Read Living with Strangers Online
Authors: Elizabeth Ellis
10
th
October 1963
Dear Joe
I’ve just spent hours writing all this stuff about kings and dukes and some stupid battle and now I’ve managed to spill water all over it. This was extra homework too because I couldn’t find my proper work, the work I did at the weekend and was supposed to hand in this morning. I did take it to school because I remember double-checking my bag in the bus queue and it was definitely there. Then when we had history, it had gone. Miller went mad, like he does, banging the table and shouting, so of course I started crying, because I do that a lot now and the girls behind me started giggling so he had a go at them too, but I still got the extra work – he didn’t believe me that I’d lost it.
I went into the loos at break to wash my face and wanted to stay there for the rest of the morning. Then Hannah came in with Frankie – you remember them? Hannah was my best friend and then she started hanging round with Frankie and they’ve gone weird now and don’t talk to me much. Anyway, I was doing my hair and they started whispering and giggling again, you know – great snorting noises. I just kept fiddling with my hair and looking in the mirror, then I went out and they followed, all the way down the corridor, right behind me. I know they were copying everything I did so I tried to walk so there wasn’t anything to copy but there always is, isn’t there?
They sit together now, all the time. Not that I mind, not really. Anyway, that’s why I’m doing extra homework and now I’ve got to do it all over again.
I’ll write soon, when I’m in a better mood. This won’t be much fun to read. Sorry.
M x
Over the months that follow Josef’s departure and into the first winter without him, I seem to sink further, my normal world a strange, alarming place. School is no easier. I hoped to find some kind of retreat there, a refuge of sorts, a distraction, something to fill up the long hours. But like so much else, the place just rings with expectations of Josef – hanging out with his friends at break, or mooching down the corridor, a subtle, condescending nod in my direction when we pass. But most of all, it’s the art room he haunts – his favourite place, leaning over a table, a huge drawing board in front of him, his art teacher hovering nearby. Anticipated sightings that never materialise. We have a special assembly when President Kennedy dies. We sing a morbid hymn about praising famous men and people talk in hushed tones, yet none of it really registers.
Other episodes at school have begun to preoccupy me and history homework is the least of my worries. There are the cartoon graphics circulated in class, left lying on a desk then snatched away too late so that I just catch sight of them. A small girl, a mass of hair, a tragic face, water pouring from her eyes like spray from a hosepipe. My big feet, my hated, sensible shoes lampooned. Then the note is screwed up and thrown around the classroom, way above my head while I try to grab it – piggy in the middle.
And the silences, the not speaking. I’m used to the silence at home – the passive, pointless silence that has grown from omission, from sadness and loss. But this is active, this rings with hostility and purpose whenever I enter the classroom or approach the dinner queue or wait for the bus. It’s spread from my own form to the whole year – a virus, a plague. This thing that’s happened to me, to our family, has tainted us and I’m contaminated, cast aside.
Then my things start to go missing, like the history homework that disappeared. Small things: a dictionary, pens, my PE kit. I never have the right equipment when I need it. And worse; someone else’s watch or fountain pen or purse that’s reported missing and turns up in my bag.
It comes to a head one wet lunchtime when Saul is called to the classroom to break up a fight. I’ve been in the library and have to go back to the classroom to fetch my glasses. As I enter, the room falls silent. There’s a group of girls gathered in the corner, Frankie in the middle, passing my glasses round, other girls trying them on. I go over and wait, hoping they’ll just hand them back. They don’t. They tighten the circle.
I try to keep my voice steady. ‘Can I have my glasses please?’ Frankie slowly turns to face me. ‘
Can I have my glasses please
,’ she whines, dangling them on the end of her finger. The group sniggers.
I put my hand out to take them but Frankie whisks them away and I catch the underside of her arm with my fingernails. The glasses fall to the floor.
‘Bitch!’ she yells and slaps me hard across the face.
