Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “I’ll mek us some cocoa,” Mrs. Rilk smiled, bustling into the adjoining scullery, where more mugs and cups than any family could ever need were visible hanging on hooks above the sink.

  “We’d better ring up David,” Esther said to Ben. “He must be worried stiff because he can’t get through to us.”

  “He worries about all the family, doesn’t he?” Marianne reflected whilst her father was in the shop, making the call.

  “He always has,” Esther answered. “But we all care about each other in our family, don’t we?”

  “I can’t say I do about Shirley.”

  Esther sighed. “Maybe you think you don’t. But I’ll have a bet with you and I hope it never gets put to the test. You’d be there if she was in trouble and needed you, or if any of her children did in years to come. And she’d be there for you and yours. You’ll never turn your backs on each other after the way you’ve been brought up.”

  “David said to phone him if I need him, even if it’s in the middle of the night,” Ben said when he returned to the living room.

  The words had an ominous ring and they sat in silence until Mrs. Rilk brought the steaming mugs of cocoa.

  After they had drunk it, she escorted Esther and Ben upstairs to her absent sons’ bedroom, then fetched a blanket to tuck Marianne up on the couch.

  “Yer’ll nod off in no time, luv,” the kindly woman said kissing her cheek.

  But slumber did not come immediately, and Marianne lay in the flickering firelight, listening to the night noises she had discovered all houses had. The whisper of the water in the pipes carrying it from the cistern. A creaking floorboard that made her think someone was walking about, though she knew nobody was. The whistle of the wind in the chimney and a rustling in the eaves by she knew not what. And in this room, tonight, the sputtering sound the coal made as the last little tongue of bluish flame licked away its oily, tar-smelling kernel.

  A year ago, she’d slept beside Shirley in a Welsh cottage. Now she was somewhere else that wasn’t her home. Where would she sleep tomorrow night? she thought with an ache in her throat. Would the room above the shop, that she’d made her very own with two planks resting on some bricks to hold her books and the washstand she’d turned into a desk to do her writing at, still be there in the morning?

  She got off the couch and took the cat under the blanket with her for company and soon afterwards fell asleep.

  The tremendous explosion that occurred a couple of hours later did not awaken her. Mrs. Rilk was drawing the curtains back to let in the grey daylight when she opened her eyes and saw that the cat had deserted her during the night and returned to its basket by the hearth.

  “The bomb went off, didn’t it?” Marianne said flatly. One look at the woman’s distressed countenance was enough to tell her so.

  Mrs. Rilk avoided her eye and fiddled with a button on her flowered smock overall. “I’m afraid it did, luv. Woke up ’alf t’neighbour’ood, ’n fair catapulted me’n yer mam’n dad out o’ bed. Pr’aps it were wi’ bein’ downstairs yer never ’eard it, Marianne. T’rest o’ us was nearer t’sky. Want a cup o’ tea, luv?”

  “No thanks, Mrs. Rilk.”

  “I ’ad ter give yer dad a drop o’ brandy.”

  Marianne put on her coat and followed Mrs. Rilk into the shop where she resumed marking addresses on a pile of Daily Sketches. She had already dealt with the rest of the morning papers and the two grey-jerseyed schoolboys who delivered them for her were leaning on the counter with grimy, hessian bags slung around their necks, their cheeks bulging with the mint humbugs she always provided to sustain them whilst they waited for her to complete the task.

  Marianne listened to the lads crunching their sweets, aware of them eyeing her pityingly. She could not recollect having seen either of them before, but most people in the district knew who she was, because they were regular customers in the shop and everyone probably knew about the bomb by now.

  She scanned a Daily Dispatch, but only the date registered with her. Twelfth March 1941, the day the Kleins became homeless. Our Arnold will get the shock of his life when he gets back from school this afternoon, she thought detachedly. He had stayed overnight with a friend and had missed all the excitement.

  She thought of Harry, too, who would find a hole in the ground when he came home on leave, instead of Ben’s Bazaar that had meant as much to him as to Dad. But she was only thinking these things and not feeling upset or anything. What was the matter with her?

