My Mother in Matumi, dignified, anxious and preparing for departure in 2007.
Mom was in a hurry. She travelled more and did more than most people and understood more and more of what she did meant something. But she was always very nervous before a trip. The first big trip she was to make when she was four didn't happen. Then there was the anxiety of departure from France after the war when she was 10. Finally they got away in 1947 on Czechoslovakian passports.
Matumi 2007
She was always very nervous before a trip. I want to talk in the present tense because the past tense frames events and gives them an artificial rim. Was I the closest person to my mother. Was I the most beloved. Of course not. Of course I was. Love is not a false dichotomy. The more of an outsider you are the more paradoxical relationships appear to you-especially if you are a parvenu. Remember I have been frighteningly aware of my surroundings and my parents since I was three. When did you appear on the horizon? How long were you around?
Mom's love for Chris had such a special quality that, though I observed it, only Chris knows. And not long before the end, when Andy was looking after his daughter with anorexia Mom repeated, almost in a shout. Andy is a saint. Andy is a saint.
She loved me. The last words she spoke to me were I love you Darling. The last words of my father were. Love you. What more could a son ask for? What do I need a God for if my parents knew me to my core and loved me. I understand the ancestors and why they were worshiped. Who knows you whole? Certainly not 'God'. Harvey the invisible rabbit.
And Mom and Dad had so many adopted sons and daughters. Why be possessive. I am not. How many of my friends became close to my parents. How many of their young colleagues too. Dale was Dad's adopted son. At least his political son and his tennis son.
But listen, I was conceived on the 7th of December, the night of their Honeymoon and it was me that Mom wrote about in her letters and said what she hoped I would become. I was the oldest son. A conundrum to most of their friends. Too complex. Far too sensitive. Far too perceptive. Sabotaged and self-sabotaging. Unambitious?
Abingdon 1971
At the age of 9 my mother read me the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and I didn't realize that Lucy was exactly the age of my mother - the war child. When she was young she had been a prodigy of sorts and then I started writing poems at nine and she became convinced that I was too. When she was Lucy's age Mom lost herself in the world of the imagination and she lead me there and showed it to me. Where children's minds disappear to in war, under duress - Pan's Labyrith an over-literal riff.
Norman Levy arranged for tests and I didn't do well. Case dismissed. But how do you measure intelligence through poetry? Now that I am an educationalist I understand how aggressive it was to do that. How it lacked construct validity.
Yes. Look it up. Construct validity. You don't measure the ability to write poems through pattern recognition tests.
The same thing happened to my son. He was 11 when we got to the UK and they scored him on an IQ test. He didn't score high and despite winning the chemistry prize at the London Oratory and being the only students to do medicine from that prestigious school at UCL for two years and getting the highest score on the BMAT that initial test still rankles. Though he was one of the best students at the Oratory he mentions that he was never encouraged or made to feel that he was. That came from himself. From us.
What was Norman thinking? What were my parents thinking?
So let us say, then, despite a test I was administered at the age of 9, for the sake of argument, that I share my mother's gift. That I can write and that I am intelligent. Can you stretch to that?
I've been thinking about my father's complete hatred of the Zionist state of Israel. I understand him. But I have come to understand this. That you cannot be married to someone who is Jewish, in the way my mother was, and constantly be vitriolic about the idea of a Jewish state.
My father would be deeply hurt. He was deeply hurt when I said this, but I have to say it.
You have to be onside with people. There is a connection between the holocaust and the state of Israel and it happened right with Hertzl who was a colleague of my great Grandfather's on the Neue Freie Presse.
Hostital Fochs, Suresnes, 1943
Now I am clear that my Grandfather rejected Herzl's ideas. He was assimilated, he was a monarchist, but look at the pictures of the Austrians gathered in Vienna in 1938 shouting for Hitler and tell me to my face that a Jewish State was not a reasonable response to that vile collection of humanity. Austrians gathering to persecute their fellow Austrians, their brothers. The people they went to school with.
And for my mother to have to live with this constant outrage against the mere idea of a Jewish state, not Israel itself, but the idea of a Jewish state must have been wearing. Though my mother signed pledges together with my father saying Israeli oppression of the Palestinians not in my name.
Of course she signed those things. Beside a fire once my father said kindly that I sang very well. He himself had been a very very good singer year after year in Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He told everyone I was. Chris had a Karaoke machine and set it up one Christmas. Phil, Dad says you can sing well. Let's here it then: And so I sang softly, in self-parody, and felt a little humiliated.
But at the fire in Matumi my father said: Sing something Phil. And I sang and all I could think of to sing was The Peat Bog Soldiers.
This delighted my mother and she laughed and said Well done Phil and we sang it together. Though we couldn't remember all the words. And my father was discomfited and I am sorry for that, but I do understand.
Did you, who are not my brothers or the next generation, whoever you are reading this blog, who think you were close to my parents understand that about them? No you didn't.
You may feel I am reading all the personal letters of my parents and things that do not concern me. Well let me tell you, first of all, whoever you are and whatever relationship you had with my parents: I'll be the judge of that, not you.
Paris 1970
And if you think that someone whose life has been shaped by travel on three continents throughout the whole of his childhood, who has the burden of a partially unfulfilled political inheritance, who is as genetically and spiritually close to my mother as I am has no right to write about her then let me ask you. At what point did you start issuing facile impertinent Papal benediction.
Of course my mother had exquisite manners. I don't. There's a difference! And so I can tell you this: it's not a matter for you to decide in what way it is appropriate for me to behave, and don't f***ing underestimate me?
Merry Christmas.
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