... And the Policeman Smiled (41 page)

But caution was urged.

Consider carefully whether you want to be a British subject. It is a serious step to take and you should only take it if the British way of life appeals to you and you are sure that you want to live in British territory and to be a loyal subject of the King.

There was an enthusiastic response from the RCM teenagers who had put down roots, by settling into a job, for example, or marrying and starting their own families. Indeed, early marriage was already a well-established practice for RCM girls who could by this means circumvent the unamended naturalisation laws. It did not always work out, as a local press story for December 1942 reveals.

With tears in her eyes, Inge Herz implored Hendon magistrates yesterday not to send her to a Jewish hostel. She said she was not religious and did not want anything to do with any Jewish movement.

Herz, who came to this country in 1939, was charged with being
an alien, absenting herself from her address in Hendon without a permit, and with failing to notify her change of address …

Defendant said she was to have married an Englishman and had got a special licence, but when she found he had three convictions she decided not to marry him. She believed that if she had married him there would have been no need to notify her change of address as then she would have been English.

There was now another man whom she had known for some years and who wanted to become engaged to her …

Theoretically, the marriage of any RCM youngster under twenty-one was dependent on the consent of Bloomsbury House. The official line was to hold out against a liaison which did not fit the conventions. But that was not always possible.

Mary told me she is going to marry the father of the child. He has been most constant in his visits and is making arrangements for Mary …

Bloomsbury House was sympathetic, even though a year later Mary and her friend were still unmarried.

Mary came to discuss the immediate future. She has given notice at her present place as she cannot cope with the work. She has to cook for a family of four adults and six children. We will try to fix up a home for her child at Bedford – Mary will then try to find a job near the child. We tried to impress upon her the importance of a solicitor's agreement for the father to sign … Her attitude towards the child's father is very protective; she describes him as generous and solicitous but very much against interference from committees and any legal steps. Mary has an appealing nature but is very weak with rather vague ideas of how best to cope with life. Their relationship … has no solid foundation at all.

There were some sad outcomes in the inevitable love affairs with American and Canadian servicemen. Ruth, who had an illegitimate child in 1946, hoped to keep her baby while at the same time planning to marry a man she had never met before:

She says her fiance is an American and is coming to England on leave at the end of October. Ruth has never seen this young man and only knows him through a four-month correspondence. We warned Ruth against taking any action …

Some months later, the mysterious American had faded out of the picture. Ruth arranged to have her baby adopted by a couple in Pinner. ‘She misses him very much but realises it is best in his interests for him to have a settled home.'

Cilly also conducted a courtship by letter, but at least she had a passing acquaintance with her boyfriend, whom she had met in Hamburg before the war. Early in 1945 she tracked him down in Brazil.

Cilly wondered if it would be possible for her to re-emigrate to Brazil [as she] is most anxious to join her boyfriend.

But her visa was denied. Her last throw was to explore the possibility of marriage by proxy as a way of gaining Brazilian nationality, but within a few weeks she had given up the idea and was corresponding with another boyfriend in Holland.

Paula had a history of being dull and backward at school. In 1944, after she had given birth to an illegitimate child, she was sent to Holloway for petty theft. The next year, she Was in prison again, for what was described, curiously, as pro-Nazi talk, and pregnant again. Her second baby was adopted at the age of three months. Paula was then sent to the Lucy Gaster home at Watford, where she worked as a machinist. Her behaviour was said to be disruptive, not least because she made no secret of her intention to marry a man who was already married. Bloomsbury House took a sympathetic and enlightened view of her predicament:

Paula called with the man she wants to marry … He will not be free to marry until September, when his divorce is being heard. Paula left £1 towards the keep of Brian [her son] …

Paula's fiancé called. Had a long talk with him. He now knows of Paula's previous shortcomings. He was aware only of Brian but has since learnt of Paula's second baby … He says however that he is so fond of her that he is willing to forgive her and that he hopes they will start their life on a sound and frank basis of mutual trust…

There were other happy endings for the mothers of illegitimate children:

Regina called with her son Uri and informed me that she would be getting married shortly to Gerhard, whom she has known for many years. Gerhard and Regina have applied to Bunce Court school for employment. Gerhard was originally a scholar there and Regina knows Dr Friedmann [the headmaster who took over from Anna Essinger] very well.

