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  We swapped the elegantly furnished flat with a view over Florentine rooftops for a single room in a boarding house in Bayswater, with a coin meter for the heating and a bath in a cupboard that we used to fill with hot water to take the edge off the flat’s chill. Nino had only been able to smuggle a few hundred pounds out of Italy and though we weren’t living in poverty, life was a lot tougher than it had been in Florence. The first Christmas was dark and cold, and my only present was a grey lead toy submarine. I felt my parents had let me down.

  Life had switched from colour to black-and-white. London was occasionally enveloped by smog from thousands of coal fires, which in later years filled the city so thickly that all sense of direction was lost within a few steps of your front door, like being submerged in thick black oil. My mother had to learn to cook more or less from scratch, and missed Florence’s rolling cityscape so much that in her first few months she took to walking the streets of London looking for hills to climb, to get a better view of her new city.

  Nino urgently needed to find work. Fortunately, his previous visit in 1932 had enabled him to register as a doctor, and we moved to Godalming early the next year, where he initially took up a job in a tuberculosis clinic. Dada joined him working there, making beds and caring for patients, but despite taking all the precautions that he urged on her, she quickly contracted TB herself. She was sent to the Alps to recuperate, and I was sent to Kingswood House, a boarding school in Epsom.

  Schooling During Wartime

  Like so many immigrants, my parents wanted the best for their children, so spent what money they had on a private education for me. But Kingswood was a brutal and unfair place, full of arbitrary punishment and cruelty. The cornerstones of the headmaster’s beliefs appeared to be that beating small children was a good thing – I was beaten regularly from my first day there – and that the Boer War was the pinnacle of British achievement. It would have been a grim experience for any child, but was particularly horrific for a homesick six-year-old Italian. I spoke a little English by then, but was certainly not fluent, and was hampered by dyslexia – as yet undiagnosed. I was bullied by other children too, but being unusually tall and later on a good boxer, I managed to defend myself.

  I was miserable at Kingswood, crying myself to sleep every night – years of unhappiness that culminated in me sitting on a high window ledge at the age of nine or ten, trying to steel myself to jump. My parents were naturally very worried, and offered to move me, but I insisted on staying put; I had lost all my confidence and was too frightened of how much worse another school might be.

  Me as a teenager at St John’s, Leatherhead.

  Eventually, following a series of disastrous school reports, I was taken away from Kingswood and sent to a crammer called Downs Lodge (I used to annoy my parents by referring to it as a ‘school for backward children’), where classes of four or five pupils were intensively coached to prepare for Common Entrance, the entrance exam for English public schools. Here, I discovered I had some sporting ability, and this combined with more focussed tuition helped me to build my confidence and improve my mental state. The atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. I remember my tutor used to tell me to ‘hit the ball and forget about style’, a maxim that applied as well off the cricket pitch as on it. I felt liberated, and my marks began to improve. I was accepted at St John’s School in Leatherhead (a former seminary for Anglican priests), to which I could cycle every day from home. My parents helped hugely, providing any extra tutoring that was necessary for me to scrape through exams, though my academic aspirations remained modest – to be second from bottom rather than bottom in the class.

  Around this time, I also started to make friends. A gang of us began to coalesce around a small muddy pond in Epsom, where we would catch newts and tadpoles, or practise falling through trees, using the branches to moderate and slow our descent. I met Michael Branch, who remains one of my closest friends, and Pat Lillies, my first girlfriend – a beautiful tomboy three years older than me (my uncle Giorgio eventually had to convince me that we should separate and not settle down in our teens). I grew in confidence and strength. Now I had my own people close around me.

  Childhood in wartime was an extraordinary experience. I vividly remember the feeling of isolation and determination that we had when we crowded round the radio to hear the six o’clock news during the Battle of Britain, listening to Churchill’s speeches, the sound of the planes – Spitfires and Hurricanes – that seemed to be all that stood between us and invasion, and the strange sight of the elephantine barrage balloons flying above Hyde Park.

  But the later period of the Second World War, and the Blitz in particular, was an amazing time for children. I really don’t think we considered the dangers. Air raids disrupted lessons and meant time off school, or crouching in the Morrison shelter (an indoor shelter with a heavy steel top, which we used as a table during the day, and I slept under at night). We would rush off on our bikes to hunt for shrapnel on bombsites. Beneath the county hospital in Epsom, where my father worked before being called up and sent to a hospital in Poona, was an undercroft, which ‘the gang’ occupied, furnishing it with animal heads and what we called ‘jewels’ (pieces of chandelier) pilfered from a nearby historic house where Canadian servicemen had been billeted.

  As a teenager I also discovered books. I had only begun to read when I was eleven, so was rushing to catch up, and my parents weren’t keen on me reading rubbish, any more than they were keen on me eating, drinking or wearing rubbish. (My parents, though strict in some ways, were surprisingly liberal in others. Even as a teenager they let me have my girlfriends to stay the night, but I had to be at the table for breakfast, with or without my partner.) I would go to the library, prop myself against the wall, and spend hours racing through everything from patriotic stodge like Our Island Story that I was fed at school to Jules Verne’s thrilling visions of the future. As I got older, I progressed to Steinbeck and Hemingway, Dickens and Graham Greene, to Joyce, Orwell and Russell, to Sartre, Gide and Camus, to Pirandello, and dos Passos.

