The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Victory in war camouflaged looming British decline and the passing of the torch across the Atlantic. For my father, raised in Berea on the Johannesburg reef, his first sight in 1945 of London’s monuments and the crowds thronging its great iron-and-glass railway stations still provoked the frisson of presence at the nexus of global power.

  By a strange quirk, his older brother, Bert, arrived in England for the first time a day later, on a plane from war-ravaged Italy. On May 19, 1945, he wrote in his diary:

  All of a sudden land was below us. This was England, very green and orderly. The sky was dull as we flew over the Sussex Downs. The Englishmen in the plane lost their aloof restraint and peered avidly through the windows. We landed in Croydon, passing over a green cricket field and white-flannelled players. A truck took us to London. Familiar names were everywhere. I saw the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and got off at Trafalgar Square where Nelson stood atop his pinnacle unbowed. I deposited my luggage at Charing Cross Station and set off to find Larky.

  Sydney had owned a violet jersey of the same color as larkspurs in the yard at Honey Street. Bert coined the name. It stuck: Larky Cohen of Johannesburg, brother of Bertie Cohen. Bert was “burning with eagerness” to see Sydney, whom he had left in South Africa eighteen months before. Through a friend he located him at the Tuscan Hotel in Shaftesbury Avenue. Sydney was out. Bert settled into the room, read a paper, smoked a pipe, and drank tea. Coupons were needed for sugar, flour, and Mars bars—but not for the sacred British “cuppa.” The reunion was emotional. “I was very happy to see the Boy,” Bert wrote, although the news Sydney bore—of their father’s sharply declining health—was worrying. “It’s time I got home to the old folks.”

  Uneasiness between the brothers set in the next day: “There is something strange; I looked forward with such passionate eagerness to meeting Larky but, perhaps as an anticlimax, I do not feel thoroughly happy with him. There is something disquieting. I cannot put my finger on it. Is it that he is not ‘simpatico’? Perhaps this is imaginary.” My uncle’s musings on my father continue in the diary that week: “It occurs to me that he hardly knows me and that I must be patient and earn his respect and affection instead of expecting it as a familial due.”

  A few weeks later, after Sydney has found his first job at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, Bert went to visit him. Sydney had encountered an astounding sight at the hospital: a white woman on her hands and knees cleaning the floor.

  My father had also discovered the need for rapid improvisation as he treated a range of war injuries. Up and down a spiral staircase from the ward he scurried to consult a weighty medical manual. His supervisor was a stiff English doctor whose brother had been a renowned big-game photographer. Sydney had treasured a book of wildlife photographs as a child. The photos, it transpired, were by the doctor’s brother. He was invited to the doctor’s house. In the hallway were photographs of a rhino and a charging elephant. “That’s the elephant that killed my brother,” the doctor remarked. You mean, killed the rhino? “No, the photograph was found in my brother’s camera after his death.”

  Bert, arriving at one a.m., found “my hardworking little brother still awake.” He writes: “We chatted for a while and then I lay down on a mattress on the floor and went to sleep. Lark has a fine room all to himself and seems to be most happily situated.”

  Bert’s reflections presaged the highs and lows of an intense, often difficult relationship between two brilliant men who would go on to illustrious careers in British science—both reaching the pinnacle of their respective fields, both appointed Commanders of the British Empire by the queen for their pioneering research, both pursuing vaccines that were never found, Bert for dental caries, Sydney for malaria. They never put to rest the combination of sibling rivalry and character difference that troubled their bond. My uncle, emotional and demanding, a born raconteur, a spellbinding weaver of thought and feeling, often found my father detached, cool, or remote. Sydney, with his intense inner world, silvery wit, loner’s self-sufficiency, wry deadpan humor, and distaste for displays of feeling, was the more introverted personality, wary of an older brother he sometimes found overbearing or controlling, a sibling who in his diary called him “the Boy.”

  In early August 1945, on the eve of departure back to Italy from England, Bert writes, “I asked Lark if I should cable him from Rome but my strange brother said that a letter would suffice.” Then an afterthought: “An atomic bomb has dropped on the city of Hiroshima in Japan today.” My uncle is peeved with my father as the first atomic bomb falls. Perhaps he experienced a fraternal affront with more intensity than the mushroom cloud over Japan.

  These two successful men stood at two poles of my life. I felt their competing natures vie within me, warmth and coolness. Bert never had children. His wife Hazel’s several pregnancies all ended in premature births, probably as a result of a backstreet Johannesburg abortion she had before they were married. One fetus, a boy, lived for a couple of days. He would have survived if born a couple of decades later. I filled that absence in some measure.

  Perhaps I also filled another. On July 8, 1945, my uncle made this entry in his diary: “Of late I am obsessed with a desire to write—but I lack inspiration. If it were forthcoming, if I could unleash my pen, I might perhaps if blessed by Fortune be able to redirect my life away from the prosaic channels along which dentistry leads.” Later that month he returned to the theme: “I am becoming obsessed with a burning desire to write well. Perhaps literary achievement is the unknown goal for which I have been feeling, groping in the dark recesses of my muddled mind.” At the end of the year, back in Italy awaiting a boat to Egypt, he declared 1945 to be the year of an important realization: “I will not be able to practice dentistry happily unless I have been successful in writing.”

