War Child

By M.J. Stoppi

Perhaps tens of thousands of orphans of all nations, created as a result of World War Two, survived because of the kindness of others or by state intervention. Many of those survivors later went on to become viable citizens of their countries. Others were not so fortunate and hopelessly drifted down to the lowest ebb of society, there to be cate

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rowanvale Books Ltd
• Release date: Aug 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911240471

M.J. Stoppi

M. J. Stoppi has lived and worked in Jamaica since 1958 as a chartered quantity surveyor and chartered arbitrator. He has been involved as managing partner of a leading firm in this field and a founding member of the Jamaica Institute of Quantity Surveyors, the Construction Industry Council of Jamaica and other national institutions. He is the published author of several recognised textbooks on the subject of commercial arbitration and conflict management in the Caribbean. He has served as President of the local Synagogue and on various boards of the local Catholic church, for which he has been awarded, by the Supreme Pontiff, the Order of the Holy Cross. His involvement in the culture of Jamaica is well documented; he was, for a formative period of sixteen years, the Board Chairman of the Jamaica National Dance Theatre Company. He is married and grandfather to several happy and talented grandchildren.

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PROLOGUE

‘O look in the mirror,

O look in your distress,

Life remains a blessing,

Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

— As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden

I have found that, after hearing about my background and personal history or reminiscences of my early formative days, most people respond by saying, ‘How interesting, why don’t you write your autobiography?’ By now, I have become used to hearing this suggestion to the extent that my reaction has always been a mixture of two emotions. The first is flattery; I could never imagine anyone would be the slightest bit interested in what happened to me sixty or more years ago; the other, more dominant reaction is fear — a real fear. Not a fleeting thought quickly overtaken and replaced with something more palatable, but the fear of facing the naked truth.

Because of the tragic event that occurred in the late 1940s, as I shall relate later, I have no memory of my childhood or anything that happened to me or anyone else prior to that date. I have often thought of myself as a ‘do-it-yourself’ detective revealing clues as to my own history. Thus, I have a dilemma; having no memory, how can my story be told? Well, all will be revealed after much research and soul-searching. The former was no problem, though the latter produced painful flashes of recognition, regret, remorse, embarrassment and a whole panoply of emotions sufficient to profitably engage a roomful of psychologists for quite some time.

To put it another way, I understand why people do not simply sit down and write about themselves; it is because they cannot bear to think about themselves. When extracted, our inner life is made available for public scrutiny, perhaps derision and certainly criticism by means of a form of public self-exorcism, a task to be undertaken only by the hardy and courageous. It is hard to be completely honest, not only in the dredged mass of facts and reminiscences from the depths of one’s past but also in the subjective interpretation of those facts. You need both a good memory and a strong stomach. Having lost my pre-war and immediate post-1940 memory, I have learned, as an instinctive defence mechanism, to negatively react and to demonstrate no emotion at all. British stoicism, without even knowing then who or what exactly a stoic was, is a trick I picked up during the war years.

I wish I could say that my earliest childhood memory was a happy, conventional one of being hugged by my mother or of my father teaching me how to hold a cricket bat, but this is not the case. I cast my mind back like a fishing net, anticipating a worthwhile catch, but on drawing in the net I find mainly trash and a few dead fish.

All the cells and neurons that contained that part of my memory were totally obliterated, erased, destroyed, reduced to nothing. My memory has been constructed from looking at old photographs, or sometimes just relying on plain invention. At the beginning of World War II, all British citizens were registered and issued with identity cards. Children like me, who were separated from their families by the government process of evacuation, were taught to memorise their identity numbers. Since 1940, trillions of experiences and impressions have been recorded — and discarded — in my memory cells. The number on my card was AICI/40/3. Why was this fact retained while I forgot the sound of my mother’s voice and the touch of my father’s hand? I couldn’t tell you. The number was then my only uncompromising and inanimate possession; I had it before leaving my loving family in late 1940 and it stayed with me for as long as my subconscious decreed that it was necessary to make me an individual, once again a person with an identity.

Auschwitz and other Nazi German death camp survivors also experienced the same phenomenon, I am told; they remembered their tattooed number clearly, while the terrifying detail of their experience was willfully suppressed. Only in my late twenties did I become aware of this psychological deficiency, of my memory loss. The influence of my wife opened me to the memory shortly after our marriage. Yael was the first person who took the trouble to awaken my faculty to think in the abstract. It had either been prevented by some unknown energy or it had never occurred to me before. Everything encountered by me in my survival lifestyle up to that point had to have a practical meaning and application, otherwise it could not help me survive. One day, early on in our relationship, she asked me about my childhood; embarrassingly, I could not give a proper reply. ‘I can’t remember,’ I would always defensively counter. She was inquisitive, but my memory was impervious to her probing. I had never actually thought about memory, but I realised I didn’t have one. My defence mechanism was insanely effective.

