bl_flip2

Your own boss I 35

We’d go back to the lorry in Endell Street, and the porters
who worked for the wholesaler would load up the stuff on
their barrows and do a round – for several people, not just
one shopkeeper. When you buy you tell them what pitch you
are, there must be a hundred different pitches, and in each
pitch there will be maybe a dozen lorries and a chap that
looks after it. So when the porter came along he’d say, ‘Where
is Pokrasse?’ and the chap would say, ‘Over there.’ And the
porter would come over and put the boxes on the tailboard.

Here Bernard came into his own, systematically imposing
order on the produce:

If I was along for the morning I would stand on the tailboard
and load. You didn’t have ropes to tether it in place. You
would just stack it in such a way that it wouldn’t fall. Now if
it was potatoes they had to go at the front – the middle of the
lorry, so to speak. Because you can’t upend it – put them at
the back and it could tip over. You have to stack them careful-
ly around, because you knew more or less what else was com-
ing. And then the soft stuff, the fruit, would have gone on top.

Lew must have felt proud of their lorry. Most greengrocers
made do without a vehicle, instead relying on a distribution network.
‘There were hauliers – contractors who would drop the produce off
to you during the day. The wholesaler would deliver it to the haulier
and they would serve all the other shopkeepers in the area. You would
pay them so much a package.’ Being in charge of his own deliveries
gave Lew an advantage, offering a wider window in which to sell his
stock, rather than hanging around while it wilted at the back end of
the haulier’s schedule.

Not everything had to be bought daily. The shop had a store-
room at the rear, meaning a certain amount of produce could be car-

36 I Your own boss

ried over. ‘Potatoes, turnips, things like that. Tomatoes would last
more than one day, apples would. You’d get fresh, but maybe twice,
three times a week. But a lot of the stuff will be fresh every day. So you
had to get it back early.’

Home from the market, their working day had still barely
begun. The next task, perhaps already underway with Clara, was to
display the stock. Inside the shop was about eighteen feet wide and
twenty-five feet deep, with fixtures along the walls to support trays
of fruit and veg, but much of their business took place on the street,
where, in the parlance of the trade, you would have to ‘dress them out’
– a real job of work, as Bernard put it.

‘Between the shop and the pavement was a forecourt about
six feet deep. So you took out boxes and laid them out, then put fruit
and vegetables in large wooden trays on top. I’m not sure whether
the forecourt belonged to the shop – it probably belonged to the local
authority. But nevertheless that’s what shops did – still do.’

They tricked out their wares as enticingly as possible. Fruit,
bright, gleaming and colourful, always at the front to attract passers-
by, with less showy vegetables playing a supporting role at the back.
‘There was a special order to how you did it, a way of stacking the
fruit. You could build pyramids and all sorts of configurations. Two
like that, then in-between goes another and you’d slide a piece of tis-
sue between them to make it look good.’

Dressing out took a couple of hours and as long again to ‘pack
them in’ at night. ‘I probably still know how to do it,’ said Bernard,
eighty years on. He missed the aroma of the shop too. ‘I don’t get it
any more, not in the produce section in the supermarket, that’s venti-
lated and the air conditioning circulates it.’

I still think I know more about fruit and veg than I do about
clothing. I was brought up in it. I can usually tell the quality

Your own boss I 37

and flavour of fruit, and sometimes veg. I just look at it and I
know, I know instinctively. Sprouts, I can tell if they are fresh
by looking.
Cabbage, you only put your finger on it and you
know. And I like virtually all of it – there’s nothing that grows
that I wouldn’t eat. Whereas if it lives I’m odd about it. I eat
meat – but not all meat; fish, but not all fish. Don’t eat shell-
fish but that might be because I’m Jewish. Then again, my
brothers ate it.

His brothers did not share his enthusiasm. ‘The love of fruit
and veg wasn’t general – that was me. They didn’t identify with the
greengrocery business the way I did.’

Bernard’s affinity with the produce seems inextricably linked
to his identification with his father. Not that he regarded himself as
having been especially close to Lew. ‘I don’t remember doing things
together.’ Yet the facts speak otherwise. Perhaps unconsciously, his
eagerness to help out ensured they were often in each other’s compa-
ny. Business did not simply entwine their relationship; it threaded its
core.

As they grew older neither David nor Godfrey, the youngest
brother, would evince much interest in shopkeeping. Yet Geoffrey de-
veloped a far stronger affinity for it, with a real flair for design and
display, and it cannot be a coincidence that he too learned the green-
grocery trade largely one-on-one, in his case with Clara, while his
brothers were elsewhere. His attachment to retail, like Bernard’s, was
secured by the strongest of filial bonds.

But for all of them, the shop was the fulcrum of family life.
When not at school Bernard was ‘in it all the time, up and down. There
wasn’t much of a separation between the upstairs and the downstairs.
I’d be down there with my mother. My father, when he came back
from the market, would be in the shop. He’d go up and have his lunch
and then he’d come down again and my mother would go up.’

Busy as they were, in other respects the family may have felt

38 I Your own boss

rather isolated. They were not the only Jews in their neighbourhood,
but St John’s was a Catholic school and Bernard would be the sole
Jewish child in his class (until around the age of ten, when he joined
his father’s alma mater, by then known as the Jewish Free School).
David meanwhile was destined to attend non-Jewish establishments
throughout his education. After infant school he attended an elemen-
tary school in Hercules Place, Nag’s Head, where he proved ‘a natural
for school’ as he put it, before modestly (if not entirely convincing-
ly) adding that he had been ‘nothing special’. By contrast, his abiding
memory of St John’s was far from academic: ‘I hated the food.’

The religious dimensions of their primary education left little
mark. ‘There were prayers every day and I was quite used to hymns,
Christian hymns, being sung. But it just washed over me,’ said Ber-
nard. ‘At first you weren’t given the opportunity of going out. Later
on, I think it came in that you could be excused from prayers and
go and sit outside.’ Being Jewish would go on to play a major role in
the brothers’ lives, not only as a foundation of their identity but as an
engine for forging social networks; however, the practice of religion
would barely merit a walk-on part. As Bernard put it, ‘At home there
wasn’t much religiousness, but there was Jewishness. I mean, today I
am an atheist and I am Jewish, a cultural Jew.’

Weekends were about work and family, with no pause possi-
ble for Shabbat on Saturday. Even on Sunday, the one day of the week
when nobody was obliged to rise with the lark, there could be no
escape from shopkeeping, not even in make-believe.

You wouldn’t leave the money in the shop overnight. My par-
ents would fetch the cash drawer out of the register and bring
it upstairs and put it on a chair in their bedroom.
There was a gas fire there too, and on top of the fire a
little ledge came down – a fold-down ring – and my mother
would turn on the gas and put a kettle on it to make a cup of
tea. David and I would go in there and get in bed with them

Your own boss I 39

for an hour. And I would play with the money and pile it up
in little heaps, making stacks of coins. It was a little family
get-together.

By way of relaxation, Lew’s preferred vice was the newspapers.
He took the News Chronicle for news and Reynold’s News on a Sunday,
plus an occasional copy of the News of the World. As they grew old-
er, the boys would enjoy this last newspaper especially. Decades into
the future it would metamorphose into a notorious red-topped tab-
loid, famed for salacious kiss-and-tell exclusives, but then it was still
a broadsheet, albeit one stuffed with scurrilous stories. ‘The print was
tiny, with few pictures. But oh it was scandalous for the times,’ said
Bernard. The boys liked to amuse themselves by decoding the mean-
ing hidden between the euphemistic lines. ‘You got familiar with the
conventions. Nobody ever had cancer: you died of a serious illness.
And of course the sex stories were dealt with by innuendo.’

Lew tended to keep his eye on the graver news items. As the
1930s rolled on, the rising tide of anti-Semitism and Germany’s Na-
tional Socialist party became more and more disturbing. ‘My father
was not just interested in what was happening in Europe. He was very
interested in British politics.’ This is not to say that he was ready to
man any barricades; his experiences after the First World War seem
to have left a lingering distaste for idealism. ‘He wasn’t an activist, we
didn’t talk a lot of politics in the house, but the papers he read were
liberal papers.’

If talk of current affairs around the dinner table was scant,
the opportunity to share family meals was itself limited. All the same,
the boys picked up something of their father’s relish. Bernard would
read the newspapers whenever possible. David was even more en-
thused, and began hankering after a career as a political journalist.
This may have stemmed from a desire to please Lew. It also suggested

40 I Your own boss

that David longed for adventures ranging across a broader arena than
his parents’ lives could afford them.

For the most part, Bernard’s passions were solidly boyish. ‘At
a very young age I could tell every car on the road by sight.’ His ar-
dour did not pass Lew or Clara by. Curiously, although Bernard could
recall no birthday celebrations, never mind presents, he did receive
one, never-to-be-forgotten gift. ‘I was very young, maybe five, when
my father bought me a little sit-in car, a pedal car. I loved it.’ So what
did he do?

‘I sold it. To one of the men who worked in the shop. For two
and sixpence. I don’t know how long I’d had it – it could have been
very quickly. And of course, my father – absolutely furious. And he
couldn’t take it back from the chap. He’d given it to his little boy.’ It
may seem astonishing that Bernard could have done such a thing, but
at the time he was delighted. ‘I got the money! I got two and sixpence!’
A wheeler-dealer was already in the making, although whether he got
the better end of the deal is debatable.

This prized pedal car was never to be replaced, but by now the
shop was turning enough of a profit for Lew and Clara to acquire a
real motor, and this proved a more enduring addition to the house-
hold. First came a navy Austin 7, then a maroon Austin 12/6. These
life-changing machines took their cherished family Sundays up a
gear, kicking off a new tradition of trips away from the grimy city.
They rarely travelled far, except for one journey to Manchester to visit
the boys’ maternal great-aunt, Fanny Tauber’s sister. ‘We stayed with
them for one night. It must have been something like Whit Monday,
when the shop would be closed for Sunday and Monday. I don’t have
any memory of her.’

