大象传媒

The period after my father, Jack (Jacob) Goldstein, was killed (in March 1945, just a few weeks before the end of the war), must have been incredibly traumatic for my mother. We two children were a handful 鈥� I was not yet six, and my sister Leila was just coming up to eleven years old. I know from a couple of letters I still have in my possession that it was ages before my mother came to terms with the fact that my father, her husband, would never come home again, and that she had to shoulder the responsibility of their family alone. It was to be about three years before she would marry again....three years to bear the responsibility of bringing up two children by herself.

We had no money to fall back on, and neither my mother's nor my father's family was able to help financially. But they provided support in a number of ways. The most important materially was that my mother was able to work in my father鈥檚 family clothing factory, where all five Goldstein boys had learned their tailoring trades. Mum was a self-taught whizz with the needle, and this provided the means for her to have an income.

Mum going to work meant, of course, that Leila and I had to fend for ourselves for a while after school before Mum could get home from the factory in London's East End. The landlord of the house in which we rented three rooms would not allow us to have keys to the house, and neither were we allowed to use the garden, so we played in the street in all weathers, waiting for Mum to get home. It was quite safe to do so in those days. There were few cars driving along our streets - I didn't even know anyone who had one - and we were oblivious to any of the nasty and evil things which seem to dominate young parents' concerns these days. We amused ourselves playing with an old tin can, a box or a ball - I remember we used the 'pig bin' (into which everyone was encouraged to put their food scraps for collection and transpoting out to farms) as a cricket wicket. Skipping was a regular bit of fun and exercise - for the boys too. We also spent ages playing 'buses' on a long garden wall. In the Spring we collected butterflies, but in any case the cold weather didn't seem to bother us, and certainly when the extremes of the famous 1946/7 winter came, we made the most of playing in the snow. The 1948 Olympics, held in London, were a stimulus to organise our own races round the block. What with collecting conkers and having our own conker championships, plus a bit of scrumping, we managed to pass the time in pretty creative ways.

But, as I said, family support was important too. All my uncles and aunts, on both sides of the family, had their problems after the war, and struggled to re-build their lives. But I particularly remember my Uncle Ron 鈥� my father鈥檚 youngest brother, and now a major contributor to the 大象传媒 WW2 project, trying to fill the huge gap which my Dad鈥檚 death had left in our lives. Our fondest memory is his taking us to Madam Tussaud's waxworks in Baker Street 鈥� what an amazing experience that was for us! And the fantastic luxury of having tea in Lyons Corner House in the West End 鈥� sitting at a table with a crisp white tablecloth, served by smart waitresses in frilly uniforms, and with someone playing a grand piano just a few yards away. And the wonderful memory of the desert 鈥� 'Apple Foam and Melba Sauce'. How that thought often comes back to me and makes my mouth water! And it was Ron to whom my mother turned when I needed long trousers and a trilby hat to appear as a juror in the Montefiore House School production of Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Trial by Jury'. And who else but Ron would be called upon to help the little lad learn how to ride a bike?

The school holidays were a particular problem, with Mum at work. Leila remembers that we were sent one year to stay in Frittendon, near Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, and indeed the name Chatteris rings a faint bell in my memory too. But my better recollection is being sent to a farm in Kent for two successive summers. I can even see the layout of the farmhouse with the fields and wood vaguely in my minds eye. The family had a son - I think his name was Colin 鈥� and I recall that Leila, who was 12-13 by then, had a crush on him. As a young lad brought up in Stamford Hill, London, I found the very nature of a farm hugely alien to me. It isn鈥檛 surprising that I had some memorable experiences there....like crossing the (very deep) pond in a barrel; sleeping all night with Colin in a (poorly) cleaned-out pig sty; walking in the woods which were full of huge rhododendron bushes in full bloom (having hardly seen any flowers before then); and finding grass snakes.

I also have some recollections of going to an RAF base in Bungay in Suffolk 鈥� why else would I have the name of such a place so firmly planted in my memory? I can visualise myself in the back of a Land-Rover speeding through country lanes, holding on in excited fear; and getting up early one morning to go with some men with shotguns to shoot rabbits 鈥� but coming back with a pigeon instead.

But somehow we came through all that hardship and trauma. In 1948 someone new came into our lives, as Mum met and then married Alf (Aaron) Hyman. It was clearly very difficult for Leila and I to adjust, and I confess not to have been the most adaptable at first. But we knew that this new phase in our lives was all for the better, and so it proved. David was born, and we moved to a new block of flats a couple of miles away at the other end of Stoke Newington, near Newington Green.

And the rest, as they say, is history.....

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