In some cases, where couples urgently wanted (or needed) to marry, the Union of Jewish Women was able to provide a much-needed dowry:

Helga was married yesterday to the father of her baby. We gave them lunch afterwards. Miss Abrahams has managed to get a dowry of £50 from the Union of Jewish Women. This will be given to Helga at once. Helga is living under very bad conditions and is desperately anxious to find a flat or rooms.

Many young people were drawn to those of similar backgrounds. Living in Belsize Park, Rosina Domingo was not far away from a hostel for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

One thing led to another. A lot of us married Spaniards. There were language difficulties but we had things in common …

My husband had had a terrible time. After fighting in the Civil War he escaped to France and was put in a camp where he had to live through the winter. Then he joined the Foreign Legion (it was that or die of cold) and when the war started he took part in the Norway campaign. When Norway fell, he got back to France and was evacuated from Dunkirk.

In London, the only job he could get was in demolition; he had no work permit. He got an extra 2d an hour by being a top man, working at the top of a building that was coming down. It was dangerous and many fell. But he was glad of the work.

Those like Thea Rudzinski went a step further and married victims of the concentration camps.

He was a survivor. There were eight in his family and only he and one sister had survived. He was in Buchenwald and Shleiben and Skarzysko and was liberated by the Russians from Theresienstadt. He has talked quite a bit to me about it. The memories can never go out of his mind. After hearing what he says I am amazed that
he can live normally. I am afraid that in his old age … perhaps it will all come out. It has got to come out somewhere.

Margaret Olmer, too, married a camp survivor.

My husband is very marked from the camps. He had to fill bombs with sulphur. If he had not judged it to the second he would have had molten sulphur all over him. There was no industrial clothing. He was very ill when he came out, but he is a clever person and he picked himself up.

It was hard for me, having escaped all that, having to sleep with someone who has terrible nightmares. I thought fate had caught up with me and I was being punished for the fate I had escaped. I didn't have to marry someone from the camp. He wasn't the only boy who asked me. I think it was self-guilt.

Bloomsbury House was especially cautious on the question of mixed marriage, more for internal political reasons than for any strong feeling that religious compatibility was essential to a successful alliance.

Leo says that he now has to marry urgendy as the girl is pregnant in the third month. As he has no savings but needs at least some money to set up a kind of home, even in a furnished room, he asked for a loan of £10. We are not in a position to give him a loan and strongly advised him not to incur debts to begin a married life, especially when he mentioned that he wanted money to buy a wedding ring. He did not wish his married sister to know, as she was not in favour of his marriage. For the same reason, he could not ask her for financial help. The girl's parents are not aware of her condition yet. He was determined to marry the girl, whom he has known for two years and whom he says he loves dearly. He wandered out very disappointed.

But not all practical help was denied. Bloomsbury House offered Leo the loan of a pram.

The change in the naturalisation laws did help to cut back on the number of hasty and ill-considered marriages. But in other respects, a British passport was not the panacea many expected. There were still formidable problems of living in a country where even former refugees were thought to be not quite the equal of the home-born product.

Postwar austerity meant that living conditions were often cramped and poor. There were few clothes and household goods available and food was rationed. Interesting and well-paid jobs were hard to come by. Most of the young refugees found themselves in menial factory or office jobs, or in domestic work. There is a pile of file cases of young men and women longing for a more fulfilling life, perhaps on the stage or as a musician. Some, like Solomon, retreated into fantasy. Arrested for changing the date of his birth certificate from 1924 to 1920, he ‘told different people that he was a Jew, Church of England, Roman Catholic and Atheist'.