More often the family zipped off for a day beside the seaside.
David had faint memories of jaunts to Westcliff-on-Sea, not far from

Your own boss I 41

Southend, but his younger brothers could only remember paddling at
Camber Sands, where they would go on most Sundays throughout the
summer. The drive alone was a great adventure, undertaken with an
immense sense of occasion. ‘You could stand between the two front
seats,’ said Geoffrey. On the way they would pass stop-me-and-buy-
one ice cream vans, and more often than not they did exactly that. The
choice was simple: a vanilla ice, either in a cornet or wafer. They were
even allowed to eat this treat in the car – ‘surprisingly,’ added Geof-
frey, noting their father’s reverence for the condition of its upholstery.

Bernard never forgot the swelling excitement of the final leg
of the journey.

As you were driving in, approaching the coast, suddenly
there would be more sky – then you would know that you
are nearly there, just a few miles to go. Then the only thing
in front of you would be the horizon where the sky meets
the sea, and there’s an absence of buildings, and you think,
‘We’re getting there.’ I still encounter that, when I go round
our shops on the coast – driving up, you get the same sort of
feeling: ‘Ah, we’re coming to it!’

Once they arrived at Camber Sands Lew would drive straight
onto the eponymous dunes, a breathtaking platinum blond expanse
that begins in the village of Camber, East Sussex, sprawling several
miles eastward into Kent. Then out the boys would clamber and Lew
would set about teaching them to swim in what they considered to
be punishingly icy water. ‘He would hold you up by the chin and you
would paddle away until you knew how,’ said Bernard. ‘I remember
practising swimming too – on the dry land. You would get a chair,
lie across the seat on your stomach and balance, then try out your
strokes.’

Very much the youngest of the three brothers, Geoffrey found
his early memories came ‘in flashes – no before or after. I remember

42 I Your own boss

a van on the beach with a loudspeaker on’. Once, terrifyingly, he got
lost. ‘I took my bucket to the water’s edge, but then came back the
wrong way. Everybody was looking for me.’ Mercifully, he was found,
a sorry episode culminating in one of only two occasions on which
his father spanked him.

A less joyous benefit of the car, as far as the boys were con-
cerned, was the initiation of another new family ritual. Perhaps once a
month or so, and always on a Sunday afternoon, they would drive east
to the Commercial Road, not far from Spitalfields market. There they
would find somewhere safe to park near White’s Row, where their
grandparents, Hyman and Rivke, still lived above their barrow-lend-
ing store.

On a weekday Spitalfields seethed with crowds, muck and
noise, but come Sunday you would never have known it from the qui-
et streets. Indoors, the Pokrasses’ home was a model of calm too. ‘The
store was absolutely clean, with all these barrows stacked up – these
were what he rented to the porters, but on a Sunday the market was
closed,’ said Bernard. ‘I have a feeling that he also imported pickled
cucumbers, although there was no evidence of that when I was there.’

Hyman, or ‘Zeder’ as they called him, had his own little ken-
nel, a cubbyhole office downstairs. Halfway down the left-hand side of
the ground floor there was a spiral iron staircase leading up to a metal
landing on the first floor. ‘You’d go through into the sitting room – I
think the bedrooms were behind. The sitting room was always spick
and span,’ said Bernard. ‘A lace tablecloth, that sort of thing. Over the
fireplace was a gas mantle for light.’

This spotless realm belonged to Rivke – ‘Bubba’s domain’, as
David called it. Like Hyman, she was small and ‘thinnish, quiet’. Al-
though not one to indulge herself, lacking the relish of Clara and Fan-
ny, nevertheless Rivke understood her grandsons well enough and

Your own boss I 43

her first move when they shuffled into the sitting room would be to
bring out the biscuit barrel. For the boys, this was the none too lofty
high point of their visit. Thereafter they had to sit in mute torment,
listening to a sedate stream of conversation about people, places and
things of which they knew little and cared even less – not surprisingly,
given that they could barely follow it.

‘My grandparents spoke Yiddish and also English, but with a
very Yiddish accent. And if my parents wanted to say something to
each other that they didn’t want us to understand they would speak
in Yiddish. But we could pick up the odd word, the gist of what they
were saying,’ said Bernard. ‘We would stay for about an hour. Then I
suppose my mother and father would keep chatting while we would
go down and sit in the car, which was parked just outside. And sit
there and sit there, bored out of our minds, of course. There was no
radio. No books.’

Afterwards Clara, ever the food lover, would whisk them off
for a lip-smacking tour of the delicatessens along Petticoat Lane and
the family would return home laden with eastern European treats
to reward their patience: olives, herrings, smetana (a thick, soured
cream) and cheese. But although the boys got to know their way
around the neighbourhood, the buzz of the East End held little appeal
for them – at least, not for Bernard.

Apart from these outings Bernard recalled only one other reg-
ular excursion, the odd trip with Lew and David to hear the secular
prophets at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park spouting political diatribes
and dire prognostications, leaving behind Clara to enjoy the peace at
home with little Geoffrey. ‘Before they reconfigured it Speakers’ Cor-
ner used to be very big. There were many people there. We would
listen for a bit, then David and I would move to a patch of grass, just

44 I Your own boss

at the beginning of Hyde Park. There were low metal railings fencing
it off, but you could step over that and we would play there.’ And this
was pretty much the extent of the family’s social life. Bernard strug-
gled to recall any mates in Holloway.

On the opposite side of the road, a little further down, there
was a pub, the Half Moon, and there was a boy who lived
there who went to the same school. So we called him Percy
Half-moon.
I went to his birthday party there – can’t recall the
party, just the building, which was set back from the road.
But I don’t think Percy was a pal – I don’t think we had pals
quite like that. Obviously I had friends at school. But I don’t
remember ever having people round in our home to play, or
going to play.

Despite spending much of their day together, the boys’ time
with their parents would be spread thinly. Very much her vivacious
mother’s daughter, Clara radiated warmth that drew in customers,
but although a ‘reasonably calm’ mother she was ‘busy all the time’,
and if she happened to be off her feet, she was tending her family’s
many needs, either cooking or perhaps darning one of the endless
pairs of socks. There was no time for bedtime stories, not as far as
Bernard could recall. Although Lew was always avid for a newspaper,
he was not exactly literary. ‘I don’t remember him reading books, al-
though there were some in the house. When I was older I remember
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, I dipped into it. There was also
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, but I don’t think many
people have read that! Still, Lawrence of Arabia was very famous and
my father had been in the First World War too so I could see why he
might have bought the book.’

If the heavy workload imposed a certain distance, the tenor of
family life was warm and when they needed to keep the boys in line,
Lew and Clara’s approach was far from Victorian. ‘I never remember

Your own boss I 45

ever being hit or shouted at,’ said Bernard. ‘They weren’t really disci-
plinarians. My mother would threaten me with “telling your father”
but that was it.’ On occasion he tested his father’s patience. ‘It was the
first day he brought the Luton van home, brand new. It was parked
around the corner from the shop. I was playing with a yo-yo, and
for no reason, without really thinking what I was doing, I just took it
along the side of the van and made a mark. My father was livid. But
there was not so much as a clip around the ear.’

Clearly, the urge to improve their lives drove on Lew and
Clara, and their attitude was borne out in their elder sons’ conscien-
tious efforts at school. But they infused this spirit largely by example
rather than closely monitoring the boys’ progress. As a result, some-
times their children’s accomplishments took them by surprise. ‘One
day I was sitting in the car, behind them, driving along,’ said Bernard,
‘and there was a bus. The stairs to the upstairs were in the open – and
there was advertising around the outside. I sat there and I remember
spelling it out and then I said, “BEEFEX.” And my parents said, “He
can read!” That was the first word.’

Another of Bernard’s early memories was of noticing a car-
toon in one of Lew’s newspapers referring to the depression of 1929–
31 – the first hint that he took on board of the unfolding economic
calamity that was about to engulf the family. The significance of this
word ‘depression’ escaped him; he was too young and, at the time, all
was well in the Pokrasse household. Nonetheless, he saw suffering in
their neighbourhood.

I remember coming out of the shop, walking down the road,
crossing over Seven Sisters Road into Holloway Road where
the pavement was considerably wider – that was the busier
stretch of Holloway Road, it still is. There used to be several
beggars standing at the kerb edge, one with his face eaten
away: lips, the nose. I don’t remember giving money to them,

46 I Your own boss

but I recall the nuns used to come into the shop, in twos and
threes, all in black. And they would just come in and stand
there. They wouldn’t say a word and you’d give them some-
thing, eventually – you would give them thruppence to put
into this black thing they had. They were frightening, to me.
But you knew the nuns did good. And you give to charity if
you can.

It was another lesson he and his brothers would never forget.
Lew and Clara were happy to let the older boys roam about

the neighbourhood, especially if the shop fell suspiciously quiet, when
they would send them off on a special mission.

All the shoppers were savvy to the prices. Money was more
precious in those days. You might suddenly find that at two
o’clock things have gone a bit slack. Why? Because somebody
around the corner has stolen the march on you. So you have
to know what the competition are up to because they’re al-
ways playing with the prices and these could change during
the day. You’d go round and see what they are selling their
stuff at. I remember a competitor in Holloway called Hicks.
They had a shop in Archway and they had a shop round the
corner in Seven Sisters Road.

Scouting the competition sounds like an adventure from a
Boys’ Own comic, but the derring-do element was relatively subdued:
‘sort of standard operation’, as Bernard put it. ‘The shopkeepers didn’t
tell you to clear off, but you had to be quick on your feet.’

Just as he had begun to master the intricacies of purchasing
and pricing, so he was also absorbing the complexities of catering for
pennywise customers.

Whether you’re selling cabbages or sprouts or tomatoes –
you’re juggling with the quantity and selling price all the
time during the day. You can’t raise it but you can lower it

Your own boss I 47

to sell more, so you don’t have to – well, what you end up
with, some fruit, you throw away. And you’re also watching
the price of your competitors – you have to continuously visit
them, pop round the corner, see what prices they’re selling
their tomatoes at, to see that you’re not more expensive. You
don’t want to make the wrong call by buying the wrong stuff
and finding out they’ve got something noticeably cheaper.
Even if the quality is a little bit less, if it really doesn’t make
any difference to the customer, they will go there. And if they
do, you’re left out in the cold.

