More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt …’
They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’
‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.
‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘— so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! I recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part…”’
That did it. I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.
‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.
The cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and house-trained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.
The Gentile Jewesses
One day a madman came into my little grandmother’s shop at Watford. I say my little grandmother but ‘little’ refers only to her height and to the dimensions of her world by the square foot — the small shop full of varieties, her parlour behind it, and behind that the stone kitchen and the two bedrooms over her head.
‘I shall murder you,’ said the madman, standing with legs straddled in the door frame, holding up his dark big hands as one about to pounce and strangle. His eyes stared from a face covered with tangled eyebrows and beard.
The street was empty. My grandmother was alone in the house. For some years, from frequent hearing of the story, I believed I was standing by her side at the time, but my grandmother said no, this was long before I was born. The scene is as clear as a memory to me. The madman —truly escaped from the asylum in a great park nearby — lifted his hairy hands, cupped as for strangling. Behind him was the street, empty save for sunshine.
He said, ‘I’m going to murder you.
She folded her hands over her white apron which lay over the black apron and looked straight at him.
‘Then you’ll get hung,’ she said.
He turned and shuffled away.
She should have said ‘hanged’ and I remember at one telling of the story remarking so to my grandmother. She replied that ‘hung’ had been good enough for the madman. I could not impress her with words, but I was so impressed by the tale that very often afterwards I said ‘hung’ instead of ‘hanged’.
I seem to see the happening so plainly in my memory it is difficult to believe I know it only by hearsay; but indeed it happened before I was born. My grandfather was a young man then, fifteen years younger than his wife and dispossessed by his family for having married her. He was gone to arrange about seedlings when the madman had appeared.
My grandmother had married him for pure love, she had chased him and hunted him down and married him, he was so beautiful and useless. She never cared at all that she had to work and keep him all his life. She was astonishingly ugly, one was compelled to look at her. In my actual memory, late in their marriage, he would bring her a rose from the garden from time to time, and put cushions under her head and feet when she reclined on the sofa in the parlour between the hours of two and three in the afternoon. He could not scrub the counter in her shop for he did not know how to do it, but he knew about dogs and birds and gardens, and had photography for a pastime.
He said to my grandmother, ‘Stand by the dahlias and I will take your likeness.’
I wished she had known how to take his likeness because he was golden-haired even in my day, with delicate features and glittering whiskers. She had a broad pug nose, she was sallow skinned with bright black eyes staring straight at the world and her dull black hair pulled back tight into a knot. She looked like a white negress; she did not try to beautify herself except by washing her face in rain water.
She had come from Stepney. Her mother was a Gentile and her father was a Jew. She said her father was a Quack by profession and she was proud of this, because she felt all curing was done by the kindly manner of the practitioner in handing out bottles of medicine rather than by the contents. I always forced my elders to enact their stories. I said, ‘Show me how he did it.’
Willingly she leaned forward in her chair and handed me an invisible bottle of medicine. She said, ‘There you are, my dear, and you won’t come to grief, and don’t forget to keep your bowels regular.’ She said, ‘My father’s medicine was only beetroot juice but he took pains with his manners, and he took pains with the labels, and the bottles were three-pence a gross. My father cured many an ache and pain, it was his gracious manner.’
This, too, entered my memory and I believed I had seen the glamorous Quack Doctor who was dead before I was born. I thought of him when I saw my grandfather, with his gracious manner, administering a tiny dose of medicine out of a blue bottle to one of his small coloured birds. He opened its beak with his finger and tipped in a drop. All the little garden was full of kennels, glass and sheds containing birds and flower-pots. His photographs were not quite real to look at. One day he called me Canary and made me stand by the brick wall for my likeness. The photograph made the garden look tremendous. Perhaps he was reproducing in his photographs the grander garden of his youth from which he was expelled avengingly upon his marriage to my grandmother long before I was born.
After his death, when my grandmother came to live with us I said to her one day,
‘Are you a Gentile, Grandmother, or are you a Jewess?’ I was wondering how she would be buried, according to what religion, when her time came to die.
‘I am a Gentile Jewess,’ she said.
All during the time she kept the shop of all sorts in Watford she had not liked the Jewish part of her origins to be known, because it was bad for business. She would have been amazed at any suggestion that this attitude was a weak one or a wrong one. To her, whatever course was sensible and good for business was good in the sight of the Almighty. She believed heartily in the Almighty. I never heard her refer to God by any other title except to say, God bless you. She was a member of the Mothers’ Union of the Church of England. She attended all the social functions of the Methodists, Baptists and Quakers. This was bright and agreeable as well as being good for business. She never went to church on Sundays, only for special services such as on Remembrance Day. The only time she acted against her conscience was when she attended a spiritualist meeting; this was from sheer curiosity, not business. There, a bench fell over on to her foot and she limped for a month; it was a judgment of the Almighty.
I inquired closely about spiritualism. ‘They call up the dead from their repose,’ she said. ‘It vexes the Almighty when the dead are stirred before they are ready.’
