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ESTHER MENELL'S BLOG

Month: April 2017

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, THEN

29th April 2017 /

For several days, since North Korea’s nuclear capability has been back in the News and the Commander-in-Chief has been making pronouncements that herald the end of the world, I have been distracted by wondering whether that boy genius, with his pudgy hand hovering over the button, is setting his sights on Washington or New York.

The thing is, my only son, my only grandson and my daughter-in-law live in New York, not in Washington, and the question for me is which will excite Kim Jong-un more, the destruction of the Pentagon and seat of government or Trump Tower and the lights of New York.

Our part of New York

My guess is the latter. Especially if he is a film-lover like his dad.

So, it was like the sun coming out when my American husband – not that you needed to be American to know this – pointed out that it won’t be Washington or New York, it will be California.

So, as my friend Pat commented drily: That’s all right, then.

Well, no. And yet how hard it is not to put one’s own concerns before other people’s. Not long ago when, in a brief cold spell, our central heating gave out, it didn’t help to think of the plight of the refugees.   The only ‘hardships’ it is easy to bear are those that are self-imposed.   I wouldn’t choose to eat out of buckets (see below), but it was fun being in this remote part of India for a few days just as, many, many years ago, was being stranded in Agios Nicolaos – now a mecca for tourists, but then virtually unknown – when the only boat scheduled to stop there didn’t and sailed past in the distance.

It is also easy enough to put up with things that one knows will come to an end, like night cramps and toothache, but the end of the world . . . ?   Laughter seems the only sane response and, as for other people, there will be no other people. Whether we like it or not, we are all in it together.

REMEMBERING JEREMY

19th April 2017 /

For a very short time, almost fifty years ago, I worked alongside Jeremy Lewis in a ramshackle office, partitioned to give just enough space for us to reach our desks: in my case, not actually a desk but a rickety table at which I sat for the half day each week that my infant son was looked after by a friend.

Forty-some years later, I re-met Jeremy – who I knew only as a kindly but ghostly presence, for there had been a bubbly glass partition between us – at the funeral of a mutual friend.  By then, he had long since immortalised his stint at Deutsch in Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London, and I had become a devoted follower of his column in The Oldie and the well-satisfied reader of many of his books, both light and heavy.

What brought him into my life in a less shadowy form was that I wrote a book myself and was persuaded to ask for his help in getting it noticed. Having worked for André Deutsch for over thirty years, the book was as much about life at 105 Great Russell Street as about my private ups and downs.  His response was immediate and generous, and led to reviews I would never have got without his imprimatur.

What happened next, and brought about our actually meeting – for at the funeral we had done no more than exchange glances – was pure chance.

I had been invited to appear at Jewish Book Week, in conversation with Peter Owen. Too good to be true!  Not only was he the most interesting of small publishers but, more to the point, his name guaranteed we would have an audience.   Or would have done.  Shortly before the event he had to bow out. His book wouldn’t be published in time.

Panic!  Alone on the platform, I would have been alone in the room.  The staff at JBW, my publisher and I all cast about wildly for someone who didn’t mind being asked at the last minute and whose name would fill seats.  It was Jeremy who stepped into the breach.

Jeremy at an Oldie lunch         Photograph © Neil Spence

Now, in the ‘green room’ and then on the stage, we met at last and I found that, unlike so many writers, Jeremy was just as you would expect him to be:  funny, self-deprecating and wonderfully relaxed, the polar opposite of the comic novelist who in the flesh turned out to be a belligerent, middle-aged soak.

And thus, in a session chaired by Michele Hanson (another comforting presence), the event went ahead after all and I experienced the joy of Jeremy in person for the first and last time.

There are not many people who will be missed by everyone who has known them.  But it is hard to imagine anyone who won’t miss Jeremy’s genial, shambling presence, his wit and, indeed, his erudition. Not only a thoroughly likeable man but a literary gent of the highest order.

Jeremy Morley Lewis, born 15 March 1942, died 9 April 2017.

STAYING LOCAL

6th April 2017 /

Another shop has closed in Camden High Street. This time a butcher. This is not as serious a loss for me as the hardware store which closed a year ago. It had been the equal in quality and range to the John Lewis basement and had the advantage that help was always on hand from the Indian family who were finally defeated by the rates.

