Part Three
WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WAS SPORADIC and seasonal in its revenues, leaving time to be put to other commercial uses. Hagen bought lost property at trade auctions conducted by the railways at their various depots. Sometimes we carried out a combined operation, as we did in a lot comprising 360 umbrellas of various kinds, eventually trebling our money on their resale. My fortunes took a temporary upswing when I bought for £6 at one such auction a racing motor cycle which had been abandoned somewhere abroad, and brought back to England after its rider had been killed in an attack on a speed record. I rode this in the novice class in several dirt track races at Harringay and the White City, coming last in every race but one, when two of the four contestants crashed. In spite of this poor record of achievement the organizers would always accept my entry and pay me the valuable sum of £5 in starting money, in the belief that it did no harm to the gate to feature a rider who could be relied upon to fall off in three races out of four. It was a great reverse when after a month or so the machine’s engine exploded and I was forced back for a short time into dependence upon the elixir.
Slowly mercantile operations began to take over. It was to be seen that a living was to be had for such as us, debarred from creative endeavour, by keeping a close watch on auctions of the ordinary kind, in which an often bewildering miscellany of goods were put up for sale. At these, low prices were the general rule, and when from time to time an article of value came under the hammer it could usually be bought cheaply and rapidly resold at a profit in an auction of the better kind. This could be an exciting and even romantic business. Experts who spent a lifetime in manoeuvrings of this kind, having dedicated years to the science of market values, could expect once in a while to pick up spectacular treasures cleared from attics that found their way to the auction room. We knew our limitations and confined ourselves to goods requiring little or no expertise, gathered loosely under the heading ‘scientific articles’ which might include anything connected with photography, microscopes, barometers, sextants, surgical instruments, and when the occasional artificial limb turned up at a sale, or in one case a box of pickled anatomical specimens, we knew that Stevens of Covent Garden were the outlet for them, and they too were taken in our net.
This trade was a nomadic one, involving endless journeyings into the remote suburbs, north, south, east and west. It became necessary to set up our headquarters near the centre of London, so we rented the first floor of a house in Woodberry Down, near Finsbury Park. This was a Victorian mansion built in prison style, probably under the influence of the nearby Holloway Gaol, with an attractive view of a reservoir from its back windows.
Woodberry Down, we soon discovered, had been colonized by Russians escaping the severities of the Stalinist regime, particularly at the time of the liquidation of the kulaks, and this tree-lined, rather somnolent street harboured a number of the kulaks or their children who had managed to get away. They were tribal people, Ingushes, Chechens and Kazakhs, who made no concessions to their present environment, dressing and largely behaving, it was to be supposed, as they and their parents had done back in Kazan or Tashkent.
Several families had joined forces to take a long lease on a house a few yards down the road, had installed English stoves and converted them so as to be able to sleep on top of them in Russian style in winter, and had pitched their black tents in the enormous Victorian rooms. The men, we were told, always slept fully dressed ready for an attack, but the women stripped naked and rolled themselves in bear skins. They drank pivo, a home-brewed Russian beer laced with methylated spirits, smoked yellow cigarettes with Cyrillic lettering on them, spent their money on fireworks, and kept the street awake with their all-night parties at which they let off rockets, beat tambourines, danced and wept.
Hagen became fascinated by the Russians after an encounter we had with one of them called Aron. We were driving down the street within days of moving in when Aron, wearing a roughly-tied black turban, the tails of his long coat swinging, and amulets hanging from his wrists, stepped out into the roadway to stop our car, merely to ask the time. He invited himself into our flat, looked it over, and said, ‘you must give this place personality.’ He advised us as to how this was to be done, and he and his friends painted the floor red, covered the walls with tin foil and stuck blue stars and crescents over them. When the work was over we held a party, and the Russians brought their beer, their methylated spirits and their tambourines, ready to dance the night away. Two of them were princes, but Aron freely admitted that they were from Caucasus where every valley had its prince. What we failed to realize was that some of our friends were Muslims — although there were Christians and Jews as well — and the date suggested by them for our party happened to be the feast of Mouloud, celebrating the birth of the prophet — an occasion for rejoicing. Some time after midnight and a short halt for prayer, the fireworks were let off and, under the direction of one of the princes, the Russians made a raft from our furniture, poured petrol over it, carried it down to the water, and set it alight. It made an awe-inspiring spectacle in the demure setting of inner-suburban London, and the Russians cheered and wept at the beauty of it. The party ended with the pointless arrival of the fire brigade, who were followed by the police. Hagen and I were on a three months’ tenancy, and when this expired it was no surprise to us that it was not renewed.
