Conversations with a Small Boy

1

Land of Hope and Glory

During the first 10 years of my life I knew of nothing other than the war that then raged across Europe, the Middle East, Far East and the Pacific. The events of those years, as difficult and as brutal as they proved to be, seem destined to be repeated in some form or other – well beyond those times.

We humans possess very short memories!

On the subject of war

While it is not my intention to dwell more than is necessary on the subject of war, the fact is that most of the events described in the following pages, occurred during a period dominated by the lead up to, during and some of the post-war years between 1935 and 1950.

That being the case you will appreciate that when providing background to lives and living during that period, the events that surrounded my family and the rest of Britain, exerted an overwhelming influence. A cloud that loomed constantly over the lives of every living soul.

It would be useful, therefore, to include some reference to the various conflicts around that period, as they form a major part of this story.

During the years following the close of the Second World War in August 1945, almost without let-up, the world has continued to experience the regular emergence of even more wars, large and small, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. The world has also become much smaller. It has also become a more dangerous place. As such, mankind since has appeared at times to teeter on the brink of yet another lemminglike worldwide conflagration.

Development and use of nuclear and biological weapons and the means of delivering them to any part of a shrinking world, makes the prospect of yet another major conflict taking hold too terrible to contemplate.

Some of the more localised wars and insurrections that continued to fester following 1945, started out in the form of a struggle for liberation on the part of what earlier had been colonies. A few other insurrections took place with the rising of previously downtrodden or disadvantaged citizens. Most of the major clashes had occurred in countries which for centuries had been owned, controlled and exploited by previously dominant European powers.

For over three decades following the end of the 1939–1945 war, the world even found time to indulge itself in yet another clash between two large, powerful blocs. This time the undeclared conflict was less about the clash of arms. This time conflict took the form of an extensive and dangerous confrontation that became known as the ‘Cold War’.

A new kind of war

Instead of a direct, hot and bloody fight between two opposing armies in the field on the seas and in the air, this conflict came about as a result of an undeclared yet at times equally bitter, ideological and often covert military confrontation. It had the potential at any time though to explode into yet another worldwide conflict.

Instead of being fought against Fascism and Nazism this time a new kind of war was being waged between the so-called communist bloc of countries, dominated by the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and the Western Allies, comprising the United States, France, Britain and its member commonwealth countries, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

As a result of the USSR’s move to enclose those eastern and north western European countries that had come under its influence following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, behind what became known as the ‘Iron Curtain’ – a dangerous, long running standoff ensued. As a result, countless millions of Poles, Czechs, East Germans and many other eastern European and central Asian populations became entrapped under the brutal control of yet another powerful and despotic ruler.

This time, instead of the recently dead, unlamented German dictator, Adolf Hitler, the new name that came to be feared by millions of Europeans, Russians and many others, was Joseph Stalin, the then undisputed ruler of the USSR.

Other wars followed, one in Korea, 1950–1953, in which the Western allies stood against the threat of communism, this time in the form of North Korea and its ally and principal supporter, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This conflict was closely followed by yet another bloody fight between the then partitioned northern and southern provinces of Vietnam, previously known as French Indo-China.

Around the same period, the native population of what until then had been known as the Dutch East Indies, had managed to throw off the yoke of their long-time colonial masters, the Dutch. Their leaders then set about the establishment of what later became known as the Indonesian Republic.

Similar struggles on the African continent and South East Asia resulted in newly created countries being born, each eventually operating under their own systems of government. Some were successful while others continue to this day to experience internal dissent and ongoing conflict.

In the case of North Vietnam, its war against the southern half of that divided country, one that continued to be waged ultimately against the US, originally started out as a struggle for independence. That struggle started out as one between the Vietnamese and their French occupiers. The Vietnamese were seeking to rid themselves of their earlier colonial masters.

The ultimate defeat of the French was achieved on 7th May 1954, at the until then relatively unknown Vietnamese city of Dien Bien Phu. This was closely followed, between 1954 and 1975, by a continuing bitter struggle between the then partitioned communist North Vietnam and its army of Viet Cong fighters and a purportedly Democratic South Vietnam.

