and they were still warm. Another time I came to
a great big crater in the road where a bomb had dropped and a bus
was stuck with its front wheels over the edge. Bomb craters were quite
common.’

The strain told most of all on Clara, who would churn with
anxiety whenever Lew was out on call. After a raid, she and Bernard
often went to the ambulance station, two or three miles from home,
to check he was okay. ‘One day I walked with my mother to find him
and they told me there had been a direct hit – a block of flats, Corona-
tion Buildings, on Kingsland Road. People went down in the shelter
and I don’t know whether the building fell in or whatever, but there
were two hundred people killed. And he was one of the team, going
in trying to get to the people. I remember my mother telling me later

War I 105

on – he was finding arms and legs. But he never spoke of it with me.’
Displacement became routine. ‘Opposite the shop there was

the Kensitas cigarette factory, five floors high. We took shelter in the
basement there every night when the Blitz started, never in the tube
stations – they were diabolical.’

It was not necessary to spend a night in Old Street Under-
ground station to appreciate how dire the conditions there would be.
Bernard rode the tube train often enough in the morning to see for
himself. ‘They were absolutely jam packed, no toilets, and the smell of
urine, it really was diabolical. And everybody lying down. They took
their mattresses, they were lined all the way along the platforms. But
I think the same people used to go every night. They’d have their spot
and I think there was a bit of a social life down there.’

The cigarette factory’s basement may have been more salubri-
ous than the Underground station, but as things turned out, it was not
nearly so safe. One night the Lewises were all together when a 2,400lb
land mine descended silently by parachute. ‘Land mines in those days
were not like today. It was a specially constructed bomb that didn’t
go deep, just landed more or less gently. It blew sideways and blew
the top two floors off. We could hardly see our way out for dust and
smoke. We came out of the building and for the rest of that night we
went down to the tube station opposite.’

The next day revealed the extent of the damage.

The following morning I walked down City Road into the
city. Whole blocks were rubble, and the girders were all bent,
melted from the heat of the fires. Now our shop was opposite
and it blew the glass front out of the shop. Afterwards we
had wooden shutters. I remember putting them in at night.
We slipped them in one by one from the side, and then one
overlapped the other and we had a padlock. There was no
more glass, not until after the war, when we put another shop
front in.

106 I War

The family were lucky to leave with no more than dust in their
hair. Very often the rubble from a blazing building could trap people
in cellars, putting them at risk of heat stroke or being burnt, or poi-
soned by carbon monoxide before they could be dug out. Yet Bernard
felt largely unaffected. ‘I don’t remember being terrified. I mean, if ev-
eryone in London had gone round being terrified – well, there was a
war to be won and you just had to get on with it. We were under siege.’

But the aftershock of the Kensitas bombing reverberated far
beyond Shoreditch. Geoffrey, still in Sutton, had left his original berth
to lodge with Godfrey at the home of the Blinches’ son Edgar and his
family. ‘And they became very, very fond of him,’ said Bernard.

When Edgar and his wife learned of the Kensitas bombing
they knew that the Lewises routinely sheltered in the factory. Wor-
ried that the family might have perished, the Blinches began to talk
of making Geoffrey a permanent member of the family. Somehow
Geoffrey got wind of this and became terribly upset, as well he might.
With communications so erratic, heaven only knows how long passed
before he heard that everyone was safe. Decades later, his memory
compressed these separate events into one incomprehensible episode
of abandonment. As he wrote to David in 1993, during a difficult pe-
riod in his life, ‘For some reason that was never explained to me, you
and Bernard returned home and I was left in Sutton with people who
wanted to adopt me.’

Despite these vicissitudes, Geoffrey became steeped in Sutton
life, joining the Methodist Sunday School choir, no doubt with Olive
Blinch. But to some locals, he remained an outsider. This status could
be fun; he recalled a wonderful snowball fight between the village
children and the evacuees. Yet it could be isolating too. ‘I had a lot of
trouble with Mr Myers, a teacher in the Sutton village school,’ he said.

Soon the time came to sit the scholarship exam. His best
friend from London passed and went to grammar school, but Geof-

War I 107

frey did not. ‘I was left as one of only two Jewish boys in the village.
And I experienced lots of anti-Semitism from the children at school. I
was given a bicycle and had to cycle past a house to school. Every day
a brick was thrown and they would shout: “Jew boy.” But it was at that
time I first started showing an interest in design. The local transport
was horse and cart but for some reason I wanted a Lagonda car. Fun-
nily enough, I never had one of those.’

Godfrey found little that was positive to say about his time in
Sutton.

I clearly remember going to school, using a chapel hall and
a yard. One of the teachers had come from the Jewish Free
School. He had a terrible temper. I remember him chasing a
boy across the desks once. Our father came to visit, he want-
ed to see the teacher. A week later the teacher referred to him,
said he was a foolish man. I got quite upset. I don’t think we
received any letters from our family, certainly not any phone
calls, and I don’t remember Mother coming down. I don’t
know why. Maybe she couldn’t.

Presumably this was the same teacher who had tormented
Geoffrey. Yet the memory is slightly questionable, since Olive, Edgar
Blinch’s daughter, clearly recalled Clara visiting them, and bringing
her a doll for a present. Possibly the visit took place before Godfrey
joined Geoffrey, Clara preparing the ground before asking the Blinch-
es to take in Godfrey too.

The boys were not the only members of the family on the
move. Intense German bombardment concentrated on the factories
and docks in Canning Town finished off the job that the slum clear-
ances had begun, and Fanny and the remaining Tauber brood were
bombed out, never to return. Initially Fanny headed to Twickenham
to be near her daughter Betty, but she ended up with Lily, who had
married a man called Alf, a tailor’s presser. Together they rented a

108 I War

shop and ran it, making their home in the flat upstairs, continuing a
way of life that had served Fanny ever since she left Romania.

After the destruction of Kensitas, the Lewises gave up on
evenings in the East End, air raid or no air raid. At the bottom of
their garden on Kyverdale Road lurked an Anderson shelter, one of
the corrugated iron, domed structures that the authorities distributed
to households in dangerous areas. It sat half-submerged in the earth,
cold, dank and inhospitable. ‘I only went into it once, one night for
a few hours, but I didn’t like it,’ said Bernard. ‘It was always flood-
ing.’ From that point onwards, the family elected to stay above ground
during bombing raids and take their chances.

