(Part One)

England

In the Beginning

In the summer of 1955, at the height of the fame of the two giant media icons of the new found teenage consciousness, the Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean (also the year of his death) and Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley, young 15 year old Mary went to a party with her older boyfriend Joseph. They had too much to drink and one thing led to another and Mary fell pregnant – no immaculate conception here but ‘an under aged girl, plied with drink and ‘statutorily raped’, according to the authorities. In the mid-50’s London’s back street abortion clinics were doing a roaring trade and their boom started towards the end of the Second World War with the stationing of US Airmen at British bases who quickly wooed the local girls with plentiful supplies of rationed items, particularly previously unheard of silky nylon stockings as well of a plentiful supply of gum and smooth talk – read more HERE.
Having an illegitimate child really was something that would bring shame upon a family in 1950’s England and would eradicate any social standing they might have had in English society where things were best seen and not heard and everyone deeply cared about ‘what the neighbours might think’.

At the tender age of 15, Mary was taken away from her parents by the guardians of the newly established ‘Welfare State’ and placed in a care home that was miles from her home and family and Mary was alone on the other side of London in Lewisham SE13, then one of the most run down and poorest of London’s borough’s. There they tried to make Mary reveal to them, so that they could inform the police, the identity of the father of the baby Mary was carrying. Mary steadfastly refused to reveal this information to them even when Mary was placed before the Social Services Court and was told by the Magistrate that she must reveal the father’s identity to the court, Mary refused and she was then told that she would have to abort the baby as she was too young to look after it. Mary insisted that she was determined to give birth to her baby and so the authorities then informed Mary that the baby would be taken away from her and given to a foster family as soon as the baby was born. Mary was alone and in a frightening and cold environment but she knew that she was determined to have the baby and keep it no matter what.

The baby was born on 2 February 1956 and Mary was allowed to keep the baby and take it home with promises and guarantees given by Mary’s mother (Nana) that she would help raise and care for the baby, but they were constantly subjected to ‘spot visits‘ to check that the baby was being properly looked after.

The Church’s attitude to unmarried mothers with illegitimate babies is plain to see in this article where the inference is that the illegitimate babies were killed –  read about it HERE.

On 14/1/2021 the Irish prime minister issued an apology following a report into the deaths of 9,000 children in Irish state and church run institutions for unmarried mothers and their babies – read about it HERE.

If you think that those were draconian days then look no further than to a shocking news item from Sky News dated 5/12/2013 concerning a baby that was literally torn from its mother’s womb on behalf of  the UK’s Social Services, the so called ‘servants of the state’:-

‘A pregnant woman was sedated against her will and her baby removed by cesarean section and taken into care after instructions from social services, it has been claimed.

Social workers went to the High Court to get a court order which allowed them to take the child from the mother’s womb, according to reports. The Italian woman, who already has two children, was visiting Britain to attend a Ryanair hostess training course at Stansted Airport in Essex when she suffered a panic attack. The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, suffered from a bipolar condition but had failed to take her medication. Despite speaking to the woman’s mother in Italy on the telephone, who explained the mental health problems, police took her to a psychiatric hospital. She was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and five weeks later she was sedated – despite her protests  – and her child removed and taken in to care, The Sunday Telegraph has disclosed. The woman was then sent back to Italy without her daughter, who is now 15 months old and the center of an international legal wrangle.

In February the woman, who is back on her medication, returned to Britain seeking the return of her daughter but was told by a judge at Chelmsford Crown Court that her child would instead be put up for adoption, the paper says. Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has taken up her case and told Sky News he plans to raise the matter in Parliament. Mr Hemming, who is the chairman of the Public Family Law  Reform Coordinating Campaign, said: “She wanted to go back to Italy to have her child naturally. “If somebody is a bit ill and then they are sectioned then that does not make them better. There was a situation where obviously the thing to have done was to get this woman back to Italy and stabilize her. “I cannot see why it would have been that difficult to get her back to her family and her two children.” The High Court in Rome has questioned why British law has been applied to an Italian citizen.

The woman, who is amicably divorced from her husband, is continuing her battle to get her daughter returned either to her or into the care of her friends or relatives. Her lawyer in Britain, Brendan Flemming, told The Sunday Telegraph, which has seen court documents ordering the cesarean section: “I have never heard of anything like this in all my 40 years in the job. “I can understand if someone is very ill that they may not be able to consent to a medical procedure but a forced cesarean is unprecedented.”

Questions are being raised as to why the woman’s relatives in Italy, who were caring for her other two children while she was detained, were not consulted about the matter. The courts have argued that they have jurisdiction over the case because the woman did not protest at the time. In addition the judge ruled her child should not be returned to her in case she fails to take her medication again. Essex County Council told Sky News in a statement: “Essex County Council does not comment on the circumstances of on-going individual cases involving vulnerable people and children.”

As a footnote Abortion was the leading cause of death in the world in 2018 killing 42 million people, you can read more HERE.

As the lone child of a single-parent Mother who had to work long hours to support me, I was in effect raised by my grandmother who we all referred to as ‘Nana’ who was Welsh, as was my Mum and Nana was in effect the ‘father figure’ of the household.

Me aged about 3 and with my Mum at Brighton

Even though we officially lived in the ‘posh’ North West London borough of Hampstead, five yards north across the road was the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm in the more working class London borough of Camden. We were very poor and when I was a child there were no computers or Game-boys to play with and I remember I had a favourite rubber duck and a teddy to play with but no other real toys that I can remember.

I recall that Sunday’s were the big day as Sunday’s were bath days. We would have a bath once a week and the bath was in the kitchen on the top floor of the massive old Victorian house, the top and middle floors of which we rented, Eton College were the landlords and they owned lots of other properties and land in the area. The bath had a wooden board over it which would act as the kitchen work surface and above that was the washing line to dry our clothes. In the kitchen in the cupboard under the sink by the window was Nana’s ‘bucket’ which was her toilet as she was too aged to go up and down the numerous stairs to reach the toilet which was an extension built on to the ground floor as we had no toilet in our flat. We had a big black and white cat called Susie and I’ve always had either a dog or a cat ever since and my love of all animals has not waned.

I grew up in a time of steam trains, black and white TV’s and music, I remember the music for I had been given a tiny blue plastic transistor radio that I used to crawl under my bedclothes at night and listen to the fantastic music that was pumped out by Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg which I could only pick up without interference in the still of the night. My uncle had given me some old ’45’ vinyl single records of his which I played on the old Dansette portable record player my Aunt owned and those songs were something special, Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining in my Heart’, ‘Everyday’, ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Otis Reding’s ‘Respect’ and ‘These Arms of Mine’ as well as C-90 cassette tapes of Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits ‘Strangers in the Night’ and also C-90’s of  Louis Armstrong and Count Basie’, I would discover The Beatles and Dylan much later!

The streets were my playground although friends were few and far between. I had two or three mates from school who I used to get into adventures with like exploring the local railroad yard and building our camp in the railway yard salt storage room there or playing down by the canal, or building a go-cart from old pram wheels and planks of wood with string tied to the front wheels as a steering device and that kind of thing, but also in those days there were no violent gangs roaming the street nor were there everyday muggings, although you had to watch out for the bigger boys, you never felt danger walking or playing in the streets though I remember one day Duggie and I popped into Chalk Farm Underground Station for a pee in the Gents and one of the cubicle doors suddenly opened and there stood a guy in his 40’s with his todger in his hand asking if we wanted anything? Well Duggie and I ran like the wind all the way up Haverstock Hill past Belsize Park Tube Station without stopping, fearful that the pervert was chasing us, which he wasn’t of course.

Aged 8

I was informed that I was a Christian and that I belonged to the Church of England and I was also puzzlingly baptised as a baby (double indemnity maybe)? I remember attending pre-school nursery at a Convent run nunnery in Parkway, Camden Town and my only recollections of that place is having dried toast as a mid-morning snack, sleeping on green canvas camp beds as a siesta in the afternoon and also running away from there one afternoon and somehow arriving at home unscathed after having caught a 31 bus from Camden High Street as a 6 year old with no money in his pockets and then waiting on the outside door step of our home till early evening when someone came home and opened the front door for me.

I attended Primrose Hill Primary School which was a state run school for 6-11 year olds and there I learnt many of the values that I still hold today like truthfulness, not stealing, showing respect to one’s elders and dealing with others as you wanted to be treated yourself. I also remember some of the Biblical New Testament parables that were told to us by our religious education teacher Mr. Jay. Primary school was a nice warm period in my life.

Class of 1963 (I’m 2nd left, 2nd row)

My first experience of finding out what death was happened when a bigger boy, Brandon Mitchel, who was in a higher class than me was killed on the railway. The nearby British Rail train station to my home was Primrose Hill Station, which was around the corner from my home in Adelaide Road and many children used the British Rail trains in order to travel to and from school. Apparently he and others boys had been playing with the carriage doors whilst the train was in the long tunnel leading from South Hampstead Station to Primrose Hill Station and the door opened and he fell out into the tunnel and was killed. We all watched his funeral procession drive slowly past the school in Princess Road below from the big Victorian school hall windows, although we didn’t really fully understand the real concept of death but of course we realised that we’d never see Brandon again.

Primrose Hill Primary School

The other tragedies I remembered from those early days were the Aberfan disaster when a mud slide engulfed a school in Aberfan, South Wales killing many children and also the J.F. Kennedy assassination, and I recall watching the funeral of J.F.K. on our black and white Baird TV and I remember seeing his small son salute his casket, an image which has stayed in my memory.

We lived on the top 2 floors of a big Victorian house in Adelaide Road and another family occupied the ground and basement floors.

Aged 10

When I was about 10, one day the downstairs bigger boy asked if I wanted to ‘play a game’ with him and with his friend who was our next door neighbour and was the same age as him. Of course I said ‘yes’, even though I didn’t really have much to do with them as they were about 15 or 16 and they had in the past taunted me about my lack of a father as when people had asked me where my father was I would innocently say that he’d been ‘killed in the war’ and to a 10 year old child that seemed to make sense but to older boys who knew a bit of mathematics, they quickly worked out that since I was born 11 years after the war had ended then my claim was impossible. My next answer to questions about my father was a story that my aunt had told me that my father had been killed in a car accident. Anyway, the games these boys were playing were I guess what you’d call ‘sexual exploration’ or trying to find their sexual identity but of course I had no idea about sex and luckily I was not touched or molested and to me at the time it really just seemed like a game and a few more of these ‘games’ took place and of course I was made to swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone about them but shortly thereafter it suddenly woke me up to the existence of sex and sexual pleasure and I think that up to then I had really been a slim handsome totally innocent child and that from then on into my teens I became fat and lacked self-esteem. I think I subconsciously tried to make myself as unattractive as possible to other males and I became totally withdrawn and did not go out unless absolutely necessary, I did not mix well with others and felt uncomfortable in a crowd and this condition would continue into my early 20’s.

