Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ would remain an indelible memory among the boys after they had bade Harold farewell on his return to Africa. In Harold’s absence his second daughter Ruth was born in 1943. One year later, Lieutenant Colonel Amiel’s war ended. Shot in the shoulder by a sniper while riding in a Jeep in Italy, he was repatriated as an invalid. Dressed in his colonel’s uniform, he spent time playing with his four-year-old daughter Barbara, who had struck up a close friendship with Peter Buckman, her older cousin. ‘Will you marry me?’ Peter asked Barbara. ‘We can’t,’ she replied. ‘We’ve both got dandruff, and that means that our children will be bald. I learned that in biology.’

      During the last months of the war, Harold arranged to establish a solicitors’ partnership with his younger brother Barry. At the same time, he fell in love with a woman called Eileen Ford. Some would blame the tensions of the war for the breakdown of Harold and Vera’s marriage in 1945; others said that Vera was an uneducated neurotic and an unsuitable wife for a cultured lawyer. Divorce was common in the immediate post-war period, but Vera was unusually incandescent about Harold’s infidelity, not least because she had partly financed his new law partnership.

      Despite the Amiels’ ugly arguments about money, Barbara Amiel was more fortunate than the many children who had lost their fathers in combat. Nevertheless, her early childhood was insecure. ‘I’ve suffered from insomnia all my life,’ she would write. ‘My earliest memory as a child of four was being sedated to sleep.’¹ There was, however, support from Mary Vangrovsky, Harold’s mother. After the divorce in 1946 and Harold’s marriage to Eileen in 1948, she gave her son money to set up a new home, and cared for her two granddaughters. By then Vera and her daughters were living in Hendon, in north-west London.

      Barbara Amiel’s early school years were comfortable. Although affected by the general post-war austerity and the rationing of food and clothes, she attended North London Collegiate, one of England’s best state schools for girls, and enjoyed the privileges of a middle-class upbringing. There were ballet lessons, excursions to the theatre and cinema, visits to the new Festival Hall to hear Dame Myra Hess play Grieg, and regular meetings with her father at weekends.² Forbidden by Vera to entertain his two daughters in his new home, Harold would take the girls to visit their cousins – Anita Amiel in Swiss Cottage and the Buckmans in Hampstead – for lunch and tea before returning to Hendon. In the era of the nationalisation of major industries by the Labour government and the Cold War division of Europe, politics was passionately discussed in many homes, especially by Jews, a number of whom ranked among the leadership of the left-wing parties. Stimulated by the arguments, especially while visiting the Buckmans, Barbara Amiel would recall her growing understanding of their ‘interest in creating a more just society … through socialism’.³ At thirteen she was an intelligent, socially aware schoolgirl enjoying a stable life. Her mother was considering transferring her to Roedean, the expensive private boarding school on the south coast, but instead opted for a more dramatic change.

      In the early 1950s Vera had begun a relationship with Leonard Somes, a non-Jewish draughtsman. Among the Barnetts and Amiels, Somes was regarded as decent and unassuming, but intellectually unimpressive. In 1953 Vera married him and declared that they would emigrate to Canada to find a new life. Amiel would later write that emigration was her mother’s only option, because the British class system discriminated against working-class men like her new stepfather, but that was fanciful. Many ambitious working-class Britons earned fortunes in the post-war era. Leonard Somes’s difficulties were his lack of talent and purpose, and his social unease. Canada, promised the advertisements, was a guaranteed escape from austerity and offered an idyllic future. Barbara’s fate was decided. By then her father had two more children, the elder of whom, a boy, was mentally handicapped. There was no possibility of Harold Amiel caring for his elder daughters.

      The emigrants arrived in Hamilton, near Toronto, at the end of autumn 1953. There was disillusion rather than a honeymoon. The job Leonard Somes was expecting had disappeared, and after their savings were spent he was compelled following a long period of unemployment to work as a labourer at a local steel mill. Home life in Tragina Avenue, recalled Amiel, was a desperate ‘rat race’ to ‘make ends meet’. The family’s plight worsened when her mother went into premature labour. Although she and her son survived after weeks in hospital, Amiel was horrified that her mother’s wedding ring had been ‘wrenched from her finger’ by a robber in the hospital’s parking lot.⁴

      At fifteen, Barbara Amiel was angry. In place of a comfortable home in London, an excellent school and endless cultural excursions, she found herself marooned in a grim wasteland surrounded by uneducated, insular provincials. Her mother, she screamed, was responsible for the calamity. Relations between Leonard and Vera deteriorated. They decided to move to St Catharines, a nearby town where there was the promise of a better job and a bigger home, a necessity since Vera had discovered that she was again pregnant. The only obstacle was Barbara, and there were furious arguments. Vera condemned her daughter’s behaviour as unreasonable. For her part, Barbara judged her mother to be neurotic and unstable, and she was equally dissatisfied with her stepfather’s lacklustre achievements. Although she would write twenty-five years later that her stepfather was ‘a handsome, warm man of whom I was enormously proud’, at the time she was infuriated by his responsibility for her plight.⁵ In her mother’s version of events, there was concern about Barbara’s education. She was settled at the local school, and was ambitious to attend university. The best temporary solution, they agreed, was for Barbara to stay with neighbouring friends and to visit her family at weekends. Accordingly, her clothes were packed and carried to her temporary home.⁶ Barbara’s version is more apocalyptic. She describes arriving home from school one day at the age of fourteen to discover all her possessions ‘packed in a cardboard box next to the front door. My mother was very apologetic. “Your stepfather and I can’t cope with you any more, so you have to move out.” They found me a room in a house on a council estate and paid my rent until the end of the school term.’ The publication of Barbara’s account in 1980 would cause great hurt to Vera and Leonard, and to many others in her family who disputed her recollection of events.

      Growing up alone without a family became increasingly difficult. In Amiel’s various descriptions, she lodged in a part-time brothel while revising for her high-school exams at St Catharines Collegiate, or was a tenant with an unpleasant Polish family. She kept her concentration by stuffing her ears with wax earplugs, but after the ‘hurt had passed and I had cried a bit, after I got over the fright of sleeping in cellars underneath the furnace pipes, I came to cherish my freedom’. During her adolescence, she would also write, she found herself ‘in the middle of a room, stranded, sitting in my own urine, sitting for hours, too frightened to cry and too frightened to move’.⁷ Her occasional companions in sexual experimentation and drinking alcohol were the children of Polish émigrés and Canadian aboriginals. To accommodate that lifestyle she moved into a boarding house during the week, and stayed with a succession of girlfriends’ families at the weekends. To finance herself, she worked in the evenings and holidays, in a drugstore, a fruit-canning factory and clothes shops. Illness forced her once to return temporarily to her parents’ home, but she soon resumed life in Hamilton. Told she was entitled to a ‘secure home’ by a social worker, she later commented, ‘I had never thought about what I was entitled to. Things were simply taken as they came.’⁸ Her brave struggle was rewarded by her securing the grades to study philosophy and English at the University of Toronto. Amiel had become a toughened, streetwise survivor. Her ‘wild’ days, she would write thirty years later, left a legacy. ‘Something decent died in me, or perhaps was stillborn: I would never be able to create a successful family life.’ Incorrect reports suggested that she never saw her mother again.⁹ СКАЧАТЬ