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Emanuel Litvinoff

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Emanuel Litvinoff
 

Emanuel Litvinoff was born in the East End of London in 1915, his parents having left the Ukraine to escape the persecution of Jewish people. He served during the Second World War. He is a poet and author.

Emanuel Litvinoff was interviewed by Hannah Burman on 11 March 1998
Photograph by Torla Evans

 
 

Below are a summary and transcript of the interview. Each line of the summary is linked to the related part of the transcript.

The v buttons take you from the summary to the transcript.

The ^ buttons take you from the transcript to the summary.

   
   

summary

v Born in the East End, 1915. Parents came from the Ukraine in 1913.
v Father had to join Russian army, did not return. Mother remarried. 9 children.
v Fuller Street Buildings. Communal toilets. Gas lighting. Sleeping arrangements.
v His grandparents.
v Parents intended to go to the US but their fare only got them to London.
v Fuller Street contained Jewish and non-Jewish people. Anti-Semitic neighbour.
v Playing in the streets, until moved into adult world at 14.
v Father worked as a tailor's presser in London.
v Mother remarried when he was 8 or 9. Conflicts with stepfather.
v After father returned to Russia, had news of him once but did not see him again.
   
v Mother a good-looking woman. A dress-maker and the principal wage earner.
v Romantic ideas about stepfather Uncle Solly's previous life in South Africa.
v Mother staying up late working.
v Mother made their clothes when young. Kept her children very clean.
v Religion did not play a major role. Learning Hebrew. Was not barmitzvahed.
v Jewish and Russian food.
v First day at school. Doing well at school.
v Being caned at school.
v Lessons.
v Had few non-Jewish friends. Anti-Semitism from children.
   
v Being lost as a child and helped by the police. Going to the West End later on.
v Failing to gain a scholarship to the grammar school because of nervousness.
v Passing the trade scholarship. The interview.
v Cordwainers Technical College. Anti-Semitism there. Getting into a fight.
v Getting a job in the fur trade in the City.
v Smoking and flirting after work.
v Joining the Young Communists League. Learning about anti-Semitism.
v Seasonal work so periods of unemployment. Guilt at not contributing at home.
v Apprenticeship at a printing works for 3 months.
v Sneaking into the cinema. The first talkies.
   
v Newspapers 'The Daily Herald' and 'Die Zeit', passed around the building.
v Expulsion from the Young Communist League because of rivalry over a girl.
v Brief involvement in Zionism.
v Had letter published responding to newspaper article on situation in Germany.
v Pawning his suit and causing a row with his mother, who threw him out.
v Tried Leeds for an unsuccessful week, selling door to door.
v Returned to London and stayed with a friend, before returning home.
v His relationships with his stepfather and siblings.
v Trying to get two novels published, without success.
v Flat in Finchley Road, working as fur nailer to support himself while writing.
   
v Keeping in touch with family.
v 1939, initially conscientious objector, before realising the dangers of invasion.
v Pioneer Corps. Journey to a camp in Glasgow. Carriage of Cockney boys.
v Avoiding work by carrying a bucket and broom around. Going into Glasgow.
v Posted to Northern Ireland. Had his first poems published.
v Not liking being a soldier. Sergeant Major talking about sex.
v Permission to go to Belfast for religious services, then not going to Synagogue.
v Working in the cookhouse, which meant time to write. Becoming an officer.
v Officer training. Compassionate leave when brother became Prisoner of War.
v Posted to a unit of mainly Jewish refugees, many very educated.
   
v Girls more interested in him as an officer.
v Family evacuated to a Zionist farm, where brother was miserable.
v Family returned to London, where they were during the Blitz.
v Meeting his wife, who was in the ATS, at a dance. Finding both wrote poetry.
v Going on a date and showing each other their poetry.
v Marrying 7 weeks later. Attitudes of his father-in-law.
v Not being able to find a room in London and so staying in a hotel.
v Experiencing an air raid in London and sheltering.
v Did not tell his mother until after he married. She liked his wife.
v His wife getting in trouble for giving him a lift and kissing him while on duty.
   
v Entering this story for a competition and winning a car.
v First daughter born.
v Posting to Sierra Leone. Conflict with the other officers.
v Putting in a report about the treatment of a young military prisoner.
v Being in charge of an Italian Prisoner of War camp.
v Establishing himself with his new unit when promoted to Major.
v Keeping his unit clean and orderly.
v Home leave and then posted to Alexandria.
v Did not see any fighting himself during the war.
v Attachment to a Smoke Unit in Suffolk in 1945.
   
v Finding a flat in Hampstead amid housing shortages. Anti-Semitic owner.
v Son born before they could find a doctor.
v Trying and deciding against writing advertising copy.
v His wife's plan that she would work and he would write.
v His wife becoming a model.
v Freelancing. Proposing features programmes for BBC. Articles in 'Tribune'.
v Meeting Louis McNiece, Roy Campbell and Dylan Thomas.
v His family. His mother enraptured by visit to Devon, after London.
v Writing a series about a Jewish man, not made because of events in Palestine.
v A founder of 'The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review'.
   
v His second books of poems.
v Response to his poem chiding TS Eliot for republishing anti-Semitic poems.
   
   

transcript

^ Q: Well Emanuel, can you tell me where and when you were born?

A: I was born on May the 5th 1915, in a street called Jubilee Street, which is off the Commercial Road, in the East End of London. Actually my official birthday is June the 30th, because my mother hadn't registered my birth and she was told she could go to prison if she didn't, so she made me two months, almost two months younger. But there it is, that's when I was born, yes.

Q: Can you tell me something about your family?

A: My mother and father left the Ukraine, Odessa, in early 1913 and stopped over in Brussels and they came over just before the war began in 1913 and they settled in East London. My older brother was just born there too and then I was born about fifteen months later.

Q: Any other brothers and sisters?

A: Yes, there were originally four of us.
   
^ A: My father had to go back to the Soviet Union because an agreement was made, actually it wasn't the Soviet Union then, it was the first Marx revolution of 1917, and the Russian authorities at the time had an agreement with the British Government that Russian nationals living in England would either have to join the British Army, or return to Russia to join the Russian Army. And my father, along with quite a number of other Russian Jews, decided to go back. I assume they thought that by the time that they got there the war would be over.

Q: How old were you?

A: When my father left I was about sixteen, seventeen months old. Anyway he never came back. So my mother remarried some years later and had another five children, so altogether there were nine of us.
   
^ Q: Did you all live in the same house?

A: We were all living in the same, not a house, but a flat.

Q: Could you describe the flat to me?

A: We moved from Christian Street, just off the Commercial Road, to a place called Fuller Street Buildings. And we had two rooms and a small kitchenette. There were toilets in the yard, there were three toilets in the yard. Altogether there must have been about eighty to ninety people living in the whole block who shared these three toilets, and there was a communal dustbin, and the place was foul. People used to stand on the toilet seats to avoid sitting on them. There were newspapers, you know, saturated with urine all over the place. The dustbins used to overflow. It's a miracle that everybody didn't die of some dire disease there. Although we seem to have grown up pretty healthily. The rooms themselves were small, they were gas lit - electricity I think had certainly not been introduced into the East End, certainly not into most of the tenements. And the gas was, you had a gas meter which used to take shillings and if you ran out of shillings or ran out of money then you just couldn't have any lights and you couldn't have gas for cooking, you see, so it was a vital thing. There were, let's see, there was a large bed in the bedroom and a child's cot and a sofa which we used to open in the sitting room, or the living room as we called it, in which four of us used to sleep, head to toe, you see.

Q: Four of you in a cot in the living room?

A: Actually I and the brother who was younger than me by thirteen months, my brother Pinny, were the two in the family who wet the bed, so we had to sleep in the cots and we were very tall kids. And I remember that my legs used to stick out of the bars of the cot quite a lot, you know, about half of my legs were sticking out, and sometimes of course we just slept on the floor.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'big city living'
 
   
   
^ Q: Can you tell us a bit about your grandparents?

A: Actually I know very little about my grandparents, because the little that was, that one would hear one's mother talking about to other women really. My grandfather on my mother's side was a Hebrew teacher and he, he couldn't make a living as a Hebrew teacher so he decided to be a peddler. And he decided to invest whatever little money he had in a peddler's tray and peddler's stock of needles and threads and whatever. And he went out to tour the country selling it and on the first day that he was out he was robbed.

Q: Was this in Odessa?

A: This was in Odessa, yes. My, I know almost nothing at all about my father's parents. The only thing I know was that my mother used to say that his mother was a very authoritative lady who was a small lady, very, very managerial, who actually advised her not to marry her son, because she said he wasn't very good. He was supposed to be an anarchist.

Q: Very political then.

A: He was supposed to be, yes, political, an anarchist. So she probably disapproved of that, and apparently he wasn't very interested in working. He used to sit in tea-shops and cafés, talking with his friends, anarchism and poetry apparently, although that's pure hearsay. I have no evidence that any of this is true on my mother's side, on my father's side. But we have an interesting, my grandparents, one of my grandparents, I don't know which one, it was on my mother's side, had a rather interesting sort of history. When they were relatively young they lost one of their children, died, and they decided that it was because they had been simple. So they gave everything they had away and they built themselves a kind of shelter open to the sky and they ceased to have marital relations and they used to see the souls of holy Jews being carried through the sky to Jerusalem. And apparently they became known in the district as holy people and even non-Jewish peasants would come to see them. Now that's a rather nice story.

Q: It sounds quite Chagall like.

A: It is very Chagall like, yes.
   
^ Q: So why did your parents come over to London?

A: Well they left Russia, like lots of other Jews were leaving Russia at the time, because of persecution and poverty. They apparently intended to go to the United States but when they got to London they were told that that's all their fare was good enough for, they hadn't paid enough to go to the United States, so they were put ashore in London. That's how they came.

Q: Did they have relatives in the Stepney area or the Whitechapel area?

A: They had, no, they had one or two friends from Odessa who'd already settled here.
   
^ Q: And tell me something about the area that you grew up in.

A: Well Fuller Street was divided, on one side it was almost exclusively Jewish and on the other side, there were more non-Jews than Jews. There were a few Jews over there but it was more or less hostile territory. We lived around the corner from a street called Bacon Street and I can only remember one Jewish family living in Bacon Street and that was a cobbler, who lived in the cellar of one of the houses there with his two or three children and his wife. But one of the things that I remember most vividly about my early childhood in Fuller Street was opposite us, in a room in a house immediately opposite the tenement, was a Gypsy woman. And on Saturday nights she always got drunk and she used to have these long beaded earrings and she used to come down and you could see her earrings shaking in the gas light of the street lamps and she shouted out 'you killed our Lord, you killed our Lord'.
   
^ Q: Did you play in the streets?

A: Yes, the streets were an open playground in those days, I mean that's where everybody played, and it was relatively safe. Because most of the traffic was horse drawn. If a motor car came down, all of the kids crowded around it, you know, because it was something to look at, you know, and wonder about. We had an assembly place, there was a toy factory and we used to sit in the doorway of the toy factory and I imagine that's where I seem to remember I got most of my early education about life and sex and all that sort of thing from other kids who were more knowledgeable than I was.

Q: Did different age groups stick together?

A: Yes, I think it stopped when, you know the oldest would be about fourteen, and then they moved into an adult world because at fourteen after all you went out to work. You had to leave school, you started a job and so they were already smoking and going around to the fish and chip shop and treating themselves and occasionally even having a drink. Although the Jewish children as whole didn't drink.
   
^ Q: And your father, before he returned to Russia what did he do?

A: He was, the only job I can recall my mother mentioning him doing was as a tailor's presser, because that's what all the unskilled people used to become. And the reason I remember that he was supposed to be a tailor's presser was that my mother said that when they came over to England he got a job as a tailor's presser and the boss said to him, 'look in this country', he said in Yiddish, he said to him, 'in this country you've got to remember this, in this country you don't spit on the pavements'. And my father was apparently so insulted that he walked out and it took some time for him to get other work you see. But otherwise I don't know, apart from that I don't know what he did.
   
^ Q: What about your stepfather?

A: My stepfather was a tailor's machinist. A relatively skilled job.

Q: Were you close to him?

