The North of England Home Service

by Gordon Burn

  Jack, the archetypal alrightnik, liked a good villain. And, if they were respectful, then, seated behind his desk and talking around a large cigar, he would express sympathy, ask encouraging questions, and finally tell them that everything possible would be done. If necessary, toes could be stepped on.

  But if one of the desirous ones was pushy, antagonistic, demanding instead of imploring inside his teddy-bear coat, or if they were bold enough to be critical of Mr Solomons, to blame him for their problems, he would rub his hands together, harder and harder. In a long, difficult meeting, his hands would get raw. His voice would grow lower, softer, and the corner of his mouth would turn down. At this point, those who knew him would back off. They knew what was next. But the foolhardy would mistake his lowered voice for nervousness or weakness. Then he’d blow and it came in a frantic roar which made its way to the bookies hanging around the telephone box on the corner and had the Windmill girls holding their pretty beringed little fingers over their pretty little rhinestoned ears in mock shock and alarm.

  It had been a red-letter day for Jackie when he had climbed aboard his bike and directed himself towards the club the hustling matchmaker Mr Solomons had made in that funny little building in Devonshire Street in Hackney, sevenpence in the balcony, one shilling downstairs, the big promoters in on Sunday mornings, sitting at the ringside eating kippers and watching the boxing. Jackie’s brief amateur career had ended with a suspension at fourteen for taking ten shillings for a bout in Chatteris. He had enjoyed a string of victories against small-timers for small pay at the Dev, and Mr Solomons was coming round to the opinion that there was something a bit right about Jackie. Only he couldn’t believe this boy skedaddling on his bicycle back home to the sticks every time without even seeing the inside of the new shower bath he had gone to such great lengths and nearly done his money (so he claimed) to install. So Jolly Jack had a notion. He put forward a plan.

  Mr Solomons loved and doted on his aged mother who, when he was a year and a half, had joined the wagon trains of Jews with pushcarts leaving Eastern Europe and trundled him out of her marshes village in White Russia. Judah, Booba’s husband, had arrived first with other landsmen from the village, and had found employment in a rag factory, sorting rags, a filthy, terrible job, and then as a cap-maker in a workshop in the East End. He had been able to save enough money to rent two small rooms above a wardrobe-dealer in Pearl Street, Spitalfields, behind the Cambridge music-hall. A couple of years later they had moved a few streets north, to two rooms in a teeming, dark, three-storeyed tenement, only ever called ‘the Buildings’. There, Booba started to take in work for Bryant and May’s, making matchboxes. Bryant and May supplied the labels and the pieces of cardboard. She had to buy the paste – flour and water and a bit of soap – out of what she earned. There were strips of sandpaper to stick on. The work was paid daily, and Jack or one of his brothers and sisters – in the final there were six of them: Jack, Maxie, Barney, Harriet, Asher and Cissie – would take the matchboxes into the receiving depot in Bacon Street for their mother. In later years, the girls would buy lace curtains in Caledonian Road and sell them or rent them for sixpence a week to the neighbours, but they never had more than the two rooms for all of them.

  By the late forties and Jackie’s arrival, Judah Solomons was dead. Jack’s brothers and his sisters, like him, had taken a step up in the world and moved away from the old East End. Not very far away: only to the double-fronted houses and two-car garages of Stamford Hill and Hendon which they had decorated in the new-style goy way. But, try as they may to persuade her, Booba had resolved to end her days in the Buildings and was determined that she couldn’t be budged. So, in truth, lodging Jackie with his mother was a very Jolly Jack way of filleting several herrings at the same time.

  For sure, exchanging the flat and empty fenland he had grown up surrounded by for the stewed enclosure of the tenement came as a jolt to Jackie’s system. The whole court or alley – it was an L-shaped cul-de-sac – had been congested to a small dimension and was about a hundred years old. It was surrounded by the backs of two timber yards and the railway arches. It seemed that the Council was not proud of the Buildings and had encouraged the builders to hide them from the public view so that not even the sunlight could brighten the gloom. The only entrance to the alley was in Brick Lane. A pub called the Jane Shore had made a small passage into the Buildings so that the people could get their beer from the Jane. This passage formed a perfect escape route for the many thieves who began to rob passers-by of their purses, watch-chains and other valuables, although anybody who carried the Solomons name or was known to be able to call on the Solomons brand of retribution was exempted from these activities. The pickpockets (called ‘whizzes’) and the gonifs, as the Jews called common thieves, hung around the entry to the Buildings and the back of the Jane. And what impressed Jackie most was the conceit and vanity of their characters. First and foremost everybody wanted to be regarded as belonging to the highest ranks of the criminal fraternity when all they mostly were was a collection of small-time, coarse and common grober yung ripe for any mischief.

