Page 3 of 6

REMEMBERING KEMAL

10th December 2020 / Esther Menell

It is not hard to remember someone you could never forget.

I am riffling through some of the many, often enigmatic, messages I got from Kemal during the four years that I was sending him second-hand paperbacks for the shelves of his little bookshop in the back streets of Antalya.

This, one of the earliest, is typical:

You have time do box of fiction?

Good evening

I must pay you

Kemal

Luckily, I did have time and those four years, when life was one long treasure-hunt, were among the most carefree ever.

The timing could not have been better. Retired by then from a life working on other people’s as yet unpublished books, I had just given up on the last of several attempts to be useful, and was ready for something new. And so it was that I stopped the numbingly useless attempts to improve literacy in prisons (the bureaucracy, not the prisoners, proved the sticking point) and plunged happily into finding reading for the English-speaking walkers of the Lycian Way in the seaside town of Antalya.

It is said that it was the paperbacks, abandoned by tourists – and found by Kemal while working on the buses – that had propelled him, a young man with little formal education but a passion for books, to start his own bookshop.

Of course, even if this is true, there must have been other steps along the way, and those of us who came to know Kemal have spent many hours trying to reconstruct his past life. It is only very recently that I heard the bus conductor story: a little more likely than the fantasies prompted by signs of a bullet wound on his shoulder.

I never saw his shoulder. We were not in Antalya long enough to join him for his daily swim.

. . . only the dead know Brooklyn by Thomas WOLFE . . .

Take care

I swim every morning

Kemal

and, having told him, almost as soon as we met, that I had a husband, I like to think it was only this that kept him from inviting me to spend a lot more time with him. For Kemal loved women almost as much as he loved books.

One of the many women lucky enough to cross his path was already a friend of mine. Another became a friend. Both treasure his memory and share with me their grief at the news of his death. Which occurred exactly one week before, unknowing, I included one of my own Kemal memories in my September blog.

It was he who hauled that hideous bowl (which I now know was a choice example of Palissy ware) to Sotheby’s, and it was the young woman who had collected it from me who, all these years later, unearthed my address and let me know he was, by his own hand, dead.

. . . next summer I will built my own spulcreve in my willage . . .

wrote Kemal almost exactly nine years ago.

What is all this about a sepulchre? Surely it is a bit early to be planning

your tomb . . .

I wrote back. I had no premonition of what was to come. Nor did he. He had simply found a sculpture (cat sculpture seal by French sculpcure) that he wanted for his tomb, and I can only suppose that now he had left the house with its large garden where he lived when I first met him, he had nowhere to put it. So he took it to where it would finally belong.

No one I know has been to his village, or even knows its name. I hope someone who was around when he died knew what he wanted, and made it happen. I hope too that they knew what kind of a send-off he would have wanted. Here again, we can only guess. That he was a Christian at birth – another of the stories about him – seems unlikely. I know for certain that at the sound of the muezzin he would close the shutters; and everything about him suggested this was not only for the sake of his eardrums.

There is so much we don’t know. And never will. For instance, where did the Palissy ware bowl and the many beautiful objects he sold or gave away come from? And what about the palatial house, with its garden full of antiquities, to which his little bookshop was an annexe? My guess is that it belonged to a wealthy foreigner: that Kemal was his manservant and became his heir.

If we seem here to be in the realms of popular fiction, or even crime fiction, so be it. Kemal, in his beauty (‘a Neptune arising from the sea’, is how one of his highly educated lady friends describes him) is a story-book creation come to life. How appropriate for someone who so loved books.

What kind of books? had been my first anxious question when, months after exchanging addresses, and never having expected to hear from him again, I got a scribbled note asking me to buy books for him, and saying that a lorry driver, already on his way to England, would come and collect them.

And so began the four years of trawling the charity shops for any book that cost no more than two pounds, was in good condition, and I would want to read myself!

Here is a page from the notebook in which I entered each purchase:

Joan Didion Where I Was From £1

Reginald Hill Death’s Jest Book £1. 50

Andrea Ashworth Once In a House on Fire £1

Rachel Cusk Saving Agnes 70p

Ian Rankin The Falls £1

Proust Vol 4 Sodom and Gomorrah £1

Don Delillo Underworld £1

Graham Greene May We Borrow Your Husband 75p

I hadn’t read them all, and still haven’t. But each author or title whetted the appetite. In the case of Proust, my own appetite had, in truth, been satisfied long ago by the end of volume 3, but the title of volume 4 seemed likely to attract a browser’s attention.

Whether it did or not, I will never know. Nor will I know what has become of the stunning collection of antiquities, dragged out of skips, gathered from building sites – ‘the dustbins of history’ (here Kemal was quoting Trotsky) – and now displayed amid the tangle of shrubs and flowering trees in that garden, which I had glimpsed that morning when I first entered the shop.

That same morning, my husband was looking at antiquities too. But in the local museum. Antalya was not a destination, but a stop on the way from the classical glories of the western coast to Beyşehir, a small town in Anatolia, renowned for its ancient wooden mosque.

There were no museums In Beyşehir, which we were to reach a day or two later, but this was to be the most memorable of all our stops. A faded leaflet pinned to the board in the only hotel showed something that looked like a well and claimed it dated back to Hittite times.

Wishing Kemal was with us, for no one spoke a word of English, we still managed to find it: a water hole in a flat, empty landscape, with a trickle of water issuing from a pipe which – such is the power of suggestion – appeared numinous in the gathering dusk.

Who knows how long we would have stood there in wonderment, if we hadn’t been distracted by the sight of a small crowd of women, approaching slowly across the scrub. When close, they emptied sacks they were carrying onto the ground and there were mounds of knitwear – sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves, in all the colours of the rainbow – spread out for us to buy.

It is a regret to this day that I did not have the entrepreneurial skills to have magicked that beautiful handwork into some Knightsbridge boutique and given much needed custom to that remote community. But this short-lived dream, which had Kemal as the middleman, lasted no longer than any other day-dream, and second-hand paperbacks remained the cargo which an increasingly unreliable lorry driver carried from England to Turkey.

In the long exchange of e-mails, the lorry driver makes many appearances:

Hope lorry driver doesn’t forget the books this time everybody seems to get alsemeir . . .

He is still in Italy . . .

Am I right in thinking we can’t expect lorry driver during Ramadan?

And then, inevitably

I am terribly sorry, but lorry driver is kaput

My memory lets me down there. Did K find another driver bringing cargoes of lemons to London? I think he must have done, because my ‘sales ledger’ tells me another year passed before things finally came to a stop. By then, I was haunting the charity shops not just for Kemal but also for my grandson, Zachariah, to whom I sent a book every month for his first five years.

Now 12 years old, Z is lost to me (though not to books) in the baffling world of Manga, and the charity shops, thanks to Covid, have long been out of reach. Those halcyon days are over when ‘buying for Kemal’ was a part of life and R and I would scour the high streets of market towns for Heart Foundation shop signs, and the back of the car was always full of books.

But the memories linger and they are not only about books. There was the time when Kemal came and stayed with us: the only time, except for that encounter in the shop, that he and I were in the same place at the same time. It was during this visit we discovered what a wonderful and willing cook he was. He loved food, as he also loved flowers: he recognised almost every one that was growing in our garden, and had grown many of them in his.

Was it an illness of mind or body that made this man, with his lust for life and love of beauty, die as he did? Or was it the increasing ugliness of the world that made him want to leave it? Whatever it was, it is over now.

Wherever you are and however you got there, Kemal,
rest in peace.

THE ACCIDENTAL PHOTOGRAPHER

12th November 2020 / Esther Menell

Five years ago, to my surprise and that of everyone else, including my husband who used to joke that I was a ‘folk-photographer’, a lot of snaps I had taken of him – mostly looking at buildings – were exhibited at the architectural school where he had been teaching and, not much later, and more surprisingly still, in a gallery in Rome.