 Outside the site of my old home (since demolished and replaced by a newer house) at 21, Adelaide Road

From the age of eleven I attended Quintin-Kynaston Secondary Modern School in St. Johns Wood (not far from ‘The Beatles’ Abbey Road recording studios). In fact when I joined it was just Kynaston School a comprehensive school next to the adjoining Quintin Grammar School but shortly after I joined the two schools were amalgamated into one.

Quintin-Kynaston School

Quintin-Kynaston School gave me a strange cold feeling and was in some respects a violent shock to my system as no-one seemed to be friendly there as everyone had seemed to be at Primrose Hill Primary School and it was hard to feel at home or wanted there. Teachers would slap you around the head, as our Chinese Math’s teacher, Mr. Lu often would if you got things wrong and he would say, as he was slapping you around the head in a heavy Chinese accent, ‘You are a vely sirry boy‘! I think my adolescent depression was triggered by both the result of the sexual games I was enticed to play with others and also this cold experience of school and really that’s what it was, it was like leaving the warmth and protectiveness of your childhood and being thrown into this cold and seemingly unloving different world, a world without love, of hate, of violence, of murder – the real world as unfortunately we know it today.

By the age of 13 I had started delivering newspapers in the early mornings and in all weathers for pocket money, whether in rain or thick snow, locally. The newsagent’s was around the corner from our home in Bridge Approach and was opposite to Primrose Hill Station on the bridge and I also used to earn extra pocket money by typing envelope addresses on ‘brown plain envelopes’ for Rod. Rod, who really did resemble a short bearded gnome, had a thriving porno mail order business going on in the back of his newspaper and tobacconist shop, actually they were more what you would call ‘saucy books’ that he ordered from Denmark than ‘porn’ and the books had no pictures in them and were really very tame compared to what is available today (apparently)!

I also used to work for Rod selling newspapers on Sunday’s on a pitch just inside Chalk Farm Underground Station and it was an easy 4 or 5 hours work usually, that is  until I got mugged one Sunday morning by an elder boy and his sister who had a large Alsatian dog on the lead and he threatened to stab me and set his dog on me if I didn’t give them all the money, which I did. As I was handing the money over I noticed a bearded gentleman standing by the nearby public underground phone booth which he then proceeded to use and I found out later that he was a newspaper reporter who had just happened to be there and after witnessing what had happened he had phoned his newspaper to report what he had witnessed and only after that did he then phone the police to report the crime and worse of all, he did nothing to help except after the muggers had run away, try to get information from me to use in his story. This went against all I had learnt about helping those in need and it taught me perhaps the true nature of newspaper reporters and the ilk.

My first impressionable and not particularly pleasant encounter with the police was to follow. They arrived in their marked police car, in fact I recognised one of the police officers as living in the police flats opposite Chalk Farm Station and next to my home and he and his fellow officer then drove me to nearly Camden Lock where one of them took me down to the canal bank and started to question me. I told him what had happened and I always tried to tell the truth but he had a big smirk on his face and basically called me a liar and told me that I was working with the robbers and that I should tell him the truth before I got into more trouble than I already was in! I think I must have turned white with shock and I didn’t understand what was happening or why a police officer, who I was taught to respect was treating me like I was a liar and a thief and I just kept repeating to him the truth about what had happened and he then seemed to give up and accept that what I was telling him was the truth and we then walked back to the police car and they drove me home.

 

My ‘15 Seconds’ with Andy Warhol

I also worked for Rod in my early teens selling hamburgers and hot dogs for pocket money by the steps leading up to The Roundhouse Theatre in Chalk Farm, just around the corner from my home and a mile up the road from Camden Town. The Roundhouse was and still is a mega artistic cultural centre putting on music concerts and shows and plays. I first saw Ian Hunter perform there, standing a few yards from him as he sang a new song about God and I first heard Hawkwind’s amazing synthesizer led song ‘Silver Machine’ come blasting out of the doors into the street where I was selling hot dogs and many stars played there including Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The Doors, David Bowie, Black Sabbath, Genesis, Jefferson Airplane and many more, and I would sneak in to watch many other bands perform there and no doubt sold a few burgers to a star or two as well!  On one particular night it was to be the grand opening of Andy Warhol’s controversial new play called ‘Pork‘ and no-one knew if he would fly in from New York or not for the London grand opening of his show. My grandmother and her sister, who was up visiting from Wales, decided to protest against the reported sexual content and nudity in the play and were amongst a small crowd waiting outside. Lo and behold but who should come skipping along the street but Andy Warhol himself with a pretty young boy on his arm. My grandmother and her sister went up to him and shouted at the top of their heavily accented Welsh voices ‘PIG, PIG’! To which Warhol, almost without blinking an eyelid, stopped, looked at them, put his hands on his hips and said, ‘Oh no my dear, I think that you’ll find that it’s called ‘PORK‘, as he minced away with a big smirk on his face. He then came towards me and I immediately spoke and apologised to him for my Grandmothers disrespect and rudeness to which he looked into my eyes, smiled and said, ‘Oh, I quite enjoyed it actually‘ and he gave a little laugh and a wiggle of his hips and then climbed up the stairs to The Roundhouse. Anyway, that was my little encounter with the legendary Andy Warhol.

Outside The Roundhouse

Aye, Aye, Captain!

I belonged to the Regents Park Boating Club (since re-named ‘The Pirate Club’ ) which was a old large steel barge moored along the Regents Canal up from Camden Lock and we used to be able to take rowing boats and canoes out for rides along the canal for a small weekly sub and I even managed, with the pocket money I had saved up from working for Rod, to buy my own little wooden rowing boat called ‘Amanda’ that I moored at the boating club. The ‘Captain’ of the boating club who we called ‘Peg-Leg’, as he had a pronounced limp (and I presume a real peg-leg), would dish out a form of punishment that definitely would be banned today and would most probably lead to police investigations, that of spanking the children, usually with them just in their pants whilst bent over his knee with a paddle, slipper or bare hand (see http://www.corpun.com/ukil6911.htm below or see Note 1) but anyway, what did we innocent children understand?

  Regents Boating Club

(This is from the  website of www.corpun.com Illicit CP –  November 1969, The people, London, 9 November 1969)Throw away that bat, m’lord By Graham JayIn these enlightened times the painful practice of giving naughty boys a good old-fashioned whacking is just about dead. Apart from a few die-hard sticklers for discipline, nobody much approves of it anyway.But on a converted barge, which members of a youth club use as their headquarters, they still know what it’s like to have their bottoms stung.For spanking is one of the club’s punishments — administered monthly by the group’s founder, the 2nd Viscount St. Davids, no less.He doesn’t call it whacking or spanking. His novel term for it is “paddling”. For the instrument used to send the dust flying from an offender’s trousers is a chunk of wood which looks like a small bat and is called the “paddle”.In the old days wily youngsters would have stuffed a thick copy of Elementary Mathematics into their pants.

‘Nasty’

Today, they take a stronger line. Members of the Regent’s Boat Club, which includes girls, too, have signed a petition calling for an end to “paddling.” “If I’m present, I invariably do the spanking myself,” said Lord St. Davids — full name Jestyn Austen Plantagenet Phillipps. “I don’t like leaving it to anyone else. It’s a nasty task, like cleaning out the lavatories. “If they are young members — say seven or eight — I spank them very gently and I never use the paddle on them. Only on older children. Boys have also been caned. I once had to cane a girl, too.”

Parents of youngsters who join the club, on the Regent’s Canal at Camden Town, London, are asked to sign a copy of the rules. These say that any youngsters breaking them can choose one of three penalties:

1. Being expelled from the club.

2. Being taken off the promotion and privileges list, which involves restrictions on using the club’s 40 boats.

3. Spanking (or “in bad cases” caning) on the “seat”.

A senior skipper at the club, 14-year-old David Sprigg, said: “I know we’re supposed to have a choice, but no one wants to leave the club and the other punishment is too long. So we choose the spanking.”

Another practice which members are campaigning to do away with is “The Promise.” This is a written undertaking which offenders have been called upon to make. It says: “I promise to behave myself, and if I break my promise my seat is to be caned hard.” But Lord St. Davids, a 52-year-old Old Etonian, says that he is content now to have verbal promises.

‘No sulks’

He went on: “It was the members themselves who suggested the cane. I suggested the ‘bad list’ and it follows logically that they should be offered the choice of no longer attending.” His lordship says that now he no longer uses the cane. He would only give offenders a “good spanking” with the “paddle”. “Within a minute or two of being paddled, they’re out boating happily again,” said Lord St. Davids. “We don’t have any long sulks and that’s the whole point of it — get it over quickly.” “I had to spank three or four girls in the spring who were rather badly behaved and annoyed our neighbours,” he said. His lordship added: “I admit our methods are unusual. I’m a revolutionary in many ways, and no doubt revolting to many people. “But I don’t believe I’m an ogre. I don’t even think I’m misguided. Am I?”

The anti-whacking petition was handed to a member of the committee, Mr. Paddy Walker, who runs a pleasure barge business and antique shop. He said: “I’m a founder committee man and personally I disagree with the spanking business and always have. But I’ve been in the minority in the past and you must remember the rules were agreed by members when it was started. “You must also appreciate the warden’s position. He’s in a very tough area, and whackings are something he’s always accepted. Remember, he is a product of the English public school system.”

Mrs. Polly Rogers, a 48-year-old architect and former treasurer of the club, said of the spankings “I think it’s a jolly good rule, especially the way Lord St. Davids applies it. “He really loves the club and the children and gives an awful lot of time to it.”

A spokesman for the Inner London Education Authority, which subsidizes the club, said: “Because of the risk of accidents, the club has strict safety rules which we’re told are rigorously enforced. “Nevertheless, our local youth officer has told the management committee of the club that he doesn’t like the corporal punishment rules and has asked them to reconsider them.”

The club, undoubtedly, is an admirable innovation which is being copied all over the country. It has a flawless safety record. Indeed, two members have received awards for saving lives. Strict rules are, obviously, necessary for safety and smooth running. But whacking? Is that really necessary?

In fairness, I fancy that Lord St. Davids, a respected sailor and active member of the House of Lords, is having doubts about it himself. As he told me: “I’m trying to let the children do what they want … I try to keep on learning.”

Right then. It seems a good opportunity to have all hands on deck … to see the “paddle” chucked overboard.

