The Dream (3 page)

But to be able to go to America! Others may have shared my mother’s dream. Certainly, there was envy among them, and it only doubled my mother’s happiness and caused her cheeks to flush with pride at being so fortunate – for once in her life.

Among the people who came over from the Christian side to congratulate us were the Forshaws and I’m sure that when they came my mother felt the same awkwardness she had been experiencing for a long time at their presence on the street, and after she had shaken their hands and chatted a little, they too perhaps concealing their embarrassment, and when finally they had gone, my mother took a deep breath of relief. She liked the Forshaws, everybody on the street did. They shared their gramophone with the whole street on summer nights, leaving their door open while it was playing so that everyone could hear. They did things like that and my mother could not have had anything against them. Except that they were Christians – and their son was married to her daughter, and there was a grandchild that was half-Jewish and half-Christian.

A secret romance between my sister Lily and Arthur Forshaw had carried on for years, and there had been a
secret
marriage at a country inn called the Seventeen Windows. When my mother found out she collapsed from grief and went into mourning, for a Jewish person who marries outside his religion is considered dead, and we all sat shiveh, which is the ritual for the mourning for the dead, and requires that you sit every day for seven days in a darkened room in your stockinged feet and say certain prayers.

Eventually my mother relented and went to see the baby that was born to Lily and Arthur, and we, together with the Forshaws, even gave a party for the whole street to celebrate the birth, and it was one of those rare times when the two sides of our street came together as one, and it was really a very wonderful thing. But then things got back to normal again and once more there was that distance between the two sides – the invisible wall – separating us and that you could never seem to get rid of, and for my mother there was constant embarrassment knowing that the Forshaws, who lived directly across from us, were relations – and Christians. I have wondered if this did not add to the urgency of her desire to go to America. I am sure, however, that she must have felt tremendous relief knowing that she would not have to be faced with this awkwardness again.

But we were not going yet. When all the excitement had died down and we were able to think more soberly, the realisation came that there was more involved to travel to America than steamship tickets. There was the rail trip to Liverpool and the much longer one from Quebec, where our ship would land, to Chicago. There were numerous other expenses, the cost of passports and taking pictures for the passports, and above all, clothes.

‘We can’t go to America looking like beggars,’ my mother said.

She would remember those words later and the irony they contained. But she could not have thought of it then and there were other things on her mind. She worried day and night. Where were we to get the money from to pay for all the things we needed? Our benefactor – whoever he or she was, and we could not seem to find out from the travel agency – had given no thought to this problem and my mother was at her wits’ end to know where to get the money. There was no use asking my father. He wouldn’t have given it even if he had had it, and he still would having nothing to do with going to America. So what was she to do? Totalling up the amount we needed, it came to pounds and pounds.

For a while it looked as if the dream, so close to fulfilment, was to be snatched out of our hands. But my mother would never have let that happen. She had faced other adversities before this and had overcome them. She would do it again.

What she did was a desperate move, and one that elicited wails of protest from us and roars of anger from my father, but it was the only way out for her. She began to sell what little broken furniture we had, together with all the ornaments and everything possible that somebody might want. With still one month to go before our departure, we found ourselves without a table to eat on, without chairs to sit on, without our beloved sofa, torn and flattened but precious to our comfort. Cups, saucers, even the teapot – they all went, and the clock with two angels clinging to either side, which had been on the mantelpiece for as long as we could remember, that too went.

We cried and protested, but what could she do? My father stormed and cursed America and all his relatives there, but that was nothing yet. He would soon be without a bed to sleep in and would have to sleep on the floor. We would all have to do that. The house emptied itself out bit by bit. Our neighbours from both sides of the street bought most of it and I think that in many cases it was an act of charity on their part rather than need.

