Statistical anomaly
For the remainder of that summer, with formidable discipline, my mother studied for the British bar, barricading herself inside her bedroom, going so far as to lock my brother and me out of the house during the height of the hot, humid season. After a couple of hours of play, desperate for the comfort of central air conditioning, we would return home to find the front door locked. Resolute in her efforts to study, aided by pale pink wax and cotton earplugs worn throughout the day, she ignored our loud banging at the door, the ringing of the dual-tone door bell, until she had accomplished her goals.
One afternoon, irked by the sound of us playing inside, she complained to our father in loud accented bursts.
“They make so much noise. How can I study?”
After this outburst, I watched my father stand before the long bank of wide multi-paned windows, gazing distantly into our shady front yard, hands wadded in the pockets of his slim-line pants. He looked visibly trapped behind the glass, peering out onto our uncared-for front lawn, a single tear sliding down his cheek. It was the one time I would see my father cry. My mother left that September for England to sit for the bar. She passed on her first try. This seemed extraordinary, given the long break between school and her studies.
Why had my mother chosen to abandon her career in law in the first place? Did she suspect that she stood little chance to succeed? In that era, few women who passed the bar qualified for the position of solicitor and even fewer as a barrister. According to BBC News, in 1957 when my mother was studying for her A Level examinations at Oxford, only 1.94% of women completing the tests qualified as solicitors. In 1967, the number was 2.7%. In 1977, the number jumped to a mere 7.33%.2
Giving in
After passing the bar, my mother began to insist that my father give up his work on superconductivity at Bell Labs and that we move back to England so she could find work as a barrister in criminal law at a chambers in London. The only time I saw them touch was when she succeeded in wearing him down after many months of determined argument. When he finally agreed to move back, she threw herself into his lap, triumphant. There my father sat under my mother in his customary swivel chair where he dozed between long stints at work, now with an odd grimace on his face, arms languishing about the bucket-shaped sides with my cheerful mother in his lap. For months, I had begged my father to give in to her pleas to move back to England. You know you’re going to do it, Dad. Just give in. The look on his face told me he was in some way pleased to give her what she wanted.
My mother got her wish, and we moved back to England at the start of what would have been fourth grade for me, and what would have been first grade for my brother. My father found employment as a reader in physics at London University while he continued to work full time at Bell Labs.
Later when I asked him how this was possible, traveling between two countries to work, he said he could only do it, “because the students at the London University weren’t much good.”
Watford, Hertfordshire
At first we stayed in Watford, an industrial town in the borough of Hertfordshire, seventeen miles northwest of London with my father’s parents, in a large brick Edwardian house that had been converted into a boarding house. Life with my father’s parents was fairly uncomplicated and by extension almost magical. The large house on Langley Road, walking distance from the Watford High Street Station, was bordered by beds of scented roses and lavender bushes, and shaded with magnificently tall and leafy chestnut trees. Behind the house was a long descending garden of manicured beds of flowers, massive hydrangea bushes and impossibly neat, clipped grass tended to weekly by my grandfather with his mid-century push-powered lawn mower. A twenty-foot rhododendron tree that grew wide and heavy with its massive pink, bell-shaped clusters of showy flowers and drapery of glossy green leaves provided a sanctuary in mid-summer. In this garden during World War II air raids, my father had hidden in a bomb shelter, been tormented by his younger brother of six years, and played with his model airplanes while hanging from the knobby limbs of massive chestnut trees.
In the dappled sunshine, I helped my grandmother hang the laundry outside and spent hours tossing an American football about with my grandfather, whose hopes for a college education had been dashed when his father died and he was required to take over the management of the family pub. Instead of becoming a writer as he had once dreamed, he worked as a traveling shirt salesman for most of his adult life, until he was finally able to obtain clerical work in a solicitor’s office in his seventies.
On this tidy green lawn, my mother once performed several immaculate cartwheels in a row, countering my father’s disbelief in her ability to do so. This would be the only time I would witness my mother engaged in an act of play.
“See,” she boasted to us children. “Your father says I can’t do cartwheels, but I can.”
1956–1974
In England, instead of eating meals comprised of cheap conveniences like frozen diced vegetables and flank steak, we delighted in fresh meats and fish purchased from the local butcher and markets, with their abundant foreign aromas. When my mother was out looking for a home or working at a London barrister’s office, Granny Iris would take me into her confidence, telling me stories about my father, her firstborn and precious Tommy. My father was the first to attend college in his largely Ashkenazi Jewish family, whose lineage in England spanned the course of two centuries. In 1956, while studying physics at Oxford on a scholarship, he met my mother who was attending St. Anne’s College, studying law.
As my grandmother told it, my parents met at a Jewish club on campus.
“Upon first sight, your mother made a beeline for your father,” she confided. “She was ready to take him by storm.” Apparently, my father was the gleaming trophy and my mother, the uncouth but lucky contestant.
