She's Leaving Home (12 page)

Not that there was any danger of pregnancy. Sexual intercourse was apparently off the agenda these days. That was a relief in its way, though it brought an obscure sense of failure to do her wifely duty. Daniel seemed to have lost interest in
that
some time ago.

Perhaps it was part of the same process. Did men suffer a menopause? One of the women’s magazines at the hairdresser’s,
Woman and Home
, had coyly raised the issue. This decline must worry thousands of other wives. Annie had always assumed that the signs of ageing would be external and easily identifiable and could be treated as life’s unkind joke. Grey or white hair, for example: both had it, though Daniel’s had thinned over the years to make him bald. His chest hair had become like wisps of cotton wool. Lines and wrinkles she could cope with – a man’s appearance in fact improved, though Annie had long despaired of her own looks.

What was troubling was the hidden, internal damage. Her husband seemed to have deteriorated – quite sharply, if truth be told, in the last year or so. If the arteries were seizing up in his legs, maybe the circulation was failing a bit throughout his whole system. He was no longer a
red-blooded
man. She glanced sideways at him.

‘What happened to us – when did we stop, Danny?’ Her voice was a whisper and he did not reply nor give any sign he heard her. ‘The night of my birthday a couple of years ago you certainly came trotting up to bed with a gleam in your eye.’ He had patted her bottom happily and hummed as he undressed while she waited, resigned and a little rigid as usual. But then he had puffed and panted and taken a long time over it, and had seemed a bit depressed afterwards. There’d been another couple of occasions, at weekends when he could lie in the following morning, after he’d had a whisky or two with his friends. Come to think of it, years ago she had been his regular after-bridge chaser. Now the game went on later and he was fatigued when he came upstairs. The liquor made him snore.

Not that he’d ever been a great lover with her. He’d known what to do – the bridegroom had not been as shy as his bride and went to with a will. She was not the one who had taught him. But intimate relations had never played a powerful role in his character, nor did he go in for protestations of adoration. Not the most romantic personality, her Daniel. Annie guessed that given the choice he’d rather talk than make love, but on the whole in recent years the two of them hadn’t done much of either.

She chided herself silently. Daniel was a fine man. In his youth he’d had ideas and ambitions, but absolutely way beyond his station. The responsibilities of married life and parenthood had necessarily put paid to that sort of silliness.

He had excellent qualities. He liked a tidy kosher house as did she. He preferred a set routine which could be dull and resisted proposals for modest change: maybe that was part of growing older too. He’d never be rich – he’d never exhibited much commercial acumen, which meant to his credit that he didn’t take foolish risks with the family’s security. But he worked hard, had few debts since he didn’t believe in hire purchase, handed over generous housekeeping every week without fail, paid the mortgage and major expenses, didn’t waste cash in the pub or on horses, or carouse or embarrass her. And was respected in the community, though he chose not to play much part in it. That was an
irritation for it diminished her own status. The wife of a prominent donor, or of a
frummer mensche
, was treated with deference. But the Mrs Majinsky whose husband saw customers on Saturdays and was low down the list of contributors was an also-ran and was sometimes made to feel it.

She wished she knew what impelled him these days. Sometimes she wondered if some part of Daniel hadn’t given up – he seemed willing to pass his days year in, year out as before, until old age and infirmity overtook them both. But infirmity had crept up without warning and threatened to turn a vigorous middle-aged man into a curmudgeonly old one in the wink of an eye. That boded ill, for herself and for the children.

‘Drift,’ she murmured unhappily. ‘We are drifting.’ Daniel’s breathing had settled into a regular rhythm but it was unclear whether he was asleep or merely ignoring her. She could visualise it: they were floating together idly downstream on a sort of river of life towards a wide open sea of eternity, making no attempt to influence their direction any more. Choices had been made when they had married. No alteration had been contemplated since, let alone discussed.

Annie lay still. If the marriage were not quite as warm and loving as she might have hoped – if she felt a bit lonely at times, and a mite hard done by – these were minor considerations compared with what many women had to put up with, poor souls. The children were their future. Daniel had matured into as reliable a husband as she could have asked. Her role was to be as supportive a spouse as he had the right to demand, and not to complain.

‘I made my bed, husband. So did you, all those years ago. Now we must both lie on it.’

