The Thursday afternoon bridge game generally broke up around six o'clock. One evening when I had mentioned, before the last rubber, that I was staying in the West End, to go to the theatre, I made a slow exit from the card room.  Herbert caught up with me. "Do you have a moment for a drink?"

I could hardly say no. We went into the bar. I asked for a tomato juice. Herbert ordered a whisky sour and we took our glasses to two overstuffed chairs in the bay window. I was nervous of what Herbert might want of me. I hoped, fervently, that he would not ask that I advocate his selection in the team for the upcoming Devonshire Cup.

He said, "You're not a native European, Freddie, I gather."

"Chicago-born," I said. "Like Augie March. My maternal grandfather was a Mauser though."

"In the sense that you did not come to this country as a refugee."

"Far from it," I said.

"I did," he said, as if it might be a surprise. "I left Vienna only in 1939. At the last possible moment. I eshtayed to obtain my engineering degree. It was not easy to get out, but I managed to get a visa to Denmark."

"Why Denmark?"

"Beggars can't be choosers, and there were many beggars in Vienna, including many who had never begged before. Luckily, the Danish consul was a lady who took a fancy to me. She knew what I really wanted but meanwhile she wanted me and . . . we were both . . . eshatisfied. As soon as I got my visa, I went home and packed my things. I confess it: I thought only of myself and my future. My mother and my sister, I promised myself, were not in danger. No one imagined what the Nazis would do, not then." Herbert took a long sip of his whisky sour.  "So I went to Denmark and from Denmark I got to England. They let me in because I had my degree and a glowing letter of introduction—yes, I typed it myself!—to a company in Wolverhampton. I was carrying an Austrian passport, of course, which had been issued when I went to Italy to study in 1937. The British chose, for diplomatic reasons, to list Austria as a victim of Nazism and so I came to be admitted as one of the Allies. Twenty-one years old, I went to Wolverhampton to try and find work. I knew no one and I had no money. On top of that, on my first night in the Midlands, I developed a tooth-ache so agonising that I walked around the town all night looking for a dentist.  Four in the morning, I saw a brass plate, ‘JAMES MACKENZIE, HAROLD JOSEPH, DENTAL SURGEONS'. The place was locked up, of course, but I sat down on the doorstep, my jaw in both hands, and waited." He sipped more of his whisky sour. "The nurse arrived first and I told her the pain I was in. She asked me which of the partners did I want, Mr Mackenzie or Mr Joseph? Whichever came first, I said. No, I had to choose; so, OK, Mr Joseph. He turned out to be a big, bald-domed man with a little black moustache and a large nose and steel-rimmed spectacles. I sat in his chair and pointed in at the molar that was killing me. He took a look and said, ‘I'll soon pull that out for you.' He began to arrange his tools. My English was not good, at all, in those days. I looked at him and the pliers he was flexing and I said, in a very eshmall voice, ‘I'm a Yiddisher boy.' He looked round and said, ‘I beg your pardon?' I cleared my throat. ‘I'm a Yiddisher boy.' He put down the pliers and indicated to me to open wide. ‘Let's have another look at that tooth.'" 

Herbert turned to me and opened his mouth and put his finger on a gold-capped molar on his lower right jaw. "It was that one back there."

"So," I said, "you spent the war in Wolverhampton or what?"