Hannah & Emil (5 page)

In the dim light in the endless stairwell I saw Boris from my class with his parents and his sisters just below us. I recognised him by the silhouette of his glasses and his unruly hair. He was Russian but that was not the language we spoke together. Father had taught me only a little of his language—much of what I knew I had gleaned from inside the curtain around my bed during his late-night conversations with Mother, when he spoke of relatives at home and how they fared: shortages, strikes, the cost of food. And English was unspeakably dull, the language of school, not for down here in the tunnels at night. We might have spoken Yiddish, but never in front of Father. He called it the dead language of the old world. He hated anything old-fashioned, anything he connected with superstition. Mother would not have minded so much. She often made up affectionate names in Yiddish, though not when Father was about. She had an endless store, so many that I often had to ask her what I had just been called. Little bird. Flower of spring. Sweet morsel.

We spoke when we were playing in a language we felt we had invented. Or if we knew we hadn't quite invented it, that we were close to its beginnings. Someone at our school, St John's, used it on us, called us little Jews. It was clear what the boys were saying. They called everyone little Jews. We listened to these and other snippets of tattle and invective in the playground and saw quickly enough that it was a simple trick. One worked out how the word would be spelled backwards, with the odd variation where needed for pronunciation. Yobs for boys and so on. Mother hated it, said we sounded like barrow boys and fishmongers.

‘Olleh Sirob.' I fell into step beside him, clutching my bundle as we descended into the crowded gloom, whispers echoing up from deep, deep below us. I loved raid nights.

He had not known it was me behind the pile of bedding. I was just a small girl, even for eight. Boris was not required to carry bedding. His mother did everything. We spoke as quickly as possible, partly to show off, partly to obscure further what we were saying. I was not one to waste a chance to irritate my brothers, who were one step behind, and stuck behind our bulkily laden forms until we reached the platform. We exchanged nonsense until our brains tired and we were forced to whisper in English.

‘Do you think there is really a bomb?' Boris said. ‘Mama says this is a waste of time.'

‘
I've
never seen one. But imagine if we went back up and the streets were missing, and we had to live in the tube forever, like rats . . .'

On the platform my parents manoeuvred themselves into a space where they could wedge their pillows against the curved tiled walls of the tunnel. ‘Hannah, come,' Father instructed. ‘Boys, come. You want the hoi polloi to crush your skulls?' As we burrowed into position, the ground trembled and the whispering ceased for a moment. Everyone looked at the ceiling. Was that a bomb at last? Or merely a rumbling in some ancient water pipe?

I was forced to share bedding with Mother, but made sure that I could lie next to Boris as well. Mother had brought an extra quilt to lay beneath us, but it was thin, the stone beneath it cold and hard. I had to shift constantly to ease the soreness in my bones. I whispered nonsense to Boris and he murmured back in Yiddish, sleepy, forgetting to use our secret language. The bodies on the ground were quiet. A few latecomers straggled onto our platform, excusing themselves as they stepped on hands and feet, drawing forth some juicy swearwords and then a harsh
shhh
, from someone's mother probably. Children all along the platform giggled. Boris trembled against my own shaking body.

Where is Boris? Sometimes I fancy I see him in the face of some Homburg-hatted relic tottering out onto the heath and I peer into the face beneath the brim, heart racing, but it is never him. One doesn't expect people to survive all the things we did. For all I know the Spanish flu got him before he finished school. Imagine, though, if he were still alive and living in London. Imagine what we would say to one another. Heavens, but you are
old
.

Anyway, the tube, in that war at the other end of the century. The lights were always on, so I had to pull the covers over my head to sleep. Mother lay quietly beside me on her back, with her eyes open, no doubt. Father snored, like the other fathers. The boys slapped each other on the other side of him, saying nothing, as though that were enough for them to remain blameless.

‘Boris,' I whispered, my corner of the quilt tented above our heads.

He smelled of lavender soap; its aroma filled the little shelter. His father owned a chemist's. ‘What if they bombed the water pipes,' I said, speaking English now that I had something close to my true thoughts that I wanted to convey, ‘and we were flooded to death?'

‘I'd save you.' But he wouldn't. He was almost asleep, crossing the border, leaving me behind.

‘What if there was so much water that it filled to the ceiling, and all our bodies spouted up the stairs and onto the road. What then, Boris?'

Silence.

At weekends I was free to do as I pleased. Father had proclaimed the Sabbath archaic before my birth and the shop had been open every Saturday since we moved from Wales. No one passed comment because in London Saturday was the day to do business. When the well-to-do were up west in their traps and motor cars for a new set of shirts, or furniture for their townhouses, or sent the maids out for linen, you would be a fool to lock your door, Father said. They liked to take treats home with them too, and he was happy to take their money any day of the week. I remembered distantly the endlessness of Saturdays in the village we had come from, in the Rhondda Valley, where Mother's family had gathered. I would look at my picture books in a corner of the kitchen while Mother cooked all day. The endless meals, sitting up straight, listening to elderly ladies who were hard of hearing speaking too loudly. Sometimes I would be asked to show my books to Grandmother, Mother's mother, a crow in widow's weeds who smelled of medicine. She was dead now and had disappeared from our lives before that. Something to do with Father, of whom Mother's family had never approved. London was the last straw.

