The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  He climbed heavily out of the truck at last, and let his legs sag under him so that he was sitting on the ground, his rifle still held in his bloody hands, his legs stuck out in front of him and his head drooping on his chest. The litany was still running through his head but he wasn’t saying it any more. He had no energy left to move his lips.

  That was how the patrol from Belyi Jar found him, when it came thundering along the road from the guardhouse to look for the missing van an hour after they should have arrived. The officer bent over him and pulled him to his feet, and Nathan managed to stand there swaying as the captain shouted at him, ‘What happened? What happened? For the love of Christ, man, tell me what happened!’

  He stared back at the officer, sick with terror. Would they shoot him now, or put him through the whole business of court martial and firing squad? Nathan’s eyes turned upward and he fainted.

  When he came to, he found himself a hero. The officer had worked it all out to his own satisfaction; the prisoners had managed to overcome their brave guards and escape. That the guards had fought courageously was clear - look at the dreadful injuries they had suffered! That Private Nathan Lazar had fought bravely was even more evident by the state he was in, the dreadful shock he had suffered, the exhaustion that so filled him.

  Nathan said not a word. He nodded and looked noble and tried not to think about those thin half starved weaklings who had been prisoners. If this officer ever heard how pathetic they were, compared with the men of the platoon, surely they would realize that the only way the prisoners could possibly have overcome their superior strength was while they were asleep?

  But the officer didn’t hear, and no one was likely to tell him that a platoon of the Tsar’s army had not acquitted itself nobly. Instead they told Nathan what a splendid fellow he was, and how brave and heroic, until even Nathan almost believed it. And when at a special ceremony they pinned a medal on him, making him the only Jew in the Russian army ever to be so honoured, he felt he’d earned it.

  He never once asked himself why it was the prisoners had not dispatched him, as well. He just took it for granted that they’d liked him. Nathan was beginning to discover that people usually did.

  Then at last, it was 1885. Nathan Lazar was twenty years old, thicker in the shoulders now and with thicker whiskers too than he had had when he had kissed Bloomah goodbye in Lublin. The time had come at last to think of Bloomah again, for he thought as little as possible about her this past year or so. Thinking about Bloomah, he had discovered, had aroused feelings and needs in him that could not be satisfied. Better not think of her at all… .

  Now he handed in his uniform and put on instead the cheap serge suit and coarse cotton shirt which was all he could afford to buy, along with a pair of stout black boots and thick green woollen muffler. That left him just enough for a railway ticket to get him back to Lublin He needed no more than that, he told himself confidently as he parted with the money and took his ticket from the clerk. Papa and Mama must have their insurance money now, and be ready to buy tickets to London for all of them, himself included.

  For there was no doubt in him that that was where he was going. The plan had been simmering at the back of his mind all through these past three years. Even if Papa and Mama had changed their minds, he would go. The Pale was no place for him to spend his life. London for him - especially if Bloomah had already gone there. If not, he’d take her.

  Lublin looked exactly the same. He climbed stiffly out of the train and stood there at the railside staring out at the squat stone buildings, remembering the number of people who had been there to see him off that day three years ago. Mama and Papa and Benjamin and Alexander, and Bloomah and Lev, but now there was just the usual collection of passerby, porters and railwaymen who cared nothing at all for him, a Jew in a cheap suit.

  Well, never mind, he told himself as he walked out of the station and turned towards the shtetl. Never mind. Today, a hero in disguise, tomorrow an obvious hero –

  He did not believe it at first. So many changes, so many faces he did not recognize. The shtetl seemed to have shrunk, somehow. House after house had been boarded up. Family after family seemed to have disappeared completely.

  The in was closed, and no one seemed to know anything at all about Reb Lev and his daughter Bloomah. His father’s house was boarded up, and he stood outside the door staring up at it, feeling very young again, not at all a twenty-year-old hero, but a lonely six- or seven-year old who wanted his Mama and Papa.