The South Vietnamese government at the time was being supported by a narrow coalition of forces led by the US. This was a coalition of which Australia became an active fellow combatant. The North Vietnamese were supported and supplied with the means to wage their war by the PRC and USSR.

What became known as the Vietnam War, started out essentially as a fight for freedom from many years under the control of an oppressive colonial power in the form of France.

The US became implicated from the start, in part as a consequence of its declaration prior to the end of the Second World War when it promised the Vietnamese and other African and South East Asian countries that earlier European colonial powers would be encouraged to relinquish their former colonies. That was a promise that failed to eventuate, once that conflict ended in August 1945.

The war that escalated between North Vietnam, the US and its ill-advised allies, including Australia, following the former’s defeat of the French, was wrongly categorised as a fight against the threat of worldwide communist domination.

The protracted bloody battle with North Vietnam that resulted was depicted by the then US administration as one designed to protect the rest of South East Asia, Australia and other Southeast Asian countries from what the US government referred to as the ‘domino effect’.

If South Vietnam (and South Korea) fell to the communists, so the theory went, then like a line of vertically placed dominos that could be made to fall over, one following the other, simply by just tipping over the first one in a line, the rest of South East Asia and many countries beyond, including Western Europe and Australia, could eventually fall to communist domination.

The Vietnamese north eventually won their struggle for independence, following the defeat of a corrupt South Vietnamese leadership and the US, bleeding from its troop losses as a result of a ferocious struggle that eventually resulted in a near public revolt against the then US president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who later resigned.

The oft-postulated domino effect failed to eventuate. Instead, a reunited Vietnam turned its attention inward, toward healing its internal wounds, re‑uniting and progressing under its own national leadership.

While modern Vietnam continues to be regarded as ‘communist’ in its structure and government, it has managed to run its own internal affairs with little evidence emerging of that country being a threat, either to its own population, its neighbours, or the rest of the world.

Clashing cultures

Recent years have witnessed two wars in Iraq, another in Afghanistan and yet another, as yet undeclared but still a potential threat to world peace, in the form of a regularly internally rupturing peace between Pakistan and India.

An unprovoked attack on Iraq by the US and a so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’ on 20th March 2003, was followed by the opening of a virtual Pandora’s box of insurgencies that later extended into Syria, Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries. From this series of skirmishes eventually emerged a relatively recent and dangerous militant Islamic group known as Isis. ¹

Continuing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and increasingly in Afghanistan, Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries has developed into what, at the time of writing, promises to be a continuing, often escalating period of violence, the very nature of which threatens to add yet another chapter to past historical internal clashes within the Islamic Middle East. Each of these have added a further dimension to aggression and attacks against the predominantly Christian west and competing Islamic sects.

This clash of cultures has taken the form of a struggle against the leading western powers by an aggressively fundamentalist led form of Islam (Isis), whose more militant followers have come to regard the US led west as a domineering and, to them at least, an evil and ‘godless’ empire. The mainly Christian west, along with an aggressively defended Jewish Israel, are regarded as ‘infidels’ – and thus in the eyes of Isis and other militant Islamic groups, needing to be destroyed by any means possible.

As a boy growing up in Leeds during the 1940s and 1950s, clashes between the Moslem world and the Christian west was in those days confined to the pages of our history books. Those clashes had resulted from a number of assaults on the then rulers of what was known by the west as ‘The Holy Land’. They were being waged mainly by the European kings of mediaeval Europe and their armour-clad armies. The European kings who became involved, their knights and armies, had set out with the intent of overcoming the Muslim leaders and population in the Holy Land. Those lands mainly included here are today’s modern Israel and what have now developed into earlier Palestinian and adjacent Arab territories.

The modern-day version of this clash of cultures had its much later and relatively recent effect on the city of Leeds – in more ways than one.

