The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Uncle Alex, what about Charles? Is there anything we can do? Anything at all? The south of Holland is liberated. Is there any way you know of we can find out what’s happening in Amsterdam? Maybe get him out, somehow? De Jongh got out, maybe we can get Charles out too?’

  He sighed and leaned forward and switched on his desk light. The room sprang into brilliance.

  ‘I'll see what I can find out,’ he aid heavily. ‘The refugee committee, they can do a bit, maybe. But only a bit. Don’t count on it.’

  ‘No, she said. ‘I won’t count on it.’

  He up and went to the window and began fussing with the blind although it wasn’t quite blackout time yet. She watched him dully, feeling very tired now. It was though she had spent the last hour running up hills rather than sitting in this luxurious office, just talking.

  ‘People should know,’ she said abruptly. ‘If it’s true. They should be told.’

  ‘So who will believe it, hey? Like I said, where’s the proof? The word of a few disgruntled refugees?’

  ‘I don’t believe it, she said loudly. He came back to the desk and stared at her sombrely for a moment and then shook his head.

  ‘I’d rather not believe it either,’ he said. I'm trying hard not to.’

  ‘It’s not because I don’t want to … ’

  ‘Never mind, dolly, never mind. Listen, I'll try to find out from Amsterdam, if I can, but don’t count on it, and I'll find this Gerhard too. Talk to him myself, match his stories with the others I heard. There’s a place in Poland they talk about, Ausch something. I wrote it down somewhere. I’d like to talk to this De Jongh fella, where do I start?’

  ‘Start?’ She blinked at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Where did he say he as staying?’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘That of course makes it easy. He didn’t confuse us with the facts, hey' He grinned at her like a nursemaid coaxing a smile from a fractious child. "Okay, okay, I'll see what I can do. Keep your chin in the air, dolly. It’s the only place for it. And remember, bad as it feels at the moment it’s no worse than it’s been the past five years. You never knew where Charles was then, what he was doing, maybe don’t know now. Remember that.’

  She tried to, but each day she woke to the thought of Charles, seeing him in that small room in Amsterdam as surely as if she had actually been there. Each day as she sat and sewed and the wireless blared and Cissie sang and Florrie brought the endless cups of tea, she thought of Gerhard De Jongh, walking away into the darkness of Paultons Square and hating herself for letting him go.

  And each day, behind those thoughts, were others. Guilt and anger and helplessness as she let Uncle Alex’s words march through her mind over and over again. The Jews suffer in every generation. Some get over it, and some are destroyed by it. We're the lucky ones, the lucky ones, the lucky ones.

  The words went on pleating themselves in and out of her thoughts as Uncle Alex week after week, reported failure. No news of Charles, no news of Henk and no news at all of Gerhard De Jongh, even though he must be, had to be, somewhere in England, if not in London. He threw all his considerable energy into the search, sending people from his office to comb the refugee societies' files, badgering the Home office for news of aliens, going to refugee clubs in every town he happened to be as he stumped about the country looking after his tours and his actors and musicians. But it was as though De Jongh had never really existed and as the year turned into a hopeful spring and everyone was telling everyone else that it was almost over, it couldn’t be long now, peace would come, she began to believe it had never happened. That night last October had been a nightmare, a figment of her war weary imagination. No young man with a thin face and dark eyes had come to get drunk in her drawing room and tell her mad stories. She had dreamed it all up because of her anxiety about Charles.

  Then, the talk about the war ending became more than hopeful gossip and changed to certainty, and the newspapers were filled with accounts of allied soldiers fanning out over Europe so fats that even the most dedicated of readers could hardly keep up with it. And at last soldiers marched into Buchenwald and Belsen and the picture arrived.

  It was a sunny day in high summer and Hannah had come limping down to breakfast to find Florrie standing in the hallway with the Daily Mirror open in he hands and her face stiff with shock.

  ‘What is it, Florrie?’ Hannah had said, as she safely negotiated the last step. ‘What’s happened? You look as though the cat’s got your - ’

  Florrie looked up and tried, clumsily, to fold the paper, to stuff in her apron pocket. Hannah stared at her, puzzled.

  ‘Florrie?’

  Florrie should her head again and then, slowly, obviously realizing the absurdity of trying to hide such a thing as a newspaper, gave it to her and Hannah leaned against the banisters, propping her stick beside her, and smoothed the crumpled pages as Cissie came down the stairs behind her, humming under her breath.

  And there they were, the pictures, the words, the proof that they had asked for, she and Uncle Alex and all the others who had listened to the tales of the refugees and not really believed them. The picture of starved bodies piled like garbage in a field, of faces staring out from behind barbed wire fences, of gas ovens and heaps of discarded spectacles and false teeth and shoes and bodies, bodies, bodies. They stood there, the three English women in the sunlit hallway of a pretty house in Chelsea, with the scent of their morning coffee in their nostrils and read over each others, shoulders of the death of millions. Florrie turned and ran, stumbling a little as she went up the stairs, and they could hear her vomiting in the bathroom.