It seems there is a category of photographers called Street Photographers, and that I counted among them. Worlds away in skill and subject (I did not have the nerve to photograph grown-up people), I nevertheless found myself in the same category as ex-nanny and one of the greatest of all street photographers, Vivian Maier.

The film about Maier*, made by the young man who came across crates of her abandoned work in an auction sale, is a joy on two counts: because it allows us to see a lot of her astonishing photographs, and because her life is as strange and unsettling as that of a character in a Ruth Rendell novel. Tall, plain, stiff (unable to unbend, except with children), this nanny-from-who-knows-where moved from one kindly middle-class family to another, with her ever-increasing number of suitcases and boxes, all hidden from view by her insistence on having a lock on the door of her room.

None of her charges came to harm. Many have good memories of her. And all of them will have been present when some of her greatest pictures were taken. As for the boxes, it was not until young John Maloof – thinking he might find something useful to illustrate a paper on local history – put in a bid and took them home, that their contents were revealed.

It was seeing this marvellous film that made me go back to my own heaps of photos, mostly taken before DoublePrint went out of business and I had to go digital. Almost all, I have now thrown out. But here are a few for which I have a lamentable fondness.

*Finding Vivian Maier: written, directed and produced by John Maloof

My husband’s ‘take’ on Vivian Maier can be found here.

LOST AND FOUND

27th October 2020 / Esther Menell

There it was. In the medicine chest. The book of stamps I thought lost for ever. But how did it get there, and does that mean I may still find the fifty-pound note my husband left me when he set off for the Lebanon: natural destination, in those far-off days, for a systems player who had been banned from every gambling club in London? That fifty pounds was to keep me and our baby son going while he was away. Careful, as ever, I put it away safely, and have never been able to find it.

And what about the unopened pack of poppadoms, the barely begun jar of marmalade, and those lacy headbands that hid my attempts to cut my own hair? Will I ever find those? All have disappeared so thoroughly that I am beginning to think there is a poltergeist at work in this house in which there have been no visitors for over six months.

Best to think about the things I have found instead. There is a favourite photo, lost for ever, I had thought, taken in a Gambian orphanage, and the long-lost letter from Mollie Keane’s agent which would have resolved, once and for all, the unseemly dispute about whether the manuscript of Good Behaviour had been sent to Diana Athill or to me.

And then there is a whole category of things, like the Estonian doll and my father’s prayer shawl, which weren’t actually lost, because I had forgotten they existed. These were among the things which surfaced as I rooted around in the massive, carved chest – shipped from some outpost of Empire by a mining-engineer friend of my father’s and still, after almost a hundred years, smelling of camphor.

Better still than lost things, are people newly found: those young relatives who, like me, are waiting to know what, if anything, they will be getting from an eleven-year-old will which came to light only recently. It is thanks to this I am now in touch with the daughter of a half-brother I never knew, and the son of a favourite cousin: both unearthed by an agency whose business it is to find Lost People.

That nothing is ever lost for good, I learnt as a ten-year-old when I dropped my precious Parker Pen on the sports field. Hours and buckets of tears later, I was allowed to go and look for it, though warned not to expect to find it. But I did, and I still remember the moment when I saw it, lying in the wet grass, momentarily as big as a small tree: an epiphany! My first and my last. Nothing, I remind myself, as I hunt for the marmalade, is ever lost for ever.

RELATIVE VALUES

24th September 2020 / Esther Menell

It is one thing discovering that some of your possessions have a value you never dreamt of*, and another finding out how to realise this.

Neither of my two experiences of selling provides a useful template. The first was when needing the money urgently for house repairs, I fished my mother’s few pieces of jewellery out of the breadcrumb jar (I had not been able to afford to insure them) and after consulting both friends and the Yellow Pages, took them first to one of the big auction houses, then (with an introduction) to the owner of one of the most prestigious Bond Street jewellers, and lastly, because everyone knows about Hatton Garden, to Hatton Garden.

The auction house was awesome. I remember being treated with icy politeness at the reception desk and feeling very out of place until someone slid into view and escorted me to a velvety little side-room, where I was able to get at the shoulder-holster under my shirt and to extract the jewellery, after which the separate pieces were laid on a felt-covered tray and borne away.

An hour or so, and several Tatlers later, I was given a rough estimate of what they were likely to fetch at auction, and told of the preliminary expenses which would include putting one of them – a brooch which a suave young man had recognised as of late-nineteenth century Russian origin – in their catalogue.

The expense of the operation and its uncertain outcome decided me to try my friend’s jeweller friend, and this time I also took with me a clutch of gold coins (legacy of an aunt who only trusted what she could see and feel) and my father’s gold cigarette case. Both, I was now told by X, a soft-spoken, lizard-like creature, should be sold as bullion. He summoned a minion, had them weighed, told me what they would fetch, and said he would be happy to take these off me now. The rest, he would like me to leave and collect in a few days’ time.

I don’t know what made me decide to stuff everything back about my person and say, rather grandly, that I would think about it, but I did, and now made my way to Hatton Garden. Here, I went into one small shop after another. In one of them I was told that the biggest stone (which eventually brought something like £700) was glass. In another, I was advised to take my gold hoard to a bullion house down the road, where I sold it across the counter for considerably more than Mr X had been going to give me an hour or two before.

In the end, not knowing who to believe, I went back to Bonhams and, some months later, got from that august establishment almost exactly what one of the little one-man businesses would have handed me in cash.

My second auction-house experience was when a Turkish friend, who looks more like a holiday-romance fisherman than an aesthete (rather as the recently departed British ambassador to the U.S. looks more like a hill farmer than a diplomat) asked me – he and his current lady love were staying with us – if I would go to Sotheby’s with him to take along a very large and untidy looking parcel that I had noticed among his luggage when he had arrived, unexpectedly, from Antalya. I was pretty sure that he knew what he was about, even though I would have taken the hideous pot he now showed me straight to the nearest charity shop.

Well, we made it to Sotheby’s and were greeted with that same blood-curdling politeness, which would not have bothered K, even had he not been preoccupied with emptying his pockets of various small hard, metal objects which (to my embarrassment) he now handed to the pretty young woman who had been sent to see what we had with us. To my surprise, she was ready to take these, as well as the pot, to be valued. And, before long, we were taken behind the scenes, to be told that they would be pleased to handle everything, but first we would need to establish provenance.

That was the clincher. Not that these were stolen goods. They weren’t. But we had had enough for one day. We walked up to Oxford Street, got on a bus, and came home.

As for the pot, it remained in our attic for many years and then, out of the blue, a phone call from ‘a friend of K’s’, asking if she could collect ‘K’s pot’. She came. It went. One of the small metal things is on the table beside me.

*I found out recently that first editions of Wide Sargasso Sea are now being sold for over £2,000.

MOSTLY HARRY

25th August 2020 / Esther Menell

It seems people are capable of collecting anything. I just heard of someone who collects the labels on eating apples. It is hard to imagine the satisfaction in that; easier to understand collecting something which you have pleasure in handling or looking at. Or anything where you can have all of a kind: say, the first 100 Penguins, or every edition of a favourite book. This would presumably give the same satisfaction as finishing a jigsaw puzzle, where completion can be such a pressing need that a friend, having mislaid two pieces of a just completed 9,000 piece puzzle, got out a fretsaw and carefully reconstructed them; only to find the originals, a few days later, down the side of the sofa.

I have never consciously collected anything, but have made up for this by never throwing anything away and therefore, you could say, collecting everything. Which is how I come to have every note that Harry – the poet Harry Fainlight – ever wrote me, only to find that these are now saleable. There are people out there actually ready to buy them.

None of the notes is substantial, quite a few are malign. One envelope, addressed in his unmistakeable hand, contained nothing but a page torn out of a book: the sepia photograph of his grandmother’s tombstone.