Seen from the perspective of the so‑called ‘Islamists’, their fight has always been stated to be against what they see as the west’s (mainly US) support for an overly aggressive Israel and the US’s attempts to dominate and control the Middle East, its people – not forgetting the west’s seemingly insatiable appetite for oil.

The US and its allies, for their part, sees the need to defend themselves against what has come to be regarded as a radical Islamist inspired insurgency, a religion-based cult supporting a continuing and deadly programme of terrorism. This form of warlike actions earlier resulted in the destruction of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, two of the world’s most prominent and recognisable buildings, on 11th September 2001. That attack took the form of an airborne hijack, followed by a deadly attack on both towers by a Saudi Arabian based terrorist group.

The attackers were successful in commandeering four US civil aircraft, their crews and passengers, subsequently crashing three of them with devastating effect, into the Twin Towers and Washington’s Pentagon building. The 4th airliner crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. There were no survivors from the four aircraft, and many more died during the resulting collapse of the Twin Towers and a severely damaged Pentagon building.

The attack resulted in death and injuries to thousands of innocent people from many nationalities and religious backgrounds.

This and the current worldwide scenario of militant terrorism was brought back to me with even greater shock when the city of my boyhood and youth also became directly involved as a result of the bombing of the London underground transport system and a London bus on 7th July 2005. This attack, while admittedly on a lesser scale when compared to that in New York, resulted in the deaths of and serious injuries to many innocent and unaware travellers.

This almost unbelievable and apparently unforeseen act of terrorism was carried out by a small group of local Leeds born and locally educated young men, each professing to be defenders of Islam. They claimed to be at war with what they saw as the oppression and maltreatment of fellow Muslims in the Middle East and Asia.

The group responsible for this outrage it was eventually found, were born, educated and had grown up in and around the Dewsbury district of South Leeds.

It is difficult for me to understand and accept that even provincial Leeds has now also become known as the city from where a group of locally born young men set out with mayhem in mind – their intention being to bomb and kill innocent fellow British citizens.

Sunni versus Shiite

The international situation is made even more complex. Iran, Syria and other Middle Eastern Islamic dominated countries constantly threaten to attack the existence of what they regard as an ‘enemy’ in their immediate vicinity. There have also been threats to eradicate the predominantly Jewish Israel, and ‘wipe it off the map’. Relationships continue to be tense and complicated. Their desire to throw the Israelis into the Mediterranean Sea on the parts of some Middle Eastern countries, has become even more complex. Regular bloody clashes are occurring constantly between followers of the two factions of Islamic faith – the Sunni and Shiite sects. Each are determined to cling to their particular claim to being the only true followers of the of Islam’s Allah (god) and Muhammad, Allah’s representative on earth.

Religion inspired fanaticism at the extreme ends of all three of the main monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, continues to threaten the lives and peace of millions of people. The actions of some of the more extreme elements of each, during recent history, has resulted in the continuation of violent insurgencies, terrorism and sometimes hot and open warfare. Each time this has been followed closely by continued and upgraded resentment and unrest, bloodshed, displacement and death to innocents.

As I write this, the situation across the Middle East continues to represent seemingly unsolvable political issues.

Across the ancient biblical lands of the bible, Israel itself has become the party regarded by an increasing number of countries and world organisations, as a contributing aggressor. This as a result of its treatment of what remains of the earlier Palestinian population, many thousands of whom are still clinging to life and what’s left of their earlier lands and possessions in the West Bank and Gaza.

The recent decision of the US to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the Israeli government’s decision to establish Ivrit (Modern Hebrew) as the country’s ‘official’ language, has added yet another element to a growing climate of unrest.

Israel continues to push Palestinian residents of villages, long established and dotted across the West Bank, away from their long-established homes and farms and into less than comfortable enclaves. This has then allowed Israeli settlers and developers to occupy Palestinian lands, olive groves and villages, thus enabling the expansion of existing and building new Israeli settlements on previously long-held Palestinian lands.

