My uncle made me 2 suits: 1 with long trousers, 1 with plus-fours. Made with Scottish wool. I took those with me [on his Kindertransport], all I had to wear. It was not many days till I found out that not a single boy, not a single man, had plus-fours.

The first breakfast [at his foster family’s Bournemouth home], I remember distinctly. Grandmother, father, mother & another boy. That boy said ‘Hello!’ I didn’t know what to say. I only knew one greeting. So when he said ‘Hello!’, I said ‘Good-bye!’ In front of me was a dish, which I didn’t know what it was, a jam of some sort. So I took that dish & started eating it. The person next to me said ‘That’s not only for you, that’s for everybody.’ By then I already got through half of it. It was marmalade. You can imagine. The grandmother was quite a funny woman. The one thing I remember was she said ‘It is lovely to look into a glass of water’. I remember that distinctly. She said nothing else. And I thought ‘Is there anything wrong with that woman, or is she teaching me something or what?’ The lady went out one evening & when she came back, she took off her fur coat & left it on the floor. This was the way things are, I thought. ‘It’s all right. The floor is clean’ she says. But I couldn’t understand why she should do that. I learnt a lot about English habits.”