The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  She paid for her calls and walked out into the street and stood there, her coat pulled up against her ears, for she was cold now in spite of the sunshine. Three hours. Three hours in this grey dingy road with its grey ugly people shuffling along the wide pavements, and the curious emptiness of the roadway, for there were none of the buses and lorries that usually thronged it, and few private cars either. The strike was now five days old and even the most eager of lift givers and parcel and letter deliveries had lost some of their heart. But there was northing more she could do. No one but Marcus could help her extricate Charles from his bondage in that pile of carbolic smelling buildings. She would have to wait, and fill in the time somehow.

  An old woman went by her, almost cannoning into her, and Hannah stepped back muttering an apology. The old woman looked up briefly, her eyes gleaming under the heavy fringe of her old fashioned wig and said automatically 'Gut shabbos.' Hannah said 'Gut Shabbs,' equally automatically and then thought, almost surprised. 'It's Saturday. Shabbos. People in synagogues.' She realized this was one of the reasons for the emptiness of the street. She remembered how it used to be in Antcliffe Street, long-ago, when people put on their best clothes and went trooping off to the synagogue on the corner, peacocking a little if they had something new to wear, gossiping busily, cuffing the children as they skipped and squabbled, and how empty the street became after they had gone by. Sometimes, when he had been in one of his unusual moods of goodwill, Nathan would announce that he was going to shul, and anyone who wanted to come too was welcome, and then she would put on her coat and that hateful pancake of a black straw hat (she could almost feel its scratchy edge against her forehead now as she remembered) and go with him to sit in the gallery staring down at all that went on below and from which she was excluded. Shul in those days had been a sort of treat, a break in the dullness of the ordinary week, and she felt a great wave of nostalgia for it.

  The wind blew a little gust, sending dust swirling around her ankles and again she shivered and looked at her watch. After a moment she pushed her hands deeper into her coat pockets and began to walk, down the East Mount Street, than along Raven Row an into Sidney Street.

  It wasn't too long a walk, along Sidney Street, through Sidney Square and then left into Commercial Road, and then there it was, looking just as it had when she was a child. But much smaller.

  She stood outside for a moment. Two old men, long bearded and with their white hair in tight curls over their ears under wide brimmed black hats, and a few small boys in ill fitting clothes, staring at her. She smiled at them but they stared unsmilingly back. After a moment she pushed past them, for they made no effort to make way for her, and went in through the double doors she remembered so well.

  She could hear them beyond the inner doors, that odd and interesting familiar combination of wailing and jubilation, the rise and fall of chanting voices with an undertow of chatter. She took a deep breath and then began to climb the rickety wooden staircase that led to the women's gallery.

  It was not full; there were only a few little knots of women scattered about. Old ones with shawled heads and a little cluster of young ones in very modern cheap cloche hats, clearly a party come to hear a boy say his Barmitzvah portion, and a few small girls with their heads together whispering busily and giggling in stifled little shrieks which made their mothers turn and hiss at them. Hannah stood there for a moment as they all turned and stared at her and then moved to the front row, picking up a prayer book as she went.

  She turned the pages, enjoying the feel of the thin rustling paper beneath her fingers and letting her eyes slide over the heavy black symbols, as incomprehensible to her now as they had been almost thirty years ago when she had sat her in that horrible hat and heavy coat and painfully large boots, watching Poppa down there below with the men. He had laughed at her when she had asked why she couldn't learn Hebrew like Jake and Solly, and had told her it was enough a girl should learn about running a decent Jewish home and not to fill her head with such thing as Hebrew lessons.

  ‘Be happy,' she heard his voice come into the back of her mind. 'Be happy, Hannelah, don't worry about reading. What good did it ever do me, I want to know? Tell me one good thing ever came from all the hours I spent sweating over my chumash or studying the Siddur, and I'll let you suffer like I did, God forbid I ever should . . .' She closed her eyes for a moment and the opened them and stared down into the synagogue below.

