When I was fourteen or fifteen – I am not sure of the year – the Yom Kippur service ended in an unforgettable way, for Schechter, who always put great effort into the blowing of the shofar – he would go red in the face with exertion – produced a long, seemingly endless note of unearthly beauty, and then dropped dead before us on the bema, the raised platform where he would sing. I had the feeling that God had killed Schechter, sent a thunderbolt, stricken him. The shock of this for everyone was tempered by the reflection that if there was ever a moment in which a soul was pure, forgiven, relieved of all sin, it was at this moment, when the shofar was blown in conclusion of the fast; and that Schechter’s soul, almost certainly, had fled its body at this moment and gone straight to God. It was a holy dying, everyone said: please God, when their time came, they might die like this too.
Strangely, both my grandfathers had, in fact, died on Yom Kippur (though not in circumstances quite as dramatic as these), and at the start of every Yom Kippur, my parents would light squat mourning candles for them, which would burn slowly throughout the fast.
In 1939 an older sister of my mother’s, Auntie Violet, had come from Hamburg with her family. Her husband, Moritz, was a chemistry teacher and much-decorated veteran of the First World War, who had been wounded by shell fragments and walked with a heavy limp. He thought of himself as a patriotic German and could not believe that he would ever be forced to flee his native country, but Kristallnacht had finally brought home to him the fate that awaited him and his family if they did not escape, and in the spring of 1939 they made it to England – just (all their property had been seized by the Nazis). They stayed with Uncle Dave, and briefly with us, before going to Manchester, where they opened a school and hostel for evacuees.
Occupied, preoccupied, with my own state, I was largely ignorant of much that was going on in the world at large. I knew little, for example, about the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, after the fall of France, the frantic crowding of boats with the last refugees to escape the Continent. But in December of 1940, home from Braefield for the holidays, I found that a Flemish couple, the Huberfelds, were now living in one of the spare rooms at 37. They had escaped in a small boat, hours before the German forces had arrived, and had then almost been lost at sea. They did not know what had befallen their own parents, and it was from them that I first gained some idea of the chaos and the horror in Europe.
During the war the congregation was largely broken up – as the young men volunteered or were called up for the military, and hundreds of the children, like Michael and myself, were evacuated from London – and it was never really reconstituted after the war. A number of the congregants were killed, either fighting in Europe or through the bombing in London; others moved away from what had been, before the war, an almost exclusively Jewish, middle-class suburb. Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood: Mr. Silver in his chemist’s shop, the grocer Mr. Bramson, the greengrocer Mr. Ginsberg, the baker Mr. Grodzinski, the kosher butcher Mr. Waterman – and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur.
Her Hebrew name was Zipporah (‘bird’), but to us, to the family, she was always Auntie Birdie. It was never quite clear to me (or perhaps anyone) what had happened to Birdie in early life. There was talk of a head injury in infancy, but also of a congenital disorder, a defective thyroid gland, and she had to take large doses of thyroid extract throughout her life. Birdie had somewhat creased and folded skin, even as a young woman; she was of small stature and modest intelligence, the only one so handicapped among the otherwise gifted and robust children of my grandfather. But I am not sure that I regarded her as ‘handicapped’; to me she was just Auntie Birdie, who lived with us, was an essential part of the house, always there. She had her own room, next to my parents’ room, filled with photos, postcards, tubes of colored sand, and knickknacks from family holidays going back to the beginning of the century. Her room had a clean, almost puppylike smell and was an oasis of calm for me, sometimes, when the house was in an uproar. She had a fat yellow Parker pen (my mother had an orange one), and wrote slowly in an unformed, childlike hand. I knew, of course, that there was ‘something wrong’ with Birdie, something medically the matter, that her health was fragile and her powers of mind limited, but none of this really mattered, or was relevant to us. We knew only that she was there, a constant presence, unwaveringly devoted, and that she seemed to love us without ambivalence or reservation.
When I became interested in chemistry and mineralogy, she would go out and get small mineral specimens for me; I never knew where or how she got these (nor how, after asking Michael what book I might like for my bar mitzvah, she got me a copy of Froissart’s Chronicles). As a young woman, Birdie had been employed by the firm of Raphael Tuck, which published calendars and postcards, as one of an army of young women who painted and colored the cards – these delicately colored cards were very popular, and often collected, for decades, and seemed a permanent part of life until the 1930s, when color photography and color printing started to displace them, and to render Tuck’s small army of women superfluous. In 1936, after almost thirty years of working for them, Birdie was dismissed one day, with no warning and scarcely a ‘thank you’, let alone a pension or severance pay. When she came back that evening (Michael told me years later) her face was ‘stricken’, and she never quite got over this.
Birdie was at once so quiet, so unassuming, so ubiquitous, that we all tended to take her for granted and to overlook the crucial role she played in our lives. When, in 1951, I got a scholarship to Oxford, it was Birdie who gave me the telegram, and hugged and congratulated me – shedding some tears, too, because she knew this meant that I would be leaving home.
Birdie had frequent attacks of ‘cardiac asthma’, or acute heart failure, in the night, when she would get short of breath, and very anxious, and need to sit up. This sufficed at first for her milder attacks, but as they grew more severe, my parents asked her to keep a little brass bell by her bedside and to ring it as soon as she felt any distress. I would hear the little bell ring at increasingly frequent intervals, and it started to dawn on me that this was a serious condition. My parents would get up at once to treat Birdie – she needed oxygen now, and morphine, to get her through her attacks – and I would lie in bed, listening fearfully until all was calm again and I could return to sleep. One night, in 1951, the little bell rang, and my parents rushed into the room. Her attack, this time, was extremely severe: pink froth was coming out of her mouth – she was drowning in the fluid that had welled into her lungs – and she did not respond to the oxygen and morphine. As a final, desperate measure to save her life, my mother performed a venesection with a scalpel on Birdie’s arm, in an attempt to relieve the pressure on the heart. But it did not work with Birdie, and she died in my mother’s arms. When I entered the room, I saw blood everywhere – blood all over her nightdress and arms, blood all over my mother, who was holding her. I thought for a moment that my mother had killed her, before I deciphered the fearful scene before me.