This Much Is True

Well, I can’t please everyone all the time. But I honour the Truth. And within these pages, you will only find Truth, or at least my Truth. There will be some smut inevitably, and it might be a bumpy ride, but I promise you the REAL Miriam Margolyes.

Daddy

Daddy was extremely handsome as a young man, despite being below average height. He had a high forehead, glossy black hair, a ravishing smile and a little moustache. He looked rather like Charlie Chaplin. He was a very fine doctor, well-mannered, with a profound sense of right and wrong, and a strong Glasgow accent he never lost. He was an observant Jew and he had no vices — a dram of whisky after the stars came out on Shabbos (Sabbath) was all he ever drank. He smoked the occasional cigar, never cigarettes. But he was a weak man. He was basically afraid: afraid of confrontation of any kind, afraid of being overlooked, and yet unable to push himself forward. Of course, he didn’t need to: my mother, Ruth, did all the pushing. I think she crushed him a little with her energy and ambition.

Genealogy is my passion: it’s being a detective in history. I have no family, no children, no husband, no parents, no brothers and sisters. Genealogy offers me the family I never had. I’m not a lonely person, but I need to investigate the past and find out about lost cousins. It’s how I discovered that Mummy’s fear of childbirth was based on fact, not just family lore. And when Daddy ended up with dementia he forgot everything from his past, and so it has always been very important for me to remember where he came from… Let me tell you about the Margolyes family.

Like many Scottish second-generation immigrant Jews, Daddy was born in 1899 in the great Glasgow slum, the Gorbals. He grew up in poverty in Govanhill, a short walk from the city centre on the south bank of the Clyde. The first born child of Philip Margolyes and Rebecca née Turiansky. I never met my paternal grandfather; he died in 1937, but I did get to know my grandmother, Rebecca, quite well, as she lived till 1959.

Grandpa Margolyes was born in 1874 in a small shtetl called Amdur (now Indura) in Belarus, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Anti-Jewish feeling started to gather and grow and by 1880 large numbers of poor Jews had made their way across Europe. Many European Jews arrived in Scotland as a stopping post on their way to America. They spoke no English, had no idea about Scotland and probably got out at the port of Leith in Edinburgh, thinking it was New York, the goldene medina they dreamed of reaching. The sea captains encouraged them to disembark so they could return more quickly for another boatload of immigrants. They ended up staying, settling mainly in Glasgow, and in particular in Govanhill and the Gorbals.

When my grandfather came to Scotland around 1887, his first job was as a peddler: a traditional Jewish trade, because it requires little capital. Grandpa Margolyes was an itinerant seller of the small gems and trinkets you might find in gift shops. We Jews call them chatchkes. He used to put his wares in a pack on his back and traipse around the lowlands of Scotland selling to the miners’ wives. He was a quiet, sweet man, liked by his customers who sensed his gentle integrity; they would save up and buy from him each time he came their way. Eventually, after many hard, precarious years plying his trade among the mining communities, he’d saved enough money to be able to buy a small premises in Glasgow in St Enoch Square, and he opened his own jewellery business. The shop was called James McMenamin: he bought it from a Scotsman and never changed the name. While the business did well, he was by no means a millionaire. I still have the well-made wooden coin box from his shop, with scooped holes for farthings, halfpennies, pennies, shillings and sixpences, from before the time cash registers were used, with their pinging drawers to hold the coins.

Philip and Rebecca married in 1897 when they were both twenty-three, and Daddy was born two years later in 1899, when they were living in a tiny, two-room tenement apartment in Allison Street, Govanhill. Then followed Daddy’s three siblings: two sisters, Doris (b.1901) and Evalyn, who was always known as Eva (b.1903), and a brother Jacob (Jack), the baby of the family (b.1906). As the family grew, they were sleeping six in a single, cramped room. My father told me he suffered from rickets as a child, a disease of malnutrition and lack of sunlight; he had bow legs as a result.