The Warsaw I saw in March 1953 was a city without character, its flatness aped by the slab-eyed, snub-nosed features of a homogeneously fair-haired citizenry. Where, I wondered, were the black curls, flared nostrils, kiss-me mouths and deep-set eyes of Dovidl’s people? Gone to the smokestacks, from which none returned.

Breaking off the tour for lemon tea and sugar-dusted apple strudel in the gilded Hotel Bristol, I was apprised by the guide that it was in a room just above my head that the opera-loving Nazi governor, Hans Frank, sealed the fate of Warsaw’s Jews with a whispering pen on a sheet of hotel paper. I have never been able to eat apple strudel since that sick-sweet day.

I returned to find London, still bomb-gapped, in the grip of Coronation fever. A new Queen had come to the throne, fostering roseate dreams of a second Elizabethan Age. Aunt Mabel bought a television set to watch the ceremony, and it was on her sofa during the singing of Zadok the Priest that I was introduced to Myrtle, whom she and Mother had selected for me as a suitable life-partner.

‘She’s got good Medola breeding and a good head on her shoulders,’ said Mother, her eyes briefly reanimated.

‘Lovely teeth,’ confirmed Uncle Kenneth.

‘Nice hips,’ nudged Aunt Mabel.

Despite these encomia, I liked Myrtle, whom I had not seen since my barmitzvah. She looked me square in the eye and did not simper or flirt, like the Beckys and Hannahs thrust on me at dinner-dances. Her name was unusual, taken from a Biblical plant which is waved on the festival of Tabernacles.

‘Mother kept trying to plant some in our garden,’ she smiled, ‘but it never took.’

‘Fragrant and resilient,’ I rhapsodised.

‘I should be so lucky.’ She laughed.

‘Better than Hyssop,’ I retorted.

‘You’re the first Jewish man I have met,’ she said, on our second date, ‘who is tall enough to look me in the eye and make intelligent conversation. The rest are either short and brainy or big and grob, like butchers’ boys. The aunts are terrified that I will marry a goy.’

‘Let me offer you a rational alternative,’ I proposed.

‘I have received more romantic proposals,’ she laughed.

‘I could drop on one knee,’ I said, ‘but then I wouldn’t be looking you in the eye any more.’

‘Keep that girl’s mind occupied,’ advised Mabel. ‘She’s the right one for you and she’ll be loyal to the death, but she won’t settle for charity work and shopping mornings like your poor mother. She needs a challenge. She speaks three languages fluently. She could do literary translations in her spare time.’

‘No wife of mine will ever work for a living,’ I huffed, in the manner of the time.