  There was noting here for him any more.

  Before setting out on the long hike to Brody, where with luck, he’d be able to sneak aboard one of the cattle trucks on the trains going north (and he was experienced in cattle trucks the good God knew), he walked once more around the shtetl, past the wooden houses with their narrow verandahs, past the inn with its boarded door, past the bakery where his mother used to send her cholent to be cooked on Sabbaths when there could be no fire at home, past the ramshackle building which had been his school. Lublin belonged to yesterday now.

  The journey was easier than he had hoped. In the hubbub of refugees still streaming out through Brody, one young man was hardly noticed. He could slip on and off trains and keep moving once aboard them in a way that evaded even the most careful ticket inspectors. He even managed to get aboard the cross channel steamer without paying, preferring to keep his money for food. The ship was so packed and so many were seasick that evading payment was easy.

  He leaned over the rail as the boat steamed up the river Thames to Tilbury. It was November, and the air smelled heavy and sulphurous, and there was rain pattering on his forehead, for he had put his astrakhan hat - his single memento of his army years - in his pocket to keep it safe and free from damage. But he did not mind the way his hair curled damply to his forehead or the way his belly lurched queasily against the heavy swell of the river tide. He had arrived in the land of fortune. From now on, it was going to be a hero’s life all the way.

  The third family had arrived in London.

  BOOK TWO

  GATHERING

  13

  On the same November day in 1885 that brought Nathan Lazar steaming up the sulphur-smelling Thames to Tilbury, Bartholomew Lammeck sat in his own special seat on the eastern side of the New West End Synagogue in St Petersburgh Place, just off the Bayswater Road. Outside there were shreds of fog swirling in the traffic-roaring streets, and the dripping trees in Hyde Park could hardly be seen beyond the railings so shrouded was the park in thick greyness. But in here all was warmth and light and magnolia scented air and high excitement, for it was not every day that such a marriage as this was celebrated - the last time had been a quarter of a century ago. A Lammeck marrying a Damont! Such drama had not been known since the days long ago when Rothschilds were marrying Montefiores, and Gompertzes marrying Mocattas.

  He looked round the synagogue and almost unconsciously tipped his glossy top hat to a more rakish angle to match that of his oldest son, Alfred, who was sitting in deep conversation with his brother Emmanuel. Such well-set-up young men, both of them, Bartholomew thought fondly, though Emmanuel hadn’t quite as much style as Alfred. Alfred, right from the beginning, had shown that he was special. He had flatly refused to be called by his given name, the one taken from is esteemed ancestor Abdul.

  ‘I'm English,’ he had told his father stubbornly, ‘and English boys don’t have such outlandish names.’ He had hit on the almost Royal sounding Alfred, at the age of ten, and had insisted on being called it ever since.

  Such a boy, thought Bartholomew again, even more fondly, so good looking, so gifted. It’s been well worth it, well worth it all.

  He looked across the synagogue to where high crowned hats alive with feathers and flowers and fruit bobbed over the smooth well fed faces and high collared coats and fur capes of the Damont and Lammeck women and their friends. There was his Augusta, half a head taller than every other woman sitting there, with the highest of hats - no wonder, Bartho
lomew though wryly, they call ‘em ‘three storeys and a basement' - and the smoothest most of the gleaming faces. The furs that lay across her shoulders were sables which quite outshone the marten and opossum of the women sitting on each side of her; her daughter Fay, looking quiet and cowed as she always did, and her daughter-in-law Susan, looking bored and impatient as she always did. Odd, thought Bartholomew, how it works out.

  Inevitable his mind drifted back to his own wedding twenty-four years before. That had not been in this handsome synagogue, for St Petersburg Place had not been built until ten years ago. His wedding had been at the older establishment at Bevis Marks, in the City, just an hour’s walk away, but an eternity away in experience and living. He had been so very young, so very doubtful, so very overawed.

