by Helen Mirren
He was vehemently anti-Nazi in his youth. Very much in opposition to his Czarist father, he became a socialist and even took part in the anti-Mosley demonstrations in the East End. His account of the famous Cable Street ‘Riot’ is reproduced here:
Battle of Cable Street, 4 October 1936
There was no anti-fascist procession, just 250,000 people, mostly local dockers and Jews, blocking the roads. Barricades were built by furniture being thrown out of windows. This I saw myself. I was there because I belonged to the TGWU.
The Communist cell met before Branch meetings and decided on the line to take, and we were urged to go independently to Commercial Road.
Information was given to the crowd by word of mouth.
When I was in Cable Street someone shouted, ‘They are going down [illegible] Street! We ran there and when I got there the fascists were passing, men, women and children in uniform, with a double row of police on either side. The anti-fascist crowd thickened to about four deep on my side. I got a violent blow on the head, and thought I had been attacked by the crowd. I was tall and young and I may have looked like a plain-clothes policeman. Then I saw a silver cigarette case on the ground; someone must have thrown it and this was what hit me. One of the crowd picked it up.
The opposition was not physical confrontation. It was thought we could argue and convince. When the fascists proposed to march through the East End, in full strength, the idea was to block their way by filling the streets, not to fight the police. It was a form of passive resistance. Aggression came from the fascists and the police.
At that time the majority in Britain were neutral or sympathetic to fascism abroad. Order instead of chaos. Persecution of the Jews was not believed.
He wanted to fight but, whether for medical reasons or because he was a ‘foreigner’, he was not allowed to join the services. Instead he drove an ambulance throughout the war, thus saving lives rather than taking them. Serving in the East End during the Blitz brought him into contact with the terrible suffering endured by Londoners.
It was in the East End that he met my mother. Before the war, they both worked in the depot of Jacqmar Fabrics, a high-end supplier of materials to posh ladies and their dressmakers. He was five years younger than her, but he was madly in love and romanced her by taking her to the first Italian and Greek restaurants in London. In fact, to my great delight one of these restaurants, Bertorelli’s, is miraculously still there in Charlotte Street. My parents always remembered Bertorelli’s as the location where they fell in love. Today it is not considered remotely exotic to eat Italian food, but in 1939 Britain was a class-ridden, arrogantly xenophobic, overcooked-beef-and-cabbage-eating world. To eat foreign food, and date a Russian émigré five years younger than herself – let alone marry him – must have been a brave individualistic act for a West Ham-born working-class girl.
Dad at home in Leigh-on-Sea.
My father, and I warn you, here follows an unobjective love letter, was the kindest and best of men. In his early years, as an émigré with a strange name, I think he always felt an outsider, uncomfortable in a country that was at that time very homogeneous. Excluded by his foreignness and also by his politics, and much to the frustration and despair of my mother, he rejected a self-interested pursuit of economic success. Instead, having passed ‘the Knowledge’, that amazing feat of learning all the streets of London which licensed black-cab drivers must master, he followed his father by becoming an overeducated cabbie. Eventually, having dropped the foreign Mironov for the more acceptable though falsely Scottish Mirren, he became a low-level civil servant, a driving examiner, in fact. It wasn’t long, however, before he rose to a bureaucratic post in the Ministry of Transport.
He never felt at ease with groups of people. He found it hard to go into a pub, or a party. We very rarely had anyone over. Occasionally he, or more probably my mother, felt it was necessary to entertain guests, and then my father would squirm in embarrassment, unable to make the necessary small talk. He was happiest at home, with his children, and later alone on his little old clinker-built boat, the Curlew, sailing the muddy waters of the Thames estuary. Though he belonged to the local sailing club, he really only used it for the facilities it afforded him to set off. I don’t think he could stand the small-minded snobberies and pretensions.
Incidentally, it was on the Curlew that my mild-mannered and kindly father mysteriously turned into a dictatorial gorgon. In the panic of the moment – of which there can be quite a few while sailing – he would snap and shout as we stared bewildered at him. At home, we were the beneficiaries of my father’s refusal to be social or ambitious. He had a great and gentle sense of humour; he was always wise and supportive and was adored by all of his children. He was loving, funny and never, as far as I can remember, angry.
Or rather, he did get angry, briefly, but that only came about later, when my sister and I began to see boys. I think he was madly jealous. My father found it very hard to see us grow up like that. But when the time came to go to college, he sent us off with all the love in the world.
He had faults that my mother suffered from. Women were attracted to him and he could be flattered by that; at least that’s what my mum said. She was ferociously jealous of him. I think they had a terrific sex life. My mother told me that if they ever had a row, they resolved it in bed. Their rows they kept private, they did not bring their children into it. I think, like me, my father hated confrontation, unless it was political. So I do not remember my parents arguing. Ours was not one of those noisy, passionate Russian households, with rows exploding and disappearing in minutes. Any noise there was came from us three children.
The key to the success of my parents’ relationship was the fact that they always found each other interesting and funny. Until their last days together, they talked and laughed together, and held hands and touched. We were a pretty tactile family; we hugged and sat on knees and cuddled until grown up and then some.