  It was my problem with learning by heart that made my school days miserable. From the age of six to 18, I had to recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning, but I couldn’t remember it however hard I tried. Now we have a name – dyslexia – for this learning difficulty, but then it was simply seen as stupidity. We still know very little about the workings of the human brain, and dyslexia is a term for a set of symptoms and characteristics that we barely understand. I revisited Kingswood House in 2014: ironically, the school that failed me so badly as a child had opened a new centre specialising in teaching dyslexic children, which is a sign of progress.

  People who are dyslexic think differently. We may not be comfortable with traditional teaching, but some dyslexic people have enhanced visual skills, and the ability to think in three dimensions. In my case, it made me realise at an early age that there was more strength in a group, in creative collaboration, than there was in the solo high achiever.

  People have asked me whether dyslexia makes you a better architect. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but it does rule out some other careers, so focuses you on what you can do. It defines an area of possibility, as well as impossibility. I was lucky to find a profession where I could work with others to achieve results. But a lot of children did not have my luck; they found that their prospects were destroyed by a narrow education system and by having nobody to support them. Today there is a change. One of my pleasures in the House of Lords is meeting dyslexic children and their parents, and seeing the huge differences that good teaching and supportive local authorities can make.

  The Skylon, designed by Powell & Moya with Felix Samuely, at the 1951 Festival of Britain. To the very left is the edge of the Dome of Discovery. These modernist icons contrast with the ornate high Victorian style of Whitehall Court in the background.

  1945 – A Brave New World

  In the 1945 general election, the British people made an amazing decision: they t
urned their backs on Churchill, the great war leader, and voted Labour – for the party that promised to bring a new world into being, despite the country being almost bankrupt by the war. The gap between rich and poor began to narrow, probably for the first time in modern history, and a progressive post-war consensus was established that survived till the late 1970s.

  My parents were excited by the possibilities of this new beginning, and the politics and policies of the day were discussed, sometimes loudly, at every family meal. Unlike many doctors, my father was an enthusiast for the Beveridge Report and the establishment of the National Health Service. The politicians of that era – Bevan, Attlee, Bevin and Morrison – still stand out for me as heroes of modern society.

  James Chuter-Ede, who was Home Secretary in that government, was a patient of my father’s. Chuter-Ede and his wife had no children of their own, and he took me under his wing, taking me out in his little boat The Brown Duck on the Thames near Hampton Court. I still have some of the bird-spotting books he gave me. He was the most charming, low-key and unpretentious politician I have ever met and I remember how unhappy he was to be moved from Education to the Home Office in 1945 (where he had to oversee capital punishment, against his every principle). Together with my parents he sparked in me a lifelong commitment to progressive politics. At my school elections I stood for the Labour Party – always an unpopular position in an English private school – winning about two votes.

  If politics was progressive at the time, England was still reserved about culture; people bridled at the word. It was seen as something alien, faintly suspicious. Modernity in the visual arts was seen as particularly suspect. In a continental doctor’s surgery, you would see a reproduction of a Picasso or Braque in the waiting room. In an English surgery, you would be lucky to see a sentimental watercolour of a landscape. The country seemed starved of visual stimulus. We didn’t lack the artists – Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Patrick Heron, Tony Caro, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson – but they had limited recognition. It would take twenty or thirty years before Nick Serota at the Tate, Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths and Charles Saatchi would open up contemporary British art to the British people, and to the world.

  My parents didn’t share these reservations – they were excited by the modern movement and inspired by what the great Australian art critic Robert Hughes would later call ‘the shock of the new’. But I remember the public outcry that greeted the Picasso exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945; the newspaper critics declaring that donkeys could paint better with their tails, and rolling out all the usual criticisms levelled by those who can’t – or won’t – understand modern art. Modern design was also seen as something foreign, as were grand city plans and there was some truth in this. British architecture had benefited from an influx of brilliant foreigners – exiles from the Bauhaus, architects like Gropius, Lubetkin, Mendelsohn and Chermayeff – in the 1930s and after the war. But there was no modern furniture or even clothing. It was as if everything had to be rooted in the distant past.

  Still, the spirit of utility and austerity was starting to stimulate British modernism, and bring its architecture into the mainstream, unlocking creativity in the design of everything from dresses, to furniture, to health centres. Everything had to be constructed with minimal materials, which forced designers to eliminate the showy ornamentation of Gothic revival, Rococo and Baroque architecture. And there was a new sense of the possibility of creating a better society, and a small but growing appetite for the cleaner lines of a contemporary world. So, while England was still grey, the seeds of modernism were being sown, mingling with a more conservative and romantic tradition. It found an early expression at the Festival of Britain in 1951, where my mother and I marvelled at the way that art and science came together in the Dome of Discovery and the Skylon.