Ten days later both of Helen’s predictions had come spectacularly true. On the night of St Valentine’s Day Harold Wilson beat the Labour Party’s deputy leader George Brown by 144 votes to 103 for the position of leader and chairman of the Party. The love affair between the British electorate and the broad-vowelled Yorkshireman was about to begin.

And the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ which had entered the charts immediately on its release made it to Number One on 16 February.

The pupils of Blackburne House were ecstatic on both counts, though naturally Meg was more taken with the enhanced possibilities of a future Labour government while Helen and Colette sat in dazed excitement, and read and re-read the front pages of
Mersey Beat
.

‘My God, it’s started. The revolution. Here in Liverpool.’ In the Library Helen giggled as if drunk. She was perfectly aware that this was an over-reaction, but nevertheless the atmosphere of regeneration, of redemption almost, of fresh hope was irresistible. Heads nodded about her in agreement. She took gulps of air to steady herself.

‘I can’t believe it. But it’s ours, kids – ours, and John and Paul’s, and funny little Mr Wilson’s: the future is ours.’

‘C’mon, lad, rise and shine.’

Daniel Shmuel Majinsky kept his eyes tight shut. A fourteen-year-old boy has the right to behave childishly if only for a few minutes in the grey dawn of his first day of adulthood.

Beside him his elder brother Izzy stirred. A hard heel kicked him painfully in the shin. Whichever was first to the kitchen would get hot water straight from the kettle. But the will to shift was not there. The bed beside him went cold.

His father sat down beside him.

‘You’re making heavy weather of it, lad. It’s easier to jump to it.’

His father, the old man. Harry Majinsky couldn’t have been more than forty, but to his children the slight, stooped figure with its spider’s web of lines around the eyes and the droopy moustache might have been a thousand years old. Before he had left for the front in 1916, those who were big enough recalled that the eyes had often crinkled with laughter; the wiry body had stood upright. As a married man with several young children Harry had not been in the first wave of volunteers or conscripts. But after a million men had fallen in a war which showed no signs of a conclusion the recruiting officers were not so considerate. He had been away two years. When eventually he came home with a mention in dispatches, a shiny service medal and a scar on his neck he bore with him a melancholy which cloaked and separated him from all those who had not served. Yet he avoided the company of former soldiers. Questioned about his experiences, he would shake his head and stare moodily at the floor.

Daniel’s eyes were still closed but the flutter of the eyelashes told his father he was not asleep. It was all Harry could do to stop himself touching his youngest son’s tousled head with its hint of copper in the dark hair.

The father rose with a shrug. ‘Well, lad, if you don’t budge soon you’ll be late. And that would not be a good idea on your first day at work. Tough taskmasters, Berman’s. Set high standards. That’s why you’re lucky to be going there.’

As soon as his father had left the tiny room Daniel jumped quickly out of bed and began to pull on his trousers and second-best shirt. He was taller than his father but had the same narrow frame and bony shoulders. Pa was right, of course. He was fortunate to have a job of any kind, let alone a proper apprenticeship, when throughout England grown men stood meekly in dole queues. Soup kitchens had appeared down Scotland Road and on the dockside. The Mersey Mission to Seamen stayed open all day and most of the night. From its small red door down in Water Street wafted a sour smell of cabbage soup and scouse, the thin stew made with barley and old mutton bones which gave the city its sobriquet. And many were glad to have it.

Yet a week from now he would enter the house with shillings a-jingle in his pocket: money from gainful employment. He would proudly hand over the coins to his mother who would reach up and drop them into the brown pot on the mantelpiece behind the clock. She would say very little, as was their wont. The act of placement told everything, that now he could help the family to pay its way. He would be earning, as a man. Or nearly.

The clothing factory was a familiar sight and within a short walk of his home. That made him doubly blessed, for nothing would be wasted on fares, nor would he face a long trudge on penniless days. He kept firm hold of his snap, a couple of thick-cut egg sandwiches prepared by his mother, with a penny bar of chocolate. The new cap on his head, a gift from his mother, felt rough and strange. He found himself in a steady stream of people, men and women, most of whom seemed to know each other, who talked and chattered and teased. The swelling crowd spilled out into the road and surged through the gutters with a gusto and confidence he did not feel, but which roused in him a
mingled excitement and fear. They headed in the same direction as himself, for several factories were crowded together in a street near the rail depot which brought coal for their boilers.

