Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “All right, Martin?” his mother asked.

  “Sure I am.” But the horror which these days darkened his private thoughts was gripping him like a sudden cramp and words began spilling from his lips as if of their own accord:

  “From out the night sky

  Fell a hideous rain.

  Below, the people left their games

  To shelter ’neath steel umbrellas.

  Some blew inside out,

  The shelterers with them

  While the storm raged on,

  Puddling the city streets with blood.

  And the stench of death

  Rose thickly heavenward,

  Mingling with the breath

  Of brave young men in aeroplanes.”

  “That boy needs his head examining, the things he comes out with!” Abraham exclaimed after a chilled silence.

  “You don’t know poetry when you hear it?” Sigmund inquired.

  “Poetry shmoetry! It didn’t even rhyme.”

  “My husband would like it to rhyme, as well as give us gooseflesh,” Sarah shuddered.

  Sigmund smiled at Martin. “It isn’t good you should be so morbid,” he said as lightly as he could.

  Miriam said nothing, but Martin could see her eyeing him anxiously. Which was nothing new. “It just came into my head,” he said with false nonchalance.

  “You made it up yourself?” Sarah said with surprise.

  Martin nodded pensively. “Except it doesn’t happen that way anymore. When I was younger, sometimes I’d see something and think I’d like to write a poem about it. But now – well they seem to happen by themselves.”

  “Whoever heard of a steel umbrella?” Abraham asked him derisively.

  Martin smiled at his grandfather’s lack of imagination and tapped the girders with which David had had the cellar reinforced.

  “A nice cup of tea will make you better, Martin,” Sarah said as if poetry were a sickness. Then the naked light bulb above their heads went out, leaving her floundering beside a pile of coal with the thermos flask in her hands.

  “I bought some matches this morning, they should be in my handbag,” Miriam said, fishing in its cluttered depths.

  She found them and struck one, and Sarah got a candle from her secret hoard on the shelf above the wringing machine, about which she did not feel guilty. War or no war, they were essential for Shabbos.

  When the candle had been lit, she poured the tea and they sat in the flickering light, in the old deckchairs that before the war had only been used in the back garden on summer Sundays. The twins were sound asleep, undisturbed by the noise of the aircraft overhead and the falling bombs, their vulnerable innocence heightening the others’ waiting tension.

  “God is watching over us,” Sarah whispered, fingering her brooch.

  “If He hasn’t been blasted out of Heaven,” Martin replied cynically.

  David was on duty that night close to his home, but apart from escorting people to the shelters and checking blackout curtains, the local air-raid wardens had no tasks to perform. The blitz was concentrated on the city centre and its perimeters.

  After the all-clear siren had sounded he stood in the street with his neighbour, Hershel Levy, gazing at the distant roseate hue of the sky.

  “How can something that looks so beautiful be the aftermath of destruction?” Hershel muttered taking off his steel helmet to wipe the sweat from his bald head. “There must be buildings in town still on fire.”

  The smoke had drifted northward and was hanging like an acrid pall all around them.

  “I wonder if they got the docks, as well?” Hershel said, folding his arms and resting them on his paunch. “Your sister lives near there, doesn’t she?”

  David hurried home to telephone Esther, but Bessie had already done so.

  “Everyone’s all right,” she reassured him. “I’ve rung up the whole family.”

  Shirley and the boys were in the kitchen with Lizzie, munching bread and jam, ravenously, as though waiting to be blown up had given them an appetite. David was hungry too and sat down to eat with them.

  “Maybe the Germans’ll leave Manchester alone again, now they’ve given it a bashing,” Bessie said.

  David swallowed some scalding tea and smiled grimly. “Only you could be such an optimist, love.”

  “Where will it get us to start being pessimists?”

  “But we’ve got to face the facts, Mam,” Ronald declared.

  “An’ one o’ ’em’s ye’re filthy dirty, our Ronald, from bein’ in’t coal cellar,” Lizzie told him. “Peter an’ all. Away yer go ter scrub yersels, this minute.”

