Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  Abraham chuckled. “She’s reminding me now, so I can start saving up to buy her a present!”

  But the chuckle did not comfort her, and she glanced at him frequently during the meal, appalled by his appearance. He had looked frail for years, but now his fragility struck her forcibly. Why hadn’t she noticed that his shoulders were even more hunched than they had been and that his complexion looked bloodless? Perhaps when you lived with someone you didn’t notice a gradual change in them. It was the sudden weariness of his tone when he talked about feeling old that had chilled her.

  Was he working too hard at the factory? How could he not be when doing so was his nature? He was now sixty-six and David had been urging him to retire but had been unable to persuade him to agree. He would not be put out to grass, he had told her, and the fire in his eyes had stopped her from broaching the subject again.

  That night, she lay in the old brass bedstead Isaac Salaman had given them after his wife’s death, letting her mind travel the years between then and now. Salaman had presented them with the bed in the days when they had no money to buy one and were sleeping on bare boards, rolled up in the big, down-filled perineh they had brought from Russia. Now, thanks to their children, they had every comfort. But Abraham did not have good health. She heard him gasping for breath and got up to open the window.

  “You want me to catch pneumonia?” he snapped in the darkness.

  “From warm September air you won’t catch it.”

  “Our doctor son has converted you!”

  Sarah switched on the light and stroked his brow. “Anything I’d try to make you better. I don’t want you to leave me,” she added emotionally and could have bitten off her tongue the moment the words were spoken.

  “Such a grand life I’ve given you, eh?” Abraham said quizzically. “Without David, you’d still be living in Strangeways.”

  Sarah did not deny this. After what she had said, and the way Abraham had accepted its implications, there had to be honesty between them. But there was something her husband seemed to have forgotten. “Who gave me David?” she asked softly. “My children and grandchildren I wouldn’t have had without you.”

  Abraham stared at the drawstring-bag containing his tefillin, which he kept on the dressing table. These days, hurrying downstairs to say the weekday morning prayer was too much for him. “I’m tired, Sorrel,” he whispered.

  “Then why won’t you stop going to the factory? David can afford to keep us and pay someone else to do your job, like he’s told you a thousand times.”

  “By my own son she wants me to be pensioned off!” Abraham shouted irately.

  The outburst brought on a violent spasm of coughing and Sarah poured some of the medicine Nathan had prescribed and fed it to him.

  “Hasn’t Nat said the steam in the pressing-room’s killing you? Why won’t you listen to him?” she implored.

  Abraham lay back on his pillow, momentarily incapable of speech, and the sound his chest was making was like a grinder bruising Sarah’s heart.

  “To be idle is another kind of death, Sorrel,” he said when he gathered sufficient strength to reply.

  After Abraham had dozed off, Sarah lay sleepless in the warm darkness, listening to the strident ticking of the clock which she usually did not notice. Some men would wrap themselves in cotton wool and sit twiddling their thumbs in order to live longer. But to Abraham that would not be living. The quality of a life is more important than the length, she had said to Sigmund when Rachel was nearing the end of her days. Now, she must find comfort in that herself.

  But Abraham was not nearing the end of his days, she thought the next morning and chided herself for being morbid. He arose looking much better and seemed light-hearted, as if the things they had said to each other had somehow revitalized him.

  “Today I’ll come to the Central Shul with you,” he smiled.

  ’Instead of going to the Chevrah Habimah to pray with your Hassidic friends? A favour he’s doing me!” Sarah joked.

  It was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and she noticed a slight spring in his step when they walked up Heywood Street to attend the service. There would be days when he felt well and others when he did not, and the well days would grow fewer as time went by. But he had made his decision not to preserve himself in idleness and she would respect it.

  Nathan and his wife and daughter were standing on the synagogue steps when they arrived.

  “Why can’t we join the Higher Broughton Shul, Daddy, so I can sit with Lila Benjamin?” Leona asked. Lou’s little girl was her best friend.

  “Because your daddy likes this one,” Rebecca answered, smoothing the skirt of her beige suit and adjusting her mink tie. Nathan’s allegiance to a synagogue in Cheetham Hill, when they lived close to another, which she considered more select, was a bone of contention between them and she shot him a glance which said more than words.

