‘No. The Jews in Eastern Europe have their own language, Yiddish. It’s like German, but different. Feldman, that was the family name.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘Pretty Jewish-sounding, eh?’ He was silent a long time. ‘Years later your mother became a music teacher. This was just before I met her. The Easter Rising was coming and things were getting rough. Mr Feldman decided to sell the shop and go to America. They had relatives there. Better late than never, eh?’ He smiled again, sadly. ‘He insisted the whole family go. Your mother didn’t want to, though, she wanted to stay in Ireland. There were other problems, too; the family was very religious but she thought it was all hokum, just as I do. So there was a quarrel, her parents and sisters sailed off, and she never saw any of them again. They never wrote, her father ruled the roost and he cut her off. I think Mr Feldman was a bit of an old brute, actually. I don’t know where her sisters are now. I can’t even let them know she’s dead,’ he added bleakly.
‘Why did you never tell me?’
‘Ah, son, we thought it better if everyone just assumed your mother was Irish. She wanted you to get on so much, and she knew that here –’ his eyes narrowed – ‘oh, it’s not like Russia was, or Germany is now, but there’s prejudice. There always has been. Unofficial quotas for Jews. Even the grammar school has a quota, you know.’ He looked at David seriously. ‘Your mother wanted her background forgotten, for your sake. Her immigration records were destroyed during the Troubles, I found that out. Our marriage certificate gives our nationalities as British – Ireland was British then, of course.’ He burst out in sudden anger, ‘People dividing each other up according to nationality and religion, it’s the worst thing, it causes nothing but misery and bloodshed. Look at Germany.’
David sat, thinking. There were a couple of Jewish boys at school who went out of assembly during morning prayers. Sometimes in the playground they got things called after them, Sheeny or Jewboy. He felt sorry for them. There was enough prejudice against the Irish; he knew it was worse for Jews.
He said, ‘So I’m a Jew.’
‘According to their rules you are, since your mother was. But as far as we were concerned you weren’t Jewish and you weren’t Christian either. You’re not circumcised and you’re not confirmed and –’ his father reached forward and took his hand – ‘you’re just your ma’s Davy, and you can be anything you want to be.’
‘I don’t feel Jewish,’ David said quietly. ‘But what is feeling Jewish?’ He frowned. ‘But, if Mum didn’t want me to know, why – why did she talk to me in Yiddish? What did she say, Dad?’
His father shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, son, I don’t know. She never spoke it with me. I thought she’d forgotten it all. Perhaps at the end her poor mind was just going back.’
David was crying, a steady flow of tears. He and his father sat in silence in the quiet lounge. When David’s crying lessened his father leaned forward, clutching his arm. ‘No need ever to tell anyone else, David. There’s no point, it’ll only hold you back, and you’d be going against your mother’s wishes. It can just be our secret.’
David looked up at him and nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said heavily. ‘I understand. You’re right. And I’ll do it for her. I owe her, I owe her.’
‘It’ll be better for you, too.’
And it had been. In the years after the Berlin Treaty his silence had saved his job, his career. But always a part of him felt he didn’t deserve what he had; he felt guilt and fear, but also a strange sense of kinship when he passed those wearing the yellow badge in the street, looking shabbier and more forlorn every year.
ON THURSDAY MORNING Sarah took the tube into London to attend a meeting of the London Unemployed Aid Committee, at Friends House in Euston Road. On the journey she read her library book, Daphne du Maurier’s
She sat back in her seat. David had not made love to her again after Sunday. He did less and less now. For most of their married life his love-making had been slow and gentle but lately, when it happened, there was a restless urgency about it, and when he came inside her he groaned, as though she were giving him not love but pain.
She had been standing with a friend and her eyes were drawn to David, talking to another man in a corner. He was classically handsome, trimly muscular, but there was a beauty, a gentleness, even then a sadness to him, that drew her. He caught her eye, excused himself to his friend and came over and asked her to dance, with confidence but an odd sort of humility, too. Sarah wore her hair shingled then – how long that fashion had lasted – and as they circled the floor to the music from the dance band she made one of her bold remarks, saying she wished she had his natural curls. He smiled and said, with that quiet humour that seemed to have quite gone now, ‘You haven’t seen me in my curlers.’
They had married the following year, 1943, and shortly afterwards David got his two-year posting to the British High Commission Office in Auckland. David’s father was already in New Zealand, an older, plumper version of David but with a broad Irish accent. The three of them had often discussed the darkening political situation at home; they were on the same side, they feared the German alliance and the slow, creeping authoritarianism in England. But that was before the 1950 election; Churchill was still growling from the Opposition benches in Parliament, Attlee at his side, and there was hope the situation might change at the next election. David’s father had wanted them to stay, New Zealand was determined to remain a democracy; there was a freedom of thought and life there which was vanishing from England. Over the weeks Sarah had begun to be persuaded, though her heart ached at the thought of abandoning her family; it was David who in the end said, ‘What’s going on can’t last, not in England. As long as we’re there we’ve got a voice and a vote. We should go back. It’s our country.’ They hadn’t known yet that she was pregnant with Charlie; if they had, perhaps they would have stayed.
Sarah looked out of the window of the tube. It was a bright day, but London seemed as bleak and grimy as ever. She had a sudden memory of a trip she and David had taken to the far west of New Zealand’s South Island, camping in a big old army tent they’d bought in Auckland. Their days were spent among the huge, remote mountains covered in great tree ferns. At night they heard the sound of silvery mountain streams and little flightless birds snuffling in the undergrowth as the two of them huddled together, laughing at how dirty and untidy and ragged they had become, like pioneers in the wilderness or Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
She jumped as the tube juddered to a halt at Euston. She got up, putting her book in her briefcase. A shop outside the station was already selling holly. It was little more than a month to Christmas, and soon the usual false bonhomie would begin. It was hard to bear when you had lost a child.
Sarah walked across the road to Friends House. As usual the Quaker headquarters had a policeman posted outside. The Quakers opposed the violence in the Empire, the war in Russia, and still occasionally dared to hold sitdown demonstrations. Sarah remembered how when she was a girl she had thought of policemen as amiable, solid, protective. Now they were powerful, feared. In the cinemas they were no longer portrayed as bumbling foils to private detectives but as heroes, tough men fighting Communists, American spies, Jewish-looking crooks. She showed her identity card and her invitation to the meeting to the policeman, and he nodded her past.
The London Unemployed Aid Committee had been founded in the early forties to provide food parcels, clothes and holidays for the children of the four million unemployed. Sarah was on the sub-committee that organized Christmas presents for needy children in the North. Sometimes she wondered how the parents must feel, passing on presents from unknown do-gooders; but otherwise the children might get nothing. Sarah was good on committees, and occasionally she deputized for the Chairwoman, Mrs Templeman, a redoubtable businessman’s wife. Mrs Templeman was firmly in charge today, though, a little round hat perched on her permed grey hair, a roll of thick pearls on her stout bosom. She nodded encouragingly as Sarah reported on her correspondence with the big toy stores about discounts for bulk orders. Sarah said it was important to try to ensure the children got a variety of toys – they didn’t want every child in a Yorkshire pit village to end up with the same teddy bear or toy train. She explained that ensuring variety was a bit more expensive, but would make a difference to the families. She smiled at Mr Hamilton, a plump little man with a carnation in his buttonhole who was Charity Officer of a large toy store. He nodded thoughtfully, and Mrs Templeman watched her with approval.