  My uncle Bert, who dreamed of becoming a writer before pursuing an illustrious career in dentistry

  It was not to be. The young man who wrote in Italy that “falling snowflakes remind me of a Botticelli virgin—pure, leisurely, fragile, very delicate and almost casual in their indecision”—became the first Nuffield research professor of dental science at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. In his diary he wrote: “The Barrier of Fact—the bigger you grow, the bigger the barrier. Beyond the barrier lies the land of colorful imagination. When you are young you can go there yourself, when you are older someone must describe it for you.”

  My mother returned to Gillespie Ward after her first electroconvulsive therapy. The ward notes for July 30, 1958, say, “Normal recovery, a little improvement noted. Visited by husband. More talkative. Said she felt rather better after ECT. Slightly restless during the night.” She is prepared for a second ECT on August 1. A nurse writes, “She seems much improved. Well occupied and interested in other people.”

  Then silence: the record of my mother at the Holloway Sanatorium stops, the ward notes lost in upheaval just like her transcripts from Barnato Park School. Her mood swings during the following six weeks of that English summer can only be guessed at. She always referred to the place as hell. I do not know how many ECT sessions she had after that second one. My father blotted out, as best he could, the memory of this nightmare.

  Perhaps June visited the hairdressing salon once a week, or attended a concert in the recreation hall, or did regular needlework, her delicate hand poising in the air as she tightened the thread. Or perhaps she was too heavily sedated for any of that. Perhaps she was led around like a child or waif. Perhaps she sobbed in guilt and pain before her daily meetings with Dr. Storey, recalled by Joy Whitfield as “your typical mad psychiatrist, odd, short, very difficult to make eye contact with.” Nor do I know how my third birthday was celebrated without her on August 2. Sydney went to visit her most days. I was often with my uncle Bert and aunt Hazel.

  Patients in Gillespie Ward did not eat in the main dining hall. A heated trolley came around from the kitchen. A nurse would serve the meals. The ward was close to the ECT room. There elect
rodes were placed on either side of the brain and attached to a transformer. Staff would hold the shoulders and hips of patients to avoid dislocation when the current passed. By 1958 a general anesthesia was often administered so that, in Whitfield’s words, “patients did not jump around so much.”

  The surviving ward notes have my mother in Holloway for seven weeks. My father’s notes at the time of her first attempted suicide say four months. She may have returned to the sanatorium later that year. In any event, June came home from Virginia Water to our house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Mill Hill on September 12, 1958, six days before my father’s thirty-seventh birthday.

  Eight years had passed since their sunny meeting on the tennis court at Château Michel in Johannesburg.

  Our house was in the north of London, close to the National Institute for Medical Research, where my father worked. My first memory is of standing at the far end of the Mill Hill garden looking through a picket fence at the allotments and field beyond. There were horses in the field. The shadows of trees played on the whispering grass. I can still feel the sensation of smallness as my hands gripped the fence. Once in that house I was very ill with flu. High fever caused me to hallucinate. This was during the absence of my mother. My father cared for me. He told me he was sick with worry. I laughed in my delirium at the sight of creatures garlanded in tinsel and mistletoe frolicking across the door of my closet.

  Life resumed. My mother found some tenuous equilibrium. Her mother came from South Africa to help—to what degree, I cannot say. June’s collapse became a nonsubject, the mute stranger in the house. A friend, Mary Warshaw, told me June hated life in Mill Hill because she felt cut off. She found relief going into town for lunches with friends. They would meet at Debenhams, a department store. June would go straight for the hats and fascinators and try them all on and hoot with laughter. She was bright—and when she was not, she hid away. She never forgot a birthday. She was full of kitchen tips. Always keep the butter paper—you can cover the vegetables with it and keep them warm. Leave the skin on the onions when you make a stock, it will give the soup a nice golden color. She darned and gave dinner parties. She tried to repair the broken bond with her husband and children.

  My father completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1959. Bound in blue leather, it sits on his bookshelf to this day, with its startling photographs of the backsides of baboons—he always pronounced them “BAY-boons”—swollen to a great size at ovulation. (This he relates to the level of protein in the blood.) Sydney was the first to bring baboons to Britain in the 1950s for medical research. He would go to Heathrow to meet them and bring food. Once he got an odd look from the grocer when, having asked for bananas and been told they were out, he said he wanted carrots instead. Later the baboons were given to the London zoo. A year or so after the donation, he went to visit, and the females started chattering in high excitement, pressing against the bar of the cage. They had always liked him, but not his assistant, whom they once pushed to the ground.

  In 1961 we moved to the house on the hill in Hampstead that my mother came to love. That was also the year my father began work at St. Mary’s Hospital with his friend Rodney Porter, who would win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1972 for determining the chemical structure of an antibody. Sydney was a gifted immunologist. Porter, later killed in an auto accident, recognized his talent and opened doors for him. His career leaped forward as June tried to find some ballast. He later told me that after a shipwreck you cling to the wreckage, you do not strike out for shore. But my parents, young Jewish immigrants recently arrived in Britain, did not have much to cling to when June broke down. Their families were in South Africa. They had embarked on an arduous adaptation only for my mother to buckle.

