The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  For the next weeks, it was Mary who seemed to be busiest of all he Daughters of Sarah. Davida was too exhausted by her pregnancy to do more than sit on her sofa and send long messages to Mary about how she would do what had to be done, and Susan complained that she was too smitten by nausea even to send messages. The other members of the committee helped a little but most of them pleaded the pressure of child care, or of husbandly demands for entertaining of business friends, and since everyone made it clear that Mary, in her childless state, was hardly likely to be as overworked as they were (an opinion she inevitable felt was fully justified) so the burden fell on her.

  But she was still uneasy about the goals of the Daughters of Sarah, feeling that to send these poor creatures she saw in the streets back to where they came from must surely be an act of cruelty. If they actually preferred to live in these conditions, what must life have been like for them in the places they had come from?

  It was Albert who soothed her fears best. He listened to her talking to Davida one evening, and shook his head and laughed in the way be so often did, a loud bluff laugh that made him seem even more boyish and handsome than he was.

  ‘Dear Mary, you have got it all wrong, haven’t you? Some of ‘em actually do want to go back to Poland or Russia or wherever - but lots of ‘em don’t. They want to go anywhere they can do well for themselves - and it’s obvious to them that they won’t do well here. You’ve seen what it’s like down there. It’s like … it’s an inferno.’

  'It’s disgusting,’ Mary said, and her face reddened a little with the intensity of her feeling. ‘Quite disgusting. It ought to be … ‘

  ‘What?’ Albert said reasonably. ‘Burnt down, all those streets and alleys? What do you do about the people there then? Chuck them our forcibly? That wouldn’t be justice, would it? That wouldn’t be humane. No, Mary, it’s coercion that’s the key. Compassionate coercion. We’ve got to try to persuade them they can do better somewhere else. Germany

  - I'm told that in Germany there’s a lot of room for immigrants. Jews can do well there. And America. Now, there’s the place to send ‘em! You know what they call it, those people? The Goldeneh Medina - the Golden City - and why not? This is an old country, my dear, and we're established in it. In America, there’s all that land to be opened up, and all that space. They're all immigrants there anyway, so we can send them more. It’s a great place for them. Don’t you think that we're not going to take care of the East End people there in your Settlement. Of course we are! Why, you should see the sort of contributions that are coming in - hundreds of pounds, hundreds. You stop worrying, Mary. Just get it all ready, the way Davida says, and you'll see. Everything will be fine.’

  So, she did. The Settlement opened its doors on the third Monday in August 1886 after handbills, written in Yiddish, had been distributed around the neighbourhood, in Flower and Dean Street and Thrawl Street, Fashion Street and Heneage Street, all along the Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road.

  She didn’t know what the handbills said, for the neither read nor spoke Yiddish, only a little Ladino, and precious little of that, but clearly whoever had written them had worded them well. There was a line of more than seventy men, women and children standing there at nine o'clock when she arrived, alone, to take the first session with applicants for relief, and her heart sank.

  They looked at her with eyes so blank, o unexpressive, that they frightened her; would they not turn on her, and try to drag the money that she had been given to distribute out of her hands? Would they not steal all the bread and flour and potatoes that the committee had bough for distribution? Would any of them accept the offer of their fare to somewhere else - anywhere else - as long as they agreed to be escorted to their ships?

  She need not have feared. They were a docile lot, these hungry aliens. They shuffled along the line and explained in their halting English, or through the Yiddish interpreters the Daughters had employed what their dilemma was and took gratefully and humbly whatever she chose to give them.

  That day six men accepted the offer of a free ride out of England and when she reported back to Davida, she in her turn sent a fulsome account of the work of the Daughters to the executive of the men’s committee, the Society for the Relief of Indigent Jews. Davida was well satisfied with the glowing letter and testimonial she got back.