While looking round for fresh accommodation I returned to Forty Hill, where any changes that had taken place were for the worse.
My father, who suffered from boredom, was going through a bad patch, sometimes causing him to groan aloud, and my mother was tired after a visit to Carmarthen where she had gone in response to my grandfather’s pleadings to do what she could to get Polly through a current crisis.
Forty Hill, and with it much of North Enfield, was moreover on the verge of a great calamity, for the great and beautiful orchards among which I had spent most of my childhood were about to be cut down and replaced by housing estates.
Against the long-term prospect of gloom, my mother had a single recent triumph to report. A woman called Mrs Edwardes from the superior residential area of Enfield known as The Ridgeway, who had been vacillating, undecided, on the fringe of my mother’s movement for at least a year, had been finally persuaded to join together with several of her friends, following a macabre experience to which she had been subjected. The tragedy of this poor woman — whom I had once met — was that over some fifteen years she had given birth to no less than ten still-born children. After the loss a short time previously of the last of these, and some final hesitation and misgivings, she had agreed to be present at a séance to be arranged purely with the object of attempting to communicate with the spirits of her unfortunate offspring. Some problems arose over differences of opinion among the circle members as to whether the still-born had souls or not. Right-wing extremists contended that a child who had never drawn breath did not, while the liberals held the view that even a foetus in an early stage of development did — although no one could draw a line as to whether the promise of eternity was present within hours, days or weeks after conception.
The séance for Mrs Edwardes called for a major organizational effort, and was attended by invitation by persons known to possess exceptional psychic endowment from outside the area. I remembered that my mother had even tried to encourage me to attend to contribute to the formidable barrage of astral force that was being prepared. The occasion, she said, was a huge success. My father had been supported by a professional medium, and at least five of Mrs Edwardes’ still-born babies had given evidence of their presence, ranging from the infant mewing of the last of her children who had so nearly come into the world to the strong and confident greeting of her (now) teenage son.
At this point I was ready with the questions that made my mother impatient with me. Until what age would the Edwardes family continue to grow on the other side? Until the ideal age — the best possible age — she thought, but she could not suggest what that age might be. And at that age they would remain throughout eternity? Yes, she thought, a little doubtfully, they would. Throughout eternity.
The success of the séance for Mrs Edwardes had been due, my mother believed, in part to the astral power provided by several members of a group of local ‘seekers’ calling themselves the Sons (or Daughters) of Osiris. Their movement — very closely allied to Spiritualism — had taken its inception following the publication of a book called The Voice of Osiris, the Book of the Truth. The people of Enfield, few of whom bothered much with books, were buying it by the hundred in the belief that it had been written through a medium by the Egyptian god Osiris, personification of the power of good and the sunlight, and that the revelations it contained held the key to the transformation of unsatisfactory lives. It was printed on paper with a faintly perfumed smell, and illustrated with softly shaded pencil drawings of posturing dehumanized humans and a menagerie of sacred animals: cats, dogs, falcons, ibises, owls. Scattered through the pages were the symbols of ancient Egypt held in a web of cosmic rays, and great vacant eyes stared back at us from faces emptied of all expression by divine insight.
It was my mother’s ambition eventually to absorb the children of Osiris into her church. A problem remained. Her following described themselves as Christian Spiritualists. Could the adorers of an ancient Egyptian deity be at the same time classified as Christians? The fact was that Spiritualism fostered open-mindedness in the matter of dogma, and I had no doubt that a way would be found of reconciling even such hugely dissimilar faiths.
