‘No one will ever love you like I do’, she would say to me several times a week. ‘I know that one day you will grow up and leave me and I don’t know how I’m going to cope.’ Of course, I knew from this that when I grew up it would kill her if I left her. I also knew that it would destroy her if I ever made her upset. If I should ever suggest she was not a perfect mother, I would drive her off the edge.
In my childish mind, therefore, I looked after and protected her. I was responsible for her happiness, her sanity, and her life. Indeed, had I not been the cause of her frailties simply by being born?
And so I was what is called in the jargon a ‘parentified child’ – in other words, since childhood is all about being looked after, free from responsibility –not really a child at all. The person who should have been the all-important foil to my mother never intruded into the sealed relationship between his wife and his daughter. If only he had been able to do so. If he had, he could have shown me that, far from being perfect, my mother’s perspective was so very distorted; and thus he could have freed me, allowing me to feel entitled to live.
Not until many years later did I realise I had never had an independent conversation with my father about anything remotely significant. All such communication was mediated through my mother. It would no more have occurred to me to seek solace, reassurance, or enlightenment from him than it would have been to fly to the moon.
The belief that I could never leave her without imperiling her sanity or even her life was deeply to affect my life as an adult. It was unthinkable, for example, that I could ever have taken a posting as a foreign journalist because I could never have lived abroad. Indeed, for three decades I lived with my husband and children just a few streets away from my parents’ flat.
I was in a trap, of course, but that trap also served as my comfort zone. The prospect of leaving it and striking out on my own was terrifying and unthinkable, because it meant facing things I did not want to face. Imprisonment is an affliction, but sometimes its power lies in the fact that it also provides a seductive cocoon. Freedom is often difficult and even painful. In exactly the same way, I was unable to think beyond the confines of the leftism that I could challenge in those early years no more easily than I could have challenged my mother’s perfection. And when I did eventually do so, the exhilaration of thinking out of the political box was tempered by the fear and discomfort of doing so.
Of course, I understood none of this while I was growing up. A solitary, serious-minded child who had never known what it really meant to play, I thought my life was happy and normal. I grew up by my mother’s side in her shop. For amusement, I would climb inside the large cardboard boxes which had contained deliveries of clothes, close the flaps and pretend I was hidden from the world; or I would buy birdseed from the local pet shop and stand for hours in the little park across the road feeding the pigeons, totally absorbed.
Desperate to join in with other children’s games, I would hover shyly and nervously at the edge, willing them to ask me to join in. They rarely did. When I was invited to birthday parties I could only goggle in amazement at girls hanging upside down from rope ladders or climbing trees in the garden. I would never have been allowed in case I hurt myself. And I would never do anything that my mother had forbidden.
Never knowing what it was to enjoy the adventure of being alive, I retreated instead into the magical world of books. Words, with which I had a natural fluency, became my allies and the shield behind which I could hide. Working at my schoolbooks made me feel in control. If I worked hard, I could make good things happen.
School was where I felt free and happy – where I had fun. What was fun? The studying. For the child who didn’t know how to play, studying was recreation. School became my life, my family. I only had a very small number of friends, but that was enough; that and the broader community of girls and teachers, the whole collective life of the school of which I felt so intensely a part.
Not that I was ever quite like the other girls at Putney High School in South-West London. From adolescence onwards, parties with boys from local schools became a feature of weekend life – for the others. My mother forbade me from going to them, as there was apparently an unbroken line from such pursuits to marrying outside the Jewish people, which I knew would kill both my parents. When I was allowed to attend rare all-girl social occasions, I was open-mouthed at the sophisticated, sexy clothes the others wore because, out of school, I still dressed like a schoolgirl.