From time to time elements of the Palestinian population, a growing number of which have become cut off from their ancestral lands are reacting violently. Some attempt to attack and injure Israeli citizens, police and army personnel, attacks being put down with equal violence on the part of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and police. As time progresses, so does the level of resentment and reactions to Israeli actions, causing regular clashes.

Where the foregoing Middle Eastern situation and other clashes in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq is going to take the rest of the inhabitants of planet earth, is yet to be seen. One can only hope that those vested with the power of decision and reason across the world can eventually find their way through what has become an ever-deepening quagmire.

It is also considered fair to comment here that the leaders of the various major religious faiths have a great deal to answer for.

The march of technology

There can also be a positive side to conflict, perhaps the only one? The ongoing development and introduction of new technologies offers the promise and potential to assist, heal and save the health and improve the living of mankind. The discovery of penicillin and later forms of antibiotics are but a few of many, wonderful technological developments that have resulted. Unfortunately, quicker ways of destroying property and people too often takes precedence.

Gas filled balloons, dirigible airships and propellers have given way to jet engines and rockets, the latter offering the tantalising promise of orbital and interplanetary travel. Television at one stage got close to replacing radio. Computers have extended our capacity to calculate, design and communicate globally with ever increasing accuracy and mind-blowing speed.

Consider the cellular phone. It has played a major role in revolutionising communications well beyond even the wildest dreams of the Dick Tracy era comics that my parents, and later I, used to read in awe as children, earlier in the 20th century.

The cellular/mobile phone today even seems to have become a semi-permanent appendage to most people. Everywhere one travels, whether by train bus or on foot, cellular phones of all kinds can always be seen to hover constantly between the hand and ear of countless millions of people across the world – from the very young to the nearly old. This and many other electronic devices, unheard of until a relatively short time ago and but a daydream to the boy in my photograph’s life, have become an indispensable part of daily life and commerce in 2018.

The speed with which new technical developments are appearing, literally day by day, directly contrasts with the situation during the early years of my parent’s lifetimes.

Born in 1908 until her passing in May 2010, my mam saw the earliest emergence of motor cars onto our roads, the earliest flights of airplanes, and later the development and use of ballistic rockets. She experienced the beginnings of radio, electric power and lighting, the telephone, talking pictures (movies), television, transistors, orbiting satellites, mobile (cellular) phones. Many more technical wonders rapidly became a part of her world – the list is endless.

These days, comfortable though I am with the use of my iPhone, iPad, Mac Computer system and the internet, I am also beginning to find some of the latest technological developments and systems offering instant communication and news, sometimes difficult to follow – in a number of cases also superfluous to my life’s needs. Maybe that tells me that although I am still able and at ease when communicating and conducting my daily business needs, correspondence and commerce by computer and the internet, my days of being able to keep up with the rush of new and even more complex communication systems are becoming less and less.

Unfortunately, so also is the span of my time on this blessed planet due to come to its inevitable close in the not too distant future.

Recollections

You will perhaps be familiar with some of the recollections of major players who took centre stage in world affairs before, during and following the Second World War. Bookshops everywhere still continue to carry racks of books, CDs, DVDs and videos covering various aspects of that war. A whole host of films and documentaries continue to be made, remade and re-hashed, dissecting and examining the war and describing that disastrous human experience from every angle possible.

In contrast, the collection of memoirs that follow contain the recollections of just one Yorkshire lad who first saw the light of day as the eldest son of working-class parents living in a northern English city.

Growing up in the midst of the Second World War, the boy in my photograph was lucky in that that he escaped experiencing the same level of tragedy and injury suffered by countless thousands of other young children around that time.

Apart from the regular German Luftwaffe bombing raids on Leeds earlier in the war, the war years thankfully had much less influence on his growing years. The six long years of that war, however, certainly effected millions of other, less fortunate boys and girls of a similar age in other parts of Britain, across continental Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific.

Innocent citizens in many countries, regions and islands, Jews, Gypsies, intellectuals, Russians, Asians, Europeans and Islanders, in addition to thousands of Britons, all became caught up in the six-year-long maelstrom during which millions died at the hands of a brutal Nazi Germany, an equally brutal Japan and a strutting but no less brutal Fascist Italy.

