The time in Lancashire must have been quite brief, and from there our first home in England was at a residential hotel in
Lancaster Gate, in the Bayswater area of London, very close to Kensington Gardens / Hyde Park. Again, the time here must have been quite brief, and since Mother was working here as a housekeeper, she sent John and me away, first to a boarding school in Sussex, called Lindfield School, and later to an orphanage in
Nottingham.
Nottingham
The orphanage sojourn must have been caused by Mother exhausting the funds she had brought or had smuggled from home, but we had no idea of the reasons for the changes at the time. The establishment was in a large mansion which must have been built for a wealthy Victorian industrialist, because it was situated on an exclusive winding road, neighboring the mansion of
John Player, the tobacco tycoon. Discipline here was rather sterner and the food was bad. If we were caught talking in bed after lights-out, we were put to work for an hour or more hand polishing the parquet floors until we were tired enough to sleep. There were two live-in lady supervisors who looked after us – Sister Enfis and Sister Bunty. The former was older (probably in her early thirties) and we quite liked her, but Sister Bunty was younger, and was having an affair with Harold, an older inmate, who must have been all of 16, and she left him to supervise the work detail when she caught us. Harold worked us longer and harder than Sister Enfis, and we had no use for him and his paramour.
On Sundays we went to the local Methodist church, where I sang in the choir, and even had to sing solo once. At Christmas there were lots of parties and pantomimes and we were given toys that were hand-me-downs. I received a set of model farm figures in which I expressed disappointment, and they were promptly taken back. Still, all the entertainment made up for that, and there was lots of party food and desserts. We received stacks of Players cigarette cards – sort of like today's baseball and hockey cards, only with soccer heroes – and we used to play games with them. We'd flick them against a wall, and the closest to the wall would win and take both cards. Or we'd keep flicking them alternately, until one card landed on another, then all the cards went to the player who overlapped the card.
London
The Czech Refugee Trust Fund, which has a poorly documented history, owned a number of buildings in London in which it provided subsidized accommodation to displaced families such as ours. Sometime in 1949, Mother was able to secure an apartment in one of their properties at
46 Emperor's Gate in South Kensington. More or less concurrently, she was accepted in employment with a fellow emigre who was a successful businessman.
Zika and Lída Ascher were prewar Jewish Czech immigrants, and their upscale
Wigmore Street premises sold designer silk scarves and varieties of textiles with motifs from artists of the stature of Henry Moore and Henri Matisse. Mother became a receptionist clerk and was now able to earn enough to take John and me out of the orphanage and reunite the family in a three room “flat”. Initially, we shared this with her sister-in-law and her two daughters, Eva and Anna, each a year younger than myself and Michal. This arrangement lasted only until Marie (M
án'a) Pollert was able to arrange another flat for her family a few blocks away at
81 Lexham Gardens.
Life in London was an evolving scene, since wartime conditions took several years to reverse. A couple of events that come to mind were the illumination of the neon signage in the West End – at Piccadilly Circus; and the end of food rationing – specifically sugar, and the subsequent abundant availability of “sweets” and chocolate. The illumination event must have been a prelude to the Festival of Britain in 1951, on the centenary of the original London “Exhibition” which saw the building of the Crystal Palace. I think that was the first of the modern day World Fairs, and left London with the legacy of the Royal Festival Hall, built for the event. Two years later for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, I won a lottery at school for a place along the coronation route. It was somewhere along the Embankment; not a good vantage point – definitely a let down.
I don't remember what arrangement Mother had for Michal's daycare - probably with M
án'a Pollert - while she worked, but John took a couple of buses to
Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea, and I walked to Bousefield Primary School, off Old Brompton Road. At Bousefield I made friends with Roger Holland, an enduring friendship that continues. A couple of other classmates come to mind. There was Rodney Davien, who lived close by in McLeod's Mews facing the wall beyond which the ground dropped off down to the District Line (London Transport Underground) railway tracks. Rodney had a fairly troubled home life – with a slutty blond mother who had a live-in boyfriend named Leigh Howard, an ex-WW2 fighter pilot. He had written a novel, titled “Crispin's Day”, which had sold fairly well. Rodney had a skinny sister with rosy cheeks, named Shirley, a year or two older. Subsequently, I heard (from cousin Eva in London, I believe) that Rodney had taken his life in his late teens. Another name I recall was of the top student in our class – Tao Tao Lieu – I imagine she became a nuclear physicist or biochemist. The ambition and endeavour of the oriental immigrant student was evident even at those tender years.
Entertainment in South Kensington in those times included all the free museums in the area –
the Natural History Museum with the dinosaur skeleton in the lobby and the plaster life size blue whale. The Science Museum was a favorite, where many displays had buttons to push to make stuff work – miniature steam engines and sparks that danced. Outings were to nearby parks – Kensington Gardens was easy walking distance, but in autumn we took the 74 bus to
Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common to go mushrooming. We always returned with a reasonable quantity. There weren't a lot of other Europeans to compete with in those days. In fact, it was the time of white bread and plain English food. Rye bread and Polish dill pickles were a delicacy available only in a few locations, needing a special trip to find.