  Before the war, Jackie would have been the only yock in the Buildings. But now there were other non-Jews, Romanies and Irish who used bottles and shiv knives against each other and bred cage birds and vicious pocket-sized terrier dogs for sale on Sunday mornings in Club Row. It was a quiet night when the peace was disturbed by only one eruption of goyishe midas – one eruption of screaming and the exercising of very foul tongues.

  But Booba – her given name was Lenah, but nobody had said the name Lenah in her hearing for very many years – was feather-bedded too deep in her memories to hear. To step into the two rooms she had shared with her husband and her children and filled with her smell and her spirit and her life for fifty years was to step back into the Russian shtetl of 1904, or even 1804. Town called Pridneprovsk. Minsk region. Pripet Marshes.

  Booba had always been happy to deny herself the delights of freedom and the possibilities of the city; outside the home, the focus of her existence was the shut, the synagogue. She informed herself of what was happening locally through the pages of the Yiddish daily paper, Di Tsayt, which ceased publication soon after Jackie moved in to live with her, in 1950. Booba had a dark face, black eyes, vigorous hair. Her old-country Jewish dignity was very firm and strong.

  She had been born in a small wooden house with caulk walls and a stove chimney and the icy press of space bearing down on all four walls. She had been able to construct Minsk region, period of the May Laws, of the pogroms and persecution, with the beads, the mantel ornaments, the brasswork in the fender, the eight-branched candlestick on the mantelpiece, the linoleum-green blinds.

  This was especially the case on Friday evenings when Booba’s children and in time her grandchildren returned to the old home before the Sabbath came in. Then she would light the candles and bring the fish and plaited bread she had prepared and Jackie, feeling not at all mishpochah yet but strange and like an intruder, ignorant of the words and the manners, what to eat with this, when to sit and when to stand, would squeeze a chair up to the table wearing unfamiliar new clothes and watch while Booba stood up to cover her face with her apron and say grace.

  On high holidays again all Booba’s children would come home, although these were always times of stressfulness and ripe for misunderstanding. Before the Day of Atonement every year, for an example, Mr Solomons resolved to take Booba to pay respects at the grave of her husband, his father. But always something intervened. A deal. A lunch. A transatlantic call he had to be there to take. He would send a car with a driver around to one of his sisters, and Harriet or Cissie, with their children if they were available, would go with Booba to the cemetery in Golders Green and look out from the maple interior-veneered Armstrong-Siddeley (Booba smelled stale cigarette odour in the upholstery; noted the slovenly smears on the window) with their mother’s flinty, disdainful eye. She always brought a bunch of blue carnations and the late Judah Solomo
ns’ prayer shawl with its black stripes and shredding fringes with her on this day of visiting the dead and forgiving the living – forgiving and asking forgiveness.

  Jack would make it to the Great Synagogue on the corner of Fournier Street for the Kol Nidre service with wine and whisky on his breath, and then make his way along Brick Lane in the dark past the ‘brides’ as the prostitutes at that end of the Lane were known, coat collar up, trilby down, tea-rose wilted, to try to make a respectable show of eating (having already repleted himself at Murray’s or the Ivy) the old-country food his adorable, demanding mother had prepared.

  On the nights Jackie went home with Greta and catnapped at the gym, Booba would make a show of ignoring him and be distant for a while. But sooner or later, he knew, she would appear and slide a plate of biscuits and pickles or challah bread with cold mutton with chrayn in front of him and then retreat to her chair to watch him eating, wagging a finger when he chanced to glance in her direction. He was her lobbes then, her lovely rascal. And she would call him this fondly before she retired for the night. She slept in a corner alcove on a high bed which she had to raise herself on to backwards, her crochet shawl around her shoulders, her side hair in plaits. She pulled a curtain across with a deep sigh before she went to sleep.