None of these differences or restrictions I ever thought odd or oppressive. I never rebelled, never stayed out late at night or went off secretly to a rock concert or spent my pocket money on furry false eyelashes or read mildly lubricious romantic magazines. My mother laid down the rules and I never questioned any of them. How could I have done otherwise? I knew that if I ever caused her to think she wasn’t a perfect mother it would destroy her. And of course she was my perfect, adored, idolised mother. But without acknowledging the sharp contradiction, I always harboured a secret fantasy that I was actually an adopted child.
Why , though, was my father incapable of acting as the crucial foil to my mother? The reason was that he too was crippled by his own background – by his mother who, to my childish eyes at least, had caused the death of one of his own sisters.
When I was tiny, my father’s mother lived in a grim slum, in a terrace of houses in Islington, North London, owned by a rapacious landlord. The street was called Duncan Terrace. Today, a house there sells for upwards of £2 million. It is a fine Georgian terrace with beautiful oval windows on the ground floor. I suppose the shape of those windows must have imprinted themselves on my infant mind as representing something quite terrifying. To this day I cannot look at upright oval shapes – the stained glass windows of a cathedral, for example, or the ‘Golden Arches’ of McDonalds, or even a lower-case letter m — without my heart lurching, absurdly, into my mouth.
In later years, when we visited this grandmother every other Sunday afternoon, I used to wait for the moment when we left and the front door closed behind us. Finally I felt I could breathe. For that precious single instant, I was free. Maybe, I felt, I could hold that moment forever. But, of course, no sooner had it arrived than it vanished, and so the inexorable countdown started once again.
For it was only at that single, perfect moment when the door closed behind me that it was a full two weeks before I would have to visit that grandmother again. Every moment that subsequently passed would bring the fortnightly ordeal nearer.
But what could have caused such a blight on a small child’s life, such shrinking dread?
Who other than those who enter the world of a child may properly appreciate the incontrovertible logic by which intuited fury and incipient hysteria can settle in a childish universe into the shape of a monster unleashing untold terrors? A monster who threatens to smash that child’s world into fragments by seeming to drive the two people who formed it apart? Booba, we called her, my cousins and I – Yiddish for grandmother. Her first language was the Yiddish she had spoken in the close-knit Jewish community of her native Poland. Even today, when I hear someone called ‘Booba’ I recoil, and yet I observe to my astonishment that whoever it is appears to be a perfectly normal, pleasant woman.
Now that I am myself a grandmother – but not, most definitely not, ‘Booba’ – playing with my own grandchildren, reading to them, listening to their chatter and cuddling them as they leap into my lap, I can see how odd was my own situation as a child. I don’t think I ever voluntarily approached or touched Booba. As far as I recall, she never hugged me, played with me, nor indeed said anything to me at all. Did she want to? I will never know. What stopped her? That, I think, I do know. Booba was a heavy woman with a thin mouth. She looked like the Polish farm girl she once had been. She habitually wore a wraparound floral apron and carpet slippers shaped like boots. When she laughed, I saw a cackling crone: Booba possessed alarmingly few teeth because she was too frightened to go the dentist, bu
t not as determined as she was never to go near a hospital, where she believed you would almost certainly be killed.
The flat where she lived in later years was in a council block in Swiss Cottage, North West London, six floors up stone stairs on which the fumes of disinfectant barely masked other more distasteful smells, and which we had to navigate because my father, who was terrified of enclosed spaces, refused ever to use a lift.
The television in the flat was always on, showing old films starring Bette Davis, Clark Gable, or Joan Crawford. When we arrived, my mother would ask pointedly for the sound to be turned down. I knew that having the TV on in the middle of the day was a sign of moral weakness. It was never on during the day at home, apart from the annual FA Cup Final, when my father tore himself away from the children’s clothes shop my mother ran and where he would make himself a weekly nuisance on a Saturday; or when I was allowed to watch children’s TV on a Thursday afternoon, the shop’s early closing day and the one precious afternoon therefore when I went straight home from school.
