Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “I think so,” David said proudly.

  Dov glanced at Marianne. “But what your niece lacks in looks, she makes up for in the head. I still haven’t got over something she said to me.” He told David about Marianne’s reply when she learned how much the religious Festivals meant to the refugee children from assimilated families. “I’m sure my nieces and nephews wouldn’t have realized it’s because Hitler reminded them they’re Jews.”

  David smiled. “Your nieces and nephews haven’t got Sarah Sandberg for their grandmother. Shirley would have understood why, too, and so would all the other kids in our family. They’ve got an unusual Bobbie, who keeps them on their toes.”

  “It’s a pity there aren’t more like her.”

  Chapter 2

  By the time the “phoney war” became a real one. Marianne and Shirley were ensconced in their fathers’ businesses and nobody suggested evacuating them again.

  Harry had been conscripted early in 1940 and Marianne was called upon to replace him in the shop, where trade was booming due to the swollen pay-packets brought home by war-workers. Arnold remained at school, Ben was determined that nothing must prevent his brilliant younger son from entering a profession.

  Shirley’s presence in the factory was not only a pleasure to David but lightened his load considerably. His assistant cutter, Ludwig Sterner, had never taken the trouble to become a naturalized British citizen and had consequently been interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. David had not found a satisfactory replacement and was filling the breach himself in addition to his other work. His daughter offered to help in the office and was now lending a hand wherever it was required.

  The fashionwear production was overshadowed by military orders and David gave most of his attention to the latter, insisting that servicewomen were as entitled to perfection in their garments as civilian ladies.

  “You’re quite right, Dad,” Shirley said to him one day after he had reprimanded a machinist for botching the seams of an ATS greatcoat. “But I hope you’re not going to let the fashion side of the business slide.”

  “With a war going on, she’s bothering me about fashion garments!” David exclaimed irritably.

  “I know you look on me as only a kid, Dad, but I’m nearly sixteen, and I’m not daft.”

  “Are you inferring I am?”

  Shirley met his gaze steadily. “I think you would be if you neglected our real trade. One day the war will be over. We’ve got to bear that in mind and keep Sanderstyle’s smart reputation in the public eye.”

  David had received a similar lecture from Moishe Lipkin and, had he been less harassed, he would have been proud of his daughter’s astuteness, but all he registered was impatience. “So keep it in the public eye! Who’s stopping you?”

  “Women still buy coats to wear for best,” Shirley answered calmly. “And smart rainwear, as I shouldn’t have to tell you, Dad, serves a double purpose, so it isn’t extravagant. But we haven’t updated our range since the war began, have we? I’ll design something.”

  “If you want to amuse yourself, who am I to say no?” David could see Eli beckoning him wildly and strode out of the office to see what the latest problem was, picking his way through the extra row of sewing machines he had installed in the workroom to cope with Government orders.

  He returned an hour later and found his daughter seated at his desk sketching. His secretary was gazing admiringly over Shirley’s shoulder. “Is that all the pair of you have got to do?” he snapped.

  Rita eyed one of David’s clumsy designs which was pinned on the wall. “I never saw a real artist at work before,” she said pointedly. “Have a look at Shirley’s drawing, Mr. Sandberg.”

  “I haven’t got time to. And if my daughter wouldn’t mind, I need my desk to sit and work at,” David replied. But he could see the sketch from where he was standing and even upside down it looked impressive. He was impelled to move to Shirley’s side and view it the right way up. “Who taught you to draw like that? It’s just like the pictures in Zaidie Sigmund’s pattern books.”

  “So you’ve been studying them, too, have you?” Shirley smiled, putting the finishing touches to the sleek garment on the leggy lady she had created.

  “Naturally. He used to get them from Paris.”

  “That’s why I asked him to let me borrow one.”

  “But now France has fallen, he won’t be getting any more,” David added grimly.

  “Forget about the war for a minute, will you, Dad? I borrowed the pattern book to learn how to draw this way. But the garment is my own design.”

