Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower

       3 The Survivor

      THE ORIGINS OF A WOMAN later renowned as a ‘drama queen’ were remarkably ordinary.

      In summer 1940, Barbara Amiel’s parents, middle-class Jews, moved from central London to Chorley Wood near Watford, north of the capital, to escape the Luftwaffe’s remorseless bombardment. On 4 December 1940, the day of her birth, the area around her grandparents’ homes in the East End was blazing. Among the subsequent victims of the incendiary bombs would be Isaac Amiel, her paternal grandfather, the owner of a sweet shop and an air raid warden.

      Harold and Vera Amiel greeted their daughter’s birth with joy but understandable fear. The Blitz was the prelude to an anticipated German invasion, and if Britain was defeated, the fate of the country’s Jews was uncertain. Harold Amiel, a twenty-five-year-old solicitor, had joined the Buffs, the Royal East Kent Regiment, and was due to be posted to the 8th Army in North Africa. In his absence his wife Vera, a strikingly good-looking woman of twenty-four, could rely on her family: her sister Katherine, a doctor, and Harold’s three younger brothers and older sister Irene, had also left London. Several of them, including Harold and Vera, had settled in Chorley Wood.

      In common with all their relations, Harold and Vera had been born in London’s squalid East End, but long before the outbreak of the war most of the Amiels and the Barnetts (Vera’s family) had escaped from the Jewish ghetto. The new generation, including a midwife, a doctor, a school teacher, an actuary, lawyers and businessmen, had abandoned regular attendance at synagogue and had consciously assimilated into British society. Although the Amiels stemmed from a well-known family of Sephardic Jews from Spain, and the Barnetts were descended from Vladimir Isserlis, an Ashkenazi scholar in Russia, Barbara and her cousins growing up in Chorley Wood were only vaguely aware that their family’s arrival in Britain had followed the discovery of great-grandfather Isserlis floating in the River Dnieper with a knife in his back. To escape the pogroms his widow had sold valuables to buy tickets on a boat sailing to Britain. Sixty years later, the fate of Europe’s Jews was rarely discussed in Chorley Wood. Rather, some families were preoccupied with persuading Britons to support the socialist or Communist parties in the next elections. Irene Amiel’s husband Bernard Buckman, the owner of department stores, was particularly close to two rich Jewish families, the Sedleys and the Seiferts. Together they championed and financed the British Communist Party. Barry Amiel, Harold’s younger brother, was also a member of the Communist Party. Among that group, Harold and Vera Amiel were known to be markedly uninterested in politics.

      Vera was also noted as a neurotic, which caused tension during Harold’s return on leave in late 1942. Since their marriage in June 1939 the articulate and intelligent lawyer, now newly promoted as a major, had become disturbed by his wife’s emotions. That concern appeared to be brushed aside as he regaled his nephews and nieces with stories about the war and handed out epaulettes taken from captured Italian generals. The prizes from the battle-front would remain an indelible memory among the boys after they had bade Harold farewell on his return to Africa. In Harold’s absence his second daughter Ruth was born in 1943. One year later, Lieutenant Colonel Amiel’s war ended. Shot in the shoulder by a sniper while riding in a Jeep in Italy, he was repatriated as an invalid. Dressed in his colonel’s uniform, he spent time playing with his four-year-old daughter Barbara, who had struck up a close friendship with Peter Buckman, her older cousin. ‘Will you marry me?’ Peter asked Barbara. ‘We can’t,’ she replied. ‘We’ve both got dandruff, and that means that our children will be bald. I learned that in biology.’

      During the last months of the war, Harold arranged to establish a solicitors’ partnership with his younger brother Barry. At the same time, he fell in love with a woman called Eileen Ford. Some would blame the tensions of the war for the breakdown of Harold and Vera’s marriage in 1945; others said that Vera was an uneducated neurotic and an unsuitable wife for a cultured lawyer. Divorce was common in the immediate post-war period, but Vera was unusually incandescent about Harold’s infidelity, not least because she had partly financed his new law partnership.

      Despite the Amiels’ ugly arguments about money, Barbara Amiel was more fortunate than the many children who had lost their fathers in combat. Nevertheless, her early childhood was insecure. ‘I’ve suffered from insomnia all my life,’ she would write. ‘My earliest memory as a child of four was being sedated to sleep.’¹ There was, however, support from Mary Vangrovsky, Harold’s mother. After the divorce in 1946 and Harold’s marriage to Eileen in 1948, she gave her son money to set up a new home, and cared for her two granddaughters. By then Vera and her daughters were living in Hendon, in north-west London.

      Barbara Amiel’s early school years were comfortable. Although affected by the general post-war austerity and the rationing of food and clothes, she attended North London Collegiate, one of England’s best state schools for girls, and enjoyed the privileges of a middle-class upbringing. There were ballet lessons, excursions to the theatre and cinema, visits to the new Festival Hall to hear Dame Myra Hess play Grieg, and regular meetings with her father at weekends.² Forbidden by Vera to entertain his two daughters in his new home, Harold would take the girls to visit their cousins – Anita Amiel in Swiss Cottage and the Buckmans in Hampstead – for lunch and tea before returning to Hendon. In the era of the nationalisation of major industries by the Labour government and the Cold War division of Europe, politics was passionately discussed in many homes, especially by Jews, a number of whom ranked among the leadership of the left-wing parties. Stimulated by the arguments, especially while visiting the Buckmans, Barbara Amiel would recall her growing understanding of their ‘interest in creating a more just society … through socialism’.³ At thirteen she was an intelligent, socially aware schoolgirl enjoying a stable life. Her mother was considering transferring her to Roedean, the expensive private boarding school on the south coast, but instead opted for a more dramatic change.

      In the early 1950s Vera had begun a relationship with Leonard Somes, a non-Jewish draughtsman. Among the Barnetts and Amiels, Somes was regarded as decent and unassuming, but intellectually unimpressive. In 1953 Vera married him and declared that they would emigrate to Canada to find a new life. Amiel would later write that emigration was her mother’s only option, because the British class system discriminated against working-class men like her new stepfather, but that was fanciful. Many ambitious working-class Britons earned fortunes in the post-war era. Leonard Somes’s difficulties were his lack of talent and purpose, and his social unease. Canada, promised the advertisements, was a guaranteed escape from austerity and offered an idyllic future. Barbara’s fate was decided. By