“Since you’re neither Y, W, nor C . . .”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 90.  When as a late teen, his father was appointed British Ambassador to France at the end of the war, JJN was a resident with his mother and father. 

I have several clear memories of that first Christmas holiday in Paris. First there was the perishing cold; it was the most savage winter the city had experienced for fifty years, and the British Embassy was one of the few buildings that had any heating. We were also among the still fewer that could provide limitless gin and whisky, obtained at tax-free, privileged, NAAFI prices—around sixpence a bottle. From the start, my mother instituted free-for-all drinks parties in the salon vert every night at 6:30 pm, open to all friends, French and English alike, who cared to drop in. Of the English, the first—he had arrived in Paris, I think, even before my parents—was their old friend Victor Rothschild. A Cambridge scientist now in uniform, he had already won the George Medal for his bravery in defusing antipersonnel bombs; what he was doing in Paris I never quite knew. When he first arrived he was billeted at the YWCA, which made my father weep with laughter (“Since you’re neither Y, W, nor C . . .”). He then moved briefly into the Embassy, but before long managed to take over the Rothschild family house in the Avenue de Marigny, together with his friend the philosopher Stuart Hampshire and his secretary Tess Mayor, whom he soon afterwards married. I shall always be grateful to Victor for taking me under his wing; it was he, I shall always remember, who gave me my first jazz piano lessons—I later had more from a black professional who came twice a week to the Embassy—and bore me off to my first Paris nightclub, the Bal Tabarin, whose topless showgirls roused me to a fever-pitch of excitement.”