Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Europe. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory. Before the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Stoppard, his brother, and their mother fled to India. Stoppard's father remained in Singapore as a British army volunteer, knowing that as a doctor, he would be needed in its defense. When Stoppard was four years old, his father died. The writer long understood that Sträussler had perished in Japanese captivity, as a prisoner of war. The book Tom Stoppard in Conversation describes this, but the author later revealed the subsequent discovery that his father had been reported drowned on board a ship, bombed by Japanese forces, as he tried to flee Singapore in 1942. In 1941, when Tomáš was five, he, his brother, and their mother had been evacuated to Darjeeling, India. The boys attended Mount Hermon School, an American multi-racial school, where Tomáš became Tom and his brother Petr became Peter. In 1945, his mother, Martha, married British army major Kenneth Stoppard, who gave the boys his English surname and moved the family to England in 1946. Stoppard's stepfather believed strongly that "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life"—a quote from Cecil Rhodes—telling his 9-year-old stepson: "Don't you realize that I made you British?" setting up Stoppard's desire as a child to become "an honorary Englishman." He has said, "I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in. I find I put a foot wrong—it could be pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history—and suddenly I'm there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket." This is reflected in his characters, he observes, who are "constantly being addressed by the wrong name, with jokes and false trails to do with the confusion of having two names." Stoppard attended the Dolphin School in Nottinghamshire, and later completed his education at Pocklington School in East Riding, Yorkshire, which he hated. Stoppard left school at 17 and began work as a journalist for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, without attending university. Years later, he came to regret the decision to forego a university education, but at the time, he loved his work as a journalist and was passionate about his career. He worked