Monty Norman

A Walking Stick Full of Bagels begins on the day of his birth through to the present time. The title comes from an early paragraph in the book: "My Dad was too young to remember much of the shtetl (village) in Latvia or the journey with his mother to England. But he does remember arriving at Tilbury Docks and seeing his father on the dockside waving at them with his long walking stick on which he had inserted as many bagels as the stick could carry. My father never forgot that image of my grandfather and the "walking stick full of bagels". Neither have I". The reason Monty begins his story on the day of his birth is another interesting paragraph: "I was born in a nursing home in London's East End on the second night of the Jewish Passover. During the traditional family service at the home of my grandmother's house, the assembled family arrived at the symbolic moment when, by tradition, the door is flung open for the Angel Elijah to enter and sip a glass of wine (indicating that the Hebrew firstborn males at the time of Moses would be spared by God). On the night of my birth the tradition was enacted as usual but instead of Elijah entering, there was my breathless father - who had run all the way from the nursing home - upstaging the Angel by rushing in and proudly announcing, "It's a boy! It's a boy!". The autobigraphy chronicles Monty's early childhood in the East End, his evacuation at the beginning of the Second World War and his time in London during the heaviest part of the Blitz.