Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  “She’s got David to keep her warm and safe.”

  “I told you that’s over and done with!” Miriam flashed. “Why do you keep giving me digs about it?”

  “It was the last thing on my mind, Miriam. And I don’t think I ever have done. Why should I?”

  They walked along in silence for a moment, pushing their heavy prams. Esther had Arnold as well as Marianne in hers.

  “I’m sorry, Esther, it’s just that…” Miriam hesitated. “Well in a way that’s how David looks at life and it reminded me. We’d’ve been miserable as sin together, he was right to finish with me. Bessie’s the right kind of wife for him, but I think it’s sad.”

  “What is?”

  “The way neither of them can help being how they are.”

  Chapter 3

  Bessie was the first of the family to have a housemaid. After the General Strike, young girls from the Yorkshire and Northumberland mining villages were sent into service by their poverty-stricken parents and many came to Manchester. They were paid five shillings a week and those who found jobs in Jewish homes lived en famille, often remaining to become pillars of the families with whom they had settled in their youth.

  Lizzie Wilson was only fifteen when Bessie engaged her in 1927, but more capable than her employer. She quickly took Shirley and the new baby Ronald under her wing and accompanied them to the Sabbath gatherings, which set David’s children apart still more.

  Sarah let her wash the dishes and had no need to supervise her a second time; she followed Bessie’s instructions scrupulously, as careful not to confuse the dish-rag and tea towel with those used for meat plates as if she had been Jewish herself. Everyone liked her and thought David and Bessie had found themselves a gem.

  Only Miriam viewed it differently. To her, Lizzie was a status symbol. “He’s got the maid, even if he hasn’t got the house in Cheshire yet,” she said to Sammy recalling how she had ridiculed David’s aspirations.

  “D’you wish you could have one?” Sammy asked casually, but his expression had clouded as it always did when she referred to the past.

  Miriam’s green eyes darkened to charcoal. Then they blazed. “That’ll be the day, when I pay someone to fetch and carry for me!” It was Thursday and she swept into the scullery to complete her pre-Sabbath chores.

  Sammy’s life with her was not undiluted joy, but he had not expected it to be and still considered himself fortunate to have married her. She had never really been his, even in their most intimate moments, and had seemed even less so since Martin was born.

  Their son obsessed her and sometimes Sammy worried about the effect of this on the child when he grew older. But Martin was not really like an only child, he reassured himself. With his three cousins just across the entry there was a limit to how much Miriam was able to cosset him.

  Miriam returned to the kitchen with a basin of carrots and sat at the table to talk to him whilst she scraped and sliced them, ready for tomorrow’s tsimmes. “I wish you didn’t work for David,” she said feelingly.

  Sammy looked taken aback. “Don’t be daft, love. He’s my brother. And there’s no other work I could do, is there?”

  She watched him painstakingly carving a block of wood. He was making book ends for Nathan. “Isn’t there?”

  He continued chipping away with the knife, without replying. The book ends were to be shaped like owls, a memento for Nathan of his schooldays which would soon be behind him; the school badge was an owl. The first one was finished and stood on the table, its perfectly wrought curves a delight to the eye.

  “Who says there isn’t?” Miriam persisted. She wiped her hands on her apron and ran her fingers gently over the wooden owl’s rippled surface which looked like delicate brown feathers. “What a mug you are, Sammy,” she said resuming scraping the carrots. Her husband was an artist and he didn’t know it.

  “I thought of being a cabinet maker once, Miriam.”

  “When?”

  “When I was a lad. I thought I’d do that when I left school.”

  “Why didn’t you, Sammy?”

  “David said people who make furniture have to lug heavy blocks of wood around and what did I want to let myself in for that for?”

  “It’s a pity he didn’t say what he really meant.” Miriam was tight-lipped. “He does to everyone else, but he never has to you. It was because of your leg he didn’t want you to do it.”

