When I Lived in Modern Times (3 page)

Joe always said, when customers balked at paying top prices for his finest cigars: “Sir, there’s only one thing worse than having nothing, and that’s looking as if you’ve got nothing. Sit down at a table in a restaurant and light up one of these cigars and you can order a glass of water and they’ll think it’s a rich man’s fancy. Light up a Woodbine and you’ll be out on your ear.”

Show them you’re on top of the world, even if you’re not. What do you have to lose?

“Buy cheap pay dear” was another of Joe’s maxims. And, “Only the rich can afford cheap shoes.”

And all these lessons were something else that made me a Jew.

I
DON
’t know what he bought his other daughters, but from the time I could read Uncle Joe would arrive at the flat with brown paper parcels of books: the novels of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope which, unwrapped and read, stood in a row between matching china bookends in the shape of horses with white faces and brown manes, until the line grew too long for the dressing table and a three-shelf bookcase was delivered from Selfridges. When I was thirteen, he presented me with a volume containing reproductions of various old masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, which drove me to the National Gallery to see the originals for myself. In its chilly rooms on quiet Sunday afternoons surrounded by the unfamiliar landscapes of Tuscany and Florence I came across a crowd of recognizable faces—kings and dukes and popes and cardinals and young men with large brown eyes and pale-faced madonnas with their lusty muscular babies, all looking very much like my Soho neighbors. For the boy who served behind the counter at Lina’s must have been a descendant of the Medici and the priest bending over the infant Jesus was the exact spit of my friend Gabriella’s surly, black-browed father who laid mosaic floors in the houses of the wealthy, the trade he had brought from Italy and which his father and grandfather had carried out before him in the churches of the Veneto.

So in the National Gallery I felt more at home than in England and I decided to become an artist and asked for a sketchbook and received one, along with a flat tin box of Caran d’Ache pencils and began to render what I saw of life in colored crayons.

“You killed our Lord,” a teacher hissed in my ear, grabbing my wrist as twenty of us thundered out of class and down the stairs toward our break. It was not the kind of anti-Semitism that made you frightened, just the type that ensured you knew you did not belong and it was in your best interests to try to conform.

In Scripture, they showed us pictures of the Holy Land. All we saw were churches and the Via Dolorosa and the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked on the water. A teacher who had been there described Bethlehem to us. She regarded Palestine as a British affair, thought the place was hers and not mine. The King James Version of the Bible, she said, was a
triumph
of English literature.

“Did you go to Tel Aviv?” I asked, putting up my hand.

She frowned. “There is nothing of any interest there.” Palestine, to her, was in a two-thousand-year-old time warp. She saw nothing later than, say, the Crusaders.

“I have heard that the British in Palestine…” I continued.

“No politics, if you please, Evelyn.”

But I had been brought up on politics. On our mantelpiece in the flat in Soho Uncle Joe had placed a blue and white collecting tin for the Jewish National Fund, in which we put our halfpennies, pennies, threepenny bits and sometimes even a shilling. Every birthday Uncle Joe pushed through the slot, to commemorate another year of my life, a whole half a crown.

“So part of little Evelyn,” he said, “will make things grow in the earth of the Jewish home.” In the office at the back of his cigar shop hung framed posters of noble, muscle-bound figures tilling the soil of Palestine. A new one arrived every year. I imagined of myself as a flower or a tree in the hands of a Jewish farmer. It was quite a thought.

On a wet Sunday afternoon in 1938, when London smelled of damp tobacco and sodden gardens and unwashed flesh, my mother and I got the tube to a cinema in Hendon and saw a film called
The Land of Promise
. We saw the Western Wall and pioneers dancing on the deck of an immigrant ship. We saw the laying of the electrical grid, drilling for water, farming on a kibbutz. We saw Jewish newspapers, a Jewish bank, a Jewish medical center in Jerusalem, and we heard Haydn’s
Creation
performed in the Mount Scopus amphitheater. In a fiery speech at the end spoken by a trade-union leader, we were told that the Zionist homeland was Utopia Today.

