Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester

I cannot recall the crucial incident itself, can only remember how I cringed when my parents told me about it, proudly, some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’

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Vol. 23 No. 13 · 5 July 2001 » David Sylvester » Memoirs of a Pet Lamb (print version)
Pages 3-12 | 14240 words

Letters

From David Hamilton

I succeeded David Sylvester at 78 Teignmouth Road, NW2 as a child from 1947 to 1956 and the house was then exactly as he described it (LRB, 5 July). I even recognised the garden in the photograph. I, too, played in Gladstone Park, went to Lords and the Hippodrome at Golders Green and could get to Marble Arch by foot and trolley bus in fifteen minutes. The devout faithful still paraded past the house en route to Brondesbury Synagogue. Dr Lazarus Goldschmidt still lived next door, though he had by the 1950s developed the unfortunate habit of playing the piano, loudly and badly, for three hours every day, the Sabbath excluded. Finally, Sylvester's parents expected him to qualify as a lawyer. Fortunately for art criticism he did not; but I did.

David Hamilton
Camberley