We preferred being in bed. I mean loads of people must have
done it, the same thing. Not everybody was down the tube
– not everybody was near a Tube. I remember us lying in
our beds at night, hearing the bombs whistling down. They
came in sticks of four, one at a time. Two were coming closer,
then the next one was further away so you were okay, you
could hear them whistling down. The funny thing was, it
never bothered me. I thought, if you’re hit you’re hit. That’s
it. I’d sooner be comfortable in my bed than in the Anderson
shelter.

How Lew and Clara felt about this fatalistic attitude one can
guess, but they took the same risks themselves.

At some point Geoffrey and Godfrey came back to London
from Sutton, and Geoffrey would prove less sanguine during raids
than his elder brothers, having spent so long sheltered from the reality
of the bombs. ‘I remember being in the kitchen – towards the end of
the war with the V-1s or V-2s,’ said Bernard. ‘Geoffrey got frightened,
but I never remember being frightened myself, possibly because I’d
been through the Blitz.’

Hard as the family worked, it grew ever trickier to wring a

War I 109

living as the war transformed the nature of their business. ‘We had
as fruiterers an allocation of coupons,’ Bernard remembered. ‘This
meant that my father was guaranteed certain levels of supplies. So
he would buy merchandise – and although it was limited, you could
generally buy something – but in wartime it was a fixed price to buy,
a fixed price to sell.’ This allocation system applied mainly to certain
imported fruits – ‘oranges and things like that, and bananas, which
didn’t really exist’. How it was decided what number each shop would
be allocated was also a mystery. ‘There were no registered customers,
so I don’t know how they measured what your allocation would be.’
Sales were not difficult to make. With everything in limited supply
there was always demand, so anything Lew could get hold of would
sell; the issue was that margins were too narrow to stretch into a prof-
it. ‘Although there was a more or less guaranteed income, it was very
small and the improved business didn’t benefit our father very much.’

It was a climate ripe for corruption. Sure enough, the Lewises
never received their ordained quantity of merchandise. Nobody did.
‘The boxes the wholesalers sold you, which were open, were always
what we called “light” by about two pounds a bushel.’ A bushel was
40lb. In other words, the wholesalers were creaming off goods for the
black market. ‘If they took 2lb out of every box they would soon get
free boxes, out of legitimate circulation.’

This sort of theft swiftly became endemic to the trade, and had
the unfortunate side effect of imposing sharp practice on everybody
else. The Lewises were not above stretching their merchandise a touch
to compensate for the shortfall. ‘The trouble was, if you didn’t operate
some kind of skimming method you were out of business. You had to
learn how to get by.’

A favourite method was ‘soaking the walnuts’. Nuts were sold
in what were called pockets, weighing 12 or 14lb, but if you made
them damp before sale this could add up to half a pound in weight per

110 I War

pocket. ‘My mother taught us that,’ said Bernard. ‘Where she learned
it from, I don’t know. You didn’t soak them exactly, you put them in
water and then you leave them to drain. It means there’s still a film of
moisture on them, but they aren’t wet.’ With so much produce already
damp, thanks to the soggy British climate, this wheeze could pass un-
noticed.

Bernard refined another technique for tipping the balance in
their favour when he was serving at the shop. Weighing fruit for a
customer, he would whip the dish off the scales a fraction of a second
early, just before the needle had settled to its final point. ‘The motion,
the impetus sends it beyond the weight of the produce, and this let
you add a little bit more to the weight. It was a good technique and it
was essential. You had to do it.’ Only once was he caught out. ‘I called
out the price then a customer objected. Don’t remember what hap-
pened but I would have covered up the mistake and said, “Oh, we’ll
do it again.”’

There were fiddles, and then there was the black market,
which operated at another level altogether. Watching the illicit cur-
rents swirling around them, any remaining trace of naivety in Ber-
nard was swept away.

I wouldn’t say that all of it was murky, but you were aware
of murkiness out there, you were living amongst it. Patriotic
people like David and I didn’t have anything to do with the
black market, and we didn’t like the spivs, no. But it was going
on all the time. And when you are dealing with people you
soon learn that, if someone could diddle you, some would. So
you had to be aware of the ways they could do that. It was a
way of life, you know. But we were young, moral, honourable
and idealistic.

At least the government supplied a little extra help for strug-
gling shopkeepers like the Lewises. David recalled that Old Street’s

War I 111

rent was halved by official mandate. The family also benefited from
ready access to nourishing food. But no amount of fruit could reme-
dy Lew’s precarious health, which sank lower under the weight of his
anxieties and all the work, plunging to rock bottom with the arrival of
the London smog, a toxic, soot-thickened miasma that darkened each
winter. ‘We used to dread the fogs, knowing what it would do to him,’
said Bernard. The smog affected everyone. ‘You cough a bit and your
eyes are a bit smart, that’s okay. But when you have only a fraction of
your lungs left like my father, you’re actually drowning, because the
soot is irritating your lungs and they can’t process the air and give you
enough oxygen.’

Clara would leave Lew alone in bed all day while she clocked
up long hours in Old Street. ‘He couldn’t move, didn’t have the
strength to dress himself, and breathing was an ordeal.’ The distress-
ing wait for spring to return Lew to health lasted longer each year.
Despite it all he fought to remain the father that he had always been.
Once Geoffrey recalled being taken to the Tottenham Lido where Lew
tried to teach him to swim, just as he had taught Bernard and David
in happier days at Camber Sands. ‘I remember being in the water and
he was a few feet away. Looking across I was absolutely shocked by
the colour of his face. He was blue.’ Geoffrey would be left with hardly
any memories of Lew being well, other than the trips to the seaside.