I recall one time when my brothers and I were carrying a dresser across the street to the Forshaws. They had bought a number of things from us before this and my mother had been surprised that they had chosen the dresser, since it was in such poor condition, with drawers that did not open or close and the paint worn off here and there. But they had bought it, saying it was just what they needed, and now we were carrying it across the street to them, the three of us sweating a little with its weight, when in the middle of the street the back fell off. And there in the doorway were Mr and Mrs Forshaw looking at us. We came to a halt, not knowing what to do, the broken back lying on the ground.

Then the next moment Mr Forshaw was approaching us, pipe in his mouth and a hammer in his hand. ‘Don’t worry, lads,’ he said to us cheerfully. ‘We’ll get this thing straightened out in a minute.’

He had brought some nails with him too, and it was just a minute that it took for him to get the back of the dresser into place again, this time more securely than before. Then he helped us carry it into his house, with his wife once more exclaiming, ‘This is just what I’ve always wanted.’

But in spite of all the help we got from our neighbours it still wasn’t enough for the clothes that we had to buy, and the shoes, and then to have a little left over when we got there so that we didn’t have to borrow money from the relatives, from my grandmother especially. Yet there was nothing else to sell – except the shop.

Perhaps this had not occurred to her before. Maybe, if she had given any thought to it at all, she resisted parting with what had meant so much to her. It had saved our lives once. Could it do it again? I do not know what was in her mind, but one afternoon, when I was in the shop helping my mother clear out what was left of the rotted fruits and vegetables of her stock, Mrs Abrams, who lived a few doors away, came in with two young and rather small people, a man and woman.

I was big for my age, taller even than either of my two brothers, so the couple who followed Mrs Abrams into the shop may have seemed smaller than they were. They looked like a little boy and girl to me, but they were a married couple and the man was Mrs Abrams’s nephew. They were from Manchester, Mrs Abrams explained, and they were recently married and were looking for a place to live and set up a bakery. The man was a bagel maker, so he was looking for a Jewish area and he thought our street might be the right place for him.

I saw my mother’s face light up. ‘My shop is just right for you,’ she said. ‘I have mostly Jewish customers and they’d all want bagels. Where can you get bagels in this town?’ This was true. I myself hardly knew what a bagel was.

My mother added that she herself would give anything for a bagel, especially one that was hot and fresh and just
out
of the oven. Mrs Abrams agreed with her. This was a good street for them. Even the Christians might learn to eat bagels.

And as this talk went on, the couple grew a little excited, the man especially. He was an excitable person to start with. He began to talk, quite rapidly, and to jerk his head around as he did so, like a rooster pecking away at the corn on the ground and the hens around him. Mostly his talk extolled the virtues of bagels. He believed they were healthy, good for you, but more than that he believed they were a symbol of Jewish unity, that they brought Jews together and reminded them of their heritage, and further, he went on, English Jews had been deprived of bagels for generations and he felt it his religious duty to bring bagels to them.

On and on he went, and my mother’s cheeks began to flush with hope, and perhaps in that moment she saw the shop as a solution to her problem, and she interrupted the little man to cry out, ‘So then you must buy my shop. It’s the perfect place for you. It’s more than a shop. It’s like a club room. All the Jewish women come in here to sit and talk and drink my sour milk. Isn’t that right, Mrs Abrams?’

Mrs Abrams, huddled in her shawl, nodded her head vigorously. ‘It’s like a shul in here sometimes. I come myself, especially on a rainy day, and when the fire is lit it’s nice and cosy, and we sit and talk for hours.’

‘Do you have a good oven?’ the baker asked.

‘Do I have a good oven?’ my mother cried. ‘I have a wonderful oven. I bake a lot of cakes myself and bread too. Come and see it.’

She led them into the kitchen and I followed. The little
man
was more excited than ever when he saw the oven. It was big and black, the door well polished. My mother had baked some wonderful cakes here, especially for the holidays. The house would be filled with its aroma and spread even to the upstairs, and you could smell it as you went to sleep.

