Jeremy Rosen Online

In 1948 I was six years old. My father moved us, his family, from a Jewish urban setting in North London to the English countryside. He had decided to establish a Jewish English Public school on an estate outside Newbury, Berkshire. A few years later the school and we moved again, this time to Mongewell Park, a Thameside estate just south of the town of Wallingford, in the Oxfordshire countryside.

In one way it was idyllic, growing up on a country estate on the banks of the Thames. But it was also isolating and alienating. I was an outsider in Wallingford and whenever I went up to London I felt an outsider there. This was made all the worse by my being the son of the Headmaster. I was always suspected of being a ‘spy.’ Everyone assumed I would tell my father everything that went on in school behind the teachers' backs. What marked me out even more was that I came from a religious home whereas almost every other Jew around me came from a lapsed or secular background.

Over time I made a positive value out of this sense of dislocation and otherness. But these stories, which are a mixture of fact and fantasy intertwined, reflect something of my fascination with life in rural England and my sense that in almost every respect, as Jew and an outsider, I did not really belong.

Jeremy Rosen 2010