  If she had her way, we wouldn’t even have Yom Tov dinner at Mother’s, Nathan thought with the sourness his wife’s indifference to everyone in the family except Bessie engendered in him. His family weren’t good enough for her! But he had always known she was a snob. He ignored her glance and gave his attention to Abraham. “You look well today, Father. You should take time off work more often, it agrees with you.”

  Sarah saw the smile fade from her husband’s face and noticed that the first trace of silver had appeared above the temples in her youngest son’s hair. “Put your hat on, Nat! Standing outside shul bareheaded!” she chided Nathan who had only removed his bowler to set it on his head more comfortably. “And don’t let me hear you nagging your father anymore.”

  Nathan eyed her with surprise. What was the matter with her? She usually backed him up when he said things like that.

  He was further perplexed that afternoon, when Sarah said she wanted to consult him and David about a damp patch on the landing wall. As a rule, it was David alone whose advice she sought.

  “Come into my bedroom. I want to talk to you both and not about the wallpaper,” she said when they were upstairs.

  “Did Father have a bad attack last night?” Nathan asked seeing the sticky medicine spoon on the bed table, which in her anxiety Sarah had forgotten to wash.

  Sarah nodded and played with her brooch which today she had pinned to a new white-lace jabot on last year’s high-necked black dress.

  The effect, with her severe hairstyle, was ageing and David noted more lines on her face than he had remembered being there. But when had he last looked at her properly? He was always preoccupied when he came here and didn’t call to have private chats with her as he had once – there wasn’t time. At night he had his air-raid warden duty. All day he was bogged down by business. Money he was making, though he had a conscience about much of it coming from military contracts; the idea of profiting from war, like his father-in-law had done, was abhorrent to him. But somebody had to make uniforms and because he had a clothing factory he was one of those who did. He did not carry money on Rosh Hashanah and was aware of a flatness in his pocket where his bulging wallet usually reposed. War-risk insurance had paid for his bomb-damage, as it had for Ben’s, and cash wasn’t a problem to him nowadays. But it couldn’t buy his father renewed health or reduce his mother’s anxiety.

  “You don’t look too good yourself, Mother,” he said flatly. “Father’s putting years on you.”

  Sarah emerged from her thoughts and glared at him. “How would you like it if your Ronald said such a thing about you, to Bessie?”

  “If I behaved as foolishly as Father’s doing, he’d be entitled to. But I wouldn’t.”

  “And how do you know how you’ll behave when you’re getting old? A man in his forties can’t put himself in the place of one like your father, with the will to work still strong in him, but the health to do so slipping away. Such a terrible predicament, nobody should have to know from it,” Sarah said distressedly.

  “But one that comes to most men sooner or later,” Nathan told her. “It
’s the kind of thing I see in my work every day.”

  “And the ones to whom it comes sooner try to preserve themselves if they’ve got any sense!” David exclaimed. “Instead of giving their family the kind of worry Father’s giving us.”

  “Maybe he’d rather die in the factory than prolong his life in the kitchen rocking-chair,” Sarah said quietly. “And if that’s what he wants, it’s up to him.”

  “Like hell it is!” Nathan exploded.

  “I’ll read the riot act to him when I get downstairs!” David declared.

  Sarah drew herself up to her full four-foot-eleven and quelled them both with one of her Queen Victoria glances. “Neither of you will say one word to him about it. Do you hear me? That’s what I wanted to tell you, but first I tried to make you see it from his point of view. So I haven’t succeeded, it’s too bad. Maybe afterwards, when you’ve thought about it, you’ll understand. But even if you don’t, you’re to leave him alone and let him be happy. Nobody is going to mention retirement to him ever again.”

  Chapter 5

  The telephone rang whilst Sarah was in the cellar mangling her laundry, filling her with foreboding as its strident summons always did these days. She left Abraham’s woollen underpants dangling from the machine in a cascade of water and went to answer it, rebuking herself for always expecting the worst. But how could she not, with three of her grandsons fighting in the war?

