'The Bermant family arrived in Scotland when Chaim was eight: before his ninth birthday he had mastered enough English to read Beatrix Potter in the Mitchell Library. Her stories were not so alien to him as one might imagine: somehow the animal characters reminded him of the Latvian village from which he had come. Chaim soon became a fan of the Beano's Lord Snooty, an aristocrat who inexplicably consorted with a gang of working class kids: the strip fulfilled every schoolboy's fantasy of finding himself among wealthy people in a noble setting"...[as] young Bermant... followed the progress of the Second World War on the Glasgow Herald and the Manchester Guardian [he felt a strong sense of British identity]. The war, the school, the boys' weeklies were all "building up new obsessions to replace the old and drawing reassurance and pride from the Empire".'