by Helen Harris
“They’ve announced cuts,” he continued. “Job cuts. Lots of people’s contracts aren’t going to be renewed. And I’m seriously worried I’m going to be one of them.”
Sylvia stared at her son in disbelief. Jeremy’s professional success, his career at the BBC was a given, as far as she was concerned. Wasn’t the BBC, rather like the Civil Service, a job for life? How could it be taken away from him now, nearly ten years in, when he hadn’t done anything wrong? She had no idea he was just working on renewable contracts as he rather boringly explained to her. Apparently, it was a widespread practice at the BBC. Now, because of the cutbacks, when people’s contracts ran out, they frequently weren’t renewed.
“But not people who do their job well, surely?” Sylvia objected. “Not people who’re indispensable?”
“No one’s indispensable,” Jeremy said irritably. “And it can happen to anyone, even people who do their job well, even people who’re blameless, if they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Well, I never heard of such a thing,” Sylvia exclaimed indignantly. “Isn’t there something you can do? Someone you can speak to?”
Jeremy sighed. “It doesn’t work like that.”
Sylvia grew frustrated. Why was Jeremy taking this lying down? Why was he so spineless?
She stood up to go and freshen the teapot. “Honestly Jeremy,” she said impatiently. “There must be something you can do.”
She swept out of the room with the teapot and came back a few minutes later to find Jeremy looking hot under the collar.
“I’m not surprised you don’t understand,” he began. “This is way out of your experience obviously. But you could not begin by assuming I’m at fault in some way.”
Sylvia sat down and turned her back to spoon some jelly into Anand’s wide open mouth. “It’s probably true I don’t understand,” she answered. “There are lots of things I don’t understand nowadays. But I know you Jeremy and I know you don’t ever fight back.”
“What are you talking about?” Jeremy asked sharply.
“Your job of course,” Sylvia lied. “I mean, surely, you need to fight back, don’t you? You have a son to support now.”
Jeremy snapped, “I know I have a son to support.”
After a moment, he added. “Though actually Smita is making so much these days that the financial aspect is the least of it.”
Sylvia turned round, horrified. “She doesn’t earn as much as you do, does she?”
Jeremy laughed. “She earns a great deal more than I do, especially now she’s taken on these US clients. You don’t imagine middle-ranking BBC salaries can compete with an outfit like GB, do you?”
“GB?” Sylvia repeated, puzzled.
Jeremy looked cross. “Gravington Babcock,” he said reprovingly. “Surely you know where Smi works by now?”
“I knew it was somewhere high-powered,” Sylvia said defensively. “Only the name escaped me.”
Jeremy tutted. “Well, try and remember it the next time you’re talking to her. She gets upset when she thinks you don’t care about her work.”
Sylvia huffed. “Honestly Jeremy, I try my best.”
Jeremy raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
Frustrated that no one was paying him any attention, Anand pushed his plastic bowl of jelly onto the floor and, at the sight of it spilt down below, burst into a loud wail.
They busied themselves with Anand and with clearing up the mess. Neither of them said anything more about Smita. But, privately, Sylvia was beside herself. Smita already had Jeremy dancing at her beck and call. If he lost his job and she became the sole breadwinner, she would have the upper hand entirely. Jeremy would be done for.
After Jeremy and Anand had left, hurrying to get home by the time Smita wanted, Sylvia sat and brooded about this unforeseen development. It was true, it did seem awfully incompetent of Jeremy to be about to lose his job. She wondered whether he really was blameless or whether he had got on his bosses’ nerves the way he always got on hers; with his endless long-suffering self-restraint, his blushes and his infuriating silences. She wondered whether there was anything that could be done and, if Jeremy was right and there really wasn’t, she wondered how she should tackle the dreadful situation which was about to unfold. In the end, she decided to ask Ruth, who had such extensive experience of all sorts of suffering, for her opinion.