  The growing influence of modernism was underpinned by an optimistic belief, amid all the scarcity, that communal action could create a fairer world – winning the peace as it had the war, building homes, hospitals and schools. The war had changed society (rationing had actually improved public health), unifying the British socially and politically in a way that would have seemed unthinkable in the 1930s. The modernist style was an expression of a deeper social purpose, letting light and air into a dark and dusty world, creating healthier places for a new generation.

  Rediscovering Italy

  As soon as the war ended, my parents and I began to travel to Italy every summer to visit our family in Venice, Florence and Trieste. We were hungry for the culture that seemed still to be rationed in England, rediscovering cities that I could barely remember from my childhood. At first we travelled in buses, as the war had devastated much of the continent’s rail infrastructure, then we took trains.

  The first place I visited with my parents was Venice, on the way to see my grandparents in Trieste, and I remember very well thinking, as we trailed round church after church and gallery after gallery, ‘I suppose one day all this will make sense.’ Even then I knew that, however boring the paintings seemed to me as a teenager, here was something to file away, rather than to ignore completely. I rediscovered my Italian family, staying with my aunt in Florence, my uncle in Rome, my grandparents in Trieste and my cousin Ernesto in Milan. In Florence, my father was a wonderful guide with a deep knowledge of the buildings and their history, and he would walk the streets pointing out highlights to us, as I do now with my children and grandchildren. My grandfather did the same in Trieste.

  At the age of 17, I began to travel independently, hitch-hiking and jumping trains. In Italy, my aunts and uncles would give me enough money to carry on to other relatives’ houses. I was adventurous; I ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and dodged ticket collectors by hanging on the outside of trains; I spent a night in the cells in San Sebastián after being arrested by the Franco-ist Guardia Civil for swimming naked in the sea.

  One adventure nearly tipped over into disaster. After I had left school, I went back to Venice with a friend who had the self-explanatory name ‘Big John’. We had checked into a hostel and were travelling to the old city on a vaporetto. Suddenly the captain started shouting at Big John to get off the boat, then I was being jostled by the crowd and one man in particular who seemed to be trying to push me into the water. I fended him off without much difficulty, and when the police met the boat I assumed they would be taking him away for his unprovoked attack.

  On the quayside, my attacker really went for me, and I landed a punch on his jaw (my schoolboy prowess at boxing showing itself). He went down on the ground, and we were escorted to the police station. After a while, they took my passport, asked me to sign a statement and said we could go.

  When I went back to collect my passport the next day, however, I was thrown into jail. I was accused of groping my attacker’s wife on the boat at the same time as fighting with her husband, who now claimed he had lost teeth as a result (this, the magistrate explained, was a permanent injury, making the accusation more serious). So I passed the night in a cell with two prostitutes, an 80-year-old man who had spent most of his life inside, and two cigarette smugglers.

  The following morning, I was taken to see a magistrate, and sent off in manacles across Piazza San Marco in a long line of prisoners, then to a squalid prison on one of the outlying islands. I was there for two weeks in solitary confinement, only able to see a crack of light from a high window, without even a belt to hold up my trousers.

  When I was brought back in front of the magistrate, it turned out that his father worked for my grandfather. He told me that I was in serious trouble, and could be locked up for years for the alleged sexual and violent assaults. He granted me bail, and quietly indicated that I abscond as quickly as possible. My grandfather put up the money and I got out. After spending a weekend being shown the alternative sights of Venice by one of the prostitutes I had met in jail (to my grandfather’s utter fury), I made it to Trieste, which was then outside Italian jurisdiction and subsequently received
a pardon after an exchange of letter between lawyers and the Vatican, which enabled me to return to Italy.

  Eugenio Geiringer, my great grandfather, an architect and engineer, who built several landmark buildings in Trieste, including the Town Hall and the offices of Assicurazioni Generali, the insurance company that had been founded by members of his family.

  Villa Geiringer in Trieste, the neo-medieval castle that Eugenio designed for his family, with a funicular railway that stopped at the Villa on its way to the neighbouring town of Opicina.

  In prison, I lost all sense of time and perspective on the outside world. I was pretty fit, but that period of isolation really took its toll. It made me wonder how prisoners coped, though it had also shown me that the people behind bars were often better and kinder than the people locking them up. I began to question my assumptions about law and order, about who the good guys and the bad guys really were. It also made me realise how privileged and lucky I was. If it hadn’t been for my grandfather’s influence, I could have been stuck in jail, on spurious charges, for years.

  Military Service in Trieste; Architecture in Milan

  Leaving school in 1951, I had no idea what I wanted to do. It was made clear that I was expected to enter one of the professions. My grandfather felt that I should become a dentist, like him, but my lack of A levels fortunately ruled that out. Indeed my academic record had led one careers adviser to suggest a job with the South African police force, perhaps feeling that my boxing skills would be useful, but ignoring the fact that my political beliefs made this just about the least likely career path I would ever take.

  My grandfather, Riccardo Geiringer, after whom I was named.