When I Lived in Modern Times Read online

  But I had Uncle Joe and what a story he had! He came as a young man from Warsaw and his family took winter cures at Austrian spa towns and his own father had traveled across the continent in his business, which was jewelry. Uncle Joe could still taste in his mouth the chocolate that his father brought back from Paris and the cheeses wrapped in a gauze which returned with him from Antwerp. He remembered him talking of the years at the century’s end when he would journey through Russia to deliver sapphires to Riga. Of the endless forest and its parched, fragrant stillness, the crunch of dry snow beneath the wheels of his carriage, of coming upon a town—a small metropolis of Jewish loggers and sawmill workers, crude men in long beards, their tzitzes hanging from beneath their waistcoats, shirtsleeves rolled up as they manhandled birch planks, shouting and cursing in Yiddish to each other, their words freezing in the icy air, then dissolving into white clouds of vapor. Where were they now? Followed their language, become mist.

  So I found out early that England was not the whole world. I learned that I belonged in part to anther country, another continent even, where things were done differently and that what I thought was real was not inevitable or incapable of changing into something else, as the Russia of the tsar’s time was not the same Russia as now.

  My mother dedicated her life to being a mistress and learned the arts of a minor courtesan: how to dress and paint her face and which perfume to use. I would watch her in the mornings sitting in front of the mirror in her curlers, cold-creaming her face, or plucking her eyebrows with sharp tweezers into two surprised black parentheses, powdering the bald place above her lids where the hair had been. She knew the erotic attractions of her body and how to attract her man with it. She cultivated an exquisite femininity, understanding exactly how to entice with hats and fragments of veil and a painted-on beauty spot. She understood the mysterious power of allure and I was fascinated and appalled by the secret arts she practiced.

  My mother and I shared all our secrets. We were inseparable. We went to the pictures and out to the ABC for tea and toasted teacakes. Once a year we took the train to Brighton and stayed for a week in a small hotel, enjoying the musical shows at the end of the pier. We both loved Max Miller. “Very smutty,” my mother said. “But you can’t help laughing.”

  Uncle Joe ran a number of concerns including a cigar shop on Jermyn Street and kept a real wife in a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. We were family number two and we lived in a flat on three floors, each with two little rooms on it, above a grocer’s in Soho. I spent my childhood and youth with the Italians and the Belgians and the man who sold knives and chef’s hats. They felt sorry for us at Christmas and bought us yeasted cakes like domes, made with butter and scented with lemon, or tarts of flushed, scarlet strawberries on a mound of custard, or marzipan sweetmeats in the shape of fruits.

  Was he like a father to me, Uncle Joe? Well, we sized one another up and he saw me as the child he had to keep in with if he wanted the mother, and I saw him as someone to manipulate for my own ends, for God knows my mother was incapable of manipulating anyone. I always knew that we were the second string, that there were other daughters, four, as it happened, pampered and spoiled and showered with even more luxuries, which they took for granted and which I calculated to receive. They were the family he showed off, the public family, the ones whom he went to the synagogue with, the ones whom his business associates met. And when he died they were the ones whose hands people would shake at the funeral and say what was said on such occasions. “Long life.”

  We were the shadow family, we didn’t quite exist. Sometimes, walking along the street, I felt that I couldn’t be seen, that you could pass your hand through me. And I wanted to be seen. Inside I was shouting, look at me, pay me some attention.

  But I have to concede that Joe was loyal to my mother. They whispered together in Yiddish, their private language. I suppose he loved her. If she asked for something (and she didn’t ask very often) he always gave in, got his checkbook out. He paid the fees for a private school where I got an education that prepared me for a future far above the station in life I might otherwise have expected. He did it because he was a Jew and believed in the best, the best that money could buy. He was convinced that learning was never wasted, once you had it. It was something no one could take from you.

