Another sacred room was the library, which, in the evenings at least, was especially my father’s domain. One section of the library wall was covered with his Hebrew books, but there were books on every subject – my mother’s books (she was fond of novels and biographies), my brothers’ books, and books inherited from grandparents. One bookcase was entirely devoted to plays – my parents, who had met as fellow enthusiasts in a medical students’ Ibsen society, still went to the theater every Thursday.
The library was not only for reading; on weekends, the books that were out on the reading table would be put to one side to make room for games of various sorts. While my three older brothers might be playing an intense game of cards or chess, I would play a simple game, Ludo, with Auntie Birdie, my mother’s older sister, who lived with us – in my early years, she was more a play companion than my brothers were. Extreme passions developed over Monopoly, and even before I learned to play it, the prices and colors of the properties became engraved on my mind. (To this day I see the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel as cheap, mauve properties, the pale blue Angel and Euston Road next to them as scarcely and better. By contrast, the West End is clothed for me in rich, costly colors: Fleet Street scarlet, Piccadilly yellow, the green of Bond Street, and the dark, Bentley-colored blue of Park Lane and Mayfair.) Sometimes we would all join in a game of Ping-Pong, or some woodworking, using the big library table. But after a weekend of frivolities, the games would be returned to the huge drawer under one of the bookcases, and the room restored to its quiet for my father’s evening reading.
There was another drawer on the other side of the bookcase, a fake drawer which, for some reason, did not open, and I frequently had a fixed dream about this drawer. Like any child, I loved coins – their glitter, their weights, their different shapes and sizes – from the bright copper farthings and halfpennies and pennies to the varied silver coins (especially the tiny silver three-penny bits – one was always concealed in the suet pudding at Christmas) to the heavy gold sovereign my father wore on his watch chain. And I had read in my children’s encyclopedia about doubloons and rubles, coins with holes in them, and ‘pieces of eight’, which I imagined to be perfect octagons. In my dream the false drawer would open to me, displaying a glittering treasure of copper and silver and gold mixed together, coins of a hundred countries and ages, including, to my delight, octagonal pieces of eight.
I especially liked crawling into the triangular cupboard under the stairs, where the special plates and cutlery for Passover were kept. The cupboard itself was shallower than the stairs, and it seemed to me that its back wall, when tapped, sounded hollow; it must have concealed, I felt, a further space behind it, a secret passageway, perhaps. I felt snug in here, in my secret hideaway – no one besides me was small enough to fit in.
Most beautiful and mysterious in my eyes was the front door, with its stained glass panels of many shapes and colors. I would place my eye behind the crimson glass and see a whole world red-stained (but with the red roofs of the houses opposite strangely pale, and clouds startlingly distinct against a blue sky now almost black). It was a completely different experience with the green glass, and the deep violet blue. Most intriguing was the yellowish green glass, for this seemed to shimmer, sometimes yellow and sometimes green, depending on where I stood and how the sun hit it.
A forbidden area was the attic, which was gigantic, since it covered the entire area of the house, and stretched up to the peaked, crystalline eaves of the roof. I was once taken up to see the attic, and then dreamed of it repeatedly, perhaps because it was forbidden after Marcus climbed up once by himself and fell through the skylight, gashing his thigh (though once, in a storytelling mood, he told me that the scar had been inflicted by a wild boar, like the scar on Odysseus’ thigh).
We had meals in the breakfast room next to the kitchen; the dining room, with its long table, was reserved for shabbas meals, festivals, and special occasions. There was a similar distinction between the lounge and the drawing room – the lounge, with its sofa and dilapidated, comfy chairs, was for general use; the drawing room, with its elegant, uncomfortable Chinese chairs and lacquered cabinets, was for large family gatherings. Aunts, uncles, and cousins in the neighborhood would walk over on Saturday afternoons, and a special silver tea service would be pulled out and small crustless sandwiches of smoked salmon and cod’s roe served in the drawing room – such dainties were not served at any other time. The chandeliers in the drawing room, originally gasoliers, had been converted to electric light sometime in the 1920s (but there were still odd gas jets and fittings all over the house so that, in a pinch, we could go back to gas lighting). The drawing room also contained a huge grand piano, covered with family photos, but I preferred the soft tones of the upright piano in the lounge.
Though the house was full of music and books, it was virtually empty of paintings, engravings, or artwork of any sort; and similarly, while my parents went to theaters and concerts frequently, they never, as far as I can remember, visited an art gallery. Our synagogue had stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, which I often gazed at in the more excruciating parts of the service. There had been, apparently, a dispute over whether such pictures were appropriate, given the interdiction of graven images, and I wondered whether this was a reason we had no art in the house. But it was rather, I soon realized, that my parents were completely indifferent to the decor of the house or its furnishings. Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father’s older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, ‘Do what you want, get what you want.’
Lina’s choices – fairly conventional, except for the chinoiserie in the drawing room – were neither approved nor contested; my parents accepted them without really noticing or caring. My friend Jonathan Miller, visiting the house for the first time – this was soon after the war – said it seemed like a rented house to him, there was so little evidence of personal taste or decision. I was as indifferent as my parents to the decor of the house, though I was angered and bewildered by Jonathan’s comment. For, to me, 37 was full of mysteries and wonders – the stage, the mythic background, on which my life was lived.
There were coal fires in almost every room, including a porcelain coal stove, flanked by fish tiles, in the bathroom. The fire in the lounge had large copper coal scuttles to either side, bellows, and fire irons, including a slightly bent poker of steel (my eldest brother, Marcus, who was very strong, had managed to bend it, when it was almost white-hot). If an aunt or two visited, we would all gather in the lounge, and they would hitch up their skirts and stand with their backs to the fire. All of them, like my mother, were heavy smokers, and after warming themselves by the fire, they would sit on the sofa and smoke, lobbing their wet fag ends into the fire. They were, by and large, terrible shots, and the damp butts would hit the brick wall surrounding the fireplace and adhere there, disgustingly, until they finally burned away.