  “Did South Manchester get it last night, as well?” she asked Mrs. Rilk. “The pal our Arnold stayed with lives in Withington.”

  “I think it were only us got it, luv. Withington ’ad its turn on New Year’s Night, didn’t it? What wi’ Manchester Grammar gettin’ badly damaged an’t igh School fer Girls blown ter smithereens. I don’t think yer need worry about yer brother.”

  But Marianne had not felt worried, nor did she now feel relieved. She was feeling nothing, as if a shutter had lowered itself between her mind and her emotions, “Thank you very much for everything, Mrs. Rilk,” she said in a voice that sounded stiff and polite, though she had not meant it to. And she could not make her face smile when she said goodbye and departed with her precious box of stories.

  The wind clutched at her tweed coat with its icy fingers and flapped her fringe up and down on her forehead as she set off along the main road. It occurred to her that now she had no clothes apart from the ones she was wearing and that she would not be able to change her undies like she did every day. But it was as though she were someone else thinking this about herself.

  The same remoteness was there when she glanced at the cloth-capped men boarding a tram, on their way to work in Trafford Park, and the lace-curtained windows in the council flats she passed, where the occupants were awakening to a new day. The clatter of empty barrels being rolled from the cellar door of the pub on the corner to a waiting lorry sounded distant, too. And the publican’s voice cursing the lorry-driver for calling too early and getting him out of his bed seemed to have a hollow echo to it.

  Even the malty reek of beer, that always hung strongly in the air hereabouts, was a once-removed sensation in Marianne’s nostrils this morning as she drew near her own block and became aware she was now inhaling dust, with an unpleasant mildewy tang to it. Then she saw the yawning gap on the opposite side of the road, where Ben’s Bazaar, Chang’s Laundry and Larry’s Barbershop had been last night and stopped in her tracks.

  The emptiness was emphasized by the drab little houses behind, which previously had not been visible from the main road. How sad they looked, huddled closer together than Marianne remembered them being, as if they were seeking comfort from each other and suffering pain from their fractured chimney pots and splintered windows.

  The staircases and upper floors of the lock-up premises on either side of the gap were still intact, though each had had a wall torn asunder. One was a grocery and the other a bookmaker’s and Marianne could see a side of bacon still in the slicer on the grocer’s blue-painted counter, with a mountain of spilled salt all around it and jagged chunks of glass embedded in some sticky red stuff that was probably jam but reminded her of blood. Upstairs, where the grocer had his stockroom, the floor seemed to be thickly carpeted in black, then she realized it was tea from the overturned chests he must have begun hoarding before war was declared.

  The bookmaker’s was a tangle of telephones, upstairs and down, and the little wooden cubby holes, where her father had told her the punters stood reading the Sporting Chronicle and making their bets, gave the place the appearance of a larger-than-life office-desk full of empty pigeon-holes.

  Army vehicles and police cars were parked at the kerbside, and Marianne saw her parents and her Uncle David with Arthur Chang and the barber in the middle of a group of policemen and soldiers.

  She walked across the road, oblivious of an approaching tram, but they were too engrossed to notice her, and she stood looking down into the vast crater, from
where the mildewy smell was coming. Some of her father’s stock was strewn around in its muddy depths. Striped flannel pyjamas and once-white towels; a salmon-pink corset and several boots. A baby shawl, only recognizable by its frill peeping from beneath a zinc tub which Arthur Chang had used for soaking shirts. And her mother’s black silk dressing-gown, that was patterned with huge golden chrysanthemums like a Japanese kimono, had hooked itself on an upended girder and was billowing gaily in the wind.

  “I’m that sorry, Marianne,” a familiar voice said, then an arm was placed around her shoulders and she raised her head and saw Edie Perkins’s freckled face regarding her sympathetically.

  “I’m on me way ter work, or I’d stop’n see if there were owt I could do fer yer,” Edie said. “But me mam sez you’n yer family’s welcome at our ’ouse fer a cup o’ tea if yer feel like one.”

