The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: Jimmy the Dog

Jimmy the Dog was a surprising source of comfort and support during this time. Although I knew he’d learned it at drama school, the sonorous patrician voice with its perfect consonants was reassuring. He guided me through the whole post-life process, the death certificate, the probate forms. He explained the intestacy rules, for as far as I could tell Lily had died without making a will — not that there was much to inherit, apart from the tenancy of the flat.

It was Jimmy who suggested a woodland burial. Wrest ’n’ Piece had recently acquired a piece of woodland moments away from Finsbury Park with its superb transport connections, he told me, which they were planning to develop as a natural burial site with the long-term goal of offering woodland burial alongside their other professional post-life services. Lily’s funeral would be, as it were, a dry run — and as such the fee would be a fraction of the normal cost. Jimmy would be the celebrant, I would be the chief mourner, he and I would design the service on secular socialist lines, as a celebration and a reunion for all who had loved her. My job was to assemble the story of her life, and a small select band to join in the solemnities.

There was a dog-eared, leather-bound address book among Mother’s papers, which she kept in the cardboard box under her bed. Most of the names in it were unfamiliar to me, I had no idea whether they were current or not. Ted Madeley’s address was still there, though he was long dead. There was even an address for Berthold Lubetkin in Gloucestershire, though he had died in 1990. Her lovers Jack Blast and Jim Wrench were listed — were they still alive? Jenny and Margaret, Ted Madeley’s twin daughters, Mum’s stepdaughters, were listed under their old addresses. Should I invite them to the funeral? I wondered. According to Mother, Jenny and Margaret, who would have been about ten years old when their father remarried, had hated twenty-year-old Lily with a passion. ‘Little witches,’ she used to call them. I don’t recall meeting them until I was around nine years old and they must have been thirty. By then they’d evidently mellowed, because I have a distinct memory of them coming round to the flat on Mum’s fortieth birthday with a bunch of flowers. They made friends with Howard, my older half-brother, who had shaggy blond sideburns and the carefully cultivated mien of a ladykiller. He bragged to me that he had bedded both of them together, which I frankly didn’t believe. Why would anyone want to cuddle up with those two? Even then, they were a scary pair.

There is a photo of me with all three of my half-siblings on Hampstead Heath. I’d no recollection of the occasion, but it must have been shortly before Howard left home. In the photo we are all grinning in that stupid ‘say cheese’ way, and I am holding an ice cream. I had hazy memories of nocturnal activities involving a rope with Howard and his friend Nige, a schoolboy tearaway who lived for a while in Madeley Court, and the beatings from my father that inevitably followed.

Howard, I remembered, used to show me his dirty postcards and fill me in with a wink on the activities in the marital bed, which I also didn’t believe. Why would my adored mother want to do that with any man, let alone with my horrible father?

My father’s address was in the book, even though he had died back in 1983. Poor Dad. I can feel for him now, fleeing the ossified certainties of Ossett and arriving, a widower with a small child, in huge, humming London. No wonder soft-hearted Mum with her penchant for improvement was moved to rescue them. But it hadn’t turned out well. I’m not bitter now, but the first nine years of my life were scarred by his volatile personality and his explosive temper, which Mum spent the remaining forty-three trying to heal.

Another recollection flashed in unbidden from the dark edges of my mind: the black, still water of a canal; a cold, late afternoon of tricky crepuscular light; Howard, Nige and I walking along the towpath, each of them holding one of my hands. A rope tied around my waist. I couldn’t recall exactly what had happened next: darkness and terror were what I remembered. When I got home I was soaking wet, and Dad took his belt to me. I crawled through a thirty-minute tunnel of fear, pain and shame. According to Mother, that’s when my stammer first started. B-b-bridge.

The address book had a new entry for my half-brother, Howard Sidebottom, in Kilburn — new in the sense that one address had been crossed out and another written in, though how long ago I have no idea. Mum had tried to keep in touch with Howard, for whom she still had hopes even after she had given up on Sid. When I lived at home, after our dad had left, he sometimes came over for dinner in the evening. I penned Howard a quick note to the address in Kilburn, thinking that in spite of everything it would be good to see him again.

Mother’s latest ex-husband, Lev Lukashenko, only had an address listed in Lviv, Ukraine, and as far as I knew, Mother hadn’t seen or heard from him in years. I had already left home by the time she married him, and I wondered guiltily whether it was maybe my leaving home that had rushed her into this unsuitable marriage — she liked having a man about the house, and Lev liked having a woman or two in his life. But I wrote to him anyway. I wrote to them all, on the bright pink Basildon Bond notepaper that Mother favoured: this isn’t the sort of area where you can buy black-edged notelets.

I took twelve letters to the post office and was horrified to discover the cost of postage. ‘It’s a bloody rip-off,’ I groused at the sullen woman behind the bullet-proof screen, in honour of Mother, who had never missed a chance to fulminate against the evils of our time including privatisation, Jeremy Clarkson, and pay-day loans.

‘Spivs and speculators poncing off the people of Britain! Of course we had plenty of that in wartime, but in them days we sent them to jail! Now they’re running the country! Poor Ted! If he was still alive he’d be spinning in his grave.’

Flossie, not cognisant of the issues but excited by her mistress’s anger, would do her best to join in. ‘Ding dong! Ding dong!’

‘Ding bloody dong, Flossie!’ Mother railed.

Maybe too much rage had taken its toll on her poor heart. The old world which had nurtured her throughout her life, the world of public provision and municipal housing created for her by men like Harold Riley and Berthold Lubetkin, had given place to a new world of offshore wealth and public austerity, of Buy to Let and bedroom taxes. The buildings still stood but their heart, like hers, had slipped away.