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MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE

20th July 2018 / Esther Menell

It is, of course, inevitable, in one’s eighties, that one knows more dead people than alive people, and yet it was quite a shock to realise this when my friend, the novelist and blogger extraordinaire, Jon Elkon – a good twenty years younger than me – pointed this out. Nothing, of course, would surprise Jon, one of whose fictional characters was a talking dog, but it did surprise me. How could I not have noticed?

My world is now full of people who are no longer there . . .

Strangers live in Ilsa’s flat. There is a grave – his grave – in the wild flower meadow that had been my cousin Anthony’s pride and joy. Juliet lies among her ancestors in a Norfolk churchyard.

Michele will never walk her dog on the Heath again. But I will always cherish her very last column: she had told me, only days before her death, the story of this near-miss with some randy schoolboys and I had countered with my story of a Greek stationmaster: both of us well-brought up and hopelessly naïve Jewish girls, we almost lost our virginity by default.

Michele Hanson

Who else? There was Gillie: an Oxford friend alongside whom I spent an Easter vacation working in a Lyons Tea Shop which would have been in the shadow of Centre Point, but there was no Centre Point. Then, some twenty years later – for Gillie died far too young – the merciless run of deaths among my authors, all in early middle age. Carol Bruggen, one of my favourites, both as a writer and as a friend: a paranoid schizophrenic, who would put on a different set of gaudy clothes each morning, to keep her spirits up. Faith Addis, who had to be dissuaded from going to writing classes, even as her fan mail mounted up and her books were adapted (horribly badly adapted) for television. Madeleine St John, whose gem-like Women in Black far out-shone her later, prize-winning novels and, later still, Gillian Avery who got tired of being looked down on by her academic husband and his high-table friends for writing children’s books and came up with a splendid tome, replete with notes and bibliography.

As the list of the dead gets longer and longer, it is the thought of out-living those who mean the most to me – not death itself – that fills me with dread. Not so my father-in-law, who watched his contemporaries pass on with grim satisfaction. He had not wished them ill but he was glad – proud, even – that it was them and not him. The final duel between him and his equally long-living brother-in-law, who Dale had long suspected of cheating at golf, had itself the excitement of a sporting event.

My father-in-law, Dale Harbison (foreground)

Not long ago, Diana Athill, now one hundred years old, let it be known that she and one of her friends in the lovely, serene Home where they both live, count not sheep but ex-lovers to help them get to sleep.

Thanks to Jon, I may now go one step further: I may lull myself to sleep listing the dead.

BETTER AND BETTER . . .

17th June 2018 / Esther Menell

The other day, I heard or half-heard (Radio 4 stays on constantly in the kitchen) that ‘the Social Contract’ has been – or, perhaps, is about to be – broken, and with what dire consequences . . . And what appeared to be meant by the Social Contract was the contract between generations for children always to do better, to have a better life than their parents.

But what kind of sense does this make, unless one is talking about countries a lot poorer than our own? How could each generation do better than the one before: a snakes and ladders concept which would soon go right off the edge of the board.

It is true, as my then teenage son pointed out long ago, that we – meaning me and his various parents – hit a good moment. When I think about it, not only were we able to get onto the housing ladder (not that we then thought of it like that), but we were too young to be unduly bothered by the war. I still have my shrapnel collection somewhere and have been left with a life-long appreciation of oranges and bananas, so plentiful now, but known only from picture books then. We were, moreover, protected from childhood obesity (another of today’s hot topics) by those buff-coloured ration books which, incidentally, also guaranteed equal shares for all.

But is that really what the Social Contract was about?

I had a dim memory of coming across the term in history lessons and googled it. And the answer, of course, was that the Social Contract went way beyond the disparity of incomes between generations. What concerned these great moral philosophers was an idea of something like universal sacrifice for the greater good and, particularly, the responsibility of government towards its citizens. Perhaps, too, citizens’ obligations to each other.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Certainly all these are increasingly rare. Everyone, it seems, is out for himself, like the Carillion bosses, so vividly described recently as ‘too busy stuffing their mouths with gold . . . ‘

Thomas Hobbes

And yet, and yet . . . the other day, also in the kitchen on Radio 4, I heard one story after another of people who had given up safe and well-paid jobs, to do something socially useful: bankers becoming teachers, accountants becoming social workers.

