In Remembrance of My Father

The man on the horse is my father. He is seen riding across a snowy landscape in Lesotho, Southern Africa. This image epitomizes how I would like to remember him: laughing as he gallops forwards, full of energy as he leans into the wind; keen for adventure, thirsty for the thrill of life, a little bit wild.

An only child, Nicholas’s story began in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was born on April 9th 1938. It was fate, and some rather bad holiday planning, that brought him to England. In 1939 his parents found themselves trapped in London at the outbreak of World War II. Apparently unaware of the impending conflict, they had arrived in the UK just two days before Churchill’s declaration of war.

Nicholas’s father, Solomon, worked as a surgeon in London’s hospitals, patching up the maimed and wounded while the family took up residence in a hotel. Nicholas’s earliest memories were of room service and of German bombs raining down on the British capital.

After a traditional English education at Westminster School and Trinity College Cambridge, where he obtained a First in Medicine and developed a love for literature, Nicholas seemed set to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the lucrative world of private medicine.
The Cambridge Graduate in the late 1950s

He had other plans.

After brief spells at Guys Hospital in London, which he described as an “endless soap opera of pretty nurses and paunchy consultants with fob watches and gold chains”, and the American Hospital in Paris, where he nurtured his early love for France, Nicholas began to move further afield.

He was keen to escape the life his parents wanted for him. And he was about to begin a lifelong journey, one that saw him traveling the globe, forever seeking a place where he might belong, that he might call home.

Perhaps his was the curse of the exile? His ancestors had fled Lithuania. His parents, perhaps still traumatized by their past, sought stability, comfort and status. Nicholas on the other hand was looking for something more. He wanted to give his life a deeper meaning.

Though he became the doctor his father wanted him to be, and though he never abandoned his Jewish roots, he seemed always in flight. Always caught in the paradox of being proud of his status and yet always wanting to transcend the banality of social labels. He resisted being defined. He wanted to be a doctor and a scientist and an artist and a bohemian too. He wanted it all.

His life choices seem, with hindsight, like a series of mini rebellions. Statements that said, I am not my parents, nor my ancestors. His love affairs and his marriages were always with non-Jews – to the chagrin of his parents and especially his mother who committed suicide while he was on his honeymoon (with my mother) in 1967.

Nicholas never wanted to be seen as English nor, god forbid, as South African. And he was, in truth, neither of those. In many ways, his was a restless, searching soul - a spirit that belonged fully to no nation.

Behind his grey-green eyes, which sometimes resembled glacial pools and sometimes glowed with such warmth, there were, I sensed, always the shadows of solitude and doubt; legacies, perhaps, of the many contradictions in his life. At times these shadows would eclipse his sparking spirit, plunging him into periods of torment and darkness.

But in 1968, with a golden future to play for, with good looks, intelligence and a first class education to thrust him forwards, the opportunities must have seemed endless.

It was in that year that a three-line advert in the Lancet caught Nicholas’s eye. A 35-bed hospital in Lesotho needed a doctor.

Thus, shortly after I was born, and just a few years after his marriage to my mother, Nicholas left England (without my mother or myself) to begin a life of travel and adventure. It was at this point that he effectively exited my life until I was 18 years old.
Nicholas outside the hospital in Lesotho

For the next two years, a missionary group called the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel employed Nicholas. He lived in a remote place called Mantsonyane and was the only doctor in a tiny rural hospital.

When the missionary priest was absent, the youthful Jewish physician extended his duties into the realm of the spiritual, conducting church services for the local Christian congregation.

Living rough in stone huts with thatched roofs and traveling to see patients over rugged mountains on horseback, he discovered the realities and hardships of life in the Third World.

Nicholas outside his hut in Lesotho

In his own words he “learned what it means to live on one meal of maize flour a day, what it feels like to go barefoot, clothed only in a blanket in the freezing winter days, and how many children die of diseases that elsewhere are entirely preventable.”

He began to ponder how improved nutrition and health could be delivered in places where resources were desperately scarce, resolving under an African sky to use his life “to improve health and survival for poorer communities in Africa and Asia”.

This was the purpose he had been searching for.

