What Are We Going To Do About Julie?

IN THE BEGINNING


In the early years, your basic character is formed. Parental influence, sibling behaviour and friendships can affect how you interact with others and help to shape your judgement of what is good and what is bad. I was born six weeks premature in Highgate Nursing Home on the 15th May 1944 and my poor mother was warned that I was unlikely to survive the night.
I am the youngest of four children, with two sisters (Tina, the oldest and Margaret, the second child) and a brother, Bill. I was not expected to live because I was underweight and very small. It was war time and there were few modern facilities available to cope with early births. I was born without nails or hair and was wrapped in cotton wool and placed in front of the fire at home for warmth. With my mother’s care and determination, I survived. My parents were ‘middle class’. My mother was the eldest daughter of William Foyle, a larger-than-life entrepreneur who, from a barrow selling second-hand books, became the greatest book shop owner in the world. But this was war time and times were hard. Our mother would queue outside the local butcher’s shop to buy a small amount of meat or offal to feed her family of five, whilst my father was away, serving in the army in Egypt.
We lived in a suburban house in leafy Surrey, having moved there before World War Two. It appeared to us that we were indeed very fortunate, for, although both our parents worked, our grandfather was always there to see that we never starved or went without essential goods, and our mother would come home from London with a leg of lamb or beef which my grandmother had managed to get from local farmers. But there is more to say about my grandparents later.

