by Stephen Fry
The gentleman from the Foreign Office listened to Albert’s story and confessed the matter to be a little out of his sphere. He recommended a man he knew in another department and was kind enough to write Albert a letter of introduction.
The man from the other department, perhaps because his name was Murray, had not taken to this Logan with a middle-European epiglottis.
“Really, sir, I am not sure what you mean by ‘taking a stance.’ We have a large number of British Jews like yourself coming here every week, all making representations of this nature. I say to all of them what I am going to say to you. There are wheels within wheels. You must understand the precarious state of diplomacy currently obtaining on the continent of Europe. After recent hard-won successes in Munich, His Majesty’s Government is hardly in a position to make demands on Germany as that long-suffering country struggles to express a coherent sense of her national identity and establish a proper place at the world’s table. It is precisely the sort of hysterical rumour-mongering that you and your fellow . . . that you and your fellows are engaged in that can upset the delicate balance of negotiations and threaten peaceful relations.”
“But my peaceful relations are already being threatened,” said Albert with the unselfconscious wordplay that only a non-native speaker of English can achieve.
“Really! If you insist on founding your understanding of a power such as the new Germany on the hearsay of a brother in Jerusalem . . .”
Albert knew enough to hold his tongue in the presence of a triumphalist Munichois.
“You are of course free to travel where you will, Mr. ‘Logan,’ but I must warn you that if you transgress any law of the German Reich you cannot expect protection or immunity from us. I would recommend that you wait a little while. If your family is sincere about coming to England they must satisfy firstly the requirements for emigration laid down by their home government.”
“But they have no home government, sir!” Albert cried, sounding, he was painfully aware, exactly like the kind of whining Jew that he and much of the world most despised.
He never told Michael or Rebecca how completely his faith had been shattered by the indifference and disapproval that he met at the hands of His Majesty’s Government that day and on the four days following, as he wore out the waiting-room chairs of Whitehall and the patience of the few functionaries who consented to see him. Had he lived to see the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, Michael persisted in believing, Albert’s belief in the British might have been at the very least partially restored. Michael was to find out later from Uncle Louis the full extent of his father’s disillusion and despair during that painful week, as he was to find out the details of all that followed.
Arriving in Vienna, Mr. Albert Logan, famed grower and refiner of beet, summoned his cousins by messenger to the hotel he had chosen to favour with his custom. Here he met his first reversal, here the sharp point of the Truth began to press against his new-grown English hide.
The messenger returned half an hour later with a letter. Albert took some notes from his pocket with which to pay the youth and was astonished to see the money being snatched roughly from him without a word of thanks.
“Steady there, young fellow,” said Albert in his most patrician officer’s Viennese.
The messenger spat on the carpet, a fleck of yellow spittle landing on Albert’s shining brown brogues. “Jew-lover,” he said with contempt and stalked from the room.
Albert shook his head with disbelief and opened the letter. Now the sharp point of the Truth pierced the skin and started to push through. His cousins could not attend such a meeting, they explained with profuse apology. In order to comply with the laws of Austria under the recent Anschluss, they were obliged to wear yellow stars on their coats. Persons with yellow stars on their coats, they assured Albert, were not allowed inside hotels like the Franz Josef.
Mohammed took a cab to the mountain. Cousins Louis and Rudi and their families were all crowded together in one small room in a part of the town that Albert, who knew Vienna well from his old days in the Hussars, had never thought to visit. He was shocked to see them, shocked beyond bearing, more shocked than he had ever been before. The white worms in the eye-sockets of his comrades and the frying livers of the young Cossacks had not shocked him more: in this small room the sharp point of the Truth finally forced itself deep inside him until it tore at the walls of his heart. Albert leant on his Swaine, Adeney and Brigg’s umbrella and cried like a baby for a full quarter of an hour while his cousins clustered about him in concern.
Albert had known and then forsworn loyalty to the Emperor Franz Josef, whose cavalry he had loved; he had known and now forswore loyalty to two King Georges and a King Edward, whose country and people and history he had revered. In that awful little room with its imponderably hateful smell, a smell that took all the dignity and colour and strength away from him, his tweeds, his expensive luggage and his small blue passport, in that dreadful stinking room he swore a new loyalty, to his people—his stupid, moaning, helpless and cosmically irritating people, whose religion he scorned, whose culture he despised, whose mannerisms and prejudices he abominated. With lies, with cunning, with the use of old army contacts and above all, of course, with the use of money, Albert procured the papers necessary to allow his cousins to leave Vienna. Besides Louis, Rudi, Hannah and Roselle, there were four children, Danny, Ruth, Dita and Miriam. He took them by train to Holland and thence by boat to Harwich in England. He stayed in Huntingdon long enough to introduce them to Rebecca and her nanny Mrs. Price, and then he drove down to Sussex to call on Michael’s headmaster, Dr. Valentine.
“Here is money enough to pay for his schooling for the rest of time,” he said. “You shall see it please that he acquires an excellent scholarship to his public school.”
“Well, I think that rather depends, Mr. Logan, on how intelligent the boy is and with what diligence he applies himself to his work. Scholarships are hardly something you can . . .”