 [NOTE BY C.F.: The first paragraph of this item seems astonishing in retrospect — whacking “just about dead” in 1969!! Of course, as is now well documented, here on this website and elsewhere, nothing could be further from the truth. But in the middle and late 1960s many adults, possibly misled by the propaganda of the teaching profession (which has always and consistently understated the extent of c.p. at any given time), really did believe that corporal punishment had largely disappeared after they had left school. I remember being carried along with this belief myself at the time, even though I had only left school myself four years earlier, and knew well that c.p. had been very much alive at that time, at least at the kind of school I attended.]

By the Regents Canal and the bridge that Dylan walks over in the video for ‘Blood in my Eyes’

I had already endured the dreaded ‘cane’ on at least 2 occasions as a form of legal punishment at Primrose Hill Primary School from the headmaster for misdemeanors, so this was just another form of punishment I thought, of course being totally innocent as to any sexual overtones that could be deduced from the ‘Captain’s ‘need to put small children over his knee to smack their bottoms as punishment in this manner!

 

It’s Raining Men

Nana used to rent out the top floor bedroom in our house to a single Christian church-going lady called Jane. She was in her late 40’s or early 50’s and we never used to hear a peep out of her, that is until one evening when we heard a crashing sound and a gut wrenching scream coming from Jane’s room! We all rushed up and banged her door which she opened terrified and crying pointing to the wardrobe. Nana and I entered her room and noticed that the wardrobe door was being held closed from the inside and more than that, there was a big gaping hole in the ceiling above Jane’s bed which was now covered in white dust! Jane said terrifyingly as she shook with fear, ‘He’s in there, he’s in there’! Nana, who had a large wooden rolling pin in her hand ready to strike if needed, said in a deep menacing voice, ‘Come out now’! The wardrobe door slowly opened and a short slightly built dark skinned Bangladeshi man in his 30’s wearing just a white vest, boxer shorts and covered in white dust from head to toe emerged saying in a shaking heavy Indian accent, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’.  Apparently he had been having an affair with the next door neighbor, a large red headed buxom Irish lady called Bridget, when her lorry driver Irish husband, who was a large aggressive Irishman came home unexpectedly and so Bridget pushed her Bangladeshi lover up through a trap door in the ceiling cavity and he then tried to make his way to freedom by walking on the ceiling’s wooden rafters in the pitch dark and though and behold he lost his footing and crashed through the ceiling right onto the bottom of sleeping Jane’s bed! Well, we gave this poor shaking man a blanket and a cup of tea and he would return a few times to us after that to plaster and repair the ceiling hole he had made and we never told Bridget or her husband what had happened!

 

I Lost It

Because I never really had any one in my life to motivate me or who I could follow as a role model, like a brother or sister, I just drifted through secondary school trying to get to grips with what I was being taught and I eventually left school at 18, I could have left at 16 but what would I then do and I certainly had no aspirations of going on to university as that wasn’t for me and was perceived then as being for ‘rich kids’ and so I left school with passes in the only subjects I really liked, I gained an ‘O’ Level pass in English Language and a Grade One (‘O’ Level pass) in Social Studies (Sociology).

I lost my virginity when at 16 after I had gotten extremely drunk on rum & cokes with a couple of school mates at a weekly disco at a pub we used to go to called ‘The Birds Nest‘ in Hampstead Lane in West Hampstead in London. I remember dancing on the small elevated dance floor to ‘Nut Bush City Limits’ by Tina Turner as we had a choreographed stupid dance we used to do to it and next thing I recall was that I was down in the bar area snogging with this red headed 20 year old Canadian girl who had picked me up and next thing was leading me to her nearby home to ‘have her way with me‘, not that I was in a fit state to do much but I did what I was instructed to do and then I remember being out in the street in a drunken haze trying to find my way back to the disco never to come across this girl again (if you’d pardon the expression)!

In fact, my first sexual encounter with a girl had been when I was about 15 or 16, when I was selling hot dogs outside of the Roundhouse when Rod introduced me to a female trapeze artist from the Grande Magique Circus who was performing there. Believe it or not her name was ‘Fi-Fi‘ and Rod asked if I could give her a place to stay for a night after the show had finished as she had nowhere to stay and, to cut a long story short, she showed her appreciation by us having mutual non-penetrative sex and I’ll never forget that smell, the first time I had smelt it, I think it’s called Patchouli oil that the hippies in the 60’s used and she reeked of it and I won’t repeat in detail a British discriminatory joke about the reputation of the French for not washing regularly but anyway, I did my bit for queen and country.

I left school not knowing what I was going to do but I felt that I had to find work in order to help with things at home. In English society usually everyone who is working contributes by paying rent to the head of the household.

Almost as soon as I left school at 18 I started working as a sweet shop/tobacconist shop manager. The shop was opposite our home and would become owned by a somewhat cartoon character who was almost indirectly responsible for my going to Israel. He was an archetypal Jew and I say that with no anti-Semitic overtones but he did have a massive hooked nose and he was a miser and in all honesty I just could not see, if Israel was full of people like him, how the country could have survived for as long as it had done and so I decided to check it out for myself for although I really hardly knew anything at all about Israel, I was aware of the Six Day War and of the Yom Kippur War as well as the Entebe Raid and I had an empathy with that country’s struggle. In fact whilst at Quintin-Kynaston School I had written an essay about hunting down and executing a Nazi responsible for killing Jews.

  Chalk Farm Parade and the tobacconist shop where I was a manager, above it the offices of Scotland Yard’s C10 Stolen Car Squad. 

 

Pot Luck

Of course working in the shop meant that I came into contact with all different kinds of people which helped to build my confidence and self-esteem somewhat and I met many people on a daily basis, like plain clothes police officers from the offices above the shop of Scotland Yard’s C10 Stolen Car Squad as well as an American lad I became friends with, or more to the point, he became friends me as I then owned my first car, a small green Hillman Imp which of course was an asset, particularly if you needed to go to different locations across London in order to ‘score’ drugs.  His father was a professor and they lived in a rented flat near to the shop and opposite to my house in an exclusive block of flats owned by Eton College, in fact most of the property in the area, including the house I lived in, was owned by Eton College. This American lad, who was a bit younger than me, introduced me to smoking Hash and, as weird as it seems, and it was, I would enter his apartment to find all of his family, his professor father, his stepmother, his older and his younger sisters and him sitting in a circle on the floor all smoking from a Hash pipe that they would then pass to one another and of course I would be invited to join them. Smoking Hash or Marijuana was never a pleasurable experience for me as not only did I hardly get high, it just made me feel more down and depressed than I already was and it just made me feel more self-conscious and somewhat paranoid. I say they were weird, but not only for their ‘communal family smoking’ which maybe was normal back in the USA, but often after they’d finished smoking the father would take his wife by the hand into their bedroom where they would make extremely loud noisy love while we were all sitting in the next room high, or not, as kites, again, maybe normal back in the USA? Also, there was a noticeable atmosphere where his stepmother was always telling him what to do, which he resented and his sister would often refer to his butt as being ‘flat as a pancake’ – so what exactly was going on amongst themselves is anyone’s guess?

A Jewish girl from Golders Green had somehow befriended me when I was working in the shop, I think as her mother pushed her to ask me out, but we didn’t have much in common and I didn’t find her particularly attractive, well in truth she was rotund and somewhat unattractive with very little personality, but anyway, things came to pass that the American lad was looking for an easy lay and so it was arranged that he would ‘deflower’ her at a fellow American rich friend’s rented house next to Primrose Hill and that she would bring her friend along for me. They went downstairs to ‘do the business’ and I was left sitting on the sofa with a girl I did not find the least bit attractive and who failed to ignite any fire in my loins and so when they came back downstairs our American friend was disappointed that ‘I hadn’t taken care of her’. After that he didn’t see this Jewish girl again and he then just continually put her down. I continued being his driver and at least once became so high (or not) that I’m sure I must have been zig-zagging all over the road on the way back from him scoring some Hash that of course you have to sample with the dealer, but by the grace of God I wasn’t stopped or arrested by the police.

I Gotta Get Outta This Place!

I was so fed up with the monotonous daily routine of breakfast, work, dinner, TV, sleep coupled together with an adolescent depression that had carried on into my late teens and maybe beyond and that was not helped by my occasional use of ‘recreational drugs’ with this American lad that made me more depressed, that I decided to break free and experience a different kind of life, life on an Israeli kibbutz! At the age of 21 leaving England was the best move I ever made as it opened my eyes, my mind and my soul, as did discovering Bob Dylan’s music, and it allowed me to see and experience a life I could never have hoped to experience & I liken it to a man being released from prison & tasting that sweet smell of freedom! On Kibbutz Hagoshrim in the north of Israel and not far from the border with Lebanon and Syria, I worked in the orchards picking grapefruits 4 hours a day and afterwards lazing by the swimming pool for the remainder of the day & I led an almost idyllic life in what appeared to me to be Paradise. I returned to London after a year, not because I wanted to but because my air ticket was valid for only a year – initially I signed up for a 10 week stay with ‘Project 67’, and then after getting enough money together to return to Israel by signing on the dole for a few months in The UK, I returned to Kibbutz Hagoshrim where to my surprise we were now being ‘protected’ by a Israeli army group of big tough (ha!) boy and girl soldiers.

By then I had progressed to working in the kibbutz communal dining room so I got to see everyone on the kibbutz during the course of the day at mealtimes. At one lunch time a cute Israeli female soldier named Dina approached me by the refrigerated soda machine in the communal dining room and starting talking with me and she asked if I wanted to go with her that evening to see a big Israeli pop star called Ariel Zilbur at an adjacent kibbutz? Not having a clue who Ariel Zilbur was but finding Dina somewhat attractive and special, maybe the uniform had something to do with it or maybe it was her cute smile and cheekiness, I accepted her invitation and from then on the rest is history, ok ok, so there’s more…. Yes the kibbutz life was known as a place for ‘free love‘ & all that although it wasn’t exactly like that. I remember upon my arrival for the first time at Kibbutz Hagoshrim being shown my sleeping accommodation, which was a large green painted somewhat dilapidated wooden hut surrounded by similar green painted dilapidated wooden huts, by

At 19

a small group of established New Zealand and Australian girl volunteers all sitting in a circle on the grass outside awaiting our groups arrival.

My first kibbutz home

I was allocated the hut where they also slept (my room mates were to be two constantly drunk English volunteers as well as a third maniac depressive northern Englishman), and Liz, the somewhat ‘large’ Aussie from Wagga Wagga barking, ‘Oooh yeah, he’s mine‘ as she grabbed my arm & rested her curly head on it, which somewhat shocked me what with me being a well mannered introverted London boy who had learned there was a time & a place for everything & who tended to shy away from those ‘rough’  and ‘loud’ people & here I was thrown in at the deep end amongst them, but I tell you, the kibbutz was the best learning ground!