A: Well I was constantly in conflict with him you see, because I was, I must have resented him as an interloper you see. He married my mother when I was, I think, just about eight or nine and somehow or other I had the idea that he had no business there and he had no business disciplining me, you see, and I had a very sharp tongue as a child. So we used to have arguments, I always remember him chasing me down the street with a copy of 'The Free Thinker', he was an atheist you see, and, but he was a perfectly nice man really.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'generations: the child's perspective'
 
   
   
^ Q: You say you never heard from your father again after he went to Russia?

A: No we never heard, we heard about him, I mean some of the men in our tenement who'd gone back to Russia returned, I would say about 1922. They managed to get out of Russia and managed to get back to England. And one of my, one of our neighbours was a man who had been with my father in Russia, and the story he told us was that they had, when the Revolution broke out Russia was full of odd groups of people trying to survive in their own way. And he said my father, he and a number of other men got together and formed a kind of robber band, the idea was that they were going to make their way to a port and get home to England. And he said they used to steal horses and they used to mint money, goodness knows, he probably exaggerated of course. He said they arrived at Archangel and they had a rendezvous with a British Merchant Sea Captain and when they turned up they waited, and waited, and then the Sea Captain wouldn't wait any longer so they boarded the boat, and as the boat was pulling out they saw my father waving from the shore. So presumably he'd overslept or something and that was the last we heard, yes.
   
^ Q: Can you tell me your mother's name?

A: My mother's name was Rosa, Rosa.

Q: Can you describe her to me?

A: She was a tall, in those days she was regarded as very tall, but I think she was about 5'6 or 5'7 at the maximum. Dark-haired woman, very good looking, because people used to say to me when I used to go to the market to get some potatoes or apples, ah yes, your mother's the tall handsome woman, yes.

Q: What market was that?

A: Brick Lane market. And she was a dress maker, in fact she was the principle wage earner, not only when she was, as it were, widowed or draft widowed, whatever it was, but even after she married my step-father, whom I called Uncle Solly.
   
^ Q: What did Uncle Solly do?

A: He was a machinist in the tailoring trade. He had a rather interesting history because he'd been in the First World War and suffered a few wounds but was on the whole lucky enough to survive more or less intact. Then settled in South Africa where apparently at some time he was kind of manager of a small hotel, and in fact we had some very romantic, he was a very, very handsome man, we had very romantic pictures of him sitting astride a horse, you know, in sort of looking like an English land-owning gentleman. So he must have come down in the world after that you see.
   
^ Q: So your mother, was the principle wage earner?

A: Yes, I mean the point is he was often out of work, it was seasonal, and she, and she usually found somebody who wanted to have a dress made or whatever.

Q: She worked from home?

A: She worked from home. The bedroom was the kind of, had a long mirror and that's where she used to sit at the machine working. I often remember her in the middle of the night working on some wedding or something and had to stay up all night to get it done because she was always late. And I can remember waking in the night and looking through the doorway, we were sleeping four on the sofa you see, looking through the doorway at my mother at the machine. And I do remember what was clearly a nightmare of her turning around with the face of a witch.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'generations: the child's perspective'
 
   
   
^ Q: So she was always busy working then and looking after the children?

A: Yeah, I mean she did everything that a woman was supposed to do in those days, I mean she scrubbed floors and did whatever cooking and rushed out to do some shopping and repaired the kids' clothes. Usually repairing our trousers because we were always getting our trousers torn at the back. In fact when were very small she used to make us our trousers, and that was a real problem because she didn't know or didn't have the skill to make flies, so we used to have little slits in the front and it was always a problem sort of getting it out, getting the penis out in time to pee before you wet your trousers.

Also you see, when we were very young my mother was extraordinarily fastidious about the four of us. We must have been rather nice looking kids. She didn't allow our hair to be cut so we wore our haircut sort of pageboy style, which she used to do herself. We were not allowed out on a Saturday until we'd all had our hair washed, and she used to hike us up under her arm, our heads hanging down into a basin and wash our hair, and then she dressed us beautifully in clothes that she used to make herself. And this left me, curiously enough, with a sort of difficulty about sunny days, if it's a sunny day I feel desperately that I have to go out. Because you'd have a beautiful Saturday and we were not allowed to go out into the street, and by the time she managed to do everything it was already the evening, getting dark.
   
^ Q: Was Saturday a special day?

A: Saturday was the Sabbath wasn't it? So we had to go out in our best you see.

Q: Could you talk about the role of religion in your life?

A: Well it didn't play much of a role in our religion, I mean, in our family life because of the absence of a father and because my mother couldn't afford to pay for us to go to Hebrew classes. Actually I went for a very short time, it was probably the influence of Mr Roitman, you know, my father's comrade and friend. After he came back, and he said, look the children must have a Jewish education, and I remember being taken with my older brother Abie to the market place and being fitted with flat caps, which really came over our ears, we were only about what five, four or five, six maybe. And then being taken round to the Working Men's Synagogue, where they had Hebrew Classes in an upper floor room, and being enrolled.

I must have been, gone there a few times, I don't know how my mother, because I do remember the teacher saying we have to ask our mother for the money, sixpence it cost at the time. And I remember, because I was very bright and I remember learning Hebrew very, very quickly, I could gabble through the Hebrew like nobody's business so and I also remember even getting a prize of a Hebrew book. But then my mother couldn't afford to keep it up so we stopped going, we were not barmitzvahed, which was really rather awful in those days for a Jewish boy to reach the age of thirteen and not be barmitzvahed. My mother at one time used to light candles on Friday, but then that fell into disuse, I mean she never had the time poor woman. She had to get a dress made by the following morning or whatever it was and so she had to work on Sabbath.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'teaching and learning'
 
   
   
^ Q: Tell me about the food that you ate?

A: Well I suppose we had what were more or less traditional Jewish dishes: Lokshen soup of course, farfallah, my mother used to make something called Veranicas which were, which was a dough with little bits of meat in the middle or something and seems to have apparently been a Russian dish. She used to sometimes make Russian borsht. I remember that chicken in those days was quite expensive for poor people, in fact we knew a very well known joke: if a Jew eats a chicken, one of them must be sick. My mother used to buy chicken giblets, which were the sort of intestines of chickens, out of which she used to make soup.
   
^ Q: Did you go to school?

A: Yes I went to a school around the corner called Wood Close, and I first went there when I was, I probably nagged my mother to go to school and I was taken there when I was four. And I, in fact I don't remember whether I asked to go or not or whether my mother thought. Because I seem to have a memory that I was taken into this place by mother saying 'we're going for a walk' and then getting into this enormous place and there was a woman with a sort of funny sharp voice and she took me by the hand and took me into a room and there were all these children sitting down. Anyway, I sat there and I was so unhappy and nervous that I wet the floor and I can remember trying to cover it with my feet, and then I refused to go, so I went again when I was five.

Q: Did you enjoy school when you returned?

A: Yes. I can remember I broke my arm at the same time and I remember that I had a teacher who, what was her name now, I've forgotten, whatever, she liked me. I had this hair cut short with a bobbed hair and I was probably very pretty. And I had broken my arm so as a special favour she allowed me to sit in front of the class, actually kneel in front of the class. And I had a chair there, I remember, with little in the seat, and instead of taking part in the lesson she said I could write a composition, and I had to write a composition about the ancient Britons. I wrote this composition, I was carried away with inspiration, I remember, you see, it was my left arm that was broken so I was writing with my right arm. When I finished she read it out to the class and from that day on I knew that one day I was going to be a writer you see. But I wasn't very bright to begin with. I remember having a certain amount of difficulty with numbers, all the kids were singing these number songs and I couldn't quite get them right, and I was really very unhappy about that. But suddenly when I was six or seven I suddenly became good at everything and from then on I always enjoyed school. Although you used to get caned a great deal, as soon as you got out of the infants and you went upstairs, into the senior.
   
^ Q: Did you get caned?

A: Oh everyday, almost everyday somebody got caned and you were very lucky if you went a whole week without being caned.

Q: What kind of reasons?

A: They said you'd been talking or you, whatever, I mean somebody passed you something. Or the teacher went out of the room for some reason and said 'you behave yourselves and keep quiet' and when he came in just at that moment you were talking. So out you came and you were caned on both hands with a stout stick. And I remember the thing was it was important not to show pain, to be very stoical, and it was very difficult. You'd put your hand out and you'd start to withdraw it before the cane came down. But that didn't seem to make a difference, every year I got a prize so I didn't mind, I mean on the whole I put up with being caned, I still wanted to go to school.
   
^ Q: Was composition your favourite subject?

A: Yes, but I especially enjoyed writing compositions because I was good at it, but I was good at everything at that time.

Q: What else would you have been learning? Mathematics.

A: You learn Arithmetic not Mathematics. I wouldn't even have known what Mathematics meant.

Q: Emanuel we were just talking school and the subjects that you studied.

A: Yes: reading, writing and arithmetic and geography and history, which was almost invariably just a list of who was the king and queens of England going back into the mists of time. And something, usually about the ancient Britons or the wars and so on. Geography, I remember we had this master, Mr Parker, who was constantly sort of going into a corner to smoke his cigarettes, he had a horrible cough and he kept spitting into his handkerchief. And he used to distribute Geographic magazines and these had pictures of Africans, African tribes and so on, and I always remember him coming in saying 'look at old Litvinoff looking at all the naked ladies', which I might very well have been doing, I don't know.

Q: How old would you have been at this time?

A: I would have been eleven or twelve.

Q: What year would that be?

A: That would be 1930,1927, or something like that you see.
   
^ Q: Tell me something about the children at school. Was it mixed boys and girls?

A: No, oh no, it was a single sex school. And our class, there was only one non-Jewish child in the class, poor boy. The one school picture I have has got this poor kid standing at the back, obviously terribly lonely and out of place, and there the rest of the

Q: Did you not mix with him?

A: I can't remember that anybody did, I mean there were all these vivid Jewish faces earnestly looking out and this poor kid looking lost and lonely at the back.

Q: In the streets around where you lived did the Jews keep very much to themselves?

A: Yes, but I don't think, it never occurred to anybody to have non-Jewish friends. Although I had non-Jewish friends from across the street, but they didn't visit our home, but I do remember visiting theirs. Because they were a family across the road called Eadland, which I always called England because I thought it was England, and they were cabinetmakers and they had their workshop on the street. And I used to like going in and watching them, his father and usually one workman with him doing you know their woodwork, I was absolutely fascinated. But I remember they were, on one occasion they had a big propeller, a wooden propeller on the wall, and I was fascinated by this, I wanted to know what it was. Apparently it was a propeller from a First World War aeroplane and they were very proud of it, yes, I think the father said he had made it, he used to make those propellers you see.

But otherwise you didn't, to give you some idea of our relations with our non-Jewish neighbours, we had practically never any gifts of any kind but a slightly more affluent friend of my mother's once came to see us and she gave us two presents: one was a coloured ball with pictures on it and the other one was a tin drum. I had the tin drum and the ball was between the rest of us to play. Now my brother and I, or it might have been my two brothers and I, were playing round the corner at a blank brick wall with the ball and along came two or three big yokes, as we called them, and they grabbed the ball and they said 'you killed our lord, so we can keep your ball' and they did. We were quite nervous about walking down the street, although on the whole, I mean apart from the fact that occasionally some kid would shout something after you or even probably run after you for a bit, I can't remember that anybody really came to any great harm.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'getting on badly'
 
   
   
^ Q: Did you ever venture out of the East End when you were a child?

A: Yes I tended to be rather odd in that way, too adventurous, and I can always remember wandering out of what seemed to me the East End into the other side of Bethnal Green Road, I think it must have been. I was five years old and I was picked up by a policeman because I was crying and he took me to the police station and I remember they put a police helmet on my head. And they had to send somebody, because there was no question of telephoning in those days, they had to send somebody round. They asked me where I lived and I knew where I lived, I knew the address, they sent somebody round and my mother came round in a terrible state of fear because it was the police. And later on of course when I was not much older than that, I mean by the time I was nine or ten, I was venturing cautiously into places like the West End.

Q: You were young.

A: Yes, yes, yes, that's right, yes.

Q: How would you get to the West End?

A: Walk, or I'd ride on the back of a van, I was very good at jumping on the backs of vans and wherever they took you, you see.

Q: You didn't care, you just wanted adventure.

