ABSTRACT
I owe my career, in large measure, to a cuckoo clock, and a particularly ugly one at that. I had returned for Christmas to my parents’ home in Vienna in the winter of 1933/34. When I finally decided to return to England and start on what I knew was an unpromising, and suspected would be a long, search for a job, my father asked me to take along a “small present” that an old friend wanted to send his son in London. It turned out to be a cuckoo clock, 5 feet tall and so heavy I could barely lift it. The train was crowded and I had to move the bulky clock to let people get on and off every time we stopped. I had to lug it from one station in Paris to another and get it on and off the cross-Channel boat. As soon as I reached Victoria Station in London, I called Richard Mosell, the recipient of the “small present”—it was then ten in the morning or so. “Why don’t you hop into a cab and deliver the clock to me right now?” he said. “Then you won’t have to carry it back home first.”
