When you’re in your seventies, you expect to have some health problems, and I’m no exception. I’m approaching twenty-five years of active life past fifty, and none of my current ailments are going to send me into a rapid spiral to the hospital. I might live another year. I might go on for a decade or more. It’s impossible to know until you receive that diagnosis you’ve feared your entire life. That recently happened to my brother and lifelong best friend, Ray. He died in 2023 at the age of seventy-three, and I’ll always miss him. In my heart, I understand that death is a natural, obviously unavoidable part of the human condition. Nonexistence is inevitable. And after that, who knows?
I’d rather not dwell on it, as I have found doing so to be terrifying, so I continue to stay active and involved with projects that stimulate me and enjoy the rewards with which I’ve been blessed. But when activity slows, I know all the life-affirming moments aren’t going to stop me from worrying every time I have a sore throat or a stomach ache. And maybe that’s what keeps me going.
GIANT
STEPS
PART
ONE
FINDING
MY FEET
CHAPTER
ONE
POOR BUT
RICH
I was born in a tenement building in Glasgow, and we moved to Portsmouth soon after, so I don’t remember much from my earliest days. As established as my dad was in the jazz scene, we never had any money. Living in a tiny rental flat on Fawcett Road in Portsmouth was colorful, but it wasn’t glamorous. At the age of ten, I slept in a small room on a single mattress with my younger brothers Terry, who was a year my junior, and Ray, who was two years younger than me. At least it made the room seem bigger than it would have had we each had our own bed. My older sister, Evelyn, had a small room to herself, and my parents slept in a room that wasn’t much bigger. Eve moved in with her future husband, John, when she finished school, and the rest of us moved to another rental, this one on Eastney Road, which was right next door to the house where Phil and his wife lived.
My parents’ new house was old and drafty, and none of the furniture matched. Not only did we share a single toilet, but we had to go outdoors to use it. Using an outhouse—whether it was the middle of winter or the heart of the summer—and having to wait if someone was ahead of me in line, colored the rest of my life. I was determined to be successful when I was older and to have enough money to buy a house with as many bathrooms as I needed. As it was, we barely had enough money for groceries.
Poverty was not fun. It was shameful to me, and it was in my roots, wrapping around the angular limbs of my family tree and threatening to suffocate us. My grandparents came from peasant villages in Poland and struggled to survive. They were chased out of Poland during the pogroms—violent village raids by gangs from local communities that felt threatened or intimidated by the area Jews. My grandfather on my mother’s side fled with his wife and boarded the closest ship out of the country. When they landed in England, he thought he was in America. He didn’t speak a word of English, and he had to accept any menial job he could find—sometimes three at a time—to support the family. I’m not even sure how long he spent in Glasgow before he realized he wasn’t in the United States.
Growing up, we all had a bath on Friday night—once a week—and since we couldn’t afford to waste anything, we used the same bathwater. Phil and Eve didn’t bathe at the house anymore, so I got the clear, warm water; Terry got the slightly murky water, which was disgusting enough; poor Ray, who was two years my junior, got cold, gray sludge. Having to scrimp and save colored everything I did when I was older—how I worked hard, the way I saved money, why I always kept pushing ahead for fear that if I paused, I would lose something I had achieved. From the time I was old enough to work, I hustled. I watched the shops for local storeowners, dug up ragworms to sell to fishing shops for bait, and, when I was fourteen, got a job working at a pork butcher at six in the morning on Saturday. Only later could I appreciate the irony of working on Saturday, the Sabbath, hanging up sides of pork, the one food that many Jews who don’t even keep kosher won’t eat. It was utterly disgusting, but it paid me a few pounds, so I was able to help out the family when my dad couldn’t.
I was always a bit confused that we were poor and Jewish. There were not many Jews in our town, but those that there were had a family business, or the father was a lawyer or architect. They had money. We didn’t. We were outsiders in a community of outsiders. But at least my parents were cultured. They loved to read, my mom enjoyed having long discussions with us at the dinner table, and we all listened to music. My parents started Ray on violin when he was seven, and he took to it right away. They valued the arts and education and were convinced that good schooling was the key to success.
Phil worked as an English and art teacher. My mother expected me to do something similar, and I started out on the right track. At the time, nearly all eleven-year-old children in England took an exam called the 11-Plus, and the students who did extremely well—about three percent of those who took the test—were sent to a grammar school instead of the regular local schools, which had a lower standard of education and were geared toward students from working-class homes. I came from good genes and was a smart kid, so I scored very well on the exam. I was accepted to Portsmouth Southern Grammar School, which wasn’t specifically for rich kids but didn’t really cater to students from poor families (who, it was assumed, would wind up at a lower-tier school). Most of the students at Portsmouth Southern Grammar School were from middle-class families. We all wore uniforms and looked the same, but when they weren’t in class, the other students wore new clothes while Ray and I had on our brothers’ hand-me-downs. None of my classmates had an outhouse at their homes either, so I never invited friends over because I didn’t want them to see how poor we were.
I was never bullied or physically attacked for being Jewish. The prejudice was more subtle and institutional. My school was very strict and structured. The teachers all wore mortarboards and cloaks, and the place was run with the precision of a German railway. We started the day with all two thousand students attending the morning assembly. There was a dais with a headmaster standing there. A teacher spoke about how all the school teams did in sports, and that was followed by a morning service for the Christian students. While they prayed, two other Jews and I, and three Jehovah’s Witnesses, had to leave the room. The school didn’t intentionally ostracize us, but they made it clear that we didn’t belong there while they prayed. They weren’t the only ignorant people in Portsmouth. Some of my friends who I played football and cricket with asked me if the rumors they heard about Jews were true.
‘Why did the Jews kill Jesus?’ was a popular question. Here’s a less accusatory but more hurtful one: ‘Is it true that when you turn thirteen, you get £10,000 and you’re taken care of for life?’
The latter was upsetting to me because I wasn’t from a family of Jews that could afford to buy fancy cars, and I didn’t even grow up in a nice house, and since I felt out of place, I imagined all the kids staring at me and thinking I was part of a cult that drank baby’s blood as I was ushered out of the assembly hall. I have no idea why they didn’t let the non-Christians stay with the other students during the service.