Stunned, I step away but she grabs my wrist and hits me again. When Saul arrives, I’m on the floor, my glasses lie smashed beside me and Frankie is tugging at my hair.
There’s silence again. Saul comes over and looks down at us.
‘Get up,’ he says quietly.
Frankie extricates herself from my trembling body and we both try to stand.
‘Come and see me after school, both of you. The rest of you sit down and wait for the bell. You’re behaving like animals.’ Then he bends down, picks up the broken glasses and puts them in his pocket.
When he’s gone, there are quiet murmurings, Frankie dabs her arm with a handkerchief while the girls fuss around her. I sit at my desk and want to die.
We go to see Saul after school, but neither of us says much. Later, at home, he asks me again what happened. I make something up about a game, a misunderstanding and thankfully he leaves it at that. I can’t add
snitch
to my list of sins.
After the incident with my glasses, I’m largely left alone. I try not to mind, try not to admit how much I miss their friendship, how lonely I really feel. I begin to wonder whether this is all my fault, that I have made myself unbearable, that misery keeps its own company and no wonder everyone stays away. I think of ways to change things, but my attempt at reconciliation goes sadly wrong.
That year my birthday is on a Saturday. I invite Hannah and Frankie to meet me in town in the afternoon and then come back for tea. I mention it to Molly, as lightly as I can – she seems to know nothing of the goings-on at school.
‘That’s nice,’ she says, ‘and Sophie?’
‘I’ll take her too. She’s good in the pushchair.’
Molly looks at me vaguely as she often does now and says something about being back by five.
I’ve arranged to meet the girls at half past two by the clock tower in the centre of town. I push Sophie up the long hill and begin to wait, craning my neck, searching the crowds. Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Sophie starts to fidget, straining to get out. I stand her next to me, holding her hand, but she’s cold, her cheeks are red and she’s clearly had enough. I give her some mints, an old tube I find in my pocket, but after three-quarters of an hour, it’s obvious the girls aren’t coming. Or I’ve missed them. Or got the day wrong.
Sophie pulls my hand. ‘Go now,’ she says, ‘go home please. Bus, home, tea.’
I bend down and rub her hands, the familiar lump rising in my throat. ‘We’ll go home in a minute,’ I say. ‘Just a bit longer. I’ll take you to the swings.’ But I know that no one is coming.
I put Sophie back in the pushchair, start to walk down towards the park by the lake, but stop before we get there. There’s a small group in the playground, several boys hanging from the crossbars, jumping on and off the spinning roundabout. At first, Hannah and Frankie don’t notice me, then someone points and they all turn round. Foolishly, I wave, even more foolishly trying to justify the cold vigil I’ve just kept. I’ve no doubt they’ve seen me but they look at each other and begin walking away in the opposite direction with the boys leaping and running in their wake. I stare after them until they’ve gone, then I pick up Sophie, go into the playground and put her in a swing, as promised. Slowly, I push her backwards and forwards. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
When I arrive home early, Molly comes into the hall.
‘No one for tea then?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s just us.’
Later at teatime, Molly has made a cake – a surprise. I can scarcely eat, overwhelmed by this kindness, by the sadness of the day, my first birthday without Josef. We’re such a little group to sit down together now.
3
rd
May 1964
Dear Joe
I thought things at school were getting better, except now I’ve been given a detention – just for forgetting my homework diary! That’s our form teacher for you – hasn’t got a clue. She’s the new art teacher – that other one, Mr. Prentice, left last Christmas. He was our form teacher before, which made me sad because I know he liked you and you spent a lot of time with him. Didn’t you tell me he owned a gallery somewhere in London? Anyway, there were all kinds of rumours going round – people said he was selling dodgy art and had to leave, someone else said he got a job up north and Hannah reckoned he was drug addict because he was so pasty looking. I always thought he was rather cool, though. Didn’t look like a teacher – even wore jeans sometimes. Anyway, just thought you might want to know.