A: Well yes it was an adventure, yes. So in that sense I would leave but I didn't really leave the East End, that's what it amounted to you see, and I didn't really leave really Whitechapel, Jewish Whitechapel.
   
^ Q: How old were you when you left school?

A: You know I failed all of the scholarships because I was so terribly nervous, it was so important for me. I mean I was, for example when I had to go in for the eleven plus or whatever it was I was reading a book called 'A Short Social History of England', in other words I was desperate to win the scholarship. The result was when it finally came to it, because I knew incidentally that that was the only way to escape.

Q: Scholarship to where?

A: To a Grammar School. It was the only way of escape from the misery and poverty and unemployment, I already knew that, at ten or eleven. I was so nervous I couldn't control my hand, I couldn't write, so the route was I failed the scholarship. But there were two scholarships, there was the eleven plus, or whatever they called it, and then there was the supplementary scholarship or something, in case you developed a little later. You took that at twelve or something. I failed that in the same way, although my youngest brother had already gone on to Parmiter's Foundation. In fact I had two brothers who'd gone to this Grammar School.

Q: Where was this Grammar School?

A: It was a short distance away, probably a mile or so away, in the East End.
   
^ A: As I didn't care, they had a trade scholarship and I bloody well didn't care about the trade scholarship, I sort of sailed through it and passed. And I remember you had to take a piece of woodwork that you had made when you had your, as it were verbal interview, you see. Now I had put down in preference, you were given a choice of what sort of school, I'd put down in the School of Printing because I thought that had something to do with writing, and as a second choice, the School of Cookery because I thought that if you were trained to be a cook you can travel around and get yourself jobs everywhere you see.

Anyway I went along to the interview carrying this, I made a towel rack and it was absolutely beautiful you know, it really was beautiful except that I didn't have the money to put the glass in. But it had the frame for a mirror and so on so I thought, and I took this beautifully made towel rack along and I had this discussion with this man. It was a committee really with three people, he wasn't the slightest bit interested in my towel rack, he asked me something quite, something that seemed to have no connection, he asked me 'why is the cotton industry in Lancashire?' And I had picked up somewhere, I said 'that's because the area is damp'. But I didn't get into the School of Printing, I didn't get into the School of Cooking.
   
^ A: They sent me to a place called Cordwainers Technical College. I thought Technical College, that sounds good, you see college. But Cordwainers Technical College turned out to be a boot and shoe college where you learnt to make boots and shoes. It was in Smithfield Market next to an offal yard. It stank to high heaven. And I had the most nightmarish experiences of my life there because, which started with the first day when you had to answer your names. And this little stout bald headed headmaster came in with this ledger, he called out the names and he had a bit of difficulty with one of the names which belonged to a sort of Italian boy, came to mine and the most extraordinary mispronunciations, Levipotsky, all sorts of incredible things, and I wouldn't answer. So eventually he said 'what is your name boy?' and I said 'Litvinoff sir', he said 'didn't I call out that name? Didn't I?' and all the kids said 'yes sir' and it started there and it was a terribly anti-Semitic school.

Q: How old were you when you started there?

A: I was thirteen. In fact it would have been the last term of my school career because you left at fourteen and this was the term before I was fourteen and you were supposed to stay at the school until you were sixteen I think. Anyway whatever, altogether it was absolute hell, in fact I wrote a story about it called 'Enemy Territory'. And I had, in the end I had, there was a kind of boy who was a leader of a gang there and he picked a fight with me and we had a fight in the school gymnasium, because it was a needle fight and everybody said, oh the teachers are very excited that it should take place in the school gymnasium, and of course I was beaten thoroughly by this man, by this boy. He was two years older than me, and so I walked out of school.

Q: Were you the only Jewish boy in the school?

A: I was the only Jewish boy in the school, yes.
   
^ Q: And so you left.

A: I walked out, I wasn't quite fourteen and I went straight out and I got myself a job in the fur trade. The same day.

Q: So you were still living at home?

A: I was still living at home, yes.

Q: So tell me about this job in the fur trade.

A: Well I saw a notice saying 'Strong boy wanted' and I walked up three flights of steps.

Q: Where was this?

A: This was in the City. It was, I'm trying to remember the name of the street, I think it was in St. John's Road, which leads from Clerkenwell towards Islington, you see, towards the Angel. I walked up and I was quite a strong boy, I'd grown rather a lot, and they gave me the job. I started work at I think it was one pound a week. My job was to learn fur nailing, so I had to wet the skins, well they used to make a lot of collars, fur collars and fur coats and fur capes, and it was my job, when the skins were sewn together I would, I was supposed to wet the garment, put it down on a chalk pattern on a wooden base and knock nails round it. Of course it took a couple of weeks before I learnt to do that, you see. So I became, as it were, an apprentice fur nailer.

Q: And how many hours did you work?

A: I used to go in from nine in the morning 'til six in the evening.

Q: You got one pound a week.

A: A one pound a week, yes.

Q: What did you do with the money.

A: I gave it to my mother and she used to give me a shilling.

Q: Did you socialised with the other fur nailers?

A: Well yes, I mean you make an adjustment quite quickly. First of all I was given the usual treatment of a newcomer, a youngster. They sent me out for pigeon's milk, rubber nails. I think I never went for the rubber nails. I did go for the pigeons' milk because they sent me to a café. And yes, a certain amount of rough play, and the women there, the girls who were working on the machines were always very, very coarse towards you, you see, because you were a kid. But on the whole I quite liked the atmosphere.
   
^ Q: When you left at six did you just go straight home?

A: Yes I did I suppose. Yes, because first of all I was hungry, and I used to go straight home and then go out in the street. By that time I was already beginning to smoke. The moment you were fourteen you put on long trousers, you buy your first packet of fags if you'd got a job, which was usually five Woodbines. And you'd be standing on the street corner talking to the other kids, flirting with the girls very shyly.

Q: What would you talk about?

A: Well I was usually showing off, you know, I would say something like, I would find something in an encyclopaedia and say 'do you know about cancer?' and give them a lecture about cancer on what I'd picked up from an encyclopaedia. It was a way really of asserting one's superiority of course.
   
^ Q: And politics were they important to you at all?

A: Oh yes of course because I was a young communist.

Q: Tell me about that.

A: I joined the YCL, Young Communist League, well I was a young Communist when I was about twelve or thirteen. And this was because there was a kid in my class who was very, very militant. A very militant Communist. And I admired him, he was very clever too, he was the second to me in terms of top of the class, he was the second. But he was much more knowledgeable about politics and he certainly indoctrinated me, explained to me how unfair the world was and why we were starving. Although I wasn't conscious of the fact that I was starving I knew that I didn't get lots of things that, you know, we would have liked. And so under his influence I joined the YCL.

Q: Was there a local branch?

A: Yes there was a local branch which used to meet in some hall just off Brick Lane. And I always remember, we had a man in charge of us who told us that there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Because apparently they were talking about anti-Semitism, I'd never heard of that, in the Soviet Union there was no real difference between Jews and Christians because the only people who made us think there was difference were the Rabbis, you know, they were feeding us the opium of the people and so on and so forth. And then when I was older I became more or less a leading figure in a branch of the Young Communists League which had a sports club called Hackney Workers' Sports Club and we used to go on cycling trips to the country and so on.

Q: Where in the country?

A: Well you'd go mainly to Epping Forest or sometimes some distance further out.

Q: How old were you then?

A: I was fifteen.
   
^ Q: When you weren't working you'd do this?

A: Well the point is, you know, I was subject to periods of unemployment because it's a seasonal trade and the Lord Mayor's Show was the mark of the moment when we would cease to be employed because that was the end of the season.

Q: When would that be, what month?

A: The Lord Mayor's Show I think is, it's in Summer, I can't remember exactly when, and then we were out of work.

Q: So then you would concentrate on Young Communist things?

A: It was a grim period because you had literally nothing, no money, until you were sixteen you couldn't draw any unemployment pay. You got a very small unemployment pay when you were sixteen. So it meant that you were penniless. You felt very uncomfortable coming home because to eat, you would eat guiltily you see, because you know that you are not paying your whack. And so it was really a wretched time and as far as I was concerned I didn't know quite what to do. I went to libraries and I read books.

Q: What library did you go to?

A: Bethnal Green Public Library. I'd go for long walks you know, I go off with one or two kids who were also unemployed and we'd go to a park or something like that, in general it was a question of trying to find something to fill one's life with.

Q: And then in the winter again you'd work?

A: I can't remember the exact seasons.
   
^ Q: But you had work to look forward to?

A: Oh I also got other jobs. I mean I worked in a cabinet maker's shop. I went to the Jewish Board of Guardians which had a Youth Employment Officer and he sent me on one occasion to an apprentice in a printing works And a friend of mine also went to the same place in Clerkenwell, a printer's shop in Clerkenwell, this boy's name was Isaac, I'm sorry I've forgotten the name, anyway whatever, he was my friend and he was very much better at it than me. We used to learn to set type from, you know, a hand set type, but the main thing was I think we were being paid two and sixpence a week for the first three months and after that you would be paid five shillings a week for the next three months and after that you'd probably get one pound a week. And mainly I was carrying enormous bundles of printing to various people who'd, you know, given orders. It was very had work. I used to try and save on the fares so I would carry them instead of going on the bus or the tram, whatever it was, I needed the money. I was very, very cheeky to this guy, the man who ran it was a man with a very heavy foreign accent, a German accent, and he was constantly having to put up with me being saucy. At the end of three months he asked me to go. So there were experiences like that. And I always remember complaining to my mother that we had to stir our tea with sticks of wood, thinking that she would say 'oh no you can't possibly do that, you can't work there any more' because I hated it you see.
   
^ Q: Did you ever go to the cinema or music hall?

A: We used to go to the cinema whenever one could, and we used to bunk in. There was a cinema in Bethnal Green Road called Smart's, Smart's Cinema, and we used to hang around the back. I was doing this from about the age of ten or eleven you see, you could hang around the back door and then when somebody came out of the back you'd nip in quickly and then you'd sneak upstairs to the gallery and sit in the cinema. The attendant used to come round looking for kids and he'd say 'where's your ticket?' and if you didn't have your ticket he'd chuck you out you see.

Q: How often would you go to the cinema?

A: I'd go usually once every two or three weeks. I'd have loved to have gone every week.

Q: Did you have any favourite stars or films?

A: Well I can remember the first talkies. Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. I can remember the excitement, the discussion going on all over Bethnal Green about the talkies, and we used to say there must be a gramophone behind the screen. And I can remember going along and sitting there in absolute awe at these voices speaking from the screen. It was really rather remarkable, yes. I can't remember having any favourite film stars. I mean we liked Charlie Chaplin and we liked all the comedians really. And we used to see, they used to have serials in which at one stage or other there was going be a pretty young woman tied to a rail track and a train was coming, or, in a runaway carriage and the horses were, you know, the wheels falling of the carriages. That sort of thing, or walls gradually coming closer and closer and water rising higher and higher and the hero and heroine penned in facing certain death until next week.
   
^ Q: Did you read newspapers? I know as a member of the Young Communist League you were obviously interested in politics.

A: Well yes, I mean 'The Daily Herald' was I think the standard newspaper in our street, more or less, because it was a Labour Party paper. There was a Yiddish paper called 'Die Zeit', and it was very interesting this Yiddish paper, it cost tuppence. Now somebody would buy it in the building for tuppence, when he or she finished with it they'd pass it on to somebody else for three ha'pence, who then pass it on to somebody for a penny and then somebody would finally have it for a ha'penny. So that tuppenny paper would probably serve five or six families before it was cut up into small pieces and used in the toilet. 'The Daily Worker', I didn't buy 'The Daily Worker', frankly because I couldn't afford to spend the money, to waste it on 'The Daily Worker'. In any case I had my own ideas about Communism, quite different from anybody else's.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'providing and benefiting'
 
   
   
^ Q: Did you have meetings with the Young Communist League?

A: Yes we did and it was at one of these meetings that I was expelled.

Q: Tell me about that.