While many who remained in Britain throughout the war also suffered terribly, others like me luckily emerged and went on to grow up with little or no visible damage to our lives and property.

In fact, it can safely be said that most of my childhood memories of the 1940s were happy ones. I was a young boy after all, so what else was there for me to be but a young inquisitive and energetic kid out to discover the bounds of my new world? While the war years raged on in the background I, like so many young children today, continued to find ways and means to play and discover the world around me. All and more in spite of the daily need to hide from the bombs then raining down across my city and the rest of the country’s major population and industrial centres.

My family emerged in 1945, safe but with little to show in the form of possessions, and next to nothing in terms of financial resources. My parents though, managed to live life and soldier on like millions of other fellow Britons.

Apart from the odd air raid with a few near misses uncomfortably close to our house in suburban Harehills Terrace – a street since knocked down and transformed into a small park, dotted here and there by a few straggly bushes, I came through the war years unscathed, but curious as to what lay beyond my home in the north of England.

A working-class lad

The strata of British society from which I eventually emerged, had always been the source of factory workers and foot soldiers who, with monotonous regularity throughout British history, were the ones always called upon and required to fight and possibly to suffer wounds or die during Britain’s wars. Whenever the need to go to war came around, it was the working-class masses, in the main, who were the sweat and bloodstained stokers feeding the furnaces powering the grandeur of Britain’s trading and military might since before the dawn of the Victorian era.

Land of hope and glory it may have been, in the words both I and my fellow students learned to sing with pride at school, to the accompaniment of Edward Elgar’s grand orchestral work, ‘Pomp and Circumstances.’ That particular piece of music always invoked within us feelings of national pride, particularly when added to the red-coloured British Empire of our school maps, possessions that girdled the world. Imperial Britain’s empire and dominions then included possessions and peoples upon which the sun never set.

While the orchestra played on, however, my parents’ lives may have been filled with hope, but they did not taste much in the way of glory. Nor did they experience more than just a minute sniff from afar of the enormous wealth thus created.

We lived in an old worn-out suburb and a poky rented house built over a century earlier. Over the years our house, like thousands of its neighbours spread throughout thousands of other working-class suburbs across Britain, had become old and inefficient. Our houses had become so coated and ingrained with soot and smog borne pollution, that the colour of what originally had been red or ochre coloured bricks, had, over many years become transformed into murky grey.

Working in factories which for the most part had improved little from standards of the 19th century, life prospects of most of the folk of my parents’ generation revolved around a questionably secure, low paid job for the length of their productive lives. They continued to work in the hope of being able to save a little money, thus enabling them to supplement a meagre pension when they could work no longer – if they were lucky.

Like millions before them, my parents expected little from life and as such they were rarely surprised. Along with other working-class folk in the industrial north, they saw nothing of the vast wealth and power amassed by the upper-strata of British society, the result of centuries of winning, colonising and exploitation of nearly three quarters of the worlds’ surface. It was their privilege though, and that of millions like them, to continue to exist with few benefits and hopes for improving themselves, as they awaited the almost inevitable call to defend crown, country and empire, whenever the powers that be dictated.

As throughout the history of earlier wars, when the Second World War ended, my dad and many thousands of other ex‑servicemen and women like him, clad in their government issue of ‘utility’ ² quality blue, grey and brown ‘demob’ ³ suits, returned to their dreary cities and streets-upon-streets of small, pokey homes. They drifted back into the same old factories and working conditions similar to those they had left before their call came to go to war.

When all was done with the war, Britain found itself a country much reduced in power, particularly following the loss in 1947 of the British Empire’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, India. This was closely followed by other former colonies that gradually, many following much bloodshed, managed to prize themselves away from centuries of Britain’s imperial rule. Britain had commenced along its inevitable decline as a world-leading power.