I was three when I first met my father. At that time, he was a stranger to me. The separation by war had affected everyone, especially the women, who were running the household until, suddenly, the fathers turned up and started to interfere with routines. I think my father felt useless, as his role in the army was now over, and he had to find another position as the man of the house.
He too was an entrepreneur. I remember that one day he decided to raise chickens. The very next day a box arrived packed with day-old chicks. Then, overnight, we lost some, which drowned in their water bath. So, he decided to put the remaining chicks outside in a makeshift pen in the garden. We then lost a few more of them to foxes and other predators! I have always loved animals and longed for pets of my own.
My mother was not overly protective and allowed me to play in the chicken run. She gave me a pudding basin, a wooden spoon and watering can and left me to play mud pies. I soon started to train the chickens and, having been to a circus, could see myself performing with my troop of colourful hens.
First, I had them jumping over logs. This wasn’t easy, but with a little push they eventually got the hang of it and, rather than face me, leapt over, flapping and squawking furiously. I soon realised that they just didn’t have the brain power to take orders, so my ambition came to an end.
Our garden was typical of the 1930s style, with a neat lawn, borders, and a vegetable patch at the bottom. It backed on to a wonderful wood and heathland called Borough Heath, an amazing place for children to have as a wild playground. We went there often, taking a picnic and spending all day climbing trees and making camps out of branches and heather. There was a large pond in the middle of the heath that sometimes iced over in the winter, and we would slide across it and revel in falling over. Once, when I was playing there with friends, I fell out of a tree and knocked myself out. My friends were worried about me, as I briefly lost my memory. They decided that I must not go home until I knew my name and where I was from, as they thought we would all get into trouble. Thankfully the concussion didn’t last, and I was able to act normally and pretend nothing had happened. Our house also had a small crazy-paved terrace outside the French windows from the lounge.
Our parents sometimes left us on our own, unchaperoned, as was fairly usual in those days; nobody thought anything of it. My siblings used this time to have fun with me in a rather sadistic way. I adored my brother Bill, as he was a kind and caring boy, and I always stood up for him. In fact, I still feel very protective of him today. Well, my sisters, and our next-door neighbour, Josephine, who spent most of her childhood in our house, decided to play hospitals and doctors. They used Bill as the patient, and Josephine would dress up as a stranger, say she was a doctor and knock on the door and ask to examine Bill. Then she would announce that she would have to amputate a limb. So, out would come an axe and some knives (health and safety regulations didn’t exist in those days), and they would lay him on the dining room table with a sheet over him and make me listen behind the door as they supposedly hacked away at a leg or an arm, while I screamed and begged them to stop. When they had had enough of me, they just locked me out of the house in the back garden and laughed and made faces at me through the French windows.
One day I got so mad, I dragged the heavy wooden garden broom over and smashed it through the window, which shattered into shards of glass and went all over my tormentors. Life stood still at that moment as I relished the fearful looks on their faces. They had it coming!
I commandeered that broom as my own personal weapon. I was often bullied by a local boy in the street. He would ride his bike at high speed then slam the brakes on just before he hit me. I forged a plan and dragged my weapon (the faithful garden broom) to the front of our drive and lay in wait for him to come speeding down the street. I hid behind the flowering cherry tree, the broom resting behind me. Of course, timing was everything, as I couldn’t attempt this assault twice.
Suddenly, there he was, almost up to me. I crouched down, ready for the kill, and up I came, wielding the broom through the air, aiming it straight at him and knocking him right off his bike. I didn’t wait to see the damage; I just legged it back to the house and pretended to be playing quietly. Around six o’clock there was a knock on the front door. I watched as my mother, wiping her hands on her pinafore, opened it to see who it was. The boy was standing next to a large, rotund woman. I could see the blood-stained bandage on his head and his red, tear-stained face.
“Mrs Samuel,” she said, “your daughter has caused a terrible injury to my son.”
Straight away my mother asked, “Which daughter was it? I have three.” When the woman replied with my name, pointing an accusing finger at me while I hid behind my mother, my mother simply said, “What? You mean your twelve-year-old son can’t defend himself against my five-year-old daughter? Well, I suggest you send him to a boxing class! Goodbye.” And she closed the door firmly. Mysteriously, the broom disappeared, and the boy stayed well clear of me after that. I would never condone using this method for protection or revenge but being a vulnerable five-year-old, I taught myself how to fight back against bullies.
Our parents had a volatile relationship, with vicious rows fuelled by alcohol. We would sit on the stairs behind the bannisters, listening to the insults and threats. This was very worrying, as we were never sure that it wouldn’t end in a physical fight. Then the next day they would carry on as though nothing had happened. I suppose you get used to anything if it becomes a regular occurrence, hence the number of badly abused children who continue to love their parents. We loved them both in different ways.
In order for my parents to carry on working, my mother hired a number of mothers’ helps to look after us while she went to work. Later, she employed girls from the continent. She also employed au pairs here in England to learn English and do some child-minding and housework.
My father always had an eye for an attractive female and one night, after a session at the local pub, got out of bed to visit the toilet. Having finished what he went in to do, he came out and instead of turning right, turned left into an au pair’s room and got into bed with her. There was a lot of squealing and commotion coming from her room until my mother arrived and directed him back to bed. Another night, my father came out of the toilet and went straight ahead, tumbled over the bannisters and rolled down the stairs, but we all know how drunkards feel no pain!
My mother was very well-educated and spoke French and German, having been to school in Switzerland as a teenager. She was the first person to go to when times were bad, for a cuddle, a reassuring smile and words of wisdom. She was the opposite of my father: kind, loyal, loving and trustworthy. We all adored her, and I miss her terribly even now, although I think she keeps an eye on us from above!
My father, Edgar Samuel: saint, or sinner? He came from a theatrical family in Brixton, where many Musical Hall artists lived. His father, Horace Samuel, died very young, having contracted Spanish flu during the pandemic at the end of World War One. Before that war, he had achieved a lot in his theatrical life, first as a member of Charlie Chaplin’s troupe at the Hackney Empire, then as a double act with his wife, Dorothy. He became an actor-manager and toured Europe extensively. His father was a talented artist. We don’t know much about our paternal grandmother except that she was probably Irish, Dorothy O’Dell, an actress in light entertainment, who sadly died of cancer around 1948.
I cannot say that my father was anti-Semitic, but I do remember him prefixing a Jew with the adjective “bloody”, which always seemed to me to be strange, coming from a person whose name was Samuel! Back in the 1900s, my grandfather had changed his name to Lawson, presuming, he thought his name, Horace Samuel, may put off people in the entertainment business and dissuade them from employing him. Along with his wife, Dorothy, the acting/singing duo became known as “Lawson & O’Dell”.
Looking back over the last hundred years of entertainment, I think we will find that Jewish people dominated in the entertainment industry. Familiar names were Levi, the Cohen Brothers, Harry Saltzman (a “Bond” film producer), Goldwyn Mayer and Harvey Weinstein! Let us not forget the amazing Jewish songwriters Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Oscar Hammerstein.
As a family, we all thought that we must have some Jewish blood, until my nephew Simon traced the Samuel family back to the early 1800s, only to find they had all been christened, married, and buried in Christian churches. Quite recently, I did a DNA test, only to find that I am indeed eight percent Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe. Learning this, I then recalled that my grandfather, William Foyle, was born to an immigrant woman, and her name was Levine. His father brought his children up as Christians (as were we), and our grandmother was a Scottish Christian, whose family name was Tulloch, way back in 1680. We discovered that two of her ancestors, Barbara and her daughter, Ellen, were sentenced to death for witchcraft and hanged at the top of Gallows Hill then there were burned nearby on a large bed of peat. Their ashes are kept in a dish in the local museum of Shetland.
Dad was a frustrated man, unable to keep up in the entertainment business due to being weakened by tuberculosis in his early twenties. This was to plague him for the rest of his life, not helped by the sixty cigarettes he smoked daily. Had he been in good health and followed in his parents’ footsteps, I am sure he would have been a successful actor, as he was a natural entertainer and regaled us with wonderful old music hall jokes and songs. However, he got a job at Foyles as a bookseller, and it was there that he met my mother.
My father had all the vices, smoking, drinking, gambling, and womanising, to which my mother appeared to have turned a blind eye.
I don’t believe in organised religion but do find people who follow a religious lifestyle happier, more at peace, and generally wanting to help others. I don’t agree with wealthy TV evangelists that money and power can change a person, as I found out later in life.
As a small child, I had a spiritual experience that made me feel there was someone watching over me. I always had a terrible fear of the dark but for no apparent reason. As soon as the lights went out, I would start to feel fear, even though I usually slept with either Tina or Margaret, my sisters. Regardless, once it was dark, I still suffered this paralysing fear and would get to a stage where I could stand it no longer and would call out to my parents, “Mum, Dad.” Eventually, the hall light would go on and one of them would be in the room to comfort me, Sometimes, if I was sweating badly and with my heart pounding, they would even let me into their bed. What a relief that was. Then, one night, when I was a bit older and on my own, my sisters having gone to boarding school, I felt this creeping feeling coming up and over my body. Even though I was now older, I had to rely on myself to overcome this terrible physical feeling, so, I prayed, “Please, God, take away my fear.” The prayer didn’t appear to work. Then, just as I thought my heart would burst, I felt two warm hands clasp me around my face and lift me up out of bed. I looked down on my own body and felt a comforting warmth surround me in the room.
I had no reason to feel scared anymore, even though I was alone, and nothing had changed. Gradually, I returned into my body, feeling peaceful and sleepy. I have no idea what happened. All I can say is, this did happen, and I remember it vividly to this day.
Our parents often went to the pub in the evening, leaving us at home. One night, we decided to play a prank on them. My mother had a full-size tailor’s dummy, as she was a great seamstress and made lots of her own clothes. Bill positioned the dummy just inside the front door and dressed it in a trench coat, topped off with a trilby hat and some dark glasses. He then tucked a full-length air rifle under the dummy’s arm, pointing the rifle at the front door. We all waited, stifling giggles quietly behind the banisters, until we heard the key in the door. Suddenly, there was a scream. The dog ran downstairs barking furiously, the cat shot up the stairs, and finally our parents came in, having realised what we had done. We expected a terrible response, but they were laughing with relief and took the joke very well.