  At twenty-two, stills peaking English with a heavy Bombay accent, he had regarding himself as very much an alien among these comfortable English Jews. They had been kind enough to him when he had first arrived. One of the Montefiore family had scooped him up at the very first service he had attended and introduced him round to the others. They had, now he realized, found him quaint and amusing. His clothes, his exotic speech sounds, his very un-English whiskers and the weight of his very successful family business.

  Bartholomew had never been in any doubt that the name of Lammeck mattered in the world. All his life it had been the most essential thing about him. In the merchant circles in Bombay and Calcutta, Shanghai and Tientsin and Yokohama to be a Lammeck was to be a prince among men, just as it had been in Baghdad for centuries.

  But he was no fool, and had not expected quite such a warm welcome from these remote English people. After all, the new office of Lammeck and Sons, in Haunch of Oxen Yard just behind St Paul’s Cathedral not from from Ludgate Hill, was far from elegant, and at first only a small amount of business passed through it. Bartholomew had been advised by his formidable Aunt Sarah Hazzan Lammeck and his cousins and brothers to be cautious, not to involve Lammeck’s in enterprises that could not be property handled from the London end.

  ‘Wait till we know we can keep the business flowing as it should, and then we'll expand,’ they had said.

  And in those early days in London, in 1859 and 1860, that was just what he had done. He had lived modestly in simple chambers near Baker Street, and then unassuming in the company of the established community.

  Yet, they had taken him up, and he was invited to every Jewish house of note, going to balls at the Rothschild mansions in Piccadilly and Grosvenor Gate, at crushes at the Montefiores' rented house in Hill Street in Mayfair, to picnics with the Goldsmiths. When the youngest Rothschild invited a glittering company to Mentmore for the weekend to sample the delights of that magnificent house with its running hot water and artificial ventilation Bartholomew Lammeck was one of the company. When Jacob Damont, the patriarch of that numerous clan, celebrated his ninetieth birthday at his splendid house in Berkeley Square, Bartholomew’s name was high on the guest list.

  That had been where it had all happened. It was her great-grandfather’s birthday celebration that Augusta Damont made up her mind that this interesting little man was the one she wanted.

  She was two inches taller than he, and proportionally larger in girth, and had a strong manner and a jutting chin to match. Her colour was as high as his was sallow, her energy as noisy as his strength was quiet. But she wanted him, as he was. Her name had been linked with several well set up young men, for she was a considerable heiress in her own right. But, she looked at Bartholomew - ‘my Birdie,’ she called him - and told her father coolly that she had made up her mind.

  ‘He’s going to be ever richer than you are, Papa,’ she told that tired widower. Isaac Damont had never really recovered from the loss of his wife, who had died giving birth to his masterful Augusta. ‘And with me to help him, there’s no knowing what we mightn’t achieve'.

  Isaac could never resist his daughter’s pleas, and Bartholomew, a little bemused and not a little flattered, found himself swept up in Damont doings till his head rang with with social whirl. But not so much that he could not see the excellent business benefits that were accruing to him. He was able to tell them in Bombay within three months of that birthday party in Berkeley Square that ‘We are now able to be quite confident about next year’s business. I have made arrangements for the shipment of large quantities of pig iron as well a as of some excellent Southdown wool - the sheep here are of a very superior strain - and would most earnestly advise a larger investment in this office for future development… ’

  Sarah, ailing now but still as businesslike as ever, sat in her godown in Bombay and nodded in satisfaction, and sent back to London cargoes of spices that Bartholomew was able to turn to very handsome profit. The small office in Haunch of Oxen Yard spread to the building adjoining it on each side, and Augusta, visiting it, nodded in satisfaction and told her Papa that the time had come to arrange the wedding.