The post‐war years

Growing up into the boy in my photograph’s teenage years during the late 1940s and early 1950s, Britain’s position in the world and its position as a world leader had changed. Following two debilitating and bloody wars in the space of 25 years the country’s capacity to maintain its earlier power had all but gone. The country had been virtually stripped of much of its former glory and was worn down, internally uncertain of its position and future.

Britain emerged victorious but nearly bankrupt from the Second World War, following decades witnessed significant political and social changes across British society.

Across Britain there was a gradual rise in prosperity and living standards, as well as radical initiatives in health and welfare provisions and education. In a changing world Britain also faced the manifold dilemmas occasioned by the ‘end of empire’ as it struggled to redefine a new place for itself on an international scene dominated by the now emerged superpowers the USSR and United States.

Already, during the war, important innovations, such as the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the Education Act of 1944, had signalled the desire for reform and change across many sections of the British public. This later resulted in the landslide Labour Party victory in July 1945, replacing the wartime government that had been led by Winston Churchill.

The new Labour government then instituted a radical programme of nationalisation in transport and heavy industry as well as the establishment of a free National Health Service. Britain’s desperate economic situation, however, forced the government to continue with rationing and controls throughout the late-1940s. This is turn provoked increasing opposition in the country as people chafed under the restrictions and shortages.

Perhaps nearly as important, internally memories of the glories of its imperial past, served to continue hopes among the British ruling class that the country could continue to retain its tight hold and some of the more rigid attitudes of the 19th and earlier 20th century. All this rendered the then wartime government led by Winston Churchill less able to manage needed changes to social and economic policy.

Even though a 10-year-old youth at the war’s ending, I was even then beginning to learn more about some of the more exciting and energetic new destinations like Canada and Australia. As I approached my later teenage years, both countries began to loom as places that I would have gladly exchanged for the rain and smog, as my growing awareness of a Britain that had become a lesser player in the power structure of a rapidly changing post‑war world grew stronger. The former ‘Great’ Britain was no longer great – no longer a world leader.

During my last year in school in 1950, it is significant that while a teenager, I penned an essay in which I questioned which, between Britain and Germany, had benefited most following the end of the 1939–1945 war.

On the one hand, it had always seemed to me that finding itself on the winning side of the war, Britain had been left with a near empty treasury. The country still possessed its outdated social and industrial infrastructure, factories, railways, housing and an outdated, hopelessly imperial view of its place in the new, post-war world.

Western Germany and Japan on the other hand, with most of their infrastructure bombed to ground level, populations traumatised, disempowered and beaten following six years of war, had benefited immensely under the US’s Marshall’ ⁴ plan. This was a long‑sighted programme that served to pour financial resources and assistance into both countries. The resultant post-war restructuring provided by the US, equipped both Germany and Japan with new factories and housing, assisting also to rebuild their shattered cities and modernise both country’s transport infrastructure. It didn’t take many years for this longsighted development programme to be followed eventually by booming economies in both countries.

In contrast, the leaders of post‑war Britain continued to labour on under the delusion that the country would continue to retain its earlier status as a leading power, even as its former colonies were being wrenched away from its reluctant grasp. In reality, Britain, England, or as the country is now usually referred to as the ‘United Kingdom’, was destined to become a world power of the past and a much lesser player among today’s world leadership.

The Britain of today has become at best, an acolyte to the US, and during recent times has also demonstrated the desire to become an ‘outsider’ when it comes to the European Union. The US, while continuing to be a global giant, is also showing signs of beginning to labour under a growing challenge to its world leadership and economic dominance by an increasingly powerful, confident and economically aggressive China. India too, alongside Indonesia is watching quietly from the wings.

China and, to a much lesser extent a reduced Russian Federation, is now challenging the US’s self-appointed mantle as the world’s policeman, super power, economic powerhouse and provider of moral leadership.

Unfolding world events, particularly in the Middle East has seen the resurgence of an aggressive Russian Federation under its president, Vladimir Putin, now also challenging US power in Syria and along its borders with eastern and western Europe.