8

The captain of his ship

In 1942, after two years at the polytechnic, Bernard was sixteen years
old and ready to get cracking. Like every other lad too young to be
conscripted for the war effort, he received an official summons to the
Labour Exchange. Given his talent as a draughtsman there was no
doubt what job to pursue, at least until he could qualify as an engineer.
‘I was sent to a freelance engineering drawing office in Hendon. They
had a contract with a company called Block Tube, who made controls
for aircraft, for the pilot to control the rudder and the ailerons and
that sort of thing. What we did was design the jigs, the jig and tool. It’s
an engineering term. These were essential for mass production.’
This job must have pleased his father no end, for it was, incon-
trovertibly, skilled work. It brought a useful income too, two pounds
seven and six a week, not far below Lew’s ambulance wage.
Bernard relished playing the adult. ‘In those days you wanted
to be grown up. The teenager idea didn’t come in until the 1960s. So
I dressed the part. I had corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and
when I was about seventeen I had a pipe. Small bowl, long stem. I
never liked the taste of the tobacco though.’
Each day began with a minor epic of a commute from Stam-
ford Hill to the outskirts of north-west London. ‘I’d get a bus from
Hackney to Finsbury Park, then change and get another bus to
Golders Green, and then another to Hendon. Sometimes I would use
the tube. It was about an hour each way.’ He would have felt right at
home in the office, which occupied the first floor over a shop, com-
prising two rooms and a lavatory – just big enough to accommodate
the two partners, another older employee, and Bernard. All in all, he

The captain of his ship I 113

found it rather congenial. ‘I think I was quite good at it, I liked the
work.’ In his lunch hour he went out, either to what was called a Brit-
ish Restaurant (these were organised by the local council) or an ABC
café, another branch of the chain where once he had drunk scalding
tea with his father at Covent Garden market.

During one lunch break Bernard had a life-changing encoun-
ter in a branch of W.H. Smith. ‘In those days they had the cash reg-
ister at the entrance of the shop, and books set out on the other side.
I remember looking through a book of poems – why I don’t know,
because I’m not interested in poetry – and I found this one and read
these two lines.’

The volume he happened to pick up was almost certainly The
Oxford Book of English Verse, and although he did not know it, the
poem that captivated him was extremely well-known, the loin-gird-
ing ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley, an influential editor and poet
who was to the Victorian age something approaching what Samuel
Johnson had been to the eighteenth-century literary scene. Henley
wrote the poem from a hospital bed while recuperating from tubercu-
losis, and its lip-stiffening sentiments epitomise the theme of stoicism
in the face of adversity. What grabbed Bernard was its resounding
final couplet: ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.’
A far cry from Scarlett O’Hara, yet there is an unmistakable
whiff of her spirit. ‘It resonated with me, it was something I recognised
as the truth. It’s a peculiar poem, and until I found it on the cover of a
Telegraph supplement for the Invictus Games’ – the sporting event for
veterans and personnel from the armed forces – ‘although I’ve come
across the lines occasionally, I’ve never had a copy of it, or read it in its
entirety.’ Yet the message would stay with him for the rest of his life. ‘I
realised then that the world is there for me. It was possible to do any-
thing, be anything, it’s entirely up to me. For instance, I’ve often said,
the biggest job in the world is president of the United States. Nobody

114 I The captain of his ship

was ever born president. Therefore, anything is possible: you can get
to the very pinnacle of the world.’
At such a fraught moment in history, when not only lives but
humanity’s very soul seemed in jeopardy, hope acquired a special ur-
gency. But it is also the case that in the midst of great alteration, great
dreams grow more credible. When everything seems temporary, it is
equally plausible to imagine that things might change for the better.
It is impossible to overstate the impact that these insights had
on a mind as logical as Bernard’s. Already he felt powerfully moti-
vated to improve his position in life. Not only did his job bring him
within sight of the world of manufacturing, but he also enrolled at the
North-Western Polytechnic for a new two-year course, on evenings
and weekends, for the Higher National Diploma in mechanical engi-
neering, which could lead on to a degree.

Everywhere he sought inspiration to shore up his resolve.
‘One of the polytechnic instructors told me something that has always
stayed in my mind. He had a friend who was studying to become an
actuary, a five-year course, so he worked out a regime. He got up at
three in the morning when the house was quieter and he was fresher
and did his studying, then he went to work, came home and went to
bed, and he kept that up for five years.’

Blackout put paid to the evening classes, since no visible light
was permitted in the city during raids, so most lessons took place on a
Saturday and a Sunday, except in the summer months when evenings
were lighter. And this was not all that he got up to at the weekend: first
David then he joined the Air Training Corps (ATC). Both brothers
wanted to be fliers, and becoming an ATC cadet was a good first step
towards the RAF.
Officially ATC cadets were supposed to be sixteen, but the
Stamford Hill branch made an exception for Bernard. ‘I got in young-
er. I suppose it was keenness. You go along and sometimes they will

The captain of his ship I 115

think, “Yes, we’ll give him a go.”’ Briefly, both he and his brother were
in the ATC together, the very first time they had shared a pastime
outside family life. ‘It was a few hours a week. Saturday afternoon and
Sunday morning – you did lessons to do with flying and rudimentary
navigation, aircraft recognition, etc. Drilling, marching, things like
that. It was to get you into the disciplinary mode. So when you joined
the air force you already understood, shall we say, the military life,
and were more useful.’
With cadetship came a uniform, another first for Bernard
(unless you count David’s cast-off Harrow grammar school blazer). It
was made in a Melton cloth, air force blue, naturally, but unadorned
by the distinctive white wings of a fully fledged RAF airman, which
could be worn only once he had qualified.

The ATC triggered a newly sociable period for Bernard, draw-
ing him out of his monastic cycle of work and study. ‘I made friends
there. I also joined a youth club and used to go along on a Sunday
evening, to play table tennis, chat. It was in a big house, ten minutes’
walk from where I lived, with its own grounds – that was both the
headquarters of the youth club and the ATC.’ Finally he had some-
where to meet girls too, although that part was all very innocent. ‘A
group of us, two or three boys, used to walk home two or three girls
every Sunday evening.’

