The distasteful history of a fishing village in India

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In January 2025, while visiting the extensive remains of Golconda, which is near Hyderabad in Telangana, I noticed an old artillery piece that bore the letters ‘VOC’, the initials of the Dutch East India Company. This got me curious about possible Dutch connections with Golconda, and I began researching on the Internet. While doing this, I became aware of Pulicat, which is on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, about 70 miles north of Chennai. This small place was under the control of the Dutch for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from learning about Pulicat for the first time, I discovered that this now sleepy place was formerly involved in the trafficking of human beings.

Just as the Portuguese had done before them, the Dutch were involved with trading slaves along the Coromandel Coast including at Pulicat. Apart from generating revenues, slaves were needed to provide labour in the Dutch colonies including Sri Lanka and the East Indies. They also exported these poor individuals to the West Indies. Pulicat was a significant centre of the Dutch Coromandel slave trade. An important source of these slaves were boats from the Burmese kingdom of Arakan. These vessels raided Bengal and captured many Indians from that area. They were then shipped to Pulicat (and other Dutch trading posts), where they were bought and trans-shipped to be sent on to places where labour was needed. It was big business. For example, between 1659 and 1661, between 8000 and 10000 slaves were shipped from Coromandel ports including Pulicat. During the heyday of the Dutch occupation of Pulicat, slaves sometimes made up from between 25% to 66% of its population.

Prior to visiting Pulicat in January 2025, I did not know about the slave trading that occurred along the east coast of India. Also, naively, I had not realised that the Dutch had been so deeply involved in the despicable trading of human beings. In July 2023, an Indian publication, ThePrint, noted that the royal house of the Netherlands:

“… had directly earned at least €500 million from the slave trade in modern currency.”

It continued:

“This weekend, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands formally apologised for the role of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in enabling the slave trade. The Dutch East India Company slave traders, the King said, had turned individuals into commodities, a kind of oppression that is ‘the most hurtful, the most humiliating, the most degrading’.”

When the British took over Pulicat in 1814, it was a shadow of its former self. This was partly because by then Chennai was becoming a major port. Whereas Pulicat’s population had reached at least 50,000 in the early 16th century, by 1889, it was about 5,000. Under British rule, Pulicat was a fishing village and a British seaside resort and picnic spot. Although its lighthouse was rebuilt in the 1890s, it served not as a beacon to guide traders into Pulicat, but merely to warn mariners of the hazardous shoals near to the place.

In 2011, Pulicat had about 18,000 inhabitants. We saw plenty of them as we drove slowly though the town’s narrow, congested streets. The main road from Chennai runs through the centre of Pulicat and then along a bridge that traverses the mouth of the Kosasthathalaiyar River next to which the town lies. After discovering the town’s poorly marked, not too pleasant, public toilets, we turned down a road that leads past the Dutch Cemetery and a modern school named Dutch Academy Nursery and Primary School, and reached the AARDE Pulicat Museum. This very basic, small museum is housed in what must have once been a small shop. Its walls have some interesting informative panels attached to them. These outline the history of Pulicat. There were also some reproductions of old plans of Fort Geldria built by the Dutch. As for the exhibits, they are a rather shambolic assembly of unlabelled odds and ends. In one glass fronted cabinet, there were some fragments of ceramic vessels. I wondered whether these were bits of things left behind by the Dutch. On close examination, I noticed one of these broken pieces was labelled “made in Japan”.

The Dutch Cemetery, which is a few yards away from the museum, is fascinating. The stone archway at its entrance is flanked by a pair of carved stone skeletons. One of them has on its head a spindle-shaped object that looks like a double-sided tabla with a wasp-waist. Actually, it is an hourglass (see below). The other appears to be resting its head on its raised right hand while placing its left hand on a skull. Like many other colonial cemeteries that we have visited in India, there are several obelisks to be seen. However, what makes the Dutch Cemetery extremely fascinating is that the lettering on almost all the gravestones and monuments is crystal clear, easy to read. Hardly affected by centuries of weathering, the inscriptions look as if they were carved yesterday. In “List Of Inscriptions On Tombs Or Monuments Madras Vol 2” by Julian James Cotton (published 1946), I found the following:

“The old Dutch cemetery is perhaps the most interesting of its kind in India; and the artistic merit of the coats of arms carved on the tombstones is such that it has been suggested that they were sent out from Holland, though no authority is known for the statement.”