The boys usually disappeared together on a Saturday morning before anyone could protest, tearing down the lane and climbing over the railings at St John's to play football with the other boys. The West End held different delights for me. For a curious child who wanted to know everything of the world, it was all there the moment I stepped off the dented stair from the shop to the pavement of Tottenham Court Road.

This Saturday Mother, generally quiet and slightly elusive, was in a vile mood because Benjamin, the little one, clumsy and in thrall to Geoffrey's wicked suggestions, had covered his weekend clothes in mud by jumping in puddles in the ditch. The clothes reeked because there was horse manure in the mud and Mother was at the wash tub in the courtyard muttering in Welsh. Benjamin sat at the kitchen table in his long johns, a look of black thunder on his face. His tin soldiers were scattered across table and floor, a small chubby hand having laid great swathes of the troops to waste. Geoffrey had long since given up on the game and gone out with a friend who'd thrown stones at the window from down on the pavement to catch his attention. This was how boys communicated, I knew; by primitive means.

I put on my hat and stepped out from behind the curtain enclosing my bed, ready to go and find adventure on the windy streets. ‘You
will
do everything he says, won't you, Benjamin?' Benjamin, four then, glowered back at me from beneath his dark curls. His clothes would not be dry until tea, by which time it would be too late for anything, and a whole Saturday would be wasted.

‘I hate you,' he said quietly. ‘And I hate Mother.' We were always saying such things. What casual horrors children can be.

‘Save it for Geoffrey,' I replied, adjusting my boater over my long dark plaits. ‘He's the one who gets you into trouble.'

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Can't I come out with you, please?'

‘But you don't have anything to wear.'

‘My school clothes.'

‘Mother will want to wash those too.'

‘She hasn't taken them down yet.'

‘We should have to get past Father.'

‘He won't care.'

‘Oh, come on then. But don't annoy me. No being a baby.'

‘Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, thank you.' He sprang down from his chair and began to dress. ‘I'll show you where Geoffrey keeps his sweeties.'

I laughed, eight and merciless. ‘You think I don't know where he keeps his sweets? And I know where you keep yours too—so watch out!'

We walked along Tottenham Court Road towards Great Russell Street for the British Museum, the street noisy with horses and motorcars and fruiterers and paperboys shouting. London smelled of animals and coal smoke and roasting chestnuts, not the food of migrants as it does now. Benjamin insisted on holding my hand. I hoped not to see Boris, or anyone else from school. I had planned to look around Shoolbred's and Pritchard's but Benjamin would just whine and all the glamour of the mannequins with their slender waists and meshed hats would evaporate. And the museum was always worth the walk.

Benjamin
had
to look at the mummies before he could be persuaded to visit any other rooms. There was no point in arguing with him. The dimple in his chin deepened when I hesitated: a warning. He was not too old for public tantrums, and it was best not to draw attention, lest some well-meaning adult sent us home to Mother. It was not that I minded, really. You never grew out of the mummies, though I was not quite so enthralled as Benjamin, his face against the glass before a mummy of a cat, mouth slack. I waited as long as I could. ‘Come on, Benjamin,' I said eventually. ‘My turn.'

I walked quickly across the wooden floors, listening to the heels of my new shoes clop beautifully with each smart step. The trick at the British Museum was not to look at the same things every time, much as you loved them. I was filled with an idea of adventure, of newness, that kept my feet moving. I could not stop for the gems or the crockery. Deliberately I passed through doors I had not noticed before. Past a hundred glass cases of statues and swords, I was drawn on, another door, another empty corridor beyond the Saturday crowds, through the great halls. I glimpsed rooms of wrapped treasures, cardboard boxes. They were packing things up to store, with the air raids, and so I was engaged in a sort of race to see things before they were gone. I entered a dark room and knew that this was where I had been headed. I turned to hurry Benjamin along. Behind me was an empty corridor.
Benjamin
, I thought. Why must you . . . But no matter, I would retrace my steps in a moment. He would not be far behind.

The cases were lit and under the glass were scrolls of parchment and huge books with leather or wooden covers open at some carefully selected page. A few solitary men, mostly very old, stood entranced in the light at certain cabinets, like figures on a stage at the beginning of a scene, emerging from the dark. I found the way actors did that eerie; I could never quite get over the fact that they had been there in the blackness without my knowing.

I placed a finger on the glass in front of me and stood on tiptoe. There was a huge book before me, handwritten with ink in Latin. I imagined the hand writing on these stiff yellow pages. The inkwell. The candle for illumination. I was enclosed in the pool of light around the box and its miraculous contents as though I had left London and this modern age. The glass was cold against my nose and eyelids. I followed the words, mouthing them quietly, thrilled to be speaking Latin, even if I did not understand it. I had the feeling that I could reach through the glass and touch the page, know it by touching. And if I could touch the paper, just once, it might give me something, transmit some magic.

I saw myself doing it, my finger running over the writing. My mind ran ahead and I could feel it, the ink on the page. I saw in an instant that all the people who created these objects were joined together by a gossamer strand. They were part of a special group, like monks or soldiers. Standing here in this light I believed myself one of them, touched by the glitter of whatever had touched them as they sat at their desks with their ink and their parchment and their dim light. Knowledge seemed suddenly like a cloud of golden dust and something had brought me to this room and drawn me inside it.