Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (3 page)

‘Pretty,’ said Jack, as a tiny bird with dappled feathers landed on the handle of his leather bag, and stared at him with round black eyes. It flapped its wings and took off in a gust of song.

From the moment he arrived home, Jack devoted his spare time to meticulously expanding the bullet points in the Helpful Information pamphlet, until there was no room left and he had to insert supplementary pages at the back. There was nothing he liked more than to make another little note, an observation upon English customs such as ‘the British housewife makes a purchase of haddock on Friday mornings’ and record this titbit of invaluable knowledge. Jack prided himself, that should another booklet be commissioned, the German Jewish Aid Committee could turn to no greater expert than himself.

The factory continued to grow, the vast looms churning out parachutes and kitbags and coarse canvas tents, so that the Rosenblums were able to move into a small terraced house in Hampstead, with a brass door knocker and a cobbled patio backing onto the heath. As the days seeped into weeks and then into months, Sadie grew tired of her husband’s list. Every evening there he was, hunched in his chair before the gas fire, the wireless blaring, scribbling, scribbling in his little book. The only time he faltered, and his pencil drooped was when Mr Winston Churchill or Mr John Betjeman came over the airwaves. She couldn’t understand this obsession to be English while she could feel that other life drifting further away, like steam from a kettle through an open window. There had been no news from Mutti, Emil or Papa for months. Jack went out every Friday for a copy of the
Jewish Chronicle,
and together they pored over the news. It was full of sinister rumours. While Elizabeth napped, Sadie would curl up on one of the pre-war Rosenblum rugs and read Mutti’s recipe books, trying to glut her appetite on visions of
Sachertorte
or puff pastry
Windbeutel.

Then, one Sunday morning in March 1943 it began to rain. Sadie knew Jack was upstairs somewhere with his
verdammt
list. The sky turned a deep shade of grey and the city was bathed in a false twilight. Water poured from the gutter and rain shattered the shimmering surface of the pond beyond the boundary. After an hour the water gently lapped the fence posts at the bottom of the garden leading to the heath. Staring out of the window, Sadie imagined she was Mrs Noah bobbing along in her house-shaped ark. She went and stood at the sink, gazing out at the pond sleepily. There was a deep-throated quacking from above, and then a cloud of ducks descended from the sky and landed on the pond. She smiled to see them; she liked the irritable sound they made when they quacked – they were like housewives bickering over bread. Then, she noticed something odd: a grey-haired woman was feeding them in the rain.

The kitchen was filling with a peculiar smell, sweet and singed; it was poppy-seed cake, slightly overdone so that the seeds on the top were beginning to burn. Sadie never made poppy-seed cake and had not eaten it since they had come to England; nor could she recall even having seen poppy-seeds for sale. It was Mutti’s favourite cake, better than Baumtorte, vanilla crescent or even toasted marzipan squares. She would eat slice after slice, getting the tiny seeds stuck in between her teeth so that she looked like a gap-toothed witch from the pages of the Brothers Grimm.

Sadie opened the door to the terrace and went out into the rain. She walked across the wet ground in her flimsy carpet slippers. The air was brimming with the aroma, as though the rain carried the fragrance of toasting seeds and sweet dough. As puddles formed in the soil, they too gave off the scent of a bakery amongst the terracotta flowerpots. Sadie walked to the fence and pushed aside two broken panels. Holding in her tummy, she slipped through the gap and stood on the bank of the pond. There, on the other side, stood her mother. She was wearing her long black skirt, a white apron and a neat blue scarf over her hair, while she fed scraps of burnt cake to the quacking ducks. Sadie stepped straight into the stagnant water. It was shallow and lapped the edge of her dressing gown, turning the bright fuchsia into dirty brown. The robe fanned out behind her like a train, her curlers forming a crown upon her head.

Closing her eyes, Sadie took a breath, drawing the sweet scent inside her. She mustn’t open them. She must not. Must not. If she did, Mutti would be gone and there would never be poppy-seed cake again.

Sadie walked home the long way, oblivious to the curious glances of passers-by. She knew there would be no more letters from Berlin. Yet she felt nothing, only silence.

‘What is wrong with you? Are you a crazy?’

Jack stood on the pavement, thin lipped. He stared at her for a second, then thrust a horsehair blanket over her shoulders and hurried her into the house, tense with disapproval.

‘I saw you. You were in the pond.’

Sadie said nothing.

‘What if someone else saw you?’

Sadie ignored him and marched into the kitchen, the dangling hem of her dressing gown smearing mud along the polished hall tiles. She could feel Jack trailing after her, stuttering in confusion. She didn’t care. She grabbed Mutti’s recipe book and wrenched it open, snatching at the pages. With a cry she tore out a leaf and crumpled it into a ball, crushing it so that the ink began to run from the sweat on her hands.

‘
Scheiße! Scheiße!
It’s all for nothing. I am lost.’

She hurled the book at the stove where it crashed into the cooker hood and slid onto the floor. Jack grabbed hold of his wife, hugging her to his chest, smoothing the hair from her eyes.

‘Hush. Hush, what has happened little one?’

Sadie could not speak, and from the back bedroom Elizabeth began to wail, woken by the noise.

‘Poppy-seeds,’ she choked, breath coming in rasps, ‘there were poppy-seeds. And there will be no more letters
.
’

Jack stared at her and for the first time since his brief internment he was frightened. He reached out and stroked her hand.