  It was as though she had never grown up. There they were, packed together as close as they had always been, swaying and bobbing, their tallus clad shoulders making a pattern against the blackness of their suits. Row upon row of striped prayer shawls, row upon row of fringes, some long, some short, some hanging free, some flung over the shoulders, row upon row of covered heads, yarmulkas and bowlers, homburgs and caps, and in the box in front of the Bimah on which the rabbi and canto stood, three glossy top hats looking as full of pride as though they themselves were sentient beings.

  The smell enveloped her, mothballs and oil from the heating stoves and cooking, for the old women near her reeked powerfully of the fish they had fried and the chicken soup they had prepared and the livers and onions they had chopped yesterday afternoon ready for the Sabbath. The sound wrapped around her too; women's voices whispering nearby, rich baritone and tenor voices singing below, old cracked voices praying. It was like crawling back into the past, and she took a deep breath and at last relaxed.

  ‘Perhaps I should go to shul more often,' she thought after a while, almost dreamily, watching the men as the swaying went on. 'I’ve left too much of yesterday behind. I don't belong there where I am.' She thought of Paultons Square and Buckingham Palace Gate, trying to make them feel alien inside her head, but it didn't work. They were where she belonged and no amount of nostalgia, sitting here in the stuffy heat of a tiny East End synagogue, could alter that. She belonged in the West End as much as she had ever belonged here, more in fact. She had only spent ten years of her life here in the middle of the poverty an fervour that so filled this small rackety building, and almost a quarter of a century on the other side of London. How could she try to convince herself that this was what she needed, and what she missed? She was just being sentimental, she told herself, trying to rub off the dreaminess that still filled her.

  The service went on and on, and she sat there, listening, watching, trying to clear her head, and then stopped trying. She just let it roll over her, the ancient rhythms and sounds. Somehow they did what it was she most needed done. They took the fear and doubt and loneliness they found there and wrapped it all in a silken shell of peace. All gone, she thought. All gone. I'm not frightened any more because it doesn’t really matter any more. Charles will live as he must and do what he must, and so will Marie, and I must do what I must and I know now that I want Marcus and it doesn’t matter anyway it’s only me, today, and has no relevance. All this is about what happened yesterday, hundred and thousands of yesterdays full of frightened anxious doubting people, and they lived and died while the music and rhythm and the chanting went on and here it still is. And tomorrow when we're all gone it will still be here, the swaying and that sound and that smell and these people. It just doesn’t matter at all.

  It was a very comfortable feeling to have.

  56

  Marcus arrive at the hospital almost half an hour before she had hoped he would, his car sliding to the curb just beyond where she stood waiting for him, huddled against the main doorway at the top of the flight of entrance steps.

  ‘Where?’ he said, offering no other greeting. She said nothing and led the way inside the building, and on towards the ward where Charles was.

  Marcus stopped at the door of the small office beside the ward entrance and with silken courtesy asked a nurse to find Sister for him, smiled briefly at Hannah and said,’Go and wait with him. I won’t be long.’ She went obediently. He was here, and she felt safe and free and almost elated, and somewhere deep underneath, intensely happy. To be happy
in such a situation was both selfish and stupid, yet there it was, and she could do nothing about it. She did not try.

  Charles was asleep and the young policeman beside him almost half asleep, but he alerted as she came in and tried to offer her his chair. She shook her head at him and perched on the edge of the locker beside Charles, and leaned there, glad to see he was resting.

  He woke after a few minutes, turning his head to see her, almost as though he knew she would be there.

  ‘Hello, she said softly.

  ‘Hello,’ he said and his voice sounded less difficult now. She was relieved by that for he had sounded almost choked before. Now he sounded only rather thick, like a child with a cold in his nose. ‘I ought to say I'm sorry. For worrying you.’

  ‘No need to fret over that,’ she said.

