Roots - Lionel

23 Carlisle Mansions,

Cheney Walk, 

London, SW3. 

telephone 352 3645

6 March 1984

Dear Ruth

Lovely to hear from you, though of course we have news all the time – try stopping your granny.

You ask about childhood, school and after.

I was the youngest, ninth, child of our family. The rest appeared pretty regularly every couple of years, but there was a gap of seven years between me and number eight, which looks suspiciously as if I were an accident.

I was born in Hull in 1922, bar mitzvah in London in 1935 (the year of the Nuremberg laws against the Jews) and was seventeen when war broke out in 1939. The threat of war, particularly as it concerned Jews, dominated all of my childhood. From my 12th or 13th year the newspapers were full of it, day after day; refugees from Germany were constantly turning up; the discussions at school and everywhere else, in an atmosphere that was very political and full of dread.

I started work at fourteen, first as an office boy in a dull city office, then ditto with a magazine ‘The Spectator’, where my first story was published. As a result of this I got a job as a journalist in Fleet Street. And when war did break out I began work at the big international press agency called Keystone. My job there was as a caption writer but people were being called up to the army so fast that I got rapid promotion, and by the time I was 18 or 19, I was news editor, the youngest in Fleet Street. But I’d already volunteered for the Navy, and was in the submarine service when I was 19. (Where I was known as the Wandering Jew: it was an unusual service for Jews, and there were only two others, one of whom got the VC, and the other became a poet).

Of the six sons of our family, four fought, all I believe volunteers. Of the other two Joe was too old and Moisha a cripple. Lammie (who got his name because as a baby he was a ‘little lamb’ – his real name was Shlomo) was in the Navy laying mines in enemy waters, where he got torpedoed and badly blown up; Cyril was on a mine sweeper, similarly dangerous; Geoff was in the air force in Africa, and I was submerged in the Pacific and China Seas.

My childhood itself, although not really lonely, made me something of a loner. Because of the age gap I was not a member of the various Jewish and Zionist groups that the others joined. But because of the age gap, in such a big family, I was greatly indulged, could read by four and was already making up little stories and writing when I started school at five. Up to this time my mother spoke to me only in Yiddish. And because she was newly widowed and sad, and not so used to babies anymore (she was 45 when I was born) she spoke to me a lot; stories of her shtetl. So that I came out of my childhood with the pattern of my life established: the habit of being a loner, a desire to write, and the knowledge that I was connected with the strange world of shtetl Jewry.

Which finishes off this sheet of paper, and I hope it's enough. 

Much love and xxx

Lionel