She nodded.
“Well, just let me say one thing to you, lass. From the mouth of someone who’s seen something of Glasgow in all his reporting years. It’s not your capitalism or your socialism or your feminism that you need to worry about in this city. If you’re looking for “isms”, it’s alcoholism you need to be concerned about. That’s the source of all the ills in this city. Every single one of them. The poor health and the poor housing. The way a man treats a man, a man treats a woman. The way a Protestant treats a Catholic and vice versa. Take away the drink and you’ll have all the humanity you need without any of your political haverings. I dinnae touch a drop myself, of course. Temperance. That’s what you should be pushing from those platforms of yours. Temperance. It’s the devil drink that rots the soul of this city.”
She said nothing. There was a mass of truth to what he had said. But she also knew it would take more than the advance of temperance to root out man’s inequality towards woman. Still she was glad of his help. So it was with a great deal of humility she thanked Jimmy Docherty for his advice and his cooperation.
Twice she made an appointment with Agnes’ lawyer. And twice she had to cancel. She couldn’t get away. The whole household was sick. Nathan had just gone down with the German measles. Four months out of bed since the war had ended, and there he was back between the sheets again with another attack from the Germans. Her mother was just recovering from Spanish influenza. The first wave had killed hundreds of people in the city the previous year. And then it had come back again worse than ever. But the virus had not reckoned for the defiance of Madame Kahn. “The Huns didn’t get me,” she said. “The British with their camps didn’t break me. And the Spanish won’t kill me either.” Her father, more meekly, had also taken to his bed. But he had nothing more than a heavy Scottish cold, leaving her with a whole swathe of international infections to contend with as she ferried food and water to her patients, emptied bedpans, wiped cold cloths over hot brows. Dr Drummond had visited the last three evenings with his supplies of powders, quinine pellets and embrocations. At least there was money to pay his bills. Papa Kahn’s tailoring business was doing well. What with all the soldiers back from the Front, back to civilian life, back to clothes they hadn’t worn for years. Leaner frames from years of trench food and rations meant old styles needing to be altered. Or those with money in their pockets, new styles ordered for new lives.
She opened the front door, crossed the corridor of the close, grasped the brass knocker, rapped hard. She saw the shadow of Mrs Carnovsky behind the stained glass panels swaying down the hallway in her approach. The door opened a crack. The smell of brass polish and boiled chicken floated out into the stairwell.
“Oh, it’s you again,” the old woman said. “Don’t go bringing me any of your foreign diseases.”
“I’m perfectly fine. Can I use your telephone?”
“What is wrong with that father of yours, bubeleh? Can he not put his hand in his wallet to order a telephone? He’s a man of the tailoring trade, after all. A business needs to be able to communicate, needs to keep up with the times. If an old woman like me can embrace these new-fangled inventions, so can a man like your father.”
“You certainly are the modern woman,” Celia said, knowing it was actually Mrs Carnovsky’s brother, worried about his sister’s health, who had insisted on the telephone. “Can I come in?”
“Yes, yes. Komm, komm. You know where it is. Meanwhile, I shall make some tea.”
She sat down by the table in the hallway, fumbled with the awkward contraption, called the exchange, fidgeted with the wire until she was put through by the operator.
“I’m afraid Mr Sneddon has the influenza,” the legal secretary said. “He is not taking any appointments at this time.”
“Is there someone else who can see me?”
“What was the file again?”
“The estate of the late Agnes Calder.”
“Let me ask one of the other partners.”
The line went quiet. She could hear Mrs Carnovsky’s kettle whistling away in the kitchen. Then the legal secretary again:
“This is Mr Sneddon’s private case. Only he can deal with you. I’m afraid you will have to wait until he is better. It could be some weeks. The winding up of an estate is a very slow process anyway. Why don’t you call back in a month or so, Miss Kahn. Or better still, wait to hear from us.” Click.
She sat still for a few moments until she had regained her composure, then went through to the kitchen to thank Mrs Carnovsky.
“I have poured you a cup of tea,” her neighbour said. “Drink before it gets cold.”