My mother and I were awestruck. A Jewish land! Everything Jewish! How could it be? We saw Uncle Joe in the audience with his other family, the four girls yawning with boredom. But Uncle Joe was the first to rise to his feet when the curtain closed and applaud and cheer. “Next year in Jerusalem,” he shouted.

Once he showed me in a newspaper an advertisement seeking recruits for the Palestine Police.

There was a drawing of a man in shorts and knee-length socks directing traffic. A car was coming in one direction, a donkey in the other. Below this, another picture depicted Arabs riding on camels.

“Where’s the Jews, Evelyn?” Uncle Joe asked.

“Nowhere, Uncle Joe,” I replied.

“Then this picture is a lie, for Palestine is
full
of Jews.”

Of course he was a Zionist. Who wasn’t back then?

Sometimes my mother and I went to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, and I would try to distinguish between those who talked sense and those who were merely crackpots—religious maniacs, vegetarians. We knew that Jews were being beaten on the streets of Vienna and Berlin. “Down with the appeasers,” I shouted, at twelve. My mother shivered in her coat.

“What is to happen to us?” she whispered, on the bus home.

“Don’t worry, Mummy,” I told her. “I’ll protect us,” for I was fierce and my fists were bunched together in fury, inside my mittens. I looked at her beloved face and thought, “Neither of us will ever die.”

When the war started my mother and I held each other tightly as we lived through the convulsive shaking of a city tormented by air raids, passing houses turned into sticks, seeing the ruins of the white Georgian terraces near Regent’s Park which when I was a child had seemed to me like high, white cliffs, hard and permanent and unscalable.

“Why can’t things be nice?” my mother asked me. “Why does someone have to spoil everything? Why can’t we all just live, and be happy?”

I thought this was simple-minded but I only said, “Because there are unjust people in the world and they have to be fought.”

“If only we had gone to America,” she replied. “There’s no war there.”

The bombs got on her nerves. She was a wreck. Last thing at night she sipped milky drinks but they did not help. She lost weight and the plump cheeks receded in her oval face, giving her a vaporous femininity. She lost herself in movie magazines and kept up to date with what the stars were doing for the war effort. “If only we were in America,” she said. “They’ll never bomb America. We’re too close, too close.”

“Don’t cry, Mummy.”

“Yes. I should buck up.” And she dried her tears and repainted her lips and powdered her nose.

But at night when I lay in bed, I thought of a German invasion and of the swastika flying above Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament and ourselves rounded up, marched off to somewhere I didn’t want to start imagining.

London was a huge, drab metropolis. The color of men’s uniforms imposed a khaki sameness on the world. There was too much navy blue in women’s suits and dresses. Before the war, I remembered, there seemed to be more red: more red dresses and shoes, more pillar-box-red coats, more crimson and scarlet and magenta everywhere. Hair had been more visible, too—Veronica Lake peek-a-boo styles falling over the face, instead of tied back in the inevitable net snood to keep it out of your eyes while you worked at your lathe or pounded a typewriter. We were on a war; footing and frivolity was banned. The Italians had been taken away and interned and the Belgians struggled to make their fabulous pastries on the ration.

From a young age I had stood at my mother’s side at the salon, handing her pins and clips, listening ungratefully while she taught me everything she knew. I was sent on humble errands: to Steckyn’s on Wardour Street to pick up shampoo capes and sleeping nets and snoods. As others hoarded string, we were sharp-eyed for hairpins that had strayed on buses or in the street, collecting them up in our handbags, knowing that the metal they were made of was diverted into the production of airplanes and helmets and ships and bombs and that these few slivers of steel had to be gathered and kept in a safe place, sometimes, when there were shortages, under lock and key.