  The boys had coal dust on their faces and clothing and went to clean up. Neither would dare to disobey Lizzie, though they loved her, too.

  “I mus’ get t’cellar spruced up’n a bit more comfortable afore t’Germans come back,” Lizzie said.

  “God forbid,” Bessie shuddered.

  “I wouldn’t bank on ’im ferbiddin’ it, Missis,” Lizzie answered. “Wi’ one thing’n another, it looks as if God’s got fed up wi’ sortin’ out t’mess ’is children’s made o’ t’world.”

  David left the house and got into his car with Lizzie’s words echoing desolately in his ears. In many ways he was not religious, but still clung to the principle of a Divine Being whose merciful goodness was mankind’s one remaining hope. The Germans had largely eschewed this, had made Hitler their God and Nazism their creed. But the few who had not, the Lutheran pastors and Catholic priests who had refused to abandon their Christian beliefs and ethics, had not been rewarded with God’s mercy. Instead, He had allowed them to be incarcerated in concentration camps along with His chosen people, the Jews.

  And now, havoc was being wreaked upon Christian England, where the churches were filled with God-fearing people every Sunday. God had not lifted His hand to strike down the Nazi non-believers against whom His devout flock were fighting His battle against evil. David sat gazing through the car windscreen at the evidence of this which still lingered redly in the sullen December sky.

  He tried to start the engine, but it was too cold, and he got out to use the crank, cursing savagely because there was no immediate response. But the anger gripping him had nothing to do with the car. It was the searing resentment that had affected him in the trenches during the last war, directed against God for requiring people to suffer to prove their allegiance to Him. And according them no different treatment than He meted out to those who had cast Him aside!

  “Where are you going, David?” Bessie called from the doorstep. She had put on her dressing gown and set her hair in flat pin-curls as she always did before retiring. “None of us has had a wink of sleep. Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  The engine had just sprung to life and David got back into the car. “First I’d better make sure the factory’s still there.” He roared off along the street with the picture of his wife’s shocked expression still before his eyes. It had not occurred to her that Sanderstyle was near enough to town to have gone up in smoke, and their livelihood with it. But it had to him.

  The pungent odour of burned-out buildings thickened as he drove down Cheetham Hill Road and drew nearer the city centre and he steeled himself for what he might find. The factory was on a side street with many others, in the heart of the Manchester rainwear district where men who had started out as workers now had their thriving businesses. Years of sweat and toil accounted for their progress to affluence and David’s was not the only car parked on the street in the drab grey dawn.

  “Everything’s all right here, thank God,” Harry Rothberg, who was Lou Benjamin’s father-in-law, called to David in the kind of voice he would have used if his nearest and dearest had just been spared an untimely end.

  David joined the group of middle-aged and elderly men whose faces wore the grateful expression he knew was on his own. The street was entirely intact, but the acrid clouds drifting from the near distance were ominous.

  “In town it must be
terrible,” said Solly Butensky, whose factory was next door to Sanderstyle, with a shake of his head. “From what a policeman I spoke to told me, when I tried to drive round and take a look, it’ll never be the same again. I couldn’t get through for fire engines and the stink was something awful.”

  David thought of the old buildings he had known since he was a lad. The face of the city was not all beautiful, but age had mellowed it to a state of grace that was all its own, and which newly erected edifices could not attain. He looked up at the small, Sanderstyle building that was like a redbrick box, but infinitely precious to him. “Let’s hope our mazel lasts, round here,” he said gruffly to the others and strode back to his car. To go on being lucky was all a person could hope for in wartime.

  The German bombers repeated the blitz that night, but David’s luck had run out. The street of factories was a shamble the next morning and Sanderstyle had been razed to the ground.

  David stood in the road and surveyed the heap of rubble that was all that was left of what he had worked for since boyhood. The toiling to acquire his own business had begun long before he married Bessie and received the half-share in the firm, which was her dowry. As a lad of fourteen he’d known he must labour hard if he was to make something of himself. By seventeen, he had become Salaman’s right-hand man and had spared no effort to mount further up the ladder he was still climbing.