Regarding the gateway, this source related:

“In front of each of the two gateposts stands a sculptured stone skeleton, almost life size. These figures are said to be male and female. One has a hourglass on his head and the other supports a skull on a column. The native legend is that the former figure holds an eggshell and represents a Dutch Governor who, during a terrible famine, doled out eggshells of rice to the starving poor and made a fortune out of their sufferings. His memory was so execrated that every passer-by used to spit at the effigy…”

This same book also lists the graves and quotes the inscriptions on them, as well as those in a second Dutch cemetery, which we did not see. One of the oldest graves that I spotted was of Dirk Maes van Rees, who had died in 1662. Many of the graves were of people who died in the 18th century. A great number of gravestones had family crests carved above the inscriptions. At the far end of the cemetery, we found two graves of people with British names: Henry Forton, who died at Pulicat in 1864, aged 52 years; and Elizabeth Catherine, wife of Mr William Lodge, who died in 1862, aged 56 years. The Dutch cemetery is a reminder that not every Dutch person, who came to India to make a fortune, returned home. What it does not recall is the vast numbers of Indians who were exported by the Dutch as slaves, and had no hope of ever seeing their homes again. Today, the cemetery is visited by tourists: we met a group of Indian students. And it is populated with goats which graze on the vegetation growing amongst the funerary monuments. Apparently, there had been a Portuguese cemetery, but this was either destroyed by the Dutch when they took over Pulicat or, like the Dutch fort, neglected and left to disintegrate.

The coast of India is dotted with tiny places that were once ruled by Europeans. Before viewing Pulicat, we had already visited Daman, Diu, Goa, Mahe, Karaikal, Tranquebar, and Pondicherry. These are all places that have to some extent become unimportant. Some other former European trading posts have flourished and become great cities, such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Surat, and Chennai. We have visited these places several times and enjoyed spotting relics of their colonial eras. Pulicat, which was once an important trading centre is now a peaceful fishing port – a case of ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’.

Much of the above is a slightly modified excerpt from my book “88 DAYS IN INDIA: A JOURNEY OF MEMORY AND DISCOVERY“, which is available from Amazon:.

It has been in use in this church for over 800 years

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Almost every old parish church in England contains at the very least one object of great interest. Usually, the older the church, the more remarkable are the discoveries within them. Recently, I visited a church in a small village in Cambridgeshire, and saw something that made me think.

The object I saw in the Church of St Peter in the village of Coton has been in use for at least 800 years because it was constructed in the twelfth century – some time between 1100 and 1200 AD. It stands on four modern stone supports at the west end of the nave of the gothic church, whose construction commenced in the twelfth century.

The Domesday Book of 1086 lists the existence of Coton. Before 1563, there were no records of the village’s population. In that year, 21 families lived in the place. Between 1800 and 1900, Coton’s population increased from 126 to 390 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton%2C_Cambridgeshire). So, when the church was built and for a few centuries after its first stone was laid, Coton’s population must have been small, but not so tiny to have prevented the church from having been enlarged in stages between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As the population increased, the twelfth century object, which attracted my attention in the church, was used each time a child was born. The item that interested me is the stone font. It is a square tank with each of its four stone sides carved with geometric patterns. No two sides have the same design.

What makes the font interesting is not merely its age and carvings, but the fact that is still in use. I wonder how many children have been baptised with water from this font during the last more than 800 years, and how many more will be blessed at this ancient water receptacle in the years to come.

In a world where so many things keep changing, often at an alarming rate, it is wonderful to find something that has remained unaltered for so long, and is still in use.  