I still expect to see you in school – round the corners, in the canteen, on the bus. It’s been tough these last months; that’s why I haven’t written. I don’t know if I’d manage without Papa there either. That trouble with the girls – the ones I told you about – its over now. More or less. They still don’t talk to me much but at least the rest has stopped. I didn’t think things like that happened in real life, only in books about creepy Gothic boarding schools. Anyway, they leave me alone and that’s fine. Most of the time.
Last week Papa talked about changing his job. He doesn’t talk much at all these days so this took me by surprise. He’s been at school for such a long time – as long as I can remember – it would be really strange if he left. I think he went for an interview a few days ago. He wore his suit and wasn’t in school in the afternoon.
Turns out Papa isn’t changing his job after all though – he told me this morning on the way to school. ‘It wouldn’t do to change things’, he said, ‘there’s been enough of that.’ Then he stared through the windscreen and said, ‘I waited so long for the job I have now. I won’t give it up, no matter what’s happened.’
It’s all very odd.
Write soon,
M x
Curled up in the blanket, reading this again, I realised the ‘wait’ that Saul referred to must have been the weeks, and sometimes months, when there was no work. As a child, I simply thought he had long holidays – times when he was at home, when we saw only his serious side, when Molly stopped smiling. Sometimes she didn’t eat at suppertime.
I’ll have it later,
she’d say, sipping a cup of tea while the rest of us tucked into soup and cheese or vegetable stew. I was only about five and I thought she was ill.
***
‘Something’s wrong with Molly,’ I announce to Josef one morning as we sit on his bunk bed with our comics.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know but she’s stopped eating.’
Josef drags his eyes from the page and says, ‘Perhaps she’s having a baby. She stopped eating before you came. Adam told me.’
I’m not convinced. ‘Don’t you get fat if you’re having a baby?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Well, Molly’s not getting fat. She’s thinner than Oma – her clothes are too big.’
Josef goes back to his comic. ‘Don’t be daft. She’s fine.’
I’m not daft and she’s not fine.
I know I’m right.
Then one afternoon Saul comes home later than usual. Adam, Josef and I are sitting on the stairs waiting for him, stacked like tins on a shelf, excited though I don’t know why. Saul picks me up and puts his brown felt hat on my head then swings me round until I bang my feet on the bannisters. This is the old house and there isn’t much room in the hall.
Molly comes out of the kitchen. ‘Good news?’ she says, wiping her hands on her apron.
Saul puts me down. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I think they liked me.’
‘I knew they would,’ Molly kisses him on the cheek. ‘Lets eat.’
Molly has prepared a feast: roast beef, all the bits and pieces to go with it. Crammed into the old kitchen, we take our places at the table, Saul next to Oma who sits, as always, worrying the tablecloth with the tips of her red polished fingers.
We learn that our father has a new job. To celebrate he takes us to London on the train in the summer holidays. I’m held up at the railings of Buckingham Palace, there are hundreds of lights in Piccadilly Circus and we have tea in a café where fountains change colour in time to the music.
Things are better after that and Molly smiles again. Something else changes too. When Adam and Josef go back to school in September, I now go with them. They’re supposed to look after me but Adam always marches ahead, pretending we don’t belong to him, so Josef trails behind and I trail with him.
Josef dislikes school intensely, that much I know. Only later do I learn of the on-going issue his schooling has become, his behaviour a major cause for concern. I’m three years younger, yet can read any of the books he brings home from school. Reading for me has been effortless, absorbing messages from the page, symbols revealing themselves magically like the image in a painting book you wash over with water. But for Josef, it has not. So when our comics arrive on various days of the week, I clamber onto his bed and read them aloud while he studies the pictures in minute detail. Then in the evenings I read out passages from his schoolbooks – the history or geography or English that he’s failed to follow in class. He listens and doodles on a large sketchpad, constructing fantastic, complex drawings – beautiful, bold, black and white figures that thrill and frighten me.