In terms of how Britain was being regarded, even as early as 2010, it is interesting to offer here a quote from one writer on the subject: Randeep Ramesh, the South East Asian correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. Ramesh described what he saw as the growing differences between Britain and its earlier colony India, writing:

Coming back to London has meant returning to a country that lives in the shadow of its former colony. Unlike Indians, the British are not on the cusp of a stirring transformation. Over spent and overstretched, they perch instead on the crest of a falling wave.

God save the King

It is worth noting that even as a youth, I had the temerity to question the continuing acceptance of God save our gracious King/Queen as Britain’s national anthem.

In an essay during my last year at school, I expressed the view that the current national anthem said nothing about the aspirations of a confident and developing modern nation. As it currently existed, Britain’s national anthem said more about a nation that continues to be supplicant to an inherited dynastic monarchy. Even at the tender age of fourteen, I saw the British monarchy as presiding over an indifferent and supine population.

The last lines of Britain’s national anthem had always grated on my senses whenever they were sung, averring always to be happy to be reigned over by a ‘gracious’ monarch.

It always seemed to me that the words Land of hope and glory, mother of the free, written to the music of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstances orchestral music, should have been adopted as a more appropriate national anthem. The words of that composition at least express the hopes and aspirations of a nation, instead of expressions of veneration to one individual, the head of a privileged family and an increasingly questionable hierarchy who continue to regard themselves as being ‘born to rule’.

The immigrant

In 1959, newly married and at the tender age of 23, following a return to civilian life following two years as a national serviceman in the Royal Air Force, I, along with my new wife, Mavis Brown, became one of the many young and not so young Britons and their families deciding to leave Britain.

Sick of an austerity ridden inward-looking and stratified society that the country had become, together with the lack of opportunities for advancement in the north of England in the late 1950s, many decided to leave the land of their birth and set sail for Australia and a new life.

After growing up in a relatively stagnant society, being constantly reminded of the great achievements of Britain’s glorious past, and the belief that its citizens were part of the richest, most benevolent society in the world, most of those deciding to leave Britain had arrived at the conclusion that the real truth lay far from the government’s rhetoric.

No, I didn’t grow up with bitterness. Nor did I ever feel the need to look back at Britain and my life there in anger. I was instead thankful for the love and security that my parents, possessing limited resources had managed to provide my sister and I with a safe, secure childhood filled with happy memories, support and love.

Australia’s post-war immigration programme was in full swing during the mid-1950s. For the cost of 10 pounds sterling, not far from the limit of my financial resources at the time, the Australian government was offering we Britons the exciting possibility of building a new life in a young, vibrant country.

My departure from Britain in April 1959 was totally different to the migration (more accurately described as an escape) of both sets of my grandparents from Lithuania and the grip of the ‘Russian bear’ at the turn of the 20th century. Our migration in the later 1950s was in search of a better quality of life and opportunities for personal growth.

A young man from Leeds

As the adult that emerged from the boy in my photograph and the following pages, it was only over recent years that I had begun to feel a real need to look back over the years, ponder on life and living, and question the direction in which my life has gone. In going, what had all those past years and life experiences come to mean?

While I had long felt the need to write about my life and times, I was also aware that not many, perhaps other than my children, would conceivably be interested in anything I had to say. After all, I was just a young, argumentative, stubborn and questioning little kid, one of many who had grown up in the soot-spotted streets of a large industrial city, and an austere still past-bound north of England.

Whenever I attempt to relate to my children just how difficult it was for my parents, as they tried to bring up and provide for their children during the difficult years of the 1940s and early 1950s, I usually am met with a blank stare.

I have to smile sometimes when I see the bemused and disbelieving looks that usually appear on my children’s faces, when trying to describe the difficulties and dangers my family, parents and grandparents experienced during the 1930s and 1940s. Their looks are usually followed by the inevitable comment, more often than not left unsaid but always visible and thus clearly stated: There he goes again, banging on about the old days – silly old bugger!

