Busy being born

UNLIKE MICHAEL PHILIP JAGGER, who was born in a hospital, I was born in a stately home. Mick may have owned several stately homes, but darling, he was never born in one!

I was born in 1943 in Hatfield House, on the northern outskirts of London, in the county of Hertfordshire. The house was built in 1608 by Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, and has been in continuous aristocratic occupancy by his titled descendants ever since. I hasten to add that I'm not one of them.

My arrival in such aristocratic surroundings was simply the result of Hatfield House being requisitioned by the government during the war and converted into a makeshift maternity hospital. This part of England was of little interest to the German Luftwaffe.

I was delivered into a complete shambles of destroyed buildings, shattered lives, millions of deaths, and general mayhem. It was the "crossfire hurricane" that Mick refers to in his song "Jumpin' Jack Flash." All of the chaos of the war was generously leavened by rampant promiscuity so that almost as fast as people were being killed, others were being born. It was a manic lottery in which the soldier and the newborn child had approximately the same chances of survival.

I was not to learn until I was fifteen that the woman who gave birth to me was Irish, from a gypsy family out of Cork. She had worked as a government typist. My father had been a Jewish mathematician on active service in the Royal Air Force. Both were to disappear in the industrialized slaughter of the war. Talk about three strikes and you're out! In the blood of my veins I was Irish, Gypsy, and Jewish!

These three persecuted races commingled in me and were the perfect combination for a career in the entertainment industry, though of course I was unaware of this at the time of my birth. My heritage and the peculiar mixture of my bloodlines has always been a source of great comfort and pride to me, as from the very earliest age I was always convinced that whatever else I was, I was definitely not English.

A family friend helpfully described my early years to me when I was a confused teenager. My birth mother had tried to cope, he told me. She was a young and devoutly Catholic Irish girl with an illegitimate baby, and far from her family — who would have viewed the child she had borne with distaste and probably abandoned their daughter. Almost certainly her family back home in Ireland was not told of her pregnancy or my birth.

My mother had tried to raise her child in secret, alone in wartime London, but had been unable to manage the joint pressures of a war and trying to survive with very little money and a small baby. The friend of the family hinted darkly that she had selflessly given me up for adoption to help secure a better future for me, and that the man who had been her lover and my father had abandoned her and then died on active service.

I have always respected my birth mother's choice and, while it hurts to this day, I have never made any attempt to trace her or get in touch. I hope she found a better life than many Irish people who lived in London. I know her full name but I don't know whether she's alive or dead. If she were still living she would have to be at least in her eighties by now. Effectively, she died for me when I was a baby. Bless 'er.

In due course, I was packed off to Swansea in Wales, to a Catholic children's home, and from that orphanage I was adopted just before the age of three. When I eventually found out that my birth name was Brendan Lyons and that I was Irish, all I could think was how grateful I was that I wasn't English and named Cyril.

My first memory is of being carried down the steps of a bomb-damaged Marylebone railway station by a nun, and being given to my new parents, Ernie and Dora Cutler. I sat in the back of their borrowed car and they told me that they had decided to call me Sam.

My adoptive mother says I bawled my eyes out throughout the journey, and when they finally got me home and my new father triumphantly placed me on the kitchen table for a group of friends to admire, he announced in a loud voice, to raucous congratulations, "Here's one we saved from the Catholics."

I was raised by my new extended family in the parliamentary constituency of Woodford, represented for many years by Winston Churchill, close to the epicenter of the vicious German bombing campaign that had destroyed London's East End. Dora and Ernie had seen firsthand what the nightmare of war had done to a once thriving community, and were unalterably opposed to war in all its forms. Dora, at the first available opportunity, called Mr. Churchill a "drunken old warmonger" to his face, and was banned from his constituency office.

My family despised Churchill and made their home available to serve as the campaign headquarters for the Communist Party candidate opposing Churchill in the elections. The communists, needless to say, lost. This did not endear my parents to the landlord, whose politics closely resembled those of Attila the Hun.

From my earliest days I remember adults as people who were invariably reading, even when they were eating a meal. In my parents' house we had the collected works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin and Mao, every left-wing book club edition that was ever printed, and goodness knows what else. But we didn't have Trotsky, or the Bible.

People were constantly coming and going and there would have been Reds under the beds but for the fact that was where even more books were stored. We were host to an endless supply of transient members of the Party, who slept wherever they could find any space and debated the great questions of the day with skill and alacrity.

In addition to books and people, we had music. Music for the people, by the people, and performed by the people. My earliest memories are of wonderful parties where the assembled adults would drink homemade beer and enthusiastically sing folk songs, sea shanties, and political ditties. Where other children learned nursery rhymes, I was raised on union songs and paeans to Stalin and the Red Army. To these were added songs from the Community Songbook. My mother played the piano and all the adults gathered around and sang lustily late into the night. One would reasonably think that after countless acid trips and the experiences of the drug-fueled sixties, the words of obscure political songs would fade from my mind, but to this day they remain eerie reminders of that distant country which is my past.

My family always celebrated the memory of those people who had offered their young lives in the service of the Spanish Republic, fighting in support of the legitimate government of Spain, only to be defeated by the combined might of the German and Italian armies, who had intervened on the side of the fascists. Remembrance of the Spanish Civil War was treated as a sacred responsibility, and I can recall people raising their glasses to the republic and shouting "Viva!"

My adoptive family were "bloody heathens," as the landlord once memorably put it. I might add that we did not consider this a problem. Christianity in our house was considered a risible deception foisted on the gullible and defenseless. Christmas was celebrated in my childhood as an ancient and largely irrelevant pagan festival, but the adults...