Saul’s new job is seen as an opening for Josef too. The school offers new thinking, new subjects and a thriving art department – a place where he might just be able to flourish. And flourish he does, winning prizes for his art at school, in the county and the whole of our region. Which is why, after it happens and Josef has gone and I suffer so much at school, I’m left with the sense that sending us there was, after all, a gross error of judgement.
November 13
th
1964
Dear Joe
Sophie’s gone to stay with a friend. Molly finally allowed it after days of pestering. She was so excited, didn’t sleep much the night before. I heard her through the wall, chatting to herself long after I’d gone to bed. How would it be to have such joy in your life? I lent her my suitcase – the old brown one Oma left me. It’s a bit knocked at the corners but Sophie was thrilled. It still had the label tied round the handle from our trip to Germany, remember? When we went to see Uncle Jakob two years ago – the summer before you left. I dug out some photos we took. There’s one of you down on the waterfront, and Papa with Uncle Jakob outside his house. I’m sure there was another photo too, one that Jakob took of the three of us – you, me and Papa in front of the Marienkirche – the church with two steeples and the broken bells – but I can’t find it anywhere.
Jakob died in June, you know. Papa went back and cleared the house, though there wasn’t much to clear – Jakob was so neat and tidy wasn’t he? But there were letters and papers, which he’d kept tied with ribbons, from Oma and Papa, written when they first came to England. I’ve learned a bit more recently – it’s better at home at the moment – when Gil’s with us. Do you remember him?
I found out that Opa Josef was put in a prison camp just outside Berlin. It was called Sachsenhausen and they kept political prisoners there. How could he have been political? He was a teacher like Papa, wasn’t he? He’d been a teacher for twenty-five years, only he wasn’t allowed to teach any more. So he ran a school for Jewish children in Jakob’s factory until that shut down too. But Opa died because of what he tried to do, because of who he was. Papa told me he was shot. It took Oma three years after the War to find out what had happened.
It’s hard to imagine really. Perhaps if we’d known more we’d have understood, but Papa never talked about it much, did he? I think he’s always kept himself a secret – hidden away. Does he open up to Molly, I wonder? Does she know him at all? How do we manage to keep so much from each other? All this that we don’t know. It’s like living with strangers.
And you, I wonder, there among real strangers. Is it home yet? Do you miss us? Will you ever come back?
M x
Until that trip to Lübeck, my father had rarely mentioned his family, his German past. I knew only a little of what had happened, small droplets of information Molly would supply if I asked. There was no elaboration, just a few facts – like the facts of life. Saul was born in a small village to the north of Berlin in 1916 and moved to the city at the age of ten. His mother, our Oma, played with the Berlin Symphony orchestra. Her beautiful antique cello stood in the schoolroom for years after she died.
After the rise of fascism, Saul fled to England with Oma and his younger brother Stefan in 1936. He met my mother at night school during the war. She wanted to train as a nurse and Saul was her night school teacher for biology. They bonded, he once told me, over a dissecting kit and the internal workings of a dead frog.
Yet I knew there was much more to learn. I knew that a war had been fought and won – yet lost too, because we were German. Half German. At primary school, the boys would play war games, racing round the playground firing imaginary machine guns. Adam would try to stop them, goaded by taunts of
Your dad’s a Kraut!
but he ended up being ignored or shoved aside.
To my relief, he gave up. I didn’t realise then that he was pitting himself against the flow of contemporary thinking; it was just not good to have your big brother fight a losing battle with tears in his eyes. I was aware too that the issues for us went far beyond nationality. There was something much greater, a backdrop to Saul’s life, a concealed weight he seemed to carry with him, in the deliberateness of his movements and the slow resignation of his smile when it came.
