At four-thirty a bell rang to mark the end of lectures for the day. I closed my books and watched Professor Tilsey as he pattered towards the door. I felt a little sorry for the old fellow. He had only been dragged out of retirement because so many young dons had left to fight on the Western Front. The death of Matthew Makepeace, the man who should have been lecturing that afternoon—"one of the most promising scholars of his generation," the old Professor used to tell us—was "an inestimable loss to the department and the university as a whole." I had to agree with him: Makepeace was one of the few men in England acknowledged as an authority on Luini. I had only attended three of his lectures before he had signed up to go to France . . . . The irony of such a man being riddled with German bullets while stretched over a barbed-wire fence somewhere in the middle of France was not lost on me.
I was in my first year at Bedford. It seemed there was never enough time to catch up, and I badly needed Charlie to return and take the shop off my hands. I had written to him in Edinburgh when he was in Belgium, to Belgium when he was in France and to France the very moment he arrived back in Edinburgh. The King's mail never seemed to catch up with him, and now I didn't want Charlie to find out what I had been up to until I had the chance to witness his reaction for myself.
Jacob Cohen had promised to send Charlie over to Chelsea the moment he reappeared in the Whitechapel Road. It couldn't be too soon for me.
I picked up my books and stuffed them away in my old school satchel, the one my father—Tata—had given me when I won my open scholarship to St. Paul's. The "RS" he had had so proudly stamped on the front was fading now, and the leather strap had almost worn through, so lately I had been carrying the satchel under my arm: Tata would never have considered buying me a new one while the old one still had a day's life left in it.
How strict Tata had always been with me; even taken the strap to me on a couple of occasions, once for pinching "fress," or buns as Mother called them, behind his back—he didn't mind how much I took from the shop as long as I asked—and once for saying "damn" when I cut my finger peeling an apple. Although I wasn't brought up in the Jewish faith—my mother wouldn't hear of it—he still passed on to me all those standards that were part of his own upbringing and would never tolerate what he from time to time described as my "unacceptable behavior."
It was to be many years later that I learned of the strictures Tata had accepted once he had proposed marriage to my mother, a Roman Catholic. He adored her and never once complained in my presence of the fact that he always had to attend shul on his own. "Mixed marriage" seems such an outdated expression nowadays but at the turn of the century it must have been quite a sacrifice for both of them to make.
I loved St. Paul's from the first day I walked through the gates, I suppose partly because no one told me off for working too hard. The only thing I didn't like was being called "Porky." It was a girl from the class above me, Daphne Harcourt-Browne, who later explained its double connotation. Daphne was a curly-headed blonde known as "Snooty" and although we were not natural friends, our predilection for cream buns brought us together—especially when she discovered that I had a never-ending source of supply. Daphne would happily have paid for them but I wouldn't consider it as I wanted my classmates to think we were pals. On one occasion she even invited me to her home in Chelsea, but I didn't accept as I knew if I did I would only have to ask her back to my place in Whitechapel.
It was Daphne who gave me my first art book, The Treasures of Italy, in exchange for several cream wafers, and from that day on I knew I had stumbled across a subject I wanted to study for the rest of my life. I never asked Daphne but it always puzzled me why one of the pages at the front of the book had been torn out.
Daphne came from one of the best families in London, certainly from what I understood to be the upper classes, so once I left St. Paul's I assumed we would never come across each other again. After all, Lowndes Square was hardly a natural habitat for me. Although to be fair neither was the East End while it remained full of such people as the Trumpers and the Shorrocks.
And when it came to those Trumpers I could only agree with my father's judgment. Mary Trumper, by all accounts, must have been a saint. George Trumper was a man whose behavior was unacceptable, not in the same class as his father, whom Tata used to describe as a "mensch." Young Charlie—who was always up to no good as far as I could see—nevertheless had what Tata called "a future." The magic must have skipped a generation, he suggested.
"The boy's not bad for a goy," he would tell me. "He'll run his own shop one day, maybe even more than one, believe me." I didn't give this observation a lot of thought until my father's death left me with no one else to whom I could turn.
Tata had complained often enough that he couldn't leave his two assistants at the shop for more than an hour before something was certain to go wrong. "No saychel," he would complain of those unwilling to take responsibility. "Can't think what would happen to the shop if I take one day off."
As Rabbi Glikstein read out the last rites at his levoyah, those words rang in my ears. My mother was still unconscious in hospital and they couldn't tell me when or if she might recover. Meanwhile I was to be foisted on my reluctant Aunt Harriet, whom I had only previously met at family gatherings. It turned out that she lived in someplace called Romford and as she was due to take me back there the day after the funeral I had only been left with a few hours to make a decision. I tried to work out what my father would have done in the same circumstances and came to the conclusion that he would have taken what he so often called "a bold step."
By the time I got up the next morning, I had determined to sell the baker's shop to the highest bidder unless Charlie Trumper was willing to take on the responsibility himself. Looking back, I certainly had my doubts about whether Charlie was capable of doing the job but in the end they were outweighed by Tata's high opinion of him.
During my lessons that morning I prepared a plan of action. As soon as school was over I took the train from Hammersmith to Whitechapel, then continued the rest of the journey on foot to Charlie's home.
Once at Number 112 I banged on the door with the palm of my hand and waited—I remember being surprised that the Trumpers didn't have a knocker. My call was eventually answered by one of those awful sisters, but I wasn't quite sure which one it was. I told her I needed to speak to Charlie, and wasn't surprised to be left standing on the doorstep while she disappeared back into the house. She returned a few minutes later and somewhat grudgingly led me into a little room at the back.
When I left twenty minutes later I felt I had come off with rather the worst of the bargain but another of my father's aphorisms came to mind: "shnorrers no choosers."
The following day I signed up for an accountancy course as an "extra option." The lessons took place during the evening and then only after I had finished my regular schoolwork for the day. To begin with I found the subject somewhat tedious, but as the weeks passed I became fascinated by how meticulously recording each transaction could prove to be so beneficial even to our little business. I had no idea so much money could be saved by simply understanding a balance sheet, debt repayments and how to make claims against tax. My only worry was that I suspected Charlie had never bothered to pay any tax in the first place.