1969
Sunday Night
The wine glasses are talking to each other again. I can hear their high, tinny voices coming from the glass-fronted cabinet in front of me. My fold-up bed is crammed between the dining room table and the wall. Every time there’s the grumble of a bus riding along the main road behind the flat, the glasses get excited and shout out to each other. I burrow down deep under the covers, trying to muffle their sound. I stick my fingers in my ears and curl up into a little ball. I try rocking, anything to drown out their chatter. What are they talking about now? Could it be about all the noise that my grandparents, auntie and uncle made this evening when they were playing their game of Kaluki, sitting around the table as they sipped their cups of tea and ate Nana’s apple strudel?
I usually like this room. The big polished table in the centre and the cushiony chairs around it take up most of the space. My family sits around this table on Saturday evenings when Nana serves up an enormous tray of her fried fish and fish balls.
I’m staying with Mum’s parents, Hetty and Robert Gee, for my half-term school holiday. Their surname used to be Goldberg but they changed it during the war. My little sister Riva and I take it in turns to stay with them during the school holidays so that Mum can go to work. When I go home, Mum always complains to them:
”It takes me weeks to get her back to normal.”
That’s because Nana makes me my favourite meals and takes me out to eat at The Lyons Tea House. Papa always has time to play with me. Best of all, I love being here on Shabbat. Nana and Papa are Jewish like us but not that heavy kind of Jewish like my parents with all the rules and things that you mustn’t do, although they also have the kosher food.
Nana and Papa were both born in England. I don’t know any other Jewish children with real British grandparents. Papa has two sisters and a brother and he was born in 1900 when Queen Victoria was still the Queen of England. Nana has three sisters and she was born in 1905. They both worked as tailors and they make a lot of clothes for us.
Monday Afternoon
The Backyard Monster is crouching outside the kitchen window on top of the broken brick wall behind this block of flats. His body is long and bumpy and he has a thick, grey head, a bulging forehead and a wide open mouth with sharp teeth ready to bite into my arm if I go outside. Even though I’m now eleven years old, he still terrifies me. He doesn’t make any noise but I know that he’s watching me. When Nana bangs her big wooden spoon on the wall between the kitchen and lounge, calling Papa and I away from our Kaluki game to eat lunch, I work out how to go into the kitchen without looking at the window. Although I’m afraid of the monster, my tummy is already leaping forwards into the smells in the kitchen. Today she’s made “bubbeles” which are really pancakes. I walk backwards into the kitchen to reach my chair at the end of their table. The monster can see me, but I can’t see him and that makes all the difference.
Nana and Papa live at number 24 in a block of flats called Hadley Court in a place called Stamford Hill, which is in the north of London. You drive along Upper Clapton Road, turn right into Cazenove Road and Hadley Court is the first block of flats on your right. You walk up a long path from the road through the garden to the entrances. There are three buildings that look like three sides of a square with grass in the middle where the fourth side should be.
After we finish our lunch, I go downstairs to play on the lawn. Papa carries a deckchair down for Nana. The lady chickens and turkeys are already sitting outside on their deckchairs, clucking and crowing, bobbing their heads up and down and talking in a mixture of English and Yiddish. I hate it when people speak Yiddish because I know they’re sharing stories that I want to hear: things about people kissing, having babies, money and illness. When one of the ladies gets up to go inside, the others let off a stream of cackling then put their heads together and whisper in Yiddish. When they see me, they flap their wings and call me over.
“Hetty, she got so tall! Keinehora,” gabbles Leah Zelner with the big square glasses. She lives in the flat opposite Nana and Papa.
“She takes after her mother,” says Lily from the block on the left.
“Bring nachas to your parents,” says Edie.
Nana has three younger sisters: Celie, Lottie and Rosie. Auntie Celie and Uncle Solly live in the block on the right and they see Nana and Papa every day. Lottie lives further away in a place called Chingford. We hardly ever see Rosie because they said she ran off with a non-Jewish sailor during the war.
