Page 5 - My Story

I remember going to the Finsbury Park Astoria, a whole group of us, my mother and aunty Fanny,
cousin Jean and Jackie and aunty Anne, my mother’s youngest sister to see Walt Disney’s Snow White,
probably in 1938. I was terrified of the wicked queen and cried and had to be taken out of the cinema.
Later, when we went to see The Wizard of Oz, I was much braver and got through it by squeezing my eyes
tight shut when the wicked witch appeared.

My mother’s sisters and brothers and their families used to take their summer vacations together.
They would rent houses in a seaside resort and we would repair there for some weeks every summer,
taking the nursemaids with us. I think the fathers stayed in London to work and joined us at weekends.
In my memory summers were always sunny and hot and I have few recollections except of being on the
beach with my cousins, Jean and Harold Kreitman, Michael who was six months my junior and David who
was born in February 1939. We were still in Dorset when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939.
Or maybe we went down there again after returning to London because I remember the first air raid and
rushing to get into my aunt’s cellar after the air raid warning was heard and that must have been in
London. I was panicking and crying and pushing to get downstairs into the cellar. Somehow, we were in
Dorset again and Jackie and I were attending a convent school where the nuns were very strict and
favoured using a cane. Despite Jackie being two years older than me we were put in the same class as
she was tiny, and we were the same height! I think we were not there too long as London was quiet and,
soon after an exciting Christmas when two of the Kreitman uncles played the ugly sisters from Cinderella
to our great entertainment, we went back.

London was quiet, and life resumed at Ridley road. Jackie and I went to school at Shackelton Lane which
apparently made no impression on me at all!

My next memory was of a fire at night. My parents had been out, and Jackie had woken up
coughing and crying because of smoke inhalation. She alerted Julie and my parents, who had just arrived
home and I was aware of a fireman carrying me down a ladder. Then we were in a taxi on our way to my
aunt in St. Kilda’s Road in Stoke Newington. My mother had refused to let the firemen carry her down
the ladder and had fallen off near the bottom and sprained her ankle – that was my mother. “Leave me
alone, I can do it!” There’s a lot of that in me and very little in Jackie! Did we not have telephones in
those days? There we were throwing stones at the windows to alert the family. Certainly Auntie Fanny
had a phone – I remember the number to this day – Stamford Hill 4408. Our grandmother, my father’s
mother lived in Clapton and I remember her phone number, too.

Granny was a constant in my childhood. Probably in her early sixties when I was born, she looked
old and wrinkled and she stayed that way. She had fled pogroms in Lithuania to come to England with
her sisters and a brother in her late teens. She had met my Grandfather in London in the late 1890s. He
was a tailor. They married and raised nine children, living in Fulham, west London. She spoke and
understood English but always had a strong accent and was illiterate. She loved listening to the radio. My
grandfather died in his fifties, before I was born.

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