In due course, Ruth had revealed the missing parts of her life story to Sylvia. No chance of Sylvia forgetting when she had done so either; it was on July 7, 2005, a terrible day on which, it seemed to Sylvia, London had changed into a completely unrecognisable place.
It had begun as a calm, warm day, a Thursday and, having yet another empty day ahead of her until her tea with Ruth at four, Sylvia had got up late and settled with a leisurely breakfast – two slices of liberally spread toast and marmalade and tea – in front of the television. At first, she could not make head or tail of what was happening but then neither, it seemed, could anyone else; there had apparently been three explosions in the Underground, mistaken at first for some sort of electrical fault but now revealed to be a major terrorist attack on London.
People were shown emerging from tube stations, blackened, bleeding, their clothes in tatters, their faces contorted in horror and pain. Sylvia watched, appalled; how could this be London, this lurid disaster zone, these stumbling wounded people emerging from catastrophe? If it hadn’t been for the familiar red, white and blue Underground signs and the helmeted policemen herding the crowds, it might as well have been some unpronounceable faraway war zone tut-tutted over on the television.
It took Sylvia a surprisingly long time to think of Jeremy and Smita and to wonder abruptly whether they were on the Tube on their way to work. She wasn’t familiar enough with all the Tube lines or with Jeremy and Smita’s routes to work to have any idea whether they might have been passing through one of the stations whose names kept reappearing on the screen.
Shaking, she reached for her phone. Both Jeremy and Smita’s phones switched straight to their messages which was, Sylvia thought – in the circumstances – the height of selfishness. They were doubtless chattering away to someone else – maybe even to each other – about the attacks with not a thought for her. Didn’t they realise she was eaten up with anxiety about them? Maybe they were simply sitting in their high-powered meetings with their phones switched off and not a care in the world?
Sylvia left four increasingly aggrieved messages on Jeremy’s phone and one comparatively restrained one on Smita’s. More than half an hour must have gone by before it occurred to her, in slow motion horror, that the reason Jeremy and Smita weren’t answering their phones might be that they were caught up in the middle of the disaster; hurt, injured or maybe even worse.
Tottering, Sylvia stood up and made for her front door. The uneaten slice of toast fell marmalade side down – naturally – onto the carpet. Ruth wasn’t expecting her until four but who else could she turn to? As she made her way downstairs, clinging to the banister, she fleetingly imagined Anand orphaned, sobbing heart-rendingly for his Mummy and Daddy who would never come home and she, Sylvia, swooping down and carrying him back to Overmore Gardens to bring him up herself.
Imelda answered the door crossly and Sylvia panted at her, “Have you heard the news?”
Imelda looked blank.
“Let me in,” Sylvia ordered her imperiously. “I need to speak to Ruth.”
“Mrs Rosenkranz isn’t dressed yet,” Imelda replied sullenly.
Sylvia barged in. “I’ve no time for procrastination Imelda,” she said grandly. “This is a serious emergency.”
Imelda followed her down the corridor muttering bad-temperedly.
“Ruth?” Sylvia called loudly. “Ruth?” She had no idea where in the flat Ruth would be but of course she knew the layout like the back of her hand.
She heard Ruth responding faintly from the bedroom and she went straight in, only wondering afterwards if sh
e should have taken more care not to give the old lady a fright.
Ruth was propped up in bed, looking particularly small and frail, the same colour as her ivory pillows.
“Whatever’s the matter, my dear?” she asked.
Sylvia sat down, possibly too heavily, on the bed and clutched Ruth’s cold elderly hand. “Something absolutely awful, I’m afraid.”
She could still remember how Ruth failed to react with any noticeable shock and horror to the news of the bombings; it was as if life, in her experience of it, had been simply a series of shocking and horrible events and what was so unexpected about news of another?
She listened quietly to Sylvia’s breathless account of the latest news reports and shook her head sadly. “At least your little Anand is safe at home,” she said soothingly.