Talking was another very important part of my childhood. We had no TV, so we always had dinner together, and talked, usually I seem to remember about philosophical things such as ‘Is there such a thing as a soul?’ (My parents were both vehement atheists.) Here, my father showed his Russian side, for the Russians love nothing better than a deep philosophical discussion: Do we need art? What is nationhood, and what is nationalism? What is belief? Should tribes intermarry? My father argued that they should, so the whole of humanity would become one race. He hated nationalism, believing it led to conflict. Encouraged by my father, we were gently prodded into thinking for ourselves. It took me years to understand how to make small talk. I couldn’t understand conversation that was not about large issues. To this day I am uncomfortable with gossip.
Still cabbying at weekends, my dad would come home from the rank at Sloane Square with gifts for us from the King’s Road in Chelsea, which in those days was the hang-out for his kind of people, artists and musicians. My sister and I were the first in school to have coloured tights, much to the approbation of everyone. Me and my friend, Jenny May, insisted on wearing one red stocking and one blue, which must have seemed unbearably challenging to the people of Southend High Street.
Later, my dad was very proud of my achievements as an actress, especially when I was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He and my mother used to come up to London on the train and just stand outside the Aldwych Theatre to watch the crowds going in.
Initially, they had both very sensibly been opposed to my ambitions to act. My mother, particularly, having come through the economic deprivations of the Depression and the war, thought it a total waste of an education. However, working with the RSC seemed like a regular job to them. Their fears were economically based, as they rightly surmised that I might not be able to make a living. The regular pay cheque, albeit very small – and of course the nature of the plays (Shakespeare, classy, intellectual) – made them think that maybe I could live as an actress.
So my father lived his quiet and noble
life out on the streets of Leigh-on-Sea and on the estuary. This grandson of a Russian countess, who had learned to walk on the family’s estate at Kuryanovo, who had survived upheaval and chaos, had created, with my mother, an island of peace and security for his children, and that is why I call it a noble life. After he retired he joined a writing class, got an allotment, and started reading and experimenting with Delia Smith’s recipes. He adored Delia, whose column had just begun appearing in the Evening Standard. He was happy in his freedom from the routine of work.
And then he died, young really, at the age of sixty-seven, of a very unexpected and I guess massive heart attack. Maybe it was the cream in Delia’s recipes.
I was doing a play at the Roundhouse that night, The Duchess of Malfi, which is all about death. My mother called me, and I took the call in a corridor twenty minutes before curtain up. My knees crumpled and I found myself on the floor. Then I had a predicament. I knew my understudy was not fully on top of the lines; she had just visited my dressing room and told me, and made me promise never to be off. My mother had said, ‘Do the show,’ so I did, but I could not stop crying. One of the speeches in that play is the description of a poor man dying, surrounded only by his loving family. That night I could hardly speak my lines. Immediately after the play ended Liam, my fellow at that time, drove me to Leigh to be with my mother, who was in a complete state of shock.
Dad on holiday.
I never saw my father again. When he died he left neither money nor debts. The sum total of his estate was two hundred and fifty quid.
The funeral took place in a scruffy little crematorium in Westcliff. My brother flew in from Manila. As an atheist, Dad certainly did not believe in the soul or its afterlife. The presiding vicar, who obviously had a drink problem and whom we had never seen before in our lives, tried to say some comforting things about my dad’s character and about heaven and so forth, only to be met with the angry, devastated faces of the little group of five – my mother, sister, brother, aunt and myself – huddled together alone in the chapel. Afterwards we went outside. There was no plaque, no headstone.
I looked back and there was the puff of smoke coming from the crematorium that marked my father’s existence on this earth. Except, of course, it wasn’t. His existence lives forcefully on in the love of his family, and the way we try to live out our lives, inspired by his fun, his decency, his sacrifice, his thoughtfulness.
There was a small postscript to my father’s life, one that is very dear to me. Some time after his death I was approached by a woman in a restaurant; I thought it would be for an autograph, or because she had recognised me. She had indeed recognised me but wanted to speak to me as the daughter of my father. She had worked with him, and wanted to ask after him. When I told her that sadly that he had died, she began to tell me of his kindness, cleverness, wit and wisdom. He was, she said, one of the best people she had ever known. She described exactly the person I knew. This encounter was more important to me than any headstone.
This perfectly describes how our father was with us, loving being a dad. On the opposite page, Dad doing what he loved, happy at the helm of a little boat, tootling about.
Dad was always trying different things to satisfy his artistic side. From music he turned to painting and photography and then, in retirement, he joined a writing class. He adored our cat called Flossie; I think they had a psychic connection, which is strange because Flossie was such a prima donna, but she undoubtedly returned the passion. Flossie had been hijacked by my parents from me; they knew my life could not incorporate the responsibility of a cat. I had fallen in love with her on the set of ‘The Collection’ with Laurence Olivier, Malcolm McDowell and Alan Bates.
This is the Russian side of my father, thoughtful, solitary and deep.