“Michael is most intelligent and most hard-working. I will see him now, please.”
A boy was dispatched to fetch young Logan.
While they awaited him, Albert addressed the headmaster once more. “Another thing to say, Dr. Walentine. It is possible that you may imagine my son and myself are Jewish people.”
“Really, Mr. Logan, I had given it no . . .”
“It is to understand that we are not Jewish people. Michael is not a Jewish boy. He is a Church of England boy. I am going away into Europe now, but I have friends here in England. If it arrives in my ears that any one single person of the school suggests or makes it said that Michael is a Jewish boy it is possible that I shall come back to take him away and that I strike you with my fists, Dr. Walentine, with strength enough to kill you.”
“Mr. Logan!”
“Here he comes now. We shall go to a walk, he and me . . . him and I.”
The flabbergasted Dr. Valentine was left to ponder this alarming threat while Michael showed his father the lake, the pony paddocks, the cricket field and the woods where he and his friends played cowboys and Indians.
Albert spoke in a mixture of Yiddish and Hungarian. Michael replied in English.
“You are seven years old now, Michael. Plenty old enough to know the facts of the world.”
“It’s all right, Father. I’ve already been told.”
“You’ve been told?”
“The man wees inside the woman and she has a baby. Wallace told me. He’s the senior boy in my dorm.”
“What a child. I’m not talking about those facts, which you can tell your friend Vollis, have nothing to do with urination. I am talking about the real facts.”
“The real facts?”
“Tell me, Michael Logan. What is your country of birth?”
“Hungary,” said Michael, puffing up his chest.
“NO!” Albert turned and gave his son a violent shake. “Not correct. Tell me again. What is your country of birth?”
Michael stared at his father in amazement.
“Czechoslovakia?” he suggested, frightened.
“NO!”
“No?”
“No! You come from England. You are English.”
“Yes, of course, but I was born . . .”
“You were born in Huntingdon. You grew up in Huntingdon. What is your religion?”
Michael had never seen his father like this before. So strong and so angry. “Church of England?”
“YES!” Albert kissed him. “Good boy. You have the idea. You must never, ever, upon pain of your life and my eternal curses, tell a living soul that you are Jewish. Do you understand?”
“But why not?”
“Why not? Because the Germans are coming, that is why not. They will tell they are not coming, but believe me they are coming all the same. The Nazi Germans are coming and they will take anyone away who is Jewish. So you are not Jewish and your sister is not Jewish. You know no Jews, you see no Jews, you have conversation with no Jews. You are Michael Logan of Wyton Chase, Huntingdon. Your uncles and aunts from abroad live with you. They are Lutheran Christians.”
“And you live with me too, of course.”
“Of course,” said Albert. “I live with you too. Of course.”
Six months later Michael had received a letter with an exotic postmark.
“Jerusalem!” one of his friends shouted. “Logan’s got a letter from Jew-rusalem.”
“My uncle’s with the army in Palestine,” Michael said nonchalantly. “The Mandate, it’s called.”
“Logan’s a Jew!”
“Bloody am not!”
“Miserly jewy Jew!”
“What’s going on here?”
Michael turned in fear as Edward Wallace shouldered his way to the front of the press. Wallace was a senior boy and known to be capable of merciless mental bullying.
“Loganstein’s got a letter from Jew-land.”
“He’s a Jew. You can tell. Look at his nose.”
“He’s a Roundhead, that’s for sure.”
Roundheads, in school slang, meant those who were circumcised, as distinct from Cavaliers, who were not.
Wallace looked down on Michael, his eyes darting wickedly back and forth across the boy’s face as if coming to a decision. Michael braced himself. His mouth was dry and he felt faint with apprehension.
Wallace spoke at last. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Logan’s not a miserly Jew, he’s a miserly Scot like me. And I happen to know, Hutchinson, that you are a Roundhead too and what’s more your nose is bigger than anyone in the civilised world’s. It’s so big, in fact, that there’s talk in the papers of East End children being evacuated into your left nostril until the end of the war.”
A tidal wave of mocking laughter swept over Hutchinson at this and Michael had to clamp his muscles tight to avoid wetting himself with relief. Wallace turned to him with a sly smile.
“Bags I have those stamps, McLogie, I collect ’em.”
Michael tore the corner from the envelope and handed them over with a beam of gratitude. Wallace clipped him round the ear and told him not to grin at him like a monkey or he’d kick him in the slats.
“Sorry, Wallace.”
Michael had then run to the school rears to read the letter in private. It was from his Uncle Amos. To this day he regrets never having read it more closely. The quickest glance was all he would allow himself before tearing it into tiny shreds and flushing it down the lavatory.
All he would ever be able to recall of the letter were a few phrases. Uncle Amos wrote that Michael’s father had been shot by the Nazis two days after Chamberlain had declared war on Germany. Something about Berlin. Something about living in the ghettos and spreading warmth. Albert Golan was a hero of the Jews and a great man. Moisha Golan, his son, should be very proud and should always remember.
The next day Uncles Richard and Herbert, as Louis and Rudi now called themselves, came to pick Michael up from school.