She felt Mrs Carnovsky’s gaze on her as she drank. The tea was too hot for her liking, but she gulped it down fast anyway, just so she could leave as quickly as possible. But no sooner had she replaced her finished cup than Mrs Carnovsky snatched at it, swirled the tea leaves around three times anti-clockwise, flipped the cup upside down on its own saucer. The old widow then ground the cup around three more times until it rested with the handle facing menacingly towards her. She stared at it, then up towards Mrs Carnovsky’s smoke-teared eyes.
“Well?” the old woman said. The word came out more as a threat than a question. “Do you want to know your future?”
She shook her head. “Your readings are never good for me.”
“What was the last one? I don’t remember.”
“It was a cross.”
“Ah yes, a cross. Suffering. Did you suffer?”
“We’ve just had a terrible war. Now there’s another outbreak of influenza. Everyone is suffering.”
Mrs Carnovsky tapped a yellowed finger on the base of the cup. “Do you want a reading or not, bubeleh?”
“All right. Tell me.”
The old woman picked up the cup, held it this way and that in the rare winter sunlight. “My, my,” she said. Then resumed her scrutiny of the brown leaves against the white porcelain. “Look, look. What do you see?”
She took the cup, peered at the markings. “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “It could be many things.”
“Come on, bubeleh. It is important you try.”
“A fish? Is it a fish?”
Mrs Carnovsky slapped her thigh. “Yes, yes. A fish it is. A fish is a fine thing for the leaves.”
“It is?”
“It means good fortune.”
Celia laughed. “From where am I going to get good fortune?”
She kept the book hidden in a private compartment she’d made for herself between her cot and the wall. Her diary went in there too. And Agnes’ letter. She covered it with brown paper as if it were a school book, but didn’t write a title on the outside, not even her name. It felt profane keeping the text in the house, like secretly eating a strip of bacon off the kosher plates, knowing how such a sin would drive her mother into a state of hysteria. She had heard of the book’s publication whispered by women colleagues in the peace movement. The Catholic Church was outraged. It was banned in America. She daren’t even read it at night when everyone had gone to bed.
She decided to go to Langside Library. The one in the Gorbals was far too close, she was bound to meet someone there she knew. A drunk accosted her outside the building, one of those skinny, mean types with his tight face and corrugated brow, clinging on to a bottle filled with urine-coloured liquid as if it were life itself he was holding. Thinking he was being friendly or funny, or whatever else was going in his addled mind, he held out a hand in a drunken hello. A hand she must shake for fear the outstretched limb might turn to a palm-slap or a punch. “Gie us a kiss, darling,” he slurred with his stink-breath. “Gie us a kiss.” She pushed him aside, continued on inside.
Thankfully, the library was close to empty, the radiators being turned down, the one in the Gorbals usually piping hot, bringing in the hordes with nowhere else to go. She found herself a table in a corner, opened up to the title page. How Agnes had managed to smuggle a copy into Duke Street jail, she could not imag
ine. And now here she was holding this thin, clandestine volume in her hands. Wise Parenthood – A Treatise on Birth Control or Contraception. By Marie C. Stopes. She read:
“If the course of ‘nature’ is allowed to run unguided, babies come in general too quickly for the resources of most, and particularly of city dwelling families, and the parents as well as the children consequently suffer. Wise parents therefore guide nature, and control the conception of the desired children so as to space them in the way best adjusted to what health, wealth, and happiness they have to give.”
And further on:
“The desolating effects of abortion can only be exterminated by a sound knowledge of the control of conception.”
She had always considered her own attitude towards birth control a simple one – she practised social purity. She avoided marriage. She avoided sexual intercourse. She no longer gave any thought to her body ‘down there’. Women had to be independent from a society structured around the lower natures of men. Her politics were her contraceptive, making her ignorance of sexual matters irrelevant.
But this book spared no detail. She learned about the workings of her own sex organs, how to fit a rubber cap, how to kill off sperm with the use of a quinine compound mixed with cocoa butter, how to rate other birth control methods such as the sheath, douching and coitus interruptus. When an elderly gentleman came to sit nearby with his newspaper, she scowled at his presence, turned her back. She read on. In her head, she could almost hear Agnes’ Glasgow guttural dictating the words rather than Stopes’ Edinburgh burr. How women with a history of miscarriages and poor health were held to ransom by the unprotected tyranny of men’s sexual desires. How overlarge families equalled poverty for the working classes. Every so often, she would stop in order to reflect on the text. It wasn’t as if Stopes’ ideas were new to her. It was just that they were set down with such clear and rational thought. It was all so affirming. It was all so bloody obvious.