These early years in greengrocery fostered an acute sensitivity
for the fundamental rules of the retail game: in merchandising, in the
fickleness of customers, and in the challenges of dealing in a product
with a short shelf-life. It was an ideal preparatory education for an-
other kind of business, one that at this point in history had yet to be
invented: mass-market, off-the-peg fashion.

*

Holloway treated the Pokrasses kindly, giving them three healthy
boys and a vibrant going concern, but Lew began casting around for
a new opportunity outside London. As Bernard explained, ‘There’s
a limit to any particular shop. The busier the position is, the more
you’ll take, and my father was obviously ambitious. So if you can, you
move to a busier shop to make more money.’ Another consideration
may have been at work. Vigorous and determined though Lew was,
and still only in his thirties, each winter he turned into a different
man, one with every reason to quail as the mercury dipped and the
chill thickened the polluted inner city atmosphere. The increasingly
aggressive assaults of bronchitis that he suffered would have been bad
for anyone, but far worse for a man whose living meant that he could
never afford to rest.

48 I Your own boss

‘It was a constant every year. In the winter he was always very
ill, he struggled along,’ said Bernard. ‘In the summer he would be to-
tally different. I don’t remember him being cross or strict as an inval-
id. But it got progressively worse as he got older and as the winters
went on. The desperate thing was of course that even if he had bron-
chitis or flu, he still had to get up and go to Covent Garden. He had to
do that six days a week, no matter what. Nobody could help because
there was nobody to help.’

The shop’s lease sold soon enough and Lew and Clara found a
greengrocer’s in which to build their new life at 255 Station Road in
Harrow, a town north-west of Wembley that was fast developing into
a London suburb, with fast links into the city on the Metropolitan
line and a programme of new housing to draw in young commuters.
‘It was leafy, not built up,’ said Bernard, ‘totally different to the grimy
Holloway Road.’ It also retained a whiff of the privileged, not to men-
tion clean, air of Harrow’s famed public school. To put a final cap on
the family’s happiness, towards the end of 1932 Clara learned that she
was expecting another baby.
All in all, it was a logical move. Sadly, through no fault of Lew
and Clara’s, it would prove disastrous.

3

Harrow

On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.
But if Lew or Clara paid any attention to what was unfolding in Eu-
rope, they had plenty else to distract them. 1933 was to be a year of
significant alterations.
Harrow’s wide, tree-lined streets may have been a step up, but
by no means did the family live in the lap of luxury. As before, home
was a flat above the shop, with no covering on the floor, let alone
carpets. The family came and went via the back entrance down a side
road, which led to the United Dairies depot and, further along, to a
smithy. Despite daily encounters with the timeless reek of blood from
the butcher’s next door and smoke from the fire at the nearby black-
smith’s, modernity was very much in the ascendant. Each morning,
often before dawn, the dairy’s flotilla of electric milk floats would sigh
past their windows, the rattling bottles serenading Lew as he got up
for the long drive to the market.
On 10 May, Clara gave birth upstairs to another little boy,
Godfrey, two months ahead of schedule. ‘Godfrey weighed about two
pounds something when he was born,’ said Bernard. ‘And when he
was new-born he had a collapsed lung, only one of them worked.’ So
tiny was Godfrey that he dozed away his earliest weeks in a tomato
crate. But under the tender care of Clara and another young woman,
Gwen, who was enlisted to live in and help with the boys and the
shop, in time Godfrey blossomed.
On 16 May, perhaps spurred into action by Godfrey’s prema-
ture arrival, Lew went to the town hall and parted with ten shillings
in order to change his name by deed poll.

50 I Harrow

Lew Pokrasse was no more. In his place emerged Leonard
Lewis. Apparently he picked Leonard as a first name because in the
war his fellow soldiers nicknamed him Len. (It must have been a com-
monplace substitution; the great American composer, Leonard Ber-
nstein, another child of parents who fled the pogroms, was originally
named Louis but everybody called him Lenny.) To Clara he would
always remain Lew, but henceforth they were all Lewises and Godfrey
bore this surname on his birth certificate.
They were not the first to make such a change. Although Lew’s
parents stuck with the Pokrasse surname, Rivke had long been known
by the anglicised Becky or Rebecca, and Lew’s brother also formally
changed his name from Marks Pokrasse to Montague Perry. To name
yourself is the ultimate act of self-determination, so it is understand-
able that Lew chose his own surname rather than copy Monty’s, yet it
also feels indicative of the distance between them.
They would have taken this step in the interests of blending
in with their new neighbourhood. ‘You didn’t want to be different or
have a foreign name, you just wanted to be the same as everybody
else. The Jews were desperate to leave Poland, Russia, the Ukraine.
When they got to England it was actually fantastic. They were virtual-
ly free. They became normal citizens. You wanted nothing to do with
the place you’d come from, you were so grateful to be in England. And
you just wanted to be English, to fit in.’
It is important to note that to abandon a foreign-sounding
name did not imply an abandonment of their Jewishness, since this was
a religious identity, independent of nationality; it was more about shed-
ding restrictions imposed by the past. Why cling to a name associated
with a country that had denied you a livelihood and imperiled your
life? Unfortunately, in tandem with the changing tone in continental
Europe, British attitudes towards Jews were also shifting, so the decision
to change name may have coincided with a surge in anti-Semitism too.

Harrow I 51

At first everything went splendidly in Harrow, aside from un-
derstandable anxieties about Godfrey. Bernard and David attended
the local school on St Ann’s Road. Bernard’s chief memory of his time
there is testament to his determination to get on, regardless of the
rules.

The junior school and the infant school were next door to
each other and I was at the infant school and then at the end
of the year they read out the names of people who, when you
came back at the end of the summer, were going into the ju-
nior school. I assume they must have held children back if
they thought they weren’t ready for it. And my recollection
is my name wasn’t on the list. But when I went back in the
autumn I went into the junior school anyway, and I got away
with it.

In 1935 David passed the scholarship, an examination equiv-
alent to the eleven-plus – a feat achieved by only around eleven per
cent of schoolchildren. This won him a coveted place at the local
grammar school, Harrow County School for Boys, which would be
the alma mater of alumni such as the Nobel Prize-winning geneti-
cist Sir Paul Nurse, England cricketer Mark Ramprakash and Con-
servative Cabinet minister Michael Portillo. ‘I didn’t know it at the
time but I loved it,’ said David. ‘I think it was the making of me.’ By
his own description a ‘very serious-minded young man’, David was
an all-rounder, adoring English but at this point not greatly enjoying
mathematics. Other than that, he liked most subjects; what excited
him was learning to understand how things related to each other. ‘I
liked seeing the pattern.’ Fathoming how things worked, then putting
new configurations together – usually with a lot of numbers – would
become his metier.
Around this time Bernard started to receive regular pocket
money, another sign that Clara and Lew were feeling reasonably flush.

52 I Harrow

‘Sixpence a week, something like that.’ To him this was not quite the
thrill it might have been; after all, he had played with the shop’s tak-
ings since infancy.
Although David was old enough to help in the shop, he sel-
dom did – unlike Bernard, who began to serve customers from the
moment he was tall enough to stand behind the cash register. He took
particular pride in a now forgotten ritual: giving change.

I could give change from a very early age. Not the way they
do it now, giving you a handful – I counted it out. The way it
was, if somebody gave you a ten shilling note and they spent
one and thruppence, you would say, ‘One and thruppence’
and then you would say ‘Ten shillings’ – out loud, so there’s
an opportunity for everybody to hear. You don’t just take the
note, you put it on the ledge on the top of the till, never in
the till, and this way nobody could say, ‘I didn’t give you a ten
shilling note, I gave you a one pound note.’ Then you’d give
three pence from the till, and say, ‘One and sixpence,’ then
you’d give them sixpence and say ‘Two shillings’ and you’d
give another two shillings, ‘four shillings’, and then ‘six shil-
lings’, ‘eight shillings’, ‘ten shillings’.

This painstaking process sounds defensive but was common
practice, and he picked it up by watching his parents. ‘People can’t do
anything without a calculator now,’ he observed ruefully.
The child had no trouble spending his pocket money. Comics
were his thing. ‘There was Adventure on Monday, Wizard on Tuesday,
then something, something, and Friday there was the Hotspur. They
were about two pence. I used to buy one every week. But I’d have
bought one every day if I could.’ Sadly, earning extra cash was not an
option, despite the tantalising prospect held out by the United Dairies
depot along their road. ‘I remember very much wanting to do a milk
round, on the milk float – I had a friend who did it – but it never hap-
pened, I don’t know why. I might have been needed in the shop.’

Harrow I 53

It is unlikely that Lew or Clara would have opposed Bernard
taking a job on protective grounds; they trusted their boys to look
after themselves. Indeed, one Saturday brought Bernard a little bonus.
‘My parents had given me a coin to go and see a Shirley Temple film
– the cinema was just up the road. I was playing with it and it slipped
through a crack in the floorboards. And that was it. The idea of asking
for it again – no, you couldn’t do that.’
Still, he made it to the pictures from time to time, alone or with
David. One memorable Saturday evening their parents accompanied
them to see Roman Scandals, the first of only two occasions on which
Lew took them to the cinema (presumably the live-in help minded
the younger brothers). ‘I think that was partly because it starred the
singing comedian Eddie Cantor, at the time one of the biggest Broad-
way and Hollywood stars, who was also from a family of Jewish im-
migrants. It was very exciting. We were so proud of people like him,
and Al Jolson.’ (Jolson, Broadway’s biggest star, was born Asa Yoelson
in Lithuania and became America’s highest paid entertainer.)
Returning in the dark after this luminous evening of fun, they
noticed a pale ectoplasmic substance shimmering over the ground in
the alley behind the shop. Drawing closer, they realised it was oozing
from the back of the butcher’s next door. Another step revealed the
horrid truth: a seething carpet of maggots.
Summer brought more salubrious treats. On a Saturday David
and Bernard would stroll off to spend a day at the Harrow Lido, the
open-air swimming pool, rolled up towels under their arms, swim-
suits furled inside. And trips to Camber Sands continued, evidenced
by a photograph of Godfrey, aged around one, playing with a stone on
the beach.
Once Godfrey was strong enough for Clara to relax her vigi-
lance a little they hired a second live-in helper to free her to work in
the shop – a luxury, but relatively cheap, as domestic staff still com-

54 I Harrow

manded meagre wages in the 1930s. With eight people under its roof
the flat above the shop was now fit to burst, so Lew decided to rent
their very first house on Welldon Crescent. If this place possessed
a garden, Bernard could not recall it. It may have been just a mod-
est 1920s terrace, a hop and a skip away from Bernard’s school on St
Ann’s Road, but how proud Lew and Clara must have felt. Finally they
had a garage too, to kennel the beloved Austin 12/6. David remem-
bered playing inside it with Bernard, mucking about on the car’s roof,
then sliding down the window screen onto the bonnet and inadver-
tently scratching the cellulose, much to his father’s rage.

