She's Leaving Home (4 page)

The bed swayed and creaked. It had been her father’s in his bachelor days. He had told her how he had been pulled out of the Hayworth Street house in the autumn of 1944 when for the fourth time his home suffered from bombing. That last occasion it was a direct hit; Helen had seen the gap in the row of terraced houses, like a pulled tooth. Daniel had survived because he had been asleep on the sofa near the fire. The chimney breast had fallen intact across him. He had emerged black as the ace of spades, coughing and wiping the soot from his eyes, but his father – her grandfather – had suffered shrapnel wounds which turned to gangrene. Three weeks later, delirious with pain, the old man had died in the Royal Infirmary surrounded by dozens of similar cases. So when did the bed appear? This
narrow bed with its ancient noisy springs? Probably from a second-hand shop soon after, when Daniel must have been taken in by an accommodating friend. It felt older than he was.

This family, Helen sensed, had been affected more by the war in Britain than by the genocide. True, Annie’s cousin’s family had been wiped out in Auschwitz; a survivor had made his way to Israel after terrible privations. But both Annie and her daughter, like Rita and her sister, were far more aware in their daily lives of acres of bomb-blasted devastation which had not yet been cleared and of the huge effort to restart the economy and to catch up both with overseas competitors and the expectations of ordinary people. All had a sense that the country was falling behind. They were probably culturally closer to their Christian neighbours than to distant relatives in Tel Aviv or Tiberias, though the older generation would have denied it. For them, assimilation was to be fought not welcomed.

Yet despite the tribulations, her father had refused to quit the shattered city. Helen admired him for that. The promised lands – Canada, America, Australia – beckoned. Others couldn’t get away quick enough. That was her mother’s verdict on the speedy captures by Daniel’s cousins of clean-cut young men from the nearby USAF air-base at Burtonwood. The double wedding photos showed both girls smiling triumphantly, their soldier bridegrooms clean-cut in their uniforms. One bride had a baby in arms by the date the ship sailed. At this point in the narrative Annie would sniff audibly. If Gertie her sister-in-law was mentioned Annie would raise her eyes to heaven and mutter. As these women were close relations she could not express outright disapproval, not in her own daughter’s hearing. Helen would speculate to herself whether any of her female relatives had behaved scandalously, but suspected it was simply that their choices were far more adventurous than her mother’s.

Had Daniel emigrated she, Helen, would have been born in America. Probably in Brooklyn. Gertie boasted an address in Queens, on Little Rock Parkway which sounded like a proper road. An open invitation was extended but the fare to New York was prohibitive. Nor had these newly naturalised Americans, who boasted of having done so well stateside, raised the funds to visit in the eighteen years since: not one of them.

It was dark. The curtains should be drawn, but as with the bus she relished her vantage point. Down in the lighted kitchen of the house across the garden, plump Mrs Williams was lifting a large dish out of the oven. At her side a pile of plates, indifferent to meat or milk, awaited the casserole and potatoes, the cabbage and gravy, the suet pudding and custard. Mrs Williams, who was Welsh, was a better cook than her mother; or at least, a more generous one.

A footstep came on the landing; her mother opened the door, her arms full of clean laundry. ‘Excuse me. I have to put this lot in the airing cupboard.’

As sheets and towels were folded away Annie chattered inconsequentially about Friday’s activities while for a moment Helen continued to gaze out of the window. Her mother paused, hands on hips. ‘You’ve not heard a word I’ve been saying.’

Helen relaxed. It was the second time that day she had been caught daydreaming. ‘I was watching Mrs Williams, Mum,’ she explained. ‘She seems so settled, like she’s been in her kitchen a century and will always be here. Yet she was born in a Welsh village.’

‘Here’s not a bad place to be,’ Annie countered. ‘You could do far worse. Liverpool people – Scousers – have some fine qualities. Even the
goyim
.’

