Jon Silkin

Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Litvak Jewish family; his parents were Joseph Silkin and Doris Rubenstein. His grandparents were all from the Lithuanian part of the Russian Empire. His uncle was Lewis Silkin, 1st Baron Silkin. He was named Jon after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College. During the Second World War, he was one of the children evacuated from London (in his case, to Wales); he remembered that he "roamed the countryside incessantly" while in Wales, collecting "fool's gold" and exploring old Roman mines.

For a period of about six years in the 1950s, after National Service, he supported himself by manual labour and other menial jobs. By 1956, he rented the top-floor flat at 10, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, (51.5463°N 0.1822°W / 51.5463; -0.1822), the house of Bernice Rubens, who later won the Booker Prize, and her husband Rudolf Nassauer, also a published novelist. Silkin, in turn, sublet rooms to, among others, David Mercer, later a prolific TV and West End dramatist, and Malcolm Ross-Macdonald, then a diploma student at the Slade School of Fine Art and later a novelist. Ross-Macdonald's first novel, The Big Waves (Cape, 1962) is a roman à clef of life in that flat, in which Silkin features as "Somes Arenstein". All three men lived by teaching English as a foreign language at the St Giles School of English in Oxford Street.