Freda Berkeley’s mystical quality

I never knew Freda well, but every encounter with her was a delight. I first met her through ‘Jim’ Lees-Milne, who on several occasions in the late 1970s and early 1980s invited us both to dinner at Brooks’s Club. From the start, I was aware both of her intense curiosity and her radiant benignity. She had a rare ability to draw one out, but also possessed what one can only describe as a magical, mystical quality: even when not talking to her one felt in sympathetic communication with her.

These dinner parties were never attended by Lennox, who I think had ceased to go out in the evenings, but sometimes by Jim’s formidable wife Alvilde. Jim, Alvilde and I represented something of an emotional tangle at the time, as Alvilde had decided to become slightly resentful of Jim’s fondness for me: Freda immediately sensed this, encouraged all three parties to confide in her, and proved a consoling friend to us all.

At Alvilde’s memorial service at Paddington Green in 1994 I met Tony Scotland, and I subsequently became intrigued by his biographical researches into Freda’s extraordinary life. I was able to make a small contribution to these by introducing him to another magical figure, the former parliamentarian Leo Abse, whom we visited at his house in Strand-on-the-Green where he regaled us with tales of immigrant Jewry in South Wales during the early 1900s. There Tony met Leo’s young Polish wife Ania who became a regular visitor to Freda during her last years, bearing gifts of delicious Polish food. In her mid-eighties, Freda was fascinated to learn about her Jewish origins, and I was privileged to be present at her first meeting with her cousin Lewis Bernstein (born in South Wales but long resident in America) and his wife over lunch at Hereford Mansions, a moving occasion.

I owe Freda a debt, as Jim had second thoughts about making me the heir to his literary copyrights; he consulted Freda, who assured him that I would not posthumously let him down. On Jim’s centenary in August 2008 Freda was unable to join the small commemorative lunch given to mark the anniversary, but invited us all to tea afterwards and was in exuberant form. Later that same month Leo Abse died: Tony and Julian accompanied me to his funeral in the Welsh valleys, and we made a detour to Merthyr Tydfil to visit the (now abandoned) synagogue founded there by Freda’s grandfather, Joseph Bernstein, in 1872, and the graves of her grandparents in the (still tended) Jewish cemetery.

I was uplifted by the haunting Gregorian Chant at Freda’s Requiem Mass in her parish church in Bayswater on 29 February 2016. At West London Synagogue the previous Shabbat I read the Kaddish for her, so that she might be remembered by the people from which she sprang.