‘Oh, I know. Nowhere else are people as warm, as friendly, as kind-hearted. Nowhere else do citizens have the same sense of humour, the same cheeky way with words, the same wisdom. Isn’t that right?’ Her mother looked puzzled: Helen was teasing. The girl continued, waving her arms as if on a television show, ‘Scousers have a keen sense of balance; in particular they know when to work and when to play. It is held to be
wrong
to work a moment beyond absolute necessity. Oh, quite.’

‘That’s true,’ Annie said, a little uncertainly.

‘The trouble is,’ Helen continued, her brow furrowed in best Cliff Michelmore style, ‘outside,
these sensible attitudes are misrepresented. Scousers are regarded as a bit of a joke. Their rich accent, thick as soup in a ladle, is a source of mockery. Their attitudes and drinking habits are held up to scrutiny. Their preference for football over hard graft is inexplicably seen as a fault, not as a mark in their favour.’

Annie shrugged and folded the tea towels. ‘So stay put. Everything is familiar, everybody talks the same. Nobody’ll laugh at you here.’

It dawned on Helen that two kinds of restrictions faced her: being Jewish and coming from a working-class background in Liverpool. Two systems, each elaborate, complete and consistent, separable yet interlinked; two thickly woven blankets intended to protect her. Yet the overall effect was of suffocation.

If Brenda and Meg were correct a third limitation existed. Should she want her own life it’d be much harder
as a girl
. She hadn’t given the question much attention; these were obstacles she had tended to take for granted. Girls were not barred entirely: they could try for Oxford, with its thirty colleges for men and only five for women. Cambridge was worse – only three took women. Even Liverpool University would accept far more men than women entrants and set secret quotas to ensure that outcome. But that was a big improvement on times when women couldn’t be admitted as undergraduates at all.

So far Helen had regarded it as a matter of ensuring she at any rate was good enough to surmount the barriers. That the existence of the barriers was wrong in principle she knew, but ignored. Hence her preference for science. However tough it might be for a northern grammar-school girl to gain entry to a top university to read chemistry, it’d be ten times harder in English and nigh impossible in politics or history: unless one’s education to date had been paid for, and Daddy was a baronet.

She laughed softly. Annie stopped and looked at her, the wayward one. Helen knew her mother found her a mystery: the element of distance between them was increasing.

‘So?’ her mother demanded defensively. ‘What did I say that was so funny?’

‘No, it wasn’t you, Mum. I was thinking how much easier it’d be to take the next steps if my father were a lord or a baronet.
Sir
Daniel.’

‘Well, he’s not. Nor am I Lady Majinsky, or Lady Muck. You shouldn’t go round wanting what you can’t have, my girl.’

Yet Helen continued to smile, if ruefully. As her mother left, arms emptied, the girl picked up a file, then rose and closed the curtains.

Annie gazed dubiously at her daughter. ‘I’m not sure you should wear jeans, Helen. And that angora sweater. We might meet people we know.’

‘So? They’ll think you have an utterly modern daughter, Mum, and congratulate you. Anyway it’s cold and that’s a miserable damp place. I’ll put my duffel coat on top. Are you ready – shall I carry the bag?’

One outcome of Helen’s musings of the night before had been a resolution to be as well mannered as possible. Unlike both Meg and Colette she had a stable home. It was not her place to attack its foundations.

Annie continued to issue a stream of somewhat disorganised instructions. It was, Helen reflected, as if nobody could close a window nor lock a door without having been told. Or maybe this was a ritual affirmation of her mother’s role as mainstay of the household. Not that Helen wished to rearrange that, either.

The girl waited on the pavement as her mother locked the front door. It was a semi-detached, pebble-dashed house like its siamese twin to the left, one of millions of suburban properties built in a wave of 1930s speculation. In the small front garden a few rose bushes straggled behind a dank privet hedge. How Helen hated that hedge. Nothing much would flourish near or beneath it, not daffodils nor lily of the valley; yet privet, as high as it could decently be grown, was a mark of respectability. Too high or straggly or uncut, it would indicate wildness or undue suspicion of neighbours. A hedge too low or viciously pruned revealed a mean streak. Breast-height bushes conferred privacy and confirmed moderation. Her mother joined her at the gate, closed it and glanced back with a nod of satisfaction.

