Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “Jews believe in thanking God with a smile on their faces,” she told Mrs. Ellis and thought of the young refugees singing and dancing on the beach that morning, despite the horror they had experienced in Germany. “Life was meant to be enjoyed,” she added recalling that Rabbi Lensky had once said this.

  Mrs. Ellis was regarding her with pursed lips, but Marianne did not care, she had made up her mind. “We’re going to the Chanukah party tonight whether you like it or not,” she declared and went upstairs to join her cousin.

  Shirley was sitting on the bed, sketching an unflattering portrait of Mrs. Ellis.

  “Do you still want to go to art school?” Marianne asked her. Much as she disliked Shirley, she had to admit that her sketches were very good.

  Shirley exaggerated the mole on Mrs. Ellis’s nose with a vindictive jab of her pencil, then gazed through the tiny, latticed window at the cobblestone area behind the terraced cottages, where the water pumps and lavatories were situated.

  “It depends on how long the war lasts. What’s the use of making plans?” she said with the practicality Marianne had learned was part of her nature. “If it goes on long enough, I’ll have to work in a munitions factory or something. And so will you.”

  Marianne lay down on the white-counterpaned, black-iron bedstead. The only decoration that relieved the room’s austerity was an embroidered tapestry bearing the words “Home Sweet Home”. And even that was black and white. Why did she have to be here? In this home that wasn’t a home. Cut off not just from those she loved, but from the chance to study, to qualify for university.

  She quelled her resentment and made herself think about Hannah’s advice. That a person could rise above the circumstances in which they found themselves. Marianne had applied this to being at the wrong school and had begun to do well there. She must do the same in her new circumstances. Become a writer without going to college and getting an English degree.

  The resolve stirred her from her lethargy. “Let’s go out before Mrs. Ellis turfs us out,” she said briskly to Shirley.

  They returned to the beach, hoping to find the young refugees there again, but only a collarless dog with a sad look on its face was there to greet them.

  “Who else but a homeless mongrel and us would be out in this weather?” Shirley shivered, eating her half of the sticky bun they had just bought. “So you’ll wrap up warm and take an umbrella. And if you still catch a cold it’s better than getting blown up,” she added, mimicking her mother’s reply when told the girls had to be out of doors all day.

  “Our Marianne always did exaggerate,” Marianne said mimicking hers.

  “How many times a day can a person be expected to walk up and down a beach and round and round a village?” Shirley burst out. “I’ll go mad if I don’t get away from here!”

  “And I will if you keep on saying so.”

  Their misery was increased by a sudden hailstorm and they stood in silence for a moment, allowing the frozen white balls, which were almost the size of mint imperials, to bounce on and off them.

  “I’m going back to the cottage,” Shirley decided.

  “She won’t let us in.”

  “I wish her luck to keep me out.”

  To their surprise, Mrs. Ellis admitted them without a word and they went up to their bedroom without speaking to her.

  “She didn’t make us take our shoes off in the doorway, like she usually does,” Shirley remarked as they mounted the dark, narrow staircase.

  The reason for their landlady’s unprecedented laxity became apparent when they entered their room and saw their suitcases standing side by side on the floor. The drawers were open and empty to emphasize that their belongings had been packed.

  “We’re being shown the door,” Marianne smiled.

  But Shirley was not amused by the manner in which they were being ejected. “Like a couple of housemaids who’ve been caught stealing!” She rushed downstairs to tell Mrs. Ellis what she thought of her.

  Mrs. Ellis responded with a homily about Israelites who ignored the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah and went to pagan orgies.

  “Is she talking about us?” Shirley asked Marianne when it was over.

  Marianne giggled because the woman’s interpretation of Jews lighting Chanukah candles was so absurd. “We’re the only Israelites here, aren’t we?”

  “I phoned Mr. Sandberg from Jones-the-grocer’s and told him to come for you,” Mrs. Ellis informed them.