  Booba couldn’t of course countenance to see Jackie fight. But on fight nights when he came back to her from the Dev she would fuss around him, running her fingers over the nicks and bruises on his face, turning his hands over in her hands, tsking over the purple and yellow patches that were already appearing, blooming and spreading, caressing the hurt-delivering, hurting reddened knuckles. Examination over, she would direct him to the table where a starched snowy cloth would have been draped, half folded, over the fireplace end and set for one. Then she would proceed to feed him the meal of Yiddisher food that she had deduced to be his favourite – matzo-meal dumplings in soup, the sweet carrot stew called tsimmes, apple strudel – until he would go oy-oy-oy and ay-ay-ay and Booba would blush and beam to see him becoming native vayttshepl in her caring.

  Booba’s Buildings were famed locally for being the tenement where the great welterweight champion of the twenties, Ted Kid Lewis, had grown up. Lewis, born Solomon Mendeloff, had started at the world-renowned ‘Wonderland’ only a short step away, and gone on to become one of the most popular British fighters ever seen in North America. From America, news of his fabulous exploits – his epic series of battles with Jack Britton, his car crashes with chorus girls – winged their way home, and he became an idol and nothing less to the young Jews of White-chapel, and a famous figure out in the wider goyim world. He appeared in advertisements, penned columns, punched a golden bag and skipped silken ropes twice nightly and three times on Saturdays for Stoll Moss Empires, and amassed a considerable fortune. For a while he was everywhere, and knew everybody, and everything he loaned his name and his gold-toothed image to prospered.

  Booba remembered this little Mendeloff as prost, utterly common, and reserved her right not to join her neighbours on the open staircases and common areas of her Buildings to see the conquering hero return in his white fedora and diamond stickpin and his white gangster suit and spats, his middle girded in multiple gaudy Lonsdale belts. Booba was orthodox and old school in this as in all else and referred Jack and his cheering brothers and squealing sisters, who for the occasion had somehow acquired an illustrated cover of Boxing magazine dated 1915 which bore the caption ‘Kid Lewis, his new coiffure, his golden smile, and Zalig Goodman, his guide and supervisor’, when she could get them finally on their own away from the kocheleffel and the vulgar mayhem, to the teachings of the rabbinical authorities and the rules of their religion which condemned sport in general as a pagan activity and decreed that striking the Other and shedding blood was mores of the heathen. Jewish fighters were ‘bums’ or ‘tramps’. To respectable Jews such as she was and they were, such men were to be considered a not-to-go-near area and an embarrassment.

  Her effectiveness may be judged by the fact that Mrs Solomons’ little boy, as the potentate cutely liked to refer to himself in later years, by the early thirties had spaded his fishmongering profits into the Devonshire Sporting Club accommodated in an old church building in Devonshire Street, Hackney. It was perhaps to reassure his mother in the matter of his moral probity that, for years after he was established, by virtue of his control of the heavyweight championship, as the world’s ‘fistic Parnassus’ and set up as a big-shot in the West End, he continued to rise at four o’clock every morning and invite anti-social odours to swarm on to him by putting on a white store coat and white Wellingtons to wade amongst the guts and entrails amongst slabbed and bucketed smelly freshwater fish. ‘They’re all alive!’ was Jack’s famous shout, which could have been the shout of the doormen at the strip clubs and clip joints that were his near neighbours in Soho. ‘They’re lovely!’

  Booba’s misgivings about the little Mendeloff Yiddle were borne out when Kid Lewis became associated with Oswald Mosley’s ‘New Party’ in the thirties and stood as a fascist candidate in East London. By the end of the war, though, he had been put on the payroll of Solomons Promotions and was functioning as Jolly Jack’s aide-de-camp and right-hand man. Lewis, sometimes known as the ‘Sphinx’ for his cruelly sharp wedge face and his narrow eyes that never betrayed elation, was still unpredictable and in condition at fifty. And, Windmill girls and hangovers permitting, he would climb through the ropes to do some sparring and shadowing and put Jackie and some of the other fighters in the lower divisions through their paces at the Great Windmill Street gym. ‘You still look tough‚’ Jackie, cruciate and medial ligaments untorn and intact, ambitions undaunted, congratulated the Kid. ‘Tougher than a night in jail‚’ came the reply just like that accompanied by an armour-plated 24-carat grin.