  “I know, love.” Other people asked if his leg hurt, but David never mentioned it. Sometimes he thought it bothered David more than it did him.

  “David likes to run people’s lives for them,” Miriam said bitterly.

  “What if he does? He helps them, doesn’t he?”

  “Does he?”

  “David knows what’s best for people.”

  “You mean he thinks he does.”

  “Look what he’s doing for our Nat and he’s been doing it for years. Nat never had to do a spare time job like David did. Me neither.”

  Miriam laughed harshly. “Some doctor that kid’s going to be! Your little brother was in here the other day when I pricked my finger on a needle and he nearly fainted. But he’s going to study medicine because David says so!”

  “So he won’t be a surgeon.”

  “You’re telling me he won’t!”

  They fell silent and avoided looking at each other.

  Was Miriam still in love with David? Sammy wondered. She had never talked about him openly before since their marriage, though she sometimes referred to the past in a general way.

  “I know what you’re wondering, but you’re wrong. It’s you I’m thinking of, Sammy,” she told him. “And if you don’t know that by now, I’m sorry for you.”

  She had not said she loved him, but her words moved him nevertheless and he got up and went to kiss her cheek, then stood behind her chair with his hands on her shoulders. “You mean the world to me, Miriam,” he said emotionally. “But so does David and I’ve a lot to thank him for.” Not even she could turn him against the brother who’d protected him all his life. He knew she’d been trying to tell him it would have been better if David hadn’t done so. But you couldn’t turn back the clock. Things were the way they were and it was too late to think of how they might have been.

  “I know he means well,” Miriam said. “But sometimes it’s the people who mean well who do the most damage.”

  Sammy closed his mind to what she was implying. “He’s never done me any damage. Just the opposite. So I don’t enjoy working at the factory, who can expect work to be pleasure?” He spent his days trying to do what was asked of him, aware of his own incompetence, waiting for the evening to come so he could go home. But a job was a job and Salaman would have sacked him the first week had it not been for David. He was damn lucky to have a job.

  “Fool!” Miriam exclaimed.

  He returned to his chair with the word stinging his ears.

  She calmed down and watched him resume carving the owl. Their house was full of his work, lovingly executed. A stool and a horse on wheels for Martin. A fruit bowl with a bunch of grapes hewn in the centre, so perfect that she would not hide it by filling it with fruit. Candlesticks and a trinket set for their bedroom. The workbox on legs which was also a table, used every day. He had come a long way since he began making dolls out of firewood for herself and Esther.

  “Such beautiful things you make, Sammy,” she said softly.

  “But they don’t pay the bills, do they, love? A job’s how you earn your living, a hobby’s just what you enjoy doing at home.”

  Miriam sighed and began slicing the carrots.

  Bessie had become a lady of leisure. Except for the cooking, she did nothing in the house. Lizzie Wilson raced through the chores with the energy which came naturally to her and the gratitude she felt showed in her work. David and Bessie had rescued her from the dire straits of Denaby Main and given her a good home. It did not enter her head that she was being exploited, but it sometimes entered David’s.
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  “Have another fish ball,” he would say to her at the supper table and Bessie would frown at him. She did not have his compassion for the underprivileged.

  Acquiring a maid had enhanced Bessie’s delusions of grandeur. She would have given Lizzie her meals in the scullery, but did not suggest it because she knew David would not allow it.

  Shirley and Ronald loved Lizzie. She was tall and angular, but somehow exuded maternity from every pore and was fiercely partisan about “her” children. Her plain, freckled face lit up when she looked at them and she was always telling Shirley how much prettier she was than her cousin Marianne. She knew how to crochet and made dresses of silk, trimmed with rabbit wool, for both little girls, but Shirley’s were worked in a fancier design.

  In the afternoons, Lizzie took the children to Heaton Park, or played with them in the house if it was raining and Bessie used her new freedom to improve her appearance. She had her hair bobbed and shopped in town for fashionable dresses, paying for them with the money her father gave to her.