It seems that the precept of the Social Contract comes naturally to a lot of people, but not to those with the power to make life better for everyone, not just for themselves.

ALL GONE . . .

14th May 2018 / Esther Menell

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.

ALSO NOT A MAN

10th April 2018 / Esther Menell

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.

ANSWERING THE DOOR

20th March 2018 / Esther Menell

Some years ago now, I came back from the High Street to find someone washing our car. It turned out that Peter, as we will call him, had rung our doorbell and asked my husband, who happened to be in, for a bucket. Peter had no tools but wanted to work. He did not like begging, he told us when we sat round the kitchen table having a cup of tea but, for reasons which became all too clear, he had no other option.

From that day on, for several years, he came by often and I heard both the sad story of his life and the various stages in his rehabilitation, which is now happily complete. He has been housed by the Council and is looking for work, and you would not know from his appearance that he had ever been wandering the streets, hungry and penniless.

All well and good. But coming to my door had become a habit with Peter and, after being disturbed by him for the nth time, I asked him to stop coming, just as I had asked friends not to drop in when I used to work at home.

But how, oh how, can I stop the ON LINE shopping?

Only yesterday, a very wet man with two big, wet packages (see below) almost wept with relief when I said he could leave them with us. But why am I taking in shopping when I have shut the door against someone needing a bit of human warmth?

There is never a time when the doorbell is not an interruption. The only time I am not in the middle of doing something is when I’m asleep. The rest of the time I am listening or reading or on the phone or in the loo and not best pleased at having to answer the door: even less pleased if the bell has woken me up.

We like all our neighbours and the concept of neighbourliness, but when people are out at work all day, what do they think is going to happen to the things they are having sent to their home addresses?

Oh for the days when we all did our shopping at weekends or after work, and brought it home with us. The only things sent were the things too big to carry. There was less traffic in the street and there were no drones in the air frightening the London sparrows: they, too, now a thing of the past.

NOLI ME TANGERE

15th February 2018 / Esther Menell

Like a lot of women of my age, I find it hard to understand what the fuss is about. When I was young, we would, of course, brush off wolf-whistles and pats on the bottom but to come back from, say, Italy, without any such memories, would leave a girl wondering what was wrong with her.

Raymond Bessone ‘Mr Teasy Weasy’

For myself, a holiday In Turkey when I was in my late teens did more for my confidence than being taken to Mr Teasy Weasy for an expensive hair cut. Turkish men don’t or, anyway, didn’t then, prefer their women to be wafer thin . . . .

Be that as it may, what began with stories of young women confronted by an ugly giant of a man with his flies undone has become a maelstrom of remembered incidents ranging from the truly horrific to the frankly absurd.

The horrific – the rapists, the stalkers, the serial predators, the husbands who beat up their wives – should be locked up. The others should be laughed out of court. Is it not pathetic that some middle-aged roué believes his exalted position as a politician or business magnate gives him the right to fondle anyone who comes within reach?

But how much damage can it really do to a normal young woman to have to brush off or even, temporarily put up with, this kind of unwanted attention and why, oh why, do they sometimes walk willingly into the mangy lion’s den?

How can anyone not regret that these stories, which trivialize a serious issue, fill the newspapers while stories of real atrocities – the Yazidi women among them – are side-lined?

Something has gone horribly wrong with a world in which a cheery equivalent of ‘Hey, good lookin’ evokes anger, and an unwelcome hand on the knee can cause a lasting trauma.

And this touch-me-not epidemic doesn’t stop there. There is my friend – a grandmother, like myself – who gave up a voluntary job at a local primary school because she wasn’t allowed to touch the child she was coaching. She didn’t mind sitting in a corridor with her pupil, but she did mind not being able to give him or her a hug or a pat on the back.

How absurd it has become. But, to end on a more cheerful note, for I dislike the crude behavior of men and resent their superior strength as much as anyone, I did enjoy the recent newspaper story of the burglar who inadvertently woke the lady of the house: a rugby player who gave chase and frightened the life out of him.

