Читать книгу Cracked Eggs and Chicken Soup - A Memoir of Growing Up Between The Wars - Norman Jacobs - Страница 12

‘Sorry, Becky, but we’ll have to tighten our belts next week. My job’s come to an end. There’s no work next week and I really can’t see when I’ll be able to get some more.’ I’m not sure exactly how old I was when I first heard those words as Dad walked through the door on his return from work, though it obviously wasn’t the first time he’d said it and I didn’t really know what it meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good as Mum started sobbing and said, ‘Oh, Jack, we can’t keep going on like this.’ As I grew older this was to become a fairly regular occurrence as Dad would often return home from work on a Friday afternoon, announcing that we would all have to ‘tighten our belts’ as he had no work to go to the following week. Somehow, though, she, and we, always did carry on.

On this particular night, however, Mum reminded Dad that we had company that night. ‘Oh no,’ she wept, ‘Woolfy and Betsy are supposed to be coming round tonight. What can we do?’ Dad shrugged. ‘We’ve got this week’s money,’ he said. ‘We can worry about next week next week.’

Woolfy was my uncle and Dad’s younger brother. Betsy, of course, was his wife and my aunt. They used to come round about once a month on a Friday evening to eat with us. Friday was the main meal of the week for Jewish families as it heralded in Shabbos. The meal when Uncle Woolfy came round was always the same – chicken and lokshen soup, accompanied by baked potatoes and rice. The soup was made by boiling up a whole chicken in a pot of water with carrots, parsnips and celery, a pinch of saffron and a large helping of lokshen (known to non-Jewish families as vermicelli). When the soup was ready, the chicken was taken out, jointed and carved and served up on a plate with the baked potatoes and rice while the soup was served up in a bowl.

This particular night when Uncle Woolfy and Aunt Betsy turned up, Mum and Dad acted as if nothing was wrong. As usual, Mum was baking the potatoes and rice in one large dish in our small coal-fired range oven, the rice on the bottom with the spuds on top and round the sides, while the soup was merrily boiling away on the open-ring gas stove next to it.

‘Ikey, get the plates down, will you,’ Mum commanded. I got down what passed for our best china, though it was somewhat old and battered with many chips and cracks and consisted of plates and bowls of different patterns, the most common of which was the Willow Pattern, a highly successful English design based on traditional Chinese images. The Victorians even invented a plausible-sounding ‘traditional Chinese’ tale to accompany it, the pattern supposed to depict the tragic story of the forbidden love between a Mandarin’s daughter and the Mandarin’s accountant, a man too far below his daughter’s status to be allowed to marry her. In some versions though, it all ends happily as the two lovers turn into doves and fly off together. Mum used to tell me the story often, but in her usual manner, she managed to get the whole thing completely mixed up and the two lovers turned into two children from Dover rather than doves. Still, as long as they made their escape and lived happily ever after, who cares who or what they turned into!

Over dinner, Uncle Woolfy said he had an announcement to make. This sounded interesting, I thought. But all he said was ‘Betsy’s expecting.’ This didn’t make much sense to me as he didn’t explain what Betsy was expecting, but Mum and Dad seemed to think it was great news. Mum got up and threw her arms round Betsy, hugging her so tight that Betsy almost had to push her off. Dad said, ‘About time too, Woolfy. I was beginning to think you didn’t know what it was for. What is it, seven years you been married now?’ Betsy blushed but Woolfy just laughed. This all seemed very mysterious to me but if Mum and Dad were happy, it was all right with me.

‘This calls for a celebration,’ Mum said. ‘Get the cola and some cups, Ikey.’ I’m sure she would have preferred to celebrate with a glass of wine, but even in good times that was far more than we could afford. So I went to our food cupboard, which was actually an orange box with two compartments covered by a curtain nailed high up on the wall to the right of the front door. There I took out a bottle of cola, which we used to buy from a travelling merchant called N. Laid, and put it on the table, then I went to the dresser and took out a couple of cracked cups, one without a handle, for our guests while the rest of us had to settle for some stone jam jars, which passed for cups in our house. Dad opened the bottle, known as a Codd bottle, which had a glass marble in the top that had to be pushed down into a recess just below the neck, the recess being just narrow enough to stop it falling into the bottle, and poured out the cola. Salutations of ‘long life’ and ‘mazel tov’ rang out around the table. I was still a bit mystified by what this was all about, but the cola was a welcome change from the normal cup of water.