III
All the money had gone, naturally. All the money from the sale of the farm in Czechoslovakia, all the money earned from his work over the last few years for the Ministry, all the money raised against his interests in the two refineries. Michael’s next three years at Dr. Valentine’s prep school were assured. After that . . .
“I shall certainly get a scholarship,” said Michael. “And I shall get a job in the holidays and pay for Rebecca’s schooling too.”
“You aren’t yet ten years old, Michael,” said Aunt Roselle, now Aunt Rose. “We will pay for your school. We all have work, we will look after you both. We will be proud to have you as a son and daughter.”
Michael had found jobs, however. Every day of his school holidays was engaged in earning money. Firstly he had worked for a bakery in Huntingdon as delivery boy and then, after his scholarship took him to public school, he called the family together and made a suggestion.
“Mrs. Anderson is getting very old,” he said. “She wants to sell her shop. Why don’t we buy it?”
“How could we afford to do such a thing?”
“We can sell this house and be able to live over the shop. I’ve made enquiries. There is room enough for all of us. It’s a tight squeeze—Rebecca, Ruth, Dita and Miriam will have to share a room, Danny and I will sleep behind the counter—but we can manage.”
Logan’s Sweets and Smokes was known in the family as Michael’s Shop. Michael did the books, having the most mathematical turn of mind in the family. He understood coupons and the rationing system, he understood how to barter and he understood how to keep customers loyal.
One evening Aunt Rose knocked on his bedroom door.
“Michael, it’s Happidrome on the wireless. What are you doing there? Come downstairs.”
She opened the door and saw Michael holding a large book.
“This is my customer book,” he explained. “Every time a customer comes into the shop I talk to them and find out what they like. I list their favourite tobacco, or cigarette, or brand of sweets, and each night I make sure I have learnt it. Take the book. Ask me.”
A bewildered Rose had opened a page and offered the name “Mr. G. Blake.”
“Godfrey Blake,” said Michael, “lives in the Godmanchester Road and smokes forty Player’s Weights a day. He buys one packet of Craven A a week for his wife, who only smokes at weekends. He has a son in the army in North Africa and a daughter in the WAAF. He’s an assistant ARP warden, injured his hip at Passchendaele and is secretly in love with Janet Gaynor. He has a weakness for humbugs and I always give him one or two if he’s out of coupons. He gives me half a crown for cleaning his car on Sundays.”
“Woosh!” said Aunt Rose. “Mr. Tony Adams?”
“Wing-Commander Anthony Adams,” said Michael, “flies a desk at RAF Wyton. He has a sweetheart named Wendy, a land-army girl working near Wisbech, and he rides there to see her twice a week on his motor-cycle. He smokes Parson’s Pleasure ready-rubbed, which they don’t sell in the Officers’ Mess, and he likes aniseed balls for himself and Fry’s Five Boys chocolate for Wendy.”
“Michael. Why have you learnt all this?”
“Because these people smoke and eat sweets. The first time Mr. Blake came into the shop he was just passing. Now he walks the extra half-mile to us twice a week. When the business grows after the war, people like that will be important.”
“When the business . . . ? Listen to him. Michael, it’s just a shop.”
“It’s a seed, Aunt Rose. Now, I have to go back to school next week. You and Aunt Hannah will be looking after things weekdays. I will leave this book for you. See if you can try to learn everything in it too. Everyone should know it o
ff by heart—Danny, Dita, Miriam, everyone—so when they help out at weekends and after school they can make the customers feel important.”
In the family’s eyes, Michael’s destiny was as inevitable as if he had been born Prince of Wales. He was a force and that was that.
During subsequent school holidays, as the war came to a close, so the proper expansion of the business, the full germination and growth of the seed, began. A paper round was added, early-morning work for Danny and his sister and cousins; bread, potatoes, flowers and an increasing range of tinned foods began to crowd the shelves of the small retail area until Michael and Richard decided that it would be worth their while to buy the house next door, knock through the party-wall and create a small version of a Home and Colonial Store.
In 1947 Michael won a scholarship to Cambridge which he turned down.
“We can really concentrate on things now,” he said.
A call-up the following year to National Service could not be turned down, however. His old protector from prep school, Edward Wallace, who had deferred service until after Oxford where he was now finishing, persuaded him to join him in applying to the Royal Norfolk regiment.
“Not a very smart outfit, which is perfect as we’ll be cocks of the roost. Plenty of time for race-meetings and women.”
One afternoon, during his officer training in Wiltshire, Michael read a short story by Somerset Maugham which gave him the idea he had been looking for. It concerned a young man who found himself in need of a packet of cigarettes in a Midlands town one afternoon. He walked along the streets searching for a tobacconist: the better part of a mile he walked before he found one. Instead of going on his way and thinking no more about it, as an ordinary person might, this young man retraced his steps to the place where he had first stood. “I shall open a tobacconist’s here,” he said to himself, “there is clearly a need.” His shop was a magnificent success. “How childishly simple,” thought the young man. For the next twenty years he travelled Britain walking the streets looking for cigarettes. Whenever he had to walk far, there he would open another shop. He was a millionaire by the age of thirty-five.
