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Copyright Christine Williams 1996 -1-

Interview from “Fathers and Sons” by Christine Williams. Published by HarperCollins, 1996.

Norman Swan, health journalist Norman Swan, a doctor who specialised in paediatrics, is now a leading media commentator on health affairs, publishing articles in the major dailies and presenting The Health Report on ABC Radio. He has three children under the age of ten, and having made his home in Sydney, he returns to Glasgow to visit his parents every couple of years. Norman thought perhaps he didn’t have much to say about his relationship with his father, a largely absent figure in his childhood, but having sat down to talk, he found there was quite a bit to say, after all. Norman Swan: My earliest memory is of a holiday journey by car to Bournemouth when I was aged about three or four. Cars feature reasonably strongly in early memories, as my father was a used-car salesman at that time. I’m told that by the age of four I could name every car on the road. Yet I have no interest in cars now. My father was not terribly present during my childhood, because not

only did he work during the day, he had a dance band and would work by night as well, and I would go for many days and only see my father momentarily, in the morning or evening in between his going and coming back from work. Christine Williams: At what age? Norman Swan: All my childhood. Then I left home when I was about eighteen. The only time he was consistently at home was when he changed work and became a schoolteacher. Then he was much more present during the school holidays, during my high school years. CW: What instrument did he play? NS: Woodwind. Saxophone. He ran away from home at the age of eighteen after first year medicine, to join a dance band in London. They were the pop groups of the day, during the war years. He actually made quite a good living playing in big bands. He then returned to Glasgow and went into business with his father who at various points had a dairy, a fruit shop, and then a second-hand car business. It’s the second-hand car business that really dominated my early childhood. And I imagine my father was a terrible salesman - he would have been too honest. I don’t think he even liked cars too much. CW: Were you proud of your father’s musical ability, or did you feel it intruded into your life, what was your feeling? NS: I was proud of his musical ability but I think children accept things. So I just accepted the fact that at weekends my father practised a lot. Another dominant memory is of my father in another room playing his saxophone because if he was off, he had to spend the day either practising or choosing his reeds for that evening’s gig, as he played clarinet as well. To a child it would take him seemingly hours to choose the right reed. CW: So it was a matter of ‘don’t disturb your father’? NS: Not really. It wasn’t precious. It was just a matter of him off having a blow. There was no resentment as a child. It was just taken as a matter of fact.

Interview from “Fathers and Sons” – Norman Swan, health journalist

Copyright Christine Williams 1996 - 2 -

CW: Any enjoyment? NS: Oh yes. I grew up with an aversion to pop music and I think that’s partly the musical background that I grew up in, which was basically 1940s dance music and jazz. So in the 60s I didn’t like The Beatles. I’m probably the only person in this world from my generation who didn’t like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. I still don’t much. It was a sound that jarred. In fact I can remember listening to that music and not understanding it. The same way I can’t understand the music my children listen to today. I grew up huddled over an old gramophone listening to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. CW: Did you learn music yourself? NS: Well it’s a bit like being a doctor’s child. The doctor’s child gets the worst care, and probably the music teacher’s child gets the worst music tuition, so at various times I learnt the piano, the oboe, the saxophone, the clarinet and the flute. And the instrument I suppose I went furthest with was the flute, but not that far. CW: You had two younger brothers? NS: And neither of them is musical at all. CW: Your father really didn’t spend much time teaching any of you? NS: No. The piano taught by an external teacher was the one my parents thought I should learn but I didn’t like it. I actually wanted to learn some of the other instruments, and had some aptitude on the flute but by that time I was in high school and had other priorities so I never went very far with it. CW: Can we learn a little more about your father running away from home when he was young, out of passion for music? NS: He grew up in a very inflexible family environment. He was an only child and it wasn’t a very warm family. He had a traumatic childhood in the Gorbals, a tenement, slum, rough migrant area of Glasgow, and his mother and her sister refused to cut my father’s hair until he was nine years old. So he grew up in one of the roughest areas of Western Europe at that time ... gang warfare ... it must have been traumatic. It happens in migrant families when people first arrive - some adapt and to some extent his father did, but as a unit the family never integrated terribly well. The experience my grandparents would have gone through, a Jewish family fleeing Russia - some people maladapt and some people become paranoid and a bit dysfunctional; at least that’s my perspective of their lives. CW: What did your father’s father do for work? NS: Well, he was never a terribly successful businessman. He was a shopkeeper, that sort of thing. My father escaped the family environment to go to London where he played for Ted Heath and Oscar Rabin, who led the top big bands of their day. When I was growing up and television began, the big bands were still around to some extent. My father could point out people who were contemporaries of his during the war. I was always fascinated by the 1930s and 1940s. Whether that was generated by my father’s anecdotes or whether I had a natural curiosity about it ... Remember we’re talking about the 1950s, only ten years or so after the war finished, and a lot of my parents’ talk was about the war. That’s not what you would have had in Australia at that time because the experience of the war was more distant. Glasgow went through a mini-Blitz and you’d hear stories about it. My father had had a bad leg and hip since childhood so he was unable to serve in the Army and he played in the entertainment corps. CW: Did your father express any pacifist views? NS: No. I grew up in a house with no books, no newspapers and no discussion of anything of



