Singing for your supper

On 23 February l937 a small boy of seven arrives at Victoria station, London. Here he is met, as arranged, by his uncle, a man he has never seen before though he has heard an intriguing plenty about him – that he is very amusing and also famous, a national hero. The boy doesn’t understand his own present situation. Why has he had to come to this distant foreign country and undergo an immediate name-change, from Andrei to Andrew? Why did his father, who travelled with him for a whole fatiguing week across Europe from Romania, abandon him in Paris, rather than accompany him to London himself? Why did he have no proper leave-taking with his mother, that affectionate, devout woman, mysteriously referred to in some quarters as the ‘Debt-Collector’s daughter’? Answers to these questions are not to be given him for many years, and comprehension of the dreadful realities behind them won’t come until adulthood.