I remember Liz, who I’d guess was about 25 and was a physical instruction teacher from some place called ‘Wagga Wagga‘ in central Australia and who had been on the kibbutz about 6 months working in the dining room kitchen, there was also Ann who was a very posh New Zealand girl whose parents owned a sheep farm there & also an Aborigine girl Marie, who lived in our hut with her Aussie surfing mad husband, Wes, then there was Mike. Now Mike was a bearded South African, I’d say he was at least 40 and he appeared to me to be one of those world-wise-travellers who’d seen & done it all and I thought of him as a bit of a know-it-all & I tried to avoid him as best I could, but for the some reason the girls just could not resist him. The two constantly drunk English guys whom I had the misfortune to have accompany me from London and who I shared our room with, didn’t have long to stay on the kibbutz, after all, all the kibbutz asked was that you work a mere 4 hours a day, don’t cause trouble and that you get up for work on time every day. I was lumbered with them in the orchards picking grapefruits & if there was the odd day that they actually turned up for work, bearing in mind that at the height of summer we started working at 4 am & finished by 8 am in time for breakfast and then bed as it became unbearably hot, specially for an Englishman used to the clouds & rain, they invariably would disappear & would be found fast asleep in a drunken stupor under a grapefruit tree in the orchard.

Among the grapefruit trees of the kibbutz

Inevitably they were asked to leave the kibbutz & I remember them being very put out about it & they couldn’t understand why? It was only by a twist of fate that I ended up at Kibbutz Hagoshrim at all as our group was supposed to go to the nearby Kibbutz Kfar Blum where the Princess of Thailand was herself a volunteer and I would later, many years later, accompany the Princess as part of her entourage on 4 different tours of Israel whenever she visited Israel, although I never told her that we could have been fellow volunteers on the same kibbutz if things had turned out differently!

I recall that my first girl friend on Kibbutz Hagoshrim was an extremely white & thinly anaemic German girl called Silvia, who really didn’t possess a sense of humour or much character at all and I’d say that we were more friends than boyfriend and girlfriend.

My next girlfriend was a blonde Danish nymphomaniac called Susan, I mean I didn’t realise she was a nymphomaniac until after a while & actually I guess she was my first real love BUT she had a thing for guys, all guys, especially Latin guys and what with there being a group of Mexican Jewish volunteers staying on the kibbutz, it became more than obvious that she was perhaps being more friendly then she should have been towards them, but anyway to cut a long story short she taught me a lot that I needed to carnally know & I think eventually she moved in with a kibbutz member & stayed a while longer on the kibbutz.

My fellow kibbutz hut mates (Liz, Ann and Susan) in the dining room

Whenever it was known that a group of volunteers was arriving from abroad, especially if they were from Scandinavia, all the single kibbutz guys would be sniffing around hoping to find one to shack up with & for the new volunteer this arrangement had it’s advantages as it meant that she didn’t have to live in a wooden shack with the rest of her group, she also had her own privacy & that she was well looked after & she would usually stay on after her group had returned to their country of origin. After that I was friendly with a rich English girl, Annabel & then another rich girl from South Africa, Michelle before encountering my first Israeli girl, Alice, who in hindsight was a bit ‘doo-laly’ but was ok. So, by the time of my second arrival at Kibbutz Hagoshrim I was a seasoned volunteer & after having worked in the dinning room I was duly placed working in the lofty position of being in charge of weed spraying in the cotton fields. Kibbutz Hagoshrim’s cotton was the finest quality in Israel, mostly because the kibbutz was afforded almost unlimited supplies of almost free water to irrigate its fields with and once the weed problem was taken care of, it allowed the cotton buds to fully develop.

 Me in the cotton fields

So I was in charge of various volunteers who I would supervise in aiming & shooting the weeds with their spray guns whilst balancing on plastic seats tied to the front of the tractor I was driving. I must admit that my favorite times at work were with a group of about 10 German girl volunteers who always insisted at the end of work that I drive them on the tractor to the river that ran through the cotton fields so that they could strip down to their bras and panties & cool off after a hard days work spraying by them swimming in the ice cold river water! Perhaps I kick myself for lost opportunities but then again I console myself with the notion that I was in a position of authority & it would have been wrong to have abused my position (yeah, right!) even if they were so free and willing!

 

The crop spraying tractor in the cotton fields

So by the time I’d started to go out with Dina (well, I use that expression as there wasn’t actually anywhere to go as the kibbutz was miles from the nearest town & was surrounded by a high & barbed wired covered security fence), another girl appeared on the scene. Her name was Caroline, affectionately known by us as ‘mitzvadots’ which is Hebrew for ‘suitcases’ as she had the most massive posterior I have yet to see! So it must have been well known on the kibbutz that Dina and I were boyfriend & girlfriend as it’s a small community where everyone seems to know everything, and so it was kind of amazing to both of us when, whilst watching a film in the old dining room (when the Monday night film wasn’t cancelled – Monday night was film night and it invariably happened that the film would be cancelled as a kibbutz member had died & the film was cancelled as a mark of respect), Dina on my left with my left arm around her hugging her & exchanging an occasional kiss, Caroline would come & sit on my right & would take my bare arm & would start to tickle it – Caroline was from a rich South African family and used to servants and I doubt very much if she’d ever had a boyfriend let alone kissed a boy & I suppose she was very innocent & for some reason that was unbeknown to me, had fallen for me. I can’t remember how we managed to get the message across to her that Dina and I were an item but I’m sure it was done as tactfully as possible, anyway, a song I wrote, ‘Miss Goodie Two Shoes‘, is more or less about her & about the South African experience and the last lines of ‘Miss Goodie Two Shoes‘ are a double-entendre reference to Caroline – “And if you don’t start to bend, you’ll soon reach your big end‘ (referring to her huge posterior!)!

So it came to pass that Dina’s army group was due to be posted back to their home kibbutz, which was Kibbutz Afek near Haifa. We had lived together with 3 other army girls in the same room and we slept on a tiny narrow iron framed metal army bed for months in the army groups’ accommodation block by the swimming pool at Kibbutz Hagoshrim and we were very much in love and so when her army group returned to Kibbutz Afek I joined them a few weeks later, leaving Hagoshrim for Kibbutz Afek where I started to work also in the cotton fields. Kibbutz Afek was a million miles from Hagoshrim in that it was a poor kibbutz with mostly old members originally from Poland as most of the young people had left to work in the cities and those that were left were either lazy layabouts and at least one was known as a drug addict. Hagoshrim was a young kibbutz founded by Turkish immigrants and had become rich from the top grade cotton it produced and also from the hair removal machine it produced called Epilady which was later to be the cause of its downfall, as a famous major American company copied their idea & then proceeded to tie the kibbutz up in legal knots in the US courts, requesting delay after delay to the copyright infringement proceedings, each time costing the kibbutz a fortune in legal fees until eventually the kibbutz ran out of money & had to concede defeat. At Afek we were given and were honoured to receive our own stone house to live in as the kibbutz tried to attract young people the best it could & so having a group of 20 or so Israeli soldier boys & girls arrive really did inject new young blood into the life of the kibbutz. We decided that Dina and I wanted to be together forever and decided to get married, but things weren’t that simple. Dina’s father, Shmuel Itzkovits had been sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp when he was a 12 year old where all of his family were killed, except for a cousin & he had a natural distrust and fear of Christians, and to him I was another Christian!

Although I was told that I was a Christian & was in fact was also baptized as a baby, my family were not in the slightest bit religious & I had perhaps been to church 4 or 5 times up to then, either for weddings or at Christmas time for the colorful midnight mass with its ceremony, gaudy decorations and lashings of incense!

Try as hard as I might I could not and do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, although I do believe Him to have been a major prophet and so being told that I was a ‘Christian’ didn’t mean that much to me. At that time I felt that in coming to Israel I had found my home and felt I belonged here and always would. I always had and do believe in God but I shied away from any religion involved in all that ceremony as a way to communicate with Him and so, at that time, Judaism seemed to mirror my beliefs insomuch as it seemed to involve less ceremony than most other religions and had a belief in one God with no inter-mediator’s in the way who you had to go through to reach Him, and so I decided that I wanted to convert to Judaism and luckily at that time the conversion process was made easier for those living on a kibbutz, city dwellers usually had to suffer 1-2 years of study in the city in order to convert but Kibbutz Afek arranged for me to attend a 3 month residential conversion course on a religious kibbutz near Ben-Gurion Airport called Kibbutz Beerot Yitzchak. I had a great time there, working for a few hours a day as the assistant to the ‘installator’ (Plumber) and then supposedly studying the Torah the rest of the day. When I say religious kibbutz it was far from being populated by black coated & black hatted bearded Hasidic religious looking cowboys but was full of young American student types with knitted kippa’s or yarmulkes. Every weekend & some nights I would slip Dina in by meeting her at the nearby main road & sneaking across the fields with her & into my room where we would spend most of the night with the other conversion course member’s playing cards! The final Torah (Bible) test was very easy for me & I think that I impressed the panel of 3 Torah expert judges with my knowledge of Torah & I passed the exam & the course, which incidentally they extended by a further month in order to test our resolve. After the course finished I had to attend hospital in order to have my religious circumcision carried out. It was a matter of being in hospital for a few hours & I went to Asouta Hospital in Tel Aviv. Since it was at the time of the large Russian Immigration to Israel in the late 70’s, I was put on a trolley in the corridor outside the operating theatre with dozens of others waiting in line who were also about to lose some of their skin. The scene was like a factory conveyor belt & in fact the surgeon who must have seen no end in sight to his work examined my bits in the corridor saying ‘Um you don’t need the operation as your skin’s short‘ to which I argued that I did need it and that I wanted the Brit (religious circumcision) but in hindsight maybe I should have left things as nature had intended for I’m sure he remembered me as I lay in his operating theatre for his work wasn’t exactly artistic! It took ages for the anesthetist to put me to sleep for the operation and when I eventually went under and awoke in a hospital room, Dina was by my bedside with her parents and in walked, or rather staggered in a rather red faced and apparently inebriated Rabbi. He was somewhat intoxicated as he had to toast with wine and bless each circumcision performed as it was a religious obligation and Mitzvah to do so and since he had a lot to bless that day he became the worse for wear and we were all somewhat shocked when he suddenly announced to Dina with her parents present, ‘Don’t let him scratch his bollocks until it’s all healed up‘! Anyway, I had to put yellow powder on the wound for a couple of weeks and it wasn’t too bad and then after it had all healed up I had to undergo a ritual immersion in a large bath containing moving water known as a Mikva, much akin to being Baptized I suppose, and I was pushed underwater 3 times by a man prodding me with a broom handle muttering religious words, as far as I remember!

