In the time I was growing up, smoking was universally practised all over the world. Along the Oxford Street pavements, for example, there were tens of thousands of spent matches. Matchsticks and, curiously enough, large numbers of hairpins.
At one time, when I owned a spring-loaded toy Howitzer cannon, I would beachcomb Oxford Street for nice clean matches to pick up and use as ballistic projectiles. I think some adult or other forbade me to use a pen-knife to sharpen them to a point. It never make sense to me to fire safe blunted projectiles!
The Linguists’ Club was my Dad’s pet project from the early 1930’s. He told my Mum, who told me that he never made any profit with it. He subsidised it out of love and his deeply held belief in the principle of world peace through nurture of understanding between world populations.
This was a common reaction against the horrors of the recently ended War. Think League of Nations, United Nations, and the growing numbers of international trade and government organisations which provided him with plentiful work as professional conference interpreter.
It’s obvious that my Dad could have bought a flat elsewhere in London. A residential terraced street of family homes each with its own garden, just like 53 Greenway, SW20 7BJ. My wife and I wanted exactly such a neighbourly environment for our children to grow up in.
My Dad could not and would not abandon his lifetime career of successful international conference interpreting.
So we lived comfortably in the flat above the business. In the Linguists’ Club’s extensive corridors and classrooms on the ground floor, passive smoking would have been utterly unavoidable. It did not occur to us as possible or desirable to avoid breathing nicotine smoke.
I can easily imagine Thadée would have felt supremely grateful to have had the great good fortune to survive, mainly due to his non-combatant work at Bletchley Park for the Enigma project. I can see anyone with a background of shared wartime work, helping to create a “free world” would be inspired to carry on with those same principles, if the opportunity presented itself.
The Linguists’ Club motto was “Se comprendre c’est la Paix”. Peace through mutual understanding.
It was my Father’s choice to live above the business. His interpretation assignments were mostly nearby in Central London. The premises were rented on a 50-year lease from the Grosvenor Estate. He occupied it from just before the War, till my Mother’s death in 1975.
I heard grumblings from others in my family that my existence in a flat tucked away in a Belgravia cul-de-sac, and isolated from all possible children of my age, left me at a disadvantage, in a sort of fishtank existence.
I had no neighbours to play with. My classmates at my school, a few minutes’ walk away in Cadogan Square, Chelsea, were not welcome, because ours was a flat above our working business six days a week. Privacy and lack of disturbance were necessary.
In the afternoons when school was over, I would mix with the old and the elderly Club members. I learned how to make grown-up small talk. Upstairs in our family flat, I read huge dictionaries for the fun of discovering words.
Our recreation consisted mainly of weekends at Hazel Cottage. I am told I first used to go there in my baby basket on the black leather back seat of our old car, a black Rover, registration number FYW 42. I would stop my crying on the two hour journeys only when the car was moving.
The 1940’s and 50’s were thickly filled with insects, before mass government subsidies were dished out for the blanketing of agricultural land in insecticides. The government had to propel modern agriculture with accelerated yields.
You should know that my particular Weird comes in part from my having forged close personal friendships with grasshoppers, caterpillers, guppies, butterflies, frogs, cows, sheep, and flies. Yes! Houseflies endlessly droning in circles in my little bedroom were my friends and my beloved companions. Their regular irregular buzz soothed me to sleep after lunch on hot summer afternoons.
My upbringing was far less gregarious than almost all my peer group, until I was sent away to boarding school in 1959. Mum was hardly well enough to look after me, with her severe depressions, obliging her to go for long stays in private “Nursing Homes”. I learned later patients were commonly given Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) to relieve entrenched depression.
I was at boarding school from 1959 till 1964. It would have been inconvenient to have to look after me at home in the long summer holidays – at least until my Mother had regained some autonomy after her depressions eased.
Frensham Heights co-ed boarding school near Farnham, Surrey, I later found out was a placement of choice to shelter boys and girls from the stresses of failing or failed marriages.
A sequence of random events meant I was sent away to spend blissful successive summer holidays at a remote village 17kms west of Geneva near the Rhône. My hosts were Roger and Germaine Ravey, who spoke no English.
Roger taught me his own working skills. He ran a small business forging iron into customised decorative wrought iron furniture and also homeware, like mirrors, gates and fencing.