In June 1942, as soon as David turned eighteen, he volunteered
for the RAF proper. On one level, the decision was easy. ‘The stories
of persecution in Nazi Germany made me a Zionist,’ he explained. ‘I
wanted to fight Hitler.’ Bernard echoed this sentiment. ‘David and I
were very patriotic. And there was the German-Jewish situation. We
felt we needed to win the war and would do whatever we could.’ But
David enlisted in the teeth of vehement opposition from Lew, who
surely spoke for Clara too.
‘The strong objections from our father were, wait to be called

116 I The captain of his ship

up – don’t volunteer for the most dangerous job you can do,’ said Ber-
nard. One of the arguments that Lew used to try and talk David out
of it was his own disappointment as a veteran.

I remember him saying, I think it was called ‘doing your bit’.
As in, you’ve got to do your bit when you’re called up, but
there’s no point in volunteering because, after the war, it’s
all different. He knew that, okay, during the war there’s this
patriotic sentiment towards soldiers, but as soon as it’s over,
that feeling evaporates. He’d lived through it. I mean, look at
injured servicemen today – it’s an absolute disgrace. A sexual
discrimination case gets far more money than soldiers who
have lost limbs.

Of course this argument was founded on optimism. Lew and
Clara’s greatest, if unspoken, concern must have been that David
would not survive at all. Everyone knew the risks; fatalities in Bomb-
er Command were notorious, with RAF mortality rates the highest of
all three services, averaging fifty per cent by the war’s end. In signing
up David not only put his own life in jeopardy but also condemned
his family to a perpetual state of dread. Bernard remembered how
that felt. ‘If you had somebody in the forces on active service you’d al-
ways fear a knock on the door, telling you they’re dead. The telegram.
And being parted . . . People were sent overseas, you didn’t see them
for years. If you were in the air force on a bombing raid, the chances
. . . Well, a tour was thirty ops, thirty flights, and not that many people
completed it. They didn’t last.’
They did not need to imagine the pain: everyone had a story.
‘My mother told me that she was at our butcher one day and they
told her that their son, who was in the air force, a flyer, had sent a
telegram saying, “Make some excuse, get me home on compassionate
leave – this is terrible.” They didn’t. The next day he was dead. In the
ATC, I had a friend who was just a bit older than me. He got through,
qualified. Down on his first op. First flight out, he was dead.’

The captain of his ship I 117

None of these considerations deterred David. In this, as in ev-
erything else, he was utterly resolute.
Godfrey recalled their father’s distress as David joined up,
then two years later Bernard followed suit. ‘But he couldn’t stop them.
Nothing could stop them!’

*

The initial training took David to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was
billeted at the Shakespeare Arms. Living conditions in this establish-
ment verged on the authentically Tudor. ‘I remember being on guard
duty one night. In the kitchen I came across a spilt bag of sultanas.
Being a young man and usually hungry, I reached out to take one –
and the sultana moved. It was a cockroach.’
He survived the cuisine and next he and his initial training
wing, as they were called in services parlance, were dispatched for
a course in navigation to Heaton Park in Manchester, an enormous
country house estate that had been turned into an RAF training depot
during the First World War. This phase complete, the training wing
boarded a slow boat to Canada and an RAF station 160 miles west of
Manitoba. At last they would learn to fly, over the glorious, expansive
prairies, far from the predatory Luftwaffe.
Rural Canada was a world away from the East End. Food may
have been rationed in Canada from 1942 onwards, but in most mean-
ingful ways everything felt free from the shadows of war. Space was
abundant, the air was clean, but flying itself proved less than a breeze,
with summertime convection currents so strong that often David was
airsick. On the ground, however, there were other opportunities to
broaden his education.
As a relatively new military service the RAF was sometimes
regarded as an upstart, looked down upon by both army and navy, but

118 I The captain of his ship

the glamour of flying offset the snobbery, making it particularly at-
tractive to volunteers from less traditional or privileged backgrounds.
David’s fellow airmen were a great mixture, largely Brits and New
Zealanders, although he never came across another Jew (apart from
his younger brother) during his flying years. His best mate on the
training course was a young British horse breeder, a lucky break be-
cause together they befriended a local farmer who conveniently had
both horses and daughters. So David’s mate would break in the nags
for the farmer, and occasionally the young men also stepped out with
the girls. David leapt at the chance to learn to ride too, and loved to
go hacking across the wide-open grasslands until one day his mount
bolted. Somehow he clung on for a mile or so, only to lose his grip and
land smack on his head. Luckily for him the harsh winter had left the
ground broken and dusty, allowing a soft enough landing for him to
stagger away from the fall intact.

All too soon it was time to go home and fly for real. The re-
turn voyage on a troopship packed to the rafters, six layers of bunks
stacked up each wall to sleep six layers of men, offered a sobering
reminder of the deprivation to which they were about to return.

Back in Britain, David sat his final examinations to qualify as
a navigator. As a general rule, anyone with results in the top third au-
tomatically received an officer’s commission. But although David won
his airman’s wings, sailing through his studies with his marks com-
fortably in the upper tier, there was no commission. He fell down not
due to a lack of ability but his personality. ‘David bucked discipline,’
explained Bernard. ‘He didn’t make beds neatly, and things like that,
so he was made a sergeant. He wasn’t anti-authority. But he had to see
the reason for doing something. David always had a problem with
pointless rules – he ploughed his own furrow. A leader more than a
follower.’
Now twenty years old, David was finally ready to go on op-

The captain of his ship I 119

erations, and was attached to No. 75 New Zealand Squadron at RAF
Mepal in Cambridgeshire as sergeant in the crew of a sturdy Avro
Lancaster bomber. Sure enough, just as Lew warned, the RAF turned
out to be the most dangerous force in which to serve. David had al-
ready lost one or two friends during training, one crashing into a
Great Lake in Canada. Many more would die in action. But if these
losses or the setback of missing out on a commission disappointed
David, he did not mention it when reminiscing many years later. On
the contrary, he spoke of his RAF days with unalloyed delight.

Airmen were all volunteers and despite – or perhaps because
of – the risks, most were highly motivated; many would cancel their
leave in a trice if there was a whisper of a possibility that they might
be sent on a mission. Still, there is always an exception, and David was
ruthless when he came across a reluctant airman. ‘I got rid of some-
one who did not want to fight, had him taken out from our crew,’ he
said. ‘My philosophy was that we had to operate together as a crew –
we were entirely dependent on each other, on our efficiency, skill, etc.’
His tight-knit team would survive several raids with their honour,
and their fuselage, intact.