By now the elder boys were old enough to begin attending
cheder, Sunday morning religious classes for children at the syna-
gogue in Sheepcote Road. There they learned the rudiments of He-
brew and Judaism and studied the holy laws, first the Torah then the
Talmud. In theory this education would culminate at thirteen or four-
teen with a Bar Mitzvah ceremony to mark their recognition as fully
accountable members of the Jewish community. Bernard even won a
prize. ‘For good attendance! It was the Passover book, called a Hagga-
dah. The prayers are there in English and in Hebrew with lots of co-
loured pictures and pull-out things. It’s a classic, still being produced
today the same as it was in the 1930s. I loved it. I suppose it was my
first prize for anything. But everybody would have got one.’

Cheder inspired Bernard to new heights of religiosity, and he
went through a phase of lying in bed at night, conscientiously reciting
his prayers. ‘This would have lasted a week or two I suppose.’ Other-
wise there was little by way of inspiration at home to fan his ardour,
and he could barely recall Lew attending synagogue. Shopkeeping al-
ways got in the way. One exception was on the Day of Atonement,
Yom Kippur, when they would have turned the sign on the shop
door to closed. ‘He and my mother would have fasted, the twenty-
four-hour fast, and he would have gone to synagogue then. Children

Harrow I 55

weren’t compelled to join in, but I remember when I got to a certain
age, about twelve, thirteen, I had a go at fasting. I would have done it
for a year or two and then gave it up. Didn’t believe in it. But it wasn’t
a question of wanting or not wanting to be part of it: you were part of
it. You were Jewish. That’s it.’
Dedicated students though they may have been, neither Ber-
nard nor David would ever receive their Bar Mitzvah, nor Geoffrey
when his turn came. ‘It is usual to have a bit of a celebration, which
we could not afford. I don’t think I was bothered not to have mine.’
All the same, the boys never missed the main feasts of the Jewish cal-
endar, which presented an opportunity for their very favourite family
get-togethers.

The big festival was Passover and the tradition is you go
along to join your family. We went down to my mother’s
mother in Canning Town for the Pesach evening and there’s
special food, it’s a lovely family feel, a very happy occasion.
My grandmother would have made the food. It’s semi-ritual,
to do with the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, and there are several
courses. You have egg, hardboiled, served with salt water – I
think the salt water is to symbolise the tears of the exiles. You
just dip the egg in it then eat it. I liked it. And then there’s
another dish, like a burnt offering. A bit of chicken or some-
thing that was sort of burnt – I don’t know what the symbol-
ism of that is. And then you had a meal proper. Generally
chicken soup with the little matzo balls in it, called ‘knadles’,
no doubt a Yiddish word, and then you’d have the chicken.
It would be with gravy – not a roast chicken but cooked in a
saucepan, something like a pot roast. There’s supposed to be
prayers too and perhaps there might have been a few – I don’t
remember.

Interestingly, Lew did not attend, thought Bernard, only
Clara, who was still close to her mother. Possibly his father could not
leave the shop, or maybe he preferred to avoid spending too much

56 I Harrow

time with the rumbustious Taubers. Intriguingly, David had a mem-
ory that he could not put a date to, of himself and Bernard ‘being
virtually kidnapped when our aunt Betty took us out – ostensibly for
an excursion but in fact to spend Seder, the first night of Passover, at
Granny Tauber’s’. Why such subterfuge might have been necessary
can only be guessed at, but apparently there was a huge blow-up with
Lew afterwards.

Although Lew was absent from these celebrations, at least
one other adult male was in attendance because at some point Fanny
Tauber had remarried. Her second husband, Harry Smitzer, never as-
sumed the mantle of patriarch. Physically, he was far from imposing
– and, tellingly, Bernard could not recall his name; the Taubers always
referred to him by the unflattering moniker ‘old man’. ‘He was placed
at the head of the table, but he wasn’t treated by my uncles or aunts
with any sort of deference. They weren’t rude to him exactly. But it was
obviously a marriage of convenience.’ To what extent this union may
have been convenient to Fanny is unclear. Godfrey thought Smitzer
had a mistress, which would certainly explain the offhand treatment.
Tensions in the Tauber home would have been exacerbated by
the stress caused by neighbourhood developments, which were set to
all but decimate Fanny’s livelihood. First West Ham’s borough coun-
cil began ruthlessly clearing the slums. Street after street vanished as
they pulled down the tiny terraced houses that rapacious Victorian
property speculators had erected beside malodorous marshland. Re-
placing these squat, insanitary homes with new buildings, health clin-
ics, children’s nurseries and a lido was a boon to local residents, and
these improvements precipitated a second wave of upgrades to the
constipated local road system. 1934 saw the opening of the Silvertown
Bypass and the Silvertown Way, Britain’s first urban flyover, which
offered new routes to the docks. As a result, more or less overnight,
Victoria Dock Road went from a jostling thoroughfare to a backwater,

Harrow I 57

putting an end to the trade on which Fanny’s business depended for
survival.
Not for the first time, Fanny faced destitution. At least old
man Smitzer’s wages helped to keep the wolf from the door. But it was
not enough. Once again thrown on her own resources, she decided
to move where the people were and got herself a stall on the nearby
Rathbone Street market off the Barking Road, selling dockers’ overalls
and other bits and bobs.

*

Judaism might have played an erratic part in the Lewis boys’ day-
to-day life but there was no danger of forgetting their Jewishness. ‘I
never personally experienced serious anti-Semitism,’ claimed Ber-
nard. Then again, the drip-drip of mild contempt towards Jews was
so pervasive that it struck him as normal. ‘Being called “Jew boy” was
standard – countless times.’ Quite simply, to be Jewish was to be oth-
er: sometimes suspect, and always an outsider.
Bernard did not get angry but, as in most matters, took a ro-
bustly pragmatic approach to this casual hostility. ‘It could be that, in
a conversation you were part of, and they didn’t know you were Jew-
ish, they were talking about someone and they might say, “Oh, he’s a
Jew boy”. Something like that. So there was a technique, if you were
mixing with people you didn’t know, you had to find a way of letting
them know that you were Jewish as quickly as possible.’
He was not particularly judgemental of people for being that
way, he recognised it was the way things were. ‘Because it was auto-
matic – they could be talking and saying something that was a bit
derogatory about Jewish people – which cropped up quite commonly
and normally in a situation – and then they found out you were Jew-

58 I Harrow

ish, and they hadn’t meant to be personally offensive. It was embar-
rassing for them. And once it was said the relationship was different.’
He could not recall when he first adopted this technique. ‘You
knew from an early age. It was standard that Jewish people could be
mocked. They were different people. I mean, you would be reading a
book – in many works of literature – and there would be, what should
we say? Slighting remarks.’
In such insidious fashion, each day came freighted with sus-
pense and the most glancing encounters contained the possibility
that a metaphorical door might be slammed in his face. ‘It could be
anywhere, from any source, from any person. You’re always prepared
for it, half expecting it. Yes.’ Constant vigilance was required in any
situation outside the family or the Jewish community, vigilance that
conditioned Bernard to read people with care.
In 1930s Harrow no paranoia was necessary for a Jewish per-
son to feel outside the general run of society. The rise of National
Socialism in Germany found its counterpart in Britain’s blackshirts,
the foot soldiers of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), who were
led by Oswald Mosley. A charismatic but volatile aristocrat, Mosley
entered Parliament representing the Harrow constituency, first as a
Conservative, next as an independent Member of Parliament, before
crossing the aisle of the House of Commons to join the Labour Party.
He became MP for Smethwick, only to break away from mainstream
politics in 1932 when he founded the BUF.
Despite these weathervane political allegiances, Mosley re-
tained a loyal following in Harrow – grace of his good looks and
stirring oratory as much as his readiness to surf the latest ideolog-
ical tides. And so it was that every Saturday a malevolent flock of
blackshirts hovered in Station Road, right outside the Lewises’ shop,
flogging copies of the party’s weekly newspaper, the Blackshirt, with

Harrow I 59

its distinctive lightning flash, pronouncing their dedication to the
promised ‘fascist revolution’. This ominous presence sounds fright-
ening but did not scare the boys, said Bernard. Rather, it signified
the hostility that was latent all around them. ‘You were aware of the
danger out there.’
These shadows meant little in the face of a more immediate
risk to their family’s welfare. ‘The life of a small businessman is haz-
ardous,’ as David put it. Because suddenly, swiftly, their steady stream
of customers dwindled to a trickle. It is unlikely that the crow-like
blackshirts hovering outside had much to do with this, although they
cannot have helped. The main problem was the shop’s enviable loca-
tion, which was so good that somebody else decided to swoop in and
pick off their trade. ‘A competitor who had quite a number of shops
opened more or less opposite. And whatever we did, he undercut our
prices. He promoted bananas as a loss leader, things like that. The idea
was to drive us out of business. And he did.’