  “Why have the shoulders got epaulets?”

  “To give it a touch of the times,” Shirley answered shrewdly. “The leather buttons do, too.”

  “The fit’s a bit snug for a raincoat.”

  “Mam told me your first fashion garment was an exact copy of one of hers that wasn’t a raincoat.”

  The reminder pitched David backwards in time to the dismal morning when he’d seen Bessie dashing out into the rain to buy pickled cucumbers and sour cream for her father’s dinner, wearing her best coat. He had asked her why she had not put on a raincoat and her reply that she wouldn’t be seen dead in one had been his incentive to produce rainwear that was smart as well as practical. At the time, Bessie had been nothing more to him than his employer’s dumpy, bad-tempered daughter and neither of them had known that one day she would be his wife. Now, their daughter was following in his footsteps, eager to build the firm’s future.

  “You’ll be Sanderstyle’s designer from now on,” he declared and watched Shirley beam with delight. “I always had a sneaking suspicion you’d do me out of the job sooner or later.”

  Shirley got up to hug him and he thought of Ronald, whose determination to be a doctor had not faltered. He would not have his son with him, but nobody could expect all their hopes to materialize. And maybe Peter Kohn, who had not yet decided what he wanted to be, would come into the business.

  Rita wafted a sheaf of Government orders under his nose and peered through the window into the street, where a lorry was unloading some bales of khaki and air force-blue cloth. “It’s time to come down to earth again, Mr. Sandberg! We’ve still got a war to win and we can’t let the Service girls go naked. I’d be one myself if I didn’t have to look after you and my widowed mother.”

  David returned to the workroom, where Issie was chastising one of the young girls who had replaced the men who had been called up.

  “Fifty times I’ve shown her what to do and she still doesn’t know!” he exclaimed to David.

  “I’m used ter mekking gloves,” she said, fiddling with her curling pins.

  “So what are you doing in a garment factory?” Issie inquired exasperatedly.

  “I wanted t’ ’elp war effort. An’ sewing uniforms pays me better.”

  “Garment-machinists get well paid in peacetime, too,” David told her. “Why not learn to make a good job of it and after the war you can stay in the trade.”

  Shirley was right, he mused. A person had to think of afterwards, when there’d be no more orders for uniforms and they still had their living to make. He decided to give more attention to the fashionwear and showed Shirley’s sketch to Moishe the next day, during their Saturday morning discussion.

  The little salesman’s eyes gleamed with approval. “Get her to design a few more, David. And let’s get them into production already.”

  “It’ll mean sub-contracting some of the Government orders.”

  “With the orders I’ll bring in for coats like this,” Moishe said appraising the sketch, “you won’t be out of pocket. It’ll balance itself out.”

  David found Shirley awaiting him anxiously when he went home for Shabbos dinner.

  “She’s been on edge all morning,” Bessie told him whilst they ate their chopped liver. “In case Moishe didn’t like her design.”

  “Well he’s the one who’ll have to sell it,” Shirley said. “So his opinion’s more important t
han Dad’s.”

  “Please put her out of her misery, Uncle David,” Peter requested watching Shirley sitting rigidly in her chair.

  “How anyone can get so worked up over a coat!” Ronald exclaimed with his mouth full.

  “Moishe liked it,” David relayed. “And we’re putting it into production.”

  Shirley sprang up from her chair to kiss him and knocked over his glass of shandy in the process.

  “Look what you’ve made her do, David!” Bessie said as he had known she would.

  David mopped the tablecloth with his napkin, but his wife snatched it from him. He had expected her to do that, too. He watched her place a dinner plate between the soaked linen and the polished surface. Her predictability was a joke, but the way she instinctively made him the butt of all her irritations was not. He quelled the desire to snap back at her and made light of it as he had learned to do. “So I’ll pay the laundry bill, love.”

  The youngsters were smiling at him sympathetically. Like his mother had once said, children were a compensation for everything.

  “Now our Shirley’s working with Dad, all we ever hear at mealtimes is business talk,” Ronald remarked.