He gazed in wonder at their faces, unnerved at their deportment. The girls seemed to be as forward as the men; they marched in twos and threes, arms linked, shrieking with laughter and energy, many with wooden bases to their working boots which clattered merrily on the stone pavements. Would he ever be like that – would he conduct himself with such confidence, such swagger? Could he ever feel at ease and draw attention to himself and his pals in that manner? No: he would not behave so. But he hoped he might feel similarly inside at least. Not sick in his stomach, as at present.

It had not been his choice. He was lucky: he clung to that, as to his packet of sandwiches. He had not dreamed of employment on the shop floor in a dusty, noisy factory. He had not wanted to work in tailoring at all, even though it was assumed, as a boy from a Jewish family of limited means, that such would be his fate. You had to stay with your own: and your own would look after you. So it was no use Daniel Majinsky yearning for a life as a draughtsman in a shipyard where great liners were crafted, whose magnificence would bring cries of amazement as they hove into view: there were Protestant bosses and Catholic bosses, but nobody with a grasp of how to put in a rivet would have given a position to a Jewish boy when good Catholics and Protestants were waiting in the outer office.

Berman’s, on the other hand, was owned by Jews. Its directors with only a couple of exceptions could be seen on holy days in various synagogues, their prosperity like a sheen on their smooth jowls and barrel-shaped chests. The mention of his name and pedigree in the right ear had guaranteed an interview. His obvious quickness and good health were all that were required. Indentures were signed. He would start Monday. Now.

Inside the door he hesitated and was buffeted as workers shoved past. Older men gazed sadly at the tall thin figure; one directed him to the manager’s office. He waited nervously at the door, cap in hand.

Around him swelled the power-driven clatter of the factory as it got cracking again after the weekend break. A steady whine of machinery filled the air – not the crash and rattle of weaving machines, which he had seen once in a cloth factory in Manchester where an aunt was a supervisor, but the hiss of a big steam engine somewhere nearby in a boiler house matched by the fizz of steam presses where trousers were laid and the irregular whirr of industrial sewing machines row upon row into the distance, their treadles pumped by five hundred pairs of feet.

The air was thick with decades of dust given off by the fabric. It hung in grey globules from the rafters, it lay in a thick fur on top of door lintels and window ledges, it smothered light shades and filled corners, it lay like a carpet under worktables. It too had rested on the sabbath but now stirred. At the least movement particles lifted lazily and hovered, only to settle once more. As girls found their seats their skirts disturbed the accretions; fibres floated aloft in shafts of light then fell softly, visibly, on to the nearest surface. Nobody took the slightest notice.

The place smelled dirty, and smoky, for ventilation was not regarded as paramount. Of course the place would be a death trap in the event of fire, but nobody bothered much about such things either: risk was a fact of life and unavoidable. All the men smoked anyway though they were expected to be careful. So did a few of the girls as they bent in concentration over their black Singers, but had any cinders damaged their work they would have been charged for it. It was true that one prized older female employee, a foul-mouthed virago whose piece-rate wages were nearly a man’s, had a cigarette permanently stuck to a lower lip as her hands guided collars under the whizzing needle, but she was regarded as generally odd and not for imitation.

Daniel was directed to a small ill-lit room with two workbenches, one on either side. Several apprentices were at work under the supervision of a thick-set man in a brown overall. Daniel knew him slightly.

‘Mornin’. I’m Solly Goldsmith. You must be young Majinsky? Know your father. Bit tall for
this job, aren’tcha?’

To tailor meant bending over: tall men were prone to bad backs. But then, so were coal miners. Daniel shook his head. At least he would see daylight. ‘I’ll make sure I don’t grow any more, Mr Goldsmith.’

He was shown where to stow his tuck, cap and jacket and handed a blue overall. Its cost would be deducted from his first week’s wages. It was not new and smelled strongly of the last man to wear it.

‘Sign here for the locker. Then there’s no argument if you go into somebody else’s.’

Daniel took the pencil and bent to sign his name. As he did so the manager chortled.

‘Cack-handed, are we? Ho, we’ll have some fun with you, my lad.’

Goldsmith called to one of the other boys, who had been eyeing Daniel with curiosity while still bent studiously to their work. ‘Benson! Bring your shears.’