  ‘I'm not sorry, though. For worrying you, of course. But not for the fight. It was a marvellous fight.’ He moved his head on his pillow and grimaced a little at the discomfort and she said quickly,’ Please, don’t upset yourself, darling. Just rest.’

  ‘I want to talk!’ He sounded petulant, like a tired child, ‘They can bash me as much as they like but they can’t do anything inside of my head, can they? And inside my head - ‘ he closed his one good eye for a moment, ‘ - it’s marvellous in there.’

  The young policeman looked at her, his face troubled. ‘I don’t think as I’d encourage him to talk too much, madam,’ he said a little diffidently. ‘I mean, I ought to take down anything he says, I suppose.’ He brightened then. ‘Mind you, he hasn’t been charged with anything yet, so maybe it don’t matter.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and smiled at him. A nice boy, she thought. Not all that much older than Charles, to look at him.

  ‘Aunt Hannah,’ Charles said suddenly. ‘I saw some people from school.’

  ‘Eton,’ she said irritably, and moved his head awkwardly again. ‘Eton of course. There was that chap Julina Lammeck, and the Gubbay twins, carrying on as though it was a great lark. Driving lorries and going into the docks trying to run the pickets down. I climbed on the cab, and there they were, and I was so amazed I fell off. Why them, Aunt Hannah? They're Jews too, how can the try to break a legitimate strike like that?’

  ‘Darling, please don’t fret yourself,’ she began but he stared at her with such ferocity that she stopped and took a deep breath. ‘I don’t see what difference it makes, their being Jewish,’ she said carefully after a moment. ‘I'm not sure what it is you mean.’

  ‘How can they? Don’t they know what it’s like for these people? Don’t they understand what poverty does to people? How Jews have suffered, are still suffering? And they come and drive lorries like all the rest of these damned capitalists - ’

  ‘Darling, they're … what do you expect? Anyone who knows you’ve been in a fight involving pickets assumes that you’ve been fighting against them! Eton boys, it’s natural. Try not to worry over it, please.’

  ‘They ought to know,’ he said, his voice rising fretfully. ‘They ought to know. They're traitors, to behave so. I'm glad I hit them.’

  ‘Was that how you got hurt?’

  He lay still for a moment and then managed another of his painful smiles. ‘Yes. Yes it was. Marvellous. They didn’t know what hit them, marvellous. But then the others got involved.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘People.’ he said vaguely, ‘and police,’ and then looked at the young policeman at the other side of his bed and said no more, and the boy in uniform blinked and looked confused and then turned his head to stare pointedly down the ward.

  They were quite for a while, as Hannah too looked towards the ward doors to see if Marcus were coming. Then Charles said suddenly, ‘I'm being Barmitzvah, Aunt Hannah.’

  She stared down at him amazed. ‘Bar - but when you were at school, you flatly refused to have anything to do with it! I asked you, and people were very angry with me because I didn’t insist when you said you didn’t want it.’

  She frowned, suddenly, remembering. ‘Uncle Alex said you’d be sorry, if I let you have your own way, and he was right - ’

  ‘Yes,’ Charles said and his voice sounded more tired now. ‘He often is, isn’t he? I'm sorry. I didn’t know any better then. I was ashamed of being a Jew, you see. At school people didn’t talk about it, so I thought it was a shameful thing. I knew so little, anyway. I didn’t understand. Now I know. Now I understand, I'm going to be Barmitzvah. Not because of God, you see. Because of Jews. That’s why David’s arranging it. Soon.’

  He closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep as suddenly as a baby. She watched his chest rise and fall and the peace that had filled her since the hour she had spent at the synagogue began to dissipate and make way for the old familiar anxiety. Would he always confuse her like this?

  At last Marcus came, walking quietly down the ward with a tall man in a neat dark suit beside him. He smiled reassuringly at her as he came to the bed.

