... And the Policeman Smiled (19 page)

Gratitude, perhaps, comes more easily with hindsight. Miss Harder was a spinster in her early fifties who ran a small tobacconist's shop in London's Archway. She had continuously offered her services to the RCM committee as a foster parent, but they had never found a suitable child and perhaps also felt that she was too poor to cope. But when she heard about Lore Selo and her two sisters, whose mother did not want them to be parted, Miss Harder promptly offered to take all three and the committee were shocked into acceptance. Miss Harder even refused the offer of financial assistance, in case it led to another child losing his chance of coming to Britain.

Lore will never forget her first meeting with Miss Harder:

A lady dressed rather shabbily in old-fashioned clothes came towards us and into my hands she put a card on which the words ‘Mother Love' were written. I knew a little English, just enough to understand what she meant to convey, but at the time my sisters and I were rather bewildered and, quite frankly, disappointed. We were young and frightened and I suppose we really had no idea what to expect, but we certainly never thought that our new foster
mother would look so unattractive. We had even more of a shock when we saw her dingy home. It was a two-room flat in an old mansion block. She had given up her bedroom to the three of us and she slept in the sitting room on the sofa. It all seemed very cramped and poor and the flat was dark.

Those early weeks when we were miserable – we missed our mother and often cried – must have been very difficult for Miss Harder. She had to spend a good deal of her time in the shop and rush back to cook meals and care for us. Three tearful children who spoke very little of her own language cannot have been easy to love. But she was patient and understanding and even treated us to a holiday on the Isle of Wight, which, we found later, she could barely afford. She was helped to pay for it by friends and customers.

After a few months the three girls began to settle down. When a message came from a friend in Prague that their mother had disappeared, Miss Harder did everything she could to console them and they became very close. With the outbreak of war, the shop fell on harder times. When Miss Harder had to do without her assistant, Lore helped out:

We were too young to realise that it must have been a most worrying time for Miss Harder. Sometimes we were naughty, as children inevitably are.

Six months after the sisters arrived in England, Miss Harder died of consumption. The sisters were separated, Lore working as a maid and the others going to foster parents. Twenty years later, in a talk which was later broadcast on Woman's Hour, Lore looked back:

I think it is only now, after all these years, that I quite understand what a truly kind, wonderful and courageous woman Miss Harder was. She was my second mother for those few months. My sisters and I owe our lives to her but we can never repay her for her kindness, for having taken three unknown children into her home, given them love and understanding and compassion.

Clearly, concern for children in what appeared to be less than propitious circumstances could be misplaced. Martha Levy, too, was happy in what many would have found an unenviable situation. She had a room in Exmouth Street in London's East End, with a family of five adults:

At that time the East End was not a particularly nice place but luckily there were a lot of Jews there. I worked extremely hard. The first morning the lady had to get up at six o'clock to show me how to make a fire; I had never seen an English fire. I was very lucky because although I had to help in the house, I was able to go every Sabbath morning to
Schule
. The family were extremely sympathetic and very, very nice to me.

The reason I had to leave was a friend of mine came over from Germany to bring me a present from my stepmother. Because he came early he saw me on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor. He got very upset and went to Bloomsbury House and told them that it was not for this that the children had been brought over. Believe it or not, they took me away a week later to a girls' hostel in Ladbroke Grove. And I had been very happy with that family.

Ya'acov Friedler experienced two very different, but both very English, foster homes, adapting with ease and enthusiasm to both ways of life. Staying first of all with the Maggses – ‘the first parents I had in four years and I have good reason for not putting parents in inverted commas' – in a small country town, he learned the respectable, middle-class way to do things:

Mealtimes were the real lessons for me. Mrs Maggs instructed me how a young Englishman should use his knife and fork, drink his soup without making a noise, and never leave the table without permission from the head of the family. The slices of bread for tea were cut razor-thin, a habit that has stayed with me.

One day, when I refused the slice of dried fruit cake (oddly enough called English cake in Israel) because I had already eaten all I could, Mr Maggs pointed out to me that a well-mannered young man leaves enough room for the cake because it is always an integral part of tea. It might have been frivolous to worry about tea and cakes while the war for the very survival of Britain was raging, but I felt that these apparent trivialities were at the heart of what we were fighting for …

Once, when a classmate invited me to tea with his foster parents, Mrs Maggs made enquiries and informed me that she did not think it advisable for me to visit that family, because they would add little if anything to my education or culture. I was sorry to have missed a day out but happy that she cared enough not to allow it. My own mother couldn't have done more …

Every Wednesday, at eight-thirty in the evening, the whole family listened to
ITMA
(one of the most popular wartime comedy
shows). We assembled in Mr Maggs's bedroom, where he retired early due to frail health, and arranged our chairs round the fireplace to listen to the big radio …

Happy though he was, Ya'acov wanted very much to be together with Solly, his brother, and the Maggses were not able to accommodate the two of them. They found a new billet in a working-class household. The Crooks, middle-aged and childless, made them welcome. There was just one problem:

They treated us with much love in the year we spent with them and it pains me still that we were forced to live a lie with them.

When it was first suggested that they take in two Jewish refugee boys from the continent, they made it plain that they would not have any German boys under their roof. It was impossible to explain to them the difference between German Nazis who were trying to destroy Britain and Jewish refugees from Germany. We had to pretend we were Dutch and kept up the pretence to the end.