  Indeed, everyone was satisfied, even Mary, in her own way. She had at last found something to fill the gaping hole left by her baby’s death and the loss of Fay. She was to spend the next fifteen years and more devoting almost all the energy had had to that brown faced house in Hanbury Street, and to the people who lived near. And, in a way she could never imagine, it would change her life.

  19

  Nathan’s and Bloomah’s marriage should have been a happy one. Heaven knew it started in a blaze of passion that should have kept it warm for many years. But somehow, it just didn’t work out that way.

  Finding her had been easy. Once he had found his parents, the whole jigsaw fell into place. the people they had known at home in the shtetl in Lublin lived scattered nearby; in Bromehead Road, Sidney Road and Jubilee Street the landsleit had found rooms in which to pack themselves and their children and the few possessions they had managed to bring with them from the Pale. They all spoke the same Yiddish with the same Lublin accent. They all took their wigs to the same wig dresser, who had found herself in an attic in Musbury Street, all took their sabbath cholents to the same baker, who had set himself up in an establishment on the other side of Commercial Road on the corner of Watney Street, all went to the same little synagogue tucked between two shops at the end of Bromehead Street. They carried on the same arguments and feuds they had started at home, the women muttering at their enemies, whispering to their cronies as they had always done, spreading the same calumnies.

  Of course not all of them were able to pick up the threads they had been forced to drop when they took to the road, running away from the pogroms. There were many like Lazar the miller whose livelihood was lost for ever. Here in London there was no call for millers, or weavers or wine makers; only for tailoring workers who would sweat there guts out for masters who were littler better off than them themselves employed.

  Lev the innkeeper, like his old friends Lazar, had lost his way of life. He had assumed that he would be able to use the money from the sale of his tavern in Lublin to buy a new one in London, but bewildered by the system of public-house ownership run by the breweries, unable to understand the rules and regulations surrounding the lucrative business of making and selling beer, he had decided to ‘look about' and see what better way he could invest his money.

  He rented two rooms on the third floor of a house in Jubilee Street and split the bedroom with a curtain, so that his daughter could have privacy, and furnished the other room as best he could with second hand bargains.

  He son Isaac tried to persuade him to invest what cash was left in his business; he had managed in the time he had been in Whitechapel to get a house of his own, for himself and his wife and four children. The family slept in one room, and had another for their kitchen and living room, while the other six rooms in the three storied building were crammed with machines and pressing tables and basters' benches, and workers, workers, workers. He put as many as he could in each box of a room, and kept them at work from eight in the morning until ten at night.

  That was the trouble with the trade, Isaac explained; sometimes there’s more work than you can handle, but that you’ve got to handle at the lowest possible prices, if you're to get enough to make a profit on, and other times you're scratching for work to do to feed yourself, let along pay workers.

  'I lay ‘em off, in the slack times,’ he told his father. ‘I ca always get new workers when

  I want ‘em, at the chazar market.’

  ‘The pig market?’ Lev said, and frowned his disapproval, and Isaac laughed. ’they call it that, Poppa. The men wanting jobs go down to Black Lion Yard, on a

  Sabbath morning,
and the masters go and see what they can get, for how much. But you, Poppa, you I’d never lay off. Put a little money in the business and I can build a shed at the back, take on more work, get more profit - believe me Poppa, this is the only way we'll ever get anywhere. Build a business, that’s the only answer -’

  But Lev, looking at the crowded rooms reeking of tailor’s soap and the grease from the heavy cloth that was used to make the army uniforms that were Isaac’s speciality, and also of rats and cats and human sweat, declined. He has other better ideas, he told Isaac, and took himself off to sit with old cronies from the innkeeper days in Lublin, at the café on the corner where the card players were.

  By the time Nathan arrived in London, Lev had gambled away most of his money he had brought with him. Isaac had long since given up trying to involve him in his business. He took on his sister, Bloomah, teaching her to be a felling hand, making the hems and oversewing the seams, her hands flickering in and out of the heavy cloth until her finger tips bled from being rubbed raw. He paid her what he could, which was very little, but enough to feed her and her father.