So, I had passed the conversion course, had undergone ritual circumcision, been immersed in a bath full of flowing water and so we had booked the wedding and invited many guests for 18^th October 1979 at the Bnei-Brit wedding hall in Tel Aviv and all we needed now was the official conversion confirmation certificate signed by the hand of the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Israel, under whose authority my religious conversion had been conducted, and then we’d be free to be married. We had met the late Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren 2 or 3 times in his Tel-Aviv office. Rabbi Shlomo Goren was famous as the first Rabbi to reach the Western Wall after the Six-Day War and is famously pictured blowing the religious shofar (Ram’s horn) by the Wall.

Rabbi Shlomo Goren at The Western Wall

It was his job to try and initially discourage me from wanting to convert to Judaism as unlike Christianity and other religions which actively encourages conversion to their particular religion(s), Judaism does not, but he obviously saw how determined I was to convert and he said that he agreed and that he would approve my conversion from Christianity to Judaism and so we were shocked when, a few days before our scheduled wedding ceremony, we were informed that he had not signed my conversion certificate as he wanted to be sure that we would keep a kosher home and that he wanted to personally interview Dina’s father, Shmuel himself in his office. Before my conversion course we had a visit by two Rabbi’s at Kibbutz Afek who had suddenly appeared without warning to check that we kept a Kosher home. The problem was that like most other secular kibbutz’s, Kibbutz Afek does not have a Kosher dining room and luckily as they walked up the stairs to the dining room someone noticed them coming and took the jug of milk off the table, and so they just saw a meat only lunch being eaten by the kibbutz members and were satisfied that it was kosher dining room! When they inspected our room which they thought that only I lived in, they could only peer through the locked glass door and all appeared to be in order to them as they presumed that Dina lived in her army groups’ accommodation and they failed to notice the unmade double bed with her negligee strewn across it!

So Dina’s father duly appeared before the Chief Rabbi in order to be questioned by him and we presumed that it would be no more than just a formality for after all, Shmuel had been sent to Auschwitz Concentration Camp by the Nazi’s for being a Jew where his entire family had been sent to the gas chambers because they were Jews and only because they were Jews, so what could Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren want from him? What he wanted was a certificate from Shmuel’s neighborhood Rabbi confirming that Shmuel attended Synagogue every single day there to pray and that he kept a Kosher home. Without this letter he would not sign my conversion certificate and we would not be able to get married a few days later at the wedding hall that we had booked and to which we had invited many guests! So, Shmuel had to prove that he was a ‘good Jew’ to the Chief Rabbi of Israel after having gone through all that he had suffered at the hands of the Nazi’s because he was a Jew!

Shmuel, my father-in-law, lives with Dina’s mother in the apartment above us in the same block of flats. He is now in his 80’s and gets around with a walking stick but is surprisingly active for his age and his size, he’s about 6’5″ tall at least, which is where my son must get his height from as he’s the same height. Shmuel has rarely spoken to me about what he suffered at the hands of the Nazi’s but recently he started to tell me about some of what he went through.

With Dina and Shmuel

Shmuel lost one lung due to his suffering in the concentration camp and he has his Auschwitz camp number tattooed on his left arm. He lives on a cocktail of drugs. Dina’s parents live in what most western countries would term as just above the poverty line and Dina’s Mother, Malka cleans and looks after old people in order to pay the bills (she herself is in her late-70’s)!

 

Shmuel’s Story

Shmuel related his war time experiences to me one day. He lived in a village in Hungary called Tcech which was near a major river near the Hungary/Czech/Romanian border and he remembers swimming in the river with friends during the summers. On the other bank of the river was Romania. His father was a hard working farmer who had fields of apple trees the fruits of which he would export to other European countries and they employed many local people to pick the harvest and they were a well respected family in the village.

When the war started it became forbidden for Jews to hold a business license and so Shmuel’s father managed to persuade a neighbouring farmer to buy his license from him and Shmuel’s father then used to carry on working his apple trees till one day the Nazi’s arrived in their village and ordered all the Jews into a ghetto that they designated would be in a small section of the village and luckily this included their house so they were able to continue living there with many other families as well but now they were under Nazi rule and occupation.

The Nazi’s then informed them that they were all going to a work camp and not realizing that this could be anything other than what the Nazi’s claimed it was, they all climbed into the train wagons with no opposition. Shmuel and his entire family were transported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp and Shmuel, because he was very tall for his 12 years of age was directed to a line of those who would work and who would live. His parents and nearly all of his family were directed to the other line and to their ultimate deaths in the gas chambers.

My father-in-law after his release from Auschwitz

 

The family farm was seized by Hungarian villagers and other remnants of Jewish property was systematically ransacked and destroyed. I didn’t ask Shmuel about his experiences in Auschwitz as he didn’t offer this information but he told me that he and his surviving cousin Harry (who now lives in Canada) and who survived Auschwitz with him, they, together with Harry’s brother had returned to their village after the war to try to reclaim what was theirs. Upon arriving at their village they were told by the villagers who had previously been their friends and neighbours either to immediately leave or die. They left but Harry’s brother hired a boat to cross the river to go back to claim what was his and what had been stolen from them by the villagers, he was murdered in the boat by patrolling villagers and his body thrown into the river. Shmuel has not returned to his home village since and has little chance of regaining his property from the Hungarian government.

After being freed from Auschwitz, Shmuel made his way to Israel where he arrived in late 1945 and met his wife to be, Malka whom he married soon after.

Shmuel made representations to the Hungarian government through their embassy in Tel-Aviv to try to reclaim their family property in Tech and were told that although records existed via documents that showed that they were indeed the owners of the farm the land was now in the hands of the Russians and the Russians will return nothing.

Ok, so the Chief Rabbi wanted to play games and if that was the game then two could play it too. Luckily Shmuel knew his local Rabbi as they had both been through the German Concentration Camps together and Shmuel gave a blessing the Rabbi and lo and behold the letter appeared written by the Rabbi just as the Chief Rabbi wanted it to be written and it appeared in Shmuel’s hands! We rushed the letter to the Chief Rabbi’s office and picked up the already signed certificate of conversion that he’d mistakenly post–dated to after the wedding date and we went ahead with our wedding as planned anyway.

It was a smallish wedding by Israeli standards with about 220 guests but it was a very happy event as we’d mostly invited young people, of course including all of Dina’s army group and friends from the kibbutz’s, and it was kept on a small scale

Dina and I with Dina’s army group at our wedding

as a wedding is not a cheap event and no financial help came from my side as I only had my mother and so Dina’s parents footed the bill. I remember the very first time that I met Dina’s parents that my eye was red and swollen like a balloon as I’d been stung by a bee and now on our wedding day Dina’s eye was red and swollen as she’d developed a sty, but it didn’t interfere with her special beauty!

We couldn’t afford a honeymoon but anyway before the wedding we had gone to Europe, it was Dina’s first trip abroad and her first time flying too, something she still hates doing because of ‘the bumps’. We went first to London and then to Paris and then Amsterdam and had a marvelous time!

After the wedding we made plans to try our fortune in England and so we again flew to London and moved in with my mum in her 13^th floor apartment in a 20-floor council owned high rise apartment block near Swiss Cottage called Bray Tower. Dina found work initially at a travel agents and then as a receptionist at Kibbutz Representatives in Golders Green in an office that sends English volunteers to work on Israeli kibbutz’s and I applied to join the Metropolitan Police.

 

 

Me and The Metropolitan Police

 

Part One

 

 

Introduction

I had grown up in Chalk Farm, North West London surrounded by police officers as my poor family home was next to a block of flats occupied by police families and I played with some of the children that lived there. Our home was also diagonally opposite to the C10 Scotland Yard Stolen Car Squad offices and garages under which was situated the tobacconists shop of which I had became manager after leaving school, and I thus got to know a few of the C.I.D. officers from their upstairs C10 offices as they used to come in to buy their cigarettes and sweets.

My first impressionable and not particularly pleasant encounter with uniformed police had happened when I was about 13 years old. I used to earn extra pocket money by selling newspapers on Sunday’s on a pitch just inside Chalk Farm Underground Station that was  diagonally opposite to my home. One Sunday morning I was mugged by an elder boy and his sister who had a large Alsatian dog on the lead. He threatened to stab me and set his dog on me if I didn’t give them all the money, which I did. As I was handing the money over I noticed a bearded gentleman standing by the nearby public underground phone booth which he then proceeded to use and I found out later that he was a newspaper reporter who had just happened to be there at the time and upon witnessing what had happened had phoned his newspaper to report what he had witnessed and only after that did he then phone the police to report the crime, and worse of all he did nothing to help except after the muggers had run away, he tried to get information from me to use in his story. This went against all I had learnt about helping those in need and it taught me perhaps the true nature of newspaper reporters and their ilk.

The police arrived in their marked police car and they didn’t seem to be that interested in going after the muggers even after I had given their description and told the officers the direction they had fled to. I recognised one of the police officers as living in the police flats next to my home and he and his fellow officer then drove me to nearly Camden Lock where he took me down to the canal bank and asked me questions. I told him what had happened, and although I didn’t go to Sunday School nor sang in the church chior, I always tried to tell the truth but he had a big smirk on his face and he basically called me a liar and told me that he thought thay I was working with the robbers and if I didn’t tell him the truth then I would get into more trouble than I already was in! I think I must have turned white with shock and I didn’t understand what was happening or why a police officer, who I was taught to respect was treating me like I was a liar and a thief and I just kept repeating to him the truth about what had happened and eventually he then seemed to give up and accept that what I was telling him was the truth and we then walked back to the police car and they drove me home. My other not so pleasant encounter with the police was when I was driving with my wife beside me shortly before I was due to start at Hendon Police College when we were stopped by a police car in the London Docks area on our way to visit friends. After asking me what we were doing in that area and following my reply the officer claimed that I had been driving slowly up and down that road 4 or 5 times and he demanded to know ‘what we were up to’? What he claimed was a lie and after he’d checked my drivers documents he said ‘Okay you can go’, but then fear set in as I already had received my starting date for Hendon Police College and I was petrified that somehow my getting stopped by police would affect everything and I asked for reassurance from him that my being stopped wouldn’t affect my joining the police and he told me my being stopped wouldn’t be recorded anywhere, not that I trusted him as I knew he had already lied about the reasons for stopping me!

I was determined that when I became a police officer that I would remain honest and tell and write the truth at all times, particularly to members of the public, whether criminals or not. These steadfast basic rules allowed me, using the knowledge of the law that I was soon to learn at Hendon Police College to successfully deal with the many persons that I came into contact with as a police officer, and also to give evidence in many court cases that I was involved in without fear of contradiction, and which led to my never having lost a court case where I had been the arresting or reporting officer.