As for the writer of these strange little missives . . . he had arrived in my life through a friend, a lot wilder than me. She knew lots of poets. Through her I met – or had at least been in a room with – quite a few of them: Michael Horowitz, of course, (who hasn’t?) but also Gregory Corso and the spectre-like William Burroughs.

Not long back from New York, where acid had begun to unhinge him, Harry needed somewhere to stay, and the little garden cell I was letting for thirty shillings a week was vacant. He moved in, and so began the little stream (I now wish it had been a flood) of notes, left around the house for me to find in the mornings or posted, variously, from a London prison, a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, his parents’ home in Sussex, the cottage in Wales where he died a few years later.

I didn’t keep Harry’s notes because I thought I could sell them. Nor the letters from Jean Rhys. Nor the one from Simon Raven asking me (I was then his publisher’s secretary) to open any mail addressed to him (it was mid-December) in case there was a Christmas cheque in it. I kept them because I keep everything and now, having found people collect not only stamps but apple labels, alarm clocks and belt buckles*, I am no longer surprised that there is a lively trade in autographs – so lively, that I have been warned not to let the originals out of my sight.

What a pity George – George Andrews – who succeeded Harry, hadn’t been given to communicating on paper. His signature (if only I had kept a rent book) might have made it worthwhile having the house reeking of pot. A benign presence, the author of The Book of Grass was a man of few words. All I can remember him ever saying, as he padded about, arm uplifted in greeting, was ‘Hi, man!’, and brown rice is all I can remember him cooking, except for the hash brownies which he hoped would bring me – a non-smoker – into the fold . . . .

Looking round me, as I try to bring some order into a house crammed with things, I sometimes think enviously of those people who throw away anything they no longer have a use for. Of course, this can go too far. My erstwhile friend, Andrea, discarded people with the same ease as others throw out an old tea cloth. It was some consolation, years after she had dropped me, to find a character in one of her novels say that friends are like pot plants: they have a short life.

I wonder if Andrea’s letters, too, need to be put aside in case (she died only recently) they are saleable. She, who had written me into her will and then written me out again, would not disapprove. Not born to money, she valued it, and I felt a strong stab of affection when I came across this page torn out of the Radio Times. The caption reads: ‘I would find it very pleasant if the critics were to hail me as a genius. But if it was a choice between critical approbation with low viewing figures and audiences of 20 million**, it’s no contest.’

I am thankful that almost all the thousand or more letters that have been keeping the present at bay are from friends whose names are known only to those who actually knew them, so I can keep them or throw them out, or return them to the writer, or to the writer’s children, without any thought of foregoing some useful cash.

As for Harry, even if I sell his letters, my memory of him will stay intact for as long as I have a copy of his book and can still see him sitting at the kitchen table, one Christmas Eve, transfixed by the Frog Prince who appeared among the green metal leaves of a slowly opening water-lily, each time he spun the top I was waiting to wrap for my three-year-old son.

*See: What is it worth? 85 different things to collect: the ultimate list

** The television series which scored that vast audience was ‘A Bouquet of Barbed Wire’

ON THE HEATH

27th July 2020 / Esther Menell

This morning a young friend of mine (not that she would think of herself as young, but she is twenty years younger than me) flew to Greece with her family. Next week, another friend takes off for Italy with her family, having just (like Noah’s dove) returned from a scouting trip, to make sure the waters had receded. Which they had. Italy is now a safe place to be.

Here, in London, R and I are trying on face masks for the first time . . .

None of the statements put out by our government carries conviction. As we are no longer useful to the economy as workers (being long retired), nor as consumers (a role we now amply fulfil without leaving the house), we feel entitled to stay locked down: a decision made easier by living near Hampstead Heath, precious substitute for the countryside which was once a part of our lives. The serenity of the ancient heathland – its undergrowth and dark stretches of water – helps as nothing else can to quieten the unquiet mind.

It was to the Heath that we went on leaving the house for the first time in more than two months, and these are some of the people who were also enjoying the still unaccustomed freedom.

In a world of their own . . .

Keeping their distance . . .

In a bubble of one . . .

Carpe diem . . .

A TICKET TO THE MOON

22nd June 2020 / Esther Menell

Talking with a friend of my own age the other day, as we sat on kitchen chairs at either end of her small front garden, I heard, or thought I heard – still not acclimatised to the hearing-aid I should have learnt how to use before lockdown – that her late mother had once bought, and paid real money for, a ticket to the moon . . .

What else does one need to know about someone than that!

We were talking about mothers. About being them and having them. What we know about our own, and what our children and grandchildren know about us. Not an entirely comfortable subject when you reflect on those long-ago days when your child needed you, wanted only you and, for too short a time, thought everything you said and did a miracle of rightness.

How short a time those glory days lasted! I still remember my son, at a very young age, saying that I would claim an elephant was Jewish, if it was particularly clever. A wholly justified rebuke. My Jewishness, until recently, extending no further than often wondering whether someone was or wasn’t.

Not many years later, his self-assertion took more active form: overnight, this enthusiastic meat-eater turned vegetarian. A step guaranteed to disrupt family meals, the bedrock of family life. And a prelude to his untimely departure.

Of course, every child is different. Some are less impatient, more hesitant about breaking the ties with home, but each one of us needs to do it eventually, or become that sad creature, the child who never leaves.*

Myself, I took the easy way, as I discover now, rooting through old letters. I waited till there was distance between myself and my parents, and am ashamed at finding how seldom, now that I was enjoying myself at Oxford, I bothered to write home. My father’s frequent letters to me ended, almost always, with a plea that I write more often, for my mother’s sake. Her more laboured efforts (she never became fluent in written English) are more subdued. She found it harder to bear my neglect.

My son’s way of breaking free was more dramatic, but that only made his return the more wondrous, and I only wish that now, thirty years on, I could cook him his favourite roast-lamb homecoming meal. But an ocean divides us.

It was a funeral which woke me up to how much parents come to need their children. Infancy and old age have all too much in common. I could not see my husband being able to put on the carefully choreographed event from which we had just returned. Who, I asked him, is going to organise my funeral? His answer was anecdotal. It seems that when Bach’s wife died, his oldest daughter came to him and asked what they should do about her mother’s funeral. ‘Ask Mama,’ was his answer.

Of course, primitive peoples – poor people – have always known that the hordes of children whose births they could not, anyway, have avoided are not only going to till the fields but also look after them in their old age. We, on the other hand, with our 1.7 birth rate, have a bleak future. Which is why I liked the idea of spending my final years becoming acclimatised to dying, among people of my own age, and with help at hand But no one is going to sign up for even the plushest of care homes for a very long time to come and, with this escape route cut off, I envy my friend, with two grown-up daughters to look after her, whose adventurous mother had hoped to fly to the moon.

My own mother’s ambition could not have been more different. She longed not for an unknown future, but for the familiar past: to speak her own language, to see the friends of her youth . . .

*My mother (right) with a friend, some time in the 1920s*

Whether I will ever see my son again remains in the lap of the gods. But, whatever happens, whoever comes into this house when both I and my husband have left it, there, among the debris, they will find my seventeen-year-old mother’s diary, trapped for ever in fading Russian script.

Unable and unwilling to read it, I will never know what she was like then, any more than my son will know what I was like before I became his mother. And that is how it should be, or so it seems to me. Parents aren’t, like friends, for knowing.

*With apologies to the many young people who cannot now afford to leave home.

AND WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT . . . .

28th May 2020 / Esther Menell

. . . . that I would back away when our next-door neighbour reaches across the fence to hand me two brick-red eggs? It is the Greek Orthodox Easter and Bobby has been giving us two identical brick-red eggs for almost forty years.