And yet, at Booba’s, I would sit crouched on a chair up against the TV, my ear so close to the set I could scarcely focus on the picture. If I could have melted through the cathode-ray tube into the movie I would gladly have done so. I could not endure what I was picking up in the room, as if I were a human antenna into which were being channeled signals of distress. It was imperative to drown out the sound of my father’s voice railing plaintively and impotently against his mother, and my own mother’s anger, undetected by all but myself.
By the time I got home, I would already have been forced to listen to the inevitable row, the bitter recriminations and dumb misery which tore me in two. And with every day that passed, the dread of the next visit would spread like a fog around my heart.
What was Alfred, my father, arguing with her about? The specifics were always far too banal and trivial to be recollected. But the real issue underlying them all was as momentous as they come. It was that Booba would require my father to dance attendance upon her and turn his life inside out in order to place her, rather than his wife and daughter, at its centre, while she made herself as uncooperative as it was possible to be.
He visited her twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, in addition to our fortnightly family appearance. He couldn’t do enough for her; indeed, it was never enough, and my mother usually ended up doing it anyway, because, as everyone knew, she was so very capable.
My father might shout at Booba; but he always, always gave in. How desperately I wanted him to stand his ground, give her an ultimatum, turn his back upon such unnatural bullying and at last put his wife, my mother rather than his own, first in his life. But he never did. The more he shouted, the more he only revealed his own inadequacy, the more my infant self writhed, recoiled, and raged. And the bitter recriminations that my mother hurled at my father as we travelled back home from our visits, with my father behaving like a cornered animal, made me — their only child — feel as if my whole universe was about to disintegrate.
Maybe my impression of Booba was unfair, in which case I am truly sorry. As an ignorant and illiterate Polish Jewish immigrant, sent to Britain as a young girl at the turn of the twentieth century by an apparently unloving family, who, for unexplained reasons, wanted to get rid of her, she had had a hard life. But to me as a child she was the most terrifying figure possible — a destroyer of her children.
In addition to my father, Booba had three daughters. Two of them, Betty and Marie, lived with her until death parted them. When we visited, they were always there. These two unfortunates appeared to have virtually no life whatsoever beyond their mother’s baleful presence.
For reasons no-one ever explained to me and I was too afraid to solicit, Marie’s chin rested permanently on her chest. To me, this poor, crippled girl seemed to have stepped out of one of the dark and menacing folktales I consumed from the local library.
Betty, who walked with a limp resulting from botched surgery after a factory accident, seemed to be herself a child in a broken adult body. On my visits she would baffle me by urging me to admire her latest acquisition, some tawdry piece of plastic jewellery from Woolworth’s or the like, which she would hold out to be shown off, as does a five-year-old, with undiscriminating pride.
No one ever explained to me that Betty suffered what would nowadays probably be called a ‘learning disability’. Occasionally my mother would murmur that she was ‘simple’, but bewilderingly everyone else seemed to treat her as a perfectly competent adult just given to doing extremely stupid things which exasperated them — and caused them to shout at her as if she was capable of rational response.
To everyone’s astonishment and no small consternation, in late middle age she married an elderly male pen-friend who seemed almost as ‘simple’ as she was. Unsurprisingly, he also moved in with Booba.
Later, after both her mother and husband had died, Betty would occasionally set fire to her flat when she was lighting candles to inaugurate the Sabbath. My father would come off the phone after an urgent call about her latest calamity and put his head in his hands. I wept both for him and for the sister over whom he was always in such impotent anguish.
The person with whom he would have these painful phone conversations was his other sister, Sally, who lived next door to Booba and her ménage. Ostensibly Sally, her husband, and their two sons lived an independent life – but in reality, Sally was bound to her mother and her controlling demands with hoops of steel.
The walls between the two flats seemed entirely permeable; not only were Sally and family constantly shuttling next door, but these lives seemed inextricably welded together. And this permeability seemed to extend to the little flat in Hammersmith where my parents and I lived.