Nana and Papa look quite different from each other. Papa is tall and thin and pale with a long, horsey face and the biggest ears I’ve ever seen on anyone. Riva and I have given them the special name of “The Jillenty Ears.” Papa is clever; he can do crosswords and difficult sums in his head.
Nana is round and soft with big bosoms and a squishy bottom. She has wavy, gingery-blond hair and is covered with freckles just like I am. She makes wonderful food and loves to be in the kitchen. She’s teaching me to make things because I like cooking as well. I stand next to her with the wooden spoon in the bowl, stirring in the flour, sugar and the cracked eggs. When I ask her how much to put in, she always answers,
“As it comes, Faigella, as it comes.”
Tuesday Afternoon
Nana and Papa live on the second floor in the central block of Hadley Court. There are four floors of flats in each building, and one of my favourite activities is climbing all four flights with Papa as he sings a song that goes: “Di dah, di dah, di diddly diddly dah”. On the top floor, the left-hand-side flat has a bright green bell next to the door.
“Green light! Green light!” I shout, so that it will bring me luck. My voice echoes all the way down to the entrance. Papa always has peppermints in his pockets and we suck on them as we climb the stairs.
Their flat is always very warm with a lot of fat cushions scattered around everywhere, and pretty china dolls and flowers on the shelves that Dad calls “tchatchkas.” As you enter their flat, there is a long hall with a red carpet and a large mirror on the right hand wall. Straight ahead is their lounge. When I’m here with my whole family, Riva and I make up funny songs and dances, rehearse them in the hall and then put them on for the family.
“Please don’t jump up and down!” Nana always says. “There are people living downstairs!”
My favorite piece of furniture in the flat is the pouffee in their lounge. It looks like a big, beige marshmallow and when I sit on it, my bottom sinks down and the pouffee spreads out to the sides. When Riva and I are here together, we throw ourselves over it, land on our tummies and laugh until somebody gets cross and says,
“You’ll do yourselves an injury one of these days and it will end in tears.”
Today the sun is out, so Papa and I walk down to the end of Cazenove Road and pass Filey Avenue where the very religious Jewish people live. The men have big, black hats and long coats and lots of children. We keep walking, pass all the buildings and cross the bridge over the River Lea on our way to Springfield Park. It’s the biggest park I’ve ever seen and such a wonderful surprise every time we get there. Papa sits on a bench with his newspaper while I explore. I run from tree to tree and stare up at their tangled arms and fancy clothes while I talk to them. I love trees, the way they are all different and tell me their stories.
Tuesday Evening
I’m under the table in the dining room pretending to play “house” while I listen to the conversation between the grownups. Nana, Papa, Auntie Celie and Uncle Solly are playing a game of bridge around the table.
Something is going on with Auntie Celie’s daughter Diana, but they only talk about it in Yiddish or when they think I can’t hear them. Every so often I tickle somebody’s feet like a cat.
“Why didn’t you bid?” shouts Auntie Celie at Nana. “You had six diamonds!” The glasses in the cabinet are silent; they wouldn’t dare interrupt their game. I can hear the patter of the cards on the table as they chat over soup and salads. Plop! There’s the sound of something splashing and everyone is laughing so hard that they sound as if something is hurting them. My head pops up to see what the matter is and Papa says that Uncle Solly told them a funny joke and Auntie Celie was laughing so hard that her false teeth fell into her plate of soup.
Wednesday Evening
This isn’t a good idea. I’m trying to sleep in the lounge next to the pouffee and in front of the television. But there are scary shapes on the wall. The flowery wallpaper has nasty faces on it. I can’t see them during the day when the lights are on. They only come out at night. They have long, thin bodies and sad, droopy eyes. I call them “The Lupins” and they remind me of the pictures on the wallpaper in my bedroom that Dad had to cover up because they frightened me. I turn onto my tummy and bury my head in the pillow.