The Crooks' old cottage had neither electricity nor a bathroom. The parlour and kitchen were lit by gas light, and if anybody tells you that electric light is better than the pure white light of the gas mantle they have probably never experienced it. Moreover, it was possible to turn the light up or down, depending on the brightness you wanted, which at the time was an advantage over electric light that could only be switched on or off. The radio worked on a liquid acid battery that had to be recharged every few months. Upstairs there were two bedrooms with no lights at all, and when we went up to bed we would take a candle in a china holder and snuff it out the moment we were between the sheets.

Margaret Olmer found her working-class foster parents in the Midlands very anxious to learn as much as possible about her background:

He worked in the local shoe factory and she worked in a clothing factory. They had no children and lived in a terraced house. She fretted when I went to grammar school – because I was getting opportunities that she never had … but they were quite cultured. She had wanted to be a teacher. They weren't Jewish but let me go to Jewish classes. They said I must have some sort of moral education and they didn't send me to church, which is consecrated ground, but to chapel, which is unconsecrated. From the pulpit you got morality, so I grew up with the religious morality but not
Jewish dogma. This was at Raunds, near Wellingborough. Their niece looked like my cousin. That was very nice for me. At one time I was the only Jew there. I joined the Brownies and my friends' parents were always very nice to me.

The family who took in Lorraine Allard had a long-term relationship in mind:

Their only son had a girlfriend who was not Jewish. By bringing me into the house, they hoped he would switch his affections. That I was only fourteen never entered their minds. In fact, their son did marry his girlfriend who converted. They had an extremely happy marriage with four children.

In any case, Lorraine was far too preoccupied to think about romance. As the prospects of war increased, many children became obsessed with getting their parents out of Germany. For Lorraine it was her one and only thought:

I could not get across to my foster parents how bad things were in Germany. I set out in Lincoln knocking on people's doors. I found expensive areas and knocked on the doors of big houses and asked if they needed a cook or a gardener because that was the only way you could get people over without money being involved. Most of the time I knocked on doors and burst into tears; sometimes, although I barely spoke any English, I could get some words out. I spent every spare moment doing this and I think if the war had waited a little I would have found someone to help. I did find homes for three other children but it was hard to get my elderly parents out. My first boyfriend in Germany came to Lincoln but the two girl cousins I found homes for didn't make it. Nor, unfortunately, did my parents.

Children who made a successful adjustment and settled in happily with a foster family were devastated when they were subjected to another round of upheaval and insecurity. This was Peter Prager's experience:

I thought that I would stay with my foster parents for good but that wasn't what they thought. They had their down periods, and their business suffered with the war. They wrote to the Jewish Refugee Committee saying they couldn't keep up the guarantee and
what they did was just push me out at Christmas – it was overnight. They told me, ‘Wouldn't you like to see your father?' and because I had not seen him since he came to England I said I would love to. So they told me to stay in London for a week and tell them exactly how much I spent so they could pay me back. I did that (I spent 17/6d) and they said, ‘That's good. You stay in London always and we will give you £1 a week.' I said: ‘So I stay there and come back at weekends …' but they said: ‘Oh no, we don't want you to come back at weekends.' Then I suddenly realised they wanted to get rid of me. They said I could stay with my father or brother, but my father lived in a furnished room and my brother just had two rooms and now a child … It was a very traumatic experience for me because, although I felt they were a bit peculiar (they couldn't understand why I was so sad all the time), I thought it was my home and I suddenly realised I didn't have a home.

Michael Brown's sister stayed with a family where her brother was able to visit. She was seven years old and he was ten:

… they put us in the same bed and we would weep and weep, both of us. She was absolutely distraught and missed her mother desperately. Later on, unfortunately, the mother of the house where my sister stayed died … it was hard for my sister because the father was a miser, heartless and couldn't deal with a youngster in the house.

Ruth Michaelis felt betrayed from the time her mother brought her over to England and left her with the Reverend Stead and his family.

The only clear memory I have that gives any sort of insight into my feelings about my parents has to do with the big doll's house at the rectory. I was allowed to play with it for a while and I remember getting all the little dolls out of the doll's house and putting them into the rubbish bin, and when somebody had put them all back I did it again. I can remember being smacked for it but I did it again. It was quite compulsive. I think my feelings about people were that they were rubbish. I can remember being astonished at myself for doing it, having been told not to.

She was constantly promised that there was not going to be a war and that she would soon go back to her family. A sixth sense told her otherwise.

The total darkness of night without any street lights made me feel unsure if there was anything there. I remember an awful feeling of there being nothing and scratching myself to test out if I was still alive because I was uncertain of whether I still existed.

Unhappy with the Steads, where she was beaten with a leather strap for wetting the bed, Ruth found a happier relationship with another family, but she could not rid herself of the insecurity.

I mistrusted people because they ditched you sooner or later, and important things they said could not be relied upon.

The job of inspecting foster homes, which was supposed to be carried out at frequent intervals, was shared between the national office, regional committees and the provincial committees. The quality of inspection varied enormously and was dependent not just on the inspectors' powers of observation but also on their view of how young refugees should be treated. There were those who, almost despite themselves, equated refugees with second-class citizens. Not for them the comfortable life; they might get ideas above their station, which was to devote themselves to hard labour and be grateful for small mercies. This attitude was not entirely absent from the ruling council of the RCM where, among others, the Marchioness of Reading, wife of the former Viceroy of India, judged every problem within narrow class conventions. Refugees were seen as deserving sympathy and help, but they were not to be pampered. She even turned down a government offer of extra clothing coupons on the grounds that hand-me-downs were quite good enough for her refugees.

Class prejudices were just as strong, perhaps even stronger, at regional level. When a mild complaint was made against the Tunbridge Wells paid secretary and she was invited to Bloomsbury House to discuss the matter with Lola Hahn-Warburg, her reaction was hostile, to put it mildly.