Free Forged with Flames by Ann Fogarty, Anne Crawford Page B

me. What could I be thinking, expecting him to answer the door?’ Later, I realised what an invasion of privacy it really was.
    After waiting a short while, the door opened again. Cliff Richard was standing there with my record in his hand. He had this big smile as if he were really happy to see me. He said hello and although he didn’t really say much else, he was everything I’d imagined. He spoke pleasantly as he handed back the newly-signed record. I babbled something before the door closed and he was gone.
    Years later as I lay recovering from my burns in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, I received a signed photo, handed to me by one of the nurses. It read: ‘To Ann, Get well soon. Lots of luv! Cliff Richard’. He was in Australia doing a concert at the time and friends of mine in London, who knew I liked him and who were friendly with him, had asked him to sign a photo and send it into the hospital for a burns patient they knew. He was just doing something kind for a victim of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. How surprised he would have been had he known that fifteen years earlier, on his side of the world, I had stood on his doorstep in red knee socks and asked nervously for his autograph.

8
    A FATEFUL ATTRACTION
    T he attraction of Cliff Richard living so close wasn’t enough though to keep me in that first job. After four months of living what was a very lonely life for a teenager, I realised that I needed to work in a household where I was really part of the family. It was sad to contemplate leaving John and little Emma, and difficult to broach the subject with their parents, who didn’t want me to go, but I was determined. In an attempt to get me to change my mind, Mrs Hyman promised to hold a big party and invite Cliff. Surprisingly, even that prospect couldn’t entice me to stay. There was disappointment on both sides that it hadn’t worked out.
    I found my second job in The Lady , too—nannying jobs were plentiful so you could pick and choose. This one was in Edgware, another suburb in London’s north, with an older Jewish family, the Maybaums. (The Hymans were Jewish, too, but not religious.) There were four children to care for: Miriam, aged ten, Simon, eight, Naomi, three and Rebecca, just six weeks old. The children were boisterous and fun, and embraced me with enthusiasm right away. Mr and Mrs Maybaum were down-to-earthand warm. Right from the outset, I felt a part of the family and Mrs Maybaum, in particular, was someone you could talk to about anything, someone you’d enjoy having as a mother. I felt as if I were thawing out.
    The Maybaums’ home was nothing like the first house in grandeur. They’d bought two terrace houses and were knocking out the shared wall to turn them into one. When I first arrived, everything was higgledy-piggledy; stuff everywhere, the smell of dust in the air, small mounds of building rubble in the corners. The builders and other tradesmen onsite, some of them young, had great fun teasing me and would say, ‘Oh, look out! Here comes Mary Poppins again’.
    Before the wall between the houses was fully dismantled, the parents and the three eldest children slept in one house, while baby Rebecca, myself, Inge the Austrian au pair girl, and a couple of lodgers slept in the other. One day, just after the middle wall had been knocked down, Mr Maybaum completely forgot and came out of his bedroom with nothing on. I walked out of my room at the same moment and saw him starkers—the first time I’d seen a naked man. At first he was embarrassed, though probably not as much as I was, but when he laughed and said, ‘Oh, it really doesn’t matter, you’re one of our family now’, I had the most wonderful sense of finally belonging, of having a home.
    The Maybaums weren’t Orthodox but took their faith seriously. Mr Maybaum and Simon would clip on their kippahs every Saturday and walk to