The painter and poet Edward Lear and a railway in Greece

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Reading about a place sometimes makes one want to visit it. Such was the case with a picturesque valley in northern Greece, about which I had read in one of the travel journals written by Edward Lear (1812-1888). Here is what I wrote about the place that Lear had described when I visited it in the early 1970s with my PhD supervisor Robert Harkness and his wife Margaret. What follows is a slightly modified excerpt from my book “Between Olympus and Aegean”.

Halfway between Larissa and Platamon – both in northern Greece – the main road winds high above a deep gorge between the slopes of Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa. Passing through this place, the Vale of Tempe, our Land Rover laden with terracotta urns recently purchased in Larissa, brings to mind John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, which he wrote in 1819 and includes the words:

“What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?”

It was not through Keats’ words that I first heard of this place, but it was those of Edward Lear. In his “Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania”, published in 1851, he wrote in his entry for the 9th of September 1848:

“To see the classic vale of Tempe, the sacred mountain of Athos and the romantic Yannina have always been among my wishes; and I had long ago determined on making, previously to returning to England, a large collection of sketches illustrative of the landscape of Greece.”

And so, it also became my wish to see the vale. I was already familiar with Lear’s sketches that I had seen in a huge album in one of the libraries at University College London. My friends, Robert and Margaret, with whom I was travelling in Greece, gave me a 19th century engraving based on one of his Balkan sketches for my 21st birthday. Lear’s drawings are at least as good as his nonsense rhymes, for which he is well known. 

            The main road between Larissa and Platamon ran high above Tempe. Even from its edge one could see little or nothing of the gorge far below it, and certainly not what Lear would have been able to see when he visited it. One afternoon, Robert and Margaret kindly drove me to the southern end of the Vale of Tempe, and left me by the roadside. Then, they drove to its northern end, where they said that they would wait for me as I tried to retrace Lear’s footsteps along the depths of the gorge.

            When my friends drove away, I looked around to see whether I could find a track or path that ran along the base of the gorge. I saw two rustic looking men sitting high on a slope above me. I climbed up to them and with a combination of miming, which involved pointing at my feet, and repeating the word ‘Tempe’ I managed to make them understand that I wanted to walk along the gorge. They pointed up at the railway track high above us, and I understood that I was to walk along this.

            Soon after I reached the single tracked railway, I heard a train approaching me from the south. I stepped aside to allow the Athens to Munich Express to rumble past me. When this long train had sped ahead, I followed it at my own pace. After a short distance the track entered a cutting between two walls of rock. When I was halfway along this, a diesel engine came hurtling towards me. In the nick of time, I flattened myself against the rocky wall to avoid being mowed down. I continued forward, somewhat shaken. Soon after the track emerged from the cutting, I saw the entrance to a tunnel not far ahead of me. It was dark; its far end was not visible. After my near miss in the cutting, I decided that I would not enter the tunnel.

            I stood on the track near to the tunnel’s entrance and looked around. To one side there was a steep slope leading upwards. On the other, there was a slightly less steeply inclined slope leading towards the narrow base of the gorge. Cautiously I made my way down the slippery slope, grabbing hold of shrubs to slow down my descent. Soon, I reached a level path running just above a stream that ran along the base of the gorge.  It was, I realised, the bed of a long since demolished railway track. This was the railway that my informants had intended that I follow. The railway track that I had been following was its modern replacement. Suddenly I was walking in an idyllic landscape that must have hardly changed since Lear visited it.

            After a while, I reached what must have once been a railway station, but was now a place, maybe with religious connections, where visitors were able to obtain refreshments and to drink from a spring that issued nearby. I have since learnt that this place was called Agia Paraskevi and that the old railway station was opened in 1910. The suspension bridge close to this, which I crossed, was built in about 1960, and was replaced a few years ago.

Soon after leaving this delightful place, I reached the car park at the northern end of the gorge, where Robert and Margaret were waiting for me. They listened with great interest as I related my adventures including my narrow escape in the railway cutting.