  She wiped her damp hands on her apron and heard the sound of sobbing the moment she lifted the receiver. Was it Esther or Miriam? She didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her it was one of them. In the old days, when they’d lived close by and she hadn’t had this ugly, black contraption on her kitchen wall, they’d have come running to her and she’d have taken them in her arms, but you couldn’t comfort someone over a stretch of wire.

  “What is it? For God’s sake tell me,” she said, with her heart pounding. But the sobbing went on and on. Then she heard a gulp, as if whoever was weeping was trying to control it.

  A convulsive, “Oh Mother–” told her it was her daughter. Miriam called her Ma.

  “Is it Harry, or Arnold?” Sarah made herself ask.

  Another bout of weeping preceded the reply. “Harry.”

  A picture of her eldest grandchild flashed before Sarah’s eyes, not as he had looked in his uniform the last time she saw him, but the long-ago memory of an eight-day-old infant, with Ben’s face in miniature and tendrils of silky dark hair peeping from beneath the little white yamulke he had worn when the mohel circumcised him. The cap, and his cambric gown, had been worn by his Sandberg uncles for their Brith and by every male child in the family since.

  “The telegram says he’s missing in Italy, Mother.”

  A great wave of relief engulfed Sarah, weakening her legs. She leaned heavily against the wall, thinking of the Brith garments carefully stored in tissue paper and lavender in readiness for her future great-grandsons. Missing was not necessarily dead; there was still a chance that a son of Harry’s would one day wear them.

  “Ben’s shut the shop,” Esther said. “He hasn’t spoken a word since the boy handed him the envelope. David’s here, sitting with him and he said I wasn’t to tell you and Father. But I had to, didn’t I? You will tell David I had to?”

  For the first time, Sarah became conscious of an element of fear in her other children’s regard for their elder brother. She’d heard the same apprehensive note in Sammy’s and Nat’s voices when they had done something of which David might not approve.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Esther said tremulously. “David made Ben get into bed and I feel so alone.”

  Sarah pulled herself together. “You’ll do what my neighbour Mrs. Watson’s daughter did. When she got the telegram about their Albert, who afterwards turned up as a prisoner-of-war. You’ll carry on, Esther. Go and open the shop and put a smile on your face for the customers. Ben can’t lie in bed forever and when he sees you being strong, he’ll find strength also.”

  “That’s what David said. But it’s easy for him to give such advice! His son is safe at home because medical students don’t get called up.”

  Sarah made no comment. She knew how shock could affect people. “This morning I got a letter from Marianne and one from our Nat, as well,” she said, steering her daughter away from the subject.

  But this brought forth a further spate of resentment.

  “Don’t even mention our Marianne to me! She could have volunteered for the Army Pay Corps, that’s based in Manchester, when she joined the ATS. Like plenty of Jewish girls did. But no! She has to be different as usual. It wouldn’t suit her to be billeted at home, the way Eva Frankl and Hildegard are. And where is she now, when she could be a comfort to her mother and father? Stationed near Salisbury Plain with all those American soldiers. I don’t sleep a wink at night, worrying about her.”

  Sarah remained discreetly silent. Marianne’s virtue was the last thing she herself was worried about; no granddaughter of Sarah Sandberg’s would ever give cause for concern on that account.

  “And our Nat’s another fine one!” Esther continued her diatribe. “Volunteering instead of waiting to be called up, even though he’s got a wife and child.”

  With this Sarah agreed. She had been unable to dissuade Nathan, and David had refused to try: these days he seemed reluctant to interfere in Nat’s affairs. “So what can you do?” she sighed.

  Esther laughed abruptly. “That must be the most over-used question in the Jewish vocabulary and it only gets asked when there isn’t any answer.”

  Chapter 6

  The platoon of khaki-clad girls trudged laboriously up the steep, hillside road that led to their quarters, wearied not just by the climb, but by their day’s work at a Royal Army Ordnance Depot.

  “This is all I need every evening, after the way the Colonel keeps me pounding the typewriter,” Marianne puffed to one of her room-mates who was marching beside her. “They ought to provide us with transport, instead of making us walk, Birdie.”