  One day in 1948, when he had just turned eighteen, Jackie was summoned by the gymnasium major domo Nat Sellers and instructed to shower and be ready to accompany the boss and his sidekick Lewis on an errand in two shakes of a lamb’s tail if not sooner and make it snappy. Jackie threw himself down the flights of chipped stone stairs with his hair still wet and his shirt-tails flying. He ran against the stream of up-coming traffic still headed for the heavy wooden door of the outer office marked ‘BUSINESS ONLY’: boxers, managers, referees, rival promoters, matchmakers, doctors, actors, politicians, police, nobility, respectable citizens, spivs and drones. They had all come soliciting Mr Solomons, to bend his ear, to seek a favour; and Mr Solomons had asked apparently particularly for him, hick from the sticks who didn’t know night from day it seemed about just a minute ago or (this was Mr Solomons’ personal assessment of how wet Jackie was behind the ears) how many has-beens make five. The boss and Kid Lewis had already taken their places in the back of the car when he reached pavement level. The Kid was holding one of the thick plaited leather straps, legs crossed, pinkie ring glinting; Mr Solomons, Havana’d and hatted, was leaning forward having a conversation with the driver, who was seated beyond a sliding glass partition. Jackie let himself in on the driver’s side and took one of the kick seats which, through an ingenious arrangement, could be set facing backward towards the passengers or forward towards the driver and turned out to be covered in a luxurious soft velvet with leather piped between the ridges. The carpet was pale and deep and luxurious and Jackie watched with pleasure as his feet sunk down into it, displacing each immaculately valeted twist pile individually. He had elected to face away from Mr Solomons and Mr Lewis so as to vouchsafe their privacy. But as the big car purred – this was the word; the rough world was a mute pantomime going about its rumbustious business on the other side of the thick, slightly green-tinted glass – Jackie could see the two important men into whose circle fate had brought him, facing away from each other, communicating with their individual thoughts, reflected in the sliding glass panel behind the driver.

  It was a glorious early-summer late morning at that time when pleasure motoring continued to be curtailed because of the rationing
on petrol, and they glided through St James’s and along the Mall in the direction of Westminster virtually unimpeded, with the whole of London laid out about them. The gold and blue leonine Standard was flying at the Palace and people were relaxing in deckchairs in the park and the air on that morning it seemed to Jackie was marked with the sense of anti-climax at having survived all around.

  It was only when they had crossed Westminster Bridge into Lambeth and then Vauxhall that he started to notice the craters, sometimes crudely walled off behind advertising hoardings, and the bomb sites with groups of wild-looking children playing on them, lush and overgrown with weeds. South London was unexplored territory to Jackie and so unlike the West End and Whitechapel and other parts that he was growing to know as to not seem part of London at all.

  In their stately way, like royalty themselves in these surroundings, they cruised past war-scarred streets and blighted buildings, Mr Solomons taking the occasional nip from a silver flask which Jackie knew contained whisky combined with milk for his ulcer problem (‘I need a stiff milk!’ was one of the boss’s jokes guaranteed to get his regular court yokking and laughing), and Kid Lewis would take a more animated slug from his own smooth silver flask shaped to curve with his upper body and not conflict with the drape line of his jacket. And watching them by their reflections – Mr Solomons so brainy intelligent and well fed even through all these war-time restrictions; the Kid, who never wore shoes until he was ten years old and seldom had enough to eat and whose face was still all hollows and chalk-like and whose ribs when he was stripped still stood out like dulcimer keys – watching them then Jackie was moved to see these two products of the Brick Lane Buildings who had taken such steps up and wore the clothes and rode in the purring car that showed the world by what increments they had bettered themselves. It made Jackie, now a denizen of the Buildings himself, fasten on with hope to the coming prospect of his own future and reflect on the small rewards he had staggered home to his father with as an amateur boxer – glassware, canteens of cutlery, and so on; on one occasion a huge armful of leather-bound volumes of the poets, from Milton to Masefield – and were still there gathering dust in his old house in the empty Fens now as far as he knew.