A: Well I've written about that in a story called 'The God I Failed'. And the secretary of the branch was the boy in my class at school who recruited me in the first place. Well I was very sweet on a girl named Hannah and we used to walk around, occasionally managed to have enough money to go into a milk bar and have a milk shake. A very sweet and innocent relationship. And one occasion she asked me 'do you believe in platonic love?', I was fifteen years old, I didn't really know what it was but I said 'yes of course' and she said 'well you won't when you're older' and off she went. She was the same age as me but obviously a little more sophisticated. Now our branch secretary was also very sweet on her, he was the boy who had recruited me to Communism in the first place. And we were having a meeting of the club and he was explaining how Communism was a cure, it would solve unemployment, it would solve poverty, it would solve sickness, it would bring equality to everybody and so and so forth. And I was being smart as usual and I was also feeling rather aggressive towards him because he was sweet on the same girl as me so I said 'tell me how it will solve the problem of a corn on your foot?'. So he sort of stretched his neck in a curious way, rather like a fighting bird I would say, and he said 'under Communism everybody would have shoes that fit properly, so you wouldn't get corns on your feet', and it was a devastatingly brilliant reply. And very shortly after that I was expelled for Trotskyism.

Q: What year was this?

A: Let's see, oh probably 1931 or something like that, '32, '31. I didn't know what it was actually but I discovered afterwards that people were being shot for it.

Q: So that was the last time that you were a member of the Communist Party was it?

A: Yes, I very soon became disillusioned with it, I was quite, I had a feeling that things weren't right in the Soviet Union and when the Purge Trials began I was by then already very anti-Bolshevik anyway.
   
^ Q: Did you join any other party?

A: I briefly became involved in Zionism and, I suppose characteristically for me at the time, an extreme form of Zionism. Something called Revisionism that was a deviation from orthodox Zionism by a man named Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was very very militant in his attitude as a Jew. In fact at one time they were talking about arranging a march, a pilgrimage by Jews from Poland and Russia who would cross-frontiers going to Palestine.

Q: This was the early thirties still?

A: This would be the early thirties yes. And I tried to form a youth group of this party and in fact my only member was my younger brother Pinny. And I remember going around and haranguing people.

Q: In the East End?

A: In the East End yes, at various Jewish meetings you see.

Q: But people weren't interested or?

A: I think I must have sounded like a lunatic, I mean, goodness knows 'we will never get freedom except by the gun' or whatever and 'Chaim Weizmann panders to the British'. All that sort of stuff you see, but it didn't last very long.
   
^ Q: At this time were you hearing about events in Germany?

A: No, you were beginning to, you were beginning to. As a matter of fact the first time I burst into print was when 'The Evening Standard', I think it was, had an article by a man, I usually remember that man's name, it was headed 'Do the Jews cry too much?'.

Q: This was the early thirties?

A: This was the early thirties yes. 'Do the Jews cry too much', saying, you know, are they exaggerating their trouble, they're erecting a wailing wall. And there was a good deal of course of sympathy with Nazi Germany in England. And I wrote a passionate, angry reply which they published under the heading 'Where will the blow fall next?'. Because rather presciently I guessed, I had the feeling that it was going to spread beyond Germany and other countries, yes. It was a long, long letter and they published it entirely.

Q: Was this the first time that you'd been in print?

A: I'd never been in print before no.

Q: Did it feel good to see that?

A: Well I certainly felt immensely proud, pleased and so on, but it was only beginning to become. Even in the Jewish community people were not, were inclined to think there must be some exaggeration. But by and large I think there was a feeling, one had a feeling as a Jew, as a young Jew that. Anyway yes, this was the story of why I got chucked out.
   
^ A: Yes, so I was out of work, I didn't have any money, and it cost a pound to go to the camp for ten days. I had a plus-fours suit that I'd bought from the fifty shilling tailor, plus fours were like golfers' trousers you see, I took it to the pawn shop and I pawned it for one pound and then went off to camp. At the end of the ten days I was allowed to stay free of charge for another few days to help them to strike camp. Now I came back after a couple of weeks or so and I walked in to a terrible row at home. My mother was outraged 'how could you pawn your suit just to go on a holiday? You didn't pawn it just to have food in the house? We've got no money, you know we can hardly buy food, and you go off on a holiday, you pawn your suit' and so on. We had this row and she threw me out of the house.

Q: Where did you go?

A: I was down and out for quite a while. I can remember hanging around the house, 'cause this was the first time I was thrown out, hanging around the house rather helplessly because first of all I was starving hungry and then I didn't know what to do with myself you see. My brother Pinny came out to see me, he was the one just younger than I was, and he smuggled me out a cheese sandwich.
   
^ A: And then I used to, I went up to Leeds with Isaac, that was the name of my friend who came from Leeds originally, and he was also not working at the time, but his mother was a very indulgent woman and she also had more money you see. He decided that he would like to go up to Leeds to look up old friends and show me the house that he came from. We went up to Leeds and, at that time we used to get a day return ticket on the railway and it was cheaper than a single ticket, so people used to buy a day return ticket. We waited at the station and we'd ask people if they had a return ticket that they didn't want, so we got tickets to go to Leeds free of charge, went there. It was bitterly cold in winter.

Q: How long did it take you to get up to Leeds?

A: A matter of a few hours, I mean I don't think it took any longer than it would now by train.

Q: What station did you use?

A: Can't remember, I think it might have been King's Cross, I really can't remember. We got to Leeds and Isaac had a little bit of money so we rented a room in a house and we had to sleep on top of a bath in the attic and if anybody wanted a bath they had to take the planks off the bath. We used to go to bed in the very cold with a stone hot water bottle.

Q: Did you work?

A: Then I went out to get a job you see, because almost as soon as we got there Isaac went down with flu, he was in bed, he was very ill poor boy. I went out and I got a job as somebody who goes round from house to house. I was trying to sell some kind of magic medical powder, can't remember exactly what it was supposed to do. But we were collected, a group of us were collected, out of work youths and adults too, taken in a van, given the stock and we had to go up and down certain streets. We were given a couple of streets to sell these things and we got commission, we didn't get paid salary or anything, we got commission.

Q: Did you do well at that?

A: No I did terribly, terribly, and what's more I, the first time I remember I made a few shillings I think, and the next time I went out there I went down by mistake the same street as I'd been in before and I was chased by a very angry man because he'd bought my stock or whatever. Then I got another job in a shop which was selling hardware, it lasted a couple of days and then he said 'no you're not good at this so you can go', or whatever. So eventually we had to come home the two of us.

Q: So how long had you been in Leeds?

A: I think about a week. Bitterly cold and hungry and desperate.
   
^ Q: You came back to London.

A: Came back to London yes and then, I remember him, I had an arrangement with Isaac, he was living in a house in Mile End Road and it was in the basement and he smuggled me in at night and I had to hide in the part of the cellar, basement that was under the grid, the street grid you see. And when his mother went to bed he was supposed to bring me in and give me something to eat and I was to sleep on the floor in his room, and we did that for three or four days. And then one day just as we were, he smuggled me in, his mother appeared at the door. She was a small, very neat, quite good-looking little woman. He had a sister, a pasty faced sister, she was fat and ugly and I think stupid and her mother incidentally was being so nice to me 'oh why didn't you tell me you've got nowhere to sleep? You poor thing, oh I'll go and talk to your mother' and so on and so forth. I think she went to talk to my mother, my mother said I can come back. By then I was determined I was not going to go back you see. So she said to me, this Mrs Greymann said to me on one occasion, she gave me something to eat and then she said, I was taller than her and I remember her looking up at me and saying 'Mannie, will you marry my daughter?'.

Q: What did you say?

A: I was terrified. I was sixteen. Well anyway, so eventually I did go back home for a while, so I was in and out.
   
^ Q: In and out. Lots of different jobs?

A: Different jobs and different quarrels. I remember, this was really interesting, I used to blame my, I could not face the fact, obviously couldn't accept, I blocked out the fact that my mother threw me out. I said that my stepfather threw me out, poor man, he never lifted a finger to me.

Q: So he was always to blame in your eyes?

A: Yes, it was only when I was about twenty-one I realised how unfair I'd been to him you know, he'd been perfectly okay. He wasn't particularly a good father but he wasn't a bad father either.

Q: And you had younger brothers and sisters, half-brothers and sisters?

A: Oh yes of course.

Q: Did you get on with them?

A: Better than I got on with my full brothers you know, except for my brother Pinny who's thirteen months younger than me. I always quarrelled with my older brother.

Q: What was his name?

A: Abie, he changed it to Al. And then my younger brother Barney, who was a writer of course, you know, and died recently. Well I liked Barney but we didn't, until he got older, I mean I didn't feel that I had much in common with him and then I felt I had a lot in common with him because he was the intellectual. But my younger siblings I liked very much, I got on very well with them.

Q: So you were in and out of your family house, in and out of jobs.

A: That's right yes, until, until 1939.
   
^ Q: What happened in 1939?

A: Well I was working at the time in the fur trade, by then I was working as, I was writing too. I'd already written two unpublishable novels you know.

Q: Did you try to get them published?

A: Oh yes, there was one man who was very, very keen on the first one, which was vast you know.

Q: What was it called?

A: It was called, oh, 'Timewearied'. I was influenced by a writer named Thomas Wolfe who'd written a marvellous book called 'Of Time and the River' in America. It must have been an absolutely hopeless book, but I mean this man was convinced it was a work of genius because it was all about poverty and, you know, squalor and struggles of life in the underworld of the East End. And he tried desperately hard to get his editorial board to accept it, and in fact he got his chief fiction writer to write me a special report. It pointed out the poetry in it. It was very poetic, it said, but the poetry was not strong enough yet, but this writer had promise and he should try another book, you see.

Q: This was just before the war was it?

A: This was in 1937 or '38 you see, and this wretched manuscript used to plomp back every bloody, I used to dread it, the postman bringing it.
   
^ Q: So 1939 comes, are you still in and out of jobs?

A: I939 I was living, by then I was working as a skilled fur nailer on piece work because I didn't want to work full time, I just wanted only enough to live on so that I could write. And I'd bought myself a second-hand typewriter and I was living in a flat on Finchley Road above the old swimming baths.

Q: Finchley Road, the Swiss Cottage area?

A: Yeah, I mean actually near John Barnes, and there was a swimming pool there and I was living above that on the third floor above there and busy writing.

Q: How did you find your way there from the East End?

A: That's another story. I got involved with a very strange Jewish couple, a woman who was deaf and her husband who was in the fur trade, a fur cutter. And they befriended me actually when I was down and out. I got to know them, they lived in Goldhurst Terrace and it was as a result of that, that I got this flat.

Q: That must have been a big move for you.

A: Well, first of all, by then I literally knew how to manage my life you see somehow. And I would earn let's say £3 a week or £3 ten shillings, I could manage excellently on that, pay my rent which was something like eighteen shillings a week and I was very good at living frugally it didn't bother me one bit at all.

Q: And where was your work?

A: Well it was back in the City which was the centre of the fur trade. So, I've lost the point?

Q: You were doing piecework, 1939, you were working at your writing.
   
^ A: Yeah, yeah, I was explaining why I wasn't going back and getting thrown out of home. By that time it was accepted that I'd moved away and I was on reasonable terms with my mother and my stepfather and, you know, my brothers.

Q: Did you visit them often?

A: I used to visit them occasionally, not often, I was not a very good, I didn't have a strong sense of family at all.

Q: Did they have a telephone?

A: No, no, no. None of us had telephones. You never thought of it, I mean, it would occur to you as an extraordinary sort of gross luxury to have a telephone. And it was during that particular period that the war broke out and another story begins.

Q: Shall we rest there for a minute?

A: Yes.
   
^ Q: So the war.

A: So the war broke out on September the third 1939. And I was initially a conscientious objector, in fact I was very much involved with the Quakers. And there was an elderly who lived near Friends House in Euston Road who had a circle of conscientious objectors who used to go there, and we would have tea and biscuits.

Q: Had you been called up?

A: I hadn't been called up no, but I decided I was going to be a conscientious objector. And at this time, incidentally, I was in a very, very strange state of mind because I was very much involved in the occult. You see, these friends of mine, you know, the deaf lady and the, were very much into occult philosophy and she was a practising clairvoyant and astrologer. I remember I used to sit around and hold hands and we were projecting ourselves into past lives and all I could see was mist in front of my eyes, you know, I had to try and say what I was seeing. Anyway but the point was I was, really in a way I was learning about astrology, I was casting the world's horoscope while the world tilted towards war. Not all of that seemed real to me.