Thursday Evening
“She’s so nervous.” I can hear Nana on the phone. “….see the doctor… give her a tonic. She eats like a bird.” I know she’s talking about me because they get so upset when I don’t finish all my dinner.
The dragon on the wall in the bathroom has opened its mouth while I wash my face and brush my teeth. His name is “Ascot Gas Heater.” I leave the door open so that I can escape if he jumps towards me. I close my eyes so that I can’t see his blue and yellow breath but I did hear him say “whoosh!” when I turned on the taps.
“Did you move your bowels today?” Nana asks me every evening. Why is she so interested and why does it matter so much?
Tonight I’m sleeping in their bedroom. They don’t have any more rooms left for me to sleep in, apart from the entrance hall to their flat which they say is too draughty. They put my bed in the corner, next to their enormous, high bed which is really two beds pushed together. I squint through my half-closed eyes, as my grandparents get ready to go to bed. Nana undoes the hooks on her corset and girdle and the clips that hold up her stockings and Papa puts on his long-johns, and his “combinations” as he calls them. They never seem to get properly undressed; they just add more layers to all their underwear. It takes them so long to get dressed for bed that I wonder why they don’t just sleep in their day clothes. There are pills and glasses of water on their bedside tables. Papa has turned on their new “Tea Maid” machine so that he can bring Nana a hot cup of tea in bed after he gets up in the morning.
I made sure that I went to the bathroom before they came in because it’s dangerous in there at night. Although the dragon is asleep, there are ugly, toothy mouths lying in the bottom of two glasses of fizzy, pink water on the window sill, waiting to jump out and bite my face if I get too close. Papa calls them “The False Teeth” but I know they’re real.
There’s a funny, rubbery smell under my pillow that reminds me of the gasmask that the dentist pushed onto my face when I had to have my teeth taken out. I turn my head from side to side but I can’t escape the smell.
Nana and Papa have started to snore. Nana makes a low sound with a rhythm that always stays the same, but Papa’s snoring is amazing! He pops and grunts and coughs and snorts. It sounds like the music that we listen to at school with all the different instruments. Now that I know they’re asleep, I pull out a copy of The Reader’s Digest to read in the dark under the covers. I love this magazine because the stories are short with funny pictures. My favourite parts are the silly cartoons and jokes.
Friday Afternoon
Today I found an interesting pile of magazines in Nana’s bedside cabinet. The titles sound exciting: True Love,Honest Revelations and Real Story. Next to their titles, it says that they are for adults only. Now I can find out about all those things they whisper about in Yiddish. I’m supposed to be doing my half-term holiday homework, so I have my school dictionary with me here. I decide to take the magazines and my dictionary and hide between their twin beds, covering myself with the shiny, silk bedspread. I look up the meanings of “intercourse” and “penetration” but I still don’t understand why there are so many men with “throbbing rods” in these stories. What do they do with them? Suddenly, I hear sounds in the room! Nana and Papa have decided to take an afternoon nap. I feel the weight of their bodies as they lie down on the beds. I leap up between the beds and shout “surprise!” and laugh but they don’t think it’s very funny. Nana needs her smelling salts and Papa is cross with me. It’s lucky I left the magazines hidden under the beds.
Saturday Afternoon
I’m sitting in the lounge with Uncle Harold, my mother’s brother, his wife Auntie Irene and my cousin Elliot. Elliot is eleven like me, but he was born in August so I’m still the oldest grandchild. I don’t really like them very much. Uncle Harold is tall and skinny with a strict, lined face, a big, hooked nose and tiny, round glasses like John Lennon. Auntie Irene has pointy glasses like birds’ wings, stiff hair and thick legs. They never buy me birthday presents and when they visit us on Shabbat they don’t bring any goodies for us. Elliot is horrible, rough and nasty and he pushes me around sometimes.