[My book “Between Olympus and Aegean” is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Between-Olympus-Aegean-Adam-Yamey/dp/1291882685/ ].  About the book:

Ants, bacon, collagen, and chlorine. These are not the first words that usually spring to mind when thinking about summers in Greece. The holidays that Adam Yamey spent in this country in the 1970s and 1980s with the professor and his wife were far from ordinary. This book provides an affectionate portrait of two remarkable people with whom the author spent many unconventional vacations. It also describes how the author travelled with them through a Europe which has undergone many transformations since these trips were made. Adam’s book is richly illustrated with his own photographs, many of them showing places that time has changed beyond recognition.

Two chain smokers with whom I had been friendly

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I have had  two friends who were chain smokers. Each smoked in excess of 100 cigarettes per day. One was a man who lived in Yugoslavia,  and another, a lady, who lived in Wales.

Seen at Vapi in Gujarat

I used to travel around Yugoslavia with my Serbian friend, and we often shared hotel rooms. As soon as he woke in the morning,  he had his first cigarette, and last thing at night, after cleaning his teeth, he had to have another. One year when I  met him, he told me that his doctor had told him to give up smoking. He decided not to give up completely, but to limit himself to one cigarette per hour. While he did this, he was permanently distracted because every few minutes he had to look at his watch to discover how much longer he had to wait before he could light the next cigarette.  Eventually,  he abandoned the effort, and returned to chain smoking.

My Welsh friend, let us call her ‘F’, smoked at least as many cigarettes as my friend in Yugoslavia, if not more.  Each summer, we used to spend a few days with her at her home in Wales. When the windows were open, as they were often in summer, you could smell cigarette smoke as far away as 50 feet from the house. The place seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of cigarette fumes.

One year, F accompanied us on a long-haul flight. She knew that she would be unable to smoke during the 11 hours we were on board. Realising this, she quilted smoking overnight – she was a very determined woman. Within 24 hours, she went from smoking over 100 cigarettes per day to none at all.

To her credit, she never resumed smoking. She told us that one of the benefits of having given up was that she did not need to have the walls within her house repainted every year because they were no longer becoming discoloured by smoke from the cigarettes.

Both F and my Yugoslav friend are no more. Interestingly, neither of them suffered from, or died of lung cancer. I miss both of them.

Slow train to Darjeeling

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MY MOTHER’S FATHER, who died young in the early 1930s, was Mayor of Barkly East, a small town in the Eastern Cape (South Africa). He was the driving force in bringing the railway over the mountains from Lady Grey to Barkly East. This was the most expensive (in terms of cost per mile) stretch of railway ever built in South Africa. It included a series of switchback stretches to allow the trains to ascend or descend the steep mountain slopes. Another mountain railway with switchbacks can be found on India’s West Bengal. The narrow gauge railway links New Jalpaiguri in the plains with Darjeeling high up in the mountains. We travelled on this line on December 2019. Here is what I wrote soon after the ride.

The author and the train

Today we travelled on a narrow gauge mountain railway with at least 5 switchbacks. It is the so called ‘Toy Train’ that runs incredibly slowly between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling which is in the foothills of the Himalayas, more than 2000 metres above sea level.

We took almost two hours to travel the first about three miles. This was mainly because of a seemingly interminable wait for a signal man to arrive to allow our train to cross a river near Siliguri. Soon after we began moving, we passed tea gardens and began our several hour slow ascent towards Kurseong, Ghum, and Darjeeling.

The train follows the route of NH55, crossing over it frequently at unguarded level crossings. The serpentine course of the railway is designed to lengthen its route in order to reduce the gradients that need to be tackled.

The wheels squeal and shriek as the carriages wind around the tight curves of the tracks. The diesel engine’s horn blasts very frequently to clear the path for the train.

The views from the train are spectacular. The carriages pass extremely close to buildings, plants along the side of the track, and steep drops. Passing through towns on the route, sometimes we were so close to shops beside the track that it would have been easy to snatch goods from them. Leafy branches sprung through the open carriage windows, shedding leaves and flowers.

The flora along the route was very varied. We passed a multitude of colourful flowers including magnificently exuberant poinsettias.

Because of our slow start we travelled the last three and a half hours in darkness as the sun set long before we arrived at our destination. We arrived over three hours late.