The powerful steel shears were black on the outside but white and silvery on the cutting edges and must have weighed several pounds. The handle was deeply curved and shaped. Goldsmith took the closed blades in his fingers and pointed the fingerholds to Daniel. ‘Go on, take them.’

A small crowd gathered. The manager’s tone had promised amusement and he expected an audience. Automatically Daniel reached out his hand – his left hand. The finger holds would not fit though he twisted his wrist and tried different poses. The shears were made for a right-handed person. The apprentices suppressed giggles and nudged each other. Awkwardly, with a growing sense of panic, he tried the other hand. The holds fitted, but when he tried to make the blades open and close he could not do it. His brain began to scream, as always when people tried to make him do things right-handedly.

‘Now then! You’ll have to learn, lad. And there’s only one way. Come here.’

The manager had a length of thick string in his hands and a gleeful smile on his face. He twisted the cord around Daniel’s left wrist and bent his arm behind him. The string was then tied around the thin body several times until the left hand was immobilised behind his back. Then Mr Goldsmith stood back, checked the tightness, and held out the shears once more.

‘We use the right hand. Only the right hand. You’ll have the other tied back till you’ve learned. If it takes days or months. It’s for your own good, if you want to be a cutter.’

It was all Daniel could do to stop himself crying out. The bonds bit into his wrist and he could feel his hand going numb. Gingerly he eased then clenched his fist tight. Part of the pain transferred itself to his chest and he found himself breathing hard through his open mouth like a frightened horse. The other boys pointed and whispered. With a huge effort he bit his lip, squared his shoulders and looked the manager in the eye. He held out his right hand awkwardly for the shears.

‘I’m ready, Mr Goldsmith.’

It took three months before the restraint could be removed. His left wrist hurt the whole time where the string had cut even after its release, as if the limb feared amputation entirely. Three months in which he felt his world turn upside down: in which his very nature was derided and he himself became an object of ridicule. The cruelty of forcing him into an unnatural mould was not lost on Daniel. Once he asked why, when steel could be fashioned in Sheffield into any shape, nobody made left-handed shears; but the question was regarded as hilarious, and as evidence that he was still a child underneath the gangling exterior. He heard many times the statement ‘Because that’s how things are’ usually accompanied with a shrug, and came to associate it with the dumb acceptance of beasts of burden. Rules were arbitrary but had to be obeyed. Life was hard and grinding but with luck could be endured, even enjoyed. The petty irritations of the factory should be reduced to just that and not allowed to intrude into the real world of family, friendships and leisure time, not least because such time was so limited. Had Daniel taken his troubles home he would have cast a pall on the whole
Majinsky household which nobody deserved: sympathy would have been in short supply. It was hard luck that he was different, but that was that.

The pain did not recede. The ache in his chest, which had begun as he had breathed in too fast the instant the ties were tightened, stayed with him. It resurfaced at night when he relived in dreams the horror of that moment, and later as he began to walk out with friends in the evenings. He would come home a little early and tired more easily than his companions, though he never complained. It was accepted that he did not have quite the stamina of his older brother but the slight weakness was put down to growing pains. His mother gave him anxious looks from time to time as he grew but did not fill out. He kept to himself the nagging pain and told no one.

One day at the factory, not long after his apprenticeship was completed, he began to cough. It had happened before and was nothing new; in that thick atmosphere, everybody coughed. He placed the shears on the workbench and pulled out a large handkerchief.

In a moment the handkerchief was covered in bright red blood. At the sight, and with a weary sense of exhaustion, Daniel closed his eyes and collapsed. When he had revived somewhat it was found he could no longer walk. He was carried home on an old door to his mother.

Thomas Leadenthall jammed his Homburg firmly on his head, heaved his flannelled bulk from the upper level of the tram, clutched the black Gladstone bag in one hand and puffed his way clumsily down the steep curve of the stairs. His demeanour was grim and resentful at the indignity of public transport. Were his talents properly recognised, were he more appropriately remunerated, he could come and go by hansom cab.

On the pavement as the tram clanked away he took his bearings. Although this quarter of the city was familiar, its rabbit warren of streets was a confusion. An urchin plucked his sleeve, its grubby face upturned hopefully.

‘Got a penny, mister?’

Leadenthall looked down magisterially. ‘I might have, young man. But in return you must tell me where I might find Grenville Street.’

The boy screwed up one eye. ‘Why d’ya want to know? Somebody important live there?’