After school and on Saturday mornings, I learned all the techniques of hairdressing and the habit has stayed in my fingers to this day. Whose hair did I dress? The mothers of the very girls I was at school with and sometimes the girls themselves. They knew me as the hairdresser’s daughter and I was excluded from their busy social lives. My true friends were in Soho and what did I feel when Gabriella, at sixteen, watched police officers take her father and older brothers off to be interned as enemy aliens, a fate which she was only spared because she had been born in England? I thought, “We are fighting fascism but who are the anti-Semites?” Gabriella, whose father had taught me how to eat spaghetti with a spoon and fork and always tipped his hat and gave a half-bow when he passed my mother in the street, admiring her chic suit and hat with a little half-veil? Or the schoolgirls whose fathers and brothers were in the RAF or the Navy or with their regiments winning medals and who never invited me to their birthday parties?

I was seventeen and leaving school and what I wanted to be was an art student. I wanted to study at the Slade where the Jew Mark Gertler had learned to paint three decades before, and whose work spoke of a life more savage and less placid than the decorative compositions of Duncan Grant or the spare, bleak landscapes of Paul Nash with their tendency toward abstractions. I wanted the art student’s life, to get away from the bourgeois conformity of my schoolfriends. I read Bertrand Russell; not the philosophy, of course, but the pamphlets on free love and marriage.

But Uncle Joe said that if I wanted to be an artist he could get me a job in an office. I could be a
commercial
artist, helping in the preparation of advertisements for things like Horlicks or aiding the war effort by designing illustrated pamphlets showing housewives how to stretch the ration or urging them to save string. Gradually, he chipped away at my confidence. Who was I to think I could be anything other than an amateur, a private painter? And if he wasn’t prepared to pay, that was the end of the matter. I took the job. I walked to Holborn every morning and made tea and ran errands and watched the men in their shirtsleeves, with bow ties knotted round their necks and I tried to pick up some techniques from them. But God, they were a dull lot, too old to fight or still waiting for their call-up papers.

Eventually they gave me a little job to do. An advert for a women’s magazine for “feminine hygiene” in which the facts of biology were rendered so vague that in the end my drawing depicted a woman sitting in an armchair with nothing more than a pained expression on her face. My boss came and took a look. “No good,” he said. “You’ve done laxatives.”

I only had to endure the office for a few months. Fate had a greater indignity for me. Something about my mother was unraveling. She was coming apart at the seams. She took more and more days off from the salon and sent me in her place. She sat at home, a nervous wreck, crying.

“Why can’t things be nice?” she asked me, over and over again.

Sometimes I thought that when she addressed me, it was as one of her sisters. “Gittel,” she said, “make us a nice cup of tea, will you?”

“Evelyn,” I said. “I’m Evelyn, not Gittel.”

“Yes. Evelyn. Has someone fed the horse?”

“Mother, pull yourself together.”

“Yes, I must. Mum will be back soon.”

“Stay home,” Joe said. “Look after her.” So I did. And who could blame me for feeling so low in London, going to the salon for a couple of hours every afternoon when she was sleeping, doing perms and sets and nearly knocking myself out on the stench of peroxide in the back room.

May 1945. The war over. The camps liberated. The voices of the pacifist appeasers not believing what they found there, saying it was war propaganda. Then sitting in a darkened cinema watching the newsreels. Uncle Joe sobbing, his head on my mother’s lap. Sixteen cousins gone. Sixteen.

Next day he said, “Never mind the six million. What about the eleven million?” And he put a five-pound note in the JNF tin.

The survivors sat in the displaced persons camps. No one wanted them. Britain said no. America said no. After a while they began to organize. They started up schools and synagogues. They elected their own police force. With the past what it was, they had nothing to do except think about the future.

I
N
the summer I came home one day from the shops to find my mother sitting on the step, her face full of cold, heavy sweat, and her eyes crazy. She tried to speak to me but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. “Put the poppy back,” she said, slurring her words like a drunkard. “On the leg. Puss.”

I held her in my arms and stroked her hair while the doctor was sent for. The Frenchman who ran the pub around the corner where my mother occasionally went for a small brandy with Uncle Joe sat down next to us and took her hand. We formed a kind of pietà sitting there, triangular in composition, as if we were a living Leonardo on that doorstep on Old Compton Street amid the traffic and the tarts and the spivs and the black-market types in their flashy suits and the expressionless men on their way to see strippers in upstairs rooms and the muscle boys in their prime coming back from shooting the breeze with a punch-ball at Mike Solomon’s gymnasium and the dour Hungarian waiters going to work at the Budapest restaurant in Dean Street and the drunk and disheveled old women in broken shoes and moldy hats with dusty feathers and the bohemians in colored shirts opening the doors of the public houses where they would stay until closing time and then vomit in the streets. It was the world I knew and it was about to be overthrown.