Meyers was the name of their nemesis, believed Geoffrey. Ber-
nard was not so sure, although he conceded that it might have been a
contender. ‘Two chains – multiples – of greengrocers grew up in the
1930s. It was a relatively new development. One was called Meyers
and there was another one called Thomas Lawton, commonly called
Tommy Lawton. They sold fruit only, mainly in tube stations.’ A retail
multiple was not without risk, primarily because it required staff to
manage each branch and the owner had to ensure they did not rob
him blind. Certainly, the limited faith that Meyers placed in assistants
was demonstrated by their distinctive uniform. ‘Long brown jackets
with no pockets,’ Geoffrey recalled. ‘You can guess why,’ said Bernard.

As the shop’s takings fell, Lew and Clara began bailing fu-
riously to keep financially afloat. First the family moved out of the
house on Welldon Crescent, back to the flat above the shop, and they
said goodbye to the devoted Gwen and their other live-in help.

60 I Harrow

Not long afterwards came the horrible day when Lew had to
let go of the Luton van. ‘He obviously couldn’t keep the payments up,’
said Bernard, who surmised that despite the appearance of prosperi-
ty, his father lived very much week by week, ploughing most of their
income back into the shop. He remembered feeling his own impotent
rage towards the rival shop. ‘But there was not much you could do
about it. And my attitude to it would have been picked up from my
parents. It’s like one place removed – those feelings weren’t personal
to me.’
Lew and Clara’s pockets were too shallow to play this loss-lead-
ing game for long. Worse still, shop credit was not freely available in
the 1930s in the way that it is today, so once their ready cash was gone
the family’s circumstances plunged from promising to desperate, ex-
actly as had been the case for the Taubers in Canning Town on the day
that Victoria Dock Road became a backwater.
To avert bankruptcy, Lew signed over his remaining assets to
their creditors – all but the car. Then in the family climbed and he
drove them back to London.

4

Harringay

Lew drew up outside a shop at 503 Green Lanes, Harringay. His broth-
er Monty was waiting with the keys.
‘My uncle had taken a lease on the shop and then let it – pre-
sumably with no formal sub-lease – to my father for a certain amount
of money per week, month, whatever,’ explained Bernard. It seems
more than likely that Lew, ever resourceful, came up with this plan,
much as he must have detested depending on his brother.
Despite its name, Green Lanes was distinctly less verdant than
Harrow. A lengthy commercial section of the A105, it was one of the
longest, oldest roads into London. For centuries drovers had trudged
along this route with their livestock on the weary march from farms
in Hertfordshire to the city’s main meat market at Smithfield, but to-
wards the close of the nineteenth century J.C. Hill, the most prolific
developer-architect of his day, built a magnificent Grand Parade of
shops that fanned down its eastern length. 503 Green Lanes stood
among the less splendid hodgepodge of commercial premises that
stretched along the opposite side. So too did Monty’s own greengro-
cery shop, which he had moved from Seven Sisters Road to 649 Green
Lanes, a few hundred yards to the north, nearer than his brother’s new
shop to the lucrative hub of Turnpike Lane tube station.
The Lewises had landed north of Finsbury Park and only
a mile or two shy of Holloway – not exactly where Lew and Clara
started out, but near enough and it can hardly have felt a triumphant
homecoming. It did not come cheap either: Monty charged them £3 a
week to sublet the shop, according to Geoffrey – a significant sum in
those days. But whatever the shortcomings of the situation, Lew and

62 I Harringay

Clara put their shoulders to the wheel. ‘My father made a success of
it,’ said Bernard. So much so that the family acquired another van. In
keeping with their reduced circumstances, it was second-hand and
smaller than the old Luton, but it did the job. In a further sign that
the family were clawing their way back, they also took on a couple of
assistants.

Success proved essential, because the household expanded
once again. After Godfrey’s distressing infancy, there would be no
more children for Lew and Clara, but Hyman and Rivke had closed
the barrow-lending business on White’s Row, as much due to age and
infirmity as to the fragile 1930s economy. No longer able to afford the
rent, they needed somewhere to stay.

Monty and his wife Lily were the obvious choice to host. Al-
though they too had a large family to care for, with three daughters
and a son (another little Geoffrey), they lived in an entire house at
the top of the hill, whereas the Lewises were confined to a flat. But as
Bernard put it, ‘I think my father had a good sense of responsibility.’
Perhaps housing their parents was also another condition of Lew’s
deal with Monty in exchange for subletting the shop. In any event,
Bernard could not recall seeing much of Hyman and Rivke, who had
their own rooms on the top floor. Still, perhaps their presence was a
comfort to the boys. Certainly, despite several relocations over these
early years, they professed not to have been unsettled by their tum-
bleweed existence. ‘I don’t remember any distress or anything when
we moved,’ said Bernard. Whatever hardships Clara and Lew were to
endure, none of their sons recalled witnessing disagreements between
their parents.

As the boys grew older they seemed less four brothers than
two pairs. Chronology played its part in this, with David and Bernard
born within twenty months of each other, and Geoffrey not entering
the scene for five more years, Godfrey arriving a couple of years after

Harringay I 63

him. Yet it is striking how separate the boys were in their day-to-day
lives, which for David and Bernard ran along parallel tracks. ‘We were
never in the same class and very seldom in the same school,’ said Ber-
nard.

Often he’d just moved on when I arrived. We were close in a
certain way. A great deal of loyalty, trust. There was a great
deal of family – I mean, it was the family against the world,
so to speak. But I don’t remember us playing together. Da-
vid was not really into sport at all. Whereas I was very keen
on sport – I regretted never having the opportunity, but the
schools I went to never really had a football team and a crick-
et team. At least, I had absolutely no knowledge of it. If there
was, I’d have tried out for it.

He could dredge up the odd memory of mucking about with
his big brother in the storeroom, jumping around on sacks of pota-
toes, but when it came to joint escapades, his mind was largely blank.
Their personalities were quite different too. ‘David was the
elder brother. Independently minded with a very strong willpower,’
said Bernard. ‘What was I? The person that did things, I suppose. I
was more physically active.’ He also engaged more with the family
business, pitching in whenever he could – after school, on a Saturday.
On the other hand, David, now on the brink of his teens, could be dis-
tinctly backward in coming forwards, and despite his rosy memories
of childhood, his strong personality led to a few ructions.
One confrontation in particular entered family legend, vividly
recalled by Godfrey, who can only have been tiny at the time. ‘Our
father asked him to clear the yard and David said, “No, you’ve got two
men working for you, get them to do it!”’ Bernard did not forget it
either. ‘There was an atmosphere for weeks afterwards, a standoffish-
ness between my father and David. I don’t know why David objected,
there was no good reason. But I’m probably more flexible than he
was.’

64 I Harringay

One benefit of returning to the city was to bring more sport
into Bernard’s life. Nearby was the Harringay Stadium, home to grey-
hound racing as well as a motorcycle track, and the brand new Har-
ringay Arena, built in 1936 for the Harringay Racers Ice Hockey Club,
although it also moonlighted as a boxing ring. ‘There must have been
only a dozen, twenty ice hockey teams in the country,’ said Bernard,
but he was inspired. ‘I joined with some other boys and we played
in the street with a ball, running around.’ Undeterred by the lack of
funds for his new passion, he made his own hockey stick out of wood
from broken boxes. None of his brothers joined in. On the contrary,
their divergent personalities and roles grew more defined with each
passing year.

Where there are siblings there may not always be rivalry, but
comparisons are unavoidable and often shade into competition. Com-
ing several years in the wake of the capable and energetic Bernard
and David must have been particularly challenging for their young-
er brothers. Bernard himself was a middle child, of course, but he
demonstrated an uncanny self-possession from early in life, being far
less preoccupied with friendships than he was fascinated by things, be
they cars or piles of coins or the mysterious dynamics at work when
pricing a box of plums at the wholesale market. Geoffrey seems to
have been a more classic middle child – the squeezed piggy-in-the-
middle, and in his case, prone to squeal and act up. ‘I can remember
when he was little, him lying on the floor and kicking and getting in
such a tantrum – this was quite usual,’ said Bernard. ‘Yes, children
that age do get that way, but no, no, that was Geoffrey. Often getting
into a temper.’

It can have done little for Geoffrey’s self-confidence to have
the charming and delicate Godfrey nipping at his heels in the sib-
ling pecking order. With a perpetual question mark over his health,
Godfrey mopped up an even greater share of his parents’ care than

Harringay I 65

is usually allotted to the baby of a family. Well may healthy Geoffrey
have craved more attention than his busy parents could spare.
Godfrey also had a range of tactics for garnering the limelight.
‘When he was two, maybe three, he would cry and he wouldn’t take
a breath. The breath would go out and out and his lips would turn
blue,’ recalled Bernard. ‘But generally he was a charming little boy.’
Although his health remained questionable, this did not hold God-
frey back. ‘He was smaller and slighter and thinner than the rest of us,
but he was handsome, very engaging and always very popular. He had
a way with him. All through our lives I suppose Godfrey was closer
to me than Geoffrey.’ Make no mistake: Bernard and Geoffrey got on
very well. But it is easy to see why Geoffrey may have struggled to find
a happy niche in the foursome.

Inevitably, the family’s ebbing fortunes meant that the young-
er pair of brothers experienced rather different childhoods from the
elder. While David and Bernard could remember their parents as op-
timistic people, on the up, by the time Godfrey and Geoffrey were old
enough to lay down lasting memories, Lew was a far sicker man than
the one who fathered Bernard and David through their first years,
and Clara had a great deal more to contend with too. Not surprisingly,
the brothers’ views of their parents varied enormously. For instance,
Geoffrey considered Lew ‘quite a severe person – he was probably
suffering’ – an assessment that Bernard strongly disagreed with, al-
though he did so in terms that confirm the impression of Lew as very
serious minded. (‘He would do anything for us. Absolutely devoted.
He would give his life for the children – he worked so hard.’) David
considered his childhood very fortunate. ‘Because we had parents who
lived for their children. My dad played with us, I remember being on
his knee, I believe he loved children, and my mother was a natural
mother. My memories are those of a warm, close family unit. We nev-
er had any problems in our relationships with our parents.’ However,

66 I Harringay

Bernard could not recall playing with either of his parents and, for
him at least, Clara was not much of a cuddler. By contrast, happy-go-
lucky Godfrey described her as ‘a very tender, loving mother’. Then
again, the baby of a family usually gets the prodigal’s portion of a
mother’s hugs. He also found his father extremely affectionate, before
adding the telling caveat ‘as far as I was concerned’. As if to illustrate
this distinction, he recalled an incident that occurred when he and
Geoffrey were very young, presumably still in Harrow, running about
on the roof of the Austin 12. When the predictable happened and
they damaged the car it was Geoffrey, not Godfrey, who got smacked.
All of which helps to explain why Geoffrey’s reminiscences possess a
melancholy tinge quite absent from his brothers’.

