England - The Leeches

The New Brothers - Hugh Robert and Hansi

The house in Bramley Hill proved as welcoming as the family. Warm and generous, easily accommodating, but it felt as on another continent. Its structure was Victorian, double­ fronted with access by a curved driveway which, without gates, seemed immediately to underline the openness of the society which had built it. It was staffed by an Irish housemaid, whose otherworldliness within this family had a similar effect.

It was here that the boy was to meet his future 'brother'. Two years older, Hugh Robert ('Bobby') appeared his senior by a much greater margin. He was learned and knowledgeable, and possessed an authority that had already made him the school's head prefect. The boy and his studies were to benefit from that in a variety of indispensable ways. Arriving with hardly a word of English in his pocket meant intensive study, with endless corrections if bad habits were not to take root. Academically, too, the boy's disrupted schooling had left him with much ground to make up and a new syllabus to adapt to. Bobby provided much of the invigilation needed, as well as organising some of his own classmates to 'correct' essays and provide a guard to ensure this curiosity being left unmolested. That applied also in the home, so that he could indulge his newly acquired taste for reading undisturbed. More than anything else, this enabled him to absorb the new language quickly and accurately, in its manifold ways of expression.

It was clear from the outset that Florence had herself fulfilled a similar function for Bobby. As had already been demonstrated before even setting foot in her house, she was a lady of considerable sensitivity, who had ensured that her son's education would be academic as well as embracing the liberal arts. Her own warmth for music became realised through his accomplishments on the piano as well as his record library. Both had a profound thirst for knowledge, and Bobby was given the tools to develop it into a productive life and acclaimed academic profession.

The boy sought to straddle this divide between the world of the mind and that of things measurable. He would enjoy the one but eventually feel compelled to satisfy his new father's desire for a son to follow his own footsteps. So civil engineering became the early goal. Meanwhile, however, there were other decisions to be made. The outbreak of war meant whatever was movable should be 'evacuated' to safety from London and its immediate surroundings. Thus the head office of Millars' Machinery Company, of which Lawrence was managing director, was to move to its manufacturing base in Hertfordshire; and so would the family, once Bobby had finished school. The boy was given the choice of staying at Whitgift and with another family, or of following the Leech family and enrolling in Harlow College. For him there was only one solution, and he stayed with those who had chosen to share their lives with him. Bonds of affection had grown swiftly with all three members, and there was nothing else to be considered.

The Old Vicarage in Little Parndon was remote from London, but proved less so from the aerial war that ensued. It lay near the River Stort, on moonlit nights a sure pathway to London's docks. Crews unable to penetrate that far, off-loaded their cargo on the way back whilst hurrying home. By day, the duels between Spitfires and Messerschmitts provided an unchoreographed celestial ballet until a plume of smoke would plummet to the ground. One morning, in the greyness of dawn, the lawn was bedecked with silk parachutes. A Canadian bomber crew had almost made it back to base from a bombing mission before having to bale out. 'With our instruments out of action, we were flying blind and had no idea where we were. A great relief to find that the white shapes on the ground were only croquet hoops, so we knew we were back.'

The boy meanwhile had the distinction of being the only enemy alien in the County to be given a permit to ride a bicycle. Better still, he became a Special Constable, charged with reporting any suspicious activity during a period of maximum alert for enemy agents expected to be parachuted into Britain. 'No real need to worry,' said the gardener Harkness standing next to the boy, 'Whatever they've got on, you can always tell a Gerry. A square head and no neck.'

The boy's mother had been able to become 'independent' after a short while. Kindly hands had found for her a live-in position in the household of the Rt Revd Canon Elliott in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Her official position was parlour maid. Somewhat shyly, the Canon had asked her, "Will you mind if I call you Josephine? It would sound rather odd if I said 'Baroness' whilst you are serving the tea." Later, she would say that it was an agreeable lesson in humility, from which she was nevertheless able to learn much of one of the upper echelons of British society. A few years later she was introduced to Baroness Valentina Springer, a born Rothschild and widow of one of the foremost industrialists in pre-Anschluss Austria, whose loss of hearing placed her in need of a Ladies' Companion. Within an easy relationship, the younger woman was able to recapture some of the life which had been so perilously interrupted. They lived mostly in the Cotswolds, in the sheltered surroundings of Broadway in the Vale of Evesham. Once the war was over, they travelled together to New York, and thence even to Havana.

Meanwhile the Leech household was in dissolution. Florence had suffered a stroke and, after two years as an invalid, had succumbed to it. Bobby had finished Whitgift and gone on a scholarship to Balliol, thence to have his outstanding intellect recruited to the Codebreakers of Bletchley Park. The boy was also offered a place at Oxford but opted not to burden Major Leech with two undesirably academic sons, becoming instead an articled pupil of an eminent civil engineer. To his relief, he was not required to fight his cousins across the channel but found himself instead designing large caissons which were eventually revealed as parts of Mulberry Harbour, the floating dock towed to Normandy for the D-Day landings.

His next assignment was to a contract in South Wales. for the design of massive foundations for a new steel mill. Housed in a rented room owned by a prim but welcoming Welsh landlady, it was his first exposure to a truly industrial environment. Strangely enough, people turned out to be far more formal, in ethics, beliefs and comportment, even than London society. An exception to these characteristics was Mair, who became his first wife (ironically also in a secret marriage, in a vain attempt to evade parental opposition). Unhappily the marriage did not long survive the return to London despite the birth of a daughter, Caroline. It was to be many years before father and daughter were reunited.

In the interim, he had left the civil engineering partnership and joined Major Leech's company which had a sudden need for a civil engineer. That led him to spend four years in India, to create a prestressed concrete industry there. The fascination with the wonders of that country and its peoples, richly explored thanks to the continent-spanning nature of his task, could not in the end cancel out the tensions of an expatriate life spent in the midst of abject poverty, which created an infinite hierarchy of poor suppressing the poorer and finding means to profit from them.

A true yearning to be 'home', among friends and family - or families - seemed also to mark the end of the boy's formative years, and his full absorption into the country and society he had entered as a child fifteen years earlier. It had been a chequered process, but an intertwining of destinies and affections which was deep, complete and final.

Bobby had left Bletchley shortly after the end of the war, returning to a lecturership at Balliol. When the Master of Balliol founded the University of Keele, he chose Bobby to assemble the academic staff. Both his renown and his family grew, Jillian producing two sons and a daughter, all exceptionally gifted, though none followed the academic route.

The war and its aftermath had separated the family, often physically, more permanently by silences enforced by the nature of their duties and the Official Secrets Act. Yet their honour and nobility survives in full through the bloodline to Bobby and Jillian's lustily surviving children Guy and Lucinda and their progeny, as well as that of Roger and his widow Vicky; in the bonds they had fashioned with the 'boy'; and in his daughter Caroline and nephew Johnny, none of whom would now exist but for that original act of human kindness and generosity.