‘This is all I ever wanted, you know, Helen,’ her mother commented, then turned away with her towards the bus stop. Compared with many at her school the Majinskys were comfortable, though life could be uncertain. They owned their home, albeit on a mortgage. Her father had his own business in the city’s heart with a diverse and largely wealthy clientele. Most precious and unusual of all, they possessed a small car, a second-hand black Vauxhall. Daniel drove it, as was normal. Few women learned to drive; the prevailing opinion which Annie shared was that females did not have the right temperament. The fact that Sylvia Bloom drove, a divorcée, served to confirm her prejudice.

A short bus ride would bring Annie and her daughter to their objective behind London Road. On the brow of the hill overlooking the river, the city had once ended at this point. Main arterial trunk roads then wound out into open country before linking up with the villages of Childwall and Gateacre, Aigburth and Prescot, which had been incorporated about the time Annie was born. Just as an ancient tanyard would be banished to the edge of a village because of the smell, so the old slaughteryard stood at the city’s original limits, not far from the railhead.

They sat downstairs. Annie paid the fares – ‘One and a half to London Road’ – and handed over the exact change.

‘You going to Harold House on Sunday, Helen?’

‘Yes, probably.’ That was the youth club to which Helen and most of the city’s Jewish youth belonged. Its home was a scruffy Victorian house scheduled for demolition near the town centre.

‘It’s nice for you there.’ Again that nod of satisfaction. As if she might have added, Helen thought, ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.’ But, faithful to her new-found ordinance, she said nothing. Her mother persisted.

‘Does Jerry Feinstein still go? And what about Roseanne?’

‘Yes, but we’re not close friends, Mum. We happen to go to the same school. We don’t even
do the same subjects.’ She ignored the reference to Jerry. Her mother was endlessly inquisitive about boyfriends.

‘Your brother is happy at the King David.’

Helen tried not to scowl. It was not difficult to follow her mother’s train of thought. As an eleven-year-old sitting the city’s selective tests she had prayed her name would emerge near the top of the Liverpool-wide lists. That guaranteed her entry to the top girls’ grammar school instead of allocation to the new comprehensive. As far as she could see the King David’s sole advantage – its location close to her house – was more than outweighed by its oppressive religious bent.

‘I have to start thinking soon about which university,’ she ventured. Annie folded her hands firmly in her lap.

‘Plenty of time yet. They tell me Liverpool’s very good, if you must go to university. Then you can stay with us.’

‘Would you say that if Barry wanted to go away?’ Helen was genuinely curious.

Annie sniffed. ‘It’s different for boys. Now don’t start arguing with me, Helen, you know it is.’

‘I don’t see why. Come on, Mum. You’re not thick. If you’d had the chance, wouldn’t you have wanted to go to college, and start a new life?’

‘I didn’t have the chance. Nobody did in those days before the war, not from our street.’

Helen wondered briefly whether she herself might talk similarly some day, with her ideas stuck in the groove established in her youth.

‘But if you had?’ the girl persisted. Then she remembered. ‘You said “nobody” and that’s not true. Didn’t one of the family qualify as a chemist?’

‘Right,’ said Annie, but there was a steeliness in her voice. ‘Our David. Fat lot of use that was. We had to make such sacrifices so he could go, and then he ups and marries a non-Jewish girl. Not the best example you could have chosen.’

‘He lives in London, doesn’t he?’ Helen was conscious of treading on thin ice. She had never met this uncle whose behaviour had marked him as a black sheep. Her mother was twisting her gloves in her lap. ‘Why don’t we see him – is that his choice, or ours?’

