A curious thing happened in Colindale when my mother was about nine years old. She had a cat that fell ill, and my grandmother suggested they take it to that nice new Jewish vet who had just set up surgery in the neighbourhood. They rang Dr. Lustig-Lendva's bell and entered the waiting room. When they were finally shown in, the vet, on seeing my mother, did a double-take, then continued with the formalities. My mother, not being slow to come forward in those days, asked him why he'd stared the way he did. 'Oh nothing, you know; you just reminded me of my best friend from Amsterdam' he replied. 'What was his name?' asked my mother. 'Jan van Wijk. Why, do you know him?' he asked, sarcastically. 'Yes', my mother replied; 'He was my father'.
And that's true. Jan and Edgar had studied medicine together in Amsterdam. Jan had come to England to continue his studies in Cambridge and had met my grandmother on a day trip to the capital. They started seeing each other, then my grandmother fell pregnant. She wrote to Jan in Cambridge to tell him what had happened and, in those days of three postal delivieries per day, got the reply late that afternoon: 'I'll be there tomorrow, we'll get married'. And come he did. Got off the train at Liverpool Street, took the Tube to Kilburn, stepped out of the station and was promptly run over by a London bus, fifty yards from my grandmother's house. You couldn't make it up. And there was my grandmother, an expectant, unmarried teenager in 1931, just the stereotype we love to vilify in 2011, so you can imagine what it was like, then. She finally got married when my mother was seven; our dear Kitty never lacked courage or will.
Just to put that last sentence into perspective: had that bus not rattled down Kilburn High Road at that particular second, my grandmother would have been called Florence van Wijk and would probably have lived an entirely normal, married life with her husband. As it was, she became an unmarried mother in 1931, a teenager to boot. We still love to put the boot in to this category, don't we? Well, let me just list what happened after this 'fallen woman'/''unmoralled teenager' gave birth:
Her daughter (my mother) attended one of the best schools in London (Henrietta Barnet) on a scholarship, went on to work at the War Office and qualified as a librarian. Later, she became Mayor of King's Lynn and West Norfolk, a frequent and welcome guest of Queen Elizabeth II at Sandringham and Buckingham Palace.
My mother's marriage to Philip, a former MI6 agent and sometime Head of German Broadcasting at the BBC World Service, sadly, did not last. One-parent families were rare and frowned upon in the '60's and '70's, but my brother made it to Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard and I, for my part, have conducted at the Chicago Lyric Opera and led a career which has taken me all over over the world, currently working at the Bayreuth Festival (look it up if you haven't heard of it) and, the rest of the year at one of the world's leading opera houses, collaborating with many of the finest singers in the world.
I cite all this not to brag, but merely to show that one-parent families do not only produce benefit-dependent wasters. Everything depends on the parents, certainly; a good protestant work ethic is, sadly, indispensible if you want to get on in life. Just compare Scandinavia and North Africa.
Edgar sent my mother two beautiful Waterford Crystal decanters when she got married. They are still there. He died in the 1970's.
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