  He could hear Harry Rothberg, whose place had also been completely destroyed, weeping beside him. Harry was not a well man and his usual liverish pallor was tinged with grey.

  “What do we do now, David?” he asked pathetically, watching the civil-defence workers milling around in clouds of dust.

  David put a hand on his frail shoulder and spoke with more confidence than he felt. “Whatever it takes, we’ll do it. We’ll get going again somehow.”

  “You’re damn right we will!” Solly Butensky said vehemently behind him.

  David turned around and saw that Solly’s florid face was consumed by rage, his treble chin quivering and his fishy grey eyes steely in the early light.

  “I’m not going to let the Nazis get the better of me!” he declared and strode off to survey his own pile of rubble.

  Maybe anger is healthier than acceptance, David reflected. But all he himself felt was an all-pervading numbness as if his emotions had been temporarily paralysed. He shepherded Harry Rothberg to his car and got into his own to drive home and tell Bessie they no longer had a business.

  Chapter 3

  Marianne stood on the pavement across the road from the shop, gripping her mother’s arm while they waited for her father to emerge through the doorway and join them. A time-bomb was ticking away in the building. Was he going to be blown to pieces?

  “I never saw ’im go back in. I told ’im so when I turned me ’ead t’other way,” the special constable beside them said for the umpteenth time. “Everyone ’eard me say it, din’t they?” he demanded of the huddle of neighbours and customers standing with bated breath awaiting Ben’s possible demise.

  “You shouldn’t have let him, Mam,” Marianne said in an agonized voice.

  “Could I stop him?” Esther had a mesmerized expression on her face and the tip of her nose looked pinched as though with fear. “You know how he values those candlesticks.”

  “Candlesticks?” the constable exclaimed. “Riskin’ ’is life fer a per o’ candlesticks? What’re they made of, Missis? Solid gold?”

  “No, brass. His dead mother brought them with her from Vienna in 1904 and they’re all he’s got to remember her by.”

  The policeman stared ominously at the dark bulk of Ben’s Bazaar. “If ’e doesn’t get a move on’n come out o’ there, ’e could end up bein’ reunited wi’ ’er.”

  “It might not go off, our’n didn’t,” Mrs. Rilk, the local newsagent, said.

  “I’m velly hopeful it won’t, or my laundly will explode with it,” tubby Arthur Chang, whose place was next door, answered mournfully. “Your husband is a velly blave gentleman,” he adde to Esther.

  “And if the bomb doesn’t kill him, I will when he comes out!” she declared as her pent-up feelings got the better of her.

  Marianne glanced at her watch, but it was too dark to see the numerals. How long had her father been in there? It seemed like hours. “Hurry up, Dad!” she shrilled in a voice that did not sound like her own when she saw him appear on the doorstep and fumble in his pocket. She hid her face against her mother’s coat sleeve. “Why doesn’t he come? What’s he doing?”

  “Locking the door, would you believe it!” Esther shrieked.

  “You want me to leave it open? All right, I’ll unlock it again,” Ben shouted to her jokingly. Then he walked calmly across the road with his mother’s candlesticks cradled in his arms and seemed surprised at the fuss everyone made of him when he reached them. “I thought I might as well bring you this, as well, Esther. If the bomb goes off, God knows when I’ll be able to afford to buy you another one,” he said giving her her fox fur, and one of the endearing crooked grins that she had feared she might never see again.

  “What a case you are!” she exclaimed, kissing his cheek tenderly.

  “Yer’d better come ’ome wi’ me,” Mrs. Rilk told them briskly. “Wi’ me lads away in t’army yer can ’ave their bedroom, like I slep’ in your ’Arry’s when I ’ad a time-bomb. Your Marianne can curl up downstairs on’t couch.”

  Old Mr. Higgins, who owned the hardware store next door to the newsagents, invited the Changs to stay with him. “If folk can’t ’elp each other out in wartime, it’s a poor lookout,” he declared.

