Our mother, Else, was born in Denmark. She became an au-pair in Paris where, in the 1920s, she met our father, Fred, who was English. He worked in the Paris branch of the Bank of London and South America.
Got that?
They had two children while they lived in France, Kir, who was two years older, and Mick, born in Denmark in 1932 as the law was that, being born in France required that you serve French national service.
Mick, I am sure, developed his interest in sport from an early age by watching his parents on the tennis court and our father playing cricket and football at the Paris ex-patriots’ club. As a child, born in 1945, I could not accept that I wasn’t there and claimed to have been lurking just around the corner, out of sight, sucking a green lollipop.
My parents told me that the family enjoyed their time in Meudon, a suburb of SW Paris. For instance, Saturday evening meal was often oysters and bread from the corner shop with a bottle of red wine. This being France, the children had a glass of wine with a little water added.
All good things come to an end, of course. In 1940, Herr Hitler decided that he wanted to invade Paris, and so the exodus began. The family’s escape from France is well chronicled in a letter Fred wrote to a friend at the time and which, fortunately, was returned to us.
Mick, his mother and Kir, had left by train on 25 May 1940 and were staying with friends. About two weeks later, when the bank staff were being evacuated, Fred had to borrow a bicycle in order to meet up with them. After two and a half days pedalling, the family was re-united after he had covered some 200 miles.
The four then travelled by train to Bordeaux where they were to be taken back to England. They were with 25 other refugees, in a cattle truck, covering something like 30 miles in 17 hours until a change of train was needed, for which they waited another whole day.
Eventually, in Bordeaux, whilst the Germans were imposing restrictions nationwide, they had to wait 2 hrs at the Consulate for their paperwork whilst the French staff had their lunch! Eventually, some 9 days after Fred left Paris, they were allowed onto a collier on its way to England, along with 800 others, mainly Polish, and arrived in Falmouth 3 days later.
Fred wrote; “The children behaved admirably all the way. In fact they had the time of their lives clambering up and down and around the ship. And, making themselves thoroughly dirty. We found them making friends, talking away, running about, being made a fuss of by everybody as they were the only children on board.”
In England, they settled in North London. For the next four years of the war, Mick was a typical 8 year old boy, going on 12, getting into scrapes and wearing out his clothes, which could not be replaced, only repaired, time and time again – so much so, he told me, that he was known as “Magic Patches”.
In the 1970s, Mick held a quite senior post with Shell – he had an office to himself, with a window and a carpet. The Shell house magazine published a picture of his desk on which were 14 telephones! These were mainly direct lines to the banks where Shell’s money was on deposit as he was responsible for paying the Arabs for the oil Shell bought. At the time, he was, of course, using a typewriter to keep track of what he was doing and we reckoned that the zero wore out every 6 months.
Eventually, when he retired, he was replaced by a computer and a couple of juniors.
and sat at the bar like a real local:
The traditional fayre was devoured happily,
And a good time was had by all:
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