  Or were they?

  Peter was admiring the coppery glints a wintry sunbeam had painted on Shirley’s hair. “It is Uncle David’s business that provides the food we eat,” he reminded Ronald. “And therefore we should all be interested in it.”

  The contrast between the two boys’ attitudes was heightened for David day by day. Ronald had no respect for him other than filial one and this was hard to take.

  “Uncle Nat’s bringing his stethoscope to Bobbie’s this afternoon to show me how to use it,” Ronald said.

  David brushed aside his jealousy of his brother but could not hold back a sharp retort to his son. “You’re a long way off the stethoscope stage, my lad!”

  “He might end up in the army before then, if the war goes on long enough,” Shirley said striking a chill in her parents’ hearts.

  “My turn will come first. And I am looking forward to it,” Peter declared.

  Lizzie had just served the chicken soup and David dropped his spoon into his with a plop that added a splash of yellow to the brownish shandy stain on the cloth. But for once Bessie made no comment. She too was shocked by what Peter had said.

  Their foster son regarded them gravely. “You think it unnatural that I want to pay back the Nazis for what they have done to my parents and grandfather?”

  “Martin can’t wait to join up, either,” Ronald revealed.

  Nobody was talkative during the rest of the meal and David just picked at his main course and refused the dessert. What he had just heard had ruined his appetite. Peter’s feelings were understandable. But Martin had no personal vendetta with the enemy and wanting to get to grips with them was contrary to his gentle nature. Being a conscientious-objector would have been more in keeping with it.

  “The while Peter and Martin aren’t old enough and Esther had a nice letter from Harry yesterday,” Bessie said.

  But this did not comfort David. Peace was a long way off and for the first time it struck him forcibly that the lads in the family who were still only schoolboys might be called upon to sacrifice their lives. One of Eli’s nephews had died at Dunkirk and what was there to show for it? David thought, with the bitter sense of waste that had haunted him during and after the last war. But this time there’d have to be something to show for it, or it would be God help the human race.

  Meanwhile, though London was being bombed mercilessly, in Manchester nothing had really changed, and it was difficult not to feel remote from the war. This feeling remained with him at his mother’s tea-party that afternoon. There was more apple than raisins in the strudel and saccharine instead of sugar in the tea, but apart from that and a reference to Harry’s letters, which were thankfully, coming from “somewhere in England”, everything was just as it had always been. Except that a new lot of young children were making their presence felt.

  “I don’t like you, Henry. I only like Frank,” Leona, who would soon be five, declared tempestuously pushing the handsome, fair twin away and hugging his mousey brother.

  “You’ll get your bottom smacked if you don’t stop being naughty,” her mother warned.

  “And I like Daddy better than you,” the spirited child retorted.

  Nathan picked her up and stroked her fiery hair.

  “That’s why she behaves badly. Nat lets her get away with everything,” Rebecca informed the family.

  “So let’s all have another cup of tea. These days we mustn’t waste it when the pot’s been filled up again with water,” Sarah intervened diplomatically. She had learned to recognize the danger signs in her daughter-in-law and the sudden glint in those lovely eyes was one of them. It would only take a wrong word from Nat for one of their regular tiffs to blow up.

  Abraham glanced at the clock and sighed. “It’s blackout time again.” On winter weekdays, his wife drew the curtains before he arrived home from work. But on Saturdays and Sundays the task fell to him and was a token reminder of what the night may bring.

  It was to the others, too. And to Rebecca in particular. “When I think of my family in London, sleeping in air-raid shelters –” she shuddered. She watched Abraham swish the maroon chenille, which Sarah had lined with thick, black material, across the bay window. “We’re so lucky living here. The war’s hardly touched us.”

  “I’ve been thinking that all day,” David said.

  Sigmund added his usual note of down-to-earth doom. “Things have got to get worse before they get better. And the way Manchester is being left alone, with the docks and Trafford Park here, can’t last.”

