Nancy, especially after Gretl’s death deprived him of ballast. Fortunately I was by then that much older, and knew myself to be on the verge of independence. And yet, I remember him intensely and with pleasure. We talked, especially in Paris, and on the long journeys when I acted as his chauffeur – for after a year we were prosperous enough to buy a car, which I learned to drive, just in time to pass the newly introduced driving test. He knew about the ways of the world, and what he said about them I took seriously, not least the observation that men should keep quiet about the women they slept with. His tips on what was good in the French cinema of the 1930s came from the horse’s mouth. He gave me what I clearly had not had from my biological father. And he, in turn, hoped that I would compensate for the repeatedly disappointed hopes of his own life.
For though Solomon Sidney Berkwood Hobsbaum, short, wearing pince-nez below a forehead that (unlike my father’s) folded vertically, was the only one of Grandfather David’s sons to become a full-time businessman, making money was not his dream. He had the salesman’s ability to believe passionately in the product of the moment, the body armour protecting him against the blows of the unreturned phone call and the cancelled order. Years later I recognized much of him in Arthur Miller’s wonderful
What had his ambitions been in his East End youth? Had he been born much later, when there came to be money in the game and the British took to it, he might have made something of his natural talent for chess, which was evidently considerable. Putting up his hand somewhere in France when chess players were asked for had got him from the western front into intelligence (i.e. codebreaking) in the First World War. He seemed to know something about such matters, but then anyone in his position knocking around central Europe in 1919–33 was quite likely to have come across people involved in secret services. He kept out of politics.
In other respects he was not creative, but he had the self-educated poor Jew’s passion for culture and loved being in the milieu of creative people – musicians, theatre actors and above all movie people. On his and Gretl’s phonograph in Vienna I heard for the first time and many times after that, a still somewhat Victorian selection of the great vocal classics of the first recorded generation – Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini – and the repertoire of the great, mainly Italian and French, arias: Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gounod. In practice his musical contacts were more modern: Rose Pauly-Dreesen, the most famous Elektra of her day, with whose career he was associated in the late twenties, was the leading dramatic soprano in Klemperer’s Berlin Krolloper, very much at the cutting edge of Weimar music. He tried to mobilize on her behalf Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Edwardian feminist and the most celebrated female composer of her day, with whom he had somehow established a relationship as a young man. But it was the cinema that captured his heart for good. Not so much the atmosphere of bigshots, wheeler-dealers, the entrepreneurial adventurers and confidencetricksters, though he had got to know them in his time with Universal. It was the milieu of the studio floor – the large world-creating hangars, small emigrant Jews around big stages, cameras, lights, make-up and scenery, all drenched in the atmosphere of technique, gossip, bohemian informality and scandal. I drove him there on his visits to Isleworth and Elstree. For him it was where man was in touch with creation. He succeeded in fighting his way back into it in England by convincing a British photographic firm that his contacts in the movie world made him the man to sell their film-stock in competition with Kodak and Agfa. After a few years of losing battle armed with an uncompetitive product (‘Uncle Sidney goes to Budapest tomorrow. Furious telegram from Joe Pasternak. Selofilm apparently poor quality’) he gave up the struggle, emigrated again and, presumably introduced by his brother Berk, invested his small capital in a share of a modest Chilean enterprise producing kitchenware. At the end of the war he left an unexciting but safe business on little more than the hint from an old contact that there might be a place for him on some new film operation to be launched in connection with the new United Nations. Nothing happened. The dream of the creative life was over. He had thrown up a reasonable livelihood in his mid-fifties for a dream. He never succeeded in getting another.
Still, for a few years in the 1930s he managed to live his fantasy on the edge of the European tragedy and I received some of the benefit. For who else would give him a chance but those on the margins of the film world – the refugees and the radicals? So he found himself involved in political movies financed by the French left in the Popular Front days, notably Jean Renoir’s
II
The Britain I came to in 1933 was utterly different in almost every way from the country in which I write this at the start of the new century. The history of the island in the twentieth century divides sharply into two halves – to put it in a phrase, before and after the simultaneous shocks of Suez and rock and roll. Almost every generalization about the country to which I came in 1933 ceases to apply after 1956, even the notorious inefficiency of the British system of domestic heating and – one of its consequences – the impenetrable Dickensian fog which, until 1953, still occasionally forced London to a standstill. Britain was no longer a major empire or a world power, and after Suez nobody believed that it was. Popular culture compensated by creating sagas of British heroism and eventual victory against the Germans in the Second World War. In 1933 people thought about the Great War not as a heroic memory, but as a graveyard. However, everyone knew that a larger area of the world map than ever before was coloured pink, and that we were the only global empire, even if intelligent imperialists recognized that our grasp was already much more restricted than our reach. But British skins were still white. In 1933 black and brown faces were far easier to find on the streets of Paris than London and, except for Veeraswamy’s in the West End, the Indian restaurant was still virtually absent. Indeed, foreigners of any kind were rare, since Britain was not a centre of international tourism, which was in any case still tiny by present standards.
Only Hitler and the war were to bring into Britain a modest number of the sort of middle-class continentals whose reactions the Hungarian George Mikes has described fondly in the little book
Britain in 1933 was still a self-contained island where life was lived by unwritten but compelling rules, rituals and invented traditions: mostly class rules or gender rules, but also virtually universal ones, usually linked to royalty. The national anthem was played at the end of every performance in theatres and cinemas and people stood for it before they went home. Wherever you were, you did not talk during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, 11 November. The ‘right’ kind of accent bonded together the upper classes (but not parvenus who could thus be recognized) and ensured deferential behaviour from the lower orders, class-conscious or not, at least in public.
In the 1930s these things were obvious. But, of course, they were not expected to apply on the other side of the seas which separated us from the foreigners. Britain was insular in every sense. When an upper-middle-class Jewish refugee doctor applied for admission to Britain as a potential domestic servant (the only option available) and offered to work as a butler, the British Passport Control officer in Paris refused him without a moment’s