‘We see everybody else,’ Annie responded shortly. ‘Your uncle Sammy and uncle Abbie in Manchester. Both have nice homes. They’re the nearest. My sisters are all over the place. We’d see more of our Becky if her husband wasn’t Reform.’

‘But we’re not close,’ Helen mused. ‘Not physically or – as friends. You and Dad are the only members of your families still here where you were born. The rest have scattered. It’s as if you two are still in the life raft after a storm when everyone else’s been rescued.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Annie shot her a suspicious glance. ‘I don’t see it like that. I don’t hanker after what I can’t have and I count my blessings. That’s why I’m content. I said it last night. Be content with what you’ve got is my maxim. Don’t turn your nose up, Helen. You could do a lot worse.’ She peered out. ‘It’s our stop soon. Fasten your coat.’

The bus left them a short distance from their destination. A chill wind whipped through the street. Helen pulled the duffel coat closer. Even a hundred yards away, cattle could be heard lowing in fear, and behind them the screech of chickens.

Underfoot it was wet and slimy. Annie steered her daughter and began to pick her way fastidiously round dollops of manure. ‘I’m not sure it won’t be a good thing when this place shuts,’ she remarked defensively. ‘I’ll have to wipe my shoes with a bit of newspaper before I get back on the bus.’

Soon rows of steel pens came into sight. Within their confines were pressed dozens of cattle, black and white or reddish brown, their broad cream noses wet and slobbery, eyes wide and rolling. Men in dungarees and donkey jackets, cigarettes on lower lips, prodded the beasts, indifferent to the
steaming odours of faeces and fear. The animals were being herded steadily towards a vast corrugated-iron shed. Its doors gaped open; a sickly yellow light from inside shone fitfully over the yards. From its depths clanging metallic noises came with a thumping regularity.

‘They don’t kill them our way,’ Annie asserted. ‘This lot’ll be stunned first. We don’t allow it.’

The girl shivered but it was as if her mother wanted to press home an advantage. ‘See, the rabbis say our animals have to be free of blemish. So we wouldn’t take that one there.’ She pointed at a gaunt specimen with a gash on its flank. The dried blood attracted flies even in the cold weather.

‘Then for us they have to be put in a sort of cage and turned upside down so that the throat can be cut in a single stroke. That’s also so that the blood can drain out; we’re not allowed to eat any blood, remember.’

‘I think it would be less cruel to stun them,’ Helen commented.

‘Nonsense,’ said Annie firmly. ‘The animal dies the moment its throat’s cut. It’s the best way. In biblical days they’d cut flesh from the living animal.’

Again that reference to ways of life thousands of years ago, still with contemporary force. Helen had scarcely thought about it but the need to be relevant to her own time was beginning insistently to assert itself. ‘Something like that still happens,’ she said. ‘With lobsters and crabs. They’re cooked live.’ Both women shuddered.

‘I couldn’t touch them. And people who eat them claim to be civilised!’ Annie continued. ‘Anything which crawls along the sea bed is dirty. Fish are permitted if they have gills and scales but no shellfish. Winkles and cockles: ugh. No thanks.’

They had left the cattle sheds behind and entered the area reserved for fowl. The noise was as loud, more urgent, more of a shriek than a bellow. On one side fat farm-raised chickens with glossy brown plumage sat eight or ten to a wicker basket; their vendors resembled the birds, plump men or women in tweeds from the dunes of Lancashire. Nearby, lorries unloaded their wares, banks of metal cages crammed with scrawny ex-layers with white feathers and raw patches around their necks. The air was more sour than near the cattle, less earthy, acrid.

Women worked around here, some in black aprons, their heads swathed in scarves, hands cold in fingerless gloves. An auctioneer in a white coat moved down a wall of cages prodding chickens and uttering a steady stream of prices. He was followed by three attentive men. One, young and thin, the auctioneer’s clerk, took notes; the others, evidently more prosperous, were buyers for local shops. Whatever was purchased would shortly grace marble slabs decorated with plastic parsley in emporia throughout the region, and appear on dinner tables with roast potatoes and mushy peas on Sunday.

