I heard a few bombs fall. And when we went down to Bognor Regis on the 1944 summer holidays, I used to watch the buzz bombs going along the front and over the sea and all the way past us towards, I suppose, Southampton and sometimes they would fall into the sea and sometimes they would go on. It was actually rather fun. It never occurred to me that I was in any danger during the war. I had the sort of sense of immunity which the only child of a Jewish mother is sometimes alleged to have. 

So the war ended upon which my father was offered again the job in Rockefeller Center in New York which he had agreed to postpone because of the war. During the war, my father was actually about to be seconded to a mission to Russia, and he was going to be given the rank of colonel because it would enable him to impress the Russians. I was rather pleased to think of my father being a colonel because he wasn't in the forces, but for some reason they thought better of sending him. It may have been because the Russians perhaps didn't want a Jew to be in this delegation – I don't know. Or maybe the English didn't want a Jew to be in the delegation – who can say? Anyway, by the time the war ended, I was ready to take my scholarship to Winchester, my school specialising getting people into Winchester. And my father thought about going back to New York and then, supposedly, he decided that it would not be fair on me if he were to do so since I was now likely to get a Classical scholarship and that would not be much use to me in New York. I have a notion that his mother, who was still alive and very domineering as a serious hypochondriac can be, was determined not to let him get away, but there we are. She never spoke to my mother nor my mother to her. We were not, as they say, a close-knit family.