He could also enjoy the absurdity of things like these huge dragons on the set of ‘Excalibur’. At his happiest, however, he was surrounded by his closest family. Here he is at one of our many Christmases with his wife, two daughters, his son, his two grandchildren, Basil and Simon, and Mary, Basil ’s mother.
Mum
An extraordinary woman – making her dreams come true
Mum was the thirteenth of fourteen children, born in East London. Her family were trades people in West Ham and Islington; her grandfather had been butcher to Queen Victoria, we were told proudly, and her father had followed him into the business. She grew up on a diet of meat and maybe that was what made her so volatile, and ultimately a vegetarian. You would imagine my Russian father would be the tempestuous temperamental one, but he was calm, thoughtful, and objective. It was my mother who was passionate and unreasonable.
The last five of her huge family were all girls; I have the impression that they were pretty much left to bring each other up, with the older girls caring for and mentoring the younger ones. They remained close all their lives: my auntie Dot, the fourteenth child, used to come to see us every Tuesday, from Barking. Auntie Queen lived in Brighton and ran a bed-and-breakfast hotel (I worked there as a waitress one summer). Auntie Gwen lived in a tiny flat, with no proper bathroom, in Hampstead Road, very poor. She was naturally musical and could play the piano by ear. With two small children, she had been pitilessly abandoned by her husband many years before and left with nothing. He even took the furniture. Husbands could get away with such things in those days before feminism. The sisters had gathered round and helped. Auntie Irene still lived in Ilford, where Mum had grown up, with her family. Then there was Auntie Vera; the beautiful one, who married ‘well’ in the sense that she married a wealthy industrialist and lived in the Midlands in a big house, with a Roller in the drive. She became an alcoholic. All these sisters were the kindest of aunts and close and supportive of each other, a relationship I now share with my sister.
Perhaps because she had never really experienced mothering from her own mother, it didn’t come naturally to Mum. I only found a true and easy relationship with her once the responsibility of being a mother had dropped away from her, after my father died. She was not really cut out for the role, and I don’t think she wanted it, although she loved us and my father totally. Some women, more than I think is generally accepted, simply do not feel the call to motherhood. This is not neurosis or some denial of nature, though it must seem incomprehensible to women for whom being a mother is everything. In Mum’s day, women were given no real alternative to marriage and motherhood, but it was not something she recommended or advised for her daughters. She was ambitious for us, and like so many of that generation, the key to freedom was education.
My mother was resentful all her life because of her own lack of education. She was self-educated, having left school at fourteen. Though she was very bright and her learning was extensive, with it came a certain hauteur and pretentiousness. In her day, your ‘position’ in the class system was all-important. I remember her describing the humiliation of having been refused entry to the Army and Navy store in Victoria; it may have been because she didn’t have an account there. I think this experience, and many others, informed her passionate determination that my sister and I would have a ‘qualification’, would go to university and be economically independent women.
Her battle up the social ladder was full of contradiction. It combined a love and respect for the truthfulness, wit and the practicality of the working class, with a desperate need not to be thought of as working class. I think that’s why she was so determined to be a stay-at-home mother: she felt it made her middle class. To be a working mother was, to her, to be working class.
We lived in a rather strange, contradictory world. Low income, working class, with my mother often having to scrape at the end of the week to buy food. But with a kind of bohemian, middle-class aspect mixed in.
Mum on the set of Excalibur.
Mum was a late-night person, often doing the hoovering at one in the morning, and completely unable to get up before ten a.m. As we grew up, we realised we had to get our own breakfast and iron our own uniforms, with th
e result that we were always scruffy and crumpled at school. She was not great at housework. There were always little piles of dust where she had got so far and then been distracted. I think she found it unbearably boring. As soon as my sister and I were old enough, we were recruited to help, which we did with no good grace whatsoever. Every night, however, she cooked a dinner for us to talk over so that when we came home from school, there was a hot and healthy meal on the table.
My mother knew about healthy food, probably from the lessons of the war years. We had home-made wholewheat bread, we were the first in Britain to eat natural yoghurt, and wheatgerm was put on everything. Our meals always included fresh vegetables, and our cakes were home-made. She made spaghetti Bolognese, borscht and curry – exotic dishes for that time. Mum was in fact a vegetarian, those years as a butcher’s daughter having given her a horror of dead animals. She never tried to force vegetarianism on us though. If we ate meat infrequently, it was for reasons of economy as much as anything.
My mother loved cats, dogs and birds, and gardens. She kept cats all her life, and always fed the birds; a slight contradiction there as she was always having to save the birds from the cat. She had a spiritual connection with birds in particular. Often, there would be birds’ feathers tucked behind mirrors or the teapot in her house. If she found a feather in her path she felt it was a message from the world of birds. She certainly had a relationship with a female blackbird in particular, who brought her chicks to meet her.
Likewise with children. The local kids down the street would come to visit and chat, especially as she grew older. This was not because she was motherly (she wasn’t), but because she was genuinely interested in what they had to say. By nature my mother was chatty and gregarious, and suffered as a result of my father’s tendency to be a loner.