*

The stability that the Lewises found in Harringay was not to last. A
series of losses hit the family in 1936. Hyman, like many elderly men,
suffered from prostate trouble and grew progressively sicker. ‘One
day I remember him being brought downstairs, I suppose by the am-
bulance people, wrapped up in a red blanket – it wasn’t a stretcher,
they just carried him,’ recalled Bernard. Geoffrey described stand-
ing with David in the front room, gazing from the window onto the
street below as their grandfather was whisked off to hospital – the last
time they saw him alive.
Lew’s grief made a deep impression on Godfrey. ‘My father
was very angry at religion, God or whatever. He didn’t attend syna-
gogue for a long time.’ Perhaps he did not realise that for Lew attend-
ing synagogue had always been rare.
Their sorrows did not end there. No sooner had business
picked up than Monty began demanding more money for the sub-
lease. ‘I think he had got into difficulties,’ said Bernard. ‘He played,

Harringay I 67

went to the dog track and gambled a bit – it was very fashionable then.’
If Lew and Clara resented this rent hike, Bernard would not concede
there was any major fallout. ‘I mean, he’s my father’s brother. If my
recollection is correct, what he did to my father was pretty nasty. But
he probably was up against it himself. He was often on the ropes.’ So
much so that at some point before the outbreak of the Second World
War, Monty would declare himself bankrupt.
With little alternative but to stay on, Lew and Clara paid up.
Then, in a brutal twist of fortune, the shop suddenly started to do
badly too. The story of Harrow was about to play out all over again.
‘Competition had opened right near us,’ said Bernard. ‘Bigger people,
already established with other shops. And they undercut everything.
The policy was to drive you out of business – and then after you’d
gone they’d put their prices up.’ Initially, the family toughed it out.
But Lew and Clara were helpless to stem the losses as customers were
tempted away.

Bernard grasped the depths of their predicament one awful

morning. ‘My father and I were going to the market early from Har-
ringay. We’d got up to Manor House and the van broke down. We
managed to get it into a local garage and it turned out that we didn’t
have the money to get it repaired. So we just left it there. Then I real-
ised what the position was: we had no money.’

Barely ten years old, he was beginning to understand that his
family relied on cash flow. If it dried up, they were lost. ‘It’s different
now because you don’t get the greengrocers. Supermarkets undercut
each other but they have sound finances. The thing is, in that time
people did not have financial reserves. My assessment of the situation
– my guess – is that when they were prosperous they were still virtu-
ally living hand to mouth, but the shop was doing well, and they could
afford little treats. But they were not building up a capital reserve of
any consequence.’

68 I Harringay

The business failed later that year. ‘I remember the shop being
closed and we were still living there,’ said David, ‘eating tinned pota-
toes from the shop’s stock. We were probably short of money for food,
but I never went hungry, none of us did. But we did not talk about it.
Finances were not discussed in the family. It is only things that I have
put together since and I realise that he was nearly bankrupted.’
‘At the end there was no stuff in the shop, nothing to sell, just
bare boards,’ said Bernard. ‘There was no way my parents could cover
it up. It was open, you could see it. They must have been in despair.’
The boy who had played with coins since infancy now began to day-
dream about financial solutions of his own.

I clearly remember coming home from school in Harringay
one day, before we moved to the East End – I suppose I was
about ten – and working it out. If I saved ten shillings a week,
then that would be £26 a year and in ten years it would be
£260. So in forty I could accumulate a thousand pounds.
Quite a sign of financial insecurity, I would have thought.
What was happening to my parents must have been very
meaningful to me and I would have thought to David as well.
Seeing circumstances defeating them. And also there was my
father’s ill-health.

This was the first conscious articulation of an ambition to ac-
cumulate enough money to make things okay for his family. Within
a couple of years he would set himself another goal. ‘I decided that
in my lifetime one of the things I would do was to save some money,
have a night out and hire a car and a driver. Once. To experience it.’
Like David, he perceived exactly what made his family so vulnerable.
‘I do remember being very conscious, from a very early age, that it
was too precarious to have just one shop. Somebody was going to
open nearby and drive you out of business. Therefore you need – you
have to have a cover, another business. The lesson basically is that you

Harringay I 69

have to have more than one iron in the fire. If you’ve got a shop you
can’t have one shop or two shops. If you’ve got a business you can’t
have just one business, you need reserves. That’s why I always resolved
– well, I knew: one shop doesn’t do it.’ This insight would prove the
foundation of his family’s success.

5

Underground in Old Street

Scrabbling around for somewhere to live, the only place that Lew and
Clara could afford was the worst possible, as far as his health was con-
cerned: the smoky squalor of the East End.

Somehow they grubbed up enough cash for the lease of a fruit
shop on Old Street in Shoreditch, across the road from the Kensitas
Cigarette Factory, a mile or so north of Lew’s first home in Spitalfields.
They must have felt as if all their efforts, all the distance that they had
put between themselves and their parents’ fraught beginnings in the
city, counted for naught. Fate was irresistibly dragging them into the
past.

‘Just a small shop, with a glass front window,’ said Bernard,
who could not fathom how his parents managed to pay for the shop-
fit. It was far from the sort of shop they were used to: minute, and
the restrictive terms of its lease permitted them to sell only fruit, no
vegetables. Neither did it benefit from local family trade, just office
workers and passers-by – not that there was a forecourt free to deck
out with enticing pyramids of glistening fruit to attract impulse buy-
ers. ‘You didn’t dress out. There was a bus stop right outside.’

What pennies remained to the family had to be ploughed into
buying stock. All out of alternatives, the Lewises moved into a small
storage room in the basement beneath the shop. There was no space
here for poor Rivke, who went to stay with Dora and her husband
Barney, an arrangement that cannot have lasted long because in due
course she was living alone. ‘I remember her renting a room in the
East End,’ said Bernard. ‘I went there once with a half-crown for her

Underground in Old Street I 71

from my father. I wonder now how he managed it. I remember bang-
ing on the door and she looked out of the window.’ There were no
biscuits or pleasantries. ‘I gave her the money and went.’

The Lewises may have maintained a tactful silence about their
troubles, but their new living quarters said it all.

We were all in one room with just the three mattresses on the
floor – one for mother and father, one for David and Godfrey
and one for Geoffrey and me. No beds or other furniture,
but there was a sink with cold running water, and an indoor
lavatory. There was a window with bars over it. Outside was
a yard full of rubbish which attracted rats. One or two could
find their way into our basement room somehow. We used
to buy a special treacle-like sticky substance to pour over a
large sheet of cardboard and bait it. The odd one got stuck
and would be dead by morning. And I remember we had lice.

This was to be their home for between six months and a year,
leaving Bernard with an abiding horror of dirt and vermin, stickiness
and discomfort.

If it was like sleeping in a dungeon, their parents work itself
became a prison, with the shop now kept open seven backbreaking
days a week. Still, complaining would not do. ‘You just got on with
it.’ Bernard could not contain his eagerness to help. ‘I was very aware
of the financial position and the precariousness. On one occasion my
father and mother had to go somewhere, so I was left in charge of the
till. A customer came in and spent one and thruppence, and I remem-
ber saying to my parents, “We’ve made one and thruppence!” And
they laughed.’ Bernard thought this was because he had no idea what
a profit was then – no sense of the expenses – but to me, this sounds
more like the mirthless hilarity of despair.

These privations took their toll and Bernard contracted sus-

72 I Underground in Old Street

pected rheumatic fever, falling ill so gravely that he was not supposed
to walk and Clara had to cart him around on piggyback.

The one advantage of Old Street was its proximity to the
wholesale markets, but without a van Lew had to buy the fruit there
and then either have it delivered, adding expense and delays, as well
as missing out on early morning sales, or lug it home himself. As the
stress and pollution bore down on him, his annual attack of bronchi-
tis brought him lower than ever.

Desperate for cash, Clara began taking in piecework from a
clothing factory around the corner on Great Eastern Street, one of the
East End’s countless sweatshops. ‘I would collect the stuff,’ said Ber-
nard. ‘I remember going up, up the different floors to a room, would
have been around four thousand square feet, full of machinists, men
and women. I used to collect carrier bags of the stuff and I’d bring it
back and my mother would sew the buttons on. It was thruppence a
waistcoat, something like that, and then I’d take them back. This went
on for years.’ It was his first glimpse of the quintessential Jewish busi-
ness, the rag trade.

*

On Sunday 4 October 1936, emboldened by Germany’s new political
order, Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts planned a march through the East
End’s Jewish quarter. One hundred thousand residents signed a peti-
tion asking the government to ban it. In response the Home Secretary,
John Simon, offered the blackshirts protection.

Six thousand Metropolitan Police officers, some on horseback,
were dispatched to permit the passage of 3,000 fascists along Cable
Street in Stepney. In response, 20,000 people stepped up to blockade
the streets. Bernard recalled the posters calling for an ‘All out against
fascism’ plastered on the buildings and walls in their neighbourhood,

Underground in Old Street I 73

as the Communist Party joined forces with the locals. ‘There was a
Jewish element in the Communist Party and also the Labour Party,
with so many Jewish workers in the clothing industry, which was
heavily unionised.’