And what about the other day when, taking it for granted that the sound of the bell heralded yet another unattended package, I opened the door to find someone standing there, hand-outstretched. He must have seen the alarm on my face and, stepping backwards, put down the arum lily he had been about to hand me. I don’t know which of us was more mortified by this encounter.

It is bad enough being frightened of packages but to be frightened of kindly neighbours or of the young medics, come to collect blood for some research project – the first and last people who have crossed our threshold for almost two months – is sadder still.

I don’t feel good either about how impatient I get on finding yet another week’s supply of free food on my doorstep. Can we get nothing right? The Scottish government lets those registered as high risk know they are entitled to this life-saving service, but only sends to those who request it. Here, these precious boxes are delivered willy-nilly, and I have spent more time trying to stop them than finding ways to get them to people who need them.

Conversely, who would have thought a time would come when I would have welcomed those erstwhile doorsteppers with their trays of seemingly useless bits and pieces? How glad I would be now of more cleaning cloths and odd containers and rubber bands. And how glad I am, too, of the small park at the end of our road: little more than waste-ground forty years ago, when our then neighbour Tessa Jowell, who spent her weekends in the Cotswolds, referred to it, airily, as ‘a lung for the neighbourhood’.

Tended lovingly by Camden Council, this long-neglected open space – once made brilliant use of by Ed Berman* and his merry troupe – now finds room not only for cheerful rows of daffodils, two football pitches and a playground but also a wild-flower garden and thriving orchard, planted despite the damage done to a previous stand of young trees, and showing serene (and let us hope not misplaced) faith in the essential goodness of man.

Perhaps, after all, we are ‘under the shadow of God’s hand’: this haunting phrase used by a reckless American Evangelical who flatly refuses to limit the size of her congregation. More haunting still (where would I be, without BBC Radio 4?) the notion, picked up from a lady astronomer, that we are all made of nuclear waste or, more poetically, if you prefer, from the residue of burnt-out stars . . . .

*Founder of Interaction, the City Farm in Kentish Town, and much else.

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT…

21st April 2020 / Esther Menell

Who would have thought that I would be spending a sunny Easter afternoon washing oranges in a bowl of soapy water? I had never washed an orange before: nor, I now realise, had I ever washed my hands. That is to say, I had never washed them long enough to raise a proper lather.

If cleanliness really is next to godliness, R and I must be getting nearer each day. And Anna, my lovely cleaning lady, some of whose requirements I picture below, must be approaching sainthood. But what was I to do with all these outlandish preparations now that she was in self-isolation too, and we had to clean the house ourselves?

After reading and re-reading the instructions on each container, I felt quite faint and – being unable to make any of the sprays spray – gave up. We now clean the house the way we always did – with duster, damp cloth and cream cleanser. The only innovation, since reading a really scary piece in The New Scientist, is to pour bleach down the loo.

How, I have been wondering, did my mother cope in the war? She had never had to cook or clean before and, more at home in Russian than English, wouldn’t have been able to read the labels on whatever cleaning products she found in the little Yorkshire town where we were living, not far from the hillside beneath which the Lancaster bombers were being built, and towards which my engineer father set out every morning.

One way or another, my mother learnt to cook and clean and mend and she, who had always loved Alsatians, adopted two stray kittens (Flicka and Poika) who I remember getting in the way when she was bottling eggs in the barrel which had been their plaything.

There was, as I have just told my eleven-year-old grandson, captive in Brooklyn as we are in London, plenty to be frightened of in the war but, even as I write these meant-to-be comforting words – after all, here I still am – I think, to myself, this is DIFFERENT. We were afraid of bombs, but not of letters and parcels . . .

Now, every letter that drops onto the doormat, every package left on the doorstep presents a death threat. A pretty pass indeed, when we find ourselves fearful of inanimate things.

Oh, for the days when, in spite of there being a war going on, we played Pass the Parcel, and packages meant presents, and I didn’t have to leave my beloved Tiny Tots and Chicks Own on the doormat overnight, or bake them in the oven to make them safe to touch.

TOUCH AND GO

20th March 2020 / Esther Menell

How many of us realised, until now, that we touch our faces more than ninety times a day?

If the possible consequences of this habitual and wholly unconscious touching were not so dire, trying to catch oneself – or one another – at it, could be quite fun. As it is, perhaps best to follow the advice of molecular virologist, James Robb, to stock up with surgical masks to protect our nose and mouth from our own marauding fingers.

What other old habits, it makes one wonder, might turn viral? Surely not the need to avoid stepping on the lines on the pavement? Though now that I tip over more easily, it might be safer to let my feet land where they want to rather than where I feel impelled to direct them.

And though they can do me no harm, should I really still be hearing these words in my head as I fall asleep at night?

Dear God, I pray that Thou will keep me safely in Thy sight
And grant to me a healing sleep right through the long, dark night.

Rooted in early childhood, they are impossible to eradicate.

It’s hard to let go of things which have stuck in some back room of the brain, and though something must have happened, perhaps adolescence, to make me abandon my Lucky Number – the lovely curvaceous 8 – this is the only mental habit I have managed to drop. But that change of allegiance, from even numbers to odd, still feels like a betrayal.

Of course, not everyone is such a creature of habit: the walls of my living room are still the same dark brown that almost frightened off a prospective lodger, more than forty years ago . . .

As for why that habitual childhood taunt – angst katchen! – has come into my head now, more than eighty years since I abruptly stopped talking German, could it be because I have just decided not to let a friend into the house?

It is not only conscience that makes cowards of us all.

WHEN IT COMES TO IT . . . ON BEING ENGLISH AND JEWISH AND ESTONIAN

27th February 2020 / Esther Menell

Like a lot of comfortably secular Jews, I was jolted into a different kind of awareness of my Jewishness by the new wave of anti-semitism which began, of all places, in the Labour Party. Here, in the wake of a week spent remembering Auschwitz on the anniversary of its liberation and watching David Baddiel’s brilliant documentary on Holocaust Denial, is something I wrote in the early days of that new awareness. I apologise for the unusual and inordinate length of this post: it is in the nature of the subject.

I have to thank Jeremy Corbyn for giving me the answer to a question that I have asked myself on and off for years: do I feel more English or more Jewish? And, more recently, since Estonia has come back into my life, perhaps more Estonian than either . . .

I have just come back from the polling booth where I voted Green. The first time I have voted anything except Labour.

So, what happened? Well, Jeremy Corbyn happened. Like so many people, I was thrilled when he appeared on the scene. I paid my £3 and re-joined the Labour Party and, though there were periods of concern, the Manifesto restored faith. Here was a vision of the future that I could believe in and wanted to help bring about. Even if it seemed pie in the sky to some, to me and many of my friends – almost all of whom would be left worse off financially from the changes he would bring about – it was worth aiming for.

The new Jeremy has found his voice and talks loud and clear to the jubilant crowds who stand ankle-deep in water to get a glimpse of him, so a friend who was at the Pateley Bridge rally tells me, and we all feel we may, at last, be on the path to victory, to a fairer society than the one in which we are so deeply mired.

So, what went wrong? To some, his sober sidekick has always seemed a somewhat malign presence. But not to me. I was glad to have a softly-spoken suit alongside the revolutionary front man. And soon there was talk of dissension among the ranks. But this is not unusual in a political party and is manifest among the Conservatives. It was the trickle of anti-Jewish stories, at first among the rank and file, but soon among more prominent members of the movement which caused real unease.

Soon, the trickle became a stream. Why was there no serious attempt to do anything about it? There is, of course, no way of dealing with the anonymous nutters who use Corbyn supporters’ websites to spout their poison. But what about the many known cases of party officials with deeply unsavoury views?

And what about Corbyn himself? For a long time I have been arguing with friends who cannot forgive his having ‘shared a platform’ with Hamas and Hezbollah. What is wrong, after all, in talking with those with whom you disagree? But the lack of conviction in his handling of the shows of anti-Jewish feeling among his known followers, culminating in the business of the Tower Hamlets mural, has shaken me. Who wants a leader who has so little historical sense that he cannot recognise what is obvious to just about everyone – not only to Jews? And do I want a leader who talks off the top of his head? He later regrets that he ‘didn’t look more closely’ before he spoke.