‘This will not do,
mein Spatz.
People will decide you are eccentric. You cannot walk into ponds in carpet slippers on a Sunday morning. It is not safe.’

Sadie felt like she might puke with anger. ‘This. This is what concerns you?
Arschkriecher
!’

Jack took a breath and licked his dry lips, ‘Odd habits are all very well for the English but we must be invisible.’

Sadie tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and gazed at her husband unblinking.

‘Very well. I shall be invisible.’

As she turned and walked away from him, Jack knew in his belly that something had broken. He almost heard it snap, but he could do nothing but watch her go, the damp fabric of her dressing gown clinging to her bare legs.

The end of the war was both a challenge and an opportunity. It meant that, no longer limited to wretched utility garments, Jack could now acquire the proper attire of the Englishman and, after careful deliberation, he decided that this meant nothing less than a bespoke suit from Savile Row. In his neat hand he recorded this as item one hundred and six on his list. Jack went to Henry Poole for the first time in October 1946. It cost him a small fortune just to acquire the requisite number of clothing coupons, let alone the cost of the clothes, but had been worth every halfpenny: that suit was the livery of the English gentleman. The store smelled deliciously of cedar wood, and the tailor called him ‘Sir’, measured his small frame without a sneer, and the suit was delivered twelve weeks later, wrapped in crepe paper inside a pearlescent box with the Henry Poole crest emblazoned in gold. His pattern was to be kept in the company vaults alongside those of Churchill, Gladstone and Prince Albert. When he put on the suit, he felt taller than his five feet three inches, his bald head appeared to shine less and his nose felt, well, less pronounced. It was how the Emperor had wished his new suit to be.

As car production increased once more, Jack was able to complete item number one hundred and seven: An Englishman drives a Jaguar. The summer of 1951, after the factory had shipped a particularly large order of sage velvet plush carpets to New York, Jack took delivery of the Jaguar XK120. He had been on the waiting list for two years, and when the moment arrived he was overwhelmed. The night before he had stayed awake and imagined himself driving along Piccadilly in his Henry Poole suit, at the wheel of his racing green Jag, beside his wife with her purple rinse and perfect nails.

However, item one hundred and eight (An Englishman’s wife has a purple rinse, nice nails and plays tennis and bridge) was problematic. Sadie was devilish at bridge but did not play tennis and refused even to consider the rinse, complaining that it was an unnatural hue to have upon one’s head. Considering she was quite content to have dazzling violet carpets on her floors, he felt it illogical for her to protest, but knowing his wife’s temperament decided not to press the point. He would have to be English enough for the both of them.

Apart from the deficiencies in his wife, Jack had fulfilled nearly all the items on his list. He had the suit, the car and the house in a leafy part of the city. He procured his hat from Lock of St James and tried his best to adjust the brim to precisely the correct degree. He ate lunch three times a week in the best of the squalid restaurants in town where he was waited upon with grovelling respect. (He mistakenly put this down to the power of his suit, when it was in fact due to his extravagant tipping. The waiters accepted his outlandish, foreign generosity and silently despised him for it.)

He took his wife to Covent Garden and to Wigmore Hall and made donations to the right charities as well as the wrong ones; giving equally to the fund to restore St Paul’s roof as well as to the fledgling Israeli state.

There remained one more item on Jack’s list. He knew it to be the quintessential characteristic of the true English gentleman and without it he was nothing. Item one hundred and fifty: An Englishman must be a member of a golf club.

 
For Jack membership of a golf course was the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Atlantis and the perfect salt-beef sandwich all at once – but it was proving troublesome. He flicked a catch concealed in the carved Griffin of his Victorian desk and a drawer popped out a few inches. He pulled it the rest of the way to reveal several tidy compartments filled with visiting cards and neatly filed bills. A fourth spilled over with paper. This was where he kept his correspondence with the golf clubs of England. The communication consisted of a copy of each application and a polite, but firm, response from the club secretary declining his admittance. Jack was persistent to the point of stubbornness; he had arrived in London with nothing but his suitcases and twenty pounds in his pocket. Within ten years he had one of the biggest carpet factories in London, so a single rejection from a snide official of a golf club was not going to dissuade a man like Jack Morris Rosenblum.

To his dismay, the single rejection rapidly turned into five, then ten, until every course in a twenty-mile radius had turned him down. The secret drawer was getting full and the papers were beginning to jam his desk. It was time he took advice. He spoke to Saul Tankel, the jeweller, who was considered to be a source not only of diamonds but information.

‘It’s no good, no good at all. They’ll never let you in. Not with that
schnoz
.’

Saul laughed, pushed back his thick, jeweller’s spectacles onto his forehead so that they resembled a pair of antennae, and waved with enthusiastic dismay; he looked like an alarmed grasshopper.

‘There is us and them. And
they
will never, ever let you in. Anyway, what will you do? They play on Saturdays.’

The problem of playing on Saturdays had already occurred to Jack, and did not unduly concern him. He hadn’t yet the courage to tell his wife, but he considered golf as an excellent alternative to a tedious morning spent at synagogue. Saul seemed to sense his thoughts.

‘You know what would happen if you did get in?’ He asked, jabbing a surprisingly large finger two inches from Jack’s controversial nose. ‘You will play on a Saturday, when everyone else is in
schul
praying to Him,’ Saul gestured to the heavens, or rather a light bulb hanging inches above their heads, but Jack took the point. ‘And you will play the best game of your life. And finally you will get the hoop-in-one.’