Another of my friends compelled by the times to pursue an unusual economic strategy was Arthur Baron, who, working at first from a small garage in Bookham, Surrey, trained himself to become a skilled mechanic and then an engineer. He specialized in buying up wrecked cars of the better kind — always cheap and, if there had been a fatality, very cheap. With patience, skill and devotion, and frequently a trivial outlay of money, these could sometimes be restored to near-pristine condition.
My first car was from this stable, although this was one that had not been crashed. It was a ‘straight-eight’ Bugatti, the property of a rich Indian, who had altered its appearance in many ways. In doing so he had made it too fanciful and, needing garage space for new purchases, had cleaned it out for any price he could get, without argument, to the first buyer he could find.
This car immediately disproved a theory of mine that the thirst for pretence was the hallmark of the English lower middle class, for this rich and probably powerful man, living in a palatial Wimbledon house, had ordered a special body built in Paris for his car — in the shape of a boat, or as nearly as this could be achieved. There had been little to be done about the front, but the rear end had been furnished with a polished wooden deck, enclosed by a low brass rail, and with fittings of the kind seen on yachts. There were also four small portholes. The Indian liked the poetic association of the word sunbeam, so he had removed Ettore Bugatti’s tiny elliptical trademark from the top of the radiator and replaced it — this was the process applied to all his cars — with that of the Sunbeam Motor Company, and an adaptation had been made to the radiator cap to accommodate an image of the Hindu’s elephant god, Ganesh. An ivory plaque covering most of the instruments on the dashboard showed a pair of lovers in lascivious oriental intertwinings.
It was a car to cause pained eyebrows to be raised anywhere in the neighbourhood of St James’s, but was received with astonished admiration in the outer suburbs, and seen by such as Alexander it was a human version of gaudy attraction hung by the bower bird in its lair to entice the female of the species within range.
Alexander’s involvement with the dangerous Russians of Woodberry Down had been prolonged by the fact that he had fallen in love with one of them and was therefore concerned at this time with the need to show himself off to the best advantage. She was a Jewess, pretty and amazingly fair, the daughter of the Grand Rabbi of Astrakhan. Making a shallow dive into the history of his own people, Alexander had learned of the existence of an originally non-Jewish people, the Khazars, who had been converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages — hence the Rabbi’s daughter’s Grecian rather than Semitic features. The Rabbi, her father, had remained behind in Astrakhan, but the rest of the family had been in England for some years and Zahra had been sent to school in Highgate. She showed neither surprise nor emotion of any kind when Hagen told her he loved her, merely saying that she would have to speak to her mother and her brother about it.
A family conference took place, after which Alexander was invited for an interview, not only by the mother and brother but also by a local rabbi whose advice they had taken and who questioned him searchingly on his family background, his prospects, but above all on his religious beliefs. In all three areas Alexander was on dangerous ground. He had never been inside a synagogue, and little remained about him that was Jewish but the faint and slowly disappearing accent. The rabbi watched him with troubled eyes as Alexander tried to explain and excuse the religious liberalism of the community to which he belonged.
Zahra’s family asked for time to consider the matter. In the meanwhile further meetings with the girl were not ruled out, but the stipulation was made that one of her friends must be present.
The picnic party in the Bugatti was inevitable, and the car was useful in its way, too, as it turned out, because the minor shared hardship generated by such excursions helped wonderfully to break the ice, and spice the encounter with mild uncertainties and adventure.
It was Sunday, the first of May, a steely and near-arctic day, with a black tapestry of cloud over London under which the buildings of the city were as white as old bones. Zahra had been spending the weekend in Bloomsbury with a friend who was of Sicilian origin with whom she had been on a course in English life and culture designed by London University for the benefit of visiting foreigners. Having removed the erotic ivory plaque from the dashboard, we arrived at the meeting place, the old Euston arch, just as a few small snowflakes began to fall. This involved us, as soon as the girls arrived, with the predicament of erecting the hood which, when not in use, was stowed away in the boot. This the girls, working with us and their hands like ours blue with cold, entered into in the spirit of fun.