Father seemed like an occasional visitor. He has chronicled
his emigration in some detail, and after he joined us in South Kensington he worked mostly abroad. He would return home for what seemed like very brief intervals. He would bring back lots of black and white photos from his travels and a variety of souvenirs – an ivory hippo from Nigeria, a sari for Mother from India, but not much of interest for kids. Holidays in those days were unremarkable. There were a couple of weeks at the seaside in Dorset, at Boscombe, in Bournemouth. Father was with us on that trip, since he painted a couple of the scenes – one was of us at a long beach stretch with a sand cliff at
Hengistbury Head, and another of a beach-front putting green. Another trip was to our old boarding school, Lindfield, which had moved to the village of
Southbourne, near the coast in southern Hampshire. We had bikes and cycled the country roads – to the closest seashore in a tidal inlet that turned into miles of mud flat at low tide. We used to collect crabs in the mud – sinking to our knees at times. Then there were trips to the sand beach on Hayling Island – part way to Portsmouth.
It was long before television became ubiquitous, so home entertainment was mainly radio. There were three choices of BBC programming – Home Service, Light Program, and for the highbrow, the Third Program, which featured mostly classical music. John and I used to listen to a number of half hour humorous variety shows – that culminated in the classic Goon Show with Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. One of its predecessors even featured a Canadian couple – Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly - in a sitcom called Bedtime with Braden.
In the spring of 1953, my final year at
Bousfield Primary School (which moved to its current location shortly thereafter, and
the old building now houses
a Catholic school), the
eleven plus exam was the major sorting process which determined a child's aptitude and was used to direct candidates into academic or technical studies for secondary school. The basic division was between the academic stream, which went to a “Grammar” school, and the rest, who were relegated to “Secondary Modern” schools. Once beyond that hurdle, there was a certain amount of choice, and we were supposed to indicate our preferences for secondary schools. Knowing very little about the choices, I stayed close to my friend Roger, who seemed to know what he was about, and we were both selected for Grammar schools. Roger's first choice was
Upper Latimer, a semi-private school which had a high reputation and ancient tradition (founded in 1624). We were asked to select three schools, and as a second choice I selected Westminster, another private school with limited space for students from the state (non fee paying) system. In any event, Upper Latimer had an entrance exam, which Roger and I took (sat) together. The results were not long in coming, and he was accepted and I was rejected. My second choice school did not even let me sit an exam and rejected me out of hand, so I was then grateful to be accepted at John's school – Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea.
Grammar School
The change from a co-ed primary school to the highly structured environment of Sloane was profound and somewhat traumatic. School uniforms were mandatory, with grey slacks, black blazer with the school crest, and corresponding black cap with gold piping and the school crest, and a school tie. Brown pants were a particular annoyance to Guy Boas, the headmaster, and he would send home any boy he saw wearing brown. Discipline in certain matters, such as uniforms off school property and being late for school were left in the hands of a corps of student enforcers, who were designated as Prefects – the student elite, who were in their sixth and final year at the school, studying for their “A” levels of the
G.C.E. or General Certificate of Education (equivalent to grade 13 in Canada), Senior Monitors – who were fifth formers taking G.C.E. “O” levels, and Junior Monitors – who were third formers and the principal agents of distress to the younger boys, since they were empowered with assigning detentions (requiring supervised after hours time at school) to the rest of the student body. The school yard was, as at most urban schools, a walled and fenced paved area surrounding the main building where boys spent their breaks and lunch hours. Sports and “games”, corresponding to present day Phys Ed, were concentrated into one afternoon a week, and were conducted a fairly long bus ride away across the river at the school playing fields in Roehampton – near Putney Heath. There was a girls high school virtually adjacent to Sloane, further south down Hortensia Road, called Carlisle, but I was too young and naive to take an interest in that.
As a first former, I was vulnerable to bullying by older boys, but received a good measure of protection from John, who was in the fifth form and known to be able to hold his own against most comers. He was generally known as “Onz” a cockney short form of his Czech nickname – Honza. I recall only a couple of his interventions in the playground, but that was probably enough to spread the word that I had protection.