WITH THE RIFF RAFF, OF COURSE . . .

19th January 2018 / Esther Menell

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.

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN . . . MEMORIES OF OFFICE LIFE

22nd November 2017 / Esther Menell

The other day, leafing through an oldish copy of the TLS, I came across a long piece about the Themersons: Stefan and Francezska who, among much else, founded the Gabberbocchus Press whose books have now become collectors’ items.

Francezska Themerson at work in her studio, 1969.

Their extraordinary careers in which she, an artist, worked alongside her poet, novelist, philosopher husband are charted in the piece which also refers to the exhibition of their work which had been held, not long before, at the Camden Arts Centre in Arkwright Road: opposite the JW3 community centre, where, as Polish-born Jews, they would also belong.

An example of Francezska Themerson’s work.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, when – in my role as jacket-supremo, a job thrown at me on my first day at the publisher André Deutsch, where I had been taken on as an editor – I was lucky enough (through the good offices of Michael Horowitz) to get Francezska Themerson to design a jacket for us, André rejected it.

‘I AM NOT GOING TO PAY FOR GREY’ is what André said.

This exceptional artist had used three colours, of which one was grey, for our modest 3-colour job and had, moreover, generously provided the colour separations which were needed in those days.

It took a great deal of angry persuasion to make André change his mind. And he never did change his mind when it came to the jacket for my husband’s first book, Eccentric Spaces, which has been constantly in print since it was first published by Knopf in 1977.

Knopf had used an Atget photograph for their edition and it remains one of the loveliest of jackets, for not only is the photograph of rare beauty, but the lettering is a perfect fit. Everyone at the free-for-all meeting at which jacket decisions were made was for it, but not André. When he heard what it would cost, he told me to ring up the French Tourist Office and get a photograph for nothing.

Such was life when André was in place. How it changed when his successor, Tom Rosenthal, took over! Tom was not one to go around switching off lights or complaining about paying for heating whenever he saw an open window . . .

But it wasn’t long before austerity began to seem a virtue as our new employer’s largesse, of which he himself was the main benefactor, began to sink the firm. Before long, after thirty-two years and with only one year to go before retirement, I was out on my ear.

My wish to take the matter of the disagreement which precipitated this to the Rabbinical Court – I had a picture of the bearded elders pinned above my desk – was discouraged by the very grand and very generous firm of solicitors who fought my case, pro bono, for four long years. I am sure they were right, and yet . . .

So much for this story of extravagance on the one side and parsimony on the other. The oranges and lemons of office life.

ANYONE FOR SLEEPING PILLS?

15th October 2017 / Esther Menell

Would anyone like a cheque book or, for that matter, a supply of sleeping pills?

I have just got back from the bank, where I found that the cheque book I have been ordering and re-ordering since March, and waiting for in every post, had proliferated. There were now five cheque books neatly stock-piled in a pigeon-hole behind the reception desk. Every one of them clearly addressed to me.

Had no one thought of ringing me? I asked the manager, who had been lounging in a chair in the customer area, but now hurried back to his cubicle. Didn’t it strike anyone that the person to whom these were addressed must be either needing them or dead?

There was, predictably, no satisfactory answer. Taking refuge behind a swivelling computer screen, the best he could do was offer to destroy one or two of the surplus books ‘for safety’, and I left him sitting with the detritus in his lap.

NOT the branch referred to! © Secret Artist NW5

Very few people, of course, would want a cheque book nowadays, except to use as scrap paper: perfect for shopping lists. But a lot of insomniacs, who have to face their doctor’s disapproval each time they ask for sleeping pills, would be glad to share in the stash that I have accumulated.

This abundance is thanks not to my doctor over-prescribing, but to the now widespread system which allows the patient to by-pass the doctor and order repeat prescriptions direct from a designated chemist. All well and good. But in my case, the system broke down and I wasn’t only getting the medication requested, but everything I had ever asked for! So, in the middle of winter, I was getting ointment for insect bites and a hay-fever spray.

I tried more than once to straighten this mess out. It proved surprisingly difficult. But there was one good outcome. By the time it was sorted, I had collected enough sleeping pills to be sure that, when the time comes, I won’t need to go to Switzerland.