None of this, nor the long list of his associations with declared anti-Semites has made me think that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. It makes me think he is a fool, albeit a holy fool. And it makes it clearer than ever that he is one of the thousands of English men and women who equate us, the English Jews, with what is going on in Israel.

But why do so many people blame an entire country and, indeed, an entire race, for its government? We don’t blame all Americans for Trump, or all Burmese for the horrors occurring in their country, or all Hungarians for having voted in a Fascist . . . And what about us? Our deplorable government should, by this logic, make pariahs of us all.

How grateful I am to the Greens who, when I found myself unable to vote Labour, provided an alternative. And how lucky to live in a borough that will never be anything but Labour, so my vote is not going to dislodge the party I have supported in the past, and hope to be able to support again in the future.

But how, as a profoundly secular Jew, can I explain this defection? I think the answer lies in the distant past, on the day when I came down to prayers, in the Great Hall of the boarding school at which I was a happy pupil, and being a few minutes early, looked at the newspapers laid out on the chest under the over-hanging minstrels’ gallery. There, splashed across the front page of the Express was a picture of two broken-necked bodies hanging from a makeshift gallows. Two British soldiers murdered by the Irgun.

I knew then, and have known ever since, that I and the Cohen sisters and Elise Morris and Hilary Hockley, who made up the quota of Jewish pupils, were different, and however good we became at games, however many badges we had on our girl guide uniforms, however many films Mr Cohen [1] lent the school, we could never be quite like everyone else.

And so it has remained. I am English, yes, but I am also Jewish, and rational doesn’t come in to it. I can hold my fire, with ease, when an ignorant old man who I am helping to get re-housed, delivers a diatribe about the Jews – wherever did he hear of the Protocols of Zion? – on the doorstep. I can take it in my stride when one of my long-term employers (Jewish himself) makes me reject a remarkable offering (the story of a Guatemalan Jew) because ‘Jews don’t buy books’. I break off relations with a Death Row prisoner – a Biblical Zionist – when he insists that Hurricane Katrina was the God of Israel’s revenge for some recent incident on the West Bank.

It is easy to dismiss ignorance and stupidity, but not in the leader of a political party.

And now a third element has entered the ring. Not just English and Jewish but also Estonian: not that Estonian Estonians would consider me Estonian and whenever I am asked where I come from, I always qualify my answer by adding that I’m Jewish. But my mother, being a direct descendant of the Nicolas Soldiers (those few Jews granted permission by Tsar Nicolas I to live outside the Pale of Settlement, also known as ‘Cantonists’), was as Estonian as a Jew can be – one of the four thousand who lived there before the war wiped most of them out.

And not only my mother. My proudly English father was born just five years after his father arrived in London from Estonia, and one year after that same Mendl Grodzinski married Esther Hoff of Viljandi in the Stepney Green Synagogue, and became George Menell.

I owe knowledge of the date and place of my paternal grandparents’ marriage to a remarkable man – an Estonian-born Israeli who came across a memoir I had written while he was trawling the internet, thanks, no doubt, to its subtitle which includes an Estonian street name [2]. Unable to locate me, this tireless researcher whose working life had been spent as an employee of IBM, tracked me down through my son who, as a musician, has an internet presence; and I will never forget the day when I received an e-mail from New York, telling me that an Estonian called Mark Rybak had come across my book and was trying to find me, and ending, ‘Mother, your book has come home.’

And so it had. There is now a copy in the Jewish Museum in Tallinn, a museum which didn’t exist when I was last there, at the turn of the century, and unimaginable in the early ‘60s, when my mother and I – on a quest to find my brother’s birth certificate – arrived at the small, dilapidated house in which the rabbi lived and which now served as the synagogue, though all the holy paraphernalia had been removed to the Museum of Atheism.

We never found my brother’s birth certificate but I was reminded of our quest the other day when – from the National Archives to which Mark Rybak had directed me – I received a lengthy document headed METROPOLITAN POLICE SPECIAL BRANCH.

Was I going to find that my grandfather – the former Mendl Grodzinski, who always had barley sugars in his pockets to give his grandchildren and would share with them the sugar lumps through which he sucked his lemon tea – was a criminal?

Happily, not. This document proved to be his naturalisation certificate and from it I learnt that, on the contrary, he was a respected member of the community who had ‘by 1920 given up his tailoring business’ and ‘with the knowledge of design which he had learned in the tailoring trade commenced to design a retort . . . ’

This retort, as I was to learn from Burning Stone: Estonia and the Menells, posted by Mark on the Estonian Jewish Archive, was of vital importance in the early days of the Estonian oil shale industry, an industry which, according to Wikipedia ‘is one of the most developed in the world’ and Estonia ‘the only country in the world that uses oil shale as its primary energy source.’

So much for the Englishness of the English side of my family. Time now, to turn to my mother’s side.

The Gutkins – anyway, the male line, for my Gutkin grandmother was born in Lodz – were, as already mentioned, descended from the Nicolas Soldiers. Among them was Hirsch ben Jeddige Gutkin who would, I like to think, have looked something like the old men in those oil paintings we see in one of the most delightful sequences in ‘Menashe’, that Yiddish-language film which has given me an idea of what he must have sounded like.

And what Mendl Grodzinski would have sounded like too. For though, as I discovered only recently, he was born not in Estonia but in Belarus [3], Yiddish would have been the language spoken in both my grandfathers’ homes. And how familiar it sounds to me. Another of those visceral connections which swung my vote. Or perhaps it is just that German (spoken by cook and nanny) were as familiar to the four-year-old me as English, when we left Estonia to return to England at the outbreak of war.

It is to my cousin, Ephraim (Fima) Zaidelson, the one English speaker among all my Estonian relatives, that I owe what I know of my mother’s family and there is a wonderful irony that, at the moment that I break loose from the Labour Party, I am indebted to someone who remained far to the left of me for most of his life. Known as Comrade Zaidelson at the English public school where he was a pupil when war broke out, Fima’s loyalty to the Party never faltered until reality became too much even for him. Here he is, caught in a nutshell by a school friend [4], visiting Tallinn, in the 1980s:

. . . Poor Jefim. On the wrong side of the twentieth century at every turn: despised by the Nazis for being a Jew, by the Russians for being Estonian, by the Communists for being bourgeois, by the Estonian nationalists for having fought for the Red Army . . .

But not only did Fima survive the war [5] and the collapse of Communism, he lived on into his nineties alongside his wife, Lena, also a child of the bourgeoisie, and they both lived to see Gutkin’s, the department store and long-time family business, restored to its former glory, whilst their children and grandchildren will inherit the gothic pile [6] which had once been their family home.

The election is over. Labour failed to take Barnet and I have taken the long overdue step to have my parents’ headstone cleaned. The nice Irishman who has been caretaker of the Jewish Cemetery in Kilburn for years, will see to this for me. I wish he could also help me set up a headstone for my aunt – my mother’s sister – who lived in Trieste and left me the money to do so. The complexity of this task defeated me and the only comfort is remembering the beauty of the graveyard in which she lies: a tangle of greenery and worn, lopsided stones, so unlike the businesslike rows in Pound Lane.

Cemeteries, of all places, help you discover who you really are. Not English, in my case, or I could be buried in one of the many hundreds of country churchyards visited when my husband [7] was writing his guide to English parish churches. But though I have only been inside a synagogue once since my first marriage almost sixty years ago, any Jewish cemetery would accept what is left of me. And had I been left in Tallinn with my grandmother when war broke out, being English would not have saved my life.