Q: How old were you at this point?

A: I was then twenty-four.

Q: Did you have girlfriends or?

A: No, no, I didn't, except this lady, this deaf lady was rather interested in me I'm afraid and we had a strange sort of odd and disturbing relationship, which really worried me a great deal. Anyway I was also beginning to write poetry. Then there was Dunkirk, no it was before Dunkirk, but already the Germans had broken through the Maginot Line and suddenly I thought to myself, what am I going on dreaming about. If the Germans conquer Britain who are they going to kill? They're going to kill my family, all of us, I wouldn't be able to arrange for everybody to escape to America or Canada or Australia, I've got no business being a conscientious objector. So I wrote a letter to the War Office, or whoever one did, asking to be called up immediately, and it appeared as a paragraph in the newspapers. It said 'Litvinoff joins up, but not the Commissar', because at that time Maxim Litvinoff was the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union.
   
^ A: So off I went, I was medically examined and I was A1 except for my glasses and they put me in the Pioneer Corps and sent me up to Glasgow.

Q: What did you have to do in training?

A: Well the Pioneer Corps really was the, sort of the brigade that dug ditches and carried stores around and all the sort of manual labour of the Army. I went up in the train, I was sent to Glasgow, a place called Nitts Hill in Glasgow, I remember travelling in the train with lots of Cockney boys. We were staring at one another, you know, with suspicion and hostility, I think I was probably the only Jew in that crowded carriage. By the time we got to Glasgow of course we were all very good pals you see.
   
^ A: There we were dumped into this vast camp, nobody knowing quite what they're supposed to be doing you know, shoved into huts, given some kind of uniform and so on to put on and still obviously not being sorted out. And I got very bored with this you know, because we didn't have anything much to do except they would pick on you to do certain chores you see. Now I'd read 'The Good Soldier Svejk' and I remember, I'm sure it was in that book, that he discovered that if he was carrying around a bucket nobody asked him to do anything. So I got hold of a bucket and a broom and I used to carry them around and I found a place on the perimeter of the camp where you could slip through the undergrowth. In the morning I would take my bucket and my brush, go around, and nobody ever asked me anything at all and I eventually would go to this place, hide the bucket and the brush, get out and go into Glasgow. Spend the day in Glasgow and come back late afternoon or something.

In fact I started a flirtation with a girl who worked in Woolworths who was a Jewish girl and who said 'you're Jewish aren't you?', and I said 'yes' and she said 'I'm Jewish too' and she made me, free of charge, a name tab and I used to go out with her. She was very guilty about it because her boyfriend was abroad already in the Army or whatever. A perfectly innocent relationship but there you are.

Came back from one of these encounters to discover that everybody had been already put into different units, companies, and in fact not only that they had appointed certain people non-commissioned officers, because they were very short of trained people in those days. And somebody said to me 'who do you belong to?'. There they all were on parade and I was going around with a bucket and brush and I said 'I don't belong to anybody'.
   
^ A: So they very angrily shoved me into a unit and the next thing I knew we went to Northern Ireland, which in those days was not having the kind of problems that it has today, in fact we arrived there and we were greeted with open arms by obviously the Protestants. We didn't know about that sort of thing then. I was in Northern Ireland for a while and I was writing poetry. In fact I started to publish poetry there, I published, my first poems were published in a thing called 'Poems from the Forces'.

Q: So you were in Northern Ireland and you had work published?

A: Yeah I, I had a broadsheet of poems published by a private printer, not that I, I didn't pay. I mean he was a cousin of Golek's, he printed as a hobby and he was a wealthy man, he liked fine printing. He printed this broadsheet of poems and I was, at this time we were employed in things like in ordnance stores, stacking and things like that and so on.
   
^ A: I wasn't very, I wasn't a very good soldier, I couldn't quite fit in to all this sort of stuff. Now had a friend named Mick who had a similar sort of attitude towards the Army as me. We were very clever at finding ways, we'd go to the ordnance depot and somehow or other we managed not to do as much work as we were supposed to do. First of all I remember we built a little shelter, hidden away, but then when that was discovered we used to flatter the Sergeant Major or the Sergeant, I think he was the Sergeant, he was a First World sweat. He was a most ugly and terrifying man in a way, ignorant as anything, and we used to, he used to like to talk about sex and we used to encourage him to talk about sex. He said, I remember him telling me this extraordinary story, whether it's fit for your tape I don't know. He said, one day he said 'you getting it you boys?', we said 'no, no, where? we can't get it', he said 'you know what you want to do, you want to go to these church socials where these old dears are' he said. He said 'that's where I go, I'm getting a lot of it' he said. He said 'do you know' he said, 'I had this old lady who invited me to tea, I think she was about eighty' he said, 'so I put my arm round her and she said I'm no good to you young man, my womb's fallen' and he said 'd'you know she was like a young girl, she was good'.
   
^ Q: Did that encourage you?

A: On the other hand I, I was involved in another situation with the same man, we were called out for church parade on the Saturday morning.

Q: What was church parade?

A: Church parade was when you had to go and pray, and I said, incidentally in our unit there were about three Jewish boys, and I said 'I'm sorry Sergeant but I'm Jewish, I don't go to the church parade'. So he said 'we're fighting this fucking war for you lot, aren't we boys? And you don't want to pray with us?'. So I said 'Sergeant, what you have said just now is a criminal offence' and I insisted that I was going to see the officer about it. I went to see the officer and I told him what had happened and he said 'what on earth do you want us to do?' and I said 'well I think that we're entitled to Jewish church parades', he said 'but there's no Jewish church here' and I said 'but there is one in Belfast'. So on Saturday mornings you see he would allow the three of us to go into Belfast, where of course we never went anywhere near the Synagogue. So really I was a bit of a nuisance.
   
^ A: But I was also writing poetry, which of course absorbed me completely at the time. And I discovered that there was a very good way in which I could probably find more time to devote to writing poetry and that was work in the cookhouse. If you worked in the cookhouse and you made the morning porridge you had to get up about five o'clock in the morning, but then you were allowed to stay in bed for reveille. So you know you could probably slide off doing work in the morning and probably find a place and do some writing. So I got this job in the cookhouse and I was the cookhouse orderly, I used to get up and do the porridge and the other job I had was to scour these huge cooking vessels that we used to have and peel potatoes and so on and so forth.

Now one day the Area Commander, who was a Brigadier, was inspecting the unit and my reputation had rather spread, particularly as the BBC had broadcast one or two of my poems in the Forces programme, from this Forces anthology, so it made a bit of a stir you see. There was a young, snooty Second Lieutenant in our unit who was I think a public schoolboy and he was showing this Brigadier around and they came to the cookhouse and I was on my knees scouring the dishes. And he said to the Brigadier 'I see sir, Litvinoff has found his niche'. And the Brigadier said 'is this the man who writes, is a writer?'. 'Well yes I suppose so sir", 'we can't have educated men doing cookery, we're desperately short of officers'. He said to me 'I think you should go and see your commanding officer and make an immediate application for a commission and we'll see if you're suitable'. So he presumably had said something to the commanding officer, so when I came in he was all ready for me and he said 'right I'm putting in an application for you to go to an Officer Training Course', and that was it, I became an officer.
   
^ Q: So you went on the officer training course?

A: Yes I went on the Officers Training Course, which was a six week course, everything was in a great hurry because the Army had grown enormously you see now.

Q: What year was this?

A: In 1940 there was a tremendous enlargement of the Army and so it needed officers and NCOs and so on and so forth. So they were doing things very, very hurriedly, putting you through the course, I stayed there for six weeks. I remember I was allowed home for a weeks leave, compassionate leave, because my brother Barney had become a prisoner of war. He was captured in North Africa. And my brother Pinny was one of the people at Dunkirk. So they gave me a weeks leave, so I'd only actually did five weeks training and then there I was, I was a Second Lieutenant.
   
^ Q: Where did you go?

A: They then put me into, I mean they must have figured out that somebody with the name Litvinoff, there must be a sort of odd pigeon of some kind. So they put me in a unit of the Pioneer Corps composed of refugee Jews mainly, German refugees. I was sent to Darlington, in the north of England, to this unit, and they were quite an extraordinary unit. I said you could have built a symphony orchestra, you could have made a film, you could have staffed a university.

Q: People were very educated.

A: Lots of them were very, very educated indeed, yes. I felt very inferior to quite a lot of them you know. I didn't like giving them orders.
   
^ Q: Was it a good time for you?

A: Well yes, I mean suddenly, one of the things I noticed was that suddenly girls were interested in you, you see. Whereas before when you were a common or garden private you went 'hello' and they didn't even see you. So I was suddenly being pursued by girls and pretty well enjoying life, because you sat in the officer's mess and somehow or other people served you and you wore this nice looking uniform, you had a batman.
   
^ Q: Tell me about your family, were they experiencing the Blitz?

A: My mother, first of all they were all, all the younger children, the four of us were in the Army, the four older boys were in the Army. The younger children were evacuated.

Q: Where did they go?

A: Well as one of my brothers Barney was a Zionist and had enlisted them in the Zionist Children's Organisation, they were sent originally to a Zionist farm in Devonshire. It turned out not to be such an easy experience for them because, I have one very difficult young brother named David who was pretty well known, his name was David Levy, he called himself David Litvinoff later on, he became quite notorious. So he wasn't easy but, so he was always getting into trouble and they used to insist that his brothers mustn't talk to him, he was sent to Coventry. He had a miserable, miserable time, it wasn't very good.

Q: And they were without your mother.

A: Of course they without my mother. So then they all came back. Then the oldest one of them, my sister, half sister Sonia, went into the ATS as soon as she was eighteen, seventeen I think she was and there were these four boys.
   
^ Q: And they stayed?

A: They stayed in London through a good deal of the Blitz.

Q: Where?

A: They were living in Hackney not far from Ridley Road Market. Well I used to come on leave and I would see them, see my mother.

Q: They lived in a flat or?

A: They lived in a house, the top floor was, my mother used to let the top room to a chap who wrote poetry. Of course she thought, if he writes poetry he'll like my son. And as they and then my younger brother, half brother, Jack went into the Air Force, you know the war went on. So my mother had a very, very tough war indeed, she was in London throughout the war.

Q: Were they bombed out at all?

A: They weren't bombed out but the street was constantly being bombed and they spent a lot of time in air raid shelters.

Q: What were their nearest shelters?

A: I don't know, I think they used to go to an underground station but I'm not too sure.

Q: Were you ever on leave when there was bombing?

A: I was on leave during the Blitz. In fact I was on my honeymoon in London during Blitz.
   
^ Q: Tell me about your marriage, who did you meet and get married to?

A: Well I was sent to, let's see what was it called, I was sent to an Army Centre to undergo a battle course. Which one was it? You see my memory's going, at my age it's difficult. Yes I went to go on this battle course and it was, I think it was the last two weeks and I used to hang around, what were you going to do between. So on one occasion I was with another officer and there was a dance going on and it was for other ranks only. There was a Military Police woman there, so we were flattering her and so on saying 'can't you let us in? can't you let us in?'. So she agreed to let us in and I remember I was dancing with, she was a very tall girl and she was a sort of upper-class girl because I remember she was telling me that her father was the Lieutenant-General of a county, an English county, and her boyfriend was a geologist. Yeah and she was very, very energetically flirting with me and I was flirting with her.

And then at a certain stage, you know, I go to the margin of the floor where this friend of mine is and he's talking to two ATS girls. And he said to one of them, she must have said something to me and I must have answered her although I was looking at this Military Police woman you see, he said to her, unbelievably he said to her 'I wouldn't be bothered with him', he said 'he's a poet and he reads palms'. I mean nothing is more likely to incite interest in someone. Anyway then I went and I was dancing with this Policewoman again and it was the ladies' excuse me and she was tapped on the shoulder and I was dancing with a pretty ATS girl who got into conversation with me immediately. She said, she said she wrote poetry and so on and she was interested in palmistry you see, and I got immediately interested in the fact that she wrote poetry. So I was talking to her afterwards and I said 'I have just had my book published' my first book published.

Q: Which book?