 

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Train Guard to Hendon Police College

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At Battersea and We Leave

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Thatcher and The Miner’s Strike

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Part 2 – At Chiswick, the Thief Taker

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On Foot Patrol   

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Working for Special Branch, SO11 and M15

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Tragedy and the Funny Side   

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Famous People and Police Driving

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Awards and Courses

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Police Racism & Recording The Abuse   

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I Take On The Police and Win & Doctors of the Mind

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Still Hounded!

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2nd and 3rd Children

In 1987 Dina was pregnant with our 2^nd  child, Sharon, and after a not too long time in labour she was born at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Hammersmith (actually it’s just over the border from Chiswick) and we call Sharon ‘Princess’ as she was born at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital.

 Sharon

 Galit, who was conceived at our next Police house in Wembley 6 months after Dina had given birth to Sharon, was almost born in the car park of Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow (again, just up the road from our Police house in Wembley) as Dina waited and waited, trying to ignore the labor pains until the last possible moment and as we got out of the car she really was ready to give birth then and there, so it was a very quick birth and Galit just ‘plopped’ out!

 Galit (she has now changed her name to Nichole)

 

Me and our firstborn, Golan

 

I was present at all of our children’s births and they were amazing events to witness and I wouldn’t have missed them for the world and you don’t have to believe in God (but it helps) to realize what a miracle giving birth to a new human being is!

Dina at this time was working as a freelance Hebrew/English Translator/Interpreter for the Police and it was a well paid job whenever she was called to Police stations or to court to work and she was involved in a few big cases including a case at the Old Bailey. Her work fitted in well with Dina’s main job of bringing up the kids at home and our kids were raised with lots of love, warmth and affection and I hoped to give them all that I had missed out on whilst growing up.

A few weeks after Galit was born our Nana, who had more or less raised me, in 1988 passed away. From ever since that I remember her she had this constant cough but never seemed to seek medical treatment for it and of course she was a smoker as was my Mum and my Aunt and while we were living in our police flat in Syon Lane I was told that Nana had been taken to a hospice in Hampstead. I had no idea that a hospice was a place where people with no hope of survival went to die and I visited her regularly, the last occasion I brought her flowers and I noticed how radiant she seemed to be with smooth clear skin like her wrinkles had disappeared but of course she was in pain and the doctors had attached a small box to her stomach that would pump painkilling drugs into her every minute or so. She died of cancer the next day and it was decided to cremate her at Golders Green Crematorium.

This was the first time that a member of my family had died and all our relatives travelled up from Wales and we travelled to the crematorium in big black limousines and I’ll always remember that upon reaching the entrance gates to the crematorium the cars stopped and then the procession was led slowly through the gates by a funeral director resplendent in black tails and bowler hat walking on foot in front of the procession and he then stopped, removed his bowler hat and bowed his head in respect as the hearse carrying Nana’s body passed, I’ll always remember that gesture of respect. Nana’s grave or spot where her ashes were buried was marked with a plaque and rose bush for a year, but then no-one paid the crematorium’s annual fees and the last time that I went to visit Nana’s burial spot it had been replaced with another’s name plaque and all traces of Nana had disappeared. In October 2022 my Mother passed away from Cancer and she was cremated and her ashes were scattered a few feet away from where Nana’s ashes had been intered at Golders Green Crematorium.

 

Court Again?

In August 1996 my family and I left England and immigrated to The Promised Land and in November 1996 I started working at the Royal Thai Embassy as a Visa Clerk. my main tasks being issuing visas to tourists wishing to visit Thailand and also legalizing documents for use in Thailand and I enjoyed working at the Embassy and after having worked there for 26 years on my 67th birthday on 2nd February 2023 I retired, but I now face yet another Labour Court battle as the Thai Embassy refuses to comply with Labour Laws and pay me social benefits including a pension that they are required to do under the labour laws of this country. Three other former Thai Embassy employees were alswo forced to take their claims to the Labour Court and they all received the compensation that was due to them from the Thai Embassy.

 

Lyric Writing

During the 3 years that I was off work and while we waited for the case to come to court, I was home with not much to do and so I started to make concert video’s of my musical hero Bob Dylan which I passed on to fellow fans, in fact I had almost 300 fellow fans that I did this service for, recording and editing concert video’s which is a huge time consuming business but it kept me busy and I took great pride in what I did. Also at this time I made contact through an advert in a Dylan magazine with a German guy who was a musician but sought someone who could write English lyrics. Since I had written poems in my teens and had given folders of my poems to girlfriends I had on the kibbutz, I thought I would give it a go and we slowly started to create songs together. I would send lyrics by e-mail and he would compose the music and perform the songs in a ‘band’ we called ‘The Grils’ and our website still attracts a number of visitors each day. We had some songs that had a lot of radio airplay and a couple that even reached the number 1 spot on an Australian radio station but my proudest achievement with The Grils was in receiving a letter from the grandson of the late great Robert Johnson about one of our songs called ‘Sold My Soul to the Devil’ in which he wrote – “I’m Steven Johnson, vice president of The Robert Johnson Blues Foundation and grandson of the late blues icon Robert Johnson. I also happen to be a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’ve never believed my grandfather sold his soul to the devil because he (my grandfather) didn’t own his soul (God owned it). What I do believe is the hard work and much practice allowed my grandfather to learn his skills on the guitar. Just as Eric Clapton, B.B. King, The Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and many other great artists that attributes my grandfather music as being the springboard of their success had to practice and still practice some more; my granddad worked hard to obtain his skills.” Watch the video promo about the letter from the grandson of the late great Robert Johnson at Robert Johnson – Crossroad Blues HERE.

My recent songwriting successes include many songs licensed for use in TV, radio and advertisements in the USA as well as a song called Christmas Time With You with lyrics by me and with music composed & performed by Michigan’s singer/songwriter Angela Predhomme. The song opens the USA’s Hallmark TV Channel’s new 2018 Christmas movie called Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane starring Alicia Witt and Colin Ferguson and millions of viewers in the USA and abroad watch the film every Christmas. You can listen to and find out all about the song HERE.

As a result of the song opening the Hallmark Movie Channel’s Christmas film, Paul was contacted by Sir Cliff Richard’s P.A. who invited Paul to write and submit songs for Sir Cliff’s then upcoming 2020 tour and album. Paul went to work with a number of worldwide artists from Canada, Germany, Switzerland and in The UK creating songs but alas the songs were not accepted as the 2020 Tour was cancelled due to the Corona-virus with no expectations as to when the tour would take place, and so Paul included a number of the songs that he co-wrote for Sir Cliff Richard with other international artists on ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) new album BELIEF released by Paul’s label Swiss Cottage Recordz in conjunction with the USA’s Studio City’s UL Sounds.

After we had settled down in Israel I started a music site on My Space which attracted a lot of visitors, over 34,000 friends, and I made many contacts with musicians wanting me to send them lyrics to compose music to and I now have my own website www.paullyrics.com built by my son Golan, who recently returned to Israel after having studied for 3 years at a London university returning with a BSC with honors in computer related studies and recently he got married and is now the C.E.O. of one of the biggest travel firms in Israel and has subsequently gifted us with 3 beautiful grandchildren, Mila, Emma and Dylan!

I have been fortunate enough to have worked with some great composers and singer songwriters throughout the world in creating songs together some of which have been released on albums but this remains a hobby for the meantime, you can check out all songs that have written the lyrics for HERE.

 

Me and Dylan

In former times I was known in the ‘Dylan world’ as ‘Dave Thomas’ from Wembley. I was just about the biggest trader in Dylan videos around in the mid-90’s and I had 200-300 people worldwide on the books. It wasn’t a huge profit making business at all as apart from the materials, the time involved in making these videos was enormous. I custom-made individual video covers with photo’s, index and timings on them too. Sometimes I worked 16-18 hours a day making them as I would put together video’s according to their customized requirements – if they wanted his concert from Woodstock as well as his collection of promo songs and the odd Dylan documentary all on one video for example then you had to physically edit them all together.

Anyway, I loved doing it and even supplied a former Dylan band member with videos (the originals of which he still needs to return to me!) and of course I got to see just about everything that there was to see past and present about Dylan. This all stopped when I emigrated from The UK with my family at the end of 1996. I I just opened the cupboard and looked at my Dylan video collection and I still have 110 video cassettes (that’s about 2 solid weeks worth of non-stop viewing) and when I retire, whenever that will be, I will make it my mission to transfer all of these videos onto DVD’s!

I have been privileged to have met many distinguished people through my former and present jobs from The Queen, Presidents, Prime Ministers to Lords and Earls and I don’t go out of my way to meet ‘famous people’ as people are people all worth the same and so called ‘fame’ very means little to me but I guess the one person who I would like to meet would be Bob Dylan aka Robert Allen Zimmerman, not that I would have a clue what to say to him, I mean what would you say?

Growing up through the 60’s I’d say that I was much more aware of The Beatles and other UK bands and artists than I was of Bob Dylan. I remember reading an article in ‘IT’ magazine and being fascinated by the story it told of the reporter travelling up to some place in the back woods with chickens in the yard & meeting Dylan and hearing his soon to be released album to be called ‘Holy Land’, well I was completely taken in (it wasn’t until I met and spoke to the author Clinton Heylin at the 1996 Manchester Dylan Convention that he confirmed to me that the story was a hoax, in fact he seemed rather shocked that I would think it was anything but a spoof)!

I guess the article had sparked an interest in Dylan and shortly after that article I bought my first Dylan record, a double album with a blue cover called ‘Greatest Hits’. This double LP knocked me out! I had never heard anything like it and I found it hard to believe that all of these songs in different styles and with different voices were all the work of one artist, Bob Dylan! I remember the song that really blew me away was ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with Thee’ (with the Memphis Blues Again).

The first Dylan concert I attended was with my new wife at Earls Court, I think in 1982 and all I remember was firstly how short Dylan was, I’d imagined him to appear so big as was his image and influence in the music world and I also remember smelling a sweet smoke smell in the air when Dylan was on stage, I guessed what it was and I remember being surprised how the uniformed policemen who were in the auditorium ignored it, I mean it was in the early 80’s!

It’s kind of funny to me that Dylan is a Jew who converted to Christianity and then returned (supposedly) to the religion of his forefathers whereas I converted from Christianity to Judaism (in order to marry & out of respect for my father in law who is a survivor of Auschwitz Concentration Camp) & even if I might want to return to ‘lie in the arms of Mary’ again I can’t as apparently you can never leave the fold.

The next time I saw Dylan was in 92 at Hammersmith and my only recollection of the gig was Dylan crouching legs spread over the electric piano on stage and that he also played ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ which was then a hit in my household with the kids!