  “We’re not staying here another minute,” Shirley replied. “We’ll ring him up ourselves and tell him to collect us at the pagan orgy.”

  They fetched their suitcases and left the house.

  “I feel as if I’ve been let out of prison!” Shirley exclaimed ecstatically. “We’re going home, Marianne!”

  Marianne was all smiles, too. “Our parents’ll probably half-kill us for getting thrown out, but I don’t care.”

  “It’s their fault for sending us to live with an anti-Semite.”

  “Mrs. Ellis is an anti-everything,” Marianne declared halting to adjust the string of her gas-mask box, which she had slung hastily over one shoulder. Then she saw their reflections in the butcher’s shop window and knew she would never forget the incongruous sight of her smooth, black head and Shirley’s ruffled, red one, flanked by two dead pigs hanging from meat-hooks.

  But this whole being-evacuated experience was memorable, thought, as they lugged their heavy burdens along the high street in the swirl of snowflakes that had followed the hailstorm. Like a drab canvas spattered here and there with bright blobs of paint.

  She wouldn’t forget how the elms and oaks in the woods fringing the village had looked in autumn, either, with the sun lending them a last golden splendour before the wind came sweep their leaves away. Or the fresh smell of pine needles mingling with the salty tang of the sea. And the little beach where every pebble had become like a familiar face to her and where she’d sat scribbling in the September warmth. She would remember Mrs. Ellis spouting about Sodom and Gomorrah, too.

  They reached Jones-the-grocer’s, which was also the post office, and Shirley dumped her case beside Marianne and went inside to telephone her father.

  Marianne had halted when she did, but was not really aware of having done so, or of the layer of snow forming on her shoulders whilst she stood waiting. The stream of vivid recollections was still pouring forth. The minister in his tall, black hat and wing collar, standing sternly outside his chapel, like Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street preparing to chastise his children. Herself and Shirley wriggling and shrieking, with their hair and eyes full of soap-suds under the water pump. The musical sound of the Welsh language which was the villagers’ everyday tongue and Mrs. Ellis’s larder stocked for the war with nothing but pickled onions.

  Why has all this come into my head just now? she mused as Shirley emerged from the shop. And why was it tinged with regret?

  “Dad was about to leave, I just caught him in time,” Shirley said. “He wasn’t a bit cross and I’m sure your dad will say what he did. They wouldn’t leave us under an anti-Semitic roof for one more night.”

  One half of Marianne’s mind was thinking it was wrong of her cousin to have used that as an excuse; it was too easy for Jews to jump to that conclusion. The other half was answering the question she had just asked herself. Those random thoughts had been because the experience was nearly over, and it was time to store the memories away. But why she felt regretful, when she desperately wanted to go home, she could not understand.

  They began climbing the steep path up the hillside, which was a shorter way to the top than the winding lane used by vehicles.

  “Come on, will you!” Shirley shouted. “You’re always stopping to stare at things.”

  Marianne had paused to look down at the white-capped breakers pitting their might against the shore, and the village nestling snugly within its fringe of trees, like a tiny island cut off from the rest of the world. Perhaps people who lived in such an isolated
place couldn’t help being like the folk were here, she reflected. They’d made their own little community and wanted to keep it that way and had closed their minds so that nothing would change them.

  “People who don’t stop to look never see anything,” she retorted to Shirley, resuming the climb. She had just seen the village and its inhabitants from another point of view and was glad she had, because after today she would never see them again.

  The path grew steeper as they neared the hilltop and would have been a hard climb even had the girls not been burdened with suitcases. They reached the manor puffing and panting, and barely had strength to push open the heavy gates.

  Marianne peered up at a coat of arms on the rusting wrought iron and prickled with excitement as they set off along the broad, curving drive.

  The spice of pine needles was very strong here and there was the rotting odour of the sodden, decomposed leaves that made the drive slithery as her shoes cut through the soft snow and of the woodsmoke she could see spiralling from a chimney.