A: 'The Untried Soldier', by Routledge, and I said to her 'well I write poetry and I got a book published'. She said 'well I'll show you my poetry if you show me yours'.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'being married'
 
   
   
^ A: And we arranged to meet in a cinema café on the base. Her name was Irene Pearson. Irene Maude Pearson. She is Cherry Marshall of course. I went there and she was already - no, I got to this place this cinema, I was sitting there with a cup of tea and saw her come up the stairs, she was a very, very good looking girl indeed in those days, plump, because she was feeding so well on the Army. And I had a very, very strange feeling as she came up that there was something odd about this, that this was important in an odd way.

And she sat down and she'd brought an exercise book and sat on it and I brought out the book of poems, the little booklet of poems, slim booklet of poems, and showed it to her. And I wrote in it a dedication to her and I said 'well, show me yours' and she said 'no, no I can't possibly show, no I can't, I'm too embarrassed' you see, but I insisted. She wrote some quite funny verses, I remember there was one about, she was an Army driver and there was a funny poem about how she's driving and this officer was constantly looking down at her knees you see and so on. It was very, very funny and I thought 'well it's quite talented'. When I wrote in the book, she said 'oh I'll show this to my grandchildren', it was quite extraordinary. Now she, in one of her autobiographies, she's written two, says that I have written 'To Irene, for her sweetness' and I thought to myself no that's not me, not me, and I've got it here. I looked it up, now there it is.

Q: 'To Irene, with the author's good wishes, Catterick, October 1942'. Amazing. 'With the author's good wishes'. Fantastic.

A: I knew that I wouldn't write it, I didn't argue it, I mean I didn't, I just thought, my God that's not me, the first time I met this girl, I was going to say.
   
^ A: Anyway whatever it was I fell like on a bloody brick and seven weeks later we were married.

Q: Seven weeks?

A: Mmm.

Q: Where did you get married?

A: We got married in Nottingham where her family were living. Her father was an anti-Semite, an ex regular soldier, company Sergeant Major. He was actually not present when I came down for a weekend's leave to meet her mother and father. I can't remember if her father was there, but they were totally perplexed, I mean probably very, very worried. Anyway we got married in a registrar's office in Nottingham. There was an officer, there were two officers, an Army man officer and a woman ATS officer, we didn't know either of them. I can't remember how they became witnesses but I know the man's name was Deer. And we went and had a wedding lunch in the local hotel, I think it was The Black Boy's Hotel in Nottingham, and there was just Irene and me and her mother and father. And her father picked up the glass and said 'well may you be as happy and your mum and me' and her mother said 'oh God no'.
   
^ Q: But you roomed in London.

A: Yeah, then we came to London and I managed by, it was almost impossible to get a room in London in a hotel, London was full of the American Army, you know Polish servicemen, everybody, Free French and so on and so forth and it was almost impossible to get a place. I tried one or two hotels and nothing doing, so we went to The Regent's Palace Hotel.

Q: Where is that?

A: Just round the corner, it still is, round the corner from Piccadilly Circus. And I went and I insisted that I had booked a telephone booking from Catterick, and 'we've come down, we've just been married, you know you can't'. So eventually, after a certain amount of sort of to-ing and fro-ing they found us a room, a small room.
   
^ Q: Were there any air raids while you were in London?

A: Yes there was an air raid, we were walking I remember through an air raid while shrapnel was hitting the ground around us, it never occurred to either of us that we were in any danger. We were somewhere in the West End, walking from the hotel and everybody being chivvied into shelters and so on and so forth and we just carried on walking for a while, for some reason or other nobody chivvied us.

Q: Did you see any buildings being blown up or?

A: I only saw them after they were blown up I didn't see them myself. It was a tremendously terrible honeymoon night because in the next door, in the next room to us, there were a couple of drunken American soldiers who'd picked up a couple of tarts and the language, the noise, the singing. It was embarrassing, we could hear every wretched word.
   
^ Q: What did your mother think about you getting married?

A: I didn't tell her until I was married and then I wrote her an apologetic letter saying 'well you know, I didn't think you could come up to Nottingham', all that sort of thing.

Q: Was she upset do you think?

A: Well she, she was very good about it I mean, she said when she met Irene - there was this pretty little girl, well big girl really - and she said to her, she said 'I'll tell you what' she said 'I know you're not Jewish but you're better than Jewish'. That meant that she was perfectly okay and she was very fond of her actually.
   
^ Q: And after the honeymoon did you go back?

A: Yeah after the honeymoon went back. Oh I must tell you one little story which was very good because it won us the motor car after the war. When, just after we were married and came back from honeymoon, very quickly Irene was proved pregnant and got her release from the Army you see, but while she was still, before this happened, as soon as we came back. Now I was stationed at that time, I was on detachment somewhere else in Yorkshire and I used to come into Catterick and sit in the NAAFE in the hope that she would be able to have time to come and sit and have a cup of tea or something to talk to me. So I was sitting in there one day and she was given a duty call to pick up an officer from the railway station, it was late at night and we had hardly we hadn't had any time together and she said 'I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll drop you at the bus stop'.

So off we went to the bus stop, now it was a blackout of course, as she stopped to let me off she switched on the interior light and we kissed briefly, I got out and at that very moment a military policeman stopped. He came up to her and he said 'Private can I see your route card?' and he looked at it and he said 'you're off route', and she said 'I just gave this officer a lift, he has to go back to his unit and I gave him a lift to the bus stop' and so and so forth. He said 'you will be reported'. So she was reported and she was hauled in front of her commanding officer, who was a woman, who said 'Private Litvinoff, you were off route, what explanation do you have for not going directly to the station and picking up the officer concerned?'. So she gave the same explanation, she said 'well this officer had needed to catch a bus and I thought well on route, just a little way off, I could drop him at his bus stop'. So the commanding officer said 'I take a very, very poor view of this' she said, 'not only were you off route but you were seen kissing an officer in the car and you have just been married'. And so she was confined to camp, to barracks, for a week.
   
^ A: After the war 'The Evening Standard' gave the first, she was by then a model you see, 'The Evening Standard' gave the first cars in a competition, they were giving one to a woman and one to a man for the best motoring stories. And she was constantly asking me to write this story down and I would say 'oh God well what's the point? I mean have they paid you a guinea for every one they publish? It's not worth me doing it for a guinea for God's sake'. At that time I was freelancing and earning the odd book reviews and so on. And she went on and on about it and then there was one night, I mean she was in bed it was late one night and I came up to bed, she said 'look will you please just do this story. What harm will it do? Because it has to be in by tomorrow'. So I sat down and in about five minutes I'd typed out that story. I was then working for 'The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review' amongst other things and I was out on a, on some kind of reporting assignment, a Jewish funeral or something and I was coming back in the bus and as we were coming down Fleet Street, because the place was in Fleet Street just off Fleet Street, I could see the front page of 'The Evening Standard'.

Q: So you got off the bus?

A: Yes I saw this full length picture on the front page of 'The Evening Standard' so I got off the bus, got a copy of the paper, and there it said, her professional name was Cherry Marshall, 'Cherry Marshall is the winner of our true motoring story, see page so and so'. And there it was, she had won a, what's it called now? It was a terrible car, it kept breaking down, it was something, a seven eight, I can't remember now what the make was but anyway there it was, we had won this car, and she of course could drive and I couldn't.
   
^ Q: So let me just finish off about the war. What year did you and she get married?

A: We got married on December the third 1942.

Q: Right, and how did you spend the rest of the war?

A: Well, then she got pregnant and our first child was born.

Q: Where did she live then?

A: In Nottingham. Vida was born.
   
^ A: And then almost immediately I was sent abroad. I didn't know quite where I was going but I had to, I'd kitted out in tropical kit so I knew that it was somewhere warm and off we went. I landed up in West Africa, Sierra Leone, where I stayed for eighteen months or so, it was the, it was one of those postings in which you couldn't, you were only allowed to stay for a certain amount of time because it was known in those days as 'the white man's grave'. So I stayed there eighteen months and then.

Q: Were you involved in a lot of fighting?

A: Never, in the whole of my Army service I never fired a shot in anger, but we were torpedoed. Not our particular ship, our convoy was torpedoed and the ship next to us went down, a terrible loss of life.

Q: Well Emanuel, I think we got to the war, I think you were telling me about your first posting overseas.

A: Oh only my first posting overseas? My goodness me yes.

Q: Where did you go?

A: I landed up in West Africa in Sierra Leone, which was then known as 'the white man's grave', so you were supposed to spend no longer than eighteen months there you see. It was a very chequered time for me. I finished up in West Africa after eighteen months, having risen to the rank of Major, but I was in trouble, literally, with the immediate sort of, my immediate authorities, right from the very beginning. Because well the day I arrived there was actually an orgy going on in the Officers' Mess and I didn't know anything about it, I just walked in and there was this you know, group of officers and two or three black women. I was pretty newly married and very, very virtuous from that point of view so I left and went back to my room. I wasn't the only one because there was another officer who was a half-Swedish Captain, who was married to an English model girl and he also, he was very disapproving. But it was noted that we were not, you know, not sort of getting in on things you see and joining in.
   
^ A: Then I got into trouble again because I, I was asked to take a prisoner who was a young African boy to the Glasshouse, which was the military prison. I went along with him in a fifteen hundred weight truck and we got there and he, and I saw the whole procedure you see, he was terrified, this boy. I don't quite know what he'd done because I'd only just arrived on the unit. The thing is, they made him double with his pack carried over his head and they kept asking him questions like his name and so on and so forth and he was so terrified that he wasn't doing it properly, so they kept on hitting him on the legs with a stick. In sheer panic he dropped the thing and he ran like a hare out the hut. I've never seen anything like it, they got a bloodhound and they chased him with a bloodhound and they brought him back, frog-marching him back.

And the whole thing was so unpleasant that I put in, very foolishly put in a report about it. And I was asked by the officer commanding my unit, he called me in and he said 'look you know this is very unwise of you' he said, the officer in charge of the Glasshouse was a Captain, 'he's merely doing his duty you know and I wouldn't, I don't think they would be very pleased at headquarters if you put in this report'. So I agonised about and then I decided that it ought to go forward and it went forward. Nothing happened, I mean as far as that was concerned, except that I put up a really big black mark.
   
^ A: So after a while they put me in charge of an Italian prisoner of war camp.

Q: Where?

A: Yeah there was a number of Italian, you know number of Italian prisoners there and they had a little prisoner of war camp and they put me in charge of it, obviously a very unpopular posting. But it turned out to be pretty agreeable to me, I quite liked it because the Italians might have been the enemy but they were perfectly nice guys you know. Except one of them who was a very, very ardent fan of Mussolini, I didn't like him at all, and he'd fought in Spain, so you know I had reservations about him. He was one of the Italian NCOs who I worked with you see.

Q: How many prisoners were in the camp?

A: I can't remember. There were probably something like a couple of hundred. I also kept getting in trouble because there was a lot of syphilis, venereal disease in the camp, and they were not supposed to cohabit with native women so I could never figure out how they got it. And then I used to get into trouble when we went to collect our Army stores for the camp, because they were entitled to, under the Red Cross rules about prisoners of war they were entitled to the same rations as ordinary soldiers, as our own soldiers. But I always had trouble getting them the proper rations and sometimes they would give me, for example, meat that smelled and I would object, or, they'd give me short weight and it used to cause a lot of bad feeling when I insisted on them, you know. So one way and another my reputation was really not very good.
   
^ Q: But you managed to make it to Major?

A: Well this is the whole thing you see. Now this culminated in, by seniority, because the length of time that you'd been there and your rank when you arrived, you were entitled to a certain kind of promotion unless there was very, very good reason for your not getting it. Now there was a unit, the Commanding Officer had been an old sweat from the First World War, he'd been a Sergeant or a Sergeant Major in the First World War and he'd made it as an officer in the Second World War and he was a real drunken old sod. He allowed everything to go crazy there, no real discipline and one thing and another, he just wanted to serve out his time and go home. So he was sent home and they appointed me to the command of this unit and I had trouble right from the very beginning.