They took my mother away to the Middlesex Hospital where a second stroke, a few hours later, poleaxed her at the age of forty-one. After some weeks they drove her in an ambulance to a nursing home on the south coast where she sat staring at the sea. Nor did my own face or that of Uncle Joe cause the corner of her mouth to move or the tip of a finger to lift. But still, to my surprise he paid for everything. She had the best from him, though he owed her nothing in law. What is that secret intimacy between two people that no one who is not a part of it can ever fathom?

I felt numb with the pain of her abrupt removal from my life. Everything we could have said to each other it was too late to say. I
wanted her forgiveness for the times when I came in late and did not go to her room to kiss her; or when I complained and grumbled about having to work at the salon; or when I resented that I had not been born into more regular circumstances; or when I was ashamed that the girls at school called me the hairdresser’s daughter.

I went to visit every Sunday. She looked at me, uncomprehendingly. Her hair was turning gray and it was fine, and only combed, not permed, or set, or styled. I held her hand and watched our shadows on the lawn. My mother had turned her face against ugliness, she had fled from the slums to a life that was pretty. She had found a protector. But even he could not save her from reality. It was obvious to me that life was not fair and made victims of people who should never have been oppressed in the spirit and the body, and that the only way to live was to summon one’s strength to fight back against whoever it was who was trying to dominate you, not retreat into a world of make-believe.

I left her with a charcoal drawing I had made of the two of us together, in our old home, the flat in Soho. I put it on her lap but she didn’t look at it. I walked away and then turned and waved. Her head was lolling. She seemed to have fallen asleep.

“She’s exhausted after the excitement of your visit,” a nurse said.

By the winter she was a wisp of ectoplasm swirling around in a chair. I kissed her papery skin and held her hand. She smelled of old food and urine. On Christmas Eve she died. Uncle Joe was away. He had taken the first family to a Jewish hotel in Bournemouth. I had to get the synagogue to find the ten Jewish men we needed for the
minyan
without which the interment could not proceed. Ten strangers. They stood there respectfully, like so many suitors. She went into the ground. They filed past and wished me long life. But what kind of a life was it to be?

“Now what?” said Uncle Joe. “You want me to find you another place in an office?”

“I’d like to go to art school.”

“How can you make a living out of art? Where’s the money in it?”

“I don’t care about money.”

He choked on his cigar. I thought the smoke would come out of his ears.

“Listen, Evelyn, who I have known since you were a tiny baby in your mother’s arms, may her good soul rest in peace. No one can live for five minutes without money. They think they can but then they find out different. Have you got a sweetheart yet?”

“No. No sweetheart.”

“You’re fancy-free?”

“Yes.”

“No ties?”

“No.”

“Then why don’t you go to Palestine?”

“I don’t know, I never thought about it.”

“How does the idea strike you?”

Palestine. I had never been further than Sussex.

He gave me books to read and pamphlets.

A week later he came to the flat.

“You read the books?”

“Yes, I’ve read them. All. Every word.”

“What do you think?”

“Palestine belongs to us,” I cried. “What do we have to do with this place, England? It’s nothing. Only the birth of our own country can avenge the death of the six million.
That’s
the resurrection.”

“Excellent. I knew you’d see it in the right way. Now we have to find a way to get you in, but trust me, I have some connections.”

We went together to the Jewish Agency. They were incredulous. What could I offer? they demanded. Nothing, it turned out. They explained, patiently, that the British were only giving out fifteen hundred entry permits and that hundreds of thousands of DPs were ahead of me in the queue. Were I of potential use to them, they could, of course, obtain one of these permits for me, but I was no use at all, as far as they could see.