1993 saw a more memorable gig at Hammersmith during his ‘As Good As I Been To You’ period. I kicked myself as I lived then in Chalk Farm in North West London which is a mile up the road from Camden Town where Dylan had spent all day walking around filming the ‘Blood in My Eyes’ video (captured by Andrew Muir in his book Razor’s Edge book & repeated by Andrew to me on a train up to attend a Manchester Dylan Convention) and I missed him!

I travelled by bus from London to see Dylan’s Cologne 94 gig and that was a great experience. Staying at the Mercurie Hotel I remember and then walking around the city with my Sony Camcorder in hand filming the wonderful cathedral and other sites of Cologne and then walking across the bridge over the Rhine to notice a crowd gathered outside The Hyatt Hotel, walking in, sitting myself down on a lobby chair to find Dylan’s band members John Jackson and Tony Garnier booking out with Winston Watson in the background. While I was seated there some big guy with his blonde/grey hair in a pony tail kept walking past me eyeing me up and I realized this must be Dylan’s tour manager known as ‘Irish something or other’. John Jackson & Tony Garnier came over & willingly spoke to us all there (some kid rambled on to J.J. in some technical language about guitars which I didn’t understand) & they exited & of course Dylan did his usual hotel disappearing trick & the coach & the white transit van with ‘Bakersfield’ license plates was seen making their way to the park. I remember it being a good concert and I must watch the video of it again!

I took my son Golan for the first time to see a Dylan concert at Brixton in 1995 and it was an excellent concert as most in 95 were (my favorite is the opening 95 tour concert at Prague) and I remember Elvis Costello opened with an acoustic set & I never knew just what a powerful voice he had!

Golan and I

The 2 concerts I attended in Liverpool in 1996 rank amongst my favorites as Dylan was very relaxed and gave a good show, even starting to sing the first verse of ‘Yesterday’ in tribute to the home of The Beatles but then stopping with a wry grin on his face. After the show I bumped in Al Kooper who was just leaving and he spoke a bit although was obviously wanted to head back to his hotel (I also never realized how short he was too)!

After I’d emigrated from The UK at the end of 96 I more or less lost track of Dylan’s concerts although I still managed to obtain the more interesting ones on video and in 2002 I returned to The UK and followed the Dylan tour at Brighton (I love these smaller venues and feel they’re more suited to Dylan than the big stadiums where he and everyone else seems lost) then to Bournemouth where after walking along the sea front and returning to my B&B on the cliff I learnt that I’d just missed Dylan as he’d popped out of his hotel to also walk along the sea front! Then up to Birmingham and to Manchester where I stayed where I always stay in Manchester at the Sasha Hotel in Piccadilly as this is where previous Manchester Dylan Conventions have been held which I attended in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2001.

At the 1994 Dylan Convention I’d met the author Clinton Heylin who had signed my copy of his book ‘Behind The Shades’ with ‘a bunch of basement noise to fill in the silence. Stay forever young’ and my copy his book ‘The Recording Sessions’ in 1996 ‘Keep the faith + stay forever jung’. At the 1998 Manchester Dylan Convention I had met Mickey Jones the drummer on Dylan’s 1966 tour (who recently released his ‘Home Movies’ about the 1966 tour) who was extremely friendly and approachable and I also attended my last Manchester Dylan Convention in 2001.

At one of these Dylan Conventions I had struck up a rapport with Dylan’s ex guitarist Cezar Diaz who had been a guest speaker and it was very sad as he was dying from what I believe was liver failure and he needed a transplant but he kept repeating the same points, that he was Dylan’s guitarist but that how everyone referred to him as ‘Dylan’s guitar technician’ (he was at one time Dylan’s guitar technician but he also played lead guitar at a number of concerts with Dylan from 1990 – 1994), and he also repeated how Dylan had lots of money and why couldn’t he give him the $100,000 he needed for his transplant? Well, how do you answer that? Anyway, it was with sadness that I learnt some years later that Cezar had passed away.

An extract from my Bio on my music site at https://www.paullyrics.com:-

“Paul grew up in the hope filled ‘Love is all there is’ drug induced stupor of the 60’s that promised so much but in the end delivered nothing but pain and broken glass –“The only good to come out of those crazy times was the music”. Paul soaked up the sounds and words of the songs he heard all around him like a sponge. He first discovered the music of Buddy Holly, Frank Sinatra, Otis Reding & Count Basie progressing on to The Beatles and other 60’s UK bands and artists later to find Bob Dylan –“Dylan was like the father I never had, he taught me so much and still is”.

Later, through Dylan’s works Paul would discover the new worlds of the great poets and authors as well as the Bible and old folk and gospel songs which were the cornerstones upon which Rock and Roll was born and flourished” Thanks Bob!

Paul’s 3 children all got married in Israel and he has been blessed with 2 beautiful granddaughters and 3 beautiful grandsons, with hopefully many more on the way! 2 of Paul’s granddaughters appear on the cover of the new album BELIEF! Their ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) next album that they have started working on, called Scared of America – Volume 3 promises to be their best so far!

One of Paul’s current new projects is called Dylan Found and is a project of ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s) in conjunction with Untold Dylan and the bob-dylan.org.uk site.
Their aim is to create songs from the lyrics of Bob Dylan that have never been made into songs before. As they add new songs they will also try to provide you with the history of those lyrics, some of which are unfinished lyrics but which have been finished by them so that song(s) can be made from them. Their aim is to make the album available for free-download via the Untold Dylan site when the project is complete.

 

(Part Two)

 

In the early 2000’s, I was diagnosed with a debilitating condition called Polyneuropathy that causes numbness and a total loss of feeling in my feet, a growing numbness in my legs and pain in the lower and upper back and is untreatable albeit for a dangerous spinal operation. It is caused by damage caused to nerves trapped by the spine and consequential damage to those nerves. I remember that I had been lifting lightish weights repetitively in the gym when I felt a burning sensation and a weakness in my right arm and so I thought that I had just pulled a muscle but the symptoms grew more severe until I lost all sensation in both of my feet. A traffic accident while serving in the police years earlier could well have contributed to my condition, when my stationary police car was hit in the rear by a drunk driver’s car travelling at an estimated 40 mph and although placed in a neck collar for 2 weeks after the accident, I perhaps rushed back to work too soon when perhaps more damage had been caused by the accident than had been realized. I continue to work and I am determined to lead as normal a life as is possible until this illness forces me to slow down.

In September 2019, I had sat in the front row of a Tel Aviv theatre with my son to see one of my comical heroes’, John Cleese in his ‘See Me Before I Die’ world tour show. I noticed that he seemed to often look at me during his show’s routine and then he suddenly asked for the house lights to be turned up as he then pointed to me, making a joke about the fact that I had kept my right leg crossed over my left leg during the whole show that caused a lot of audience laughter, little could he know that it was the only position I found to be comfortable because of my ailment and pains in my back. Funnily enough, the only other time that I have sat in the front row of a show was when I was about 10 years old and my Mum took me to my 1st ever concert to see Manitas De Plata at London’s Royal Albert Hall. I was absolutely mesmerized by his guitar playing, I’d never seen anyone play with one hand on the fret board or play in the other amazing ways he did and he seemed to notice my wonder, or me sitting there in awe with my jaw dropped open, and he came up to the edge of the stage opposite to me, smiling at me as he played in this wonderous way which he did for a lot of the show, it’s something I will never forget and this was my first real introduction to the magical world of music! Shortly after that I was introduced by my Uncle to the songs of Buddy Holly, then to The Beatles and then Bob Dylan …..

 

My Heartache

My lingering heartache remains the abuse my daughter suffered as a 6 year old when she was sexually abused by a neighbor while we were living in Wembley in England.

My daughter only started to recall what she had suffered upon entering her teens and while we were living in Israel which caused her to twice attempt suicide and led her to suffer from the eating disorder bulimia for which she was locked away in a secure eating disorder unit at a local hospital for one solid year.

Although we had made an official complaint to the London Metropolitan Police, we were of course forced to rely upon the police’s investigations in spite of me having proven them to be racist at a London Industrial Tribunal case against them when I was a serving police officer in 1996 and fearing pay back from them.

The police invited my daughter and I to fly to London in January 2008 to try to identify her abuser from police suspect photograph albums, but how could someone who was 6 years old at the time of being abused be expected to pick out a photo of her abuser when the photo wasn’t of him from then in 1994 when the abuse happened and his face was imprinted in my daughter’s mind, but it was a recent photo taken a few weeks previously in 2008? Their action just didn’t make sense and lo and behold my daughter failed to pick him out and subsequently they didn’t proceed with the case and he got off scot free”!

To say that I thought about ‘taking the law into my own hands’ with this animal that had caused all of this suffering to my daughter would be an under-statement, but by the same token I think that what good would it do my family if I did what perhaps should be done and I spent 10 or 15 years in prison as a result? I hope and pray that he will be paid  by the Almighty for what he did!

The police’s inaction against my daughter’s abuser had an even more detrimental effect on her and she relapsed and again attempted suicide and we spent whole nights going from hospital to hospital trying to find somewhere safe and secure where she could stay and be watched over in order to protect herself from herself and the last stop was always the local mental hospital where we have never been sure if the doctor is really a doctor or is a patient dressed up like a doctor! So bad are these places that we have always abandoned our search and tried to watch our daughter as best as we could at home!

My daughter’s eating disorder did not improve even though she had spent a whole year confined inside the secure unit of the hospital’s eating disorder unit as a teenager being treated for Bulimia and after a long wait we were finally informed that a place had become available at the same hospital where my daughter was previously treated but this time in the adult wing of the same unit. She spent a couple of months in this unit being treated for her eating disorder and was released earlier than expected to return home.

Despite all that she has suffered and has been through, our beautiful daughter remains loving and good and she only wants to help others and she worked in a kindergarten with children suffering from Down’s syndrome and she also helps other abused children at a support meeting house she regularly attends. Because of her illness she missed most of her school studies and wasn’t able to study or take her school exams and so she is years behind other children of her age but because the National Insurance Institute examined and decided that my daughter is 100% disabled she has received assistance from the Social Services and is now with their help attending college studying for her basic school exams to hopefully give her a start to a career.

 People ask me if it’s dangerous to live in Israel as all they know about Israel are invariably the images of fighting and bloodshed in Gaza or past atrocities and my reply is always that it is the safest place I have ever lived in! What I mean is, yes, the reality is of course that the country is surrounded by enemies hell bent on destroying her and its people, but if you look at the world there really is no absolutely safe place to live. London has been rocked with bombs and people are being killed daily in street knife attacks and many other countries have similar daily violence and what I do know is that my children are free to walk the streets here day and night as they often do without any fear of being kidnapped or sexually molested or murdered as is the situation in many other countries, particularly in the UK where we fled from, and of course here we do not face persecution for our religious beliefs and besides that the weather is wonderful with hot sunny summers with a short winter, there are beautiful sandy beaches everywhere and I remember London where I grew up with it’s almost constant cloudy skies, cold, rain and in fact I remember one year where the sun wasn’t seen for the whole year and that’s enough to make any normal person depressed!