Across the road, and belonging to another branch of the same family, was an unusually well-stocked and well-organised stationer’s. It has gone too.

There will soon be nothing left among the plethora of cafes but the banks, the discount stores and the Money Shops.   Apart, of course, from the larger chains which we all use and which have helped cause the havoc.

© Secret Artist NW5

As for Kentish Town High Street . . . If only I had gone to Abba Electrics for all the fridges and washing machines that I have bought over the last fifty-odd years, instead of heading for the West End.   The washing machine that I bought there the other day is working perfectly, and it was a lot more fun discussing it and arranging its delivery with the owner of the shop and his helpers than with the polite and well-trained staff at John Lewis.

So, too, did I enjoy buying a pair of trainers at the little sports shop just beyond the point where the High Street forks and becomes Fortess Road.   Here we had a long talk about how small businesses suffer from restricted parking and also about the similarities between his race (Greek) and mine (Jewish) when it came to old-fashioned ‘family values’.

© Secret Artist NW5

It is not that the staff in Lidl or M&S are any less human but they can’t stop and chat, though the other day, when I dropped something and the film-star handsome black store walker apologised for failing to pick it up for me, this led us into a fascinating conversation about football injuries. He was even less able to bend down than I was.

In terms more general than shopping, I ‘went local’ years ago, helping to stop a flyover being built where all we needed was a zebra crossing and preventing the council from pulling down our street. I was not among those who saved Kentish Town West Station, nor those who fought off the Council (for Council, read Developer) from encroaching on our little local park, but I do remain interested and am a conscientious reader of our campaigning local paper.

© Secret Artist NW5

Who, oddly enough, failed to support me when my book was published. Of the three review copies we sent them, only one was even acknowledged, yet they have published every letter I have ever sent them (except one offering to help a particularly unsavoury business mogul pack his bags when it was reported he threatened to take his business elsewhere). It was disappointing, too, that my local bookshop, which I have supported since it opened some forty years ago, didn’t display my book for even a day.

Perhaps it is not surprising that one is made to feel more welcome by the small shopkeepers, who are struggling to survive, than by the thriving literati.

Many thanks to Secret Artist NW5 for use of the illustrations above, see more at www.secretartistnw5.com.

NIGHT LIFE

1st April 2017 /

The discovery that dung beetles navigate by the light of the stars is just one of the many wonderful scraps of news I have picked up from turning on the BBC World Service when I come down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, to take some valerian drops or make a cup of cocoa. Another is that there is a language in northern India which has no name. Its 400 speakers just call it Our Language . . .

Of course, there is also Trump.

In truth, there is nothing like the World Service for the range of its topics and its deep seriousness about everyone, everywhere and everything. As the public parks are (for me) the best thing about London, so is the World Service (with Radios 4 and 3 a close second and third) one of the best things about Britain. When, a few years ago, the government cut its funding to the World Service, it showed a callous disregard for the three million plus people to whom it is a lifeline, and a culpable ignorance of the benefits it brings to this country: which is why, of course, when they belatedly woke up to its value as the most useful ambassador of all, the funding was restored.

Street Parade, Soviet Estonia in the early ‘60s.

Much as I love such items as the one about the dung beetles, it is memories of what the World Service meant to people I met in Soviet Estonia in the ‘60s and ‘70s that make me so passionate about it.   The two elderly men, old friends of my parents who had risked listening to it throughout the years of Soviet rule, knew – as many of my younger relatives did not – that all was not as it was said to be. No, I had to tell my cousin, Eva, a convinced Communist, we did not send little boys up chimneys any more and Yes, we could leave the country any time we wanted. She found both these things hard to believe.

And then there was the young man on the train to Viljandi (my grandmother’s birth place) who heard us speaking English and told me how much he would love to have a copy of Fowler’s English Usage. Another clandestine listener to the BBC.

As Jilly Cooper said the other day, in a lovely piece about what it is like to be eighty, being up in the small hours comes with the territory; but these broken nights have, thanks to the World Service – truly a service – opened up not only new terrestrial worlds but also the firmament itself: how else would I have known when looking at the Milky Way that every dung beetle in our garden was looking at it too?

 

 

 

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