  Bartholomew, waiting for his own son to appear and stand beneath the chuppa, the wedding canopy, on a foggy November day in 1885, looked back down the twenty-four years to Bevis Marks in 1861 and watched himself marrying August Damont in full view of a richly dressed and somewhat amused congregation who had thought he had done well for himself, a Lammeck marring the Damont heiress. Now that same congregation, looking only a little older themselves but with their small children grown into handsome young adults and wearing bustles and pelisses rather than crinolines and Balmoral mantles, waited to see a Damont marry a Lammeck and thought the Damonts lucky to have such rich and promising a young man for their daughter.

  For Augusta had been right in her view of her little Birdie. How the man had flourished! Dealings in commodities like pig iron and Southdown wool and imported spices occupied too little of his energy. He invested Lammeck money in the cotton mills of Lancashire and competed keenly with his own relations in the Indian trade. He loaned money to his fellow traders and so almost without intending it added merchant banking to his enterprises. He became interested in diamonds, through his wife’s father, who was a diamond merchant of note with close family links on the Amsterdam diamond bourse, and started dealing in them too.

  Haunch of Oxen Yard gave up building after building to feed the insatiable maw of the Lammeck office until, just five years ago, the metropolitan authorities had given up the struggling and change the name plate on the entrance to the Yard. Everyone had taken to calling it Lammeck Alley long before, and Lammeck Alley it was to be, officially.

  That had been a moment of great pride for Bartholomew. He had not really intended to be quite so busy a businessman. In his young days in Shanghai he had been interested in many things that were not designed to make money, like horse racing and cards, and had always planned a life with minimal attention to work, maximum to enjoyment. But Augusta had different views, and the only way he could escape her loud and very reiteration of them was to go to the office.

  Now his industry had given his family name to part of the greatest metropolis in the world. Baghdad had had many such labels, for Lammecks had been there for centuries, but this was London, a much older, much richer and altogether more important city. The years spent here working over ledgers and haggling with other merchants had seemed wearisome at times, but now he had Lammeck Alley to comfort him. It almost helped him feel less irritated and his dear Augusta.

  There was a flurry at the entrance to the synagogue, Bartholomew pulled himself back into the present with a little start. Beside him his third son Ezra stood up, nervously pulling at his grey kid gloves. His brother had chosen him to be his best man (not entirely unprodded by Ezra' wife Susan, who had strong views on the way Ezra’s older brothers tended to overshadow her beloved husband) and looked nervously along the line at Alfred and Emmanuel, both of whom were also standing now and staring up the synagogue to the entrance.

  Bartholomew set his hat back at its more sober angle, and stepped forward at the same time that his wife did, her bustle curving with such richness of line that i
t seemed quite possible that she would be toppled flat onto her imperious nose at any moment, and they both turned to watch their youngest son, the bridegroom, come towards them.

  Albert looked quite delightful. His hat shone with a satin rich gleam above a face as round and soft as a child’s. His chin seemed to be as smooth as an infant’s, with no sign on it of any hair, yet his upper lip was adorned with a silken black moustache. His linen was a startling white and the collar of his shirt was so high that his ears seemed to rest upon it. His black tail coat and impeccable cut trousers fitted his slender form as though he had been poured into them (and indeed his tailor was so uniquely gifted that even the excessively rich Bartholomew had been taken aback by the bill) and his boots did all they could to outshine his hat. Altogether he looked like every little servant maid’s dream of male perfection, as Susan, ever waspish, enjoyed pointing out to her cowed sister-in-law behind Augusta’s majestic back.

  The wedding party took its place beneath the chuppah, and the rabbis - surely more than could fit under the velvet canopy? - came surging to join them. From somewhere behind a screen shrill tenors and rich basses lifted their voices in wedding melodies; the New West End Synagogue prided itself on its modern approach to the great traditions of religion, and its choral offerings were as splendid as any that could be heard in any church along the Bayswater Road, and indeed in all London. The mother of the groom took her place, smiling mistily, and the congregation stiffened and fell silent, waiting for the bride.