‘This way.’ The buyers ignored Annie as she threaded her way past. Just one more housewife with an old leather carrier-bag, off to fetch her dinner cheaper than she could get it from them. Wanting to see the live bird for herself: as if that were any guarantee of its quality. How could she know more than they did?

In a moment the two arrived at a roped-off area arranged as a small yard. On one post hung a white plastic notice with lettering in blue, English and Hebrew, plus the six-pointed star of David, the same as was exhibited in every Jewish food shop. It indicated the jurisdiction of the Beth Din, the guardians of
kashrut
.

A corrugated awning provided shelter from rain or snow but not from the wind. Underneath sat several ancient hags dressed in black each with a leather apron covering the lower body. Behind, acting as an inadequate wind-break, was a double row of black iron pots, like chimney funnels. Helen suspected they were exactly that – liberated in a job lot from a builder’s yard, exactly the right shape and size. The bottom of each pot was open; each was nailed to a metal bar and suspended over a small open drain filled with black blood which oozed in sluggish rivulets. Some of the pots held chickens,
upside down, their legs sticking up helplessly, red or yellow, the long claws packed with grime. The smell was overpowering and made her want to retch.

‘Good morning, Mrs Ginsberg.’ Annie greeted the nearest old woman with deference. The sticky eyes peered back at her glumly.

Mrs Ginsberg was completely bundled up in black from top to toe. Under her apron and stained skirt thick stockinged legs could be glimpsed which disappeared into heavy boots laced up past the ankle. Like the other women who glanced up in momentary curiosity then returned to their tasks she wore black fingerless gloves stiff with blood, mucus and feathers. The fleshy face was wizened and red with cold; a headscarf was tied tightly around her head but wisps of grey hair had escaped unnoticed. A couple of small white feathers had lodged in the tendrils. On her lap lay a headless chicken which she plucked with speedy ferocity, the feathers dumped in handfuls in a sack at her side. The other women were similarly engaged but worked more slowly.

‘Mrs Majinsky. Not a good morning. Bloody freezing.’ Mrs Ginsberg sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘Go choose your chicken. Brigstone’s got some nice ones. Watch out for the old man.’

That meant the wily old Rabbi from the Beth Din was in the vicinity. Like a malevolent vulture he would scrutinise as animals and chickens were dispatched. If he did not like what he saw he might declare the carcase not kosher. Then a noisy row could ensue as the purchaser demanded her money back and the vendor, the sale completed as far as he was concerned, refused. Customers had been known to come to blows. On one occasion a butcher, driven to distraction by the Rebbe’s pernickety ways on a singularly bad day, had grabbed his beard and threatened him with his
shochet
’
s
knife. He had been heavily fined by the Beth Din for that.

Mr Brigstone stood nearby, a wicker basket at his feet. He came in from Formby. Annie preferred his birds as they were mature and healthy, as was evident from the red wattle and clear eye; often several eggs would be found in the oviduct, semi-formed and delicious. Once the abattoir was closed, these opportunities would vanish too. Whatever was inside the live bird at the moment of purchase was hers to use – giblets, liver, heart: all except the gizzard, solid with stones and
half-digested
corn, which must be discarded, along with the guts. That was a skilled task. A careless hand would yank out the intestines and break the bile sac or duct; then the flesh would be tainted and useless. But the remaining innards made excellent soup, and by family tradition were Annie’s own to nibble with the meal.

For a moment, for the sheer pleasure of it, Annie debated with Mr Brigstone the virtues of each of the six hens remaining in the basket, then chose the middle-sized one as she usually did. A ten-shilling note was handed over, change counted and put away. Chickens were not cheap, but they were essential for a proper Friday night dinner.