The Complete Short Stories (49 page)

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.