To them, the stories of my youth must seem like the Monty Python team’s famous sketch featuring four Yorkshire men, each in true laconic Yorkshire fashion, trying to outdo their companions with transparently tall tales. Each comparing the hardships under which they claimed to have grown up with varying degrees of truth, along the lines of

You were lucky! I say … you were lucky. We were so poor that mi dad couldn’t afford an ’ouse an’ we ’ad t’ live in a shoebox in’t middle of t’ road…

It all seems so far-fetched now, even to me sometimes, when I sit and cast my mind back over the years.

To the present generation, the years during which the boy in my photograph grew into his youth and early manhood probably appear nearly as far back in that period of history known as the ‘Dark Ages’? Come to think of it, maybe they were in some ways?

In terms of world history, this collection of memoirs will form but a footnote, albeit an interesting glance back into a time and lifestyle long since gone.

And yet to me it feels like it happened only yesterday…

2

Zaidie was a Litvak

Zaidie ¹

I only knew you briefly, you were old and I too young,

to understand why you came here from what then was your motherland.

As I grew I often wondered, who you were and what you thought,

what held you to the traditions my Cheder rabbis taught.

How I wish I could have met you when I became a man myself, that time alas has gone forever and,

all I have – a silhouette.

The boy in my photograph first saw the light of day on the final day of the northern hemisphere winter.

To those with a belief in astrology, that would suggest that we were born on what is generally known as the cusp between the astrological signs of Pisces and Aries. This timing may also be a pointer that accounts for my tendency to indulge in dreaming incessantly on the one hand, often countered by an aggressive and single-minded desire to be independent on the other. That is if one actually believes that the relative position of the stars and planets at the time of one’s birth have even the remotest influence on an individual’s characteristics, which I don’t.

It was around 7.00 am, or so I am told, that the first baby cries heralding his, and of course my noisy entry into the world, rent the rain, soot and smog laden air surrounding Leeds’ Hyde Terrace Maternity Hospital; the local hospital of choice for those of our parents’ means. I cannot claim to remember anything about the day in question, but according to my mam, I came into the world kicking and screaming and, I haven’t stopped since!

Among the nursery rhymes of my childhood, were memories of an oft‑repeated poem of the day that went along the lines:

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe

The Wednesday bit, particularly as I was born on a Wednesday, really used to really piss me off. This particularly so as I related much more closely to the line that went on to say,

Thursday’s child has far to go.

Now that was a description that appealed much more. As my life progressed it became a more accurate description.

It actually happened many years later, that I did manage to achieve the far to go bit, some 23 years later to be exact, migrating nearly as far as one can go on this planet from Leeds, to Australia.

Meet the family

My parents? Well, I was the first (and only) son born to Annie and Jacob Dubbin (Jack to his friends), a young couple then in their mid-20s. Both came from a similar background to countless thousands of other young working-class people living and working in the north of England during the 1920s and 1930s. While similar in terms of the place they occupied in British society, they were very different in at least one very important aspect of their lives, them being 1st generation children, born to immigrant Jewish parents.

My parents’ working lives were spent, bent over a sewing machine in the case of my mam, who worked for most of her life as a trouser machinist. Later she became manager of the trouser making section in a large wholesale clothing factory.

It was chisels, drills, planes, saws and other woodworking tools and machinery, as well as the pungent aromas of exotic timbers and animal glue in my dad’s case, a furniture maker of some note by those who knew and worked alongside him at his trade as a cabinetmaker.

Following their marriage on 4th March 1934, my parents moved into 25 Harehills Terrace, a back‑to‑back terrace house with two bedrooms, two attics and two cellars. The house was located in north east Leeds. This continued to be their home as tenants until the early 1960s.

Living as tenants in the 1930s was the way young, working-class couples could afford to acquire a place in which to live. Few couples from their strata of society, particularly during the years following the 1929 depression, could hope to amass enough funds to provide for an initial deposit on a relatively cheap terrace house. They didn’t wait for too long following their marriage to make a start on their family. I arrived on the scene just a year and 14 days later.

The old back‑to‑back terrace house that was my home for the first 18 years of my life, while small and cramped when compared with the space I have in which to live today, possessed all the then available services of the