Hans-Joachim Franz ('Johnny') Scharfenberg had a more difficult childhood, inevitably searching for an identity, conscious of the difference from other children on every count, Johnny was to grow up with the fiction that the elderly lady caring for him was his mother. Mutti felt that only in this way could she recreate the bond that he had lost, protect him and, as a virtual stranger, have him acknowledge her authority. Rightly or wrongly, it was a strategy that marked him out as even more unusual to his fellows as did his general lack of antecedents to speak of and compare. Adding to that otherness was the fact that this was early in the period when Mutti was companion to Baroness Valentina Springer. As a Rothschild, she had a foot in the Atlantic world and frequently travelled to America. She had grown-up children of her own and was able to understand that Mutti had to bring the child with her. So, Johnny spent much of his infancy cossetted on aeroplanes, in the Waldorf Astoria and even the Havana of Graham Green days. Small wonder that it took him a little time before he was able to emerge from confusion and establish an identity for himself.

From his earliest days, the hiding from a crumbling but still vicious Nazi machine, the flight in little more than a handbag across Russian lines, the not always welcome arrival at the door of distant family friends, afraid that a child would make it difficult to send these migrants on their way again, the furtive dodging of regulations and officialdom - all this must have imprinted on the unformed mind a state of angst and rejection of authority which in other times serve as the framework supporting a child's social development. A brusque change of country, language, home and guardian, becoming the school butt of anti-German slogans, compounded by the anguished loss of the one person he had been able to trust, must all have been massively disorientating. It inhibited even his sporting activities, until finally he was able to take up cycling, gyrating at high speed around Lewes Crescent with the desperate vigour of one who needed at all costs to prove that he could win somewhere along the line. Greatly to his credit that his boyhood testing of behavioural boundaries made him develop into a fine human being, now at the head of an industrious family of Liz and their children Zoe and Maximilian, each having already delivered him a grandchild, respectively Mia and Audrey.