Sylvia burst out, “Well, I don’t know for sure. I don’t know about any of them. And I can’t get through on the phone. They’re not even answering.”
“Of course is Anand is safe at home,” Ruth said firmly. “The nanny isn’t allowed to take him on the Tube; you told me so yourself.”
Sylvia blushed. It was true; only last week, it seemed, she had been complaining to Ruth about yet another of Smita’s silly, over-protective rules and now it had turned out to be so wise.
“Your son and your daughter-in-law are almost certainly safe too,” Ruth continued. “In such a big city, the chances of being caught up in this slaughter are very small, remember. It is not as if they were being specially selected, targeted.”
Sylvia looked at Ruth in blank incomprehension; everyone was being targeted, weren’t they?
“You will see,” Ruth said. “There will be some sort of hindrance or delay: traffic chaos, phones not working. All will be well.”
Sylvia was convulsed by a giant suppressed sob. “What is happening to the world?”
“Nothing new,” Ruth replied evenly. “Only different uniforms, that’s all.”
Sylvia looked at her friend with concern; she was getting on and since her operation she hadn’t been the same.
Ruth smiled at Sylvia reassuringly. “Remember, I go back a long way. Now would you mind waiting in the sitting room, dear, while Imelda helps me dress and then we’ll have a nice cup of tea and a chat.”
That morning, Ruth told Sylvia the story of her life. For a long time, Sylvia practically forgot all about the bombings and her fear for Jeremy and Smita. She discovered that she had not known anything significant about Ruth at all and everything which she had imagined had in fact been wrong.
For a start, Ruth wasn’t really German at all, well, not in the sense in which Sylvia’s generation meant it; she was Jewish, she had come to this country as a refugee in 1939, fleeing Hitler. She had come alone without her parents, in fact effectively promoted to parenthood herself – at the age of fifteen – because she was in charge of her baby brother who was only four. After their harrowing parting on the platform of the Friedrichsstrasse station in Berlin, her proud and dignified father openly weeping, her gentle, emotional mother turned to stone, Ruth had never seen her parents again and she had from that day on effectively become Siggy’s mother.
On arrival in England, they had been sent to stay with a childless retired couple living in the Oxfordshire countryside. In some respects, they had been luckier than others; sent to working-class Jewish families in poor neighbourhoods, forced to live in cramped conditions with large dirty families who only bathed once a week and shared beds. The house in Oxfordshire was clean and orderly, the Masons – that was their name – were civilised educated people; Mrs Mason played the organ and arranged the flowers in the village church, Dr Mason liked to read histories and biographies. But they were cold, unemotional people, their house was always freezing too and while their act of taking in Ruth and little Siggy was undeniably generous, their behaviour towards them certainly wasn’t.
They thought Siggy was over-indulged and spoilt; they set about sternly disciplining him. He was sent at five to the village school where the other children persecuted him because he was German and the teacher hit him across the back of his short chubby legs with her ruler. Ruth had to end her education there and then; she was virtually sixteen and, the Masons said, there was no point continuing. Dependent on them for her board and lodging, she did not dare object although she knew her parents would have been outraged. They had been planning to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland. In any case, the Masons had other plans for Ruth; she was to be their maid and helper, working for nothing in exchange for bed and board and, of course, for their taking care of Siggy.
It was hard to describe the five years which she had spent with the Masons. She thought it was not an exaggeration to say that she had not been fully alive. She had done what she had to; she had worked as a maid and a cook and a cleaner, she had taken care of Siggy and tried to bring him up as their mother would have done. She had improved her English – and tried to carry on her education – by reading the books in Dr Mason’s library in her little free time. But she had no friends, no young people around her, no parties or outings, no youth. She had often thought about leaving. She turned seventeen and then eighteen; legally she was free to do as she pleased. But how could she have left Siggy all alone in that cold house with no mother and no father, with Mrs Mason telling him off for his every move and Dr Mason perpetually glaring at him?
