As the company founder and perfumer (a rare combination) Pilkington is memorable, punchy and charismatic as the perfumes she creates. “I had to work for myself as I think I’m probably unemployable!” she declares with a grin. Standing at around 5ft 2in, Linda is a fragrant firecracker, and a self-professed consummate visionary and perfectionist. “I’m always thinking of changes to the carrier bags, to the perfume lids — even though it makes no business sense, but I like things to be beautiful!” She doesn’t mince her words either. When I first met her, she promptly smacked my wrist when I went to smell a perfume she had just sprayed on my skin. (“Let it settle first!”) I was also wearing a chai pendant around my neck, which she instantly remarked upon, in the way many British Jews do to tacitly imply a shared heritage.
But in fact, she and her sisters didn’t even know they were Jewish on their father’s side, until he sat them down when she was ten and told them his life story. He had fled his native Hamburg on the Kindertransport at 13 and settled in the UK where he later met and married Linda’s mother.
Rolf Fedor Bloch —who later changed his name to Pilkington — was born in Hamburg in 1925. As a child, his family were arrested from their home and murdered in the camps — including his mother Bertha, grandparents Rosa and Waldemar and his aunts Alice, Camilla and Anni. Rolf’s life was spared because he wasn’t home at the time.
He sought refuge with his Jewish school teacher Rudolph Grunwell and his family who hid Rolf in their basement for about three months. (“They taught him how to play chess,” Linda explains.) They convinced a non-Jewish German doctor to pay the 50 deutschmarks for Rolf to be smuggled out on the Kindertransport, as one of the 10,000 Jewish children who fled Nazi-occupied Europe to safety between 1938 and 1939. (The Grunwell family told Rolf they were leaving Germany too, for Israel.)
He arrived in England aged 13 in 1938 and was interviewed by the Home Office — as many of these children were — to make sure he wasn’t a spy. He was fostered out to a family in Manchester and advised to change his name from Bloch to the British-sounding ‘Pilkington’. As the war escalated, a few years later he was made to enlist in the British army. For obvious reasons, he concealed his German-Jewish background from almost everyone in his regiment (he’d lost his accent by then). At the end of the war, he found himself marching back into Germany, where in a twist of fate, he ended up back in his hometown of Hamburg, as part of the liberation movement. “Many locals even recognised him and were shouting ‘there’s Rolf!’” his daughter tells me. He returned to the UK where he married Linda’s mother and started a family.
Many years later, he made some enquiries to the German authorities and found out that his mother, grandmother and aunts had been sent to the women’s concentration camp, Ravensbruck and were all murdered in the same camp (his mother and two of his aunts together on the same day) in 1942. His grandfather Waldemar died in Sachenhausen that same year.
“When he met my mother, he didn’t tell her about his background until they got married,” Pilkington explains. “Because of his trauma, he wanted to hide his identity as much as possible. I was about 10 when he sat us down and said ‘you’re actually half-German and half-Jewish’. I didn’t really absorb it at the time, but my mother said to us, ‘if you want to learn more about your background, you can.’”
Along with her sisters, Pilkington began to get more curious as a teenager. As a young woman, she visited Israel to live and work on two kibbutzim, where she also learned to speak fluent Hebrew.
Her husband is also of dual heritage which has given their two sons a rich exposure to many religions and cultures. “My husband’s father is a Muslim from Turkey, his mother’s Danish, my father’s a German Jew, my mother is English (Church of England) — so we’re like the United Nations at home!” she exclaims.
While she doesn’t identify as religious, there are certain Jewish values that she carries with her. “Every time I go to the synagogue or listen to someone speak who is Jewish, they always have wise words to live by. They often talk about needing a strong foundation for the family to stand on, and I think, that’s absolutely right! I used to love listening to people like Jonathan Sacks, how wise and how clever was he? And what beautiful things did he have to say.”
It’s clear her Jewish father is also a very wise and inspirational presence in her life. This month, he celebrates his 96th birthday and today in Hamburg, there are six memorial blocks (called “Stolpersteine”, or “stumbling stones”) outside his family home on the Marktstraße, with the names of his family engraved on each one.
“When he talks about his family, he told me that he liked to think they took comfort from knowing that at least Rolf was still alive,” she tells me. “And today he’s got daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When he goes to sleep, he recites the names of each family member who perished, one by one and says ‘Goodnight. I will see you soon.’” Her voice slightly breaks as she tells me this, before whispering a hurried goodbye and turning to another journalist, who is here to talk about fragrance.
I leave her shiny boutique and glance at the beautiful bottles in the window, thinking that Rolf Pilkington must be incredibly proud knowing that his family legacy will live on, not just in his children and grandchildren, but in the beautiful fragrances created by his daughter.
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