  68

  In some ways it was harder to recover from the second world war that it had been from the first. Hannah had thought then, back in 1918, that she was at the very nadir of her life with Peter dead and Judith dead, and she alone to bear the burden of living on. But there had been the children then, two urgent reasons for getting up each morning and trying to get through the day. And she had been younger, and with more essential power still in her, though she had not realized that at the time.

  But this time she realized full well how drained she was. Physically, she was deeply weary, eroded by the constant arthritic pain in her leg and hip, legacy of the injury to her ankle She learned to stand as tall as she could, to use her stick at all times, and to control her pain by not thinking about it. When it got too bad to allow her to sleep, she took aspirin, but that was all. She would not see doctors, however much Cissie and Florrie nagged her to do so, determined to cope with her state as best she could, knowing to be permanent.

  The effect could be seen on her. Not only did she move with a rigidity that was a marked contrast to her old lithe easiness, but her face had changed. Her mouth had become tighter with the corners downturned and there were lines cut between them and her nostrils. The copper colour of her hair had faded, and now was tinged with white, though it was as thick as ever, and she flatly refused to do as Cissie did and have it dyed. Cissie was marching through her sixties triumphantly, a vision of New Look clothes and waved hair and lavish makeup while Hannah was heralding her fifties, it seemed, by displaying her age rather than fighting it.

  But it was the emotional burden that was the heaviest. For the first two years after the war was over she went on hoping, forlornly, though she knew she was absurd. Of course Charles was dead, it could not be otherwise. Maybe, she would tell herself in the long dark hours, maybe one day someone will turn up who will know what happened to him. Maybe Henk will come to the door and tell her that Charles was well, alive and well and living in some remote country suffering from amnesia, his past driven from his memory by the the hell of a particular present. She drifted back into the comforting fantasy habits of her childhood, weaving complex stories in her head to explain away the pain of reality, making elaborate story structures in which Charles triumphed over and over again, all culminating in Charles coming home to her.

  Uncle Alex went on try
ing but a tide of displaced people was unleashed in Europe and in all the chaos and recriminations and confusion tracking down the fate of one Englishman who had lived in Amsterdam was a herculean task. At last he did find the facts and that was a bad day for Hannah. For Charles had died not a hero’s death, fighting the injustice and hates that had fuelled him for so long, but a pointless wasted one, alone in a charity ward coughing his tubercular lungs into a chipped enamel bowl.

  For weeks after the news reached Paultons Square Hannah walked taller an straighter and more grimly than ever, and Cissie stopped singing. Her own TB had been cured, leaving her with a safely calcified spot on her right lung. She, sixty-five years old, was alive; Charles, who had been little more than thirty, was gone, and that shamed her. So Hannah had to comfort her too. Bad day, bad days.

  And not helped by the silence from Marie. Lammek Alley moved back into gear slowly, picking up the threads of business as the world shook itself and returned to normal living, and it took some time for Hannah to identify the person most likely to help her. Peterson had long since retired, grateful for a little peace at last. He was succeeded by a Damont cousin who was quite uninterested in past family history, and took little trouble to advise her. But, by means of persistent letters and phone calls, she at last persuaded him to give her what news he had.

  It was scant. Mrs Rupert Lammeck, had gone on drawing her income until 1944 and then stopped. No more had been heard of her. There was now an accumulation of funds in her name, although of course the amount could not be divulged to anyone, even Mrs Rupert Lammeck’s mother.

  ‘Dammit!’ Hannah shouted at the smooth faced boy reciting this at her. ‘Dammit, do you think I care about her money? I only want to know where she is, is she well? What about her child. That’s all.’ But he shrugged; he knew no more.

  She considered hiring a private detective, but Uncle Alex talked her out of that. ‘It’s a big country, dolly, and she always on the move. Forget it, look it in the face and forget it. She don’t want to know you no more. Sure it hurts, but who promised you a life with no hurts in it? Anyone did, he was a liar.’

  She wrote long letters to her brothers in New York, asking them to see if they could find news of her, not because she really thought they could but because it was better than doing nothing. They wrote back, short scrappy little letters full of their own doings on the fringes of the boxing world that made it clear they could not find their niece and wouldn’t know where to begin looking. And Hannah tried to do as Uncle Alex advised and live with her pain.

  The early post war years were hard for all of them, quite apart from any personal distress. Food was in shorter supply than it had ever been, and rationing seemed to be a permanent feature of British existence. Women who could get their hands on black market cloth came to Hannah but most of her work was the dispirited making over of old garments, lengthening skirts to approximate Christian Dior’s New Look, remaking lingerie so that every possible use was made of every scrap of fabric. But at last the forties died miserably and became the fifties and people began to talk more of the future to plan for it instead of looking back over their shoulders.

  As the years of austerity eased and money became more available, it sometimes seemed to Hannah that the new young people had forgotten all the pain that their predecessors had suffered for them. Who cared any more about her Charles, about Marcus and his bitter loss, and her and her constant pain, who gave a damn? She would look at the young ones strutting about the streets in their full skirted dresses and drainpipe trousers, lugging their portable radios around and bawling their ugly noisy songs and was filled with a resentment and anger that tightened her mouth even more. For a long time Hannah disliked herself and her world sorely.

