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In 1940 I was evacuated as a 4-year-old, with my mother, to Canada. We lived for some months with a family in Montreal, and then moved to New York, where my grandfather lived at the time. I remember being in a cinema when the news was flashed up, on a written slide, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbour. Most of the audience left, but I insisted on staying on to see the rest of the movie.

With the war going on much longer than anticipated, my mother was anxious to return to England and my father. In November 1942 she obtained a passage on a convoy, despite my strong protests — I was only 6, but I knew that ships were sunk in Atlantic convoys, and even if we survived that we were likely to be bombed, and even if we survived that, the food was much better and more plentiful in New York.

Nevertheless we embarked on a small ship (HMS Hilary — which I believe later carried Monty on D-Day). We were the leading ship in a huge convoy, escorted by destroyers. It was a three-week voyage, up past Iceland (it snowed) heading towards Liverpool. We lived in daily expectation of torpedoes and U-Boats, and there was a sighting — but it turned out to be a small boat from an RAF plane which had crashed in the sea. We stopped to pick them up. One of the survivors gave me his crucifix on a chain, telling me that it was very precious because it had saved his life. I played with it for a short while, but my mother disapproved and took it away — we were Jewish.

Half a century later I discovered that ours was the first convoy to get through unscathed after the breaking of the U-Boat code at Bletchley. My former Oxford tutor revealed (in his mid- 80’s) that he had been a military intelligence analyst at Bletchley then — perhaps what he did helped save my life.

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