Nana has just brought in our tea. She made lots of open halves of tiny sandwiches with cream cheese and cucumber and smoked salmon on a tray. She calls them “bridge rolls.” Elliot reaches his hand out and grabs one from the table, pushing Papa’s arm away.
“Say sorry to Papa,” Uncle Harold hisses at Elliot.
“No,” says Elliot.
“I said: say you’re sorry to Papa.”
“I fucking well won’t!” Elliot shouts. Wow! He said a terrible word. Nana puts her head in her hands. Uncle Harold stands up and moves towards Elliot.
“You say you’re sorry now or I’ll give you a good hiding!”
Elliot pushes his father who falls onto Papa who collapses onto Nana who falls onto the tray of food. They look so funny! I watch them get up one after the other and Nana has little sandwiches stuck on her bottom. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop laughing. I cover my mouth with my hand and then the front door slams. Elliot has run away and now Uncle Harold runs out after him down the stairs into the street. Papa is crying. I’ve never seen him cry before.
I want to phone my parents and ask them to come and take me home.
1973
24 Hadley Court has warm, outstretched arms waiting to hug me with love. I can feel them pulling me towards them during the car ride over there. The flat is full of soft places; the armchairs, sofa, dining room chairs and beds are plumped up and cozy, like the feelings between me and my grandparents. When I’m there, it’s as if I’m inside a glass world like those ornaments on their mantelpiece and shelves. The ones with the cute, little houses and snowflakes that swirl when you shake them.
Beyond the windows, there is a frightening world. Nana says that the neighbourhood is going down the drain and “common” people are moving in. I can hear tough workmen swearing and whistling outside, screamed arguments coming from the council estate behind their flat. I see hard-faced youths on the streets. The women in the shops along Upper Clapton Road wear lots of makeup on their pale faces, very short skirts and high heels. Sometimes at night I hear police car sirens.
In wintertime, the trees in Cazenove Road look sad and stark, with branches like long, black fingers with sharp nails clawing into the sky. The streets are lined with old-fashioned, forbidding Victorian terraced houses. I walk past the houses with Papa, sucking on peppermints, as I accompany him for his morning “constitutional” and imagine how the servants worked below the stairs in olden times.
Papa is a typical English gentleman. He rarely raises his voice, always has a smile on his face and a pleasant, cheery manner. He wears a starched handkerchief in his breast pocket, his shoes are shiny, and he holds doors open for women. He treats Nana like a precious jewel, catering to her needs and wishes. Mum told me that she and Nana have always had a difficult relationship. She says that Nana is spoiled and demanding but I haven’t noticed that. All I can see is her soft, round, loving body with its deep cleavage. I wish my figure was more like hers.
Even though I’m fifteen, I’m still not allowed to walk around their neighbourhood alone. But I don’t want to anyway; I’m happy to sit opposite Papa on the pouffee, a glass-topped tea table between us as he teaches me new tricks in a game of bridge. Sometimes we take the ride together on the 257 bus to the East End where he used to work and we go to the factory outlets to buy cheap clothes. Last time he bought me a long, brown, 1940s-style coat with padded shoulders. It goes well with my brown platform shoes.
Elliot never comes here anymore because his parents sent away him to a boarding school because they said they “couldn’t cope with him.” I get into such a strange, uneasy mood when I think about this that I force myself to pretend I’m with David Cassidy or Donny Osmond so that I feel better.
I don’t sleep in Nana and Papa’s bedroom at night anymore. I sleep in the lounge. The “Lupins” on the wall have gone. The dragon and the monster have disappeared as well but there are other creepy things hiding in their flat.
