Category: Personal (Page 5 of 6)

For as long as I have lived in the street I live in, which is fifty-three years, the one thing that hasn’t changed – although it has been spruced up recently – is the pawn shop on the corner.

The little tobacconist at the other end of the street, with its bad-tempered owner who became my friend when I persuaded the Council not to pull his house down but just chop it free of the house next door, is long gone. So is he: back to Goa from where he and his wife had come, via Uganda, many years ago.

They were luckier than those other refugees, just around the corner from the pawn shop, who created a magical cave-like coffee house: the seats low, the walls rich with coloured hangings and, at the corner table – a constant presence – the mother of one of them, still dressed in the flowing manner of the land from which she had come. Mercifully, she died just before these two enterprising foreigners had to close down because their landlord (also a kind of foreigner if, as I am told, he lives abroad) raised the rent beyond the means of a small, independent business.

Also gone are two of the three pubs we once had in our street.

A former pub, lost to flat conversion. Photograph courtesy of Tom Kihl, Kentishtowner.

And, round the corner, from where the tobacconist and his family lived – behind the counter, behind the curtained doorway, in that half house – a whole street disappeared!   The laundrette, the Film Co-op where we sat on old mattresses watching Kenneth Anger films, the sweet shop – all gone. But, in their place, a well-designed and leafy council estate, though how many of those desirable, balconied flats are still lived in by council tenants is anybody’s guess.

Demolition of Prince of Wales Crescent, Kentish Town, early ’70s. Photograph by Jeremy Ross, courtesy of Kentishtowner.

In our own street – ninety per cent council-owned when I and my first husband (also long gone) scraped together the £1,500 deposit for a council mortgage – you could probably now count the council-tenancies on the fingers of one hand.   And, where the bus garage once stood, we now have a gated community where the ‘bijou town houses’, though built on the same scale as their early Victorian equivalents, have none of their tenderness.

As for the pawnbroker, granddaddy of the Money Shops that have sprung up on our high streets, it must be doing better than ever. Even so, these days there is more money to be made from bricks and mortar than any business could bring in and I expect, before long, the Three Golden Balls will have gone the way of everything else and turned (like Cinderella’s coach) into Three Luxury Apartments.

One of my most cherished memories from early childhood was being kissed by Prince Charming. I had no idea, of course, that this vision of manhood in his soft thigh-length boots and feathered hat who bent down and kissed my hand (which I would not allow to be washed for days) was a woman.

Whether I was disappointed when I found out that Prince Charming was the actress Evelyn Laye, doing a stint in pantomime at the Leeds Hippodrome, I don’t remember. But I can report still to be reeling from the discovery that D.K. Broster – writer of intoxicating novels of derring-do, which transported the twelve-year-old me from the confines of boarding school into the realms of pure romance – was also not a man!

It was trawling the internet on some quest or another (a friend calls this activity ‘falling down the rabbit hole’) that I happened on this unwelcome news. A woman! D. K. Broster? Impossible. My yelps of dismay attracted the attention of my husband. He was sympathetic but uncomprehending. And, on reflection, should I not be glad to be able to add another name to the canon of women writers? Another victory for the sisterhood?

But I don’t want D.K. Broster to be a woman. And what about Violet Needham and Harrison Ainsworth and all my other childhood favourites? Could they have been deceiving me too? Was John Buchan, perhaps, a Surrey housewife? Could P.C. Wren have been a lady, and the writer of Jean’s Golden Term a man?

Not only has the swashbuckling (as I had imagined) author of The Flight of the Heron turned out to be a woman, but also an alumna of my old college! More astonishing still was the discovery that while I was devouring her books behind the walls of Battle Abbey School, D.K. Broster was living down the road with a long-time female friend and companion.

Dorothy Kathleen Broster, born in Liverpool, 1877, died in Battle, Sussex, 1950.

Not many years after the birth of the NHS, I needed to have my tonsils out, and I will never forget the GP asking my mother whether she wanted me to have this done ‘properly’ or ‘with the riff raff’.

I recalled that phrase just the other day . . .

