Making a Noise

MAKING A NOISE tells the finely observed story of how this child of Mitteleuropa underwent an education that led him to Cambridge and then to a career at the BBC, and to a second career as an influential arts administrator. John Tusa's story began in Zlin in Czechoslovakia, a newly established Bata (shoe) company town. His father was a company man through and through, and it was Bata which offered him employment in its factory in East Tilbury and also provided visas for Tusa's family.

With his mother and older brother, three-year-old Jan Tusa took a tense train journey to England in 1939 just in advance of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Despite the dislocation, the family had a comfortable existence within a Czech community that resided in a Bata Estate which was almost uniformly similar to the estate in Zlin. In September 1942 young Tusa was sent to a boarding school that had been evacuated to a hotel in Devon, where Tusa felt foreign. The gap that 'first opened between us on that platform at Paddington.