Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (23 page)

On arrival in England, they had been sent to stay with
a childless retired couple living in the Oxfordshire countryside. In some respects, they had been luckier than others; sent to working-class Jewish families in poor neighbourhoods, forced to live in cramped conditions with large dirty families who only bathed once a week and shared beds. The house in Oxfordshire was clean and orderly, the Masons – that was their name – were civilised educated people; Mrs Mason played the organ and arranged the flowers in the village church, Dr Mason liked to read histories and biographies. But they were cold, unemotional people, their house was always freezing too and while their act of taking in Ruth and little Siggy was undeniably generous, their behaviour towards them certainly wasn’t.

They thought Siggy was over-indulged and spoilt; they set about sternly disciplining him. He was sent at five to the village school where the other children persecuted him because he was German and the teacher hit him across the back of his short chubby legs with her ruler. Ruth had to end her education there and then; she was virtually sixteen and, the Masons said, there was no point continuing. Dependent on them for her board and lodging, she did not dare object although she knew her parents would have been outraged. They had been planning to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. In any case, the Masons had other plans for Ruth; she was to be their maid and helper, working for nothing in exchange for bed and board and, of course, for their taking care of Siggy.

It was hard to describe the five years which she had spent with the Masons. She thought it was not an
exaggeration to say that she had not been fully alive. She had done what she had to; she had worked as a maid and a cook and a cleaner, she had taken care of Siggy and tried to bring him up as their mother would have done. She had improved her English – and tried to carry on her education – by reading the books in Dr Mason’s library in her little free time. But she had no friends, no young people around her, no parties or outings, no youth. She had often thought about leaving. She turned seventeen and then eighteen; legally she was free to do as she pleased. But how could she have left Siggy all alone in that cold house with no mother and no father, with Mrs Mason telling him off for his every move and Dr Mason perpetually glaring at him?

Sylvia felt tears cascading down her face but Ruth laughed and said, “Don’t cry, it was all a long time ago.”

When the war ended, Ruth was twenty. She did not know anymore who she was. She was no longer completely German but she was certainly not English either. In Germany, their family had never been religiously observant, now, with the Masons’ encouragement, she went regularly to church. She did not believe in the Masons’ church but she thought it could do no harm and, who knew, by a miracle, it might help to bring her parents back. The news coming out of Germany and the Pathé newsreels made her wonder if she would ever see them or her Tante Trude or anybody else again. She did not give up hope though, not for years; she kept searching through the Red Cross and writing to every single person she could think of. Only in 1950, when she was already married and
her son was newborn, she had suddenly understood that her parents would never see their first grandchild,
they were never coming back
and she had collapsed and cried for three whole months.

Freedom, when it came, was complicated and at a high price. She had been planning for some time how to leave the Masons; she could not stand another year buried in that little village, trapped in that cold house but the thought of leaving Siggy was of course unbearable. He was all she had left. But she began to calculate that if she found a job, a
real
job with wages, in a city, she could probably support herself and Siggy provided they lived modestly. Secretly, she began answering job advertisements in
The
Lady
. Soon enough she was offered a job in the northern city of Sheffield with a family by the familiarly German-sounding name of Rosenkranz. “Yes,” Ruth smiled winsomely at Sylvia. “Yes indeed.”

Breaking the news to the Masons was extremely difficult but Ruth, although she was barely twenty, felt much older than her years and she already had a strength and determination she believed unusual in one so young because of everything she had lived through. In any case, there was actually nothing the Masons could do; because Ruth and Siggy’s parents had not been declared dead – and Ruth absolutely refused to allow that – they couldn’t formally adopt Siggy and now Ruth was over eighteen and Siggy’s next of kin, she was legally entitled to do what she wanted.

At this point, the Masons had unexpectedly done another remarkably generous thing; they had offered to
pay for Siggy, now nearly eleven, to go to boarding school, a very good English boarding school where he would receive an excellent education, far better than what the local school could offer. Ruth had been confronted with a horrible dilemma; did she agree to Siggy being sent away for the sake of his education or was it her duty to keep him with her at all costs? She tried hard to imagine what their parents would have wanted but the circumstances were so unimaginable that it was impossible to come up with an answer. And, in future, what price would the Masons extract for their generosity?

