“What about a tribute to Paul Robeson, sir?”
“Paul Robeson? That Negro communist? I presume you’re joking.”
“He has a wonderful repertoire.”
“Oh does he?”
“ ‘Joe Hill,’ ‘Ol’ Man River,’ ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’…”
“Yes, I know his songs,” he snapped. “I also know that whenever he opens his blubbery black mouth there’s some kind of trouble.”
That was what Maurice liked about Paul Robeson. He had read how he had got involved with a miners’ strike in Wales.
“You could say the same thing about Jesus, sir. Apart from the blubbery black mouth.”
Mr. Costello had had enough. “I don’t know what you’re up to,” he hissed, leaning in to Maurice’s face, “But let me tell you this: you’re quite an ordinary boy. Not at the bottom of your year, but by no means the top. I doubt if you’re going to feature in the Oxbridge intake, let me put it like that.” He gave a nasty little laugh. “Sport? Not picked for many teams, are you? Friends? You’ve got a few, I suppose, but not the golden boys, not the elite. You’re one of the gray ones, aren’t you? One of the colorless ones. A tiny glimmer of youthful promise beginning to dissipate already. Oh yes — you’ve got an unexpected gift for music. It won’t make you stand out from the crowd, but if you’re lucky it might just give you a bit of definition. I’d say it’s a lifeline for you. I wouldn’t throw it away too quickly, if I were you.”
“I’m not going to throw it away. I love music,” Maurice said quietly.
“Well then, you’d better begin learning the part and forget about this nonsense. You’re not the only one who can sing John, you know.”
Maurice was wavering and he hated the feeling. He forced himself to speak before it got worse. “I won’t,” he said. “I can’t.”
Afterwards, after Mr. Costello had stalked out of the room, he felt a small sense of peace, a feeling that something had started — no, not as passive as that: it was he alone who started it — that would leave him in control for the first time in his life. The next thing would be a summons from the headmaster, perhaps a refreshingly abrasive discussion about personal integrity. His schoolmates might collar him in the corridor and ask breathlessly if what they had heard was true, that he had taken on the might of King George.
Then, he supposed, there would be a drab confrontation with his parents — they didn’t like the texture of their lives being ruffled — that would involve some sordid discussion about whether refusing to sing in the choir might remove the pathetic scholarship he had. He didn’t really care if he had to leave the school, but not yet: he wanted the full effect of his stand to be felt.
The strange thing was that, in the succeeding days, nothing happened at all. Nobody mentioned it. He was not called to see the headmaster. His parents had obviously not been told. When he did not turn up for choir practice later in the week, he expected a note from Mr. Costello, normally rigid about attendance, but there was nothing. Maurice saw him coming out of lunch the next day and slowed down his walk, preparing to look surprised when Mr. Costello collared him, but there was just a small breeze as the master swept past him like a giant ocean liner oblivious to the pathetic dinghy in his path.
All in all, he had the uneasy feeling that Mr. Costello had managed to get the better of him. In a way, he rather admired him. It was a classic technique, a textbook way to neutralize rebellion: destroy the printing presses, blow up the railway line, barricade the radio station — he had simply starved Maurice of oxygen. General Franco couldn’t have done it better.
In fact, the only implicit acknowledgment was a list pinned up on the notice board outside the music rooms with the names of the soloists for the concert. Arthur Mayall, one of the few boys Maurice might have called a friend, was to sing St. John. Of course, they had no ideological bond, but Arthur’s old man was a GP in the same practice as his father and their families occasionally had Sunday lunch together.
A couple of years before, when Maurice wondered, on the basis of no real evidence, whether he might be a homosexual, they had masturbated together. Arthur had clearly enjoyed it more than Maurice did — there was an awkward moment when Arthur leant down and looked as if he was about to put his penis in his mouth. Maurice had to move backwards quickly and pretend not to have noticed. He wanted to experience everything to the fullest, of course, but on balance he felt that just using their hands would be enough to get the gist of this particular one.
Now he was in an impossible position. His absence from choir practice must look like sour grapes and if he told the truth about why Arthur was singing St. John instead of him, it would sound like an implausible invention to save face. When he ran into Arthur and the others as they were heading to the chapel, hastily pulling surplices over their dark green cassocks, most of them averted their eyes. Even Arthur had difficulty managing a hollow greeting. Already they thought of him as a sore loser.
He had made a fatal mistake with Mr. Costello. He had not thought it through. He should have accepted St. John and then, once it had been announced, maybe even after the programs had been printed, he could have taken his stand and refused. That would have really have shaken things up.
Now he seemed to have ended up with nothing. He had not realized he would miss the choir so much. If only you could just ignore the words, filter them out and bathe in the music itself. But even then there would be the taint of God or Country or something unacceptable. He could not go back now. Anyway, he had come up with a new idea, something that might cause the kind of stir he knew he was capable of, and, without his knowing it, it would set into motion the events that would lead him to Isaac Herzl.