Our enjoyment of this superb railway journey was enhanced by having conversations with a businessman from Bangalore and a couple from Lincolnshire in the UK.

Even though it is very slow, a trip on the Toy Train is thoroughly recommendable.

When we arrived at Darjeeling, it was dark and extremely cold. There were few people at the station apart from our fellow passengers. There were no taxis or autorickshaws, and we had no clue as to where our guest house was located, and how to reach it. Luckily, we had our host’s telephone number, and we rung him. The kind fellow, a Nepalese Buddhist cleric as we discovered later, came in his car to fetch us.

Although our host’s family were very hospitable, we would not stay at that place again. The main problem was that it could only be accessed from the street by a steep outdoor staircase without a handrail. One false step, and one of us might have fallen from the steps and then down the orecipitous slope into the ravine far below us.

I have yet to revisit Darjeeling, which I loved, but next time, I will choose a warmer time of year.

Two dishes separated by 1300 miles – one from Albania, the other from Kurdistan

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Today, 26 August 2026, a Tuesday, we ate lunch in a Kurdish/Iraqi restaurant, Arbil City, in north London’s Kilburn district. While perusing the menu, I noticed that included “Pachaa”, which was described as:

“Specially cooked lamb, head, legs, and tongue, served with tandoori bread.”

We could not order it because it is only available on Friday and Saturday.

Seeing its name reminded me of a breakfast we enjoyed in 2016 at a restaurant in Tirana, Albania – a city about 1300 miles away from the Kurdish city of Erbil. We were hosted by an Albanian friend, Shemsi. Here is an account of that breakfast as I recorded it in my book “Rediscovering Albania”:

We woke at the beginning of a hot sunny day. Promptly at the time we had agreed, Shemsi picked us up from our hotel, and drove us to a suburb close to the centre of Tirana. The day before, we had asked him what comprises a typical traditional Albanian breakfast. The restaurant to which he took us, which had no name visible on its frontage, was where we discovered the answer to our question. The 3 of us seemed to be the youngest customers in the eatery that morning.

The centrepiece of the breakfast was paçe soup. This is a breakfast soup (‘khash’ in Armenian, ‘pache’ in Persian) made from meat, in fact from just about every part of an animal, in our case veal. It had a slightly gelatinous texture, but was delicious. It was served with pilaf, a rice and meat dish. The soup was accompanied by bowls of condiments such as red chilli grains, sliced garlic marinated in vinegar, and wonderful thick ‘homemade’ yoghurt. Bread was also available, and we washed the breakfast down with glasses of raki. Albanian raki, made from fruit not grain, is not at all like the aniseed flavoured Turkish raki; it is more like the Italian Grappa or some of the Yugoslav hard spirits. We were also served wine with this filling meal.

I do not know for certain, but I imagine that the Albanian word ‘paçe’ is both etymologically and gastronomically related to the word ‘pachaa’ on the menu at Arbil City.

A case of mistaken identity at a restaurant in London

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The Internet, and in particular social media, is both a boon and a curse. One of the good things about using social media is that occasionally one gets the chance to reconnect to people with whom you have been out of touch for a long time. Here is an example of this that I experienced a few years ago.

George, which is not his real name, was one of my fellow pupils at the primary school I attended in the second half of the 1950s. In those days, he had red hair, which to my then young eyes was a curiosity. More than 20 years later I was visiting a friend who was studying at the University of Cambridge. As we walked past the University Library, I spotted George. It turned out that he was at the same college as the friend whom I was visiting. We stopped and exchanged a few words.

About forty years later, I connected with George on the LinkedIn social media website. Soon after this, he sent me a message, suggesting we meet up. We arranged a date, and agreed to meet at a restaurant near one of London’s railway termini. The location was chosen because he lived out of London and used the train to visit the city.

I arrived at the restaurant before him, and he turned up a few minutes later. Although he had aged and his hair was now grey instead of red, I recognised him. We ordered a meal and chatted pleasantly while we ate. He explained that he preferred meeting at a restaurant rather than at home when he had not met the other person before, or, at least as in our case, not for a long time.