Before she died, Oma had talked a great deal of the past – piecemeal fragments just as Molly’s answers had been – that I absorbed into the fabric of who we were without needing to know more. I realised even then that holding back was endemic, the guarding of truths unable to be expressed embedded deep in the spirit of our family’s collective past.
***
One evening, Saul sits down at the supper table. ‘I’ve had a letter from Jakob,’ he says. ‘It seems he would like us to visit.’
‘Uncle Jakob?’ Adam asks, ‘Oma’s brother?’
‘Is he still in Lübeck?’ Molly hands Sophie fingers of toast.
‘He’s still there, in the same house.’
‘Does he say why he wants us to visit?’
‘Not exactly. I think he’s in poor health. It’s not surprising, he must be over eighty now.’
Sophie bangs the high chair with a spoon. Molly gently removes it, giving her more toast. ‘Would you want to go – could we, do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. Not all of us anyway.’
‘Where are we going?’ Paul mumbles through his food. ‘Can I come?’
‘I’ll go,’ I say, ‘I’d like to go.’
‘It’s a long journey.’ Saul says. ‘Three trains and a boat – it will take two days.’
I’m not put off, though Adam wades in with more obstacles. ‘And it doesn’t bother you that Germany is cut in half now?’ he says. ‘You can’t go further than Lübeck.’
‘But Uncle Jakob lives in Lübeck. Why would we want to go anywhere else?’ I look down at my plate. ‘I just thought it might be fun.’
Saul puts his hand on my arm. ‘I think you’re right. I think we should go. You and I, Maddie – and Josef will come too. It will be good for you both.’
Adam puts down his knife and fork noisily. ‘Well, I’ll be working this summer anyway.’
And Josef, standing up to clear the plates, catches my eye then and winks. This is the year before he leaves, my last memory of light and space, the last time he and I share our lives.
*
As the summer approaches, talk at school revolves around holidays. I have friends whose parents have started to take them abroad – to Spain or Italy where it’s always hot and you can lie on a beach all day. Our family experience of a beach being far removed from heat or lying around, I try to ignite interest in my plans with details of our trip to Germany.
‘So you’ll be on a train for how long?’ Hannah sprawls on my bed peering into a hand mirror, pulling her face around.
‘Eighteen hours. Well, more than that. We get a train to London, then a thing called a boat train to Dover, then a night crossing to somewhere in Belgium, then a train again, all the way to Hamburg.’ I’ve learnt the route by heart. ‘Uncle Jakob will meet us with a car and drive the last part to Lübeck.’
Hannah squeezes a spot on her chin. ‘Sounds a bit boring to me.’ I suspect she has no idea where these places actually are.
In the schoolroom, Josef and I pore over the map of Northern Europe in my school atlas, tracing the route. We follow too the journey Oma made with her sons all those years before.
‘Do you ever wonder about Papa?’ I ask Josef.
‘What about him?’
‘What it was like for him. Growing up – leaving his home.’
Josef shuts the atlas. ‘Has he ever told you about it?’
‘Not really. But Oma did sometimes, especially later on. She rambled – it was all bits and pieces, but I remember some of it now and it starts to make sense. She told me something about a necklace that her sister gave her. Oma brought it here in her cello case, stitched into the lining.’
Josef looks up, surprised. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he says.
That makes my day – I don’t often get the chance to impress him. So I say, ‘I once heard Adam ask Papa if we could change our name – so it was more English – he suggested Fielding or something like that. That would be weird though, wouldn’t it?’
‘Adam’s full of weird ideas.’
‘And Uncle Jakob? How come he ended up in Lübeck?’
‘I don’t know. Same reasons maybe.’ Josef stands up. He’s tall now and thick set, with Molly’s fair colouring, like mine. It sits well on him – my friends from school all blush and giggle stupidly when they come for tea, though he never seems to take much notice. I look at him standing by the door and feel the tug of change that will pull us further apart. Just how far apart I have no notion then, mercifully perhaps. As he leaves the room I race with excitement and regret.