Fifteen
“YOU LOOK EXHAUSTED.”
She slowly raised her head from the newspaper spread across the kitchen table. Nathan was smiling at her. Her not-so-little brother, with his white hair and sad eyes, back on his feet after his bout with German measles. His nimble fingers and sharp sense of style turning him into quite the young tailor with a flair for the cut and the cloth, customers asking for him by name now. Nathan teasing their father about this, suggesting he might start a business on his own. “Mr Nathan’s”, he would call it, bespoke cloth-meister of the Gorbals, discounts available to returned soldiers looking to get back into mufti.
“I’ve been very busy,” she said.
“I know. I never see you. Where do you go at nights?”
“Meetings. You know that.”
“I thought you women had the vote now.”
“If we’re over thirty and married to a man of property. Anyway, we’ve got a lot more to struggle for than the vote.”
“Elbowing your way into the sales at Pettigrew and Stephens?”
She couldn’t help herself smiling at the comment. Nathan clapped his hands together. “Well, I finally made Miss Serious crack her face.”
Madame Kahn bustled into the kitchen, discarding her apron as she walked. “Now, now, kinder. Prepare the table. It is time to light the Shabbos candles. Your father is waiting. And where is that brother of mine?”
“Is Uncle Mendel back for the Shabbos?” Celia asked.
Her mother pointed to the ceiling. “Who do you think is making that racket upstairs? He could put on his slippers. But no. He has to stomp around in those boots of his. Like a big fat golem.”
Celia quickly folded up the newspaper, laid out the linen tablecloth and the Dresden china. Her mother placed a pair of silver candlesticks at the centre, a legacy from her own mother that could be traced all the way back to a great-grandmother from a poverty-stricken shtetl who still somehow managed to indulge in the luxury of owning such silverware. “These candlesticks are worth a small fortune,” Madame Kahn would tell her. “They are your inheritance. Your dowry. Unless…” The implications of the word “unless” were understood, a direct threat against marrying out of the faith. A bribe. She wed a Jew, she got the candlesticks. That was the deal. Or step over her mother’s dead body, if she didn’t.
She heard cheerful male voices in the hallway. Uncle Mendel greeting her father, then the two of them entering the kitchen, chuckling.
“Airplane fabric?” Papa Kahn said. “Clothes from airplane fabric? The boy is serious?”
“Good Shabbos, my dear family,” Uncle Mendel said, ignoring his brother-in-law’s question, spreading out his arms wide in bestowal of his greeting. “Good Shabbos.” He then clasped Nathan in a rough hug. “Look at you. Look at you. A young man you have become.”
She went over to kiss her uncle lightly on the cheek. His beard, more grey than dark now, smelt of lavender soap. “Good Shabbos, uncle.” He smiled at her with his watery eyes, then skirted past her, opened the back door, peered out and up to the sky in a ritual she could remember for as long as there had been an Uncle Mendel and a Sabbath in her life.
“Where is the first star to announce the arrival of the Shabbos, eh?” he asked. “Bah! In this city smog, nothing you can see. To my cottage in the country, you must come. And a sky with a million stars you will witness. A million stars.”
“Until then, Mendel,” Papa Kahn said wearily, “we will just have to make do with the Sabbath commencement times as published in the Glasgow Jewish Evening Times. Now, tell me about this airplane fabric.”
“Shah,” Madame Kahn scolded. “First, the candles, then the airplanes. Komm, my daughter.”
Celia went to stand by her mother as she lit the candles using a long taper ignited from the fire in the grate. With their hands miming a gathering motion above the candles, together they beckoned the Sabbath into the home. Celia closed her eyes, mumbled the blessing while Madame Kahn swayed beside her in silence for a good few seconds longer. She wondered what her mother’s secret thoughts were during these quiet moments. No doubt, she would be asking God to bless her little family with good health and prosperity. But there were also probably some added desires too. That her brother should cease with his gambling and his drinking, that her son should continue in good health, that her daughter should not humiliate her with an inappropriate marriage. Her mother opened her eyes, breathed out a sigh both as an indication that her requests would probably go unanswered and also that her husband should proceed with his duties. Papa Kahn slowly enunciated the blessing for the wine, everyone responded with “Amen”, and drank down the sweet concoction. Her father then cut and distributed the Sabbath loaf, so fresh from Fogell’s bakery that it was still warm in her hands.