In the end, it was made easier for her by Siggy wanting to go away to boarding school, doubtless imagining it would be like the English boys’ adventure stories he loved to read: dormitories and midnight feasts and escapades. So, after a few terrible days of indecision, she thanked the Masons on her parents’ behalf and agreed that Siggy should go. So Siggy went away to boarding school and grew up to be a perfect English gentleman. Unlike Ruth, he lost his accent completely and acquired the lifelong nickname of “Posy”. Sylvia giggled. Ruth moved to Sheffield and began to work as carer and companion to elderly, disabled Mr Rosenkranz.

The Rosenkranz family was everything the Masons were not: kindly, warm and welcoming. They were also Jewish although not in a way Ruth had encountered before. In Berlin, her family had had a Christmas tree, they had only gone to synagogue for weddings and special occasions. They had been cultured, emancipated people and they had considered Jewish religious practice frankly
rather primitive. In this respect, the Rosenkranzes were primitive; they went to their ugly red brick synagogue every Saturday morning, wearing hats. On Friday nights, they would all gather at the house of Mr Rosenkranz’s eldest son, Selwyn, for a traditional Sabbath meal. Hebrew blessings were recited and candles lit, Flossie Rosenkranz, his daughter-in-law, covering her face and whirling her hands about as she did so in a way which seemed to Ruth no different from voodoo. The Rosenkranzes included Ruth matter-of-factly in everything as if she were a member of the family and while they seemed to have no understanding at all of what she had lived through, their kindness touched her.

Unlike the Masons, they did however seem to understand that Ruth was not naturally a servant, that she came from a good family and had only been reduced to her present situation by unfortunate circumstances. They made sure that whatever socialising was organised during those austere post-War years for the Jewish young people of Sheffield, Ruth was always included. Her escort was usually Morris Rosenkranz, Selwyn’s nephew, who had broken with the family tradition of finance and accounting and was studying to become a doctor in nearby Leeds.

Morris Rosenkranz was a serious, polite young man but Ruth never really considered him as a fiancé. How could she? He might be from the employer’s family and Ruth the employee but still she felt herself to be in so many ways superior to the Rosenkranzes. Apart from the ones who had gone abroad to fight during the war, none of
them had ever been abroad. Before the war, Ruth had holidayed every year in Switzerland or France or Italy. The Rosenkranzes did not read much either; their leisure pursuits centred around the synagogue, bridge and coffee and cake. Besides, there was the whole religious aspect. How could Ruth conceive of marrying into that primitive ritual and superstition: kissing doorjambs, separate sinks for meat and milk? But in time she came to realise that Morris Rosenkranz was the exception in his family. Not only had he chosen to move away and study medicine, he always had a paperback book in his pocket to read on the train and when he had finished reading it, if it was any good, he passed it on to Ruth.

One evening, he took her out to dinner in a restaurant in Leeds and ordered shrimp. Ruth had been living with the Rosenkranzes for long enough to have learnt that shrimp was a forbidden food. In Germany, her family had eaten everything including pork in all its delicious forms. She must have raised her eyebrows because Morris explained to her that, as a scientific rationalist, he had abandoned religious practice and only kept up appearances at home to preserve the peace. That had been the first revelation for Ruth.

But still it never crossed her mind that she might one day end up marrying Morris. For one thing, she did not see her future in the North of England. Quite where she did see her future was another question. There was obviously no possibility of ever returning to Germany. But she still hoped, hoped desperately for wider horizons than Yorkshire.

In due course, Morris graduated and, to his family’s dismay, he took a job in London. Ruth discovered that she missed him and he must have felt similarly because he wrote her letters, beautiful letters which impressed her with his insight and sensitivity. He came home in April for Passover. It was an eight-day holiday and he and Ruth went out walking together every day. Old Mr Rosenkranz was seriously ill by then and needed full-time nursing care which left Ruth with a good deal of free time. On the last day of his holiday, Morris proposed to her, sitting beside her on a bench in one of Sheffield’s finest municipal parks.