  And so they managed, Lev spending al his time at the café, betting on horses and paying his eternal solo or klobiash or kaluki amid loud recriminations and shouts of excitement and Bloomah working her days and evenings away at Isaac’s workshop, and her early mornings and late nights at the flat, for food had to be cooked and laundry had to be washed, for that was woman’s work. She couldn’t expect Lev to do it.

  When Nathan arrived, one Shabbat afternoon, primed with her address by his unwilling mother (who was worried indeed by his interest in the girl; Rivka had only just got her boy back after all! Was she to lose him again so soon?), she was sitting at her window, staring down at the children in the street below.

  The two years she had spent as a felling hand had left their mark on her. No longer was she the round faced pretty girl she had been when Nathan bade her goodbye in Lublin. Now she was thin, her face hollowed under the cheekbones and her jawline as clean cut as a flint edge. Her eyes, always big and dark now looked huge in her attenuated face, and her hair, fluffed out in a fashionable fringe on her forehead - like most of the East End girls she had studied pictures of Process Alexandra in the illustrated papers - made her look particularly vulnerable and appealing. She was wearing a new georgette blouse which she was buying for a penny a week from the tallyman, the door to door pedlar who clothed almost all the girls of the quarter, and because it had not yet been washed to a limp rag it retained a pristine freshness that added greatly to her look of fragility. Nathan stood in the street looking up at her in the thin wintry sunlight of the December afternoon, his astrakhan hat on the back of his head, and felt sick with excitement.

  Had he come later in the evening, Lev would have been at home, sitting snoring in his chair before the fire; had he come on any other day of the week, she would have been at Isaac’s wearing her usual rep skirt and old grey shirtwaister, her hair tied up in a tattered scarf. But as it was, she was alone, and the excitement of their meeting and the intimacy of the small cluttered kitchen with its old horsehair sofa on one side of the coal fire and the light dwindling to a cosy dimness was more than either of the could resist.

  It was not that Bloomah was in any way a bad girl. She had been carefully reared by her mother to be aware of her own sexual value. No respectable shtetl girl let boys take liberties. No respectable shtetl girl recognized any base urges in herself - or if she did, never dreamed of admitting that she had such. Certainly no respectable shtetl girl allowed any man to anticipate the pleasures of her marriage bed.

  Yet on that winter afternoon in Jubilee Street, Bloomah did all those things. Maybe it was the combination of circumstances that overcame her; the fact that she was dressed in her finery, and was freshly clean, for it was only on a Sabbath afternoon that she had the privacy and the time and the energy to give herself the all over wash that was the nearest she could ever get to a bath; the fact that her body was poised at a peak of fertility that made her more than usually receptive; the fact that she was deeply tired, and so less able to control those deeper urges which are powerful enough always to overcome conscious will; above all the fact that Nathan looked so woebegone. Had he returned to her the strutting self-confident young buck she had said goodbye to so tearfully at Lublin railhead all that time ago, she would have been well able to deal with him. There would have been the age old ritual of flirting and repartee and pushing and giggling to protect her. There would have been some kissing and cuddling, just as there had been that night he had come to her father’s inn to say goodbye, but no more than that.

  But now, in Jubilee Street on a winter afternoon in a small front room fretted with flickering firelight he stood and looked at her, his astrakhan hat held in both hands, his chin tucked into his neck so that he had to look up at her from beneath worried brows, and he was thin and shabby and infinitely sad, and she opened her arms to him, and drew him into a maelstrom of feeling that burst the banks that he had put up inside himself to control his own need.