Virtually every cough, sneeze, stomachache, headache, earache, ingrown toenail or bout of indigestion experienced in Swiss Cottage was conveyed to my father. He would then report all this in doom-laden tones, plus Booba’s latest demands, to my mother, who would smoulder with the suppressed fury that so frightened me — and would then dispense advice and suggestions to smooth away all the problems, which would be conveyed back to Swiss Cottage.
My mother, Mabel, was the problem solver. She was governed by one overriding imperative – to keep the family peace. She would rage at my father, but then she would swallow her fury and do whatever was required to prevent her greatest dread, a broiges, or family feud. Her terror that anger might drive any of us apart appeared to derive from the pathological guilt she suffered. If someone else in the family – her entire world — behaved badly, she simply couldn’t cope with the guilt she would inescapably feel if this resulted in division. And so she would put aside her own wishes and do whatever was necessary to pacify her mother-in-law, avoid family feuds at all costs and make my father content.
From infancy onwards, I would observe all this and silently grieve. It was all so horribly unfair. Bad deeds were not just going unpunished but were even being rewarded. My mother was being martyred, and my father was allowing this to happen. He himself was being bullied and was weakly giving in. Why couldn’t he be a proper grown-up and look after my mother instead of having her run after his family?
The answer was that my father was also consumed by guilt. He felt that by marrying Mabel and living a few miles away from his family he had escaped, and so he had to do his bit. But to me he had not escaped at all. To me he had been turned into a shadow of a husband and a nonexistent father. He seemed incapable of autonomous action. Physically present in my daily life, as my other parent he just wasn’t there.
In fact, to my childish eyes, fathers throughout my family just ‘weren’t there’. Not that anyone was divorced or a single parent as they are today — my family was a solidly nuclear, traditional sort. But the fathers tended to be bossed around as if they were children, treated like imbeciles -- if they even existed at all.
My mother’s father had died well before I was born. My father’s father died when I was a tiny child. I b
elieve they were both meek, gentle men. Both my grandmothers were strong women who laid down the law. My maternal grandmother was often referred to admiringly by other members of the family as ‘the matriarch’. Various uncles appeared to be generally squashed by their wives from whom they retreated for a quiet life. And my own father — well, unfortunately he seemed to me to be just a shell. Treated by his mother as if he owed her the duties of a husband, and by his wife as if he were a helpless infant, he simply didn’t figure in my childish universe other than as a benign but entirely passive presence.
I loved my father very much — he was gentle, kind, and innocent. And he had a great sense of humour. I always looked forward to hearing what had happened to him during his working day, stories he unloaded every evening upon my mother and me, which generally featured scheming bosses who lived in expensive houses, the gossipy customers for the ladies’ clothing he sold from a van, and Nazi-style traffic wardens. But his apparent powerlessness and the way he seemed always to be trampled upon upset me very badly. It gave me a lifelong passion to stand up for the vulnerable — and it also provided me with the insight that sometimes the vulnerable can be ill-served by those who appear closest to them.
I don’t remember my father’s father, my zaida, at all, even though I was four years old when he died.
What I do remember is my father’s reaction to his death, as I peeped from the doorway to see him sitting at the dining table with a glass of whisky, crying. I realised something truly terrible had happened. I had never seen my father drink whisky during the day before, and I had certainly never seen him cry. But I wasn’t allowed to go to him. My mother’s reaction to grief, as it was to rage, was to pretend it didn’t exist.
I was not allowed to see anyone being ‘upset’. When we visited a house where a family was sitting shiva — the seven days of mourning observed in traditional Jewish households for a relative who has died — I was invariably left in the car, supplied with sandwiches and books, for the hour or so my parents were inside. It was the same with death itself. No one ever died. They simply vanished. ‘Very sad news’, my mother would announce, ‘about Great-Uncle or Great-Auntie So-and-So’. And she would shake her head sorrowfully. What the sad news was, she never said; but of course I knew. And I also knew that death and distress were to be erased from existence.
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