When David came home to Stamford Hill on leave, every inch
the man in his air force blue, his little brothers felt that they might
burst with pride. And he was not the only member of the Lewis family
ready for a change. Geoffrey spotted left-wing books lying around at
Kyverdale Road, as well as manuals on car repair – indications of new
interests and perhaps a new ambition on Lew’s part. At this stage the
family had no vehicle other than the ambulance, so these books were
a hint that Lew had decided belatedly to follow the careers advice he
gave to his eldest sons and learn a trade of his own.
Come February 1944 and Bernard was old enough to sign up
for the RAF too. As far as he could recall, Lew put up less ferocious
resistance than when David enlisted. Probably he was resigned to the

120 I The captain of his ship

fact that Bernard would follow in his brother’s footsteps; by this point,
with conscription in full swing, everyone was conditioned to accept
that young men would be called to arms. In fact Bernard’s work at the
drawing office was a ‘reserved occupation’. Simply put, this meant that
the government considered designing tools for aircraft production
sufficiently vital to the war effort to exempt him from active service.
Those in reserved occupations were only permitted to volunteer for
one of two alternative occupations – jobs considered so dangerous,
and so undesirable, that recruiters were desperate for as many hands
as they could get. Such men could either work down the coal mines
or – conveniently for Bernard – as aircrew. Nothing could tempt him,
as a young man of action and longstanding devotee of comic book he-
roes, to cleave to the safer course. ‘I could have sat out the war making
airplanes, but I was mad keen and patriotic.’ Although, as he told it,
for neither him nor David did passion drive this choice, just a grave
sense of duty: ‘It was just, “This is what we are going to do.” It was
simply a question of getting in at the sharp end.’
Another compelling attraction sealed the deal. Long before
joining up, while still in the ATC, Bernard had applied for a ‘special
C’ – a short-service commission, the fast track to become an RAF of-
ficer. ‘The idea was that if you passed the officer selection board they
would send you to university for six months.’ Given the choice of any
university, Bernard set his sights on the most eminent possible, put-
ting Cambridge top of his list, since it offered an engineering degree.
All that remained was to pass the interview.

I went up to Aldwych, the Air Ministry, and was interviewed
by a board of three air force people. When they asked what
my religion was, I said, ‘I’m Jewish agnostic.’
Then a man asked me, ‘Are you ashamed of being
Jewish?’ A strange question today, but not then. I said I was
not.

The captain of his ship I 121

‘Take my advice. Call yourself Jewish.’
I can understand this now, and he was right. People
would not understand – your beliefs didn’t come into it: you
were Jewish.

Aside from this curious exchange, the interview went fine,
and his obvious intellectual abilities were deemed sufficient recom-
mendation to put him on the fast track. At long last, year upon year of
dedicated study had borne fruit. To cap it all, he was sent to Corpus
Christi College.
‘It was a very big thing, going to Cambridge,’ said Bernard.
One can imagine Clara and Lew’s complicated emotions: elation that
their boy was entering higher education, and at such a place, but at
the cost of serving his country in a potentially life-shortening occupa-
tion. David reacted as a kind uncle might and sent him £25 – quite a
sum, even accounting for his RAF pay. (‘Seven shillings and tuppence
a day,’ remembered Bernard, with his usual unnerving precision, ‘But
David had been working as an errand boy for two years before he
joined up so he had savings.’) He even handed Bernard his overcoat.
‘Because David was shorter than me my mother let the hem down to
make it a bit longer. I never wore it because there was a crease all the
way round it. In any case I didn’t need it because it was the summer.’
Bernard arrived in Cambridge in March 1944. Despite his
months in Cambridgeshire, this was the first time he had clapped eyes
on the fabled city. The university’s stone medieval buildings could not
have been more different from the grimy brick of Shoreditch and in
Corpus Christi he had alighted upon one of the loveliest colleges.
Founded in the fourteenth century in defiance of the Black Death,
and host to luminaries such as Elizabethan playwright Christopher
Marlowe, its honeyed stone quads resonated with glorious history.
Not really understanding at first who was who at the college,

122 I The captain of his ship

he found the staff hierarchy baffling, struggling to sift the porters from
the bedders and all the other individuals who kept things ticking over.
‘I remember when I went there, my first day a chap came and showed
me to my rooms, he was very friendly and helpful, and I didn’t know
who he was. I learned later he was the bursar.’
Bernard shared rooms with another RAF student called Ran-
dal and they did not mix widely, mainly sticking with fellow recruits.
There was scant opportunity to meet anyone else. ‘Obviously our lec-
tures were separate because it was a specialised course – there was an
intake of about a couple of hundred from the RAF spread over the
university.’
The difference between him and the other cadets soon became
apparent. ‘I believe I was the only person there in two hundred who
had ever been out to work. They’d all left school at eighteen and come
there. One chap was from Oundle, other people from Eton, from all
over. Mostly public school boys, although there were grammar school
boys too.’ Yet he did not feel remotely like a fish out of water.

I don’t recollect it being like that – all this business of class,
stratified society. I don’t think anybody looked down on me,
it never occurred to me. I was just another person there. We
were the same. I rowed, I joined the College Boat, number
two, did a few months of it but gave it up; I didn’t like getting
up at six in the morning. Academically I struggled more than
they did because they’d had more education and had done
some of the work before at school. Whereas my schooling
had been substandard and a bit chaotic. But I did not feel
inferior. I could see I was more capable than some. In a way
it was the opposite; I had been out in the world for two years,
plus my shop and market experience.

The experience was overwhelmingly positive. He vividly re-
membered a day when he was caught in a downpour, sheltering in a
doorway on Bene’t Street around the corner from Corpus Christi, and

The captain of his ship I 123

standing there, marvelling at his situation, thinking about the poem
‘Invictus’, and wondering what life might have in store for him: here
he was, a student at Cambridge University, on his way to becoming an
RAF pilot and, perhaps not long after that, an engineer.
‘I loved everything about Cambridge,’ he said. ‘I loved the ar-
chitecture, the paintings, the company, the other people there. Totally
different world. You had all your meals in hall and you had to wear a
gown.’ Inspired, his literary interests also began to range onto more
elevated terrain. ‘I remember sitting down and reading Julius Caesar.’
But his studies were too intense to permit much extra-curricular ac-
tivity, consisting as they did of a normal university course, but with
the first year’s study condensed into six months. ‘At the same time,
you did RAF work at the University Air Squadron. You went along
there in civilian clothes, I suppose one day a week or two half-days a
week, for lectures etc.’