MOTHER LOVE

14th September 2017 / Esther Menell

The scene on a bus the other day reminded me that we are not all natural mothers. The young woman looked desperate as her baby, scarlet with rage, screamed and screamed and screamed. I remembered just how it had felt. The angry mutter of a city gent – ‘I hope I never find myself in a carriage with you and your child and your dog again’ – as we bundled off the train in Worthing. The tantrum at the end of a birthday party when my three-year-old didn’t want to give away the going-away presents . . .

With Aaron and Patch on Worthing beach

The myth of the happy, dimpled baby is hard to dispel. If mothers only knew what they were in for. Hours spent alone with a small person who can’t talk to you. Can’t tell you why he is screaming the house down. Can’t tell you what it is that he wants. The broken nights, the broken days . . .

I can still remember the day when there was a knock at the door and two little girls asked if they could wheel my baby round the block. I had reached the point which many new mothers – especially single mothers – will recognise; when they would be ready to hand their offspring over to Dracula himself.

Of course, I didn’t. But I did put the now beaming infant in his pram and we all walked down the road to meet the children’s mother. Nothing could have been more reassuring. Mrs B, a cleaning lady, and Ron, a handyman, along with their two daughters became – and still are – a part of our lives.

For Mrs B (or Auntie Doll, as she was to become) babies and small children were no more trouble than the dogs, cats and rabbits that all lived, happy and well cared for, in that small terraced house where my five-year-old would later stay for two whole weeks while I went to St Louis, Missouri, to visit the man who would soon become my second husband.

Those two weeks gave my son, an only child, a precious taste of family life: sleeping on a put-up bed between the two little girls, doing everything to the background of non-stop television, drinking lots of sugary tea . . . and, perversely, happily doing what he was told!

He told me, not so long ago, how safe it made him feel to know that Doll meant what she said.

What supremely good luck it was that these people lived round the corner. Doll would not have believed how difficult and isolating I and many of my friends found those early years.

Mother and Child (after Vincent) by R.B. Kitaj

Mother love, the overwhelming love that nothing can extinguish and remains as powerful a force when one’s child is no longer a child, does not preclude moments of desperation. When I chose this painting of Kitaj’s for the jacket of a novel which was, in effect, one long and powerful scream, it was in recognition of something I knew about for myself.

A QUIET DAY

15th August 2017 / Esther Menell

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.

BODY PARTS

30th July 2017 / Esther Menell

In the old days, it was my car which fell to bits: now it’s me. Shakespeare, of course, knew all about this, even though he didn’t live long enough – I don’t think – to need false teeth. I forgot to put my own in the other day when I went to meet a newish friend. She took my apology in her stride: was only sorry she couldn’t lend me hers . . .

I am reminded of another spare-parts story: well, not actually spare, for when Ilsa (see below) found that her friend, Diana – guest speaker at some grand occasion – had arrived without her hearing aid, she lent her hers, and sat through the entire event without hearing a word.

Ilsa Yardley and Diana Athill

Yet another sign of true friendship was the parcel which arrived when I had pneumonia last year and all the coughing made me (temporarily, thank heavens) incontinent. Posted by a friend who lived too far away to visit, it had in it some frilly white padded knickers.

It’s lucky, of course, that when we are young, we don’t know about incontinence pads and Old Age Spots*, and not being able to reach one’s own feet, as there is nothing we can do to avoid getting old, except dying first. As it happens, though, I am more clued in than most, as my best friend used to be a geriatric social-worker and is still familiar with all the paraphernalia of old age: the things to help us see and hear, the things to hang on to, the things to help us put on our socks.

And I have learnt for myself, what she told me long ago, which is that no one changes inside. In my eighties now, I am still surprised that I can drive a car and keep track of my bank account: such grown-up things to be able to do!

So, hobbling along on a bad foot (‘weak’ not ‘bad’ I have been told to say) worrying about thinning hair and needing the telly on a bit louder than I did before, I enter old-lady-normal-land from which there is only one exit, and I am in no hurry to reach it.

• Seborrheic keratosis: a crusty version of Liver Spots (aka Senile Freckles) and just as harmless. But, oh for the time when acne and sunburn were the only ills the flesh was heir to . . .