Then she told me what happened to spiritualists after a number of years had passed over their heads. ‘They run up the garden path, look back over their shoulders, give a shudder, and run back again. I dare say they see spirits.’
I took my grandmother’s hand and led her out to the garden to make her show me what spiritualists did. She ran up the path splendidly with her skirts held up in her hands, looked round with sudden bright eyes, shuddered horribly, then, with skirts held higher so that her white petticoat frills flickered round her black stockings, she ran gasping back towards me.
My grandfather came out to see the fun with his sandy eyebrows raised high among the freckles. ‘Stop your larks, Adelaide,’ he said
to my grandmother.
So my grandmother did it again, with a curdling cry, ‘Ah-ah-ah’.
Rummaging in the shop, having climbed up on two empty fizzpop crates, I found on an upper shelf some old bundles of candles wrapped in interesting-looking literature. I smoothed out the papers and read, ‘Votes for Women! Why do you Oppress Women?’ Another lot of candles was wrapped in a larger bill on which was printed an old-fashioned but military-looking young woman waving the Union Jack and saying, ‘I’m off to join the Suffragettes.’ I asked my grandmother where the papers came from, for she never threw anything away and must have had them for another purpose before wrapping up the candles before I was born. My grandfather answered for her, so far forgetting his refinement as to say, ‘Mrs Spank-arse’s lark’.
‘Mrs Pankhurst, he means. I’m surprised at you, Tom, in front of the child.’
My grandfather was smiling away at his own joke. And so all in one afternoon I learned a new word, and the story of my grandmother’s participation in the Women’s Marches down Watford High Street, dressed in her best clothes, and I learned also my grandfather’s opinions about these happenings. I saw, before my very eyes, my grandmother and her banner, marching in the sunshiny street with her friends, her white petticoat twinkling at her ankles as she walked. In a few years’ time it was difficult for me to believe I had not stood and witnessed the march of the Watford Suffragettes moving up the High Street, with my grandmother swiftly in the van before I was born. I recalled how her shiny black straw hat gleamed in the sun.
Some Jews came to Watford and opened a bicycle shop not far from my grandmother’s. She would have nothing to do with them. They were Polish immigrants. She called them Pollacks. When I asked what this meant she said, ‘Foreigners.’ One day the mama-foreigner came to the door of her shop as I was passing and held out a bunch of grapes. She said, ‘Eat.’ I ran, amazed, to my grandmother who said, ‘I told you that foreigners are funny.’
Among ourselves she boasted of her Jewish blood because it had made her so clever. I knew she was so clever that it was unnecessary for her to be beautiful. She boasted that her ancestors on her father’s side crossed over the Red Sea; the Almighty stretched forth his hands and parted the waves, and they crossed over from Egypt on to dry land. Miriam, the sister of Moses, banged her timbrel and led all the women across the Red Sea, singing a song to the Almighty. I thought of the Salvation Army girls who quite recently had marched up Watford High Street in the sunshine banging their tambourines. My grandmother had called me to the shop door to watch, and when they and their noise were dwindled away she turned from the door and clapped her hands above her head, half in the spontaneous spirit of the thing, half in mimicry. She clapped her hands. ‘Alleluia!’ cried my grandmother. ‘Alleluia!’
‘Stop your larks, Adelaide, my dear.’
Was I present at the Red Sea crossing? No, it had happened before I was born. My head was full of stories, of Greeks and Trojans, Picts and Romans, Jacobites and Redcoats, but these were definitely outside of my lifetime. It was different where my grandmother was concerned. I see her in the vanguard, leading the women in their dance of triumph, clanging the tambourine for joy and crying Alleluia with Mrs Pankhurst and Miriam the sister of Moses. The hands of the Almighty hold back the walls of the sea. My grandmother’s white lace-edged petticoat flashes beneath her black skirt an inch above her boots, as it did when she demonstrated up and down the garden path what happens to spiritualists. What part of the scene I saw and what happened before I was born can be distinguished by my reason, but my reason cannot obliterate the scene or diminish it.
Great-aunts Sally and Nancy, my grandfather’s sisters, had been frigidly reconciled to him at some date before I was born. I was sent to visit them every summer. They lived quietly now, spinsters of small means. They occupied themselves with altar-flowers and the vicar. I was a Gentile Jewess like my grandmother, for my father was a Jew, and these great-aunts could not make it out that I did not look like a Jew as did my grandmother. They remarked on this in my presence as if I could not understand that they were discussing my looks. I said that I did look like a Jew and desperately pointed to my small feet. ‘All Jews have very little feet,’ I claimed. They took this for fact, being inexperienced in Jews, and admitted to each other that I possessed this Jewish characteristic. Nancy’s face was long and thin and Sally’s was round. There seemed to be a lot of pincushions on tiny tables. They gave me aniseed cake and tea every summer while the clock ticked loudly in time to their silence. I looked at the yellowish-green plush upholstery which caught streaks of the sunny afternoon outside, I looked until I had absorbed its colour and texture in a total trance during the great-aunts silences. Once when I got back to my grandmother’s and looked in the glass it seemed my eyes had changed from blue to yellow-green plush.