After dinner was over, Mum said she had a favour to ask of Uncle Woolfy. ‘Have you any work going for Jack?’ she asked, getting straight to the point. Dad was a French-polisher by trade and Woolfy was a cabinet maker, so sometimes he was able to put a bit of work Dad’s way. But this time, Uncle Woolfy sadly shook his head and said, ‘Things are bad all round in the furniture trade at the moment, Becky. I have very little work on myself. I’m sorry, Jack.’ This short conversation seemed to bring the grown-ups down to earth after their happiness at Betsy’s news and a more sombre mood settled over everyone until it was time for Uncle Woolfy and Aunt Betsy to leave.

I must have been about seven when we heard the news that Aunt Betsy was expecting. By this time there were eight of us, as Mum had been producing new babies at regular intervals. I was followed by Davy, then Woolfy (known to us all as Bill), Abie and, just a couple months ago, the latest arrival, Joey. As it happened, Mum must also have been pregnant just like Aunt Betsy, although probably too early to know, as yet another small Jacobs joined the world a short while after Aunt Betsy’s baby. This was Manny, who was the last to be born in Palmer Street.

Even without Manny, bedtime was a bit of a challenge as it always was. First of all, when Mum said, ‘Time for bed’ she made us all line up and took us out to the back yard so we could do a wee before going to bed. Back upstairs, Julie took over and marched us boys into the back room where there were two single beds. As soon as we were inside and free of parents, we started playing up, nothing too bad, but we would stick our tongues out at Julie and generally make things as difficult as possible for her as she tried to get us into bed.

Our favourite game was to get into a long oblong box that stood about 18 inches high from the floor against the left hand wall. Formally, it was a coal box where we stored our coal for the coal hearth which housed the range and oven, but to us it was a bus, a train, a police car or anything else we wanted it to be.

On this particular night it was a fire engine. ‘Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling,’ Davy squawked as he jumped in the front and turned the imaginary steering wheel. ‘Fireman Bill, man the ladder,’ I commanded. With Abie joining in as well, even though he was only two, Julie could see she had her hands full. ‘Stop it,’ she shouted, ‘get to bed or I’ll tell Dad.’

As it happens, she didn’t have to carry out her threat as Mum threw the door open and said, ‘What’s going on here? Why aren’t you all in bed? Julie, get them to bed already!’ Although her intervention made us get out of the coal box and get ready for bed, the real reason for her visit was to bring in the night-time pail, which she placed in the corner of the room. This was to save us having to go downstairs and out into the yard in the middle of the night if we felt the urge to go to the loo.

In fact, going to bed was quite a simple procedure as we had no pyjamas to change into. At that age I had never even heard of such things. It was just jersey, trousers, boots and socks off and into bed in our shirts. Julie slept in one bed with Abie, while we three older boys slept like sardines, heads top and bottom, all legs meeting in the middle. Baby Joey slept with Mum and Dad in their bed in the living room.

The following morning after we’d all trooped down to the yard for the toilet and a cold water wash under the tap, we came back upstairs for breakfast. This consisted of a slice of bread and marge each. As we were eating, Mum started sobbing again. Dad got up and put his arm round her, ‘Don’t cry, Becky, we’ve been here before, remember. We’ll manage.’

‘Why can’t you get yourself a proper job?’ she said bitterly.

‘I do have a proper job,’ Dad replied, ‘there’s just not much work around at the moment. We’re not the only family suffering. On Monday, I’ll have a look round to see if there’s anyone needs some lino laying.’

As well as being a French-polisher, Dad was also a very good lino-layer and as he knew quite a few furniture shops along the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads he would get the occasional job doing that.