If the workload was not daunting enough, the tenor of inter-
actions between tutors and students was quite alien to him. ‘At uni-
versity you’re treated as an equal and of course at school, at polytech-
nic, you’re not. There’s the teachers and there’s you, you’re not the
same. So I didn’t understand that at all. Tutorials, there would be half
a dozen of you. I never got anything out of them because they were
just discussion. I was flabbergasted. There was absolutely no help at
all.’

An outstanding memory was of the college Feast Day. ‘It was
in the main quadrangle, a big social thing, lots of people there, and I
remember talking to a chap who was a pilot in the air force. He was in
the fighters and I asked him how he managed to get in his squadron,
doing what he was doing, rather than shunted off doing something
else, because this was 1944. By that time we were starting to win the
war.’

Bernard and his peers were gradually coming to realise that a

124 I The captain of his ship

new recruit’s chance of getting to fly was receding rapidly, since there
were already enough active pilots and the Nazi threat was shrinking
by the day. ‘But he was actually flying fighters. It dawned on me that
he got where he was by using his contacts. He obviously had connec-
tions, and he had spoken to people he knew.’ Bernard claimed that
this revelation did not make him angry. ‘I didn’t resent it – he was
very nice. But I realised that this was how the world worked. You have
to make things happen if you can and not just sit back and hope.’
Perhaps it was this revelation that spurred Bernard to do something
uncharacteristically rash. ‘I got hold of a bottle of gin to myself, I was
eighteen, and without realising what I was doing, got very drunk, and
missed a mathematics exam the next day.’
This lapse aside, he packed a great deal of work into his six
months, which ended in September 1944. But he had joined the RAF
to fly, and his commission meant that, once qualified, he would auto-
matically gain a command. Until history intervened.

Five days after the College Feast Day, on 6 June 1944, Bernard
was sitting in a tutorial when he heard word of the successful Allied
invasion of the Normandy beaches, which became immortalised as
the D-Day landings. ‘It was all over the news, as soon as we landed.
I remember sitting there and saying sort of “We’re doing this”, and
the tutor looked at me and said, “We?” In other words, you’re here –
you’re not doing it.’

It was the beginning of the war’s end – marvellous news. But,
although he could not know it then, the invasion also crashed any
vestigial hope that he might become airborne.
There were to be graver immediate consequences. A week lat-
er, on 13 June, Germany began firing V-1 rockets on Britain. These
jet-powered buzz bombs were given the friendly nickname ‘doodle-
bugs’, but were lethal in their effects, and swiftly succeeded in the
autumn by the even deadlier V-2 rockets. Known to their German

The captain of his ship I 125

makers as ‘retribution weapons’, revenge certainly seemed to be the
objective of both V-1s and V-2s because they served no meaningful
military goal: to all intents and purposes, Germany had lost the war.
‘We expected victory after D-Day. I mean the Americans were in it
then, it was only a matter of time,’ said Bernard. ‘We were surprised it
took so long. England was sinking under the weight of the American
soldiers, the American troops, tanks and planes.’

Germany’s renewed aerial assault specifically targeted British
civilians, as payback for the Allied bombardment of German cities.
And so began a second wave of evacuations from London. Once again
Geoffrey and Godfrey bundled up their meagre belongings and were
packed off, this time to Leicester.

Now eleven, Godfrey was able to understand why they need-
ed to be out of London. ‘We knew all about the war. Everyone was
doing it in England.’ But that made their experience in Leicester no
less painful. ‘We were shuttled from family to family,’ said Geoffrey.
‘For some foster families this was a business, with lots of children.’
Godfrey put it more baldly: ‘It was pretty horrid. We were with two
separate lots of people, both not nice. As though the eight shillings a
week they were given for looking after us was something to make a
profit out of. Our Sunday treat was a jacket potato with a little bit of
margarine. That was it.’ He did not think any better of the city. ‘All red
brick – a boring place to be. But I remember the US soldiers arriving,
the privates were better dressed than English captains. They had more
money, enough to hand out pieces of chewing gum.’

Facing hunger and hardship, Geoffrey decided to take a news-
paper round to earn pocket money. But when he told the family no-
body praised his initiative. ‘It was either David or Daddy who got
angry. If I had spare time, they said, I should study,’ he remembered
(and how telling it seems that to him, Daddy and David were inter-
changeable). ‘Sounds like David,’ said Bernard. Certainly, David wrote

126 I The captain of his ship

to Geoffrey while they were away. Here is a typical extract: ‘My study-
ing is progressing very slowly and as I want to get down to it again I’ll
finish this letter. Best regards, David.’ The formal tone suggests he
took his duty to set a good example very seriously indeed.
But for Geoffrey study always proved a challenge – maybe,
he speculated, because of a strain of dyslexia in the family, although
Bernard doubted this. At fourteen Geoffrey left school but rather than
head back to London as Bernard had done he stayed on in Leices-
ter, presumably to keep watch over Godfrey, and enrolled at an arts
college. There, to his great relief, his poor spelling did not matter a
jot and at long last he began to find his own niche. ‘They gave us
an assignment to design a house. And I had this idea for one with a
communicating dining and living room with sliding doors. I came
top of the class, which was a great thing, because I hadn’t succeeded
in anything before that. The only prize I got was for good behaviour.
I was always well behaved,’ he added ruefully, as if this were a matter
for regret.

When Bernard’s accelerated course at Cambridge came to an
end in September 1944, saying goodbye did not sadden him; he had
made a few friends, but would maintain contact with none of them.
All he wanted was to get on, and up into the air.