  Marianne managed to smile but was momentarily unable to speak. She glanced around and saw that several passers-by had paused to view the debris and were consoling her parents.

  “I’d offer ter lend yer summat ter wear, but we’re not t’same size any more. I’ve grown upwards’n outwards’n you ’aven’t,” Edie said. “I ’aven’t fergot yer once gave me a frock, Marianne, ’n I never will,” she added. “We don’t see much of each other nowadays, but I still think of yer as me friend.”

  They had drifted apart after Marianne left school to go to Wales, but she knew it would have happened in any event. She sometimes saw Edie walking down the main road arm in arm with Catholic boys and girls she knew from church, just as her own friends were all Jewish. These days, she saw a lot of Eva Frankl and Hildegard. They went to Hallé concerts with Martin and some of his schoolmates and met in each other’s homes on Saturday nights to talk and listen to gramophone records.

  Marianne had come to realize that these new friendships were on a different level from the relationship she had had with Edie and Dot, who were not interested in books and music and politics. Their drifting apart was not only attributable to their different religions. But even if Edie and Dot had the same interests as herself, they would have gone their separate ways, like Christians and Jews always did, and Marianne regretted that it had to be that way.

  “Did yer know I’d got a job in’t Ship Canal Office’n I’m courtin’ Jack Renshaw?” Edie asked her. “’E’s t’lad whose mam’n dad’s got that fish’n chip shop on’t corner o’ our street, ’im’n me’s savin’ up, so we can get wed an’ open one oursel’s after t’war.”

  Edie wanting nothing more from life than to settle down with Jack in a back-street chip shop makes us different, too, Marianne reflected. But the thought was unaccompanied by feeling, as had been the case with all her thoughts that morning. She became aware of a faint, musical sound and raised her eyes to a pile of torn timber on the edge of the crater. The inside of the barber’s piano was teetering pathetically on top of it like an abandoned harp, with the wind rippling its strings.

  The sight and sound moved her as nothing else had succeeded in doing. “Oh Edie, I’m glad you’re here,” she gulped, clutching her old friend’s arm. Then she burst into tears.

  “There, there, luv,” Edie comforted her.

  Marianne would not have liked Eva or Hildegard to see her weeping, but with Edie it was all right. And what a relief it was to feel like herself again.

  “I’d be wettin’ me knickers, never mind jus’ cryin’, if I’d ’ad t’shock you ’ave,” Edie declared, giving her a handkerchief.

  “I’m lucky to be alive,” Marianne whispered, as the thing she had refused to let herself think about returned to her mind and her vivid imagination transformed it into a drama.

  “Yer mean wi’ it bein’ a time-bomb?”

  Marianne shook her head and tried not to visualize herself hurtling into the crater, split in half by the deadly missile. “I went to bed right after tea last night, because I had a headache,” she said, concentrating on the facts. “When the siren sounded I didn’t want to get up and go down to the cellar. I had a row with my dad about it and in the end he told me to please myself. About half an hour before the all-clear sounded, I got up to go to the bathroom and while I was in there, there was a tremendous thud that shook the walls and threw me against the door. I thought a bomb had landed in the next street. It often sounds right on top of you when it isn’t, doesn’t it?”

  “You’re trembling,” Edie said.

  “So would you! When I got back to my room, I nearly choked with dust and the light had gone off. So I ran to the cellar for my dad to bring a torch and when he shone it, we couldn’t believe our eyes. There was a great big hole in the ceiling and another in the floor, where my bed had been.”

  Edie remained silent for a moment, then she straightened Marianne’s hair that looked as awry as it sometimes had on the netball pitch. “Didn’t yer once tell me yer was born wi’ t’cord twisted round yer neck, an’ t’doctor said it were a miracle yer came inter t’world alive? Well, in a way, what ’appened last night’s t’same thing. An’ if I were you, I’d jus’ say a silent prayer ter God fer savin’ yer twice. I’ll say one ter Jesus, fer good measure. I mus’ go now, Marianne, I’m late fer work already.”

