I was 15 and had just crossed the U-boat-infested Atlantic in a liner on my way to meet and live with a small family in Connecticut, USA. They had sent word to the Women’s Voluntary Services in England to ask for a young male refugee from the highly possible German victory and conquest of England.
I had been used, even at that age, to looking after myself in a cottage during school holidays. So I had already learned to be independent.
My future hosts, Mr and Mrs Killorin, came aboard the Duchess of Richmond in Montreal to claim me.
I recall that as we made our way by car south through Canada and then the USA, we ate at a place where my new-found hosts noticed where a famous journalist and notable, called Dorothy Parker, was writing at a table. I had not heard of her. We continued south.
Our relationship was not easy, thinking that because our common language and ways of life were much the same, which is not the case at all. We were foreigners to each other.
As my kind lady host worked in some capacity at the local and famous Taft School, I was enrolled at that August institution.
But other than gaining my numerals (a logo for one’s sweater) at soccer, it was soon apparent that my strengths were not related to academia. So I was transferred to a State School for mechanical training.
I went there by yellow bus each day, mixing with quite a different bunch of boys to learn how to draw cog teeth on wheels. Humour and interests there were on the crude side, but I was made welcome, not just because I was a refugee from a war-torn country, but because the headmaster thought I would make a suitable match for his rather plain daughter.
This involved escorting her to balls and providing her on such occasions with a corsage (paid for by my hosts as I had no money). Fortunately, the Torrington Trade School was some distance away which was inconvenient for my hosts but convenient for me.
My mother did eventually manage to send me a small amount of money, so I was, at last, able to buy ice cream (of which the Americans are particularly fond). I made good friends locally with mostly boys of my own age, but most importantly, for this callow boy’s outlook on life, there was an older misfit who lived in the loft above his family’s garage who became a lifetime influence on me. He played the clarinet, carved in wood, and drank neat Bourbon.
I did not learn music but made a wooden instrument rather like a balalaika, and sampled Bourbon. (When I was later in the USA I located him living at a house in the open countryside repairing antique furniture. He had almost forgotten me.)
Concerning the Bourbon, I once drank too much, and although my friend’s garage loft was some distance from where I lodged, I do remember crawling home, mostly on all fours, and getting into my bed to witness the entire room spinning around me. Since then I have been tipsy at times but never so sozzled as then.
My hostess tried, without much success, to employ a maid. One was to give me breakfast before I left the house early to catch the yellow bus to school. One morning a candidate maid, smelling of alcohol, was attempting to fry me an egg but forgot to place the frying pan between the broken egg and the gas ring.
I was, as the Dutch say, a “puber” and learning about life.
For sport, a golf course green was at the end of our garden where I constantly tried for a hole-in-one with a number 9 iron, without success. In a dried stream on the course lived a viciously armoured snapping turtle which was well to avoid (you wouldn’t pick up a golf ball near this creature). Beyond the rough, poison ivy flourished in the countryside, ready to inflict horrendous rashes on the skin of the venturesome - acquired, even from the smoke when it was burned in a bonfire.
Winters were cold and snowy, causing drifts around the house so deep that we would sometimes have to cut our way out.
I was given an old pair of skis that were tied to the shoes with string, creating disastrous outcomes. So I turned them into a successful toboggan.
I tended the garden for my hosts and made some money by knocking on doors and selling magazine subscriptions.
When I was old enough to return to join the RAF in 1942 I welcomed the day, having been so grateful to the Killorin family who took me in and befriended me.