The rule was that when you took over a unit you called what they called a Commanding Officers' Parade, at which your unit had to parade out in their uniform properly clean and so on and so forth, as it were to make your acquaintance. And I called for a Commanding Officers' Parade, I told the senior NCO that I wanted to have a Commanding Officers' Parade. Now as far as I can remember it was a Saturday morning. Now there was a certain amount of amusement because I was sharing the Mess with Officers who were commanding other, or, were attached to other units and there seemed to be a certain amount of amusement about this and I was wondering why. And it all became clear to me when I came out to inspect this Commanding Officer's Parade and nobody had turned up, and there they were, the other Officers were standing on the veranda of the Mess all looking there grinning. And I knew I was trouble because, you know, I'd got to show that I was commanding the unit and I'm capable of command. So I sent the NCOs round to each of the tents to order the men out, or else there were going to be disciplinary problems, and they came back and they said 'they won't go out sir, they say they they're not supposed to do it'. Incidentally they used to keep chickens in their tents.

Now I was in great distress because I thought to myself, if I fail this duty there is a possibility that they would send me out to Burma, because they'll have to give me a posting. We supplied officers and troops to Burma, I was now two-thirds through my eighteen months and that meant that I'd go to Burma and I wouldn't get home, if I got home at all, until the end of the war. So I took a deep breath and I, there was a Military Policemans' Unit nearby which was staffed by Nigerians, and the Nigerians in Sierra Leone didn't like the Sierra Leoneans, they looked down on them with contempt you see, the Nigerian Military Policemen were tall strapping fellows. So I rang the Officer there and I said 'can you send me one company of your men?', no, 'one section of your men', he said 'what's the trouble?' and I said 'I've got a mutiny on my hands', so he said 'great, we're coming over right away', he said 'I'll send them over in a truck'. So he sent them over and he came himself on a motorbike and he was a young zealous Captain, you know, very enthusiastic and he said 'do you want my help?' and I said 'no, no I'll manage'. So then I asked these Military Policemen to wait in the guardroom and then I sent one of my NCOs round the huts and I said 'if anybody doesn't appear on parade in five minutes he's going to be flogged'.

And nobody turned out, so out came these, I sent these Nigerian Military Policemen out to the first tent. They dragged all these fellows out, took them to the Guard Room and they started to flog them, they only had to do, I can't remember, perhaps half a dozen of them and there the men were coming from all the tents out on parade, and they were absolutely a terrible shambles. And I decided then that I had to do something that would mark, very thoroughly make it clear that I was going to exert the toughest discipline, so they lined up with their bedraggled looking equipment and so on and so forth and all the NCOs were in front and I went up to each of the NCOs and I took off their stripes. And then I appointed, picked out a number of other people and said you know 'you're a Lance Corporal, you're a Corporal, you're a Sergeant and so on and so forth', I said 'now take these men away and I want them out on parade very smart in half an hour'. And they turned out looking reasonably smart. From then on I kept an extraordinary regime.
   
^ A: You know the guards, I'd heard about the guards, they would line their equipment up so you could measure right across the hut with a ruler, every bed would be exactly right, the blankets would be stacked properly you know, the great coats and so on and so forth absolutely perfect. So I instigated this, everybody's hut had to be, the huts had to be spotless. Another trick I thought I would do on the, on the Guards Unit, in which they were made to whitewash the coal. So I got them to whitewash some coal and to clean out each of the kitchen implements so that you literally could see your face in them. And then I told the Sergeant Major that I didn't want anybody brought in front of me unless he'd committed a serious offence, and if he came before me he was going to the Glasshouse. I had absolutely no trouble, they were terrified.

Now some, the Brigadier in charge of the area was going around each unit on inspection and he arrived at mine, without any warning he arrived at mine, and he said 'I've been looking forward to inspecting your unit Major Litvinoff', I was a temporary Acting Major at the time, 'I've heard some extraordinary things about it'. So he came round first of all to inspect the tents, and at the door of each tent stood an orderly, oh incidentally I made them polish the soles of their shoes, boots, and they used to put silver paint on the studs. So the Orderly would salute, walk in and the Brigadier walked down, looked at one, absolutely immaculate, looked at the next immaculate, looked at the next immaculate and so on and so forth. He said to the last Orderly, House Orderly, he said 'you keep this very good. Why?' and he said 'Because otherwise Big Master beat me'. Then he went to look at the cookhouse and there was this fantastically spotlessly clean cookhouse.

He said to me 'By the way Litvinoff', he said 'I notice that your men polish the soles of their boots and paint up the studs. What do they do that for? Don't they ever wear them?' so I said 'no sir, only when they go on leave' and he said 'what do you think we issue boots for?', I said 'look sir, as you know, these men normally walk around without boots and without shoes. They come from the bush, they're much more comfortable in their naked feet', I said 'as a matter of fact the thing they try and do is to get European type narrow boots because their boots are especially wide because of the shape of their feet', because they were very proud of their boots and when they went on leave they wanted to wear them you see. And I said 'so as a result of that we do get recruits coming from their villages'. He looked a bit uncertain but there it was you see. So that was it, I was with this Unit until it was time for me to go home on home leave.
   
^ Q: When was that? How long before you could go home?

A: Eighteen months, after eighteen months, I completed eighteen months. I was due to go on home leave. There was some dispute about what my rank should be because you had to be an Acting Major for a certain length of time, I can't remember exactly what it was, and then you became a substantive Major, you kept the rank. But there was some uncertainty about it because the officer who I took over from had spent some time in hospital before he was fit to go home you see. So I had to come down to Lieutenant, which I was before than, because I jumped straight from Lieutenant to Captain. When I left to go to the Transit Camp for the homeward trip, voyage, all my boys were standing there cheering my departure. And then when I got home I had a short leave then I was posted to the Middle East.

Q: Where was home at this point?

A: I was living in Nottingham.

Q: And you had a new daughter.

A: Yes, there was my wife, my young wife who'd been demobbed from the ATS, and I had Vida, my eldest daughter, by the time I got home was about twenty-one months or something like that. So I was at home for a while, for about three months, because they posted me temporarily to another unit and then I was sent out to the Middle East to take command as a Major, because they'd referred my rank, to a unit of Nigerian troops actually who were stationed in Alexandria. They had units along in the desert guarding airports and places like that. But I don't want to go into the whole of my war history because, it's quite funny and amusing but it takes a long time so.
   
^ Q: So what happened after Alexandria, were you posted somewhere else?

A: No it was getting near the end of the war and I was posted home.

Q: Did you see any fighting?

A: I didn't see any fighting at all during the war. We were torpedoed, our convoy was torpedoed going out to West Africa and the ship next to ours, the troop ship next to ours was sunk. But the nearest I got to any real danger from firearms was actually when I took a unit from West Africa on a firing range and I had to be in front of them with a pistol and they were firing over my head and I was by no means sure that I wouldn't get hit. No, I saw no fighting at all.

Q: After Alexandria you went home?

A: Yes after Alexandria I went home. How long was I there for? I was there about eight months in Egypt and then I was sent home to be demobbed.
   
^ Q: Was it 1945 then?

A: It was 1945 yes, and I was for a while attached to what they called a Smoke Unit. A Smoke Unit was a unit of the Pioneer Corps which had machines which emitted dense clouds of smoke, and when there was danger of an air raid they were supposed to blanket the area with smoke. I doubt whether they were any use at all. And that was in Suffolk, I have very little memories of it because it wasn't serious and I wasn't really involved, I was just marking time until I actually got orders to come to London and actually be demobbed.
   
^ Q: So when you were demobbed your whole family moved to London?

A: We had moved to London when I came home on leave in Nottingham, because we found a place in a basement in Fitzjohn's Avenue in Hampstead. Well there's a bit a story there you see, this basement was, somebody was moving out and we heard about it on the grapevine because it was very, very difficult to get a place in those days. Really it was almost impossible. It was a question of paying I think ten pounds to the people who lived there and they let us know that they were going. And then we had to go and meet there a woman who owned the house who lived in a kind of grace and favour house in Chelsea Barracks because she came from a Army family you know. So Irene went to see her when we got there, because this man told us that she didn't like Jews, so I was somewhere hanging around and I was still in Army uniform then you see and she went in. All she told this woman was that her husband was an officer in the Army, you know, and so on and so forth, and that sounded to be alright so we got the place. I think it was seventeen shillings a week and when she discovered that I was Jewish it was too late by then. So anyway, we were living in Hampstead in this basement and I was trying to make some kind of a living as a freelance writer.
 
   
   
  < go to the theme of 'a shared experience: finding a home'
 
   
   
^ Q: Did you have any more children at this point?

A: Yes, Julian my son was born when we were living in Fitzjohn's Avenue. It was dreadful time because it was very, very hard to get medical treatment in those days and I remember he was born before a doctor or nurse could arrive and my mother-in-law and neighbour from upstairs, a woman neighbour from upstairs, were helping in the delivery while I was going around on a bicycle trying to get a doctor.
   
^ Q: Tell me about life in Hampstead and trying to earn some money through writing.

A: Well first of all I tried to get a job, because I had no confidence at all as a freelance writer, all I'd published was one little book of poems and a number of poems in anthologies you see. So I went to see Herbert Read, the poet who was a publisher and who had published my little book of poems, and he was very grumpy about it, he said 'all you chaps are coming out from the Army and hoping to get jobs' he said 'it's very difficult you know'. He said 'I have a number of authors coming here and asking for my help', so he said, he was in the process of turning down my second book of poems and I didn't know that at the time. So he said 'well I'll give you a letter, do you think you might be able to do advertising copy?', so I said 'well I'll do anything Mr Read'.

So he gave me a letter to somebody and I came in to this rather grand looking place where there was an immaculate sort of receptionist and I sat in a comfortable looking foyer. So this man turned out in his shirt sleeves you know, looking very sort of relaxed, and he said 'yes I've seen this letter that Herbert Read's given you for me', he said 'I understand you're a poet?', I said 'yes I'm a poet'. So he called out 'George, George, do you think a poet can write advertising copy?' and another man appeared, stuck his head round, he said 'well why not? I don't know' and off he went. So this man said to me 'look I'll tell you what' he said, 'I'd like you to go off and write some advertising copy for a brand of soap, nice smelling soap. Bring it along say next week' you know, on such and such a day 'and we'll have another chat'. And I went home, I remember going on a bus to get myself home, and trying to think of slogans for the soap and I knew I couldn't do it. Absolutely hopeless. So I tried, I wrote things out on a sheet of paper but nothing would come and I thought in any case I have the feeling he wasn't very keen on me, you know, his casual way about it. So I dropped that altogether.

Q: You decided not to go into advertising.

A: I didn't go into advertising, probably was a mistake, yeah.
   
^ A: And I was, you see when I got married in the idealistic way these things happen, Irene had said to me 'when you come out of the Army, 'cause you're a genius you see, you're brilliant', she'd seen my first little book of poems you see, and she said 'I will work and you will write', this is rather like your family background. And so the next thing that we were doing was trying to get her a job and I remember she was a driver in the Army, a very skilled driver you see, and we were looking in the newspaper and I saw there was an advertisement for a chauffeur for a Rolls Royce. And I said to her 'well do you think you can drive a Rolls Royce?' she said 'I'll drive any car', she said 'I've driven lorries and I've driven staff cars and I've driven a motor bike' and so on. I said 'well look I'll tell you what, I'll ring up and I'll pretend that I'm the chauffeur, find out how much they're going to pay'. I rang the number, put on a cockney voice and said I was interested in the job as chauffeur for this Rolls Royce and she said 'what experience, have you driven Rolls Royces before?' and I said 'yes, I have yes' and so on and so forth. I said 'what are you going to pay?' and she said 'well first of all I will have to see you and I will have to see that you know how to handle a Rolls Royce' and that was the end of that.
   
^ A: And it so happened that I was meeting this half-Swedish Captain who had been demobbed and he was a would-be film script writer and he and I had already started to try and collaborate and do something together that might make a bit of money. He was married to this half-Burmese model, beautiful lady. We'd gone round there for coffee or a meal, I can't remember, he lived in a block of flats near Marble Arch. And we were talking about, we were looking for a job, trying to find a job for Irene, so this girl, this model looked at her and said 'stand up a minute' you know, and she was very, very beautiful, Irene, and had a marvellous figure. So she said 'I think you could be a model', she said 'I'll give you some lessons', so they walked up and down for a while, I don't know, and then this girl said 'look you come tomorrow morning and I'm going to take you to a dressmaker and see if we can get you a job'. She took Irene to this dressmaker, a man of course, who was gay, and he desperately needed a showroom model immediately and he took her on.