The Lewis boys were too young to participate, and, keen as
his interest might have been, Lew could not countenance becoming
involved. ‘He couldn’t afford to be injured or anything like that.’ But
Clara’s brother Jackie, and possibly also Lou, both still young and un-
attached, readily joined in what would come to be dubbed the Battle
of Cable Street. ‘And they did, they managed to stop the march! De-
spite the police.’

During the street fighting 175 were injured and 150 arrested,
the latter suffering further maltreatment at the hands of the police. If
Jackie or Lou were hurt, nobody told their nephews. But as dramatic
as these events sound, the boys did not consider them outlandish.
‘You accepted it,’ said Bernard. ‘It was part and parcel of what was
going on. Mosley was famous, he was always in the papers and he had
quite a following. The blackshirts used to stand on the street corners,
speaking, all the time.’

In a belated attempt to defuse potential conflicts, that Decem-
ber the House of Commons passed the Public Order Act, which for-
bade all political parties from wearing uniforms. Yet support among
the middle classes for Oswald Mosley’s party and its anti-Semitic, na-
tionalist agenda continued to grow.

Eventually Lew and Clara had put by enough money to rent
a flat in an old-fashioned Victorian tenement on the corner of Great
Eastern Street and Singer Street, across the road from the shop. ‘There
were four rooms. One for my parents, David and I shared a room,
then Geoffrey and Godfrey were in with one another. And there was a
living room, and of course the loo. It was pretty grim. But it was okay.’

When winter bit they heated the place with a smokeless fuel

74 I Underground in Old Street

called coalite, rather like coke but with an unpleasant sulphurous
aroma, which Bernard remembered buying by the sackful every week
from a shop in Hoxton Square, sixpence a bag, and humping it home.
As for sanitary arrangements, there was only a rudimentary lavatory
– ‘a wooden plank with a hole in the middle, like a big wooden seat,
which filled the width of the room’. But however cash-strapped the
family, hygiene was never forgotten. There were always toothbrush-
es and toothpaste, including a fascinating red-coloured brand called
Gordon Moores, which promised to whiten teeth (in fact it dyed their
gums crimson). And once a week the boys trooped off on a week-
ly pilgrimage to the public bathhouse in Hoxton Square for a wash.
Geoffrey and Bernard chuckled remembering it. ‘A chap walked up
and down outside and if you wanted hot water you would have to tell
him, because the taps were outside the bathroom – you couldn’t con-
trol it. And you would cry out, “More hot water, number five.”’

Of the four boys, at this stage David thrived the most, hav-
ing transferred to the grammar school on Cowper Street, a couple of
hundred yards behind the shop, where he continued to excel academ-
ically. Far from dampening his spirits, their circumstances whetted
Bernard’s appetite to knuckle down at his studies. Unfortunately this
would not prove easy. Just as his parents had done, he was attending
the Jewish Free School on Bell Lane in Spitalfields.

Originally established in 1732 by the Great Synagogue with
a mandate to educate the children of the poor, by 1900 JFS had bal-
looned to over 4,000 pupils, making it Europe’s largest school. Num-
bers had dropped a little by the time Bernard arrived. Regrettably, so
had the standards.

‘It is a marvellous school today but it was diabolical in my day,’
he said. ‘Useless. My schooling actually astonishes me. I can never
remember having a history, geography lesson, no foreign language,
English grammar.’ And the lessons bored him stupid.

‘There was discipline but there was no ethos of learning.’

Underground in Old Street I 75

Discipline included being caned when he displeased the teacher –
‘Hand out, palm up, three strikes on each hand. It helped to hold your
hand against the cold tiles on the wall afterwards.’ Only one subject
was taught with rigour. ‘Every day there was a lesson in Hebrew, prac-
tising the prayers. There’s quite a lot of Jewish festivals apart from the
famous ones – there must be half a dozen – and you would rehearse
the particular prayers for that occasion in Hebrew and sing the songs
together as a class.’

Religion aside, in every other regard teachers’ aspirations
for pupils appeared close to nil. When the time came for Bernard to
sit the scholarship examination for grammar school, help was not
forthcoming. ‘It was no big thing, there was no training for it. If you
passed, you passed. I suspect that they preferred you to stay and keep
up the school numbers.’ But, keenly aware of the prize on offer, he be-
gan preparing for the examination intensively. ‘I remember working
away – in lunchtime, playtime, at my desk in the classroom, because
you could get hold of the previous year’s papers. So I was setting my-
self mock exams. I recollect no sort of motivation coming from my
parents – I suppose the drive came from me. I just wanted to do really
well.’ Alas, his body had other plans.

Then I had mumps. I remember being away from school, in
Singer Street on my own, and looking in a mirror and seeing
my cheeks pushed right out by the swelling.
Nowadays you would get a chance at anoth-
er exam sitting. But it was completely ignored. I knew
I’d missed my chance – the idea that you could take it
again didn’t occur to me. My parents at the time, their fi-
nancial circumstances were absolutely desperate, so of
course I can’t blame them for not agitating to the school. It
wasn’t that they would have had to pay for me to go to the
grammar school, but they were so desperately worried, I
don’t think they could think beyond their problems.
It was just fighting off bankruptcy on a day-to-day
basis, which would have meant losing the shop.

76 I Underground in Old Street

So Bernard was stuck at home, whistling the tune that was
on everybody’s lips in 1936: Bing Crosby’s smash hit, ‘Pennies from
Heaven’. He would have been one of many disappointed children. Sta-
tistically around a tenth of each year group should have made the
grade, but at JFS the ratio was far worse. ‘In my class, and there were
about thirty of us, only one boy, my friend Drucker, passed. I think I
would have passed but there’s no guarantee. It was one of the regrets
of my life.’

The closest he would get to grammar school was David’s
hand-me-downs. ‘I wore his green blazer with a crest on it to school.’
This was not a fashion statement but a household economy; there was
no official uniform at the Jewish Free School, or any other secondary
modern for that matter, smart garb being another privilege only for
those selected by the grammar schools. Bernard’s teachers were non-
plussed to see him in it. ‘I remember one saying to me, “What’s that?”
And I said, “It’s my brother’s from Harrow County School,” and he
said, “Oh, right”.’

JFS’s chief benefit was that finally it afforded him an oppor-
tunity to play sport, but even this he had to organise himself. ‘I had
a cricket bat and I would get there early and play before school. And
in the morning break, afternoon break, evening.’ Occasionally he also
crossed paths with his cousin Ivan, who was around David’s age. ‘We
weren’t in the same class, we weren’t friends, but we’d come across
each other. He was family.’

Ivan was the son of Lew’s sister Dora and her husband Barney,
who worked at Spitalfields market – doing what exactly, Bernard was
unsure. Although they lived fairly nearby, the families were not close.
‘We didn’t see a lot of them. I may have seen Dora two or three or four
times in my life but I never remember visiting. There wasn’t time for
it. My parents’ shop in Old Street was seven days a week. And mon-
ey for travel wasn’t there. People didn’t socialise as much as they do

Underground in Old Street I 77

today. I mean, the accommodation – where could you entertain?’
Dora and Barney had three boys, and their varied fates illus-

trate quite how differently life could turn out for a twentieth-century
man of business compared to one who opted for the predictable wage
of regular employment.

The oldest was Godfrey, who had a greengrocer’s shop on
Ludgate Hill. He was doing quite well and then he sold it for
£3,000 to the bank next door, who wanted to enlarge, and
that set him up for life. This would have been in the 1940s.
And then he got a job as an area manager for a chain of shops
selling crockery, I think there used to be one in the West End
on Oxford Street. Chinacraft? Then they had another son,
Solly, Solomon, who became a porter at Spitalfields, straight-
forward porter, and then there was Ivan, who called himself
Ivor Spencer and became a well-known toastmaster. He did a
lot of famous functions and became president or chairman of
the Guild of Toastmasters, and founded a training school for
butlers. A lot of his pupils went to the USA to work.

It is intriguing that despite the limited contact between Lew
and his siblings, they ended up giving their children the same names,
with the two Godfreys, and Uncle Monty’s boy Geoffrey. Perhaps they
were just fashionable names in the 1920s and 1930s or perhaps they
were heirlooms, paying homage to now forgotten Pokrasse forefa-
thers.

Come December Lew was making Herculean efforts to haul
himself off to the market as he laboured against bronchitis, but family
funds were now so low that there was nothing to buy extra Christmas
stock – a particular disaster, as ‘that was when you made the money’.

I remember – or rather he must have told my mother, oth-
erwise how would I know? – my father went to the pub,
spent one and thruppence on a whisky to give himself Dutch

78 I Underground in Old Street

courage to go to the bank and get the £30, £35 overdraft, so
he could go and buy the Christmas stock. I also remember
taking five shillings myself down to Shoreditch town hall, to
pay the rates. There must have been a court order or some-
thing, because if you were paying the rates off regularly, I
suppose every month or every week, you would have needed
to do that.

It was either around this time or a few years earlier in Harrow
that Lew received a court order known as a statement of composition,
with his creditors agreeing to accept a proportion of the debt that he
owed them – thereby staving off bankruptcy. ‘By the time he was in
Old Street he must have been casting his mind back, thinking, if only
I’d kept just £50 out of that money I had.’

Of all their deprivations, hardest for the boys to bear was
watching their father humiliated by circumstances. Recalling it still
upset Bernard, eighty years later. ‘One of the peculiar things, which
I’ve only become aware of very recently, is that when I talk or think
about those days, I get emotional. I’ve never been able to get over it.
Very recently, I dreamed I was back in the fruit shop in Old Street, and
as I woke up and knew where I was I gradually realised that the anx-
iety that I woke up with could be let go, everything was all right, and
I lay there contented for a few minutes, realising it was all done.’ But
in the late 1930s worse was to come. Not long after Bernard missed
his scholarship examination, the Lewises entirely ran out of money.
‘I presume the bailiffs were coming. Because one day we sent the fur-
niture off to my grandmother’s place. I think in Victorian times, they
called this “doing a moonlight flit”.’