He received a week’s home leave before embarking on the
next phase of training and took the opportunity to make a day trip to
Leicester to see his younger brothers for a few hours. ‘It was grim, but
they were okay. They were well, alive, and getting on.’ To them he was
thoroughly impressive, finally in his uniform, and neither forgot the
gifts he made them of two half-crowns for Geoffrey and one for God-
frey. This gesture, like that of a solicitous uncle, underscores the gulf
between the brothers. Geoffrey was five years younger than Bernard
and Godfrey eight years, but in terms of life experience, they were
worlds apart, boys to his and David’s young men.

The captain of his ship I 127

Once his leave was up, Bernard headed south-west to the RAF
aircrew induction centre in Torquay on the Devon coast for his own
three-month stint in the initial training wing. He was billeted at the
Oswald Hotel in Babbacombe. ‘All the hotels were requisitioned by
the air force in that area. There were two, three hundred of us, aircrew
cadets, not just from the university. Once you were in you all mixed
in together. I was the only officer cadet that I knew of. I shared a room
with two other men.’
The Oswald had no central heating but his quarters were above
the kitchen, for which he was especially grateful as autumn turned to
winter. All in all, he was very happy beside the seaside and the con-
straints of service life did not chafe at him as they had David. ‘I didn’t
mind the pernickety rules and regulations, I could ride with it. There
was marching, there was aircraft recognition, how to take a gun apart
and put it together again.’ But there was no mistaking that what they
were about was deadly serious.

I remember we had a sergeant, a group of us, about half a
dozen and we were training in a small park area and he said,
‘What are you here for?’ I don’t remember what we said, but
he said, ‘No, you’re here to kill the enemy.’ That remark may
shock some people today, but this was just twenty-five years
after the First World War, with the slaughter of the battles of
the Somme and Verdun, and what was currently going on
in the eastern front between the Russians and Germans, let
alone in Normandy – well, I suppose he wanted to make sure
we knew that this was serious. A war is not civilised, and it’s
not being fair. War is total. They are trying to conquer you.
And given the chance they will kill you.

As temperatures nosedived and the smog thickened once
more, Lew decided to evacuate himself from London and pay Ber-
nard an extended visit. He found a room in a bed and breakfast, leav-
ing Clara behind to run the shop in Old Street. The expense must

128 I The captain of his ship

have been considerable, a sign of how ill Lew must have been. Al-
though Bernard trained all week, he could enjoy every Saturday or
Sunday with his father. As far as he could recall, Clara did not visit –
she would have been too busy – and his father made no trips home. If
this latest separation was tough for the couple, it was worth it. ‘You’ve
got to imagine – in Torquay he was up and about. In London he was
so weak he didn’t have the strength to do anything, he couldn’t get out
of bed.’
The trip was also something of an experiment, thought Ber-
nard, speculating that Lew might have been considering a new start.
‘We had a bus journey once round Torquay, to other small towns in
the area. We looked from the bus at a small greengrocery, in a small
town, and I remember discussing with him how it all worked – I think
there were wholesalers who instead of you going to the wholesale
market, they would come to you. So much better. I think it was in his
mind to possibly move down there, get a small greengrocery.’
As well as special time with Lew, Bernard also enjoyed a fleet-
ing touch of romance. ‘Me and another boy got to be friends with
a couple of girls who went to the teacher training college. We used
to see them on a Saturday for about maybe four weeks.’ Perhaps this
prompted Lew to share some rare paternal advice. ‘I remember my fa-
ther saying to me, “Don’t get married too early, see a bit of the world.”’
All too soon the three months in Devon were up and Bernard
moved north to Carlisle, then in Cumberland, to learn at last how to
be a pilot in an old open-cockpit Tiger Moth biplane. Lew returned to
London.
During training, Bernard’s extraordinary sang-froid came to
the fore. ‘When I was doing my initial flying training, I remember the
instructor for a bit of fun demonstrating his aerobatic skills. Loop the
loop, spins. It was such a responsive little plane. He was clearly enjoy-
ing himself, I was too. He ended up with us flying upside down. There

The captain of his ship I 129

we were, hanging by our straps. Fine. I was not bothered about phys-
ical danger. I was eighteen and in Air Force jargon, I was fireproof.
Nothing would happen to me. And if it did, so what?’
If this might imply that Bernard was unusually emotionally
detached, he was far from devoid of emotion. A case in point was
the cruel day when, after just seven hours of dual-instruction flying,
he was informed that he could not complete his training: the RAF
already had enough pilots in the pipeline. The news upset him ter-
ribly. It was to be the first in a series of disappointments that took
him further and further away from his goal of being airborne. ‘Then
I was meant to become a navigator. But at that stage it was coming
right to the end of the war and they were winding down. Less aircrew
were being killed and they had these people in the pipeline waiting to
become aircrew who had to be slowed up. So in between courses the
RAF would send you off to do something else for three months.’
In April 1945, as the war staggered to its close and the country’s
spirits began to soar, the Lewises received the worst possible news.
‘Daddy was very ill and he was in hospital, in Hitchin or
somewhere just outside London,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I came back directly
to London from Leicester.’ He must have brought Godfrey with him,
and Bernard too headed home on compassionate leave, rushing to the
hospital.
He sat with Clara at Lew’s bedside, feeling utterly helpless. ‘In
those days there was that diffidence between the public and the med-
ical profession. You didn’t question them too much. Today you would
get hold of them and find out what’s going on, what can be done, that
sort of thing. Then, you just left it to them.’ All they could bring was
hope, affection and gifts. ‘I remember we took him oranges. It was very

difficult to get them. Afterwards I remember sitting in a sort of semi-

park area, it might have been some grounds, waiting until it was time
to take the train back. The trees, the almond trees were in blossom.’

130 I The captain of his ship

When his leave was up Bernard returned to his training wing,
only to be transferred again almost immediately to another station.
‘So I contacted home to tell them where I was going.’ The messages
flew back and forth, faster than he could travel.

When I arrived at the new station, I’ve got a feeling it was at
Lincoln, there was a telegram waiting for me. He was dead.
I went straight back home. I remember walking to the
office, the guard room, to get permission for compassionate
leave from the duty officer.
It was like being in a dream. I remember borrowing a
bicycle, riding to the train station, looking down at the road,
looking down at the wheels, the front wheel, thinking, ‘This is
momentous. It’s happened.’ I abandoned the bicycle by the
ticket office, took the train, then I was on the bus to Kyver-
dale Road. By the time I got there the funeral was over.