  “An’ I wonder wot them bleedin’ cooks ’as ruined fer our tea ternight?” Private Bird replied through the side of her lipstick-caked mouth.

  Talking during a march was forbidden, but the girls, and Birdie especially, thought most of the ATS regulations were made to be broken.

  Marianne shrugged, then straightened her shoulders as Corporal Davies, who was escorting them, cast a beady eye in her direction. “We’ll never know, will we?” she whispered to Birdie. Their meals were largely unrecognizable but telling the orderly officer so when she made the statutory visit to the cookhouse to receive complaints, had no effect.

  “It won’t be lokshen soup, that’s fer sure!” Birdie, who had once been a waitress in an East End Jewish restaurant, said nostalgically. “More likely bubble’n squeak, made wiv the leftover bacon rind, ’n bleedin’ caterpillars fried up wiv the flamin’ cabbage like the larst time!”

  Another glance from Corporal Davies put an end to the exchange and Birdie raised her voice in song with their comrades who were rendering one of the bawdy ballads included in their nightly repertoire.

  Marianne usually sang with them, enjoying the camaraderie of Service life that compensated for its less pleasurable aspects, but this evening she was dispirited. Who could be cheerful when their brother might be lying dead, his body not yet accounted for? She was trying to look on the bright side, but it wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, she had applied for compassionate leave, so she could go home and comfort her parents.

  “You’re out of step, Klein!” the corporal barked.

  Marianne executed the necessary staccato shuffle and almost tripped over a stone on the unpaved road. What was she doing here, in the middle of nowhere? Wearing a uniform and being ordered about by an ex-schoolmistress from Cardiff? Sharing a room with two cockney girls who were man-mad?

  “You’re out of step again, Klein!”

  And getting called by her surname by women and girls to whom a stripe or two on their sleeves,
or pips on their epaulets, had lent unquestionable authority? She’d joined up, that’s what she was doing here! But sometimes she had to pinch herself to believe it. That she’d gone against her parents’ wishes and was miles away from home. The family would faint from shock if they could hear what her comrades were singing.

  “Roll me over,

  In the clover,

  Roll me over, lay me down

  And do it again!”

  Marianne had blushed the first few times she had heard it, but you couldn’t blush every time you heard something like that in the Services, or you’d walk around with a permanently red face. What a sheltered upbringing she’d had. Some of the other girls had, too, and now took everything in their stride, as Marianne had learned to do. But there were still some things that shocked her.

  “Gerrartofit yer fuckin’ bleeder!” Birdie yelled after a passing jeep that had raised the dust in their faces.

  And the language was one of them.

  “Arseface!” Marianne’s other room-mate hollered when an army truck repeated the offence.

  “That’s enough of that,” Corporal Davies rasped as she did regularly in the same circumstances. Her uniform and hair were as dust-laden as everyone else’s, but, unlike her lessers, she marched along stoically, every inch the living image of a woman who has found her true niche in the army.

  When it was not dusty underfoot, it was muddy, and the girls invariably arrived at their quarters coated with one or bespattered with the other. Marianne had to change and make herself look presentable before going to Platoon Office to find out if she had been granted leave. There was an evening train to London which would get her there in time to catch the midnight one to Manchester. Barring delays, she thought restively when she was left cooling her heels until the CO found time to see her.

  The distress that had lowered her spirits since her mother’s letter arrived that morning increased whilst she waited. And the news about Harry only accounted for half of it. Was the recrimination she had read between the lines just her imagination? The praise for Shirley, who kept dropping in to cheer up Marianne’s parents in her absence. The reference to Eva Frankl’s always being there when her mother and father needed her, because she was stationed in Manchester. Even the mention of people they hadn’t seen for years caring enough to ring up and console them seemed an oblique rebuke. The tin of homemade strudel with which the letter had been enclosed did, too. A reminder that Esther Klein did not neglect her maternal duty to her daughter, despite her anxiety about her son. Duty! Marianne thought and was shocked by the sudden surge of resentment aroused in her. Possibly these thoughts were just the product of her guilty conscience because she had left home, but her feelings about duty were not. It was the first time she had seen family ties in that light.