  She would pop into Fuller’s for tea and encounter acquaintances who also had maids and plenty of leisure time. A new kind of life opened up for her and she learned from the women who lived it.

  “Why don’t we go to the State Café on Saturday night?” she asked David one evening. “Like other people do.”

  David looked up from the Daily Dispatch, which he had not yet had time to read and noticed that his wife had painted her fingernails red and was carefully made up. Her dress was the latest style. The short, pleated skirt revealed her thick calves and the new hairstyle didn’t suit her large features, but nobody could say she didn’t look fashionable and well turned out. When did the transformation take place? This was the first time he’d noticed it.

  “What did you say?” he asked her, shocked by the knowledge that he could live in the same house, sleep in the same bed and be unaware that she had changed. It was not just her looks, but her whole demeanour, as though she was wearing a new personality as well as new clothes.

  “I want to start enjoying myself, the way everyone else does,” she told him.

  David laughed uneasily. He felt as if he was suddenly confronted by a stranger. “Who’s this everyone you keep talking about?”

  She mentioned some of her recently acquired friends and how she spent her afternoons with them. She had not done so before in case he would disapprove of the children always being left with Lizzie, but knew she must tell him sometime if they were to become part of “the crowd.” The other women saw each other in the evenings, too, gossiping in each other’s houses whilst their husbands played cards together in another room, or going somewhere special in a group, dressed up to the nines.

  “What’s the good of me having my hair done and buying new frocks if nobody ever sees them?” she said petulantly.

  “Since when was I nobody?”

  “Don’t be daft, David!” She put her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

  Lizzie did not live en famille in the evenings, they sat in the parlour and left her to darn and iron in the kitchen, which Bessie had been advised to do by her new friends.

  “But while we’re sitting here by ourselves, other people are out having a nice time,” she informed him and flung herself onto the sofa, bored and restless.

  “When I get home from work I’m too tired to go anywhere, love,” David replied. Letting her have a maid had been a mistake, she was getting big ideas. But a fine one he was to think that! His were bigger than hers.

  “If we had a car you wouldn’t have to walk anywhere, or go by tram,” she pointed out. “All my friends’ husbands’ve got cars, they’ve had them for ages.”

  “How can they afford them, the way business is?”

  “I don’t know. But they manage it.”

  The implied rebuke was too much for David and he lost his temper. “I believe in making sure I can walk before I ride, Bessie! And it’s not just cars I’m talking about!”

  “But you can still pay wages to your good-for-nothing brother!” She did not know he also gave money to his mother every week. “All the nice things I have get bought by my dad. What’ve I got out of being married to you?”

  David felt sick. “Aren’t Shirley and Ronald anything?”

  “I’m talking about things, not children!” She got up and put a jazz record on the gramophone.

  David rose from his chair and knocked the needle sideways with his balled fist.

  The violence of the movement frightened Bessie, but she stood her ground. “If you won’t buy us a car so we can start going out to enjoy ourselves, I’ll ask my dad to.”

  David’s fury subsided into cold acceptance. “Why not?” he said roughly. “He bought me, so let him buy you the car, too.”

  Bessie choked back a sob and rushed from the room. He heard her go upstairs into their bedroom, slamming the door so hard it reverberated through the house.

  Lizzie came in from the kitchen and looked at him anxiously. “Is summat t’matter, Mr. Sandberg?”

  David noticed her workworn hands, red raw from cleaning his home and washing his family’s clothes, the way his wife’s hands had sometimes looked before Lizzie came. But it was not possible to reach the heights to which he aspired without stepping on other people. Life was a ladder and those who got to the top could only do so by using the ones at the bottom. You had to be in one class or the other and he’d decided long ago where he belonged.

  “Whatever is it? You look dreadful, Mr. Sandberg.” Lizzie sounded terrified.