  A photograph from July 1958 shows June in a small boat on the Norfolk Broads. It was taken during the seventeen days between her discharge from St. Mary’s Hospital and her admission to the Holloway Sanatorium. She is seated. Her smile is expressionless, an outward show overwhelmed by inner torment. I would come to know similar expressions well, a straining to reach the surface. Aged nearly three, I am behind her in a white shirt, my anxious look directed straight at the camera. Behind me a Danish au pair, Jette, holds my fourteen-month-old sister, who looks down in apparent distress.

  June has two infant children but is holding neither of them. Depression has buried her gaze. My father must have taken the photograph. His life henceforth would never altogether escape this tension.

  My mother liked to quote Othello: “What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” And William Walsh: “I can endure my own despair / But not another’s hope.”

  I was born in 1955, midway between the atomic bomb and the release of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, at the start of a postwar boom that would endure decades, on the free side of the iron curtain, in a Europe embarking on the “ever closer union” that stopped the self-destruction of the first half of the twentieth century, safe from the Nazi death factories, too late for the trenches, not too late for flower power, in time for the hippie trail to the subcontinent, and in line for the sexual sweet spot between the arrival of the Pill and the onset of AIDS. This was a good time to be born. One grew up without device distraction and got into the habit of reading. As Philip Larkin noted, “Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three.” For me it began five years later in a Chelsea town house, a couple of hours after watching the Pink Floyd free concert in Hyde Park and feeling, to my surprise, Sarah’s toes touch mine in the grass. I can never listen to “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” without recalling the moment I realized her toes were not mingling with mine by mistake. She knew a lot more than I did.

  June between sessions at psychiatric hospitals with me, my little sister, Jenny, and our au pair, Jette, 1958

  Such luck could not but build forms of amnesia. Weren’t things always this good and love always this free? The distance between the generation that had known the war and my own insouciant band of baby boomers was not easy to bridge. Especially because my father, in a word my mother often used, was a loner. Or at least he became one.

  June once wrote to me of him:

  He may not be able to show and express what he feels because such is his nature. But I know that he has a vast depth of feeling, understanding and true love for me and you. Life has taught me that very often highly intelligent and gifted people are loners—their work and the genius they are able to apply cuts them off from us lesser mortals. Theirs is an esoteric and somewhat unique life force. Try therefore to allow for his occasional appearance of detachment. I know that he feels with passion. He cherishes us and if we need him—as I have often done—he spares no effort to support, to love and to care.

  I knew the love beneath my father’s severity. But after boyhood it was a prize to be earned rather than a sure harbor. My father could not fill the empty space left by the electricity jolted through my mother. Each of us has his limits. I could not count on love. So I sought it where I could. Always, within me, there was a dreamed-of reconciliation, in effect, as I came to understand much later, the restoration of my mother to life.

  Children are ingenious even in their complete dependence. They build worlds that allow them to cope with fears they cannot understand. My father, in his notes on my mother’s depression, kept a photocopy of a chapter from Anthony Storr’s book Human Aggression, with certain passages underlined. One reads:

  Young children are, of course, totally dependent upon their mothers. If they are uncertain of their mother’s affection they soon learn to behave in such a way that they could not possibly offend or irritate her; but on the contrary, they are compelled to placate her in order to get what they need. Such children become very sensitive to their mother’s moods and feelings; and it is this early and skillful adaption to her which makes them able to adapt and identify with others later in life. More robustly confident persons with a greater conviction of their own value are often less sensitive to the feelings of others. On the other hand, when they do become awa
re of them, they have more to give.

  My father, the apple of Polly’s eye and object of her unstinting love, had an immense amount of love to give—when he chose to. I had a gift—one I would later put to professional use—for entering others’ psyches.

  I was a resourceful child with a strong will to survive. Jette, the Danish girl in the back of the boat on the Norfolk Broads, was the first of a succession of Danish au pairs—Inge, Manja, Marianne. In their late teens or early twenties, they lived at my end of the Hampstead house. They bathed and cared for me, gave me the goodnight kiss I craved, and took on the brunt of what my mother could not or would not do.

  My father in his midforties

  I discovered as a boy that I had power over them. I could, it seemed, bend them to my child’s will. A storyteller is what I am. I may have driven my mother away. At least that is how I understand the mystery. I may dwell in a cold house. But I can escape. By dividing myself, I can have two women, my dead mother whose touch I long for and my vital close-by girl. Division is a small price to pay for the elixir of escape.

  Manja Fristoft came to work in our house in early 1965. I tracked her down in Minnesota, and she recalled her time with us almost a half century earlier. She found my mother to be “a lady all the way through, very thoughtful and sweet,” but also a little lost, as if “she had a wall built around her or is a person living in a big grayness.” June often rose late. Sometimes the cleaning lady informed Manja that “Mrs. Cohen is not feeling so well.” Then the door to the bedroom remained closed.