AND WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO?

10th July 2017 / Esther Menell

The title of this post, written a day or two before the events in North Kensington, has become horribly topical, but this was the question put to me, on my doorstep, almost half a century ago, by a Camden official.

What do you mean? Where would I like to go . . ? He looked surprised that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

It took a few minutes to discover what had happened. And it took four years to fight off the Council.

It turned out the plan to re-develop the street I live in, where the ‘bijou workmen’s cottages’ (built in the late nineteenth century for railway workers) now change hands for over a million pounds, had been drawn up years before, but only passed for action at the tail-end of a meeting about CentrePoint, by which time no one was paying attention.

One of the proofs that they had not done their homework was the man with the clip-board’s surprise on hearing that I was not a council tenant, as almost everyone else was, but was buying the house (which then cost £4,500) with a Council mortgage.

And no, I did not want to move to Woolwich or Eltham or Thamesmead (nowadays it could be Gateshead or Birmingham).

But neither, to my shame, had I noticed that everyone from the other side of the street had already been decanted.

Somewhere, my husband has written of the learning curve that he experienced and delighted in after agreeing to give a course of lectures on the entire history of architecture. Every week he was tackling a new civilisation! Well, this was to be my learning curve, for there is no more sedentary and back-room job than being a book editor.

Along with my two neighbours, the only other owner-occupiers in the street, we formed a Residents Association of which the Chairman was my next-door neighbour John, electrician and Communist Party member*; the Treasurer was Bill the builder, a working-class Tory; the Secretary, me.

For the next four years, I became a mix of pamphleteer and social worker. I learnt as much about the inhabitants of this street and the weaknesses of local democracy as R was to learn about entire civilisations.

The arrogance with which people are treated! For once in my life I was glad of my middle-class accent; also of owning both a telephone and a typewriter. Not everyone had the first, and no one else had the second. In fact, in my survey of every household, I found one house had no electricity, and the old couple who lived there preferred it that way. Arguing their case (they were the age I am now) was one of my more unusual assignments.

Looking back, I feel lucky to have had the chance to do something worthwhile: my proudest achievement was arguing the Council into allowing their tenants to move into the empty houses across the street and then back again, after the re-hab which took the place of wholesale destruction.

I am not sure that my fifty-year old son has such warm feelings about this period when I was often absent at meetings and endlessly pounding the street, with him in tow, distributing roneoed information sheets.

Not that I don’t have one or two unsettling memories myself: at one door, I was greeted with a diatribe about the Jews. The old man didn’t realise he was talking to one and I didn’t tell him. And there was the young couple, one of the few tenants of a private landlord, who were embarrassingly grateful to me for getting them out of his grip, but were later to abscond with some association money . . . And then, to crown it all, by the time the long battle was over, our four local councillors had all left the area: one of them leaving behind him a house with an extra storey which still sticks out like a sore thumb, as no one since then has been granted planning permission for this most common of improvements.

You can’t win them all. And how things have changed! If the street were threatened now there would be a galaxy of lawyers, architects, journalists ready to spring to its defence. Meantime, the only topics that can be relied on to produce a torrent of e-mails are Litter, Parking, Noise and BINS!

Which is why I preferred the way it used to be, and fear for the tenants who are going to be decanted from their homes to make way for the development of our local Morrisons site (see artist’s visual below).

They will be told they can return. But no one returned to the other side of our street.

* When he retired, John moved out of London and sold his house to Tessa Jowell. But that is another story.

‘A SWEET BROWN MAN’ for HEIDI

8th June 2017 / Esther Menell

It is almost thirty years since I tried to get someone – anyone – interested in publishing Heidi, and about ten since I discovered she was dead. By then she was living not far from me, in sheltered housing. I have never taken the step of searching out her death certificate to see if, as I feel sure must be the case, she decided she had had enough.

There was so much we didn’t know about Heidi when she came to work as a secretary in the editorial department at André Deutsch, only to leave, two years later, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t live on what we were paying her. We didn’t know, for instance, that she had spent most of the previous year in a psychiatric ward. Nor that the father she had never known had been a GI. Nor that he was black.