“No politics,” Madame Kahn warned. “For once there will be no talk of politics at the Shabbos table.”
“What is this airplane fabric?” Nathan asked.
Uncle Mendel poured out a glass of schnapps for himself, one for Papa Kahn. “It is Avram’s idea,” he said. “Out of airplane fabric, waterproof clothing he wants to make. For the farmers and the shepherds, the hunters and the fishermen.”
“A meshugge idea,” Papa Kahn said, as he blew noisily on his chicken soup. “Madness.”
“A crazy idea it is not,” Uncle Mendel corrected. “Today with an aircraft manufacturer in Carmunnock I met. Now the war is finished, rolls and rolls of the material they have left over. Waterproof fabric from the wings and the … what is this word? … fuselage. At a very cheap price I bought. There is more if we want.”
“Then you are mad too. You can make clothing from such a material?”
“It is possible.”
“I can make a few samples,” Nathan suggested. “What does Avram want?”
“He suggests a smock,” Uncle Mendel said. “Some leggings maybe.”
“Let me have some of the material, uncle. I can do the designs, get the girls at the shop to make them up.”
“See,” Uncle Mendel said, p
ointing at Papa Kahn. “There is a young man open to change.”
“I just want to know when Avram will come back,” Celia said. “He’s been away too long.”
Uncle Mendel shrugged. “Up there, he has his own life. The work he enjoys. A good business sense he has. And football with a local team he plays.”
“Football,” Papa Kahn moaned. “Always with the football. And now with the waterproof clothing. Why can’t he just be a credit draper?”
The next morning they all walked to the Great Synagogue in South Portland Street. “We shall go like a family,” her mother declared as she tried to co-ordinate the event by stopping Papa Kahn and Uncle Mendel from going too early, her children from going too late. Celia had always despised the journey. Jew Street. Gentile Street. Jew Street. Jew Street. Gentile Street. Jew Street. Those were the descriptions mapping out the walk in her head ever since she was a child. The Saturday might have been the day of rest for the Jews of the Gorbals, but for everyone else it was business as usual. The coal wagon still came, the ash cans were still emptied, milk and post were delivered. People went shopping, pushed prams, lit fires, cooked hot meals, visited the park bandstands and the local libraries, traded with notes and coins. No Gentile was dressed up to the nines, carrying Tallis bags emblazoned with the Star of David as a shining symbol of otherness, staring straight ahead as if the Cossacks on their horses awaited around the next corner.
Starting out on her own Thistle Street was easy enough. After all, it hosted the most number of Jewish families in the Gorbals. She could relax then, pretend she lived in a city of Jews, a country of Jews, where Saturday was the official day of rest. But when she turned into Cumberland Street busy with its Saturday traffic and shoppers, the giant smoke-stacks of the electricity power station belching in the distance, she began to tense up, felt the trickle of sweat down her ribcage. When she was young, this was the point in their journey when her father would take her hand, she would skip along at his side without any sense of inhibition. Now, he just pressed on in front of her, back hunched, head down, while her mother clutched her coat collar, quickened her pace. Only Uncle Mendel with his long beard and sidelocks seemed oblivious to his foreignness as he chatted loudly with Nathan about Avram’s idea for waterproof clothing. The next street, Abbotsford Place, was fine, there was her old school, several Jewish shops with their Yiddish signs above the doorways, all closed down for the Sabbath. Then it was across Bedford Street, another Gentile thoroughfare. She remembered one time seeing a non-Jewish classmate standing there with her mother. The young girl had started to raise her hand to wave but her mother had whacked her across the top of her head, ‘shooshed’ her, as if a bunch of lepers were passing. Finally, the ordeal was over when their little party reached the impressive façade of the synagogue on South Portland Street.
The Liberation of Celia Kahn Page 12