“In the normal course of events,” he said delicately, “of course I would have asked your father first.” But in her terribly sad circumstances, he could only hope that she felt her father would have approved of him.

Sylvia was sobbing, with great, wrenching sobs. “Oh Ruth,” she repeated, stricken. “Oh Ruth.”

Ruth had been so shocked, at first she had not known what to answer. She had asked Morris if she might please think it over and give him her answer the next morning before he caught his train back to London. He had obviously been disappointed – he must have hoped she would fall into his arms – but politely, respectfully he had agreed. Ruth had lain awake all night, debating. Never had she missed her parents so much, nor felt so acutely the absence of anyone to turn to for guidance.

Obviously, it was better to be married than unmarried; that much was simple. But never having thought about marrying Morris, she now found herself, out of the blue, faced with having to make a hugely important decision.
She liked Morris, she liked him a great deal in fact. He was a doctor, an honourable and secure profession. She would be able to move to London: a huge plus. But she was just twenty-one; should she be getting married at all? To the first person to ask? And did she want her life, for ever after, to be tied to the Rosenkranz family and to Sheffield? What would her parents say if they ever miraculously returned and found out they had in-laws who prayed, rocking heel to toe, wrapped in silk prayer shawls?

In the end, she decided to let Siggy, now nearly thirteen and according to the Rosenkranzes’ beliefs almost a man, be the arbiter. If he liked Morris, if the two of them hit it off, then she would go ahead. Siggy would have a home, a proper home, to come to in the school holidays. Well, fortunately, Morris and Siggy had got on famously and Siggy had wholeheartedly given his approval. In January 1948, she and Morris had got married in the ugly red brick synagogue with all the hullabaloo the Rosenkranz family expected and Dr and Mrs Mason sitting in the congregation, looking like two fish out of water.

It had all turned out to be utterly unimportant anyway; her worries about social standing and religious practice. She had married Morris because she knew he was the sort of young man her parents would have wanted her to marry and, even though it had not been a match born of great passion but a carefully weighed decision, they had grown to love each other deeply and they had been extremely happy together for forty-seven years.

“Tell me,” Sylvia said tentatively, “about your children.”

But Ruth put up both her hands in a defensive gesture.
“Not now,” she said, sounding terribly tired. “Not now. I think that’s quite enough for one day, don’t you? Besides, shouldn’t you go back up to your flat in case your son is trying to get through to you?”

Sylvia climbed heavily back upstairs, severely shaken by everything which Ruth had told her and by the reminder that someone’s life could so easily appear to be one thing on the surface and yet be, shockingly, something entirely different underneath.

As she reached the landing, she could hear her phone ringing inside the flat. It stopped ringing before she could get the door open but started again almost straight away as she came in. She picked it up and it was Jeremy, beside himself.

“Where the
hell
have you been?” he exploded, the minute she panted, “Hello?” “I’ve been calling you for the past
two hours
. The mobile networks are all down. I had no way of knowing where you were. Why on earth didn’t you call me to let me know you were alright?”

“But I did,” Sylvia said shakily. “I called your mobile loads of times. And Smita’s. I just got your messages.”

“I
told
you,” Jeremy sounded at the end of his tether. “All the mobile networks are down. Why didn’t you try our home number, for Christ’s sake?”

“I assumed you were at work,” Sylvia said weakly. Even today, of all days, she seemed to be doing everything wrong.

“Well, I’m not,” Jeremy retorted angrily. “I’ve been at home worried stiff about you for the past two hours. Where on earth have you been?”

“I was with Ruth,” Sylvia said faintly. “I was frightfully worried about
you
. And Anand and Smita.”

“Anand’s fine,” Jeremy snapped. “You know we never take him on the Tube. And Smita’s in New York. I’m quite worried about the nanny though; she hasn’t turned up for work and with all the mobiles down, she’s probably got no way of contacting us. I just hope she’s ok.”