At the end of the meal after we had settled the bill, he admitted to me:

“Well, you are not the person I was expecting to meet.”

I was not sure how to react to that, as he was exactly the person I was expecting to meet. Additionally, although we had a pleasant enough time together, I did not feel any urge to meet him again.  

On learning about the art of writing essays

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THERE IS NO ‘right way’ to write an essay. However, some essays are crafted in styles that are more pleasing to readers than others.

At school, I was taught or, rather was guided in the arts of essay writing not by my English language teacher, but by someone else who taught a quite different subject …

Back in the 1960s when I was attending my secondary school, Highgate School in north London, we took state examinations known as ‘O Levels’ (Ordinary Levels) when we were 15 to 16 years old. One of the subjects in which we were examined was ‘English Language’, which was distinct from another paper called ‘English Literature’.

Our English Language teacher in the year leading up to the O Level examination was Mr B. This man was far more interested in teaching the better students than assisting the others, including – and I am not being modest – me. Instead of concentrating on grammar and the standard of essay writing that would give us all a good chance of doing well in the paper, he wasted our lessons by filling the 45-minute periods with discussions of contemporary poetry. He was particularly keen on the poems of Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and Philip Larkin (1922-1985). His lengthy analyses of each line of these poets’ works were not only dull, but also helped put me off enjoying poetry. Furthermore, his learned discourses and discussions with the few people in my class, who enjoyed poetry, did nothing to improve the ability of the rest of his pupils to write essays competently.

After O Levels, we began studying for A Levels, the examinations required for admission to university. I chose three subjects: Mathematics, Physical Science (a combination of physics and chemistry), and biology. Our biology teacher was the ageing Mr Sellick. A confirmed bachelor, he told us the following when we reached the part of the syllabus that dealt with mammalian reproduction:

“I need not cover this. You boys know all about it.”

Mr Sellick was not only a biologist but also a naturalist. Like my PhD supervisor, Robert Harkness, Sellick emphasised the fact that a biologist should not only become obsessed with the minutiae of biological processes, but ought to constantly bear in mind the whole organism. One day, when several of us from his class were out walking with Mr Sellick, he stopped, stooped, picked up a leaf from the pavement, and asked us:

“What kind of tree did this fall from?”

When we told him we did not know, he said:

“It’s sad. You know all about DNA and RNA, but you cannot even recognise a leaf from a beech tree.”

Every week, we had to write essays in preparation for our biology A Level examination. Mr Sellick ploughed through them methodically, and on Saturday mornings, we had a one-and-a-half-hour lesson with him. During that double-length class, Mr Sellick used to sit behind his desk at the front of the classroom. In front of him, there would be a tall stack of papers – the essays we had written that week. One by one, he would go through the essays, reading short extracts from them, and then making a comment on each bit he had read out. He used to point out where something had been written well and clearly, or where the pupil had written something badly, and how it could be improved. I found these sessions very useful, and I believe they helped greatly to improve the way I write.

Many years later, in 1982, I qualified as a dentist at University College Hospital Dental School (‘UCH’). One of my teachers there was a dental technician, Mr C, who taught us the techniques involved in manufacturing removable dental prostheses. In addition, he assisted in the teaching of dental materials science – a subject in which we were examined and needed to write essays. After I qualified, I remained in touch with Mr C, who did some of my dental laboratory work for me after I went into general practice. Often, we spent time chatting when I delivered work to his home.

By the mid-1980s, students applying to dental school were required to have scored top grades at A Level, otherwise they were not admitted on the dental course. Interestingly, some of the best dentists I know, both in practice and in academia, were admitted to UCH in the 1970s with very low grades at A Level. They have done well despite their poorish performances at school. Those students were selected at a lengthy interview rather than because of their ability to score well at A Level.   

One day in the mid-1980s, Mr C told me that even though the dental students he was then teaching at UCH had achieved the highest grades at A Level, most of them were unable to write essays – they had neither needed to do that, nor had been taught how to write, at school. So, in the second year of their degree course, in addition to teaching them about prosthetics and dental materials, Mr C and his colleagues were having to teach these students with impressively high academic qualifications how to string sentences together clearly enough to produce coherent essays.