HOLIDAYS WITH THE GRANDPARENTS AT BEELEIGH ABBEY


It would be remiss to leave out the times we spent with our beloved grandfather, William Foyle. There is already enough information on his life and achievements and the building of the most iconic and greatest book shop in the world, but I shall tell you about the side we all knew and loved as his grandchildren. I can only write about my own knowledge and memories of William (he didn’t allow us to call him “Grandad”), but all my life I have been attracted to eccentric people, and maybe that’s because of the lasting impression, and the wonderful colourful character, of William that set the bar. He was a jolly Father Christmas kind of man with shoulder-length hair and a smile always playing on his face. He smoked everything, mostly cigars, an occasional pipe and cigarettes in between, but he always smelled delicious, as he splashed liberal amounts of eau de cologne about his person, bottles of which he had placed in all his guest rooms.

My grandparents lived in an eleventh-century abbey in Beeleigh, a small hamlet near Maldon, Essex. We spent two or three weeks every summer staying with them, mostly without our parents. Our cousin, Christopher Foyle, would often stay alongside us too.
The abbey had such a rich history, having been inhabited by monks for centuries. Although when we were there it was full of laughter, it certainly had an eerie atmosphere. There were five bedrooms on the first floor and three on the second floor. We slept mostly on the top floor. All the major bedrooms had four-poster beds and were full of antique furniture, as, indeed, was the whole building. One bedroom on the third floor was named the “James Room”.

The bed in there had a carving on the bedhead of James II. This room was rumoured to be haunted, but by whom, we never knew! Up against one wall was a beamed bench which had indents, grooves worn down by the monks when they said their prayers. It was thought too that the monks were made to kneel flat against the wall in penance for their sins. We were all too scared to go into that room alone, but many times one of my siblings would plot to shut one of us in there for fun. Poor Christopher; we were not very kind to him. He was outnumbered by Samuels. Once too, we trapped an exchange student from France in the room because he was most annoying and we did it to teach him a lesson, just for being French.