Both girls were exceedingly vivacious. Zahra was more beautiful than her friend, but Ernestina, who reminded me of Carmen Miranda and sported a good deal of jewellery unsuited to the climate, had more to say. Our intention had been to drive out for lunch to a little place on the river near Richmond, but a small difficulty arose over Zahra and kosher food, and she had come provided with sandwiches. The girls had heard exciting reports about Epping Forest, and were eager to see it, so we went there instead.
More sandwiches were bought at the Robin Hood pub near Chingford, after which we parked just off the road by the side of a small, slatternly mere. Both girls, neither of whom had left London during the time they had lived in England, were enchanted by their surroundings. Ducks copulated with noisy and incessant ardour in the shallow water among the half-submerged oil drums and the bicycle wheels. The wind had snatched the snowflakes away, but now the landscape was fleeced with rain. Once in a while, as we munched our sandwiches and shook the water from our sleeves, a little derelict sunshine burst through a rent in the clouds to produce a sombre and fleeting illumination among the trees which Ernestina found ‘Turneresque’. Although she knew nothing of England beyond what she had read in books, she had formed an attachment for the country and its people based largely on Dickens and fallacy, and was ready to excuse anything. We discussed the class system which she saw as evidence of the dynamic democracy of our institutions. In Spain, where she had been educated, there was no democracy, and only two classes, the rich and the poor. Surely we were better off? The English could do no wrong. I dressed badly and knew it, but what I realized as a personal shortcoming, an incurable untidiness, she almost certainly saw as commendable humility.
The matter of love came up, although treated in a somewhat academic fashion. The fair Zahra, who had ceased to nibble her last sandwich, turned her soft, trusting eyes upon us and spoke of Jewish idealism and the five-year betrothal preceding marriage in Astrakhan, where such idealism was practised in its purest form. Ernestina shocked her by assuring her that all married men in Sicily who could afford to do so, kept mistresses.
‘What happens if they’re found out?’ someone asked. Ernestina lifted a hand, clasping an invisible pistol to her forehead, crooked her forefinger as if pressing a trigger, clicked her tongue and giggled (she had a most infectious laugh).
‘They get shot,’ she said.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘If they are so foolish as to be caught, what good are they to anyone? Far better out of the way.’
‘And do the wives go to prison?’
‘Of course not. These are family affairs. They’re hushed up.’
‘Would you shoot your husband?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I won’t marry a Sicilian. Just to be on the safe side.’
Alexander was giving his set display of the worldly wisdom of the man about town, but I felt that it failed to impress, largely because it was not understood. Whenever the opportunity arose, Zahra fixed him with her soft eyes and plied him with a question. Soon I began to realize that Alexander was being subjected to a renewal of the rabbi’s interrogation, a subtle affair of small, artless queries through which all the facets of his character were under test. He was encouraged to talk on, and he did and Zahra watched him, probing and sounding. Despite the swagger of the Russian group as a whole, I saw her as cautious and calculating. In all probability we all wore disguises for this occasion, but Alexander, so carefully dressed for the part, was least convincing. There was little indication of the hard centre almost certainly concealed beneath Zahra’s confiding personality. I caught at her thoughts:
Handsome, yes, but penniless. An adventurer who will receive no inheritances. My father has a sense of humour, but never where I am concerned. How would he take this? Is it possible to imagine this man awaiting me as I am led in procession to the chappah? If he has no money, how can he offer the mishrim of gold coins, and the sharab in silver drinking vessels? Could he, even for this one occasion, play a single note on the r’beg or the toba? Oi, what complications! Could he take the traditional kobeiba of mince meat and cracked rice from its salver, shape it skilfully, using forefinger and thumb alone, into perfectly round kefta to feed both me and himself before our assembled friends, without covering us all with shame? Assuredly not. Would he respect the mikvah and learn in reasonable time to chant the prayers for the saba’a? It is improbable. As an Ashkenazi, spoiled with the fat living of the degenerate West, could he be persuaded to live on unleavened bread and dates during the fasts? No.