  “I said the place was crumbling to bits, didn’t I?” Shirley said critically as they drew nearer to the house. She plodded on, looking neither to her left or her right.

  Where’s her artistic eye? Marianne wondered. On either side of the drive, great tangles of holly bushes had spilled their scarlet fruit on to the white carpet and their spiky foliage, too slippery to hold the snow, gleamed in the wintry light as though it had been newly polished. Behind the bushes, tall conifers towered darkly against the sky and seemed oblivious to the whirling flakes around them. There was something dramatic about the ambience that made Marianne hold her breath.

  “It’s so beautiful here, it makes me want to cry,’ she said to Shirley when they reached the house.

  “Now I know you’re out of your mind,” Shirley replied prosaically. She grimaced at the white-pillared portico that was chipped with age, then walked up the disintegrating stone steps and pulled a rusty contraption beside the door. “I’m glad I didn’t live in the days when they had these things instead of doorbells,” she declared.

  “I don’t think I would have minded,” Marianne answered. Her cousin had no sense of history.

  Dov opened the door and apologized for keeping them waiting. “I forgot to tell you to come round the back. It takes a long time to walk through to the front from the kitchen,” he smiled. “You’re early, but welcome,” he added, taking their suitcases without asking why they had brought them.

  Shirley told him and the way she put it made Marianne cringe with shame.

  “We’re refugees now, too.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Shirley!” How could her cousin compare them with boys and girls who’d been persecuted by the Nazis?

  “Well we are in a way, aren’t we? From a woman who doesn’t like Jews.”

  Marianne was tempted to argue with her but knew it would not change her opinion of Mrs. Ellis. Shirley would store up the Sodom and Gomorrah memory, just as Marianne would, but to her it would be an anti-Semitic experience.

  Dov led them across a vast, oak-panelled expanse.

  “This must have been a ballroom,” Marianne remarked hurrying to keep pace with his long stride. The floor was parquet, roughened with age, but there was still a hint here and there of the original glossy surface.

  “Maybe so,” he answered distractedly, and she sensed that he had other things to think about and fell silent.

  “It’s like a freezing-cold barn. How can you bear to live here?” Shirley said to him.

  “We only use the kitchen and the bedrooms, except for a butler’s pantry that I’ve made my office.”

  The kitchen was huge, but warm and cosy, redolent of the familiar cooking smells that to Marianne and Shirley epitomized home. Several huge saucepans of goulash were simmering on the hob beside the big open fire and a lady in a white overall was making strudel, sprinkling cinnamon on to the apples and raisins.

  The young refugees were helping to prepare the festive meal and Shirley went to talk to a group who were peeling potatoes.

  Marianne, who had not learned German at school as her cousin had, felt somewhat out of it.

  Dov patted her shoulder comfortingly. “Evacuees’re running back home all over the country. It’s nothing unusual,” he said mistaking her silence for anxiety.

  His grey eyes were twinkling at her from behind his thick lenses. But his face wore the weary expression of a man whom nothing would surprise. “Mrs. Ellis isn’t anti-Semitic, she’s just a narrow-minded person,” Marianne said to set the record straight. There was something about this man that demanded total honesty.

  “Good. That makes one less,” he answered. “Now forget about her and go and chat with the other kids. If you can’t speak German, you’ll get by with Yiddish, it’s similar.”

  “I only know a few words and phrases of that.”

  Dov grinned wryly. “Whatever is the Jewish race coming to? I don’t suppose the next generation will know any Yiddish at all. But I was only pulling your leg, dear. All these kids speak English. They’re letting your cousin practise her German on them because they’re very polite.”

  “I’d rather talk to you, if you don’t mind,” Marianne said. The reticence that always affected her among strangers made it difficult for her to do what Shirley was doing; her cousin was what Bobbie Sarah called a good mixer.