Nicholas found himself pulling teeth, dressing wounds resulting from alcohol-fuelled violence and even performing cesarean sections - with the help of a few textbooks and some advice from his father. Payment for his services was often in the form of live chickens.

When he ventured into South Africa proper, he made a point of displaying his opposition to apartheid, carrying bags for black African women and using his camera to document the regime’s injustices. He was eventually banned from South Africa, a status he wore as a badge of honour.

By 1970 Nicholas had met Therese Blanchet, with whom he was to share his life for next twenty or so years. In that same year, during a freak snowstorm in the highlands of Lesotho, their first child, Natasha, was born. She was also given an African name, Melehoa or “Mother of Snow”.

A year later Nicholas moved back to England where he read Epidemiology and Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene. He then traveled north to Nottingham University to work alongside Professor Maurice Backett at the recently founded Department of Community Health.

Ever the traveler and always determined to spend as much time as possible in the field, in 1976 Nicholas was on the road again, this time as part of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) smallpox eradication campaign.

Crisscrossing the remote and beautiful landscapes of Ethiopia in a yellow helicopter, Nicholas enjoyed the thrill of being on the frontline of medicine. His numerous photographs of that era depict a rustic society living in a manner that had changed little in centuries.


Nicholas in Ethiopia

A talented writer, Nicholas’s Ethiopian adventures are best and most evocatively described in his own words:

“We tracked smallpox from the green fertile slopes of Arussi, across the sand scarred start of the great African Rift valley at Awash, along the vertiginous eastern escarpment of Shoa and north west with the Afar towards the Danakil desert. Wilfried Thesiger trained his men on the same terrain before his crossing of the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia, recounted in Arabian Sands.

Waking at night in village huts, schools or tents, I could sometimes hear the hoarse coughing of lions. The yellow WHO helicopter flew me over random herds of zebra, frightened ostrich, baboon on the move, nomads carrying Italian 1930s rifles and families of hippo bathing in the crocodile infested Awash river. On the high plateau, bright red circles of spicy pepper could be seen drying beside every village. The beauty, the quality of the light, the mix of so many peoples – Amhara, Agober, Afar, Issa, Oromo, Yemeni, Arabic – made the backdrop of the landscape quite majestic. I felt that somehow we were at the centre of the Universe. I have not known sights and days like that before or after.”

Having returned to the gray skies of the British midlands and just a year after the birth of his second son, Alexis, in 1978 Nicholas was again packing his bags this time to move to Bangladesh where he lived for over a decade, working first with the Save the Children Fund and then with Helen Keller International, for whom he became Country Director.

With Natasha and Alexis in Bangladesh

His interests had by now almost completely shifted from conventional medical practice to the realm of public health and epidemiology. The challenge, as he saw it, was to formulate and implement policies that would improve the health and well being of entire populations.

In Bangladesh Nicholas had chosen one of the poorest nations on the planet. The problems were gargantuan. Typically, he sought to understand his adopted home from the inside out. He learned to read and write Bengali and immersed himself in the cultural life of the country.

With his full ginger beard and traditional Bengali attire, Nicholas cut a striking figure. He became a popular, well-known and sometimes controversial personality in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. A Jew living in a predominantly Muslim society he would sometimes explain that the letters M.D. after his name actually stood for Mohammed!

With Alexis on a trip to Calcutta

Determined to put his medical knowledge to good use, Nicholas also spent months at a time volunteering at Mother Teresa’s hospice for the dying at Khalighat in Calcutta, India. This was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Calcutta, a city to which he returned to live briefly later in life and of which he always talked and dreamed.

Much of Nicholas’s most important work for Helen Keller International in Bangladesh focused on Vitamin A deficiency and its role in causing blindness among the most vulnerable and malnourished sections of the population, especially children.

His colleagues remember him as a brilliant and daring thinker. His suggestion, for example, that stopping Bengali fathers from smoking might have a positive impact on child nutrition was originally met with skepticism, though it was later proved that economic resources diverted away from tobacco were often used to purchase healthier food. Stopping smoking wasn’t just better for people’s lungs it could also lead to a better diet.