The rich are not used to taking no for an answer. “Is there any other way?” Uncle Joe asked, taking his checkbook from an inside pocket of his jacket and unscrewing the cap of his gold-plated Parker fountain pen.

They replied that they would think about it.

A week or two later, he telephoned them. Had they had any ideas? Yes. They suggested that I present myself to the Mandate authorities at the Foreign and Colonial Office and explain that I wished to enter Palestine as a tourist, a pious young Christian wanting to visit the Holy Land. I could take a perfectly legal passage on a perfectly legal ship and cruise pleasantly through the Mediterranean to Haifa. It was something that other people did all the time.

“How about this?” said Uncle Joe. “I will sell the salon. Your mother worked there for twenty years and you’re entitled to something. Suppose I buy a ticket and give you a banker’s draft to cover your first three months?”

“It’s very generous.”

“The future belongs to the young people, Evelyn. I’m too old to go but you…”

Did he really see me as the future hope of Jewish humanity? Or was he just getting rid of me? Still I don’t know.

First, I had to obtain a passport and endure the icy politeness of the officials when, looking at my birth certificate, they observed the space where my father’s name should have been. Then I dressed in a hot brown scratchy tweed skirt and a modest cream blouse with a peter-pan collar for my interview at the Foreign Office. I borrowed a gold cross from Gabriella who was working in one of the newly reopened Italian restaurants and hung it round my neck. She had great sympathy with my cause. A lot of people did in those days. She gave me a rosary of brown wooden beads too which I put in my handbag. I went with no lipstick or rouge and my hair, which reached to my shoulders, was screwed into a bun with tight fingers.

I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue where the cleaners were busy on the steps of the theaters, to Piccadilly Circus. Past Lilly-whites, where there was an artful arrangement of cricketing paraphernalia in the window, then down Lower Regent Street, into Trafalgar Square and across the Mall. Walked along Horse Guards Parade, where on my right the swans and mallards and Canada geese made their way across the lake in St. James’s Park, and I saw one rise from the water and take wing above the bare black twigs, and turning saw it fly over Buckingham Palace with the flag ripping against the wind to tell us that our King and Queen and princesses were at home. A car passed and a somber profile that I recognized from the newsreels looked straight ahead. The might of the British Empire was burnished in the frail sunshine of this morning in February 1946, when London had never looked lovelier. The grandeur and majesty of England bore down on me.

I was trying to make myself feel as I appeared to be: a modest Christian girl hurrying through Whitehall, perhaps to polish the candlesticks on the altar at Westminster Abbey or to commune with the tombs of English poets, four hundred years dead. Or whatever it was people did in churches. The rosary beads lay in the darkness of my handbag, clicking against each other. A man passed me in pinstripe trousers and a morning coat and wing collar and he lifted his bowler hat and said a courteous good morning. I smiled back. Across the city, the East End and the docks were flattened, in ruins, but here nothing had changed.

Inside my head the kings and queens of England were stacked like pancakes in chronological order going back to the Wars of the Roses but no one I was related to had ever set foot on English soil until forty-five years ago. What could an immigrant child be, except an impersonator? I
felt like a double agent, a fifth columnist. And I knew that as long as I lived in this country it would always be exactly the same. I walked among them and they thought they knew me, but they understood nothing at all. It was
me
that understood, the spy in their midst.

There was no difficulty at all in obtaining permission to go to Palestine. The situation was not stable, they warned me, but with proper care and by closely following the advice of the officials I met there I should experience no danger.

I was told, enthusiastically, of the sights I wound find: one of the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Nativity and other Christian and Muslim landmarks that did not interest me. Neither archeology nor ancient history moved me in the slightest. All the madonnas of the Renaissance were, for me, studies in perspective and pigment and skin tone.

“You’ll want to visit Galilee,” they advised.

“Where Christ walked on the water,” I replied. “How wonderful to think that I’ll see it with my own eyes.” But as I regarded things, I was pretty close to walking on water myself.

Uncle Joe gave me a book of modern art as a going-away present. I looked forward to spending the voyage reading about Picasso, and Matisse, Miró and Chagall.