I began to wonder if there had not been another more suitable woman out there, someone more pliable and less arrogant who might have won my father’s affections had my mother not been, in my grandmother’s estimation, so aggressive. Prior to the war, Jewish students generally chose to hide their religious background and ethnicity. Prejudice in England against Jews had been a long-standing practice. According to the Oxford Chabad society, the aftermath of World War II did much to change public perception of Jews:
The war changed much in Oxford. Apart from a massive, though temporarily swelling of the Jewish population of Oxford, and the arrival of exotic European refugees, including Einstein, the war shattered the already tattered remnants of the social fabric of the old order in the Oxford colleges. Thus the postwar era saw a great expansion in the numbers of Jewish students attending Oxford, and an exceptional growth in the numbers of Jewish academics.3
I was surprised to learn that my parents had participated in any kind of social club. In their married life, they had little time for such frivolity.
Summer 1960
The story of my mother and father’s honeymoon goes something like this: Traveling one night in Germany, my father found himself driving the wrong way down a poorly lit, oneway road. Suddenly, a big rig appeared out of nowhere. My father managed to swiftly maneuver his small English car into a tight parking spot, failing however to position the car entirely out of harm’s way. The truck clipped the rear end of his car, and my father was flung headlong into the windshield.
Not wearing his seat belt, my twenty-three-year-old father cracked his skull open. Meanwhile my mother, who was belted in, incurred minimal injuries—a light concussion and chipped front tooth. An augur of trouble to come.
1970–1973
In America, with my professionally educated English parents, I was markedly different from my peers, and often on the receiving end of thoughtless invective. Here, where my father grew up, I had hoped to find some sort of easy acceptance. This would not be the case. On the playground of my private school (what we call a public school in the U.S.), I was branded a “Yankee” and teased unmercifully until I finally adopted a British
accent.
After that, I soon found my place at school. This would be a pivotal time, when I would discover I had some aptitude for writing. That term, our teacher arranged on a tall bookcase as many disparate yellow objects as she could find. We were required to choose one object as impetus for writing. I chose a vinyl purse and wrote about its mysterious contents: a matchbox containing an entire community of miniature people and witches, whose calibrated magic spells adhered to the powers of a waxing and waning moon. The story seemed to write itself—a reflection of the vast reading of children’s literature I had done at my mother’s direction.
My teacher deemed this an excellent story, and typed it up, before arranging for me to meet our headmaster. Intended as encouragement, this meeting was anything but inspirational. Seated before this figure of dispiriting authority, I was met with stony British derision.
“Now tell me,” the tense-looking man interrogated, “which do you say? Cookie or biscuit?”
“Biscuit,” I answered dutifully. Once again, I was being schooled in proper English. The lesson was a never-ending one.
At home things were no better. Apparently I had made a big mistake adopting the accent of my peers, I was soon to learn. Why can’t you speak like your mother? my father would fume. You sound like you grew up in the gutter. I had no idea that the working class accent I had adopted would cause such a ruckus. Of course, what my father wanted from me was impossible. My mother had a southern African accent. While she had been schooled in England from the age of twelve, she had apparently not chosen to assimilate like I did. She had retained her accent with its high degree of German inflection. This distinguished her as someone who had grown up in a British colony, an outsider, and certainly not a member of the upper class. I could not discern the benefits of adopting her accent. With little understanding of English class structure, I could not yet pinpoint the intensity of my father’s rancor.
Loughton, Essex
Our parents were rarely home. Our father was often traveling for work and our mother spent her time commuting to London to work in chambers.
It wasn’t long before my mother purchased us a modest townhouse in Loughton, Essex. This northeastern suburb of London located on the edge of Epping Forest, known as “The People’s Forest,” the ancient woodland distinctive for its massive pollarded trees, is located at the end of the Central Line of the London Underground.
During this year-and-a-half while our mother was working, we had a number of babysitters and two live-in nannies from whom I learned firsthand of England’s rigid class structure—one in which young girls who did not have the good fortune or opportunity to pass the 11-plus exam in school would go to work as live-in nannies for affluent families when they were sometimes as young as sixteen years old. I was especially enamored of our first nanny, Avril, who came to live with us at seventeen years old. Her father, I learned, had been a factory worker and was missing a finger. For my birthday, she bought me small gifts of a diary and a hairbrush, gendered frivolities I cherished. We counted on each other in small ways, and it was the first time I felt I could languish in the warmth of an adult who was not a family member. It felt exceptionally luxurious. My mother, however, did not seem to appreciate the help of this young woman.
Before giving her notice, one night Avril confided in me the distress she felt working for us.
“I can’t keep cleaning up after your mother. Whenever I clean a countertop, she immediately spills coffee all over it. She is always making a mess. I just can’t do it anymore.”
There were other complaints about my mother and her perplexing obliviousness, but these did not seem to influence her behavior. Avril’s departure was disappointing—our next nanny, Gail, was even younger still and not nearly as warm or steadfast. After six months, she too disappeared but not before playing for me The Who’s rock opera album Tommy on her gramophone. This part is for you, she would say at the critical moment in “Smash the Mirror” when Tommy breaks through his psychosomatic illness. The sound of breaking glass would course loudly through her small bedroom. Her dedication left me feeling strangely humiliated and betrayed. What about my behavior had elicited this reaction?