I was paid ¢5 Swiss money per unit of decorative wrought iron curls, “volutes”. I made these by heating rods in a charcoal fire and hammering the red hot ends over an anvil to form gentle curls. These modular pieces would then go on to be welded into gates or other decorative elements.
In 2013, my wife and I went back to visit those places with their powerful formative memories. That was when we stayed with Albert Ravey.
One of my black & white photos won first prize in the holiday photo competition at my prep school at 68 Cagogan Square SW3. This school was a ghastly repressive Dickensian establishment where verbal abuse and violent daily physical punishment were the routine teaching tools. Knowledge was crammed. Very conveniently it was only a quarter of an hour’s walk from home, via Belgrave Square.
At various times my Dad smoked a pipe, cigars and, yes, cigarettes too. He was not as skilled at blowing smoke rings on demand for me, as was my beloved Uncle Vivien. My ‘Uncle Vee” was an accomplished architect, an FRIBA. He had a playful sense of fun which never ever left him. Every boy’s favourite uncle!
When her younger bother, Harry Sachs died in 1958, also from lung cancer, there was less fuss. Harry was a most talented artist in watercolour. His life had been saved by being hidden, living alone on an old boat, in Friesland, Netherlands in WW2. My mother and he would paint in the green fields of Sedrup during long summer days in 1950.
Roger and his son, Albert, fourteen years older than me, and built like a film star, took me mountain climbing near Annecy in France. I have photos and vivid memories of that adventure and of all of those halcyon days as a French-speaking “Swiss” adolescent.
Young, alert and fancy-free, I noticed the lack of pasty-faced repressed north Europeans. I made myself a pact. I promised myself one day that I would settle down with a spirited Mediterranean girl.
At one time, briefly, I had a French-speaking girlfriend. Sylvianne Fauchet was a farmer’s daughter living near Epeisses in Avully. We went potato picking together, with dry baguettes, cheese and cheap red wine drunk from a bottle.
Our children offered their combined unified front of strong disapproval of my smoking at home. This was a tremendous stimulus to my giving up. I will always be grateful to the both of them. So many of their generation couldn’t resist tobacco, or worse.
I renewed and deliberately built on my French language skills, written and spoken, from my time at the Lycée Français de Londres, South Kensington (1953 – 59).
I spent hours unndisturbed walking the streets of Geneva in the early 1960’s. It was a cosmopolitan hub, attracting not only tourists from all over Europe, but families of multinationals, expats working for the UN and other NGO’s.
My Father and Roger had met in 1947, and formed strong brotherly bonds of friendship. During those long weeks in hot summer holiday sunshine (1959 – 63), I learned from Roger, one of life’s naturally gifted motivators, how to throw myself with pride and gusto into physical work, no matter what type.
With my first earned 25 Swiss Francs, I bought a Kodak Brownie 126 camera in a photographic shop in the rue du Mont Blanc. It was owned by a client friend of Roger.
I never spoke English on my idyllic stays in Geneva far from parental control. Instead I resolved to use my near-fluent French to pass myself off as a French boy.
Fifty-one years on, in Switzerland, having managed to track down Albert, who had been the elder brother I never had, I was mortified to hear him gleefully tell me Sylvianne and he had got together too!
So it was I married an amazing Brazilian girl, cold like ice and hot like fire, in 1979. My “Girl From Ipanema”!
Read my EveryNow blog post here:
https://everynow.blog/2020/09/24/face-to-face-with-lifes-extreme-fragility/
My Mother’s brothers all smoked cigarettes. Her older brother, Hans Sachs was by all reports a Renaissance Man whom everyone loved and admired. He died of lung cancer in 1952(?). Someone rang her at home from Holland.
I feel upset to this day to recall her terrible sudden cries of grief. I couldn’t fathom it out. I’d never heard or seen her cry. I walked into their bedroom. My Dad was embracing her to hold her up. He said, “She’s got a headache.”
Few direct truths were told in those times. And I now know so much was kept from me for better or for worse, in order not to “upset” me.
I started rolling my own very slim fags at Frensham Heights School in strict secrecy aged 15. I used Rizla Blue papers, because they were the thinnest. My choice was “A1 Light” tobacco in red two shilling quarter ounce packets with gold foil.
I cannot understand how I avoided lung cancer, though I requently had bronchitis in autumn until I gave up with help from hypnotherapeutic suggestion in July 1994.
Thank you both from the Heart!
The View at 72+ 