‘If not I’ll go down the club and see if there’s any work going there until I can find some more French-polishing work.’

From time to time he would work as a waiter at the Netherlands Club in Bell Lane. When I was a bit older I used to boast to my school friends that my father was the head waiter at the Bell Lane Club, which is what we called it. He wasn’t of course, and waiting was really only a stop gap until he could find some proper work.

‘That’s all very well, Jack,’ said Mum, ‘but we’re still going to have to tighten our belts in the meantime.’

‘Well, we’ve still got some money from last week’s work,’ Dad reminded her, ‘so let’s at least have a good weekend and then worry about what we’re going to do later.’

So, on that Saturday we ate quite well. For lunch we had more bread and marge, while Joey had some semolina washed down with some milk from his bottle which was just an ordinary medicine bottle with a teat.

In the evening we had our main meal of the day, dinner, which on this day consisted of fried ox heart with rice boiled with shredded cabbage and currants and boiled potatoes garnished with a knob of marge. Sometimes, on other good days, we might have lamb’s liver or sausages instead of the ox heart.

Sunday saw us blow nearly all the rest of the money we had with a salt beef dinner, which was really my favourite. Cooked with carrots, cabbage and potatoes in the same saucepan, I enjoyed the fat most of all, even though it always gave me a bilious headache. It was so good that I ate it anyway even knowing what the consequences would be.

Work or no work, money or no money, Sunday night was bath night. As the two eldest, Julie and I, were called on to help out in this procedure. ‘Ikey, get the bath out and Julie, start bringing up the water,’ Mum ordered. So off I went to the back room, to take the tin bath off the nail that Dad had banged into the wall to hang it on and brought it in to the front room and placed it on the floor in the living room. Julie meanwhile had started the slow and laborious process of going down to the backyard with our kettle, filling it up with water and bringing it back up the two flights of stairs to pour into a bowl on the gas stove. After I’d brought the bath in, I helped Julie by getting an old cracked enamel jug we kept in the cupboard and running up and down the stairs with her till the bowl was filled. Once Mum felt the water was warm enough she’d pour the bowl into the bath. We had to fill the bowl several times to make a bathful. By the time the last bowl was poured in, I expect the first lot of water Mum had tipped in had gone cold, but there just wasn’t any other way of filling the bath.

Julie, as the oldest and the only girl, was always the first to get in the bath, then the rest of us went in in pairs. Once in the bath, Mum would give us all a good scrubbing with a bar of Lifebuoy soap. She’d then pay special attention to our hair and used some soft soap to destroy any head lice and nits we might have, thus keeping the notorious ‘Nitty Nora’ (as schools’ nit nurses were called) at a distance. In appearance this soap looked like thick grease. It was bought in the oil shop and sold by weight and wrapped in newspaper.

Head lice were also kept at bay with regular haircuts. Dad always did these himself. He’d give us all a short back and sides with the clippers he had and shave our necks with a cut-throat razor.

As well as destroying the bugs and lice on our bodies, Mum would spend an inordinate amount of time in her perpetual battle on fleas, bugs and lice in our flat. Keating’s Powder was her favourite weapon in this war as it boasted it killed all lice and bedbugs. She religiously applied it to all bed springs and mattresses at least twice a week, but it always seemed to me that the bugs were unaware of Keating’s boast as they just carried on minding their own business and multiplying at an alarming rate. Every now and then, in an attempt to thin out these unwanted hordes, Dad would employ a sulphur candle, which gave off acrid fumes when you applied a match to it. Windows and doors had to be sealed to prevent any leakage. Alas, after each fumigation they never stayed thinned out for long. They must have thought they had squatters’ rights.

This fight against germs, lice and bugs went on incessantly. Carbolic was yet another aid in keeping the germs at bay. Bought as a liquid it was added to a pail of water and Mum would set to scrubbing the floors, which were mainly bare boards. Sunlight Soap, scrubbing brush and flannel were the other articles required in this operation.