  In 1955 Cissie at last took the plunge about which she had been talking for years. She had said, when Lenny and his Nina had gone to America to bring their children home and had decided to stay there, that she would follow them, would make her future there. Somehow she never found the courage. But when she head heard that her oldest grandchild had become engaged, she could bear it no longer. She would go - and what was more, she would go by air.

  How they ever got her into the cab out to Heathrow to get on her plane Hannah never really knew. The excitement in Cissie was so high it was almost hysteria, and Florrie started crying over breakfast and didn’t stop all day, and Hannah was tight lipped with misery, for Cissiei was her dearest friend.

  They said little when they parted, just hugging each other, and Hannah sat beside a still weeping Florrie in the cab going back to Paultons Square and asked herself dully why she bothered to go on living at all. It seemed so pointless now. What was left of all the hopes and plans of the early years? What was there in this new world for which her Marcus and Charles had died that was worth living for? Nothing at all, she told herself, nothing at all.

  Cissie wrote regularly at first, twice a week. Her letters punctuated Hannah’s dreary days with interest, but as the years moved on they became fewer and scrappier. It was not that Cissie had forgotten Hannah, but she had a new purpose in her life now, Hannah supposed, and was too busy to write.

  Hannah was genuinely glad for her, but it underlined her own lonely uselessness. What good was she anyone? Uncle Alex, as old as he was, was still vigorous, still busy though not with business. Now an indefatigable committee man, he spent all his waking hours raising money for the infant state of Israel, an activity which seemed to have injected him with ever more energy, if that were possible. Certainly he had no need of Hannah. As far as she could tell, her only use was as someone for Florrie to fuss over, someone to give purpose to her life. That she had none in her own seemed irrelevant to everyone.

  Until an evening in June 1957. It had been a hot day though not as hot as the previous week had been; the country had sweltered in one of the hottest summers on record, and Hannah, like many people, was drained by it. She had been to a wedding at Edgware. One of Reuben and Minnie’s great brood had married, and Hannah had sighed when the invitation had come, wearied by the thought of yet another family party, for they were a burgeoning and busy clan, the Lazar’s. Wedding and brisses and Barmitzvahs seemed to happen with every rising of the moon, interspersed with house warming parties, as the young ones prospered and moved on, shaking the dust of the East End from their well shod feet for the richer pastures of north west London.

  It amused her sometimes to contemplate them, business men and accountants, factory owners and shopkeepers, with their befurred and scented wives and silky faced expensively educated spoiled youngsters, talking earnestly to each other of University for young Sandra and Lawrence and Andrea and Vernon and Debra and Ivor. They who had left their schools at fourteen were going to see to it that their children would have a better life in this better new world. Being Jewish in London in the nineteen fifties was a comfortable and safe thing to be, for was there not, at least, a safe haven available in case anything went wrong? When the State of Israel had been born in 1948 some of the more politically minded of them shook their heads, worried about the long term outcome, but most of them breathed deep and told each other how marvellous it as and set about fund raising as part of their social lives, and generally felt good.

  So, when the invitations to weddings and parties came Hannah sighed and accepted. It would be hurtful not to, but she never wanted to go. Their closeness with their children and grandchildren underlined too painfully her own solitude. And today was no exception.

  Florrie was away, gone to visit Bet in Whitby, for her annual summer holiday, having left Hannah with long lists of emergency instructions, so she was alone in the house. The street outside was still shimmering with heat, even though it was now seven in the evening, for the day had sweltered. The reception had been a tea dance - tea dances were more fashionable now, because they were loss ostentatious than the old East End style parties with mountains of food and hours of dancing. Those were considered vulgar, too reminiscent of the old days in the shtetls. English Jews t
oday aimed to be as English as they could be. Which meant control, and an awareness of what was high class behaviour and what was not. Really rich people (and the father of the bride as a record shop owner was becoming exceedingly rich) could make these more stylish modest parties without being thought cheapskates by the older generation while adhering to their own notions of what was proper. Hannah for one was grateful. And also grateful to be home.

  She showered slowly, letting the water run over her, feeling some of the pain ease from her hip, and then went limping into the bedroom, not bothering to dry herself. Letting the water evaporate on her skin was cooling and she needed that. She caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror as she went past it and stopped to stare. The silence in the house enveloped her and for a moment time seemed to slip. It wasn’t now, but long ago, when this room had been newly decorated and she frowned sharply at the image in the mirror. Who was that, so tired looking and lined? Whose body was that with drooping breasts and thinning hair? What had happened to her? Inside she felt as she always had but on the surface was a total stranger.

  She shook her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them again the moment had passed. Just for a second it had seemed as it used to, with a small watching Hannah sitting in the corner of the room jeering at her, commenting cruelly on her, making her feel like a totally different person. She could not cope with that feeling again now; she would not. She moved away from the mirror purposefully and put on the cotton housecoat in which she was most comfotable.

  A first she thought she imagined it when the bell rang downstairs. With Florrie away, there was no one who would call on her at seven on a Sunday evening, and for a moment she felt a surge of fear, a memory of that night thirteen years before when Gerhard De Jongh had come.