Sylvia felt tears cascading down her face but Ruth laughed and said, “Don’t cry, it was all a long time ago.”
When the war ended, Ruth was twenty. She did not know anymore who she was. She was no longer completely German but she was certainly not English either. In Germany, their family had never been religiously observant, now, with the Masons’ encouragement, she went regularly to church. She did not believe in the Masons’ church but she thought it could do no harm and, who knew, by a miracle, it might help to bring her parents back. The news coming out of Germany and the Pathé newsreels made her wonder if she would ever see them or her Tante Trude or anybody else again. She did not give up hope though, not for years; she kept searching through the Red Cross and writing to every single person she could think of. Only in 1950, when she was already married and her son was newborn, she had suddenly understood that her parents would never see their first grandchild, they were never coming back and she had collapsed and cried for three whole months.
Freedom, when it came, was complicated and at a high price. She had been planning for some time how to leave the Masons; she could not stand another year buried in that little village, trapped in that cold house but the thought of leaving Siggy was of course unbearable. He was all she had left. But she began to calculate that if she found a job, a real job with wages, in a city, she could probably support herself and Siggy provided they lived modestly. Secretly, she began answering job advertisements in The Lady. Soon enough she was offered a job in the northern city of Sheffield with a family by the familiarly German-sounding name of Rosenkranz. “Yes,” Ruth smiled winsomely at Sylvia. “Yes indeed.”
Breaking the news to the Masons was extremely difficult but Ruth, although she was barely twenty, felt much older than her years and she already had a strength and determination she believed unusual in one so young because of everything she had lived through. In any case, there was actually nothing the Masons could do; because Ruth and Siggy’s parents had not been declared dead – and Ruth absolutely refused to allow that – they couldn’t formally adopt Siggy and now Ruth was over eighteen and Siggy’s next of kin, she was legally entitled to do what she wanted.
At this point, the Masons had unexpectedly done another remarkably generous thing; they had offered to pay for Siggy, now nearly eleven, to go to boarding school, a very good English boarding school where he would receive an excellent education, far better than what the local school could offer. Ruth had been confronted with a horrible dilemma; did she agree to Siggy being sent away for the sake of his education or was it her duty to keep him with her at all costs? She tried hard to imagine
what their parents would have wanted but the circumstances were so unimaginable that it was impossible to come up with an answer. And, in future, what price would the Masons extract for their generosity?
In the end, it was made easier for her by Siggy wanting to go away to boarding school, doubtless imagining it would be like the English boys’ adventure stories he loved to read: dormitories and midnight feasts and escapades. So, after a few terrible days of indecision, she thanked the Masons on her parents’ behalf and agreed that Siggy should go. So Siggy went away to boarding school and grew up to be a perfect English gentleman. Unlike Ruth, he lost his accent completely and acquired the lifelong nickname of “Posy”. Sylvia giggled. Ruth moved to Sheffield and began to work as carer and companion to elderly, disabled Mr Rosenkranz.
The Rosenkranz family was everything the Masons were not: kindly, warm and welcoming. They were also Jewish although not in a way Ruth had encountered before. In Berlin, her family had had a Christmas tree, they had only gone to synagogue for weddings and special occasions. They had been cultured, emancipated people and they had considered Jewish religious practice frankly rather primitive. In this respect, the Rosenkranzes were primitive; they went to their ugly red brick synagogue every Saturday morning, wearing hats. On Friday nights, they would all gather at the house of Mr Rosenkranz’s eldest son, Selwyn, for a traditional Sabbath meal. Hebrew blessings were recited and candles lit, Flossie Rosenkranz, his daughter-in-law, covering her face and whirling her hands about as she did so in a way which seemed to Ruth no different from voodoo. The Rosenkranzes included Ruth matter-of-factly in everything as if she were a member of the family and while they seemed to have no understanding at all of what she had lived through, their kindness touched her.
