My father has always been nominally Church of England. My mother was brought up as a Roman Catholic though she had a Jewish father. We were raised with nothing, though I received a sort of baptism by sprinkling at my great aunt Mabel's church in south Manchester,which was very low free church or something similar. My mother was always proud of her Jewish heritage and often reminded us of it. Whilst still living in Woodhouse Park we became friends with Franca's neighbours, a Catholic couple. I remember she was called Imelda and she had a sister called Mary, a gentle soul, whose affliction was that she was born looking elderly and witch-like. I think Imelda's husband was called George and their surname may have been Marshall. Imelda gave me a small plastic crucifix, and also an aloe plant that I kept alive for decades.
Religion till then consisted of attending my auntie Lynn's wedding, and later going fearfully to Methodist chapel services at Iddesleigh with my grandparents.
I must have been nine years old when I went to stay with Auntie Anne and Uncle Vic, a childless, kindly couple who were somehow connected with the Manchester firm of Quiligotti who manufactured terrazzo flooring. They would have liked to have adopted me. I stayed with them a couple of times at their home near All Saints. They also had living with them a young man called Aldo who was an Italian war orphan. Whilst I was staying there Aldo went before a tribunal who had to decide on his most likely age as he had no memory of who he was or who his parents were. I remember that he was surprised with their decision. I also remember sharing a bed with several males and I was the youngest, and going to the toilet entailed climbing over them. Perhaps it was Vic and Aldo.
Anne and Vic took me with them on a Sunday morning to the Jesuit church of the Holy Name in Manchester, near the university. This was the first time I had attended such a service, and I remember fainting with the smell of the incense. Perhaps I was hungry too. I was fascinated by the pomp and ceremony and loved it, and told my parents about it upon my return home. I think this must have prompted feelings on my mother's part, with the consequence that we all underwent conditional baptism at the church of the English Martyrs in Alexandra Road very close to 16, Manley Road, and my parents went through a form of marriage. I wonder if this meant that we were till then illegitimate. I started to receive instruction at the Cenacle Convent in Alexandra Road South. I would go there on a Saturday morning, and the gentle Mother Pascal would be summoned by a special code rung on a handbell. Soon we also changed school, so that I left Chorlton Park Primary School, which I had quite liked, especially the student teacher Miss Markarian, and I transferred to the Bishop Bilsborrow Roman Catholic primary school adjacent to the bus depot and a depressing place with atrocious toilets and only a tarmaced yard and not a blade of grass, though Alexandra Park was opposite but we never went there. Instead we marched in procession each day to huts behind St James's church in Princess Road near to the Manchester City football ground in Maine Road for our school dinner.
The headmistress of the school was Mother Monica, a nun of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an order that was based at the Loreto Convent in Moss Side. It was on my first day at the school that I attended the school assembly and made the sign of the cross back to front, in the Greek Orthodox manner. Mother Monica interrupted the assembly to point out my mistake and make sure I and everybody else made the sign of the cross correctly. Twenty years later when I was a lecturer in St Albans I discovered that Mother Monica was living in retirement at their convent across the road from the college, and I visited her. "Frank Gent?" she said, "Oh yes, that very quiet boy."
I have no recollection of my first communion whilst at Bishop Bilsborrow's, but I do remember a little of my confirmation by Bishop Beck, when I bravely chose the confirmation name of Anthony Mary.
Disillusionment with Roman Catholicism came though with puberty. As masturbation was a mortal sin, with the threat of eternal damnation hanging over me if I were to die after a wank, it meant going to confession late on a Saturday, receiving communion on Sunday morning, and then there was afterwards the glorious relief of masturbation and orgasm. It was a mental and physical torment, which I sometimes resolved by brazenly masturbating in front of a crucifix.
When I went to St Bede's College at the age of eleven after passing my 11+ I experienced the delights of solemn high masses in all their Tridentine splendour, and loved it. By the age of about fourteen I became a sacristan and altar boy at the Cenacle convent, and enjoyed the friendship of Sister Anne Waite and Sister Maud Burns. The religious life did appeal to me, and I enjoyed the status that helping at the convent gave me. As well as serving at benediction each day I did sundry odd jobs, and was often served tea and cake on a tray in the priests’ parlour. I was also allowed to enter the enclosure to perform my various tasks.
I, along with many other boys, experienced the prurient enquiries of Monsignor Duggan, the rector of St Bede’s, who delighted in gliding along the corridors and asking boys of they were pure. He also delighted in sexually abusing many boys, and I came quite close to this myself. The first time must have been in January of my first year, 1961, and I typed my own absence note on a toy typewriter, having inadvertently gone back after the Christmas break a day late. For this I was required to go to his study, remove my trousers and underpants, bend over the arm of his chesterfield, and receive six strokes from his leather strap, a humiliating procedure, which was followed by an arm round my shoulder and the usual question about being pure. A year later I received the same punishment for attempting to cheat in a chemistry exam - a subject that was singularly badly taught - with the difference this time that after my thrashing I was required to stand half dressed facing the wall while Monsignor Duggan retreated to his neighbouring bedroom and I heard the noise of a rustling soutane.