Atlantic Crossing
Early in the new year in 1954 we learned that we were to follow Father to British Guiana, where he had been sent by his employer, the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) to undertake management of a sawmill. There was much preparation – finding out about flora and fauna of tropical South America – and generally preparing for a lengthy trip and new lifestyle. Many visits to the Natural History Museum – this time with a mission. We learned about guavas, a mystery fruit we had never encountered. Father had traveled there by sea, since air travel was still something of a novelty and not yet commonplace. In the colonial system which had been in place since British rule had been imposed, there was one company which had a monopoly on commerce in British Guiana – Bookers Brothers. They had a couple of ships which carried general cargo from Liverpool to
Georgetown on a three week schedule. They were around 3000 tons displacement and accommodated up to a dozen passengers. Father had sailed to B.G., as the colony was known in those days, on one of these Bookers ships – the SS Amakura. For unknown reasons, likely of Mother's choosing, we were to take an alternate route. Ocean liner across the Atlantic, and then Pan American Airlines from New York to B.G. It was early summer, and we were booked on the dominant trans-Atlantic route, Southampton to New York, on the largest passenger ship of its time,
RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Queen Elizabeth of the Cunard Line. The same ship that ended up thirty years later gutted by fire set by an arsonist in Hong Kong harbour as while serving as the campus of “Seawise University” - an advanced education venture funded by a semi literate billionaire named C.Y. Tung.
Arrangements for departure were feverish, with tropical wear to acquire and luggage to organize and pack. I have no idea how Mother disposed of furniture, but our belongings were compacted into two categories of luggage – cabin baggage, and "not wanted on board" – the trunks with heavy goods. John was to stay behind to finish his G.C.E. “O” Levels, the high school graduation basic level of the time, and then he was to follow us to B.G. on his own. He had a pretty good relationship with one of his teachers, who offered him room and board until his school year was completed, and the offer was taken up. John's time at the Pledgers is a story he should have documented, since it was an experience to learn from, but unfortunately I only remember that it was not a time of which he wanted to be reminded. Percy Pledger, as the teacher was “fondly” known, turned out to be a major disappointment, a mean little man with an even meaner wife, who took in the boarder mainly for expected financial gain.
The departure for New York must have been in June of 1954 after the end of the school year. Our luggage was painted with bright coloured stripes so it would be easy to pick out in a pile. We left for Southampton by a special train which went right in to the docks, and we disembarked into the sea terminal where the ship was tied up. There was lots of waiting, and porters to pay for bringing our luggage from the train's baggage compartment to the departure hall, where the trunks and larger items were consigned to the ship's hold. The boarding procedure took most of the day, and we did not actually sail until late afternoon – with all the fanfare and hoopla that the event generated. We were up on the boat deck for casting off, with ticker tape and waving at those left on the dock. With the ship's horn sounding, and attendant tugs pushing our hull, the departure was a grand event. It was also memorable because just a little way from us on the boat deck a very glamorous couple were waving at their fans on shore – Elizabeth Taylor and husband (#2) Michael Wilding.
The ocean voyage made a big impression on me. There were three classes of passengers, with carefully segregated space and facilities. We were traveling tourist class – at the bottom of the heap, with the largest numbers and the least space: basic accommodation and services. The wealthy traveled first class, with lounges and pools, and all kinds of luxury – mostly under utilized. Between these there was cabin class, and I can't really recall what their space was like since it was distinctly inferior to first class, and that was where I spent most of my waking time on board. During the departure the whole ship was wide open to everyone, but during the first night the barriers were established, and locked doors and blocked passageways were set to keep the classes segregated. I found the weak points very quickly, and used them to advantage, so that I only returned to our tourist accommodations for meals and sleeping. The first class movie theatre was huge and mostly empty, so I watched all the movies there. The tourist class movie theatre was always crowded, the screen was small, and the movies were older. I took Michal with me to first class a few times, but he proved to be too much of a hindrance and a liability if we were observed by staff and queried as to where we really belonged.
New York
Arrival in New York was the spectacle as pictured in many movies. There was no
Verzano Narrows Bridge or World Trade Centre, but sailing past Ellis Island and the
Statue of Liberty was a moving experience, finally docking at the prominent Cunard pier on the Hudson River in Manhattan. The arrivals hall was much like departure in Southampton – teeming confusion, delay, and lots of waiting to retrieve baggage under alphabetical signage. Final release was to a taxi which took us to some Manhattan destination where friends were waiting to take us in. The principal friend who spent the most time with Mother during the two or three days we spent in New York may have actually met us upon docking. He was introduced to us as Mr. Hostovsky, an alias of convenience I surmised subsequently. That first day Michal and I were dropped off at
Radio City Music Hall to see a movie while he and Mother went off to talk somewhere. I never managed to get any details later as to who he really was, but I believe there was an illicit affair involved since all Mother would ever reveal was that his real name may have been Leon Braun. I believe she met him again in New York a number of years later when he was married and the relationship no longer held the same mystique. I have a much better memory for useless, irrelevant detail - the movie we saw at Radio City was "
A Long Long Trailer" a comedy with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.
Montreal
The stay in New York was brief - perhaps a few days, and I believe we travelled to Montreal by bus, crossing the border at Rouses Point, where there is no provision for buses now. Again, my recollection of our time in Montreal is clouded and I surmise we must have been there only a day or two, staying with Klusáčeks, before moving on to Ottawa, where we would be based while Father worked in the Duhamel region for
Singer Canada's logging division.