Michael and Esther Gelfand
During gaps in childcare, my mother’s parents took turns looking after us. First Granny Esther came to stay—an engaging, somewhat high-strung woman whose life was devoted almost exclusively to the care of her distinguished husband, Mike, and his all-encompassing career.
Granny provided us with the structured care we so sorely lacked. She would greet us at home after school in a kempt straight skirt, her bluish gray hair wound in a tight bun, with the “tea” she would set for us on the polished wood dining table: a glass of watered down orange squash, sections of peeled tangerines with a small bowl of peanuts and raisins. An effective homemaker, she would tell us fairy tales and help keep the house tidy. With our grandmother in residence, afternoons were mostly calm and cheerful. Only when she felt we weren’t following one of our mother’s tedious rules, would the peace be broken. She would grow hysterical, cry and barricade herself in her room, yelping in that signature high-pitched voice of hers that our mother was now going to be very cross with her because of our disobedience. I could not fathom how my grandmother allowed her daughter’s temper to become the barometer of her actions. But there was not much I could do to win her over. Granny Esther’s tears were simply too much to bear.
Soon after her departure, my highly accomplished and exceptionally driven grandfather would arrive. My mother’s father, Michael Gelfand, the son of Lithuanian parents who had fled the violent anti-Semitic pogroms of the Russian Empire for South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, had attended the University of Capetown to become a distinguished doctor and author. His expertise in researching subtropical diseases earned him an OBE and a Papal Order of the Knighthood of St. Sylvester. Founding professor of African medicine at the then-University of Rhodesia, there were few other doctors in then-Salisbury—or, for that matter, the rest of the country—with my grandfather’s stature. In his lifetime he wrote twenty-nine books, many of which were devoted to the study of the Shona or Mashona, the majority tribe of Zimbabwe, and their customs, religion, and culture. He was deeply impressed by the ethics of the Shona people, despite his admittedly racist views on African independence.
Eternally thinking, walking, doing, always on the verge of some limitless quest, Grandpa Mike could not tolerate a single unproductive moment and spent his time expounding on the topic of his work researching cures for subtropical African diseases. The previous year in America, he had set up a slide projector in the spare room to show my brother and me the stark images of those who suffered from the most dramatic of diseases native to subtropical Africa, the subjects of his research and care. Goiter. Elephantiasis. Bilharzia.4 Diseases that caused legs and necks to swell to disproportionately large sizes or blister painfully.
“Here is a man with goiter,” my grandfather told us, clicking through slides. “And here is an image of elephantiasis,” he remarked of another. Sheltered as I was then from disfiguring or chronic disease (or so I believed), these were distressing depictions. For my grandfather, however, these images were nothing short of revelatory. Colonial medicine practiced before 1950 in then-Rhodesia shunned the study of the effects of diseases on the African population, focusing instead on the prevention of diseases from which colonial whites suffered.
My grandfather, known for his research into bilharzia, a disease prevalent in tropical and sub-tropical areas in poor communities without potable water and adequate sanitation, was especially keen to recognize the symptoms in African children that the authorities had purposefully overlooked. Between giving important lectures that year in England, my grandfather grew exceedingly restless. One morning as he walked me to school, Grandpa Mike made a disturbing proposition. “Claire, why don’t I give a lecture at your school on subtropical diseases?”
The student body of my school was comprised mainly o
f girls, three to twelve years old. I did not think the subject matter was appropriate. Worse than this, I faulted my grandfather for being in constant need of an audience. He would not take no for an answer and did his utmost to wear me down, beseeching me as we strolled past heaps of bright purple morning glories to let him speak to the headmistress. Despite his entreaties, somehow I managed to hold my ground.
1974–1975
We didn’t see much of my father over the next year and a half while my mother worked to establish herself as a barrister in criminal law. When he did manage to return home for the occasional week or two, he performed his domestic duties with ritualistic tenderness: making Saturday grocery trips to town by foot with the aid of the ubiquitous English wicker, handheld trolley; taking long strolls through the Epping Forest, where we climbed old pollard trees and meandered for hours along fecund streams; and playing board games with us children late into the night. I loved these games, particularly Monopoly, which I won handily almost every time. Our mother showed no interest whatsoever in our games, the shopping, or our long walks. She spent almost all of her time alone in her bedroom, studying or working, I presumed. It was really anyone’s guess as to what she was doing up there.
Full Stop
One day during a class discussion of grammar and run-on sentences, our teacher, in a snarky mood, asked us to define what came at the end of a sentence. A regular “motor mouth,” my hand shot immediately into the air. “Period,” I exclaimed loudly.
“Eww,” the girls roared, turning in their seats to eye me with bemused horror, “that’s disgusting.”
A Room with a Darker View Page 3