My father arrived in the UK on an American ship as a Polish (and therefore Allied) refugee. The Yanks had rescued him, along with many others, from a POW camp in North Africa. Although he was born in Lviv, which was considered part of Poland in the 1940’s, he was in point of fact an Austrian citizen and should therefore have been classed as an “enemy alien” (as indeed my mother was). However they decided to call him “a person of uncertain nationality”. He wanted to join the British Army and fight Hitler but he was half blind by that time, his eyes permanently damaged by the sands of the Sahara. So, like many others of his kind, he was assigned a job by the government, one of the innumerable industrial jobs that British men were no longer around to carry out. He spent the remainder of the war years and several years afterward cutting out plastic parts for handbags.
My father worked seven days a week to feed us. He came home every Friday in the company van with big rolls of multicoloured plastic or of lining fabric, and spent most of the weekend cutting out the parts on the big cutting board that they had lent him. He had a feeling for geometry and had become expert at interleaving the various shapes so as to get the maximum number of useful parts out of a roll with a minimum of waste. I remember being very annoyed when I discovered that this was classed as “unskilled labour”.
When my mother lost her job in the printworks, she started working at home for my father’s boss. She acquired from the company a heavy-duty (and very noisy) sewing machine and spent her time sewing handles for the handbags they made. My job was to put the brass rings into the loops at the ends of the handles. When I came home from school, I had tea, did my homework, and then put in the day’s rings. I felt very proud that I could contribute in this way to the family income.
We were poor but we were never desperately poor. There was always food on the table and a shilling for the meter. Shillings were considered valuable in our family because they were needed for this special purpose. If I ever got one in my change, I always gave it to my mother. We were never in debt and we even managed to get away to the seaside for a couple of weeks each summer. Of course we never went abroad because only rich people did that.
The irony is that my parents, like many Jewish refugees, were middle-class in origin. My father was an orphan but his family had all been businessmen and my mother was the daughter of a Viennese banker. Maybe that background was what enabled her to keep the family solvent by metaphorically turning every penny twice. She was also very good with a needle, although left-handed. She designed and made all her own clothes and mine too. Between them, my two parents taught me all that I needed to know about money. My mother taught me: “If you can’t afford to pay cash for it, then you can’t afford to buy it.” And my father taught me: “Never get into debt. Once you owe someone money, they control your life.”
Of course not getting into debt meant that we could never get our feet on the housing ladder. Houses then cost a few hundred pounds but that was still a lot in 1950’s money and you needed a mortgage. My father absolutely refused to consider such a thing. Our flat in the Mews was rented out under what was then called a protected tenancy: that is to say, the rent could not be increased and the landlady could not throw us out as long as we continued to pay it. When the Conservatives came into power again in 1951, they abolished protected tenancies but only on an as-from-now-on basis. Existing tenancies remained intact. This of course gave landlords a strong incentive to try and get rid of their tenants so that they could rent out the premises for a higher rent.
Our landlady was called Mrs Dubnow and I remember her well. She was a handsome old lady with snow white hair and a hawk nose. Her husband was a Polish Jew like my grandparents had been, but she came from somewhere in the Levant and spoke excellent English. As long as my father was alive, she made no trouble for us, but as soon as he was dead, she set to work to winkle my mother and myself out of the house. By this time, the garage was no longer an oil storage facility. She ran what she called a sauna there; in fact it was a brothel. My mother often said that where Mrs Dubnow came from, brothel-keeping was considered a respectable profession. Of course she wanted the upstairs rooms to provide additional facilities.
Mrs Dubnow came every week to collect the rent. She would stand at the foot of the staircase and shout insults at my mother, who would prudently retreat up the stairs as soon as she had handed over the money. The noise often attracted our next door neighbour Mrs Wakely, who liked my mother a lot. She was a real cockney and not afraid of anyone. She had been “in service” with her younger sister, who apparently had what we would nowadays call learning difficulties. Mrs Wakely described her in the language of the time as “simple-minded”. In the first half of the 20th century, female servants were often abused, so Mrs Wakely had had to act as her sister’s champion. She now became my mother’s. She would come out of her house and plough into Mrs Dubnow, asking her if she was not ashamed of herself for persecuting a poor widow and a fatherless child!
In the end we did move because my mother couldn’t stand it any more. We managed to buy a house in Dyne Road, Kilburn, with the payout from the insurance policy that my father had taken out for me when I was born (it matured when I reached 18), together with temporary loans from friends. There was a sitting tenant on the ground floor (another protected tenancy!) so we got it cheap. But there was a rather comical sequel.
Mrs Dubnow’s “sauna” made a good deal of noise and neighbours became seriously annoyed with it. Quite apart from anything else, there were often drunken men knocking on doors and asking for service (or so Mrs Wakely told us). So several of them complained to the police (there was a police station in West End Lane) who sent an undercover policeman around. He soon twigged that this was indeed a brothel and Mrs Dubnow was prosecuted for living on immoral earnings. My mother had to go to court to give evidence and she told the court about all the noise and men’s voices from downstairs late at night when she was nursing my father through his final illness. Mrs Dubnow had hired a good lawyer (she obviously wasn’t short of money) and he cross-examined my mother:
“I put it to you,” he said, “that all this took place much more recently, during the time that you were at odds with my client over the tenancy.”
“And I put it to you,” my mother answered with spirit, “that I know the year my husband died much better than you do. I was the one who had to look after him.” And the whole court (my mother said) burst out laughing.
Mrs Dubnow did not go to prison but she had to pay a fine and the brothel was closed down.
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