  “Why are you crying, Mam, now Dad’s safe?” Marianne whispered, seeing Esther dab her eyes.

  Esther was listening to the warm cries of encouragement and hope the simple, working folk clustered on the pavement were calling to her own family and the Changs as they trailed off in the darkness behind their kind hosts. “Because the people round here are so wonderful, Marianne,” she answered. “I told you they were, didn’t I? Before we came to live here, when you didn’t want to come.”

  The barber and his family who occupied the premises next door to Chang’s Laundry were spending the night at the confectioner’s opposite. All the other stores on the block were lock-up premises, but the houses on the back street running parallel with it had had to be evacuated, too, and the occupants had gone good-humouredly to a church hall to await the fate of their humble homes.

  Esther had slung her fur carelessly over one shoulder, and one of the Changs’ young children, whom she was carrying, was rubbing his snotty nose against it, but she did not care. She was reflecting on how the war had made everyone the same and wished it could be that way in peacetime as well; with nothing extraordinary about a Jewish woman cuddling a Chinese child on her way to be the guest of a Christian neighbour.

  Marianne was holding seven-year-old Jimmy Chang’s hand.

  “We might ’ave no ’ome termorrer, Marianne,” he said to her solemnly.

  “Let’s not think about it, Jimmy.”

  “But what if me new Meccano set gets blown up?”

  “Your dad will buy you another.” Marianne tightened her grip on the cardboard box in her other hand, which contained all the stories she had ever written. Like her Viennese grandmother’s candlesticks, they were something no amount of money could replace, and she always took them with her to the cellar when the air-raid siren sounded.

  She looked down at the plump little boy trotting beside her. Even in the dark his hair and his round face had a sleek shine. She hadn’t really noticed until tonight that Jimmy and his brothers spoke with the local accent and didn’t pronounce the letter “r” as an “l”, the way their parents did. Why had she always assumed that Chinese were born with a speech impediment? Mr. and Mrs. Chang only spoke the way they did because they’d born in China, and Chinese was their native language; just as her grandparents had retained Yiddish speech mannerisms that marked them out as immigrants. The Chang children were
as English as herself; yet she had always thought of them as foreign, because of their appearance, in the same way as some Christians thought her foreign because she looked Jewish.

  “I’m glad we came to live round here,” she said to her mother. “I’ve learned a lot from it.”

  Esther smiled at her as they reached their destination and waited in the wild March wind for Mrs. Rilk and Mr. Higgins to unlock their shop doors. “So have I, love.”

  Newsagents’ shops had their own special smell, Marianne noted when they followed Mrs. Rilk inside and passed behind the cluttered counter to the living-room. She had not been conscious of it when she came here to buy things and the front door stood ajar, but tonight the scent of newsprint, pipe tobacco and aniseed balls mingled pleasantly with the mustiness of old wood and damp plaster noticeable in most of the local shops.

  “Mek yersels at ’ome,” Mrs. Rilk invited, shooing her fat, black cat off the faded chintz couch and poking the fire into a cheerful blaze. “It’s nice fer yer a widder woman like mesel’ t’ave comp’ny though not fer t’reason I’ve got some ternight.”

  “This is a lovely room,” Esther said glancing around, and Marianne wondered if her mother was just being polite. This was certainly not Esther Klein’s idea of lovely.

  Old-fashioned was how Marianne would have described it as she eyed the dark, heavily-carved sideboard with its mirrored back and the many framed photographs on the mantelpiece, which had a maroon velvet cover with bobbles on it. One of the photographs was of the late Mr. Rilk in the sergeant’s uniform he had worn in the last war. All the others were of the two Rilk lads and charted their progress from babyhood to the smart young soldiers they were now.

  A couple of gilt-framed pastoral scenes adorned the brown lincrusta walls and the threadbare carpet still had traces of its original rose-pattern. China shepherdesses and thick, pottery Toby jugs completed the decor, occupying every inch of surface. But the room had a comforting cosiness and in its own way was lovely, Marianne thought. Lovely and welcoming.