Page 3 - My Story

MY ARRIVAL and the FIRST TEN YEARS

My childhood was dominated by World War II. The war lasted for six years in Europe, from 1939
to 1945 and certainly most of what I remember of my early childhood happened during the war and
because of the war.

I was born in London at the Hackney Downs Nursing Home in 1934. I was second generation
British. If you check my DNA, I am pure East European Ashkenazi, through and through. I suppose “Fiddler
on the Roof” shows us how my forefathers lived but there is no record of how my grandparents came to
England. My mother’s parents died in their fifties but I had so many opportunities of asking Granny, my
father’s mother, what the pogroms were like, how it was to flee Lithuania, how she withstood the
overcrowded ship, who helped her when she arrived in London, was London the first port of call or did
she have to make her way from Liverpool – if only I’d had the curiosity.

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My Parents’ Wedding 8 June 1930

My earliest memories are of living in Ridley Road in Dalston, which is just north of east London,
where my parents had a wool and yarn shop and covered buttons and buckles. The younger siblings of
my parents worked in the shop and I can remember my mother was always knitting samples for the shop
window and everyone else hooked rugs. We had a hooked rug in our nursery of some comic book
characters whom we loved, Mrs. Bruin and the Bruin children – bears, of course and the rug is still around
in Jackie’s house. There was always chat and laughter down in the shop. I say down because we lived
above the shop and were taken care of by Julie who in those days, we called our maid.

Next door to our shop was Bonds where they sold curtaining and drapery. The Bonds were my
Auntie Barbara’s family. She had married my mother’s older brother and was the mother of Michael and
later, David. The Bonds were noisy and funny and gregarious whereas my mother and certainly my
father’s sisters were prim and more “ladylike”. In 1937 my father’s younger brother, Ivan, married Jules
Nathan. She was one of twins and the girls were very attractive with dark curly hair. My mother bought
a new evening dress for the occasion, it was dark green moiré, off the shoulder and straight down to the
knee where it flared out in a kind of Spanish style. I loved that dress and thought my mother looked very

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