Bloomsbury House advanced him a small loan to set himself up in steady occupation but without much hope of success. In 1945, Solomon was in trouble again:

Piccadilly police rang asking if we know the boy … He arrived here today … very conceited, full of bluff. He is going to study music. He has only to play the violin before the authorities and his career is made. He wanted to know if we have a studio here where he can have his photos taken for his friends.

In 1950, Solomon returned to Bloomsbury House with a request for a suit. He had been offered a job as a clerk with the Ministry of National Insurance and was not at all suitably dressed.

I gave him £3 … as I feel he is now going to settle down … he is married and has a child of two years.

So much for dreams.

Where there was proven talent, the prospects were more encouraging, though, as one of the few who made a highly successful career, Leslie Brent is the first to acknowledge that luck has played a big part in his life. His first break was to be plucked out of Dovercourt by Anna Essinger, who spotted him as a prospective star pupil at Bunce Court. After the army, he read zoology at Birmingham, which prepared him for his second stroke of good fortune. He was to be accepted as a postgraduate student at University College under Peter Medawar, one of the world authorities on immunology. He stayed on to be part of a research team whose work on the mysteries of the immune system led to Medawar being awarded a Nobel Prize. In 1965, Leslie Brent was appointed Professor of Zoology at Southampton.

Alf Dubs, who was one of the Czechoslovakian contingent of child refugees, became a Labour MP and is now Director of the British Refugee Council. His success came through an early dedication to radical politics:

At grammar school in Manchester other people of my age weren't interested in politics. But I was passionately involved in the 1945 election. My mum took me to St Anne's-on-Sea for a week in a boarding house. The first election results came through at midday. There was a loudspeaker in the main square and people at the hotel sent me off to get the score. Since I was Labour I was delighted to be able to announce that we had 120 seats against only 30 for the Conservatives. I remember someone moaning, ‘Oh, my God, it's the end of England.'

I remember when they nationalised the mines and I thought it was a great thing. I was in hospital when the health service began. I had an ear infection and was quite ill. I said to the sister on the ENT ward (where I was the youngest), ‘Are we getting special food today?' and she asked why. ‘Because of the Health Setvice.' She told me not to be silly.

After national service, Alf Dubs went to the London School of Economics. He was elected to Parliament in 1979.

A few were able to draw on skills acquired before they were uprooted. For example, Käthe Fischel, now a successful artist known chiefly, and perhaps significantly, for her scenes of urban dereliction, was already an art student when she was forced to leave Czechoslovakia.

Others, like Clive Milton, had to start from scratch. Even as a young farm labourer he was saving money and making profit out of various farming enterprises, sometimes to the irritation of his employers. His fulfilment was to establish the Sheraton Patisserie chain.

Freddy Durst worked his way up from an apprenticeship to a jeweller. With his friend John Najmann, he went to evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

As the war progressed, we were taught how to make military instruments like bomb and gun sights for the RAF. We worked for three years for up to sixteen hours a day, saving what we could. Our aim was to put together a hundred pounds so that we would have enough to start on our own. After the war, we set up our own
little workshop. When John went off to Germany to find his mother who had survived Auschwitz, I was on my own for a while. That was when I bought my first bits and pieces of gold. I filed them up and made a few rings to sell to the Oxford Street shops. I sold six here, six there and, by the time I got to Selfridges, they were all gone. The problem was I didn't realise that after you sell something it takes a month to get payment. I should have opened a bank account but at twenty-one that wasn't easy. In fact, the shopkeepers I visited said they would talk to my father about it because they didn't really feel it acceptable to do business with a mere boy. But I got more and more orders and I had to arrange credit with the bullion dealers who knew me from when I ran errands. I was soon earning £8 a week, which was substantially more than when I was in charge of thirty or forty people making bomb sights.