Rose
IT WAS NOT just Huddie who seemed to be losing his strength. Iz had become old in the last few years. He could still get around but he did not really move much outside his study. In her practical way, Carla had begun to make adjustments for him. His legs were slightly shaky so a metal bar had been attached to the wall by his bed so he could pull himself to his feet. Once on his feet, though, he could walk reasonably well even though he had to be careful on the stairs and use a stick. I hoped that Carla was not going to install a stair-lift. It would have been undignified for him to be whizzed up and down as if he was on a funfair ride.
In other circumstances, Iz might have moved to the ground floor, where he would not have to climb any stairs, but there was not enough room for both him and Huddie there and Huddie’s wheelchair trumped Iz’s various infirmities. He seemed to have shrunk into old age. He had become broody and silent: I wanted to think of him as he had been when we were children, big and bearded and buzzing with energy, although his energy always seemed reserved for other people rather than us. We never saw much of him then. He was often away from home, and when he was back at home he always seemed to be about to go away again. Now he was old and never went away, we did not really see much more of him. I would go and see him sometimes when I got back from school, but he was not someone you would have a cozy chat with. He had somehow become more intimidating over the years. Carla always said rather proudly that he was too concerned with others to share the secrets of his soul. I wondered if that could be construed as selfishness on his part.
His domain was on the first floor, where he had a large study with a bed in it. He spent the day there with Lally, who called herself, only half-jokingly, the curator of the Isaac Herzl Archive. For a man who had always said that you should never look back, there were certainly a lot of newspaper articles and photographs from his past which Lally was collating and putting into fat scrapbooks.
Carla’s quarters were on the top floor, where she had a study and bedroom of her own. I was not sure when Iz and Carla had stopped sharing a bedroom but I had an uneasy feeling it was when Joan arrived to help Carla. Joan lived in Muswell Hill as well and they were involved in a lot of local activities: supporting an AIDS hospice, trying to get more speed bumps on side roads and starting petitions about the la
ck of residents’ parking. Protest seemed to have got downsized.
Joan did not live with us, but she was there most days and sometimes stayed the night when they worked late. They did that a lot. By then, the house had divided into factions: me and Huddie on the ground floor, Iz and Lally on the first, Carla and Joan on the second.
They were writing a book together about the depiction of women in nineteenth-century folk songs. Folk music was a specialized area, but enough folk obsessives had come to the house for us to know that someone would be interested in the book. Iz himself had published several, the first ones on the origins of Israeli folk songs but later he had concentrated more on Britain and America and the history of the protest song.
Huddie and I never liked folk songs much. We preferred the protest songs — at least they were about something. The folk ones seemed so silly: people sang them in strange nasal voices with odd regional accents. In idle moments, of which there were many in Huddie’s life, we amused each other by inventing ridiculous folk songs that piled disaster on top of disaster: lairds being poisoned by their lovers and ships being dashed on rocks and doomed maidens left in the lurch at the altar and all of these crazy things being crammed into the Merry Month of May. It made Huddie laugh, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities to do that these days. We needed to find funny things on the edges of his illness, already spreading outwards through his life like an ink stain on a piece of blotting paper. We laughed about his funeral a lot. I suppose it was a kind of aversion therapy. Maybe Huddie’s sense of humor was morbid but I’m not going to apologize for it: he had the right to do whatever he wanted with the concept of death.
Iz sang both traditional folk songs and protest songs. I think one of the reasons they were so popular was that they were rather unspecific. “Let Them See Your Scars” had been appropriated for a lot of causes, just as relevant to South America as South Africa or South Korea. His songs multitasked.
Lally probably knew his songs better than Iz did. She knew everything about Iz. We could not remember a time when she had not seemed part of the family. In a way, of course, she actually was part of the family: she had been Iz’s first wife. They had known each other for fifty-one years, as Lally was always telling us, but had only been properly together for a couple of years even though they did not get divorced until years later when Iz met our mother. There was no awkwardness between Lally and Carla: after all, for Carla, thirty years younger than her, there was nothing much to fear, and for Lally, it was our mother whom Iz had left her for, not Carla.
Lally was almost as old as Iz, but in better shape, except for her deafness. She lived in Tufnell Park and she walked the four miles to Muswell Hill and back whatever the weather was like. Her job had expanded into being the curator of Isaac Herzl himself as well as his archive. Like I did with Huddie, she was the one in the house who cared for Iz and kept him company and cooked for him.
Huddie and I were fond of Lally even though she had ridiculous opinions. For someone who professed to be such a radical, she was very right-wing. I did not even mind that Lally always called me Rosie and kept losing her glasses, which I had to find for her. Anyway, she spent time talking to Huddie, which was certainly more than Carla and Joan did. They were always too busy with their projects.
Lally came most days. On one particular day at the beginning of the time when things began to change for us, she arrived at the house early and came in to say hello to us as she normally did.
“And how’s Huddie this morning?” Lally said, looking at me. Like a lot of people, she had difficulty asking direct questions to someone disabled.
I turned to Huddie: “How’s Huddie this morning?”
“Huddie has a terminal illness this morning,” Huddie said in my direction.
I turned to Lally: “Huddie has a terminal illness this morning. How’s Lally this morning?”
“Super! Glad it’s going well.” Her deafness was getting worse.