  Sigmund’s prediction materialized the following night when the brief, but devastating Manchester blitz began and brought the war into the forefront of their lives.

  Sarah was putting the kettle on to the fire to boil when the air-raid siren sounded and wondered if her neighbours the Evanses were back from Chapel yet and whether Bridie was safely home after her Sunday evening out.

  “Get out the thermos flasks while I make some sandwiches,” she instructed Abraham.

  “Even sitting in the coal cellar she wants to give people food to eat!” Abraham watched her pick up the telephone receiver. David had had a phone installed for them, in case of emergency. “Who are you ringing up just now?”

  “Esther.”

  “You think she didn’t hear the siren?”

  Sarah replaced the receiver sheepishly.

  “But you just wanted to make sure! Another mother like you I don’t think there is in the world.”

  “Every mother is like me.”

  “But they don’t act like you.”

  “So shoot me!”

  Ten minutes later they were installed in the cellar. With them were Sigmund, Miriam and Martin, who had brought the twins wrapped in blankets. Carl and Sammy were air-raid wardens, and Hannah and Helga were on duty with a mobile canteen.

  “Just tonight had to be their turn,” Sarah said anxiously listening to the sound of aircraft and the ominous, distant thuds. “Sammy and Carl remembered to put on their tin hats, Miriam?”

  “They’re steel helmets, Ma. And if they’d didn’t it’s their own lookout,” Miriam answered edgily. The rush through the streets with her young nephews had unnerved her, but the alternative was to crouch in the broom cupboard under the stairs where she would not have felt safe. The nearest public shelter was no nearer her home than Sarah’s house.

  “Sigmund must have a crystal ball inside his head, what he said yesterday,” Abraham joked to calm everyone’s nerves.

  “A black one,” Sarah said grimly.

  “What I’ve got in my head is a brain. And rose-coloured spectacles I don’t wear, like some people,” Sigmund declared.

  “The ones to be angry with, Bobbie, are the swine who’re bombing us,” Martin said as a thud, louder than they had yet heard, reached their ears.

&nbs
p; “You think I’m not?” Sarah demanded in an outraged voice. “I wish I could do something to stop them!”

  “As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to,” Martin replied tensely.

  Miriam had little Frank on her lap and stopped stroking his hand, abruptly. “You’ll be at Oxford by that time,” she made herself say evenly. But her heart was thudding with foreboding. “The war will be over, and you’ll be wearing a cap and gown and riding a bicycle with the other students, like you’ve always wanted to.”

  “Come out of your fool’s paradise, for God’s sake, Mam!” Martin exclaimed. “England’s got to take the initiative to win the war. Drive the Germans out of France and take the battle into the enemy’s territory. And it’s going to take a long time.”

  “I agree,” Sigmund said.

  Miriam’s eyes looked charcoal instead of their usual translucent green, in her deathly-white face. “Be quiet!” she rasped to her father.

  “Zaidie keeping quiet won’t change the facts,” Martin declared. He pointed his fingers towards the ceiling and the shadow this cast on the whitewashed wall was that of a gun. “I’ll be up in the sky shooting the bastards down before the war’s over and any Jewish mother who doesn’t want her son to fight the Nazis should be ashamed of herself.”

  Sarah handed little Henry to Abraham and went to put her arm around Miriam’s quivering shoulders. “I think it’s you, Martin, who should keep quiet.”

  Then a tremendous crash that sounded as if it was right beside them reverberated through the cellar.

  “It must be the same for the Germans when we bomb them,” Martin whispered. But I’m not going to let myself think of them as human beings. If they were, they wouldn’t have let Hitler do what’s he’s done to the Jews.”

  Nobody replied, and he sat with his knees hunched up, sickened as much by the pangs of humane conscience which sometimes eroded his will to hit back, as by the fumes from the paraffin stove heating the cellar. Were the German lads who were now pounding Manchester with their doom-laden missiles thinking of the people down below? He doubted it. And he wouldn’t allow his mind to dwell on that when the time came.