  It was as though they had never been apart, so easy and natural was it. They pulled at their own clothes and at each other’s stripping them so quickly that they had no time to feel any shame at their nakedness. The sight of his white body, so very thin that the ribs made a trellis pattern against his skin, made tears come into her eyes, and she took his head in her arms and held it to her so that this face disappeared between her breasts and he could hardly breathe - but that was what he wanted. The smell of her, the faint animal scent was that overcame the breath of the carbolic soap with which she had scrubbed herself, the heat of her skin against his cheeks were like all the dreams he had ever had in the long dark watches of his army days; and he let the dream carry him along, not really believing it was happening.

  He knew there was some pain when he pushed himself into her body, felt the slippery blood that his urgency drew from her, but he also knew that she relished it, pushing herself against him ever more urgent, aching her back so that he was almost crouching over her, and grunting her need, and then, finally, with staring eyes and a mouth drawn back in a grimace to show her teeth, her satisfaction. And feeling her muscles grasping him so tightly and rhythmically, his own rising excitement at last broke over the top and he was thrusting himself into her with such vigour that it seemed to him he would pass right through her body to emerge on the other side.

  And then they were lying there, he sprawling ever her on the horsehair sofa breathless and sweating, their legs entangle and their eyes blank and staring. They lay for so for a long time, dozing for a while until a coal shifted in the grate and collapsed into dull embers and the fire sank a little and the room seemed colder, and she woke and pushed him away.

  She snatched her clothes from the floor and fled to the other room, leaving him to dress again as best he might, and then he came back to stand in the doorway and stare at him with wide now frightened eyes.

  They managed to talk, at last, haltingly, carefully. He told her how much he had thought of her, how much he had always needed her, wanted desperately to let her know what had happened this afternoon had not been in any way a casual matter, but the natural climax of three long years of wanting her and needing her, and she told him that she too had thought of him every day, and most nights, too, ever since he had gone away. By the time Lev came home, in high good humour because this afternoon he had won (not actually taking the money, of course; one did not handle money on the Sabbath, even when you were a reprehensible hellbent gambler like Lev; but you could play the games, and settle the debts the day after) they had news for him. The would be married as soon as they could get a place to live in, as soon as Nathan could earn enough money from his new occupation to make a proper marriage home possible.

  No one was pleased with their news. Lev, realizing that without Bloomah’s earnings he would have to work to earn his own bread, objected strenuously. Where were they to find the money to pay for a home of their own? Whe
re would they find the massive fee the rabbis demanded to marry people, three pounds ten shillings, an impossible amount! Where were they to find the strength to cope with thee inevitable children that would result? ‘You're young,’ he shouted. ‘Too young!’

  Rivka said the same, though more quietly, and without any real hope of being regarded. For her, life had become blow after blow; her home disintegrated, her children flown, what more could she expect but the loss of the child so newly returned to her? As for Nathan' brothers - Reuben grunted and looked at his own Minnie, pale with nausea in her fifth pregnancy, and said nothing, and Alex threw up his hands and shook his head and told Nathan he was mad; didn’t he have problems enough? Benjamin said nothing; he too was looking more that a little interest at one Sarah, the daughter of the rabbi at his synagogue, for the first time in his life finding something more interesting than books and talmudic study, and thought it prudent to make no judgement at all on people who married young. After all, he was two years younger than Nathan.

  The only one who offered any practical support was Isaac, ho told Nathan he too could have a job with him.

  But Nathan refused. Some of his old assurance had come back to him now, for he felt himself to be at last a man. He had his own occupation, which, he assured everyone, was developing nicely. Didn’t he already have seven regular clients who paid him every week to write letters to their relations in the Pale? Weren’t there more where they came from?

  Of course, there was something else to sustain him, something he did not talk about. The memory of what had happened that dark afternoon. That single experience had lit a flame that clamoured ever more loudly for more fuel, but Bloomah steadfastly refused to allow any further such encounters until she was safely and respectably married. But never mind, he could remember it all, which he did in every vivid detail, whenever he could. And he planned and saved and scraped to raise the money for a wedding and to pay rent on a place of his own.