So, however English I feel and sound, and though my chosen resting place (as ashes, of course) is a very particular spot on the North Yorkshire moors, there is no getting away from it: when it comes to it, the answer has to be not English, not Estonian, but Jewish.

Dedicated to Mark Rybak born Tallinn 8.3.1945 died Tel Aviv 6.3.2018 and to my Brooklyn-born grandson, Zachariah Hawk, whose Jewish blood mingles with that of his Native American and African American forebears.


[1] Mr Cohen: Nat Cohen (1905-1988) summed up in Wikipedia as ‘the most powerful man in the film industry’
[2] Estonian street name: Loose Connections:  from Narva Maantee to Great Russell Street, London, 2014.
[3] Belarus: in a town called Polotsk.
[4] a school friend: Frank Branston (1939-2009) an alumnus of Bedford Modern,  newspaper proprietor and novelist.
[5] survive the war: The astounding story of his war in  which – so emaciated that village women crossed themselves as he passed  – he wandered from place to place determined to fight the hated enemy  but so inept a soldier that he was finally put to use composing  patriotic songs, is told in a letter he gave me which can be read –  called Fima’s War – on the EJA website.
[6] Gothic pile: This mansion, built by Lena’s father as a family home, was requisitioned by the Soviets and became the Tallinn Conservatoire.
[7] my husband: Grandson of a Methodist minister, my American husband, Robert Harbison, wrote The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches, London, 1992.

GOING DIGITAL

19th January 2020 / Esther Menell

It is almost exactly two years since I had to give up on my old camera and went digital. Film had become a luxury item and the firm that turned my little rolls of film into photographs had gone out of business (see February 2017 post IN MEMORIAM). So, back to John Lewis – where I had bought my now defunct ‘film camera’ – to ask for the easiest-to-use digital alternative.

Well, there is no such thing as an easy-to-use digital anything. Easier to use, perhaps. But easy-to-use, no. I have become inured to unexpected outcomes since returning from a rather special party with pictures of nothing but feet.

Diana Athill’s 100^th birthday party, held at the venerable Highgate Institute.

This was two years ago. I am told I must have pushed the timer button so the camera didn’t go about its business until I had discreetly lowered it out of sight. That’s as may be, but who knows what I did wrong this morning? Every picture I took appears in triplicate. I have no more idea of what the camera is up to than I did on the day that I bought it.

Which makes me wish I could just junk it. But it does have one saving grace, if stealth can be termed a grace. This fiendish little device is not only silent but able to photograph at a distance. Everything within sight becomes a possible target. For instance, these young people sitting in front of me on the 46 bus, or the kitchen worker, taking a smoke break, seen in passing.

Unable to justify intruding on people’s lives, I take comfort in thinking that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, and who is to say that some camera-happy person hasn’t snapped me, a bedraggled old person with a shopping trolley, frantically searching for her bus pass . . .

As it is, to those below I offer my apologies and my thanks:

As for this remarkable character, whose permission I sought before taking his picture, he has made an outdoor home for himself, rather like those Vietnam veterans who took to the woods. Fortified by books, he lives in a world of his own creation.

NOW WHAT?

18th December 2019 / Esther Menell

In a world where one has seen a sober European minister addressing an empty podium as our Prime Minister goes awol, my experience in the public library this morning is small beer. But it continues to rankle. Having used the library very seldom over the past few years – and not knowing my way around – I asked one of the librarians where to look for anything by Rory Stewart. Rather surprisingly, he didn’t recognise the name. More surprisingly still, instead of directing me to the non-fiction shelves (though I was later to find these were not in strict alphabetical order) he more or less pushed me down onto a chair in front of a computer screen and told me to type in the name.

Affronted though I was, I do know how to type (not everyone does) and typed it in. Then, having no idea what to do next, I swivelled round in my seat and yelled: NOW WHAT?

Now a different assistant came to the rescue and, though I would always prefer to be my own search engine (that is to say, look along the shelves of books with my own eyes), she did quickly establish that this library had none of Rory Stewart’s books, but offered to order them from another branch.

At this point, I chickened out of my good intention to borrow rather than buy and made for the nearest bus stop, only to find that there, too, being literate was no longer enough. The board on which I used to be able to read when my bus was due, and to track its progress, has vanished. Instead, we have a poster inviting us to use our mobile phones for travel information.

What makes Transport for London think we all have – can all afford to have – a mobile phone? And why do the powers that be assume that everyone is computer-literate?

It is time for another Pattie Moore.* The world is full of old people who are being cast into outer darkness because they cannot – or do not want to – join the modern world: a world in which a cheque I issued the other day has not been honoured because some clever scanning machine could not read my writing.

As someone who once leant out of the car window on the outskirts of Birmingham and asked ‘which way to London?’ (and then got to London), and who has heard stories of satnavs taking people the wrong way down busy streets, I prefer to trust in human speech and the old skills of reading and writing.

Anyway, it isn’t possible to catch up, even if I wanted to. I have just learnt that my pride in my ability to use e-mail is misplaced, e-mail is already yesterday’s toy.

*To learn about this remarkable woman, who spent three years convincingly disguised as an octogenarian, to experience being old, click the link to listen to this excellent BBC Radio 4 broadcast.

NO LOVELY LAUGHTER

21st November 2019 / Esther Menell

Those cherries fairly do enclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which, when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rosebuds fill’d with snow.
An Howre’s Recreation in Musike, 1606

For more than a week now, while most of my bottom teeth are with a dental technician, somewhere on the South Coast, I have been walking around with just five front teeth and a very visible gap*. Who, when they were young, could imagine a time when they would be putting their teeth to bed in a glass of water every night and sticking them in with glue every morning? Or that they could appear in public, as I have been doing, gap-toothed and lisping.

There is nothing to prepare one for Old Age. But at least my generation – the vermin who are destroying the world is how my friend, M, describes us – have an old age. And the physical discomforts that go with it prove a distraction – although not as agreeable a distraction as ‘Spiral’ or ‘MasterChef’ – from what is going on all around us.

One of our main preoccupations, as the young will learn for themselves one day, is how not to fall over. With age, something happens to one’s sense of balance, and the time when one could fall flat on one’s face, get up and carry on, is long over.

My friend Judy knew what to do without needing to be told. Having started life as a dancer, she understood about balance and used the three long flights of stairs to her East Village home as her exercise ground. Climbing them without using the banister for support, she remained steady on her feet well into her nineties.

Judith Martin, founder of The Paper Bag Players theatre company

For the rest of us, there are Fall Clinics and exercise classes where you learn how to use a wobble machine and to walk in a straight line with your eyes shut, and you are advised not to stand on one leg when gardening. A crushed plant will recover faster than you will.

But back to teeth which are my current preoccupation, even as I hear yet another outrageous lie from the Boris camp, followed by the news that the bubbling stream which made the visit to Fishlake parish church so memorable, has drowned the pretty little village.

With no back teeth, I eat like a rabbit. To my surprise, I learn rabbits do have back teeth. They are called ‘cheek teeth’. But it seems that they prefer not to use them.

Be that as it may, both the rabbits and I are better off than the convicts, unforgettably portrayed in a brilliant documentary about a prison for Russian non-political prisoners. With no access to dentists in the Siberian backlands, the burly inmates – murderers and the like – have barely a tooth among them. But they are not wasting away. So, it seems that gums harden and provide a substitute able to cope with a diet that consists mostly of stale Russian bread.

As for me, I am waiting for the phone call to tell me my teeth are ready to be collected, and I will soon be able to recall visiting the Wellcome Trust’s enjoyable ‘Teeth’ exhibition – visited before I became a potential exhibit myself – without a shudder of recognition.

*My excellent NHS dentist believes in make do and mend.