  Marianne watched her run across the road and leap aboard a tram, clutching the scarlet tam-o’-shanter that matched her high-heeled shoes but clashed with her mustard-coloured coat. The cheap scent she wore lingered briefly in the air after she had gone, and Marianne was assailed by the aching pity for Edie and her kind that had dogged her schooldays. But the way they accepted the drab niche in which life had placed them and had no aspirations to climb out of it affected her more.

  She blew some dust off the box of writings she had, thankfully, remembered to grab before abandoning her room, last night, and went to find her parents in the crowd now assembled on the pavement. But she could only see her mother, talking to Mrs. Chang.

  “So that’s that, love,” Esther said with determined cheerfulness when Marianne joined them. “We’ll have to start from scratch again, only this time we’ll be starting off with something in the bank.”

  Mrs. Chang went to speak to her husband, her five children trailing behind her, and Marianne drew Esther away from the crowd for a private word.

  “Where will we live, Mam?”

  “At Bobbie’s, where else? Until we fix up another home. She never wanted that big house when Uncle David rented it for her, but now all those spare bedrooms will come in useful.”

  “Where are Dad and Uncle David?”

  “At the undertakers.”

  Marianne paled with alarm. Was someone in the family dead?

  “The Christian undertaker’s, down the road,” Esther said seeing her expression. “He passed away himself, last week, and your dad remembered his wife saying there was nobody to carry on the business, when she came in to buy black stockings for the funeral, and she was going to rent the place out.” Esther sighed, then shrugged philosophically. “One person’s misfortune can be someone else’s mazel. Your Zaidie Abraham got his first job in England, when half the immigrants in Strangeways were unemployed, because Auntie Bessie’s mother died, and her father needed someone to replace her as his presser.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Esther’s eyes misted with remembrance. “There’s plenty you don’t know about those days, Marianne. But why should you have to? They’re over, thank God.”

  “But they’re part of my family history, aren’t they?”

  “They’re part of Jewish history,” Esther answered with a bitter smile. “But let’s get back to the present. You know your dad, he doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet. He’s already been on the phone to the undertaker’s widow and he’s looking the place over with Uncle David, now.”

  The undertaker’s windows were varnished black and whenever Marianne walked past them she imagined the grisly secrets that lay behind their sinister gloss. “I’m not going to live there. It’d give me the creeps, Mam!”

  “It’s a lock-
up, so you won’t have to. But I wouldn’t set up home again near the docks in wartime. Last night was enough. I’d rather shlep back and forth from North Manchester like I used to. And this time I won’t grumble.”

  They could see Ben walking wearily towards them, rubbing his blue-jowled chin.

  “You’ll feel better when you’ve had a shave and a bath,” Esther said when he reached them.

  “First I’ll have to buy a razor and borrow a bathroom,” he reminded her dryly. “That shop’s like a barn, Esther. Except for little room at the back, all the walls have been knocked through to make it into two big floors.”

  Marianne shuddered. “I expect he stored the shrouds in the little room and used all the other space for bodies and coffins.”

  “If imagination was marketable, our Marianne’d make fortune!” Ben exclaimed witheringly. Then he studied her forlorn expression and thought of the lucky escape she had had last night. Troublesome she was, but, oh, how dear to him. He gathered her close for an emotional moment, then resumed the conversation with his wife. “David’s gone off to the factory, but he thinks I should take the undertaker’s place.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Ben surveyed the wreckage of his years of labour and felt the way David had under the same circumstances, then he thought of his mother-in-law’s favourite saying, that everything was bershert. “Sometimes Fate gets you where you intended to go sooner than you expected,” he said with the wry grin his family had always found immensely reassuring. “Didn’t I always say I wanted a walk-around store?”

  Chapter 4

  By 1943 the elder Sandbergs and the Moritzes were the only members of the clan still living in Cheetham Hill.

  The North Manchester community’s exodus to Prestwich and Broughton Park had begun some years previously, as families accrued sufficient capital to put down a cash deposit on their own homes and pay off the mortgage instead of the weekly rent they had expended all their lives for houses which would never be theirs.