any import such as politics or current events. It was an environment which couldn’t be more different from the one in which I live now. I mean there was no bookshelf until I insisted on one in my room. In high school I went out and bought my own newspapers. I would find Radio Four, the Home Service, on the dial and would be told by my parents to turn it off because the noise was irritating. That changed, but there was a period when it was alien. If I brought friends home and we’d talk about issues or ideas there would be a certain hostility which still exists today. They feel excluded from that type of conversation and think it’s rude for somebody to come into the house and not enter into a conversation which they can join. CW: How did your father meet your mother? NS: I think one of my grandfather’s businesses was a tailoring factory. My mother was a secretary and went to work for them. They met there. CW: Why do you think your father was slightly hostile to your friends’ discussions about ideas and issues when they’d visit? NS: Habit, I think. He didn’t grow up in that environment. He reads the paper now but still doesn’t get a newspaper at home. But he obviously enjoys reading the paper when I buy it. He went to one of the best government schools in Glasgow and got into university to do medicine. He is definitely very bright. And I was encouraged to do well at school. CW: And television? NS: I think it was rationed, as was typical for most of my generation. CW: Your father went bankrupt when you were about nine. I suppose it’s hardly profound to surmise that it must have had a major impact on your life? NS: It was one of the major traumas of my childhood. We were never affluent and money was always an issue. But we lived in a reasonably nice house in a reasonably nice neighbourhood. You might describe us as lower middle class. My grandfather was a hopeless businessman, he’d gone through multiple businesses, and this second-hand car business crashed, leaving huge debts and huge family divisions. My mother blamed my father’s father for the collapse and also to a certain extent my father, and claimed my father had been done out of money by his father. We were left relatively penniless although, paradoxically, living in quite a nice house. We went through a phase when my father was on the dole and there was a real issue about providing enough food on the table. CW: You felt it as a boy. NS: Oh you couldn’t avoid it. Arguments at home; there was a schism with my father’s family; they didn’t talk to us, we didn’t talk to them. CW: Was the schism ongoing? NS: It was resolved, in part, three or four years later. CW: So how long was it before your father found work as a music teacher? NS: I grew up with the name Swirsky and this was the name we had right up until the bankruptcy. Every job my father applied for he didn’t get, and as many Jews did in those days, he changed his name, suspecting good old British anti-Semitism. The week after he changed his name he got a job. So around about the age of ten I became Norman Swan. CW: Did you change schools? NS: No. It just happened overnight. One day I walked into the class and the teacher announced that my name was ‘Swan’. Around about the same time I started wearing glasses. (Laugh).



CW: A makeover? NS: Yeah. A total new image. (Laughing) CW: Did you feel changed? NS: It’s certainly a weird experience for a child, changing your name, and having to deal with it. Kids in the class wanting to know why, and you’re not sure, although I had a clear idea it was to get a job. Anti-Semitism was an omnipresent phenomenon, growing up in Britain. Much more than in Australia. CW: What incidents can you remember? NS: The usual carping in the playground, the calling of names. When I went to high school, a fairly rough school, Jews were actually physically attacked. There was one Friday lunchtime when a Jewish kid was stabbed in the playground. I was once roughed up and my brother had a coat slashed. CW: Did the Jewish boys stick together? NS: Yes, there was a bit of that. My friends were mostly Jewish. I went to a Socialist-Zionist Youth Movement. CW: Was your father active as a Jew? NS: They were a typical traditional Jewish family of the era where the synagogue they attended was an orthodox Jewish synagogue. They would only go a handful of times a year, and when I was a child we kept a vaguely kosher home. But they would eat non-kosher food out of the home. When I was at high school they became less kosher. They carried a lot of baggage and had a vision of themselves as orthodox Jews but weren’t. CW: How many Jewish beliefs carried through from your father to you? NS: Very few. I don’t think my father was terribly well educated in Jewish culture. For example we would almost never have a proper Friday night, the beginning of the Sabbath, when traditionally you would have a fancy meal, light candles, say a blessing over the wine and the family would be together. My mother would always light the candles but we’d never have a formal dinner because on Friday nights my father was always ‘playing’; and I don’t think he ever had a Friday night when he was free. The family used to be together - my father wasn’t there, but my mother’s mother would come round. CW: Has an appreciation of Jewish culture increased for you during your own life or has it diminished? NS: No it hasn’t diminished. Quite a few things I did in my adolescence strengthened my Jewish identity. I was part of a youth movement, which was very ideological. As a result I went through the standard socialist revolutionary period as well receiving a Zionist education, which people who don’t understand Zionism think is a contradiction in terms. And all that was pretty alien to my parents. They didn’t know much about Israel and the thought that their child might go and live on a kibbutz was pretty radical for an essentially suburban Jewish family. They found it frightening that my mind was being altered by these people who were ‘brainwashing’ me about Socialism and Zionism. CW: And did you go? NS: No, although a lot of my friends did. You see, the essence of my relationship with my father in my childhood is that of a largely absent figure. My mother was the dominant parent in my life.