In 1988 Nicholas celebrated the birth of his third son, Louis Felix, and moved back to Europe to take up a position at the World Health Organisation in Geneva where he worked as a consultant for seven years. Although he did not take easily to the bureaucracy of the UN, he nevertheless battled to get his ideas accepted.

Rare sighting in a suit

One co-worker at WHO described Nicholas as a “genuine pioneer” in his quest to see Vitamin A widely administered to children at risk in developing countries. A policy, wrote his colleague, that “has saved the lives of countless infants and the sight of even more.”

It was while working for WHO in Geneva that Nicholas met Nancy Jamieson, an American public health consultant he was to marry in 1997.

Nancy shared Nicholas’ fondness for the quirky side of life, his thirst for adventure and his love of Asia. In Nancy Nicholas found a kindred spirit, a global citizen who had led almost as many lives as he – working on trawlers in the wild seas off the Alaskan coast and bringing relief to communities on Pakistan’s wild northwestern frontier - a woman who had committed the latter part of her career to educating communities about the risks of AIDS.

Wedding day to Nancy

Nicholas and Nancy spent a number of happy years living in Delhi, Calcutta and Jakarta. Both worked as consultants traveling in the region. They spent many long days ferreting out the most interesting corners of the cities they lived in.

But by the mid 90’s, Nicholas was already beginning to show clear symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease that was to afflict him during the latter part of his life. Nancy, whose own father had suffered from the disease, knew what the future would hold.

Nicholas confronted his illness with courage and good humour, refusing steadfastly to be defined by it. Even as Parkinsons gradually stole from him the ability to travel and move around freely, he remained as dignified, as fun loving, as curious and as determined to savour the poetry of life as ever.

In 2000, Nicholas moved to Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. After years spent in France – a country he loved – and after the colour, intensity and vibrancy of life in Asia, Nicholas initially found life in North America dull.

But if British Columbia’s seduction was not immediate, he grew to love his life in Victoria. It was among the immigrants of Canada, and most especially amongst Victoria’s cosmopolitan Jewish community, that Nicholas felt most at home.

With Nancy’s help he found an apartment with a spectacular view across the straits of Juan de Fuca, looking towards the majestic Olympic Mountains on the American coast. His daughter Natasha, her husband Mutang and his two grandchildren Noeli and Agan lived close by and became a source of vital support and a focus for his love.

Despite his declining health, Nicholas remained a man whose zest for knowledge and love of life never diminished. He read widely and embraced new technologies, using Skype and Facebook to communicate with friends around the globe. He studied Thai, Russian and Italian in addition to the Bengali, Hebrew and French he already spoke fluently. And despite his handicaps he was always planning trips, always ready for a new adventure.

In December 2009, Nicholas returned to the UK, bringing his life full circle. He entered a nursing home in the town of Thames Ditton, close by my mother, where he noted that the cosmopolitan staff seemed a perfect reflection of his globalised past. Characteristically it was not long before he cut a familiar figure among local librarians and café owners.
A couple of hours after arriving in the UK. "Let's go to the pub!"

In September 2010 Nicholas fell ill with pneumonia. When doctors at a local hospital examined him more closely they found extensive cancerous tumours and informed him that he had but a few days to live.

He faced death with the same courage and dignity with which he had lived his entire life. He called those he loved to his bedside and waited patiently and peacefully for the end to come, smiling on his family and reciting prayers in Hebrew.

Looking back on my father's life, one can only feel sorrow. Sorrow that such a wealth of talent, that such depth of knowledge and culture should be lost. Such loss is akin, I feel, to an amputation. A part of one's life is forever gone and one must learn to adapt to a new, seemingly incomplete, world.
With me in London earlier this year

Looking beyond the immediate sorrow of mourning, looking beyond Nicholas's achievements and his talents, it is his extraordinary charisma that defines him most.

He was a man blessed with that invisible spiritual electricity that lights people up. He could arrive anywhere and instantly turn heads and before long he would be making new friends.

It was this charisma, combined with his rich life experience that made him a mentor for so many young people. For if his body deteriorated over time, the energy of his soul was ageless.

It is this ageless energy and charisma, mixed with many beautiful memories and the enduring warmth of his love, which remains.