On one of these afternoons they mentioned my father’s being an engineer. I said all Jews were engineers. They were fascinated by this fact which at the time I thought was possibly true with the exception of an occasional Quack. Then Sally looked up and said, ‘But the Langfords are not engineers.’
The Langfords were not Jews either, they were Gentiles of German origin, but it came to the same thing in those parts. The Langfords were not classified as foreigners by my grandmother because they did not speak in broken English, being all of a London-born generation.
The Langford girls were the main friends of my mother’s youth. There was Lottie who sang well and Flora who played the piano and Susanna who was strange. I remember a long evening in their house when Lottie and my mother sang a duet to Flora’s piano playing, while Susanna loitered darkly at the door of the drawing-room with a smile I had never seen on any face before. I could not keep my eyes off Susanna, and got into trouble for staring.
When my mother and Lottie were seventeen they hired a cab one day and went to an inn, some miles away in the country, where they drank gin. They supplied the driver with gin as well, and, forgetting that the jaunt was supposed to be a secret one, returned two hours later standing up in the cab, chanting ‘Horrid little Watford. Dirty little Watford. We’ll soon say goodbye to nasty little Watford.’ They did not consider themselves to be village girls and were eager to be sent away to relatives elsewhere. This was soon accomplished; Lottie went to London for a space and my mother to Edinburgh. My mother told me the story of the wild return of carriage and horses up the High Street and my grandmother confirmed it, adding that the occurrence was bad for business. I can hear the clopping of hooves, and see the girls standing wobbly in the cab dressed in their spotted muslins, although I never actually saw anything but milk-carts, motor cars and buses, and girls with short skirts in the High Street, apart from such links with antiquity as fat old Benskin of Benskins’ Breweries taking his morning stroll along the bright pavement, bowing as he passed to my grandmother.
‘I am a Gentile Jewess.’
She was buried as a Jewess since she died in my father’s house, and notices were put in the Jewish press. Simultaneously my great-aunts announced in the Watford papers that she fell asleep in Jesus.
My mother never fails to bow three times to the new moon wherever she might be at the time of first catching sight of it. I have seen her standing on a busy pavement with numerous cold rational Presbyterian eyes upon her, turning over her money, bowing regardless and chanting, ‘New moon, new moon, be good to me.’ In my memory this image is fused with her lighting of the Sabbath candles on a Friday night, chanting a Hebrew prayer which I have since been told came out in a very strange sort of Hebrew. Still, it was her tribute and solemn observance. She said that the Israelites of the Bible and herself were one and the same because of the Jewish part of her blood, and I did not doubt this thrilling fact. I thought of her as the second Gentile Jewess after my grandmother, and myself as the third.
My mother carries everywhere in her handbag a small locket containing a picture of Christ crowned with thorns. She keeps on one table a rather fine Buddha on a lotus leaf a
nd on another a horrible replica of the Venus de Mio. One way and another all the gods are served in my mother’s household although she holds only one belief and that is in the Almighty. My father, when questioned as to what he believes, will say, ‘I believe in the Blessed Almighty who made heaven and earth,’ and will say no more, returning to his racing papers which contain problems proper to innocent men. To them, it was no great shock when I turned Catholic, since with Roman Catholics too, it all boils down to the Almighty in the end.
Alice Long’s Dachshunds
The guns clank on the stone, one after the other, echoing against the walls outside the chapel, as the men come in for Mass before the shoot. Mamie, whose age is eight years and two months, kneels in the second row from the back, on the right-hand side, near the Virgin, where a warm candle is lit. There is no other warmth. Alice Long is kneeling on a front hassock. Her two brothers from London have come in — tall men in knickerbockers and green wool stockings that stride past Mamie’s eyes as she kneels in her place.
Other big men have put their guns against the wall outside the chapel door. The Catholics from the cottages have come in. Everyone except the strangers is praying for more snow and a road blockage to the town, so that poor Alice Long can decently serve roe deer, roe deer, roe deer for all the meals that the London people are going to eat. The woods are cracking alive with roe deer, but meat from the town has got to be paid for with money.
Alice Long is round-shouldered and worried; she is the only daughter of old Sir Martin, and is always addressed, to her face, as Miss Long. Her money is her own, but it goes into the keeping of the House.
Alice Long’s two brothers’ wives have come into the chapel now. They are the last, because they have to look after their own babies when they get up. Before Mamie’s birth, all the babies in the House had nurses. The two wives were differently made from the start, before they became Alice Long’s sisters-in-law, and still look so, although their tweed coats were made more alike. One is called Lady Caroline and the other, Mrs Martin Long, will be Lady Long when old Sir Martin dies and Martin Long comes into the title.