  “A great man once said”—Uncle Joe was a devout admirer of great men—“if you learn a poem by heart and they put you in prison, still you’ve got the poem.” I was set to work to learn to recite by rote chunks of Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning. Always the narrative works. “What is a poem,” asked Uncle Joe, “that cannot also tell a story?”

  So yes, he was a good man, a mensch, but that didn’t stop me worrying that my mother was not getting any younger, despite her dexterity with cosmetics, and—old before my time, with a precocious, courtesan’s wisdom that I shouldn’t have had—I thought that sooner or later his sexual and financial favors might be withdrawn and we would be stranded, back where we started, with nothing.

  Meanwhile, I was looking around to figure out who exactly I was. In the end, all I had to know myself was a fragment of something and I was trying to find out what was the main whole it had broken off from.

  It turned out that the fragment was part of a story, I was part of a grand narrative that had started before I was ever born. Who was I? I was a Jew. How did I know? Because of the tales they told me, of Poland and Latvia, and also the times we lived in when anti-Semitism was a wolf roaming the world.

  And because we lived in Soho.

  Maybe in some other place my mother and I would have been forced to dissolve our identities. Maybe we would have tried not to attract unwanted attention, an unmarried mother and her child, but in Soho it didn’t matter. No one asked questions. Within those few streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road it was acceptable to be different, it was normal. We were all ethnics, from somewhere else. Everyone had their own churches and social clubs, little colonies in which we preserved the customs of the place we had come from, as my mother and I had the synagogue on Dean Street we attended three times a year, for the most important high days and holidays. We bent our heads over our prayer books among a congregation of market traders and shopkeepers, actors and theatrical impresarios.

  I grew up in a world of night streets, of stage-door johnnies ardent or wan with hopelessness holding bunches of flowers; of little ballet dancers from Sadler’s Wells like brown wrens when out of their costumes and in their gabardine macs, warming their thin hands over cups of tea; of wrecked men from the first war blowing into harmonicas along the Strand; of the amber and scarlet flame of the braziers that roasted chestnuts on street corners; of the lit-up windows of Fortnum and Mason—once with a fairy coach pulled by silver-painted plaster horses and Cinderella inside it; of the electric advertisements at Piccadilly Circus and bronze Eros with his bow and arrow.

  This was my home, but I always knew I was a Jewish child growing up in a Christian country. That I woke up, every Sunday morning, to the sound of church bells ringing across the whole of Christian England and when I heard them I was not summoned to God. After the bells, silence. The shops shut, the traders on Berwick Street market not loading their stalls or sweeping up cabbage leaves, the theaters dark, the pubs closed. If you got on a bus and went to the suburbs there was nothing but the monotonous smell of roast dinners squeezing out through the cracks under the closed front doors. On Sundays life halted. England became a morgue. Outside there were a few walking corpses on the streets. I never understood why England did this, stopping the very flow of blood in its veins on Sundays and allowing it to flow again on Monday mornings. To rest? Why rest? You rested at night, in your bed!

  I was a Jewish child in a country where, unlike America, there was no contribution I could make to the forging of the national identity. It was fixed already, centuries ago.

  I was eight years old, and already I was an exotic. The English fed their dogs better food than they ate thems
elves. They fascinated me. They were exotic.

  I was a round-faced, stubborn, dark-haired girl whose lips were too red and whose eyes were too black. I would grow up into a watchful young woman who stared at herself in the mirror and thought her neck was a fraction too short and whose hair had to be bullied into curls with strong chemicals. I was naturally argumentative but my mother warned me early on that this was not considered an attractive quality in the female sex and so I learned, from her, to curb my tongue and to do what I could to cultivate prettiness and a feminine style.

  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.

  If your health and intelligence are good, if you’re single and want a man’s job—one of the most vital jobs in the British Empire—if you like the glamour of serving a crack force in a country of sand dunes and olive groves, historic towns and modern settlements—if you prefer this type of life on good pay that you can save…here’s how you can get into the Palestine Police Force.

  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 lip
s 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?