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Oral history recording with Barbara Joan Michaels collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born in Birmingham in 1933. My paternal grandfather was Dutch. Not until many years after he died did we learn of members of the our family who had perished during the Nazi occupation of Holland. I had what I’d call a traditional Jewish upbringing. My parents weren’t ultra-frum but we had Friday nights and my parents belonged to Singers Hill Synagogue. We moved to Shrewsbury when I was six years old after a bomb had dropped at the bottom of our garden. We lived opposite a farm. I can I still remember having a great time collecting eggs. My mother, who came from the East End of London, never got used to the farm. As soon as there was any sign of a cow she was out of the gate. My father was in the furniture business and stayed in Birmingham during the week and came down at weekends. During the war he used to do fire watch on the roof of the furniture shop. On one particular night he should have been on duty but wasn’t. The shop was bombed flat and razed to the ground. I was very close to my father so that was a poignant memory that’s stayed with me. I got into university on the results of my school cert, and to my father’s horror and disbelief, I refused to go. I wanted to work on a newspaper. My father had left school at fourteen and must have been so disappointed. It wasn’t until I was seventy, here in Cardiff, that I went to university and graduated as a very mature student with a BA in English Literature. I hope my father knew. It was a male world in those days and very difficult to get a job on a newspaper as a woman, but I managed to get a job with a local paper and after a while I was given my own page – the ‘Woman’s Page.’ Every week I had to produce a recipe, which was a difficulty for me because in those days I couldn’t boil an egg. So I raided my mother’s cookery books and I used to copy the recipes down with no idea really. On one disastrous occasion I left the eggs out of a cake recipe and our switchboard was jammed with complaints. But apart from that the column went well. I did that for a year and then went to work for the Slough Observer. I became the paper’s theatre critic, and had another column called ‘Pets in Peril’, an absolute nightmare. I got married in 1955 to David Michaels, from Ealing, London. We had three children. After my youngest was born I went back to journalism, working for a syndication agency and as a freelance journalist specialising in celebrity interviews. Eventually, I opened my own agency which I ran until my beloved husband became ill with a brain tumour. He died in 1991. He was only 64. All my children married Jewish partners, and I have six grandchildren. In later years I switched from interviewing “celebs” to writing about houses and collectables, also doing book reviews. I am now writing fiction, theatre and book reviews, and have just taken over as Editor of Bimah, the magazine for the Jewish community in South and Mid-Wales. I came to Cardiff in 1996. When I was contemplating coming down here one of the first things I did was to contact Rabbi Elaina Rothman who was fantastic. I’ve become more involved now than I ever was. I think the Reform community is great. It’s very warm and uncritical. We look out for each other.