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to Girton.

      26 A British film made in 1939 starring David Niven and Olivia de Haviland, based on ‘Raffles’, the amateur cracksman short stories, by E. W. Hornung (1866–1921).

      27 On his walking holiday in north Wales, Gershon had stayed at the farm Eileen owned near Beddgelert in Snowdonia.

      28 Even by Egyptian standards, the cotton manufacturing Smouhas were spectacularly rich. In the wake of the Suez conflict they would lose a huge fortune when Nasser confiscated Jewish Egyptian property. Joseph’s son, Edward, won a bronze medal for Britain in the 1928 Olympics.

      29 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

      30 Adonais, by P. B. Shelley.

      31 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.

      32 Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, scene iii.

      33 A reference to ‘Mariana’, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

May–September 1940

       On 7 May, in the middle of the disastrous Norway campaign, Neville Chamberlain opened a two-day debate on the debacle in the House of Commons. The idea of the campaign had from the start been Winston Churchill’s, but three days later it was Chamberlain who was gone, a scapegoat for Norway and belated judgement on the years of appeasement and moral failure, and Churchill was prime minister. It was not a moment too soon. On the same day, German armies swept into neutral Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland. The Phoney War was over.

       The Battle of France, which began on 10 May 1940, was effectively all but over for the British by the end of the month. At that time, and since, the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ masked the extent of the humiliation inflicted on the Allies, but the brutal truth was that within the space of three weeks, neutral Holland and Belgium had been overrun, France brought to her knees and almost 340,000 British and French troops, minus almost all their heavy equipment, transport vehicles, tanks and guns, left trapped in an ever-diminishing pocket on the French Channel coast. The campaign would limp on hopelessly through the early weeks of June, but by the 22nd, France had gone the way of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium and the invasion of Britain seemed only a matter of time.

To those returning from France to Britain in June 1940, however, London still seemed remarkably untouched by events across the Channel, and the ‘terror bombing’ it had expected in September 1939 no nearer than before. In many ways, in fact, the war had yet to affect Eileen directly, but when on 10 June Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Britain and France, her mother, Vicky – married to a British citizen, and the mother of three British children, but like so many Jews within the old Ottoman empire, the owner of an Italian passport – suddenly found herself categorised as an ‘Enemy Alien’.

       At a time when an invasion was expected at any moment ‘Fifth Columnist Fever’ was in the air – even Jewish refugees would find themselves interned on the Isle of Man – and while Vicky herself was at no risk her money was. The fear in the Alexander household was that with an Italian army threatening Egypt, and so many Egyptian Italians known to be fascist sympathisers, the family-owned Mosseri Bank, and with it all Vicky’s capital and their only regular source of income, might be confiscated.

       The news of the death of Vicky’s brother, Eli, the head of the bank, only the day after Mussolini declared war, further darkened the future, and one of the first casualties was Eileen’s academic career. The fears would eventually prove groundless, but with dire talk of what the Nazis would do to Jews when they invaded, and her father threatening to take the whole family to Canada, Eileen, like most of her Girton friends over the next eighteen months, gave up her dreams of Arthurian Romance and Cambridge to apply for war work in one of the government’s rapidly expanding ministries.

       The war had at last caught up with Gershon, too, who – after spending his final month of freedom walking in Wales, where he stayed on the farm owned by Eileen, and farm-labouring in the West Country with a Cambridge friend – was now ‘1310136 Aircraftman 2 G. Ellenbogen’, the lowest rank in the RAF. For a man with his education and language skills his future lay in intelligence work, but in 1940 he was still too young for a commission into the intelligence branch, and for the next eighteen frustrating months his life would revolve around a succession of bases and camps across the country, punctuated only by the occasional snatched and uncertain leave in London.

       This at least meant that he could see Eileen, because in the middle of May 1940 the Alexanders took a house in London’s Swiss Cottage, and for the rest of the war 9 Harley Road, NW3, would be her home. The house was a comfortable, detached, red-brick building not far from the anti-aircraft battery on Primrose Hill, sandwiched between larger houses on either side, with a couple, Mr and Mrs Wright, to cook and generally ‘do’ for them, an Austrian refugee called Mrs Seidler as their first semi-permanent ‘guest’, and a big garden at the back, complete with its own concrete air-raid shelter.

The shelter’s time would come, but over the long summer months of 1940, as Beaverbrook’s factories worked heroically to keep up with fighter losses, and RAF pilots were thrown into the fight with only a handful of hours of air time behind them, the battle between Goering’s Luftwaffe and Dowding’s Fighter Command – the ‘Battle of Britain’ – raged largely over the villages and fields of south-east England. While there were continuous attacks on airfields, ports and shipping, it was only at the beginning of September 1940, when the Luftwaffe turned from the airfields, radar stations and strategic targets of the south-east to the capital, that London’s volunteer army of wardens and fire-watchers – soon to include Eileen and her mother – found themselves on the war’s front line alongside the city’s firemen, gunners, barrage balloon teams, medics and bomb-disposal units. The Blitz – short for Blitzkrieg, Lightning War – had begun.

3

       My Young Fellow

Saturday 13 April 1940 [Eileen’s twenty-third birthday] Darling, when I wrote to you yesterday, I felt as though I should never smile again – but I was wrong. This England1 produced not a languid twitch at the corners of my mouth or anything like that – but a twinkle, and then a wide smile, and then a giggle, and then the loud laugh, which is such a source of surprise to you, dear.

      The birthday atmosphere is somewhat marred by it’s being Saturday, and the fact that I have a headache as though the flames of Hell were roaring in my skull.

Well, with all this, my gloom fell from my shoulders like a cloak – and now, I’m ready to laugh at anything – even at the merry absurdity of my ever casting you into the limbo of Men I have Known & Forgotten. As a matter of fact, I never forget anybody, not even the young man of Jewish Lineage and Parisian up-bringing who, for some reason known only to himself, wanted to impress me – and set about it by telling me that he’d had his first Mistress at the age of 12½, and that she was the mother of his best friend at school. He hastened to add that the suggestion came from her – and that Love (by which he meant Lust) was Very Beautiful. All this happened by moonlight on a Messageries Maritimes Liner in the middle of the Mediterranean – and was intensely funny. I listened solemnly to his catalogue

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