I had arrived for my appointment at a well-known London hospital a few minutes early. Although the waiting area was crowded, there was no wait at reception and, after signing in, I made for a chair at the very far end of the room. I didn’t want to catch anybody’s anything, if I could help it.

From this vantage point I saw very little movement for some fifteen minutes, until the first name was called. There was now a bit of rustling while someone got their things together and disappeared through the swing doors.

By the time an hour had gone by, three more people had been summoned and I had reached the second murder in the Agatha Christie picked up from one of those random book exchange points I happened to pass on my way in.

When I finally heard my name called, another hour or so later, I had reached page 110.

And here, before we come to my six minutes with the doctor, I must interrupt my story to report how a member of the non-medical staff came round to all of us weary waiters – today’s intake of riff raff – with a big box of chocolates: an oasis of kindness and consideration which I will not soon forget.

As for the doctor! After I had been in the consulting room so long that I thought I’d been forgotten, he catapulted in, told me his name and asked me why I was there.

I told him as briefly as I could of the arthritic hip for which I had first received treatment twenty years before. It was now a lot worse and I feared for my mobility. I was there to find out just how bad it was and what to do about it.

Dr H had not yet looked at me below the neck, but his answer was immediate: ‘nothing to do about it’. The GP had mentioned cortisone injections, and earlier hospital visits had led to hydrotherapy and exercise regimes . . . All these were a waste of time, he said, and then, almost as an afterthought: ‘I’d better look at it.’

I lay on the bed. He raised and rotated first one leg – now bare, except for an ankle sock – then the other, as if they were the hands of a clock.  He delivered his diagnosis:  an arthritic hip!

As for his advice, given on the run: CYCLE. SWIM. WALK.  No suggestion of physio. No talk about the doubtful wisdom of delaying an operation for someone already in their eighties. He was gone.

Many years before, at a poly clinic in Soviet Estonia, a doctor who really did have nothing to offer – except mustard plasters and Chinese Tiger Balm – to deal with my badly bruised ribs (I had slipped on the ice while peering through the dirty windows of the house in which my mother had been born) at least took an x-ray, told me what I had done and what to expect.

And then, a few days later, somewhere between Vilnius and Riga, a bedraggled group of English-speakers boarded the train my husband and I were on.  Returning from a Bahai conference in some desolate seaside resort, between them they collected and gave me a fistful of painkillers. Like that Agatha Christie, the gift of some person unknown, the riff raff had come to my aid.

NOTE: This is one of the very few times – whether as an in-patient or an out-patient – I have been disappointed in an NHS hospital. Without them, I would not still be around to tell this tale.

Not long ago, my husband took off on a five-day ‘business’ trip which was, in fact, more of a jaunt than anything else but, instead of being cheesed off (to rescue another quaint expression) my heart leapt! Five evenings when I don’t have to think ‘What are we going to have for supper?’ and listen to stories about President Trump, who I would prefer to forget.

But, before ‘Me Time’ could begin there was a bit to do, for my husband – who taught himself French by reading Rousseau and reads Finnegans Wake for fun – does not pay much attention to things around the house; a small price to pay for the time-honoured privilege of the shtetl wife: to look after the needs of a male person who lives not in the everyday world but in the world of thought.

But the tidying didn’t take long and now three hours of uninterrupted reading in which my dislike of T.S. Eliot reached new heights, as I entered further and further into the sad and hectic life of his ‘mad’ wife who, at this juncture is – along with the poet – the plaything of the demonic Bertie: not the nice king of my girlhood, but Bertrand Russell whose History of Philosophy accompanied me through my teenage years, when I still had aspirations, but still sits on the shelf unread.

T.S. Eliot

Now, a brief visit from an old friend where we let our soup get cold as we exchange news about the wretched state of our feet, the efficacy of our various physios and our NHS insoles.

Then things began to go wrong. Just as I had put on a CD and was settling down for my nap, a phone call to report that the front door of my tenants’ flat (see post ON BEING A LANDLORD) was open. The kindly neighbour who had observed this did not know what to do. If she shut it, would she be locking my nice young tenants out? If she didn’t . . . left unsaid was what she might find if she went inside!

