Read Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman Online
Authors: Natasha Solomons
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Immigrants, #England, #Germans
POSTSCRIPT
Elizabeth shaded her eyes with a hand, searching the sun-soaked garden for her father. She spied him sprawled on a deckchair under the shade of a cherry tree. He was fast asleep, the sound of his snores harmonising with the hum of the bees, his walking stick propped beside him. She watched as blossom rained down on his bald head like confetti.
The flowerbeds were overgrown with ragged-robin, clouds of pale blue forget-me-nots and ground elder; bindweed choked the roses and ivy grappled with the clematis. Slugs had eaten away the red snapdragons, leaving silvery trails along the low stone wall. The grass was long; it had not been cut for several weeks and had begun to go to seed under the creaking plum tree, but Elizabeth said nothing about the general state of neglect because Jack was insistent – Sadie had liked the weeds, so this was a garden where everything was allowed to grow. The only sign of interference was the small space cleared around her mother’s beloved rose bush. There was a single peach-coloured bud that smelled faintly of cinnamon, but the bush was turning black and half of its leaves were dead.
Jack stretched luxuriantly and gave a great yawn. ‘It’s hard work being old. Very tiring.’
Elizabeth laughed. ‘I know.’
‘Poppycock. You’re not even fifty.’
‘I’m fifty-three.’
‘Exactly. You’ve barely started. I only got going at fifty-three.’
He got to his feet, leant on his stick and adjusted his skewed hat. ‘Shall we?’
They strolled through the garden and into the field where the meadow grass was a lush, May green and speckled with wild flowers – scarlet herb robert, celandine and ox-eye daisies. A stream meandered through the middle, trickling over pebbles and tiny pieces of broken crockery to fill the large dew pond at the bottom. Fat buttercup lilies trembled on the surface while lazy dragonflies flitted amongst the reeds.
Jack produced a flask from his jacket pocket, took a gulp, and then gave a loud hiccup.
‘You shouldn’t drink that stuff, Dad. Can’t be good for you.’
‘Nonsense. This is what’s kept me alive so long. I’m completely pickled – like a herring.’ His shoulders sagged. ‘If only I could have got your mother to drink more of it.’
Elizabeth stroked the white hairs on his arm and watched as he knocked back another mouthful of cider. His eyes watered – she was not sure if it was the alcohol or the memory. With a shake of his head, he resumed the climb, and Elizabeth clambered up the slope behind him. He moved with the measured gait of an old man but he still had a brightness in his step, a little half jump, and while Elizabeth was perspiring, his cheeks were barely pink.
They came to a stop beside a neat grave, marked with a tattered flag. Jack dropped his stick and sat on the grassy mound. Elizabeth’s breath was still coming in heaves and gasps.
‘God I’m unfit. Give me that,’ she said snatching his leather flask. As she gulped down the fiery liquid, she felt her heart slow and her panting ease. She slumped beside her father and stared out across the fields. The land sloped smoothly to the bottom of the valley, where the river Stour dawdled amongst the trees. The only blight on the landscape was an ugly clump of concrete houses that were partly obscured by a copse of cricket willows. Several of the houses had fallen into the river when it flooded the year before. Jack fumbled in his pocket and handed her a package.
‘A present.’
Elizabeth took it from him and peeled off the brown paper. Inside was a leather-bound volume, inscribed in a slanting, old-fashioned hand. It was Sadie’s recipe book – all the women in her family had learned to cook from its pages. She felt a tightness in her chest. Closing her eyes, she sniffed the spine and remembered the first time she had used it, cooking meatballs for her mother. For a second, she imagined that it would smell like a glorious concoction of all the recipes inside: chicken soup with
kreplach
, vanilla crescents, beef
cholent
and honey, but it only reeked of dust and damp age.
Elizabeth wiped her hands on her jeans before leafing through the fragile pages. ‘My German is just good enough . . . oh.’
A faded blue pamphlet was sandwiched between the pages of the Baumtorte recipe, like an extra layer in the cake. It slid onto her lap. ‘This is your list, Daddy.’
Jack peered at it over the top of his spectacles. ‘So it is. Good bookmark.’
He studied his daughter. She was starting to look more and more like her mother. He guessed that was the fate of all women. A woodpecker hammered at the bark of a gnarled oak and a pied wagtail trilled his flute-like tune. Jack smiled. This was his last summer. He couldn’t explain how he knew, but he did. He sensed it, like the swallows knew dusk was coming, or the black-nosed badgers sought their winter hideouts deep underground, sensing the coming snow. These were his last yellow meadow vetchlings, and he’d never again pluck splinters from his backside after accidentally sitting on prickly sowthistle.
‘Tomorrow, bake a Baumtorte,’ he said, turning to his daughter.
She smiled at him, ‘All right.’