ALL MY YESTERDAYS

25th October 2019 / Esther Menell

Housebound for a few days by a lingering malaise and fearful, as I come within days of my 85th birthday, of wasting any time, I took the plunge and began the process of de-cluttering the house in which I have lived for more than fifty years. Clothes would be easy: they barely fill a cupboard but, even so, contain heirlooms. The beautiful wine-coloured dress that a generous friend (now permanently housebound) gave to me forty years ago. The hideous baby-blue jerkin bought, one lunch hour, from a stall in Oxford Street. Both too venerable and memory-laden to put in the Oxfam box. They will continue to fill space until I am no longer around to save them.

Other sacrosanct space-fillers are the Je Reviens bottle that I had on my bedside table in the labour ward and the faded photograph of my husband and me that stands in a frame beside it: taken soon after we had met, as I can tell from my outfit, bought to make myself look eligible when I was on the register of the Heather Jenner Marriage Agency . . . .

So far, so good. The bedroom presents no serious problems. The hundreds of books that fill the stairwell and every other room aren’t a problem either. It is all the paper stuff – the letters and diaries and children’s drawings and obsolete account books (2 x white wine £7) and fearsome-looking legal documents and drafts of unfinished novels . . . . It is these and the photographs – especially the photographs – that are so hard to dispose of.

As I braced myself and, for the first time, threw away a person, I felt like a murderer. But the disquiet at breaking this taboo didn’t last long and I was soon throwing away photographs of my parents, my son and his son, schoolfriends, et al, as though there was no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Or not much of one.

Hard as the initial step was – reminiscent of jumping into that cold Finnish lake, when honour-bound to join in a communal sauna – getting rid of photographs is quick work. Infinitely slower is all the other stuff and, as I battle my way through a lifetime’s accumulation, I wonder at the stamina of serial biographers. Of course, they are mostly trawling through papers which a professional archivist has already put into some kind of order. They are not going to find, as I have, the originals of illustrations for a children’s edition of The Arabian Nights interleaved with handwritten notes to my deaf father-in-law: ‘I never have oatmeal or orange juice or prunes for breakfast’, nor the picture of a prize-winning gooseberry stuck to the cover of an ancient issue of Isis which has in it an article by John Gross who, in those days (February 1957) seemed to me like just another nice Jewish boy . . . .

And what about everything – letters, postcards, scraps of paper – written in languages I don’t know?

It was lucky that my aunt, adrift in Rome during the last months of the war, had been spending time with an American soldier and was practising her English for, in a letter dated 16.1.45 – addressed to my mother, to whom she always wrote in Russian – I learnt not only of his existence, but also that he had promised to marry her. But when I visited her in Trieste, a few years later, there was no trace of him.

And so it goes on. On June 6, 1948, the headmistress of my boarding school wrote: ‘Dear Parent . . . We are considering having a medium-weight brown coat and skirt, to be worn with a tussore blouse, instead of the brown winter frocks . . .’ Quite a bold suggestion when clothes rationing was still in force.

The next item to surface is an alluring recipe for Peach Clafoutis, which will now join all the other untried recipes in the THROW pile. But into the KEEP box will go my baby son’s cheerful picture of a royal threesome, alongside a festive card from Camden Register Office which has reminded me that today is my Wedding Anniversary.

WHAT’S IN A NAME . . .

25th September 2019 / Esther Menell

It must be about fifteen years ago that my friend Jane and I spent ten days in the Gambia, by default, as it were.

We had actually booked to go to a remote part of western China, and I still have what I call my ‘China bag’, which is of the exact dimensions allowed on that fatally undersubscribed tour. With this holiday cancelled – not enough people wanted to see those rushing rivers and pointy mountains – we had a dilemma. Where should we go instead? It was in the Observer that Jane found the ad for our Gambian adventure.

The adventure could have taken many forms. Already in our late sixties, we could have had fun with the beach boys who followed us on our evening walks. We didn’t then know that this is what many ladies of our age came to the Gambia for. But that wasn’t what we were there for, and they never bothered us. Nor, as we walked along the boardwalk at sun rise one morning, were we pestered by the paper-thin youngster who suddenly appeared, as out of nowhere, and wanted to take us birdwatching. Anxious to get back to the hotel for breakfast and, in my case, continue with a novel in which the psychopathic killer closely resembled a prisoner with whom I was corresponding*, we said ‘Sorry, not now,’ and then spent the next couple of guilt-ridden days, trying to find him.

Which we did, and here is a list of the birds we saw or, rather, he saw on our two outings together.

This list, with its touching farewell, invoking the blessing of Allah, reached us just before the coach to the airport started up. Ebrima had not been allowed into the hotel to give it to us.**

Happily, the story doesn’t end there and although I have never seen him again – not even in photographs, as he has never before had access to a camera – we have kept in touch and, just the other day, I received this photo of his ten-year-old daughter: my namesake, in her school uniform.

The pictureless years, though, have been far from arid. During them I have learnt about marriage customs very different from our own, about the geography of a compound and about the disastrous consequences of the Ebola epidemic which has made Ebrima’s proud Official Tourist Birdwatcher’s Badge a sad relic.

And each year, when the festival which demands the sacrifice of a goat comes round, we think about Abraham and Isaac. Ebrima learnt long ago that in my religion, his name would be Abraham.

As for the blessings of Allah, which continue to this day, who knows if they haven’t helped me to live beyond my sell-by date.

*I was later to learn that my prisoner friend had tried to sue the well-known writer for attaching recognisable features of his case to a fictional character.

** Like my family in Soviet Estonia, who had not been allowed into the hotel in which we were obliged to stay. It was for foreigners only. In the Gambia, it was not foreigners that the hotel management was keeping out.

TO RECOMMEND, OR NOT TO RECOMMEND

29th August 2019 / Esther Menell

The other day, R – a paragon among builder-handymen, who I had thought would be there for ever – told us he was retiring. We will miss him badly but, I have to remind myself, we were beginning to miss him already, because I had recommended him to so many people, he was no longer easy to get hold of.

It would have been selfish to try and keep him to ourselves, but from now on I will be a bit more circumspect if we should ever find another R, as my husband was when, writing a guide to English parish churches, he left out one or two of our own favourites. We told ourselves, they wouldn’t necessarily be other people’s favourites . . . after all, think of the books one has recommended, or had recommended, which have drawn an uncomfortable blank.

Tastes differ in every sphere of life. We have a lusciously beautiful Italian friend who finds Benedict Cumberbatch irresistible. More baffling still, almost everyone we know likes Breaking Bad, whereas almost no one has any patience with Ruskin (long-winded) or The Wire (impenetrable), which we love. There are even people who read Finnegans Wake for fun.

It doesn’t, of course, matter that we all like different books and different films; nor does it much matter when we over-recommend a workman or keep knowledge of a tranquil, snowdrop-filled country churchyard to ourselves. But it does matter when character recommendations are made in bad faith.

For a long time, when T took over our firm, we thought the colleagues he had left behind must miss him: so lavish was the praise they had bestowed on him. How wrong we were. We learnt – and by then it came as no surprise – that his previous place of work had been happy to see him go. What simpler way to get rid of someone than to heap them with praise?

But, even when truthful and given with the best intent, recommendations can prove treacherous. How could that down-to-earth architect, who had done such a good job for us, run up a bill for twice the original estimate for our neighbours? And what about the solicitor who not only grossly over-charged another friend, but produced a legal document full of spelling mistakes?

Never again! No more recommendations. And yet, when asked to give a character reference, how can one refuse, even though one knows that references are barely worth the paper they are written on and no more to be trusted than those effusive quotes on book jackets. Once you discover that these are often solicited from the author’s friends, you realise they can be as meaningless as the TV ads which guarantee that products will banish acne or deliver eternal youth.

POOR BORIS . . .

26th July 2019 / Esther Menell

It was perhaps unfortunate for Boris that when I read a long and sympathetic account of his childhood unhappiness (his mother had a long breakdown, probably caused by his father’s infidelities) I had just returned from the Jankel Adler exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, which specialises in the art of the dispossessed.