Q: Where was his showroom?

A: Somewhere in Mayfair. No, there was a problem there because at this particular time Irene was feeding Julian, my young son, who was a matter of a few weeks old you see. So she had a problem about breast size you see, she used to have to take a breast pump to work with her, and he couldn't understand it you see, because she would suddenly become much bigger and then she would disappear to feed him. After a while she began to get the hang of this thing very well and she went straight from there into another job by a firm called 'Spectator Sports' and from then on she got very well known quite quickly. She was in 'Vogue' and places like that, not earning much money, but certainly enough to live on.
   
^ Q: So the pressure was taken off you.

A: The immediate burden was taken off me and I was doing a little bit of freelancing. You know, writing the odd book review, trying desperately hard to put up ideas for the BBC for radio programmes. I did one based on the fact that I thought, well I can say something about modelling so I did a thing about modelling. I remember very little about it, it was a feature programme you see. At one time incidentally during this particular period the Features Department of the BBC was playing with the idea of taking me on as a possible producer. One of the senior producers there was a very nice man, I've just forgotten his name for a moment, he was very well known, and he was - could you switch it off a moment while I to think of this man. There was this very senior producer in the Features Department, he was an extremely kind man and he was also Communist I think, and so he decided that he was on the side of people who were struggling and desperately needed a job. So he was doing his best to help me.

I remember him taking me to a local pub which was used by BBC writers, producers, actors and so on and so forth and to introduce me to people who might be of some help. When we first went in he introduced me to -switch it off a minute - he introduced me to McNiece. Incidentally, I had written two articles for 'Tribune', one was an article about being down and out, 'A Return to the Doss Houses', 'cause I went round to see what they were like, I had stayed in them before the war of course. And the other one was a thing about tenements called 'Homes in the Sky'.
   
^ A: I was introduced to Louis McNiece, who was getting together crowds, voices, for a feature he had done about the Roman Empire, one of the Roman Emperors. And this producer friend said 'oh Louis I would like you to meet Emanuel Litvinoff' you know, and McNiece pranced by me with his hand held high and said 'oh yes, you write don't you?'. That was that, it was very unfortunate, it caused this friend of mine incredible distress and embarrassment. He was quite incapable of behaving like that himself.

So then he saw Roy Campbell, the poet Roy Campbell, and he said 'look, oh there's Roy, you must meet Roy'. I said 'you can't introduce me to Roy Campbell', I said 'he's a fascist, he fought for Franco in the War, he's supposed to be an anti-Semite'. 'Absolute rubbish' he said, 'he's the nicest guy in the world'. So he took me over and I was very nervous, I thought before I knew where I was I'd probably be in a bout of fisticuffs with Roy Campbell. Because Roy was an enormous man with a Bush hat. He said 'Roy, this is Emanuel Litvinoff', Roy Campbell seized my hand and shook it fiercely he said 'dear man you're Litvinoff' he said, 'I read 'The Untried Soldier' I had on a Troop Sheet' he said 'I used to lend round to everybody', he said 'you're a real ranker of a poet, you're not one of these pansy boys'.

Then I was introduced to Dylan Thomas and Dylan Thomas was absolutely wonderful because, he shook my hand, he said 'I read these articles you wrote in Tribune' he said 'they're very, very good', he said 'you ought to write a book about it'. And I thought that was really, because I absolutely thought he was wonderful, I mean he was my, almost my hero. I felt rather good, but it didn't result in my eventually getting a producers' job, somebody else got it who wrote, on the strength of a series he wrote about a London policemen whatever. So in the meantime I was carrying on writing my freelance.
   
^ Q: What happened to your family? Your mother and your brothers and sisters? Were they still in the East End?

A: No they were living in, my mother, most of my family were living in Hackney.

Q: They'd moved out.

A: They moved, well we moved to Hackney from the East End when I was fifteen and a half, which was no better incidentally.

Q: Where in Hackney? What part?

A: We lived at the back of a tobacconist and sweet stuff shop and I remember there was a cement floor in the kitchen and it was, it was you know, it was £1 a week.

Q: Was your mother still there?

A: No, no she'd moved to another place, a place called Sandringham Road in Dalston, which I believe is now the centre of the drugs trade in Hackney. My brother Barney was a Prisoner of War most of the war, he'd been married anyway, he was married and a Prisoner of War. My brother Abie, my eldest brother was in the Army, he also had just been demobbed. My brother Pinny had just been, he was also in the Army, demobbed. My one sister had been in the ATS and had just got married so somehow the family had been redistributed and there were the younger siblings around.

Q: Did you visit your mother often?

A: I visited her, I wouldn't say often, I might visit her periodically, yes I suppose about every other week. In any case she died very soon after the war of cancer. She'd had a very hard life. In fact I remember that she managed to go down to Devon at the end of the war, one of my brothers took her down to Devon and she hadn't been out of London and the countryside was wonderful. I remember her being absolutely enraptured about how beautiful Devon was and England was and that was literally a short while before she died. Now where are we?
   
^ Q: Let's go back to your writing. You didn't get a job as a producer so did you decide to concentrate on writing?

A: Yeah, I was trying desperately to get work at the BBC because I mean I had done this one feature and I'd put up lots of ideas. I was almost as prolific as your father was in putting up ideas but nobody every said, 'OK we'll commission it' you see. So I wasted a lot of time and a lot of energy in trying to break into that appalling, and the thing that used to depress me was that they would say 'yes well it's a good idea but didn't we have something like this about eighteen months ago John?' or whatever, it was always something along those lines you know.

Although I got very near getting a series on, because I'd thought of a character who was the owner of a delicatessen, a Jewish delicatessen shop, and he was a kind of odd kind of philosopher. He got everything sort of garbled but he was constantly giving philosophical advice and uttering philosophical maxims, and the feature department was very keen on it. The idea was that they would be five minute intervals, episodes if you know what I mean. But then, that's the way that the BBC works, somebody in the, one of the planners in the Features Department said 'it is not Features, it is Variety', off it went to Variety and Variety said 'we don't have anything like this' and so on and so forth. And it kicked around for a while and then it was, so they abandoned that and then somebody, one producer suddenly came up with the idea. There was an American comedian, he'd been a kind of leading film comedian and he was very much on the skids so he'd come here and he was doing, here he was still a bit of a star and they were looking for a series for him. What was his bloomin' name? It was Harry Green, yes. Somebody said 'look that's not a bad idea you know, this chap Litvinoff has written about this delicatessen owner, bit of a philosopher, maybe it would suit Harry Green'.

So I was commissioned to do a treatment. I did the first script and they liked it, so then I did another two, three scripts. Harry Green was fantastically happy and elated about this because he could see himself becoming a star again. And then they commissioned me to do, first of all there were three, I think one script was complete, two scripts that I had outlined. And then they asked me to do the outline of three further scripts so that they would have six and I did it and all this was going out to be tentatively scheduled. And just before it was due to go on, I think the week before it was due to go on, something happened in Palestine. It caused a tremendous feeling of anti-Semitism in England, there was in fact a bit of a pogrom somewhere in Wales, and the whole idea was immediately shelved. So that, I remember people had told me that I was made because not only was I going to get whatever it was, thirty odd guineas for each script, but it was going to be repeated every week and it would go on the overseas service, so in all I was going to be a rich man. It didn't materialise.
   
^ A: But then things got a bit difficult for me at home because it was terribly tough for Irene working and looking after particularly a young baby and so on. Although she didn't want to give up her job because she was very, very ambitious, she wanted to have the feeling that everything didn't rest on her. I found myself a job on a journal called 'The Jewish Observer and Middle East Review', in fact I was one of the founders of it. Because there had been a previous weekly called 'The Zionist Review', they had taken on rather a good journalist as the editor. Oh God, I can't remember names - switch it off. They had taken on John [surname], who was had a pretty good reputation as a war correspondent actually and a war expert, military expert for I think 'The Observer' and 'The Evening Standard'. And he had plans to turn this funny little magazine 'The Zionist Review' into something more substantial. I was in at the planning stage and I became the Assistant Editor, I earned a modest living there and I stayed there for a number of years while I was writing poetry or whatever else I was doing.
   
^ Q: Did you publish your own poetry while you were there?

A: Yes I had published the second book of poems which Herbert Read had turned down. I remember, this is one of those extraordinary things, he asked me to come and see him at Routledge which was then in the bombed out city, you know, one of the few buildings standing was George Routledge and Sons the publishers. And he was one of the directors and certainly in charge of all the poetry and he took me out for lunch into an ABC teashop and I remember that he had an egg salad and I had cheese on toast for tea and he carried out this parcel of my manuscript with him. And he said to me 'Eh Litvinoff' he said 'Eh I was wrong about you, you're not a poet at all' and handed me back my manuscript, which absolutely, absolutely destroyed me.

Q: How did you recover?

A: Well I recovered because I managed to find somebody who would publish it you see and thought it was very good you see. In any case one always either recovers, or you're totally crushed and you never do anything. But I'm afraid it soured my view of Herbert Read and it had a strange, an extraordinary postscript.
   
^ A: Some years later I had written a poem, I'd read T.S. Eliot's 'Selected Poems' which was published in 1948 by Penguin. I got hold of this and I read these poems and it included some of the worse anti-Semitic poems he had written in the '20s, now this had been selected by him and published by Penguin after Auschwitz. And I thought okay, in the 1920s goodness knows there was so much anti-Semitism in English literature okay, and he's a wonderful poet Eliot, I could absolutely forgive him for that, for doing it in the 1920s. But to choose them as his selected poems and publish them after 1945, after Auschwitz, was an appalling thing for him to do. Shocking and absolutely condemned him utterly. And I wrote a poem to T.S. Eliot chiding him about this thing.

And it had not then been published when the Contemporary Library, the Contemporary Arts were having the first poetry platform. It had not long been put in existence, I think this was about 1951 maybe or something like that, and they wrote and asked me to come and read. And I went along there with two, I had two poems to read, one was a poem I can't remember and the other was this poem to T.S. Eliot. I arrived there and there were all my literary friends from Hampstead there and there was Dannie Abse, there was Rudy Nassar, there was Bernice Rubens, there were famous people like that, and it was absolutely packed and in the Chair was Herbert Read, who was by now Sir Herbert Read. Although he was an anarchist he had allowed himself to be knighted fairly recently. Now when I was called to read my poems, I had read the first one which was absolutely innocuous and I had just announced the title of the second one 'To T.S. Eliot' and Herbert Read said 'oh good Tom has just come in'. Eliot apparently had arrived with an entourage and I felt dreadful about reading it, I felt very, very nervous and I thought to myself, well look the poem is entitled to be read and I read it with a trembling voice that gave it an extraordinary power. In some ways it's a fairly devastating poem, it begins something like

'Eminence becomes you,

Now when the rock is struck,

Your young sardonic voice which floats on beauty'- no -

'Which broke on beauty,

Floats amid incest,

As though a God utters from Russell Square

And condescends,

High in the solemn cathedral of the air,

His holy octaves to a million radios,

I am not one accepted in your parish,

Witstein is my relative and I share the

Proterozoic slime of Shylock'

and so on and so forth.

There was an absolute shocked silence. When I finished reading it Herbert Read said to me 'if I had known that you were going to read such a poem I would never have allowed it' and I thought 'eh and you're an anarchist?' Then hell broke loose and I remember particularly Stephen Spender getting up and saying 'as a poet as Jewish as Litvinoff, I'm outraged by this unwanted, undeserved attack on my friend T.S. Eliot' and so on and so forth.

Q: Were there voices in support of you?

A: Not a single one. Not a single one. Now I wanted to explain why I wrote this particular poem, the motive behind it, but Herbert Read would not allow me to speak and I was shouted down and I had to get off the platform, I went back to my seat. Apparently Eliot was heard to mutter, he had his head down leaning on a chair, to his entourage 'it's a good poem'. So we left, Irene and I left after a while, I didn't want to run out because I thought that would be cowardly, I thought I'd wait until two or three other poets have run and then I'll go and when that happened I'll go. And as we were going out, one of Eliot's entourage said in indignant tone 'good God he's with a beautiful girl'.
   
 

Emanuel Litvinoff has a website at http://www.emanuel-litvinoff.com

 

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Last modified: September, 2008