How, then, can I write about a memory I do not possess? I believe that most human qualities are only understood and experienced if one has encountered their opposite. How can one be dishonest without first knowing honesty? So now, after years of blankness, I write to unearth even a fleck of that gleaming thing, memory, from the sand and mire that covers it, the textured nothing upon which I stand. I write to find a specific, shaped past, even though I am afraid of it, even though I know it is a lost cause. But then, nothing is ever lost; once, I watched my wife find her wedding ring in the sea the day after it had vanished.

Soul-searching produces regret, remorse and embarrassment. It can only begin with confession. But that means telling the truth. I am a QS — a quantity surveyor, a cataloguer, counter, assigner of value, a reckoner, a constructor of possibilities. The quantity surveyor looks for truth. Telling the truth means cataloguing all the elements, providing an accurate reckoning, making claims, squaring up the numbers and making them balance to produce an ultimate truth.

I invite you to join me on this voyage of personal discovery, to try to put together the fragments of remembrances in some kind of logical sequence. I’ll begin, even before the beginning of my own memory, with the joining of two quite separate lives that conjoined in the East End of London and whose union produced the pain and joy of my own.

Chapter 1

The year my parents married, 1929, saw the end of a tumultuous period barely a decade after the end of World War I, a war that caused more death and mass destruction and which changed the fates of more nations and states than anything in history that had preceded it; it was also, for the first time in history, fought by many disparate nations on land, air, sea and below the sea. Europe was slowly emerging from this traumatic blood-letting catastrophe. The wounded were slowly healing but the period of mourning continued indefinitely.

The world that was dramatically emerging from this catastrophe had not awoken to realize the new roles that the great turmoil of the war had thrust upon them. The young democracy of the United States was still celebrating its first overseas military venture as a major world power (Latin American engagements, largely considered by them to be ‘domestic’ matters sprung from their Munroe Doctrine, did not really count) and was blithely unaware of the dark days of depression.

About to confront them, the ‘victorious’ countries were greedily calculating their spoils; harsh reparations were made against Germany, and there was a land-grab from the defeated Ottoman Empire, who sided with Germany. All of this proved to be a case of counting chickens before hatching in disastrous naïve anticipation; the joy of victory was about to be overtaken by the ashes of reality. The recovery period was not happy; 1929 saw the grim Wall Street crash followed by a world-wide depression, not only in the US but throughout the world.

The decade fought back with the rise of Hollywood, the ‘flappers’, and the ill-fated but widely heralded League of Nations. People rather than issues became important to the impoverished masses: Mae West, Greta Garbo, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker, followed by Prohibition and Mickey Mouse. Some new names were also beginning to receive more than a passing interest, locally at first and then internationally, such as Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler.

How my parents met, I don’t know. Perhaps it was at a Jewish function or wedding, or maybe through mutual friends or relatives, or possibly even — as was the custom among Jews — through the medium of a shadkhan¹. I do not know. From a copy of their Ketubah, I know that Fanny Fox and Nathan Stoppi married on the fifth day of the month of Ellul in the Hebrew year of 5689, corresponding to the tenth day of September 1929 at the Spital Square Poltava Synagogue² in Spitalfields, off Bishopsgate in the postal district of London E1. Below the standard conditions of that document, written in a firm, confident hand, is the signature of the groom. Below, in a smaller and rather timid hand, is the name ‘Fanny Fox’. The document goes on to state the groom’s declaration to his new wife:

Be thou my wife, according to Moses and Israel. I faithfully promise that I will be a true husband unto thee; I will honour and cherish thee; I will protect and support thee, and will provide all that is necessary for thy due sustenance, even as it beseemeth a Jewish husband to do. I also take upon myself all such further obligations for thy maintenance during thy lifetime, as are prescribed in our religious statute.

In response, his new bride replied:

The said bride has pledged her troth unto him, in affection and sincerity and has thus taken upon herself the fulfillment of all the duties incumbent upon a Jewish wife.

The covenant of marriage was duly executed and witnessed that day according to the usage of Israel.