  “You can help me peel some apples for the next lot of strudel then,” Dov smiled.

  “I’ve never spent Chanukah away from my family before,” Marianne told him when they had begun the task.

  Dov eyed his young charges. “So how do you think they feel?”

  “A lot worse than me.”

  Dov split an apple in half and removed the core pensively. “I can’t get over how excited they get about Yom Tov. Especially as some of them come from families who’d forgotten Jewish Festivals existed.”

  “It might be because of the way they were reminded.”

  “You could be right.”

  Later, Marianne helped lay the supper table.

  “My name is Hans Shlager, how do you do?” a boy beside her said, placing glasses beside the cutlery she was setting down.

  “Did you help like this at home?” Marianne asked him, struck by the way the boys were sharing the domestic tasks with the girls. “My brothers don’t.”

  “And nor did I,” he smiled. “It was not expected of me. But on a kibbutz in Palestine it will be and here we are preparing ourselves for that. They have there the sex equality,” he added.

  Marianne wished they could have the sex equality in England, instead of Harry and Arnold sitting with their feet up whilst she helped her mother wash the dishes.

  After supper, Dov lit the little coloured candles in the brass menorah. They were about to begin singing the Chanukah hymn when David arrived.

  “You’re just in time to sing Maoz Tsur with us,” Dov said, handing him a prayer book opened at the appropriate page.

  David accepted the book, though he knew the words by heart. The long drive had wearied him, he was not looking forward to repeating it in the opposite direction and was filled with disquiet about taking Shirley and Marianne back to the city. He had toyed with the idea of spending tomorrow in Wales to try to find alternative accommodation for them, but the factory had begun turning out army greatcoats in addition to the fashion rainwear, and Eli, who would be in charge though Sammy was nominally so, might go to pieces under the strain.

  He could not summon the energy to raise his voice in song with the others and stood gazing at the candles, beset by the unreality of being in a Welsh manor house listening to Maoz Tsur. Then the familiar melody moved him the way it always did, and he ceased to think and stared down at the prayer book.

  His eye fell on the translation on the left-hand side of the page and he saw it was not like the one in his own prayer book, but a hymn in its own right. This must be the kind of book used by Reform congregations, where much of the service was conducted in English.r />
  He read the last verse, with the ancient Hebrew words resounding all around him, and its contemporary appositeness lingered in his mind after the final rousing notes had died away.

  Children of the martyr-race,

  Whether free or fettered,

  Wake the echoes of the songs,

  Where ye may be scattered.

  Yours the message cheering,

  That the time is nearing,

  Which will see all men free,

  Tyrants disappearing.

  David was conscious of the youngsters milling around him, his daughter and niece among them. Whether a Jew was free or fettered was an accident of their birthplace and it was this alone that had saved Shirley and Marianne from the others’ fate. Would the time ever come when winds of oppression would not scatter Jewish seed to take root where it may until the next storm? Was it too much to hope for that this war would put an end to it, that the children in this room, and their seed, would I never be cruelly scattered again?

  He watched the refugee boys and girls help themselves to strudel from the big platter on the table, laughing and talking animatedly, and marvelled at their resilience. But resilience was a built-in Jewish quality and thank God it was. Where would his people be without it?

  The lady who did the cooking told him her name was Marta and handed him a plate of steaming goulash.

  “It was the best meal we’ve had since we left home, Dad,” Shirley called to him, then returned her attention to a group of admiring lads.

  Marianne was deep in conversation with the girl who had sat beside her at supper.

  “All this way I shlep for them at a minute’s notice and they’re too busy to be bothered with me,” David said dryly to Dov.

  Dov sat down at the littered table and played with some discarded orange peel. “Some of the stories I could tell you about what the kids here have been through – well, it’s made me believe in youngsters having a good time while they can.” He eyed Shirley who was smiling up at the boys. “That daughter of yours is a knockout, isn’t she?”