Here I learnt that Adler and his friend, Josef Herman – while refugees in this country – heard that their entire families had been murdered. But this did not turn either one of them into the kind of greedy, lying, irresponsible buffoon that Boris has become. On the contrary, after Adler had nursed his friend through a breakdown, they both produced remarkable work and were soon to have families of their own.

But they did not forget. Josef kept this painting – given to him by Adler – in his living room, for the rest of his life.

Orphans 1941, Jankel Adler

That tragic episode in his mother’s life does not excuse Boris. Nor does it appear to have jinxed the lives of his siblings who, presumably, comforted each other during her absence.

No more did being turned down by a prestigious art school excuse – or account for – another leader’s murderous rage. What these two inadequate men ‘suffered’ is no more than a pin prick when set against the suffering one of them inflicted on millions, and the hurt and confusion the other has already left in his wake.

No one, surely, gets through childhood without some painful setback: ranging from having to flee one’s country of birth, to never being picked for the first eleven. But it seems we are wired to survive, and time brings with it a mix of forgiveness and forgetfulness.

What makes the Trumps and Johnsons of this world different from the rest of us is their abandonment of the principles – the common humanity – which stop most people from putting their own desires above those of everyone else. These two exemplars of the school bully, these two monsters of self-gratification have, somewhere along the line, and of their own volition, lost touch with ‘the court of conscience’.*

Let’s hope that Boris, with his backpack of classical allusions, has also read Shakespeare, and remembers that the evil that men do lives after them.

* ‘There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience.’ Mahatma Ghandi

OF TREE BOOKS, TREES AND THE PERILS OF PROLIFERATION

18th July 2019 / Esther Menell

It was while combing the internet for opinions of a particular translation that I came across the term Tree Book for the first time. Here was a reader who had greatly enjoyed one of the monuments of Russian literature, but regretted it was not yet available in electronic form. He had been obliged to read it as a Tree Book.

Well, it didn’t take too long, for I had just been immersed in an article about trees – the beautiful but monstrously invasive Bradford Pear – to work out what a Tree Book was, and I shuddered at the memory of the occasion when I had almost joined the electronic ranks myself.

It was about a year ago that I heard an agent had expressed interest in a manuscript that one of my authors had been trying to get published for a very long time. I was pleased for M, but not surprised when this came to nothing.

All was not lost, however, for the agent now offered to reissue five of M’s out-of-print titles, including my own favourite in which this irrepressible storyteller had given his fictional brothel his real-life publisher’s actual phone number . . . .

Good news but somewhat baffling, for it seemed that all re-publishing meant was posting the books on the agent’s website, alongside a dizzying number of other rescued titles. But was this really enough to attract new readers to these long-forgotten books, and wouldn’t many of this quirky writer’s original fan-base be, by now, either in their dotage or dead?

Still, what harm could come of such an operation? The books would be available again – they might even be re-jacketed (appearance is all) – and the author would get a cut of any money that they made.

The story would have ended there had I not then sent the agent a copy of my own memoir to prospect for potential additions to his list. But he mistook my book for a submission.

I could not have predicted what came next: first, a flattering note about how much he was enjoying it, then a phone call to establish whether it presented any problems of libel (which he would have known, if he had read it) and then, without further foreplay, a contract!

In spite of the breakneck speed, which should have served as a warning – in my day, publishers had been notoriously slow to commit themselves – my own novice publisher and I, who had never seen an e-book, were tempted to accept the offer. Electronic publishing was a mountain we still had to scale and here was someone who would take this operation off our hands.

But we did want to know a bit more before signing a contract and suggested a meeting, at the agent’s convenience, saying that although I was very interested, I wouldn’t want to let the rights go just yet. To which I had this reply by return:

I wish you had told me you weren’t actually looking to be published, so I wouldn’t have wasted all that time.

What has happened to good manners? And are there many publishers who don’t read their post and who publish books they haven’t read?

Maybe the day will come when these agent-cum-publishers will stop to taste before they propagate. They should take a leaf out of the book of scientists who are now trying to undo the work of their predecessors who had gloried in the beauty of the fast-growing Bradford Pear, which they had mistakenly thought to be sterile but which has now overwhelmed the suburban areas of those little American towns it was brought in to prettify, spreading to the surrounding countryside and strangling everything in its path.

The proliferation of e-books, we are told, has not stopped people buying and reading Tree Books which, like trees themselves (with a few exceptions) grow slowly to maturity. However, to see anyone reading a book which is not on a device is a rare sight. Which is why I was prompted to talk to the rough-looking youngster next to me on the bus the other day. I could see the running head of the book he was reading. Bitter Lemons. Durrell was writing about the village from which this young man’s family came. And yes, it was unusual for him to read a book of any sort, but he now intended to read more. And, having responded in friendly fashion to my interruption, he was soon buried again in the pages of his Tree Book.

E-books do have a place, of course. I wish they had existed in my back-packing days when I mistakenly thought Meredith’s The Egoist would make good holiday reading, and I will be glad of them when I no longer have the strength to hold a heavy book (Life and Fate defeated ninety-year-old Diana Athill for that reason) or can’t read without a magnifying glass. But they have become as invasive a species as that beautiful but deadly tree and only children, while they are still children, are resisting their spell.

They do have one advantage though, if you can call it that, of being very easy to get rid of. See Self-destructing e-books reveal a dark digital truth in a recent Financial Times, which describes how every e-book copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vanished without a word of explanation.

THE COMFORT OF THINGS*

22nd June 2019 / Esther Menell

Not long ago we made an unfortunate choice of house to rent when spending a few days in a part of Derbyshire we hadn’t been to before. Not only was the prettily named village – which had been photographed from vantage points we were never to discover – not a village, but the house looked unwelcoming from the start.

Described as a cottage, but with all signs of its cosy cottagey past eradicated, the room the front door opened into was as bleak as the parlour of a funeral home. A giant tankard of artificial flowers, which left no room to put anything else there, stood on a low table in front of a sofa which looked as though it had never been sat on. The table was made of wood or some kind of wood laminate and at least didn’t, like the glass dining table, clang every time you put something down on it.

The dining table we had to use, for there was no alternative, but a choice could be made between having a bath and not having a bath. After needing to be hauled out of the rimless, oval shell that stood, on claw feet, in the middle of the room, out of reach of the the tantalising array of expensive soaps and unguents, I decided – in spite of the fun to be had with the Waterfall Tap – that once was enough.

Only the bedroom was hazard-free. The owner of the house had not yet indulged in the ‘careful deployment of the aesthetic of subtraction’ which one bed manufacturer promotes but, as we could see from the neat pile of interior design magazines (the only reading in the house), our landlady was a compulsive follower of fashion, and it could be only a matter of time till she turned her attention to the many possibilities to be had with a bed.

As for the kitchen, this was a minefield of unfamiliar gadgets and it took a phone call to find out where the cutlery drawer was: hidden in the recess of what looked like just another shelf.

I have been reminded of this sterile environment by hearing a young man on the radio talking about how empty his first rented room seemed, after leaving a home which had been full of things.

It takes time to accumulate the clutter which spells home but even a young person used to have a few books and copies of Time Out or NME. He or she might even have had a picture of their mother and father, or favourite dog.

All these now, and the communal television set which brought flat-sharers together, are contained in a small metal box, no bigger than the palm of your hand. Gone are the days when the only metal box was the biscuit tin and every unnecessary object, jostling for space, had a history. When books lined the walls and littered the floor. When all around was the stuff of memories, of lives lived and living.

No wonder the young man felt desolate and yearned for the comfort of things.

*This is also the title of anthropologist Daniel Miller’s book which catalogues the possessions of the inhabitants of a single London street: an exercise carried out before the electronic takeover and the advent of commercial de-clutterers.

AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF