Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
The emigrants arrived in Hamilton, near Toronto, at the end of autumn 1953. There was disillusion rather than a honeymoon. The job Leonard Somes was expecting had disappeared, and after their savings were spent he was compelled following a long period of unemployment to work as a labourer at a local steel mill. Home life in Tragina Avenue, recalled Amiel, was a desperate ‘rat race’ to ‘make ends meet’. The family’s plight worsened when her mother went into premature labour. Although she and her son survived after weeks in hospital, Amiel was horrified that her mother’s wedding ring had been ‘wrenched from her finger’ by a robber in the hospital’s parking lot.4
At fifteen, Barbara Amiel was angry. In place of a comfortable home in London, an excellent school and endless cultural excursions, she found herself marooned in a grim wasteland surrounded by uneducated, insular provincials. Her mother, she screamed, was responsible for the calamity. Relations between Leonard and Vera deteriorated. They decided to move to St Catharines, a nearby town where there was the promise of a better job and a bigger home, a necessity since Vera had discovered that she was again pregnant. The only obstacle was Barbara, and there were furious arguments. Vera condemned her daughter’s behaviour as unreasonable. For her part, Barbara judged her mother to be neurotic and unstable, and she was equally dissatisfied with her stepfather’s lacklustre achievements. Although she would write twenty-five years later that her stepfather was ‘a handsome, warm man of whom I was enormously proud’, at the time she was infuriated by his responsibility for her plight.5 In her mother’s version of events, there was concern about Barbara’s education. She was settled at the local school, and was ambitious to attend university. The best temporary solution, they agreed, was for Barbara to stay with neighbouring friends and to visit her family at weekends. Accordingly, her clothes were packed and carried to her temporary home.6 Barbara’s version is more apocalyptic. She describes arriving home from school one day at the age of fourteen to discover all her possessions ‘packed in a cardboard box next to the front door. My mother was very apologetic. “Your stepfather and I can’t cope with you any more, so you have to move out.” They found me a room in a house on a council estate and paid my rent until the end of the school term.’ The publication of Barbara’s account in 1980 would cause great hurt to Vera and Leonard, and to many others in her family who disputed her recollection of events.
Growing up alone without a family became increasingly difficult. In Amiel’s various descriptions, she lodged in a part-time brothel while revising for her high-school exams at St Catharines Collegiate, or was a tenant with an unpleasant Polish family. She kept her concentration by stuffing her ears with wax earplugs, but after the ‘hurt had passed and I had cried a bit, after I got over the fright of sleeping in cellars underneath the furnace pipes, I came to cherish my freedom’. During her adolescence, she would also write, she found herself ‘in the middle of a room, stranded, sitting in my own urine, sitting for hours, too frightened to cry and too frightened to move’.7 Her occasional companions in sexual experimentation and drinking alcohol were the children of Polish émigrés and Canadian aboriginals. To accommodate that lifestyle she moved into a boarding house during the week, and stayed with a succession of girlfriends’ families at the weekends. To finance herself, she worked in the evenings and holidays, in a drugstore, a fruit-canning factory and clothes shops. Illness forced her once to return temporarily to her parents’ home, but she soon resumed life in Hamilton. Told she was entitled to a ‘secure home’ by a social worker, she later commented, ‘I had never thought about what I was entitled to. Things were simply taken as they came.’8 Her brave struggle was rewarded by her securing the grades to study philosophy and English at the University of Toronto. Amiel had become a toughened, streetwise survivor. Her ‘wild’ days, she would write thirty years later, left a legacy. ‘Something decent died in me, or perhaps was stillborn: I would never be able to create a successful family life.’ Incorrect reports suggested that she never saw her mother again.9 Her anger at Vera was compounded by another surprise. In 1959, on the eve of going to university, she and her sister were invited by their family to return to England for their summer holidays.
Unknown to Amiel, in early 1956 her father had become severely troubled. Harold Amiel, the practice’s accountant, had been stealing money from clients and from his solicitors’ partnership. Exposure was imminent. Fearing disgrace and the anger of his younger brother Barry, he went on 19 April to his mother’s flat in Marylebone while she was on a winter cruise, and took an overdose of barbiturates. A verdict of suicide was declared by the coroner one week later. In their grief, the families decided not to tell Harold’s two daughters in Canada, partly because he rarely talked about them, and also because he had not mentioned them in his last will, signed the day before his death. Barbara’s cousins were told that Uncle Harold had died of his wartime wounds. Amiel’s sole memento of her father was a photograph of him dressed in a colonel’s uniform. Many years later she described her father swallowing the tablets while listening to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.10 In contrast, Barry Amiel recalled that his brother was reading a good book and eating an apple before his death.
Considering her hardships over the previous six years, Barbara Amiel’s arrival at university had been achieved at a price. Emotionally she was unstable. To relieve her stress and tiredness she swallowed a dozen Codeine 222 tablets a day, and took antidepressants to help her sleep. The physical result was an undernourished, sultry young woman with deep black shadows under her eyes. Sprawled across the bed in her room in the students’ hall of residence were panda bears and other soft toys. On a shelf was the solitary photograph of her father in uniform. ‘Welcome to the Jewish Common Room,’ laughed fellow-student Larry Zolf as the thin Barbara entered the Junior Common Room. ‘The most beautiful fellow-travelling Marxist I have ever seen,’ was Zolf’s conclusion after a few conversations revealed her fascination with Stalin, ‘and certainly the most intelligent.’ Curious about her past, Zolf asked the shy girl about her family. ‘Oh, my father was very poor and unemployed,’ replied Amiel, ‘and we were kept afloat by a rich uncle.’ Other family members do not recall those circumstances.
Sitting regularly in the JCR, the centre of her social life, with her new best friend Ellie Tesher, Amiel confessed her need for security. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked when a handsome, dark-haired student walked in. ‘That’s Gary Smith,’ replied Tesher. ‘He lives in Forest Hill’ (an affluent area of Toronto). ‘I think I’ll marry him,’ said Amiel flatly.
Gary Smith, a gentle, quietly-spoken law student, was the son of Harry Smith, the owner of the once-famous Prince George Hotel in Toronto and a member of a well-known family. In 1958 Harry Smith had opened the luxurious Riviera Hotel in Havana, Cuba, in partnership with Meyer Lansky, the Mafia boss, who owned the hotel’s casino. Fidel Castro’s revolution one year later terminated their investment. In an attempt to recoup some of their money, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr and Sophie Tucker were booked to appear at the Prince George Hotel, and the income their performances generated was substantial. The downside was Harry Smith’s chronic and unsuccessful gambling in casinos across the USA. Nevertheless, to Barbara Amiel, the Smiths appeared a wealthy, stable Jewish family who might offer her salvation.
Amiel enjoyed Gary Smith’s adulation. Silently, he admired her skills in political argument – the legacy, she said, of those family debates in north London. As her self-confidence grew, she became the centre of attraction in student debates as a fiery supporter of neo-Marxism and Leon Trotsky. ‘You don’t know the difference between Trotsky and a hole in the ground,’ laughed Zolf. Once their relationship had become established, Smith was untroubled by Amiel’s frequent indifference towards him, even when she treated him like an imbecile. Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly. ‘Sex is good with Barbara,’ Smith confided, albeit that it invariably took place in the back of the car he borrowed from his parents – by