And bake one more layer. A layer for me. But he didn’t say this aloud, not wanting to upset her. She’d find out soon enough. Besides, there was nothing to be sad about. This was the way of things. Jack was the last of them – they had all left for the churchyard at the top of the hill and weekenders from the city had taken over their homes. Even Basset had gone last spring, aged ninety-odd.
Sadie’s grave was apart from the rest, nestled into the hillside and marked by a flagpole instead of a headstone. Jack knew that even after fifty years in England, his Sadie would not want to be buried in a churchyard. He sat for a moment in silence.
‘This was the fifth hole. My favourite. Look at that sweep,’ he said.
‘It was a wonderful course, Dad.’
‘No, it was the greatest course in all England,’ he said, correcting her. He pointed to a slight rise at the edge of the trees, where the land was flattest. ‘That was the fourth hole. Not so lovely as the fifth but a fine hole nonetheless. Your mother always made a birdie on the fourth.’
He chuckled at the memory, while Elizabeth stared at the shining fields, trying to remember them as they had been – a series of fairways, smooth greens and waving chequered flags. The greens had long since reverted to wild meadow grass; the holes had closed over and sunk, while the hedgerows crept from the rough and onto the fairways. Now, the land was a mixture of tangled grass, unkempt hedges and scrub – the gorse grown thick and fierce, the friendly yellow flowers belying the vicious spikes, and brambles spread amongst the trees, while blackthorn tore across the tees. Yet, underneath all of this lingered the remains of the golf course, slumbering like Sleeping Beauty, hidden by the knot of bushes, grasses and branches. A long time ago, Bobby Jones had played here.
‘What happened, Dad? Why did you let it go to ruin?’
Jack rubbed his nose. ‘Well, we were open for quite a while. And then demand seemed to slip away and, of course, we got old. But we had a good time of it. Your mother was quite a golfer.’
He paused and gazed out at the fields below with a gleam in his eye.
‘But the real reason is that Jack wanted it back.’
‘Jack?’
‘Jack-in-the-Green,’ he said. ‘He’s a woolly-pig, a will-o-the-wisp or the red sun sinking behind Bulbarrow Hill on a summer’s night. Everyone should know Jack. And if ever you tell the
bubbeh-myseh
about the crazy old man who built a golf course on the side of a hill, you must remember Jack-in-the-Green.’
With that, he turned away and started his journey back down the slope, leaving Elizabeth alone on the hillside. She noticed a hulking oak at the edge of the rough with peculiar knobbles and calluses that looked weirdly like bone sticking through the bark. Then she saw that it was not bone, but dozens of golf balls embedded in the trunk, and that the bark, in time, had grown over the balls and absorbed them into the great rings of the tree. It was one of the strangest things she had ever seen.
The sunlight filtered through the leaves, casting green patterns on her skin. The roots were thicker than sapling trunks, and plunged deep, deep into the earth. In her mind, Elizabeth saw that they formed an inverse shadow tree under the ground, even broader than the great branches above her head. The roots reached down beneath the soil, stretching under the Stour and below the sea. She pictured them surfacing on a forest floor in Bavaria, where an ancient oak tree creaked in the hot summer wind. She inhaled the sudden scent of pinecones and peat, and remembered her mother telling her bedtime stories about a cabin in a dark wood and a boy named Emil.
A green acorn dropped onto the faded blue pamphlet in her hands. She looked down at the peeling cover –
Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee
and, opening it, started to read her father’s list. Each item was annotated with Jack’s scrawl. Several extra pages had been inserted, all covered with his writing. There were more than a hundred points, detailing every aspect of daily life –
‘an Englishman is scrupulously honest . . . an Englishman always says thank you . . . an Englishman apologises even when something is not his fault . . .’
She turned to the final item, reading it aloud, ‘Item one hundred and fifty-one – This last item supersedes all previous list items. If you see a Dorset woolly-pig you are a true Dorset man. And as any noggerhead or ninnywally knows, the Dorset man is the best of all Englishmen.’
Elizabeth closed the leaflet, slipped it back inside the recipe book and hurried to catch up with the old man walking steadily down the hill.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first thank you is to the people of Ibberton in Dorset. Many decades ago, they welcomed my grandparents, Paul and Margot, to the village and after years of living in exile helped them find home. My parents, Carol and Clive, have provided endless emotional support and horticultural advice, as well as home-made biscuits and damson jam. I am most grateful to Katharina Schlott and Sharon for sharing their remarkable knowledge of vintage German curses, and to all my family and friends, especially Joanna, Michael, Katy and Rachel. Maureen Solomons generously allowed me to use her parents’ names for Jack and Sadie. Thanks also to Elinor Burns, and my supervisor and mentor Janet Todd. I am deeply grateful to my agent Stan for his friendship and advice. Thanks also to Jocasta Hamilton, Reagan Arthur and everyone at Sceptre for being such a delight to work with.
Lastly, thanks to David – without him, I would never have written a book at all.
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