  ‘Hannah, my dear, it’s all arranged. Charles is to be transferred to a nursing home in Harley Street. An ambulance has been ordered. Dr Jaeger here is in charge of his care, and is happy to take him into his private cllinic. Dr Jaeger, Mrs Lammeck.’

  She bent her head in acknowledgement. The tall man smiled a little remotely and the moved to stand beside Charles, and took his wrist between his fingers to count his pulse.

  ‘Constable,’ Marcus said, and the policeman stood up. ‘I have been speaking to your Sergeant Forbes on the telephone. He’s waiting for you to call in. You can return to your station, but speak to him first.’

  ‘But I was told to stay here until I was relieved, sir, and - ’

  ‘I know,’ Marcus said, still very soothing. ‘And you're quite right to be unsure. That’s why I arranged for your sergeant to speak to you on the telephone. You place your call yourself, and then you'll know it’s all straightforward, won’t you?’ Though he still looked dubious the policeman yielded to the note of authority in Marcus’s voice and did as he was bid.

  ‘Solicitor’s there already,’ Marcus said briefly in response to Hannah’s puzzled gaze. ‘Young Peterson had alerted him, sensible chap, and he’d already done some investigating before I got here. It’s all fine, my dear. You can stop looking so desperate. He’s going to be all right.’

  ‘I'm not desperate,’ she said, but she felt the tightness in her face and knew he was right.

  The transfer to Harley Street was uneventful, the ambulance moving through the half empty streets without hindrance, and once she saw Charles safely tucked into bed in a handsome single room, already bedecked with flowers and warm and scented, as unlike the bleakness of the London Hospital as it was possible for a room to be, she took a deep breath and realized just how tense she had been. The doctor assured her gravely that the boy was all right, bruised and a little battered but no worse harm done.

  ‘His nose may have a certain - ha - shall we say characterful look about it henceforth. I

  set it as neatly as I could, but of course it isn’t easy always to ensure a perfect cosmetic result. His skull is not broken we’ve now had time to look carefully at his X-rays, so you can be assured on that score. The fracture of the radius is a simple one and should heal without any dramatic problems. Try to keep him out of trouble once I send him home to you, in a few days, I think. And relax yourself, my dear lady.’ He smiled that somewhat remote smile again and bowed her out. Marcus took her elbow in a warm grip and led her down to his car, and took her home.

  Not until she sat in her own armchair beside her own fire, with an anxious faced Florrie bringing her tea could she take in all that had happened. Marcus explained to her that there had been an intention of charging Charles with wilful obstruction of the police in execution of their duty but that the Lammeck Alley solicitor, a much experienced man, had managed to persuade them that this was unnecessary since the boy was merely hot headed and infected with the current craziness. There would be no further problems, the solicitor had assured the police bla
ndly - well brought up boy you know, and all that - and faced with the lawyer’s authoritative superiority and the fact that his client was obviously very rich they allowed themselves to be persuaded. Charges were dropped.

  When he had finished his reassurances Hannah looked at Marcus and smiled, or tried to, but only managed a grimace as the tears exploded at last. He put his arms out and she crept into them and wept until she was exhausted.

  ‘It’s silly, isn’t it?’ he said after a while.

  ‘What is?’ By now she was sitting back in her own chair, her head thrown back against the cushions, feeling the puffiness around her eyes, aware of the tear stains on her cheeks and not caring, almost revelling in her exhaustion.

  ‘You treat me like a husband,’ he said. ‘When there’s trouble, you call me. You want me, and you need me but you won’t marry me.’

  ‘I tried to do everything myself first - ‘ she began.

  ‘And had to call me. Hannah, stop being so silly. Marry me. You know you'll have to eventually.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and let her eyes, tired as they were, move so that she could see him. ‘I decided that this morning in the synagogue.’

  He sat very still, only looking at her, and after a long moment opened his mouth to speak, but all he said was, ‘The synagogue? Were you so frightened?’