The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: Gobby Gladys

The look of alarm on Inna’s face when I came in through the door after my discharge from hospital made me feel a twinge of guilt that I had exaggerated the seriousness of my injury. I slumped on the sofa, moaning from time to time, and let her ply me with tea and vodka. I had hoped the hospital would issue me with a pirate-style black eyepatch when they discharged me, but the one at the dispensary turned out to be confectionery-pink and rubbery. On my face, it looked like a misplaced cupcake.

‘Oy, you look like crazy, Bertie! One-eye blind crazy!’

‘The doctor said I’ve a fifty-fifty chance of losing my eye, Inna,’ I said. Which was not entirely true — the doctor had said my eyesight was not at risk — but why waste all that goodwill that people seem to summon up for the blind?

‘Better you not lose it too soon. You ev birthday on Tuesday. I will invite Blackie coming for dinner. I will make golabki kobaski slatki.’

‘Lovely. But remember her name is Violet, not Blackie.’

‘Blackie, Violet, all same — innit, Indunky Smeet?’

The parrot looked mardy and did not respond. It must be tough for a creature of limited intelligence to handle so many name changes. I was brimming with excitement but I put on a display of nonchalance for Inna’s benefit.

‘I was thinking, Inna, should I invest in one of those George Clooney-type coffee machines?’

You never know what will please a woman.

‘Too expensive,’ Inna declared. ‘Waste of money. Dovik got one. Coffee in Lidl is better.’

Due to factors beyond my control, for which I largely blamed Jimmy, I had never managed to deliver the oration I had so painstakingly prepared for Mother’s funeral. But now, lying on the sofa in the sitting room, I turned my melancholy one-eyed gaze on the casket of ashes which Jimmy had given me in hospital and which I had placed on the mantelpiece. All that energy and complexity compacted into a box of dust. I tried to recall what she had told me of her life. What I did not know would now remain a mystery.

Mum had been wont to brag of her humble origins. She had been born in a flat above a pie shop on Sutton Street, Shadwell, she claimed; not even a real flat. Just two rooms on the first floor, sharing the hall, staircase and mezzanine kitchen with another family. There was no bathroom, only a communal toilet in the back yard. Nevertheless, Mum said, they were better off than many families, who lived in just one room, or in a lightless basement. Her father, my Grandad Robert, born in 1890, had survived the horrors of the Great War and worked as a tally clerk in the Port of London. He had witnessed at first hand the humiliating scramble of unemployed dockers fighting each other for a brass tally, which was the promise of a day’s work, tossed by a foreman into the hungry crowd. Once he saw a man killed in the crush. It affected him deeply, and Mum told me in a hushed voice that her father, before he died, had made her promise never to cross a picket fence. I puzzled over the mystery of the fence, but I did not question it, so powerful was the mystique of my grandfather. I snuggled beside Mother on the sofa and let her voice lead me through the gallery of the sepia-tinted past.

Her mother Gladys, she told me, was born into a Yorkshire mining family in 1900, and had moved down to London during the Depression to work as a maid in the household of a Chelsea dentist. Never one to hold her tongue, Gladys, nicknamed Gobby Gladys, had stormed out after an argument over wages, and found a job in a rag factory in Whitechapel. Within two years she’d set up a trade union branch there. Gladys and Robert met at a rally in Bow at which George Lansbury was talking about his vision of a better society. Gladys, pint-sized and pugnacious, wearing high heels and a red felt hat with a flower on the side, jumped up and yelled that all this talk about ethics and aesthetics was highfalutin claptrap and we must fight the fascists in the streets. Robert, giant-sized and peaceable, looked on in awe and asked her out for a drink afterwards. There was a photo of them at their wedding, he tall and handsome in a double-breasted suit, she barely reaching to his shoulder even in high heels, wearing white silk, and flowers in her hair. If you looked closely, you could just detect the bump under the silk that was baby Lily, who was born in the year that George Lansbury became the leader of the Labour Party, and trundled around to Labour Party meetings and rallies all over the East End, her pram stuffed with leaflets.

I never met my Grandad Bob, he died before I was born, but I was once taken to meet Granny Gladys in her old people’s home in Poplar. She was a tiny shrunken figure hunched over her Zimmer frame in a small overheated room that smelled of disinfectant and pee. There was a sampler on the wall embroidered in cross stitch, with the motto ‘Fellowship is Life’.

‘Kiss your granny, Bertie.’ Mother gave me a little push, and I stumbled forward.

Her cheek felt dry and soft like crumpled tissue paper. She was still gobby; she railed in a shrill quavering voice against Stanley Baldman, and Mum whispered that she meant the pre-war Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who had been dead for twenty years. At tea, when I reached for a chocolate biscuit before it was offered, she rapped my fingers with a spoon.

When Granny Gladys died, Mother was inconsolable for weeks, but I was secretly glad, because I didn’t like her much, and after the funeral I got Grandad’s walking stick with a carved dog’s head for the handle. Mother inherited the sampler, which she hung on the wall in the sitting room. She also inherited both Granny Gladys’s gobby spirit and Grandad Bob’s steadfastness. Even now, remembering the way her voice choked as she spoke about him brought a tear to my eye.

‘What does it mean, “fellowship is life”?’ I had once asked, poking at the sampler with Grandad’s walking stick.

She turned on me, her eyes shining with tears, and said, ‘They were only in power six years, and they gave us the NHS, unemployment benefit, pensions, proper education and thousands of new homes, including this one, Bert. That’s what fellowship is.’