So, over to the flat where, gingerly – for I too have read my share of murder mysteries – I opened every door to find neither bodies nor signs of a forced entry. Clearly, one or other of them had left in a hurry and failed to lock up behind them.

Back home and about to fall asleep to Schumann’s Liederkreis when the doorbell rang and there was the electrician, come to do a few small and non-urgent jobs before lingering to chat. Do I know anything about Neil Sedaka? No I don’t. What about Bessie Smith? Yes, I do. By the time we had run through a gamut of mostly unfamiliar names (for he had mistaken the nature of my cassette collection) it was time to put on my supper.

I never got back to Eliot and his unfortunate wife* but, with the kettle on for my hot-water bottle and the Evening Pill Box – lovingly curated by my absent husband – at the ready, I did manage to tap out a testimonial for one of my long-ago authors** who, at seventy, is starting a new career as a hired-hand memoirist, to support her true calling as a brilliant but neglected writer of popular fiction.

So the day wasn’t wasted. But it wasn’t quiet either.

* Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour Smith

** Laurie Devine whose description of the ‘cutting ceremony’ which occurs early in Nile, the first of her epic novels, is as devastating and – as we know from the vivid testimony of Nawal El Saadawi – as topical as it ever was.

It was in the hope of publicising my book that I submitted a piece to Saga Magazine for their ‘Humble Treasures’, a charming series (now defunct) in which old people, like myself, wrote a few words about some object for which they had special affection. In my case, it was a handwritten recipe for chicken soup.

What I hadn’t realised was that the pieces would not be published in their original form.   At the photo shoot to which I and five other contestants had been summoned – a jolly occasion, as can well be imagined – there was a journalist present whose job it was to interview us, rather in the manner of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and then re-write our stories in her own words. These then appeared, under our names, nice and big, along with the barely visible by-line: As told to Moira Petty.

Although – and with good reason, as it turned out – I was fearful of what the accompanying photo would be like: we had all been photographed along with our treasures – a locket and a pair of hiking boots among them – I wasn’t worried about the text, as Moira had been punctilious in allowing me to vet it. But I should have been. For not only had some meddlesome person made unwelcome changes, he or she had also misspelt my name. ESTHER MENNEL reads the banner headline above the miserable photo and the mangled text.

Here, then, on a day when I am again feeling a bit under the weather, and in memory of my mother and my grandmother, is the piece I sent to Saga Magazine for its Humble Treasures series, in its original form and with its original title.

JEWISH PENICILLIN

The other day I was feeling a bit off-colour and did what I always do if I feel I am headed for a few days in bed:  I asked my husband to go and get the best chicken he could find (no chicken these days gives you the wonderful thick schmaltz that I remember from my childhood) and on his return, with the chicken and the carrots and the onions and the parsley, I set about making several days’ worth of Chicken Soup.  I don’t, of course, need the recipe but I still like to keep in front of me this, in my mother’s handwriting, is how it reads.

BOILER
Wash all in cold water. Put
in sauspan and cover with water. Boil up, take of scum.
Add one onion and one carrot
cut up halfe, also parsley-
rooth if available. Simmer
all about 3–3½ hours.

As you can tell, English was not my mother’s native tongue.  That had been Russian, but Russian had been abandoned when we arrived in England in 1939.

The recipe (which must originally have been in Cyrillic script) was sent to my mother by her mother – left behind in what was thought to be the safety of her home in Tallinn.  Less than two years later, in July 1941, the Germans invaded Estonia, and my grandmother was murdered.

Thus does this recipe remain a precious talisman of times long past and I was delighted when the nice Irishman who comes to help in the garden found me making that batch of chicken soup the other day and said, oh yes, he knew all about the magical properties of ‘Jewish Penicillin’.

It seems that good things never die.

That scrap of aged paper, together with the leather-bound volume of faded photographs, from which these images of my mother and grandmother have been carefully lifted, are more precious to me than diamonds.

My mother, who had never had to cook before the War.

My grandmother Helena Banker (holding the parasol) with her sister Adele, taken in Lodz, where they were born.

But nothing could equal in poignancy the worn little teddy brought along by another lady in our group: it had been pinned to her gown when she was found abandoned on the steps of an orphanage.  Treasures indeed.