Monsignor Duggan left suddenly when I was in the sixth form and was succeeded by Father Geoffrey Burke, who interviewed me and asked me if I had considered the priesthood. By that time my attitude was changing, Catholicism was becoming less attractive, and I was already becoming more attached to my Jewish heritage. When eleven I had bought the book 'Teach Yourself Biblical Hebrew'. My father also gave me Hebrew grammars from his Jewish customers. Father Dearman at the school had studied Biblical Hebrew at the Gregorian University in Rome, and he had encouraged me. Then, in June, 1967, when I was in the first year of the sixth form, the Six Day War took place in Israel, and this gave my mother a huge surge in her Jewish identity, previously limited to a tribal connection chiefly shown by recognising who was Jewish in film credits. It was the first time I considered going to Israel, to help as a volunteer, but at the time my mother was also pregnant with my younger brother, and was spending most of her time in hospital in Manchester while I looked after my father and younger sisters.
During my first year at university I finally lapsed completely from Roman Catholicism. Partly it was a sexual issue. It was towards the end of my second year in 1970 that I bought the Penguin paperback 'Boys and Sex' by Wardell B. Pomeroy and it undermined completely the Roman Catholic teachings I had unsuccessfully attempted to assimilate and allowed me at last to feel normal. It was read out loud in my room in the hall of residence by a group of about ten students of both sexes reading in turn. We were all learning and this was a good way to do it.
I cannot remember if it was at the university of Leicester or the following year at the university of Southampton that I made use of the language laboratory to start to study Modern Hebrew, as I still had longings to explore my Jewish roots and to go to Israel. It was during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 that I attempted to seriously do something about this, and applied to Kibbutz Representatives in London with the intention of going there as a volunteer. Despite my attempts nothing came of this.
I suppose the real turning point came for me in the Spring of 1977. I was very much involved with New Dimensions in Education, an organisation set up by Vi Howe, the Modern Languages Adviser for Hertfordshire County Council, that organised colonies de vacances for French and English children. I had first become involved in French colonies whilst at university, having been trained by CEMEA — Centres d'Entraînement aux Méthodes de l'Education Active. On April 2nd 1977 I went to Victoria Station to lead a group of English young people who were to train as youth leaders in France together with French young people. It was here that I met my life partner, whom I instinctively recognised as Jewish, and who in fact had a similar background to myself, having a mother who was a refugee from Nazi persecution, like my own.
In January, 1979, I went with my partner to Israel for the first time. Because of the bad weather our flight was delayed so we were there for less than a week, but we did explore the country together. That summer I resigned from my post as a college lecturer, and travelled in the autumn with my partner, via a visit to my grandfather at Peschiera, and a stay at Senigallia followed by a ferry trip to Poros and Spetse, eventually travelling by ferry to Haifa.
I spent two and a half years in Israel, firstly on kibbutz, then at another kibbutz working and learning Hebrew, and finally in Ma'alot, a small town in the north near the Lebanese border. In those days most of the residents were immigrants from Morocco. We were adopted by Eli and Rachel Shitrit. He ran a small shop selling Jewish religious artefacts, and it was here that I bought my first tallit, or prayer shawl, which I still use now and hope to be buried in one day. We started attending his shul, which was named for and on the site of the Ma'alot massacre of five years before when twenty five children in the school were killed. I was made welcome here, and was taught much that I know about Judaism, its traditions and worship. Curiously, although the worshippers were of Moroccan origin, they mostly followed Ashkenazi forms of worship.
We returned to England early in 1981, and I was finally circumcised as I had long desired. That summer we were back in Ma'alot as madrichim, and had been planning to make aliyah to settle there, but the Israeli invasion of Lebanon took place in June, 1982, and we saw the grief of our friend Hayah Sklaar, whose only son was killed on the first day of the invasion. We were not to return to Israel till 1997.
Whilst in England we had sold my flat in St Albans and moved to a derelict cottage in Bideford, with the intention of renovating it so that we could let it out as a source of income when we made aliyah, knowing that it might be difficult to find good employment in Israel. Our plans changed, and we stayed in Devon, but we missed Jewish contact, which we only had through Mr and Mrs Lewis who ran the newsagents round the corner in Bridgeland Street. It was in this way that we started to make contact with the Exeter synagogue, and fortuitously services had recently been resumed by Harry Freedman, who became a lifelong friend. We were caught up in the enthusiasm, and I started a regular newsletter. We had become since our time in Israel big fans of the Jewish Catalogue, three self help manuals for Jews who wanted to know more about Jewish beliefs and practices. I have stayed proudly Jewish ever since.