CW: So the appreciation of Jewish culture came through your mother? NS: Yes, but I didn’t grow up in a very intellectually stimulating environment. A lot of the tradition was acquired from my mother and that’s often the case in Jewish families. It’s a very matriarchal system in which the mother passes on the traditions. CW: That’s the ritual, but what about the philosophy? NS: I acquired that outside the family. CW: And is that strong now in your life? NS: A sense of Jewishness is very strong. But the orthodoxy is not strong. I attend a liberal synagogue, with probably about the same frequency as my parents, just a few times a year. CW: Can we talk about your father’s relationship with your mother as you saw it through a child’s eyes? NS: It was clearly stressful at times; in acute stress during the bankruptcy. It wasn’t a demonstrative relationship. But not many families were at that time. When I went to visit my friends at home their families didn’t seem any different. Mine seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but certainly things were tough when money was tight. I left home at eighteen, and I think the nature of their relationship has changed quite a lot as they’ve grown old together. They also had a child late in life which I think brought them together after the period of the bankruptcy. CW: So in later years did you see your father showing his caring side? NS: No, my father is still not very demonstrative. He’ll give me a hug, but there is a physical barrier to some extent which is certainly not there in my family life with my kids. I’m not actually reacting against anything in my childhood. I think there are lots of aspects of me which are similar to my parents but there lots that are different because I removed myself from the family environment quite significantly during my later adolescence. I wanted to get away, much to the chagrin of my parents. When I left school my choices were to go to drama school or a university to do medicine, and I decided it was far safer to be a second-rate doctor than a second-rate actor. CW: Yet you’d followed in your father’s footsteps. NS: No medicine was an insignificant part of my father’s life. He didn’t encourage me at all in that direction. The norm in the UK is for a student to leave home at the end of school and go to another city to study. I applied to get into Edinburgh University and this created enormous trauma in the family. My mother, with my father’s support, organised for any friend they could marshal to come in and counsel me against this. I actually buckled and went to Glasgow University; realised I’d made a mistake; had a miserable first year at University, and then transferred to Aberdeen. CW: Would you say that your father was weaker than your mother in their relationship and that was a model for you? You say you felt stifled at home, and perhaps that was because you didn’t have a father who was a strong model. NS: I think there was no question of that. I just had to get out of the environment. My father was not a dominant influence at any stage but I always respected him. And I think I have consciously broken that mould in my own life. My children would also see me as a relatively absent figure, I suspect, because I’m out early in the morning and I work late, often back home after they’ve gone to bed. But I think I play a more active role in family decision-making, decisions that my father wouldn’t have had any part of.



CW: For instance, when you had anti-Semitic violence shown against you at school, did you take that problem to your father? NS: Oh yes, and he responded strongly. My father took it to the school and advised me not to tackle it head on, to turn the other cheek. The attitude was that these kids were ne’er-do-wells, to let them be so and go on your own way, and I accept that. CW: Did you ever rebel against your father? NS: No. Occasionally there would be resentment when my mother would get fed up disciplining us so she would goad my father into action, and he wouldn’t quite know what he was getting into. He would set off to whack us but wouldn’t know why, really. He never had a strong sense of relating to children. Once he left me alone in the car far too long at the age of 4 or 5; another time he took me to a carnival and put me on a ride which was too scary and fast and I was petrified. But in fact, now, with my children he’s a very good grandpa, and will sit and play with them and talk with them for hours. Clearly all that was there when I was a child - he just didn’t have time for us then. I remember I was always jealous of non-Jewish kids whose fathers would take them off fishing, walking or camping. It’s a very non-Jewish thing to do, family holidays sailing, or building a fire in the backyard to have a barbecue. I always thought it would be fantastic to have a father like that. I never knew a Jewish kid who had a father like that - you know, shootin’, huntin’ and fishin’ or even fixin’ the car. I was never sporting. But now, with a son growing up in Australia I go to the cricket and watch the soccer. CW: So what do you see as the strongest influence from your father on your life? NS: I think that what I feel about my father is that I saw somebody who never really got it together. I saw a major catastrophe in the bankruptcy and I actually felt quite alienated from both parents at that time. I felt pride about his music, and later, saw that he was loved by his students. He would give me advice about money which I knew in my bones was wrong. So in a sense I resolved to follow through on my ambitions, believing that he hadn’t reached his potential and that I wasn’t going to be like that. If you look for the most significant influence my father had on me it was that I saw somebody with potential who didn’t achieve it and in a sense had poor judgements about life, and I wanted to be sure-footed and succeed. The influence the bankruptcy has had on my life is that I have a constant sense of financial insecurity. I still have that today. I know what it’s like to lose almost everything, and I don’t want ever to experience that again. It doesn’t mean I want to become a multi-millionaire, but I’m obsessed with financial security so I can explore my creative side, the interesting areas in my life, such as writing and broadcasting.

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