There are ghosts hiding behind the heavy, embroidered curtains in the lounge. In the drawer in Papa’s bedside table, a tragedy is hidden away and never taken out for an airing. Mum told me that during the war, their family moved to Winslow in the countryside with the other Londoners to escape the bombs. They lived in a row of cottages in the village. For a long time, they were protected from the food rationing because they got all their fruit, vegetables and eggs from the nearby farms. Papa’s parents, sister and seven-year-old nephew Victor were living five minutes away from them in another row of cottages. One night, a British bomber plane on a training flight crash-landed onto their cottage, killing all of them. The hospital couldn’t even save the little boy. Papa never speaks about them. So really he had three sisters and one brother but he has never mentioned the dead sister. Even Mum hardly talks about her and the little boy. They sent Mum and Uncle Harold away to stay with relatives during the year after that because they were crying all the time.
But there is also a miracle under Papa’s shoes on the bottom shelf of their wardrobe. He told me that during the early part of the war when the streets were blacked out at night, he was waiting for his train home from work in the railway station waiting room. The train arrived but the driver couldn’t see anything because of the blackout. The train came off the rails and ran over the waiting room, killing everybody in it but Papa. He was the only one to survive! He was in hospital for months with very bad injuries, and even now suffers every morning from terrible headaches called migraines. If I go into the lounge before breakfast, I see Papa sitting in his armchair holding his head in his hands but he never complains.
“No-one can feel my pain. Only I know about it,” he says, “Why should I make everyone else suffer?”
There is an evil spell hidden under the sewing machine in their bedroom. It has something to do with Papa’s accident in the war and him losing his tailoring job in his brother-in-law’s factory when he was well enough to go back to work. They gave it to someone else and he didn’t get all the money he says they owed him. They stopped talking to each other right after that. I’ve never met his sister, Auntie Fanny, so I don’t know any of those cousins.
There’s a sickly smell of disgrace and cruelty in the kitchen mixed up with the smell of the apple strudel and chopped liver. Nana and Papa still whisper to each other in Yiddish when we eat but I understand quite a few words now, and sometimes I listen to Mum talking to them on the phone at home. I finally learned that that when Auntie Celie’s daughter Diana was married, she ran off with another man on a cruise and when she got back, her husband Andy divorced her. Everyone was very angry with her because Andy was nice and kind, a male model who wasn’t Jewish but they all loved him anyway.
Now she’s married to a man called Lionel, who sticks his hand up her skirt when they sit together on the sofa in the lounge. Lionel’s first wife died, and he already had two little boys when they met, but Diana doesn’t like Alan, the younger one. He comes to our house a lot for Shabbat “to let him be with a loving family,” as Mum says. I get all hot and angry when I hear how Diana shouts at him and see his little face screw up in fear. My stomach aches after I see them and I can’t sleep. I keep asking my parents to tell somebody about her but they say that it is private family business and they can’t interfere.
In the bottles of drinks next to the glasses in the dining room cabinet there are all kinds of invisible secrets and scandals. The sweet, red wine holds the affair that Auntie Lottie had with a serviceman during the war when her husband was in the army. The calming brandy shushes up the year that Papa hid from the army in 1917 and 1918. His parents sent him away to relatives in Ireland because so many young men were dying in the battles and they told the Recruiting Office he had run away from home and they didn’t know where he was. The bitter whiskey covers up Auntie Celie’s two suicide attempts after Uncle Solly died but it can’t hide the third successful one that killed her last year. They said that she took lots of sleeping pills all at once. It happened at three o’clock one afternoon when I was in the middle of a cookery lesson at school. I thought it was strange that I kept seeing her face in front of me when I closed my eyes in the classroom that afternoon. Then I came home and Mum was sitting on the stairs crying because Auntie Celie was her favourite relative. I still don’t understand why they couldn’t stop her.
No wonder those glasses still make so much noise with their chattering, jangling and clinking all night long.
___________
Fran Levin is a former Special Education teacher. Her work was awarded the Bar Ilan University 2022 Dave Greber Social Justice Nonfiction Award and has appeared in BigCityLit, CaféLit UK, Voices Israel Anthologies and other publications. She is presently writing a memoir about her teaching career and practices yoga alongside her Swiss shepherd dog in a home crammed with beading and art projects.