This Much Is True

When my mother left school at fourteen, she went to work as a salesgirl in Flora’s shop. She relished her time working there, delighting in her selling skills, cajoling and sweet-talking a customer until they had to buy. One of her stories related how at the end of a day when she’d sold nothing, a woman came into the shop. Mummy was determined to make a sale. The woman tried on hat after hat; Mummy was losing patience. Finally, she jammed a hat on the customer’s head and twisted it harshly to get the decoration at the front. The woman screamed, tore the hat off and shouted as she ran out of the shop, ‘They do people in, here!’

Mummy was in her mid-twenties when she met Daddy at the Jewish tennis club. She noticed this dapper Scottish chap with his bright face and little moustache — but, more importantly as far as my mother was concerned, she appreciated his status: he was not merely Jewish, but a Jewish doctor. My mother confessed that she didn’t love my father at first when she married him; she wanted him because she wanted a doctor as a husband. I don’t know if he ever knew that and, of course, I never told him, but Mummy told me because we told each other everything. She told me that she grew to love him and always said he was a good man and a good husband. He was an honourable person and that was the thing that she loved about him. He had complete honesty, decency and integrity. Mummy recognised that. If he found money in the street, for example, he would take it to the police. I’m not sure Mummy would have, but he would. He was also always scrupulous about his income tax. We weren’t particularly well off, but he always said to me, ‘Never dodge the taxes! Never cheat the government.’ That was one of his criteria for living a decent life.

They got engaged in 1930. At the crowded engagement party at Siggi and Flora’s house, her beloved parrot, Polly, collapsed in the heat and was found expired at the bottom of his cage the next day. He used to squawk, ‘Polly wants a butty!’ (a Merseyside expression for a piece of bread and butter), one of the few remnants of Liverpool in my mother’s life.

The wedding reception was held in the Porchester Hall in Bayswater, on the other side of London from the synagogue in New Cross — an absurd expense. The music was supplied by Nat Gonella and his band, the top Jewish orchestra for weddings. The theme of the reception was ‘floral and coral’, while the bridal party’s clothes, chosen by Mummy, were inspired by Little Lord Fauntleroy. The honeymoon, chosen by Daddy, was in Norway, sailing up the fjords. They spent their wedding night in the Grosvenor Hotel — very posh. It was the only time in their lives that they went abroad together.

My grandmother Flora wasn’t happy. On the morning of the wedding, Grandma said to Mummy: ‘Well, you’ve made your bed and you must lie on it.’ She didn’t like my father, because she felt he thought he was a cut above them socially, but that’s a spiteful thing to say to your daughter on her wedding day. That’s what my grandmother could be like, and yet she was all sweetness and light where I was concerned. She adored me.

Mummy married Daddy and raised her social status in a single stroke, which is what she intended to do. They went to live at my father’s house in Terrace Road, Plaistow, where he was in single-handed practice as a GP. Their household was completed by a wire-haired terrier called Bonny and Daddy’s loyal housekeeper, Miss Shrimpton.

Mummy was the rock in my life. It was not that I didn’t love my father, but he was quiet, and she was not. In some senses, they were incompatible. They came from very different strands of Jewish life. Mummy was the most vivid person I have ever known. She was an overflowing, ebullient, seemingly confident and, if I’m honest (and I must be), slightly vulgar person, while my father was totally buttoned-up, very Presbyterian and hemmed in by all the orthodoxy of Judaism to which his family subscribed. My mother was more of a free spirit: accomplished and brave and fearless.

While undeniably much more like my mother, I remain a strange mixture of them both to this day.

Enter Miriam