No record exists of any honeymoon, if ever there was one; the next official record that came into my possession was dated the 23rd of December 1930, and was deposed by one H. A. Palmer, registrar for the district of Hackney in the sub-district of North Hackney in the County of London. He deposed that a male child had been born on Sunday the 16th of November 1930, named Maurice Jack Stoppi, at 68 Kenninghall Road. The rank or profession of the father was stated as ‘Ladies’ Tailor’, and the signature, description and residence of the informant was given as F. Stoppi, formerly Fox, mother of the same address as the place of birth. In general terms, that year was traumatic to say the least; my birth was rapidly followed — as The Times reliably informed us — by the marriage of Emperor Haile Selasie of Abyssinia and the brutal Japanese invasion of Manchuria; two events over which I had absolutely no control. In retrospect and with much hindsight, a future re-run of the previous ‘great’ war was inevitable. All the ingredients were in place: the predictable resentment of the German people and the harsh and greedy Allied terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which became the fertile economic, racial and nationalistic breeding ground for the propagation of Nazism and its megalomaniac leader, Herr Adolph Hitler.

My arrival was not reported in The Times of London on the day of my birth, since Fleet Street, at that time, had not invented Sunday newspapers, but the following day it told its readers that the government was going to spend its way out of the depression with massive investment in public work schemes. One could also, readers were further informed, winter in Jamaica travelling by Fyffe’s Steamship Line for sixty pounds for a round trip, hire a parlourmaid for fifty-five pounds a year and buy a Ford Cabriolet car for £210 pounds — equipped with ‘strong steel bumpers, wire wheels and unsplinterable glass windows’. One could also apparently buy twenty cigarettes for one shilling and two-pence, or a four-bedroom house in the suburbs for £1250. Other indispensable items of information from that newspaper revealed that the King and Queen³ left from King’s Cross Station London by Royal Train at 12:55 for Sandringham⁴, while the House of Commons continued to debate the thorny question of Palestine. On the entertainment scene: Madame Galli-Curci performed at the Albert Hall, the moving picture Hell’s Angels was being shown at the London Pavilion cinema and Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were performing Private Lives at the Phoenix Theatre.

Newlyweds Fanny and Nathan must have left the Jewish immigrant area of London’s East End earlier than most, probably the result of a combination of foresight and ambition. The only house I ever lived in with my parents, from my birth until 1940, was a typical Victorian working-class terraced tenement that was about four storeys above ground and had a basement below a steep flight of entrance stairs. Our flat was at the top of the linoleum-covered staircase. There were two main rooms, one front and one back, and a minuscule kitchen. The front room was the only bedroom; we all slept together in the one large bed — an arrangement that only seemed strange to me years later. Under the sink in the kitchen, hidden discreetly behind a little curtain, was the slop bucket; everything that could not be disposed of in the sink was thrown into this. When I was about six, it became my proud duty each morning to empty it.

The flat, small and meagre as it was, was never anything but spotlessly clean. The only toilet in the house was four flights of stairs down at the bottom of the main staircase. In the summer, apart from the smell, it was no problem. In winter, leaving the comparative warmth of the top floor was no fun; more often than not, it was occupied by a member of one of the other families who lived in the lower floors of the house.

My faulty memory also reveals that there was also a small attic or loft in the roof space above our top-floor flat, reached by a rickety wooden flight of stairs. This contained Dad’s little workshop, where he plied his trade making ladies’ coats for private clients; it was also where Bubba Fox, my grandmother, had her small bed. One could hardly call it a bedroom; she, poor thing, had no privacy — her accommodation was simply her small bed and a footlocker, in which she kept all her worldly possessions.

Bubba, I seem to remember, was a little peanut of a woman; small, thin and slightly Slavic-looking with high cheekbones that had been passed on to her daughter Fanny. She had come from France, where apparently she then still had relatives in Paris. I dimly remember visiting them there in 1937, when Dad and I went to visit my aunty and other family members, as well as to see the World’s Fair being held in Paris. My later researches also revealed the existence of an elderly lady related to my mother who lived in London, whose exact relation to us was unclear, by the name of Aunt Rosa Hagendorf.

Bubba Fox was a higgler. She would acquire sweaters and woollen garments, bundle them up and take them to the market to sell on a stall in Club Row in Brick Lane. Everybody at the market was Jewish and their lingua franca was Yiddish⁵. There were three or four Yiddish theatres in the East End of London before the war, as well as Yiddish opera singers and newspapers. A thriving Ashkenazi Jewish culture had come intact from Eastern Europe and supported the community that had taken root in the East End. Across the street they would sell pickled fish — schmaltz herring — imported from Poland.

My uncle, Harry Klaber, who was married to my father’s sister Yeadis (Judith), had a little tailoring workshop in Old Montague Street, in a room above the Kailingold bookshop. I remember passing Kailin-gold to get to the Klabers’ workshop and the dark smell of musty books downstairs and the little room upstairs with the Klabers’ cutting table and the sewing machines. They made ladies’ coats.

I remember another tailor’s