  David managed to smile. “Just a lovers’ quarrel, Lizzie.”

  She eyed him reproachfully. “Don’t tell me you’n t missis ’as been ’avin’ words? You should be like me’n count yer blessins every night. It’d do yer ’eart good. Don’t let me ever ’ear you two at it rowin’, or I’ll be tellin’ you ’ow lucky you both are!”

  Lizzie marched back to the kitchen, leaving David close to tears.

  “Why d’you give Lizzie work to do in the evenings?” he asked Bessie when he went upstairs to bed.

  “She doesn’t mind,” Bessie snapped.

  That’s the trouble, David thought. But when they start minding they get like Mendel. You couldn’t have it both ways, as he’d told himself before.

  “You’re too soft with that girl!” Bessie said sharply. “She must think you’re crackers, the way you won’t let her clean your shoes.”

  This was David’s way of expressing that he would not allow servility to sink below a certain level. But he was only expressing it to himself and he was not sure why. Perhaps because his own beginnings were similar to where Lizzie stood now, he mused, and part of him would always remain rooted where he began. His children would not have the same attitude. How could they when he was making sure they had no reason to?

  “Are we going to the State on Saturday night, or not?” Bessie inquired in a surly voice. “You have to book a table.”

  “Whatever you want, love,” he said tonelessly. The socialising she desired was no different from having a maid, just one more facet of the pattern his ambition had set for them.

  Chapter 4

  Sandbergs were not the only immigrant family who had struggled to educate a bright son and Nathan began his medical studies with his friend Lou Benjamin and several other Jewish students.

  Lou now lived around the corner from Nathan and they went to enrol at Manchester University together, their necks swathed in the distinctive blue and gold scarves which proclaimed they were not just college boys, but future doctors. Lou, who was proud of this, flaunted his scarf like a flag and kept looking around on the tram to see if anyone had noticed it. Nathan sat gloomily beside him, full of trepidation which increased when they alighted on Oxford Road and made their way to the imposing seat of learning which would be their second home for the next six years.

  “Pull yourself together, you shmuck!” Lou instructed. “Look, the Infirmary’s just down the road. All those beautiful nurses!” he adde
d with an anticipatory smile.

  “Think there’ll be any Jewish ones?” Nathan asked trying to cheer himself up.

  Lou winked. “Listen, what the eye doesn’t see.”

  “Your mother should only hear you,” Nathan said as they passed beneath the archway into the university quadrangle and entered their student life.

  The amount of personal equipment a medical student required had astounded David, but he had bought it for his brother nevertheless and gone with him to select it. He had also had a desk and a bookcase delivered to his parents’ home for Nathan and had arranged for a gas fire to be installed in his bedroom to make the long hours of study ahead more comfortable.

  Nathan knew he should feel grateful, but the only emotion aroused in him was shame because he did not. When all his new possessions were in place, everyone trooped upstairs from the Sabbath tea party to inspect the room, even Lizzie Wilson. The bookcase was already full of text books, but his personal reading matter, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Plato and Socrates, the poems of Catullus and other treasured volumes reposed on the desk between Sammy’s twin owls.

  David’s instinct was to tell him to put them away, but something stopped him from doing so. Perhaps the books were to Nathan what the orange-box was to himself, a reminder of what was not to be, but some kind of comfort all the same.

  Also on the desk was the costly microscope, the skull and the stethoscope, Sarah’s pen and inkwell which she had brought from Russia and never used, a small leather attaché case from the Moritzes and two fountain pens, one from Esther and Ben, the other from Salaman. Everyone had given him something, but Nathan could still not feel anything but shame.

  “It reminds me of our doctor’s surgery!” Lizzie exclaimed when she saw the stethoscope.

  “Well my brother-in-law’s going to be a doctor,” Bessie informed her proudly and the maid looked awed.

  Nathan’s glory was already reflecting on the family, but only Miriam noticed the strained expression on his sensitive face.