David was waiting for him, having managed to return in time
for the ceremony (traditionally, a Jewish person is buried within
twenty-four hours of death). Although Bernard could not recall his
other brothers being present, they were, according to Geoffrey. ‘He
died a few days after I came home,’ he said. ‘Mummy and I were the
only ones with him.’ Godfrey remembered it differently. ‘He was in
hospital in St Albans. Mother was at home with us in Stamford Hill
when she received the message.’
Whether Lew died alone or with his wife and son, the facts
were indelibly sad. Only forty-seven years old, he lost his life when
peace was on the horizon and the family to whom he had dedicated
the last ounce of his energy was on the brink of being together again.
From this moment onwards, everything that Bernard would do in his
life can be seen as an attempt to redeem Lew’s loss – not just to ‘take

The captain of his ship I 131

care of Geoffrey’, as his father once requested, but of everyone. Yet he
would not heed Lew’s advice to find a trade, and neither would any of
his brothers. Instead they would seek to be their own masters, just as
Lew had been, for better and for worse. From that day on it would be
the family against the world.

9

Against the world

‘I remember my mother saying when I got home, “He’s down there in
the cold,”’ said Bernard. ‘My father hated the cold because of what it
did to his chest.’
How do you comfort a widow, barely forty years old, with four
children, especially if you are her teenage son? The best that Bernard
and David could offer was to try and make Clara’s life easier. They
stayed home on extended leave, helping Clara, Geoffrey and Godfrey
to gather the threads of their new life without Lew.
Notionally, other practical support was available nearby.
‘There was her brother Isaac who managed a factory a few hundred
yards away from the shop in Old Street. There was my father’s sister,
Dora, her husband Barney in Spitalfields. There was possibly some
help from those two.’ But any assistance would have been limited at
best. Nor were there great streams of friends and relations popping
around with food and comfort. Years of isolation, ministering to the
needs of family and business, had radically curtailed Clara’s social
network. On the other hand, she was an extremely capable woman,
and as Lew’s health declined she had kept the shop going, more or less
single-handed, for months on end.
After two weeks the brothers’ leave was up. There was still a
war to be won. But when David returned to the front line, he found
the war effort had shifted into very different territory, of restitution
rather than destruction. On 30 April his crew took part in a supply
drop of powdered milk, eggs and chocolate over the starving Dutch
city of Rotterdam, dispatching the food in papier-mâché coffins left
over from the Blitz – a perfect symbol of the change of direction.

Against the world I 133

On 22 May his crew were selected for what was mockingly
called the Cook’s Tour (an allusion to the whistle-stop package holi-
days organised by Thomas Cook). This entailed flying up and down
in straight lines over Germany, carrying photographers, reporters and
film crew in their hold in lieu of their former explosive cargo, often at
a height of just 200 feet above the ground, in order to film the damage
wrought across the land. This afforded David an unrivalled view of
the cost of almost six years’ fighting, as his passengers documented
the devastation in Antwerp, Aachen, Munich, Gladbach, Düsseldorf,
Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Hanover, Brunswick and
Hamburg.
His next assignment was a humanitarian task, repatriating
Belgians to Brussels as part of Operation Exodus. When that was over
another opportunity arose to re-enter the fighting fray and join the
Pacific War effort, but David declined to volunteer; he wanted to stay
closer to home in order to support his family. Instead he received a
compassionate posting to London, an extremely dull desk job at the
Air Ministry Unit for the RAF Paymaster.
When Bernard returned from leave via the train station he
had left a fortnight earlier, there was no sign of his borrowed bicycle.
Trudging back to base on foot, he arrived to find a crowd of strangers.
It transpired that while he was at home his training wing had set sail

for Canada to continue their instruction. He never got to say goodbye
to his fellow cadets, and was destined to meet only one of them again:
Sydney Samuelson, another Jewish boy who hailed from Shoreham,
near Brighton, and who was to become one of just two men whom he
would feel able to describe as a true friend.
He bitterly regretted missing out. It was yet another setback,
through no fault of his own. The lesson had been driven home:
rely on others for your chances and you can expect to face a long
wait. Missed opportunities was destined to become the theme of his

134 I Against the world

remaining time in the RAF. ‘My whole twenty-two months in the air
force I wasn’t in a squadron once, I was always in training.’ So what
was he? ‘Nothing. Leading aircraftsman. That’s what it was called. The
lowest was AC2, Aircraftsman Second Class. Trainee aircrew were
leading aircraftsmen, who when qualified, became sergeant or offi-
cer.’ With the war’s momentum lost, his motivation evaporated. ‘The
whole sense of urgency and purpose had gone. All you really wanted
was to get out. Go home. What did you want to be in the forces for?
The war was effectively over, it was nearly won, and I was not able to
do anything useful.’
Going home was not an option. Instead Bernard joined a long
queue of superfluous young men for whom the Ministry of Defence
needed to find something – anything – to do. He did his share of
marching at an NCOs’ school somewhere in Shropshire. Thereafter
began a farcical round of ever less satisfactory jobs, between bursts
of training. There was a brief spell in signals. However, despite his
radio course at the polytechnic, Bernard was not a natural techie. ‘I
was very good at Morse code – getting it out, and receiving it – but
you also had to be able to repair the radio, in case you were in a situa-
tion where it got shot away from under you.’ Still, the communication
habits instilled by the air force would have a very long afterlife. One
day, several decades after the war had ended, he signed off a telephone
message for his daughter Caroline with the word ‘Conclusion’ (to in-
dicate that his statement was complete, according to RAF protocol),
much to her amusement.
Afterwards came a stint as a bicycle repair mechanic, then
it was off to the Air Ministry to be a filing clerk in Bush House on
Aldwych. Of all the purgatorial torments that could be contrived to
harrow an energetic young man’s morale, few could have beaten that
job. ‘I was driven to distraction by doing nothing. The bicycle repair
was okay, you’d be doing something, but filing was the living death,