She went upstairs to see Iz but came down after a few minutes. Iz was still asleep. “Look what I found in the archives. Isn’t that fun?”
She handed me a photograph, and I moved over to Huddie so he could see it as well. It was a picture of Lally when she was young, her hair done up in braids, holding a strange-looking instrument that looked like an elongated guitar.
Huddie snorted. “Did you actually play that?”
“Yes, I did,” Lally said defensively. “It’s a rebec. It’s a medieval fiddle. I’ve always thought you should play traditional songs on the original instruments.” There were a lot of strange rules in the folk world.
“When was it taken?” I asked.
“I suppose just after I’d left home and come to London. I must have been about eighteen.”
“Was that when you met Iz?” Huddie asked cautiously.
Lally was predictably reticent about the past, but she had become more forthcoming recently. Maybe it was because Iz seemed to be failing and — just as for Huddie — there was not much future to talk about.
“Oh, I just had my little nose pressed to the window in those days. I was shy. It was all I could do to get up onstage and sing, let alone speak to the famous Iz Herzl. He was like a lion then — everyone wanted to be in his orbit. Gazelles like me didn’t dare approach him. It must have been in the mid-fifties, that’s when the folk music boom really took off. He had come back to England from Israel with all those songs he had translated.”
“Those awful Hebrew songs?” Huddie said, making a face.
“They weren’t just Hebrew songs, Huddie,” Lally said sternly. “They were also the songs that Jewish immigrants from places like Lithuania and Poland had brought with them. He did very important work with those songs at the beginning but he moved on. Israel’s a small country, dear — he needed a bigger canvas than that. He began writing those wonderful protest songs of his, one after another. He was a bit of a legend by then, playing at the Ballads and Blues Club in Soho with the big boys like MacColl and Lomax, then doing all those radio things and concerts.”
“So when did you get friendly with him?” I asked.
“Have you listened to his albums of Appalachian songs? Breathtaking! That’s how I really got to know him. I was concentrating on my tuppeny-halfpenny life working as a little nobody in the library at Cecil Sharp House and he came in to do some research because he was going on a trip through Virginia to find old songs. I helped him because I knew where all the books were — I was mad for those songs! — and to my astonishment, he asked me to be his assistant on the trip.”
“He must have fancied you,” Huddie said, laughing.
“Certainly not. He just needed my help.”
“So what did you do on the trip?”
“Oh, lots of things. Operating those big tape recorders they had then, indexing the tapes, keeping a record of the songs we found. Extraordinary stuff! There were eighty-year-olds who were still singing songs they had heard their grandparents sing. So many lovely ones!” She began to sing in a croaky little voice:
Send for the fiddle and send for the bow
And send for the blue-eyed daisy.
Send for the girl that broke my heart
And almost drove me crazy
“I think I fell in love with Iz when he sang that. We were friends, then we became romantic friends. I knew I could never have all of him. I was just grateful for what he gave me.” She looked mistily into the distance and sighed like a Victorian heroine uttering her last words: “I must have done something right to have had such a remarkable man love me.”
I could see Huddie trying not to laugh.
“And he was so kind to marry me.”
“Kind?” I said.
“Well, I got pregnant by accident, and I suppose I didn’t want to hurt my parents. Do you mind me telling you this?”
“No, not at all,” I said. It was fascinating to hear a seventy-five-year-old woman talking about her sex life.
“But I lost the baby.” She wiped her eyes. �
�Silly to cry after all these years. As I always say, it’s the future not the past you must concentrate on.”
Everybody had so many secrets in our house: we had not known any of this. “That’s awful, Lally.”
“I had problems in the ladies’ department afterwards. I couldn’t get pregnant again. I think he would have liked a child. Afterwards, really, Iz and I went back to being just friends. Occasionally we were loving friends, but not often.”
“Radicals with benefits,” Huddie said softly to me. I tried not to smile.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Anyway, it all ended well. You both came along. But when our baby died, it was painful for Iz. Poor man, he has so many areas of pain.”
“I think everyone has those, Lally,” I said pointedly, trying not to look at Huddie.
Lally was not one for irony. “Iz has more than most,” she said briskly. “You know what he’s been through. Germany — so traumatic he can’t even talk about it. I’ve known the man for fifty-one years: never a word about his parents being murdered. That terrifying journey to Israel on the ship — and then the bombs and the fighting. Friends being killed. Death everywhere! So brave to hold it all in and concentrate on others. I found a newspaper piece the other day which called him ‘part working-class hero, part cipher.’ Isn’t that a lovely description?”
“No,” Huddie said. “It’s just gobbledygook.”
“You just be grateful that someone’s saying nice things about him, Huddie Herzl! It doesn’t happen very often these days. After all he’s done! If you stand up and be counted, people try to pull you down. Maybe he’s stood up and been counted once too often.”
Then she gave a mournful little laugh. “Well, he’s certainly let everyone see his scars from fighting in Israel, hasn’t he? His poor arms! He did what all of us tried to do: he fought and was wounded and went on fighting. Even the Jewish Chronicle is horrid to him now: they accused him of not being Jewish enough! I’m certainly not putting that piece in the archive!”
The Songs Page 3