Swallowing their last residue of pride, Lew, the man whom
everyone in the family had looked up to, and Clara, a married mother
of four, were back in Victoria Dock Road with the unsinkable Fanny
Tauber.

6

We were the poorest

In 1937 the docks were still thriving, but nobody would have guessed
it if they found themselves meandering along the cobbles of Victoria
Dock Road. ‘When I knew it the road was virtually dead,’ said Ber-
nard.
Ghosts of a bustling past lingered in the shop, in the Sing-
er treadle sewing machine and the long counter with its inset metal
measuring strip, although it had been decades since either had served
any customers under the careful hands of David Tauber. Now the
room was pressed into service as boudoir to Fanny, who gave up her
bedroom upstairs to Lew and Clara.
The house itself was more than lively, with Aunt Lily and Uncle
Jack, both in their early twenties, still at home: ten people crammed
under one diminutive roof. Yet if Fanny resented the constraints im-
posed by the new arrivals, she never let on. Always an exuberant char-
acter, she possessed many appealing qualities to make her an excellent
granny for young boys in need of cheering up. For a start, there was
her haphazard English. ‘Which meant lots of malapropisms, she was
very funny,’ Bernard remembered. ‘One that stays in mind was there
was a chain of shoe shops called Lilley and Skinner. She used to call
them the Skinny Lizzie.’ Like Clara, Fanny adored food and would be
waiting with a beaming smile and a simmering pot when her grand-
sons came back from school. ‘Sometimes she would give me canned
tomato soup with rice in it, and raw onions, cut up, a little oil and
vinegar, I think that was a Romanian thing,’ recalled Godfrey fondly.

80 I We were the poorest

But no amount of cheer or chicken soup could mask the fact that the
house was full to bursting. Bernard described their cosy ‘slum’:

Behind the shop was a sitting room – very small – and be-
hind that was a kitchen and then a wash area. In other words,
there was a sink. I don’t remember ever having a bath. It was
just two storeys. You went up a staircase, worn-down steps,
just bare wood, and a few stairs up on the half-landing there
was a room to the right – that was my aunt Lily’s bedroom.
Then left off that landing to a slightly higher level there was
another half-landing with another bedroom. This was shared
with my uncle Jack, his bed was on one side. We shared beds,
David and Godfrey, Geoffrey and me. The rooms were very
small.

Clara and Lew enjoyed a modicum of privacy in the third bed-
room at the front of the house, which was just large enough to accom-
modate their double bed. Downstairs the family were reunited with
some of their remaining furniture, a reminder of better days. ‘Dining
room table, sideboard and sofa, all I think came from William White-
leys, no doubt on hire purchase. So God knows what happened to the
furniture my grandparents had. If they had any.’
The family’s lavatory stood in the small back yard, an over-
grown scrabble of weeds with a solitary lilac tree whose appeal for a
child who might be interested in climbing it was radically curtailed by
the fact that it housed a nest of spiders. The boys would scuttle down
the path to relieve themselves in the privy, wiping themselves clean as
best they could with newspaper torn into squares and hung on a nail,
and then hurry back indoors as fast as they could, before the spiders
could catch them.
Inside the house, the only heating was a gas fire in the sitting
room. ‘Nothing else. There would be ice on the inside of the win-
dows in winter. My bedclothes – there was a blanket and then you

We were the poorest I 81

put newspaper on top of it and a coat on top of that, then your day
clothes on the foot, and you would put them on in the morning while
still under the covers because of the cold. I suppose it was about this
time that I developed chronic bronchitis. I remember I couldn’t stop
coughing, and attended the Royal Chest Hospital as an outpatient one
day a week for a year.’
Wretched as it might have been, Bernard claimed that their
living conditions never bothered him. ‘There would have been mil-
lions of others living in a similar fashion in pre-war Britain.’ Only one
thing really got to him: the bed bugs, worse even than the lice and
rats in the basement under their shop in Old Street. ‘Every summer
we were infested; I had a horror of them. I would wake up at night in
the dark and try to study the pillow to see if they were crawling over
it. For those who have not had the pleasure of their acquaintance,
they are about the same size as ladybirds, but flatter, and they feed on
human blood.’
There was, according to Geoffrey, also a dog in the house. But
whatever joy this animal brought was fleeting, because one day he
watched it run into the road, under the wheels of a lorry – an event
that, it must be said, Bernard could not recall.
Clara put on a brave front. ‘Mum was always smiling,’ said
Geoffrey, who remembered her cooking lovely dishes when she had
the chance to be in the kitchen – Romanian recipes he presumed,
including Godfrey’s great favourite, her tomato soup. ‘And there was
a gas fridge so she would put milk at the back where it was warm
to make cream cheese, to separate the curds.’ (Bernard thought this
would have been after the war, when they could finally afford a re-
frigerator.) Still, undoubtedly Clara was under tremendous strain, not
least because Lew was largely absent.
Godfrey reckoned that their father spent 365 days a year, sev-
en days a week at the shop – to avoid being at home with his in-laws as

82 I We were the poorest

much as to earn a crust. Bernard agreed. ‘I think he was embarrassed
because he’d lost all his money and moved in with his in-laws. The
shop was his one place. He would stay there and just come home and
go to bed.’ Lew’s misery left an indelible impression. ‘I could sense the
atmosphere. The financial situation dominated their lives absolutely.
I don’t think they grew embittered, it was more that they were so des-
perate.’
The children also saw rather less of Clara than in their Sing-
er Street days. ‘Our parents were gone by the time we got up – the
shop had to catch the early morning trade. My mother would leave
a shilling on the mantelpiece in my bedroom every morning for me
to cover the fare to school and food. My lunch was always a saveloy
sandwich from Barnett’s in Middlesex Street and I was also able to
buy a Mars bar for two pence for breakfast and the Daily Mirror for
one penny. I always read “Cassandra”, a lead columnist. I remember
a teacher saying, “You always have a newspaper.”’ A wise investment,
given the papers also served as bedding and toilet paper.
Thinking about current affairs offered Bernard an escape from
the confines of his existence, as perhaps it did for Lew. But oppressive
as it could be, in other respects living in Victoria Dock Road widened
the boys’ world, bringing them into contact with new people as well as
new ways to make a living. Such as Aunt Lily, who was a salesperson
at the Houndsditch Warehouse Company, a large store around the
corner from Petticoat Lane on Middlesex Street, popularly dubbed
‘the Selfridge’s of the Jewish quarter’. ‘It was a big emporium and the
way they worked, the idea was you had to be a member. They sold
virtually everything I think. You could be a small shopkeeper and you
could go and buy there. Like a cash-and-carry, semi-wholesale. But
you didn’t need to be a retailer to become a member – just had to
register.’
Uncle Jack worked as a bookkeeper for a butcher on Old Mon-

We were the poorest I 83

tague Street in the East End, and Fanny herself was still fizzing away,
running her stall on Rathbone Street market, flogging Boleyn brand
workman’s denim dungarees, socks and other oddments. ‘She rented
a shop nearby where she would load the stuff in,’ Bernard explained,
‘and she packed the stall out every day, dressed it out. The shop itself
didn’t trade because it was really off-pitch – a storeroom essentially.’
When Geoffrey described the business as a menswear shop, Bernard
scoffed at the grandeur that this implied. ‘I never saw a customer in
there.’
The brothers also got to know their other Tauber aunts and
uncles a little better. Aunt Betty had married a clothing contractor
called Maurice, Uncle Morry to the boys, who was what is called an
outdoor maker. ‘He had a little workshop and he’d collect cloth from
manufacturers then make it up into garments and give it back to
them. He and Betty also had a shop, a gown shop it was called, near
Rathbone Street market. They sold clothes, dresses and coats, which
then were called “mantles” – gowns and mantles.’ But despite being
nearby, the families were not close. ‘We saw very little of them. Funny,
isn’t it?’ In fact Bernard never learned precisely where Betty and Mor-
ry lived.
The Lewises had more to do with their Uncle Isaac, Ike, who
managed a large clothing factory that specialised in suits. ‘I suppose
there were fifty, sixty people working there. It was just the other side
of the street from our shop in Old Street – three minutes’ walk away.
He had a wife called Anne, daughter Linda and son David, and they
lived in Green Lanes. But there was no question of playing with them.
I used to see Anne occasionally and Isaac occasionally. But I never
visited their home.’
Then there was Uncle Lou, who also worked in the rag trade
as a machinist, and would in time move to Poplar not far from Fan-
ny, with his wife Hettie, an assistant in a shoe shop. Later on Lou

84 I We were the poorest

went into partnership with Ike running a CMT – cut, make and
trim – workshop, manufacturing garments such as jackets, skirts and
trousers, and anything else that could be fashioned from cloth.
If living with Fanny brought the boys up close and person-
al with the clothing business, this was only natural, said Bernard.
‘Clothing employed a lot of the Jewish people. There was not much
else.’ Still, it would be misleading to overstate the knowledge he and
his brothers might have absorbed about the trade, beyond a flavour of
the business mentality.
Neither did the neighbourhood supply much in the way of
new friendships. A distinctly different social tone prevailed from that
they were used to. ‘The people next door, we never knew them, never
spoke to them. There seemed to be a large family with a lot of parties
at night, people coming and going. The only thing I remember is that
the children didn’t wear shoes.’
Bernard helped at his parents’ fruit shop whenever he could,
which turned out to be rather more often than his brothers. Geof-
frey and Godfrey, still so young, stayed behind in Canning Town, and
David now attended another grammar school in Plaistow, Barking,
the opposite direction from Shoreditch. ‘But my school was relatively
close by. So instead of going home to Canning Town I’d head for Old
Street. Quite often my evening meal would be the fruit that used to be
specked – you know, when part of an apple is bad, it’s an in-word in
the trade. You cut the bad bit away and you eat the good. It wasn’t that
I was short of food, I had as much as I wanted. I just liked fruit – still
do. Then I would come back home with my parents to Canning Town.
You could do it non-stop on the same bus, but if you got off in Poplar
and changed to another bus you could save a ha’penny.’
Helping at the shop sharpened his sense of his father’s unhap-
piness.