Although I have been writing essays since I was at school, I have discovered that only by writing frequently and on a variety of subjects has it become easier for me to write anything at all.

Eating at the slow table in the 1950s in northwest London

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I WAS BORN in the early 1950s, just over 50 years after Queen Victoria died. In those early years of my childhood, London still had a network of trolleybus lines. One of these routes ran along Finchley Road in the Golders Green district of northwest London. Trolleybuses used to run past my co-educational primary school, which was located on the corner of Finchley Road and Middleton Road. Called Golders Hill School and founded in 1908, I attended it from 1956 until 1960. During my time at the school, its headmistress was Miss Davies, a spinster who used to cycle to the school from her home in Highgate every day. She used to be accompanied by her two corgi dogs, who travelled in a wicker basket attached to the front of her bicycle. The rest of the teaching staff were also women, amongst whom Mrs Fitzgerald was a formidable personality. The school had high academic standards, and many of its pupils continued their education in academically prestigious schools after passing their eighth birthdays. We began learning French when we were 7 years old, and if one made it to the top class,which I did not, Latin was also taught.

The day started with assembly and taking the register. We stood in rows facing a photograph of the Matterhorn, while our names were read out. When you heard your name, you had to answer in Latin with the word ‘adsum’. Following the rollcall, we recited The Lords Prayer at great speed. It sounded like mumble-jumble to me, and it was only many years after leaving the school that I realised what we were reciting. Interestingly, although almost half the pupils were Jewish, they were expected to join in spouting out the Christian prayer. During Jewish holidays, there were many pupils absent from the classes. The school was quite old-fashioned. Its teachers would have been brought up in the early part of the twentieth century, and did not have modern or ‘progressive’ ideas, such as was the case at another school in Golders Green – King Alfred’s, where pupils addressed their teachers by their first names and free expression was encouraged.

We ate lunch at the school. Groups of pupils sat around long rectangular tables. The children on the table that finished their entire lunch fastest were rewarded. The prize was a small piece of sugary, melt-in-the-mouth confectionery from a box of Dolly Mixture (first produced in the 1920s). After finishing their meals, the children were allowed to play outside in the playground area attached to the school.

In my childhood I was an incredibly fussy eater. There were only a few things I was prepared to eat. None of these items were ever served at Golders Hill School. Although it might sound ungrateful, nothing, apart from the school’s steam pudding, appealed to me. The food seemed nightmarishly disgusting. Therefore, I was classed as a ‘slow eater’, and forced to sit at the ‘slow table’. This seated four children. I was the only boy. One of the girls was called Rhoda. I remember this because it was a name I had never come across in my then short life.

We had to remain at the slow table with our unfinished food, by now quite cold, on the plates in front of us. Whilst we sat at this table, we could look through the nearby window and see all the other children playing outside. Pointlessly, I used to shift the food around my plate hoping it would disappear, but it did not. In desperation, I would put the unfinished food into the pockets of my short trousers, and then visit the toilet. There, I entered a cubicle, and emptied the contents of my pockets into the toilet bowl. Curiously, my mother who washed my clothes, never remarked on the state of my pockets that had contained unwanted luncheon.

One day, I was defeated by a dish. It was gooseberries, which I hated, in custard. I could not bring myself to fill my pockets with the contents of the dish. Because of this, suddenly my life felt hopeless. I decided that I would carry the dish to the door of the staff room, and hoped that someone would give me permission to abandon it. Full of apprehension and fearing the wrath of the teachers, I knocked on the door. It was opened by one of the younger looking teachers, Miss Dredge. As soon the door opened, my hands must have moved – I might have been trembling – and the bowl with its contents fell at her feet. Miraculously, nothing adverse happened to me, and I was not made to eat any more.

I often wonder whether dropping the gooseberries and custard was an unfortunate accident or, possibly, an act of rebellion on my part.

PS: Many years have elapsed since the dessert slipped out of my hand. Now, I love eating gooseberries, especially gooseberry fool, but sadly they are rarely available in shops in London.