This, of course, accounted for her dusky skin and perhaps also for a kind of quiet elegance and the self-containment which she certainly didn’t inherit from her mother, the bitter subject of almost every one of the prose poems, haikus, call them what you will, that she left me with.

She never cared for us. She should never have had children, but she gave birth so easily. She just opened her legs and the babies came out.

As for her father: the only thing her mother told her about him was that he was a sweet brown man. She did not add that he was one of many.

The village where Heidi was born was on the Norfolk coast and close to an American base. As far as I know, none of her siblings had African American fathers, but they were all neglected. Their mother paid no attention to their clothes or their food or how they did at school. What Heidi remembered was that she liked sweet things (a child would notice this) and any kind of finery. She would decorate her hats with lots of tulle and roses, and – a happy memory – the Christmas tree.

As an adult, Heidi came to equate all her mother’s sources of pleasure with her appetite for sex.

The only things she could cook well were fruit cakes. She knew the secret of making them dark and fruity. She liked her men that way.

Bananas too: She loved bananas more than any other fruit . . . They must have come from the PX. There were no bananas then. Not even in London.

Too painful to write the story of her life in a connected form, we have only these glimpses of a child unwanted by her mother, unknown to her father and looked on askance by the villagers who knew all about the comings and goings in that house by the sea.

No wonder Heidi adopted so many different names. Leafing through the manuscripts I see she was sometimes Georgia Ray, sometimes Kate France, sometimes herself. I don’t know under which name she sent stuff to Virago, but I do know their response made her happy for, like all the other readers (apart from one professional poet*) they recognised the emotional power and transforming wit of these fragments: songs, dirges, cries for help . . .

I am glad, all these years later, to have found a way to send them out into the world and, for once, wish more people were reading this.

* ‘26 little whimsical perceptions about family relationships . . . Not for me.’

IT’S NOT ALL BAD

23rd May 2017 / Esther Menell

The other night, attracted more by the venue than the occasion itself (a free bar is no attraction to a non-drinker) R and I went to a reception at the Francis Crick Institute. The event was to celebrate and promote the activities of the UCH Cancer Fund and as many of those who attended, including me, owed their lives to the UCH oncology unit there was a built-in sense of well-being and camaraderie.

Exterior view of the Francis Crick Institute. Photograph by kind permission of the Wellcome Trust.

Even so, standing still is hard on the feet and the back and, the moment the speech-making was over, R and I moved to the outer edge of the crowd and into the vast and beautiful space that stretched out beyond it. Here was a field of glass exhibition-stands each one of which, in exquisite pictorial detail, told the story of historic and on-going medical research with wonderfully lurid pictures of the killer bugs and modest photographs, often taken in a laboratory setting, of the indomitable men and women the bugs are up against.

My immediate thought was that I must bring my nine-year-old grandson here. I cannot imagine a child who would not be inspired by the exhibition, and am already wondering what QUESTION about the Meaning of Life he will write on the card that one is invited to fill in and which is then displayed on the wall of windows.

Reading these messages distracted me from studying the building itself, but it was not time wasted. Like the prayer requests in a Spanish church which reveal the lives of the congregants so, in this secular shrine, did these votives tell us about ourselves. Why me, not someone else? How did the world begin? Where do we come from? And my favourite, which had been transcribed for a five-year-old: Why is a five-year-old elephant so much bigger than me?

By now, I was flagging and we turned to go. The crowd was thinning and I caught a glimpse of the doctor who, twenty years back, had been the person who in the whole world I was most pleased to see. And I thought of all the lives he had saved since then, and also of one life which he and his colleagues had been unable to save, though they had done everything within their power.

My friend Ellen.

Even so, my QUESTION and, I am sure, hers too (albeit rhetorical) would have been: How can we thank you enough?

As R and I stepped out of the building and back into the self-destructing world, we were buoyed up by having seen great work being carried out in a great building. It seems that it isn’t all bad, after all.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016.

THE SAGA EXPERIENCE

8th May 2017 / Esther Menell

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.

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, THEN

29th April 2017 / Esther Menell

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 / Esther Menell

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.

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 / Esther Menell

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.

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’.

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.

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 / Esther Menell

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?

AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF