mother and I landed in England in October 1939, accompanied by my father’s brother Giorgio, a concert pianist, and a man as romantic as my father was rational. I remember him rehearsing Schubert and Chopin on a concert grand piano during the Blitz while I sat underneath hugging the legs.
We swapped the elegantly furnished flat with a view over Florentine rooftops for a single room in a boarding house in Bayswater, with a coin meter for the heating and a bath in a cupboard that we used to fill with hot water to take the edge off the flat’s chill. Nino had only been able to smuggle a few hundred pounds out of Italy and though we weren’t living in poverty, life was a lot tougher than it had been in Florence. The first Christmas was dark and cold, and my only present was a grey lead toy submarine. I felt my parents had let me down.
Life had switched from colour to black-and-white. London was occasionally enveloped by smog from thousands of coal fires, which in later years filled the city so thickly that all sense of direction was lost within a few steps of your front door, like being submerged in thick black oil. My mother had to learn to cook more or less from scratch, and missed Florence’s rolling cityscape so much that in her first few months she took to walking the streets of London looking for hills to climb, to get a better view of her new city.
Nino urgently needed to find work. Fortunately, his previous visit in 1932 had enabled him to register as a doctor, and we moved to Godalming early the next year, where he initially took up a job in a tuberculosis clinic. Dada joined him working there, making beds and caring for patients, but despite taking all the precautions that he urged on her, she quickly contracted TB herself. She was sent to the Alps to recuperate, and I was sent to Kingswood House, a boarding school in Epsom.
Schooling During Wartime
Like so many immigrants, my parents wanted the best for their children, so spent what money they had on a private education for me. But Kingswood was a brutal and unfair place, full of arbitrary punishment and cruelty. The cornerstones of the headmaster’s beliefs appeared to be that beating small children was a good thing – I was beaten regularly from my first day there – and that the Boer War was the pinnacle of British achievement. It would have been a grim experience for any child, but was particularly horrific for a homesick six-year-old Italian. I spoke a little English by then, but was certainly not fluent, and was hampered by dyslexia – as yet undiagnosed. I was bullied by other children too, but being unusually tall and later on a good boxer, I managed to defend myself.
I was miserable at Kingswood, crying myself to sleep every night – years of unhappiness that culminated in me sitting on a high window ledge at the age of nine or ten, trying to steel myself to jump. My parents were naturally very worried, and offered to move me, but I insisted on staying put; I had lost all my confidence and was too frightened of how much worse another school might be.
Me as a teenager at St John’s, Leatherhead.
Eventually, following a series of disastrous school reports, I was taken away from Kingswood and sent to a crammer called Downs Lodge (I used to annoy my parents by referring to it as a ‘school for backward children’), where classes of four or five pupils were intensively coached to prepare for Common Entrance, the entrance exam for English public schools. Here, I discovered I had some sporting ability, and this combined with more focussed tuition helped me to build my confidence and improve my mental state. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. I remember my tutor used to tell me to ‘hit the ball and forget about style’, a maxim that applied as well off the cricket pitch as on it. I felt liberated, and my marks began to improve. I was accepted at St John’s School in Leatherhead (a former seminary for Anglican priests), to which I could cycle every day from home. My parents helped hugely, providing any extra tutoring that was necessary for me to scrape through exams, though my academic aspirations remained modest – to be second from bottom rather than bottom in the class.
Around this time, I also started to make friends. A gang of us began to coalesce around a small muddy pond in Epsom, where we would catch newts and tadpoles, or practise falling through trees, using the branches to moderate and slow our descent. I met Michael Branch, who remains one of my closest friends, and Pat Lillies, my first girlfriend – a beautiful tomboy three years older than me (my uncle Giorgio eventually had to convince me that we should separate and not settle down in our teens). I grew in confidence and strength. Now I had my own people close around me.
Childhood in wartime was an extraordinary experience. I vividly remember the feeling of isolation and determination that we had when we crowded round the radio to hear the six o’clock news during the Battle of Britain, listening to Churchill’s speeches, the sound of the planes – Spitfires and Hurricanes – that seemed to be all that stood between us and invasion, and the strange sight of the elephantine barrage balloons flying above Hyde Park.
But the later period of the Second World War, and the Blitz in particular, was an amazing time for children. I really don’t think we considered the dangers. Air raids disrupted lessons and meant time off school, or crouching in the Morrison shelter (an indoor shelter with a heavy steel top, which we used as a table during the day, and I slept under at night). We would rush off on our bikes to hunt for shrapnel on bombsites. Beneath the county hospital in Epsom, where my father worked before being called up and sent to a hospital in Poona, was an undercroft, which ‘the gang’ occupied, furnishing it with animal heads and what we called ‘jewels’ (pieces of chandelier) pilfered from a nearby historic house where Canadian servicemen had been billeted.
As a teenager I also discovered books. I had only begun to read when I was eleven, so was rushing to catch up, and my parents weren’t keen on me reading rubbish, any more than they were keen on me eating, drinking or wearing rubbish. (My parents, though strict in some ways, were surprisingly liberal in others. Even as a teenager they let me have my girlfriends to stay the night, but I had to be at the table for breakfast, with or without my partner.) I would go to the library, prop myself against the wall, and spend hours racing through everything from patriotic stodge like Our Island Story that I was fed at school to Jules Verne’s thrilling visions of the future. As I got older, I progressed to Steinbeck and Hemingway, Dickens and Graham Greene, to Joyce, Orwell and Russell, to Sartre, Gide and Camus, to Pirandello, and dos Passos.
It was my problem with learning by heart that made my school days miserable. From the age of six to 18, I had to recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning, but I couldn’t remember it however hard I tried. Now we have a name – dyslexia – for this learning difficulty, but then it was simply seen as stupidity. We still know very little about the workings of the human brain, and dyslexia is a term for a set of symptoms and characteristics that we barely understand. I revisited Kingswood House in 2014: ironically, the school that failed me so badly as a child had opened a new centre specialising in teaching dyslexic children, which is a sign of progress.
People who are dyslexic think differently. We may not be comfortable with traditional teaching, but some dyslexic people have enhanced visual skills, and the ability to think in three dimensions. In my case, it made me realise at an early age that there was more strength in a group, in creative collaboration, than there was in the solo high achiever.
People have asked me whether dyslexia makes you a better architect. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but it does rule out some other careers, so focuses you on what you can do. It defines an area of possibility, as well as impossibility. I was lucky to find a profession where I could work with others to achieve results. But a lot of children did not have my luck; they found that their prospects were destroyed by a narrow education system and by having nobody to support them. Today there is a change. One of my pleasures in the House of Lords is meeting dyslexic children and their parents, and seeing the huge differences that good teaching and supportive local authorities can make.