There was no question that the baker was impressed, and he began to jerk his head about this way and that, looking around the kitchen, opening and closing the oven door, peering inside, looking at the fireplace, peering up into the chimney, sizing up the place no doubt as a future workroom.

I saw his wife pluck at his sleeve and take him aside. She whispered in his ear. I have very acute hearing. I heard what she said: ‘Don’t be such an idiot. Stop liking everything. She’ll only charge you more.’

My mother would not have charged more than what it was worth. Back in the shop they began their haggling. The little baker, mindful of what his wife said, began to disparage things, saying the shelves looked warped, the hinges on the bin doors were rusted, the counter sagged a little, the scales didn’t seem to be accurate, finding fault with everything, even the window. It looked too small to display his bagels. ‘My bagels,’ he said, ‘need plenty of space to show off their beauty. I have a secret recipe that has been handed down through my family only for over a hundred years. There aren’t any bagels like them in this whole world. They deserve to be shown off.’

Then, still mindful of his wife’s whispering in his ear, he came to a sudden decision. ‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you five shillings for the whole lot.’

I saw the shock go through my mother. Her face began to turn red from anger. ‘I could get more than that if I sold it for firewood,’ she said.

The little man and his wife pretended to start turning away, with Mrs Abrams shaking her head under her shawl. But the couple wanted the shop and there was a bit more haggling before it was settled, and the money my mother got for the shop was not quite as much as she needed, but it would do, and it left her triumphant and happy once more. I do think, however, there was a lot of sadness inside her at parting with the shop. It had served her well through the hardest of all the years, and she would never again have the feeling of independence that it had given her, and the warmth that came on those afternoons when she sat enthroned behind the counter with all the women gathered around her, gossiping and sipping the sour milk that she had made, and the fire blazing behind her, throwing a dancing light on the bent figures huddled in their shawls.

Chapter Four

WE LEFT ON
a warm, sunny day in June. Both Lily and Arthur came to see us off, bringing their baby. They walked with us to the railway station, Lily carrying her baby, my mother carrying hers, side by side, with the rest of us straggling behind, each of us carrying a piece of the second-hand luggage my mother had bought for the trip.

My father, though, was at the head of the parade, walking a bit faster than the rest of us, as if he wanted it to seem that he had nothing to do with us and was not going to America himself.

The whole street had come out on to their doorsteps as we left, and they were all waving and shouting, ‘Ta-ta. Good luck in America!’

We answered with little waves of the free hand that was not carrying luggage and shouted back to them, ‘Ta-ta!’

I remember that Mrs Humberstone wept a little as she stood on her doorstep waving to us.

There was weeping too from my mother and Lily when we were at the railway station, and the train pulled in
and
it was time to say goodbye – and hugs and handshakes from Arthur. We kept waving to them from the windows as the train started to move and we did not know then that we would never see them again.

But we quickly forgot about them in the excitement of the journey. Until that day I had never been outside the town, even the street itself, other than for an occasional ramble to Bramhall or Marple and places like that. It was the same with my two brothers and my sister, so we saw England for the first time through the windows of the train that took us to Liverpool, and watching the landscape flash by seeing farms and fields and cows and sheep and strange towns with strange-looking buildings held us fascinated for the entire trip.

But that was nothing compared to Liverpool and our first sight of the ship that was to take us to America. We had seen ships before only in pictures in books and magazines, but never a real one like this huge vessel resting at the side of the dock, its three funnels slanting lazily and the name on the bow telling us that this was the SS
Regina
. There was something awesome and frightening about it, and when the time came to board I don’t think any of us felt comfortable. We clung close together, and followed a steward down to our cabins, and once there the fear soon vanished, and after days of eating without a table or a chair to sit on or a bed to sleep in – those last terrible three nights when we slept on the floor – we began to appreciate the luxury of an ocean liner, the kind of life that may have belonged in our dreams, certainly not in the harsh reality of a Lancashire mill town.