Everybody called him Harry, I think his full name was Henry Michael Buritsky. Uncle Harry came from Southeast Poland, probably in the early ‘20s, but I can’t swear to the voracity of that, if you like. Nobody worried about the fact he might have been a Jew or he was Polish, really it didn’t matter, he could have come from Timbuctoo as far as I know, but it didn’t bother us. George and I met him when mum said, ‘This is Harry Buritski, he’s going to marry Aunt Rose.’ We got on well with him, he said to us, ‘Hello boys, I’m Harry, Uncle Harry.’ And I said, ‘Nice to meet you Uncle Harry.’ And from then on it was Uncle Harry. ‘Hello boys!’ you know, that sort of thing. I can’t remember any real accent, as far as I was concerned, he was speaking English as good as I was. He was dark, as a well-tanned Australian might be and he was quite a pleasant person, a reasonable build, about 5’ 7”, 5’ 8”, he was dressed very similarly to dad, brown coat, brown suit, something like that, he might have had a blue suit, I don’t know. I liked him, most people liked him, he was an affable sort of bloke, as far as I was concerned he was quite a nice uncle. I’ve got an idea sometimes he used to pass out a couple of bob or tuppence or threepence to George and I, which in those days was a small fortune to a kid. He was a nice bloke who was going to marry Aunt Rose and he did marry Aunt Rose.
Aunt Rose was a quieter woman, where they would have met I don’t know, it might have been a local dance hall or something like that. 1925 I remember a big Church of England… at the top of Raynham Road in Edmonton, that was probably where they were married. Rose was in white, Harry was in a very nice suit and a hat. A lot of English girls married foreign people, nobody bothered about that, in fact, very often if you got on the tram you’d very often be sitting next to somebody from either Jamaica or somewhere in the West Indies or even from West Africa.