I had grown up in a household where everyone smoked and I had seen cancer take Nana, my Auntie Ann and my Uncle John and more recently my Mother, and so after a number of times of trying I finally managed to stop smoking about 15 years ago. I did it just by totally stopping one day, I had previously tried to slowly cut down with the aim of eventually stopping but that never worked so I just stopped, had ‘cold Turkey’ for a few days and then I was clear.

I also became a vegetarian from 2008. My 2 daughters had been vegetarians for some time and I always felt that life was sacred and that man has no right to take life but I kind of closed my eyes to the suffering that animals endure in order to feed man and so I stopped eating meat and fish and I feel better for it.

With my wife Dina and Tomi

 

My Mother Dies

My Mum Jan, short for Janice, had lived alone for years in a top floor small flat on Hilgrove Road in Swiss Cottage North London. She paid subsidized rent to the Housing Trust owners of the old Victorian house, and she was very proud of her little flat even though she had to climb and descend three flights of stairs to her flat that was in prime position in North London not far from Central London. Jan had been to visit and stay with us in Israel for a few weeks from 29 March 2022 and we could see that she wasn’t her usual self, albeit that she was 82 years of age, she was slower and seemed to have less energy than usual but we are so grateful that she managed to come and that we took the final family photo with her in the garden of my daughter Nichole’s moshav flat.

The Thomas Family 22 April 2022

On 5/4/22 both Jan and I tested positive for Covid-19 and we had to stay in our flat until we tested negative on 11/4/22. After that we visited a few places with Jan, to a wedding and shopping ., but she didn’t seem to have her normal vitality and often felt tired, but as a 82 year old that seemed natural.

After my Mum had returned home to London, our daughter Sharon felt that she needed to be with her more and in July she flew to London to stay with Jan for a few weeks. It was during this time that Jan revealed to Sharon that she had developed terminal breast cancer. She had discovered a lump in her breast and had the check before coming to visit us in Israel and she had received the test result upon her return home to London. She asked Sharon not to tell anyone at the moment, ‘As they’ll only worry’! It wasn’t until 15/9/22 that Jan phoned me and informed me that she had cancer that has spread to her spine and which can’t be cured, she said that she accepts it. Luckily Sharon persuaded Jan to buy a mobile phone as it would be our lifeline to her in the coming weeks, as on 22/8/22 I suddenly received a WhatsApp image of Jan sitting in a hospital bed with a large gash on her forehead with her head bandaged up! She had sent the image by mistake while trying to figure out how her phone worked and she would never really fully understand the workings of that phone. Apparently, Jan had fallen over in the middle of the night, something she had done more than a year previous while staying with us in Israel; and that occasion she had dislocated her shoulder, on this occasion it seemed that she was lucky to survive the fall as she was knocked unconscious and when she came around, she went to bed and upon waking up in the morning saw the large amount of blood and called an ambulance that took her to St. Mary’s Hospital. We were then in regular phone contact with Jan when she was at St. Mary’s Hospital and then at the Royal Free Hospital where she underwent more treatment for her cancer and she was then moved to a convalescent ward at St. Pancras Hospital. 

On Sunday 16/10/22 I had phoned Jan and at first she sounded okay saying, ‘Oh hello darling’ and she told me that the day before she had been walking around the hospital ward and she told me that she was sitting in the hospital chair in the room but that she feels very tired, then her speech started to sound slurred. She then said that she is going to bed as she feels very tired. I tell her I love her and she says she loves me, which is what we always ended our phone conversations with. This would be the last time that I would have a conversation with my Mother.

On Monday 17/10/22 at about 2 pm, I got a call on Jan’s mobile phone from Dr. Teranaka, the doctor treating Jan at St. Pancras Hospital. She asks if I know what Jan is being treated for? I say breast cancer and cancer of the spine. She tells me that the cancer has now spread to all her body. She asks if any doctor had spoken to me? I tell her ‘No’. She says that the problem is that they are not allowed to make international calls which is why she phoned me on Jan’s mobile phone, and she said that she doesn’t think that Jan has got much time left. I asked her. ‘is it weeks’? She says ‘No’, I asked, ‘Is it days’? She says that she can’t say but most probably yes. I tell her that I will make arrangements to fly over as soon as possible.  At about 6.30 pm that same day, I got a video call from Jan’s phone. The kind nurse who had been looking after Jan and who brushed her hair everyday, had first let Sharon see and speak to Jan via video call and then she had video phoned me. Jan was aware that it was me as the nurse showed her the phone screen and she opened one eye and said, ‘Hello darling’ and then seemed to wave, but maybe she was just putting her arm up by her head. I told her that we are arriving tomorrow from Israel to be with her.

The next day, on Tues 18/10/22, Golan had managed to find us a 7.10 am flight to London with Virgin Atlantic. Golan, Sharon and I got a taxi at 4.15 am to Ben-Gurion Airport. Golan arranged for quick check-in and for us to have breakfast in the airport’s Dan Lounge. We are upgraded in flight to Business Class by the kind steward. Upon arrival at Heathrow Airport, we took the Underground train to Swiss Cottage and we left our cases in Jan’s flat then took the Underground to Kings Cross Station and walked to St. Pancras Hospital and arrived with Jan at about 2.45 pm. Jan was aware that we are there and she turned to see us while lying on her back in the hospital bed and opened one eye. We asked if she’s in pain and she shook her head. A couple of times Jan grabbed my arm to pull herself onto her side to look at us and then she turned back. Golan and Sharon left at about 6pm and I stayed with Jan. The nurses brought me another armchair to put my feet up on for when I sleep. At about 8pm Jan reached over and grabbed my arm and she turned her body to face me and she opened one eye and stared at me. I said ‘I love you’ and she sofly replied’ I love you’, she then turned back and closed her eye and appeared to sleep. I dropped off here and there during the night but at about 3am I woke up to a deep rumbling sound of Jan breathing heavily that lasts for about half an hour but then she breathed normally again. 

The next morning, 19/10/22 at about 7 am, 3 nurses came into the room and said they needed to change the sheets and so I went to the nearby lounge to wait. A few minutes later I heard one of the nurses shout, ‘Paul, Paul come here’ and I started to walk towards the room and another nurse came out of Jan’s room and told me to wait outside and to give them a few minutes. When I was called in I went into the room and saw that Jan was lying peacefully with her eyes closed with a white sheet pulled up under her neck and she wasn’t breathing. A nurse said that she was sorry, but Jan had passed away. I asked her what the time was? She said 7.10 a.m. One of the nurses had a small bowl of water and I guess that they had washed Jan. I opened the window to let Jan’s soul fly up to heaven and I sat with Jan talking to her and stroking her head and then sent a WhatsApp message to inform the family that Jan had sadly passed away. Dr. Teranaka arrived and examined Jan and she declared Jan as being deceased at 8.36 a.m.

All my family and the nursing staff all agreed that Jan waited for us to arrive and say our final words to each other before she passed on!

Golan and Sharon arrived at about 9 am and said their goodbyes to Jan and then we were told that we would have to wait while the Death Certificate was prepared. In the meantime we went to a nearby street café and sat outside and drank coffee and then returned to the hospital where the doctor had prepared what she said was the Death Certificate, but was in fact the Medical Certificate (that we would later give to the Registrar at Camden Town Hall in order to receive the official Death Certificate). I spoke to the doctor and she said that they were not used to having patients die there as it is a convalescent hospital and that Jan was there recovering from the fall she had. We then contacted the Funeral Directors Leverton’s by phone and told them that Jan was to be cremated as soon as possible. We initially arranged for the next day, Thursday 20/10/22, but this was not possible and so we arranged for Friday 21/10/22 at 9.30am. We then contacted the Camden Council Registrar by phone and she issued us with the ‘Green Certificate’ that would enable Jan’s burial/cremation, although we needed the official Death Certificate in order to do so. 

On Thursday 20/10/22 we went to the Camden Council Registrar’s office and were issued with the Death Certificate that would enable Jan’s funeral to take place the next day.

In a moving ceremony, my Mum’s remains were cremated on Friday morning 21/10/22 at Golders Green Crematorium where, Matt Monro was also cremated, and his song ‘On Days Like These‘, was one my Mother’s favourite songs and was played as her coffin was carried in, as was her other favourite song, ‘Human‘ by Rag ‘n’ Bone Man that was also played at the ceremony, Jan was more aware than I was of modern pop songs!

With Golan and Sharon at Golders Green Crematorium

On Sunday 23/10/22 the children had urged me to see Dylan in concert at the London Palladium. I had almost forget that he was giving a series of concerts and I managed to get a ticket and see his show, you can read about it HERE.

We arranged for Jan’s ashes to be scattered in the flower beds on Monday 24/10/22 at Golders Green Crematorium not far from where Nana’s ashes has been interred in 1988 in an emotional ceremony where we all said our ‘goodbyes’ to Jan and where after Jan’s ashes had been scattered, as Sharon read some words she had prepared to say, when she said, ‘If you can just give us a sign that you’re here with us’ spookily the phone message tone rings as if a sign from Jan just as Sharon says that – watch HERE exactly how it happened and you can draw your own conclusions but afterwards I checked the phone and there was no message nor a call indicated for that time!

The next day I flew back with my son and daughter to Israel.

 

 

The End?

So what have I learnt through life? As my wise Rabbi teacher, Rabbi Foreman on my conversion course taught me, the whole essence of the Tanakh (or Bible) encapsulated into one sentence is, ‘Treat others as you yourself would want to be treated’ and I try my best to live each day by this principle! I am now 66 years of age and as I mentioned am a vegetarian, almost a Vegan and I believe that life, all life is precious, from the biggest whale in the ocean to the smallest ant on dry land. I believe that killing is wrong. Man does not need to grow then kill living creatures to eat as millions of vegetarians and vegans worldwide prove and hopefully soon lab-grown meat will be widely and more cheaply available to satisfy man’s psychological need for meat! you do not need to eat meat to survive but man has an appetite for killing, whether be it fellow-man or animals killed for ‘sport’, why is this so, well it appears to be an evil part of man, like his sexual appetite for sexual gratification at all costs and the world would be a more peaceful place if women were the dominant sex, of that there is no doubt!

Despite what I have endured during my life, there have been bad, sad and dark times but as many if not more happy times and I look forward to the future with hope and love, for love is really what makes the world go around.

 

                                                                                                                                                   Paul 2021

 

You can listen to our song ‘All I Ask‘ that I recently wrote for Sir Cliff Richard HERE that sums up a lot of what I wish.