June the first was our day of peace. It came in that year with all sunshine and the windows open and the neighbor’s radio. It was tennis players and the yellow seasick trams grinding down Cathedral Road. It was the end of a school day where we left our carved initials, hurt and momentous, in the wooden desk, and schoolteacher (old Knobble-knees) rubbing off chalk from the blackboard like a nasty day from the calendar.

“Mind how you cross the road,” she said.

“Please, Miss Morgan,” asked Philip, “can I have my yoyo back? I won’t talk again during lessons.”

Keith had asked me to his house for tea, for it was our day of peace, an interlude in our constant campaign of being mean to each other, of masterful vilification. We walked hardly together for we were enemies. Suddenly Keith said: “There’ll be bananas and cream so you can leave as soon as you’ve eaten ’em.” “I like bananas and cream,” I said. Other people’s houses have a strange smell. Keith Thomas’s home was no exception and I was sniffing. “What’s the matter?” Keith’s mother asked. “Is there something burning?” I went very red when the others sniffed. They just stood there, Keith and his mother, heads cocked, drawing air through their nostrils. “I can’t smell anything,” she said. I could. Perhaps it was the odor of sin or the past remains of previous tenants. I ate bread and butter and jam and Welsh cakes, and Keith sniffed and sniffed louder and louder, quite ostentatiously I can tell you. “Blow your nose, Keith,” said his mother. I tipped the tea over the tablecloth and grew redder. . . .

This was all a long time ago: I was ten years high and I lived in South Wales. There everything was different, more alive somehow. The landscape and the voices were dramatic and argumentative. Already I knew the chapels and the pubs and the billiard halls and the singing.

“How old’s your mother?”
“Thirty.”
“Mine’s forty.”
“Mine’s fifty.”
“Mine’s sixty-three.”
“Mine’s ninety.”
“Mine’s hundred and ninety.”

_____________

Near the White Wall I was born in a smoky house, boasting. I knew the paper flowers, the Sunday suits, the stuffed animals, and the brass, the clocks, and the ferns.

Always there was too much furniture in the room. Always there was too much noise and familiarity. Always there were visitors. Lovely it was.

But Porthcawl was the place with the long wind and the terror of the sea coming over the promenade with sloppy white paws. On Sundays, father would drive us down, plush and proud, scrubbed and avid, dodging in and out amongst the procession of cars that the seaside called like a magnet. And I would be in a race steering from the back seat. Over Tumble Down Dick and down Crack Hill. Past the Golden Mile and the green and green. Stop for bull’s-eyes. Stop for weewee. Porthcawl was the place. Posh. The Figure of Eight and the Ghost Train. The slowest speedboats in the world and the thinnest Fat Lady. Come and See Minny She Creeps and She Crawls, She Walks on Her Belly Like a Reptile—Hey, Hey—Tanner a Time. Not to mention Sandy Beach and the parents shouting at the deaf children: “Don’t swim out too tar.” “Stop that.” “Dai, you’ll get sick eating sand.”

Keith’s mother put a plate under the tablecloth.

“Never mind,” she said to me.

“What are you blushing for?” asked Keith. “Look Ma, he’s as red as a beetroot.”

“Quiet, darling,” said his mother.

“I thought we were going to have bananas and cream,” I said.

Later the man of the house came in, ate, and said no word. Grumpy he was. My mother used to say that he had whisky instead of blood running through his body. It was true too; I could smell it through his mouth. Besides, lunchtime yesterday, I heard him and saw him come out of The Bull with One Leg. Drunk he was and shouting, “I am damned, we are damned. I know what sin is so I know what God is. We’re damned, damned, damned.” I stood in the street as the pub’s doors swung behind a weeping Mr. Thomas who staggered tenderly into the sunlight. “Darro,” he said, looking at me with spaniel eyes, “you’re damned too, little one.” And wobbly he walked down the road under the two o’clock sun. But now, in his own house, he said no word, looking at me without recognition though only yesterday lunchtime it was that he confided to me the terrible, the most unspeakable truth. “Come and sit down, Mr. Thomas,” said his wife, so Keith and I went out into the garden. (Their garden is not as big as ours.)

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Our washing machine,” Keith said.

“Does it work?” I asked.

“Put your finger by ‘ere.” Keith said.

I did so and he turned the handle and my nail was crushed and I went home crying to mother. He was my enemy.

It was Friday night and we were Jewish. The two candles burning symbolized for me holiness and family unity. My mother could speak Welsh and Yiddish and English and Dad knew swear words as well. One of my big brothers would say the prayer and we would eat. My brothers’ names were Wilfred and Leo. The meat was kosher. “Wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands. Comb your hair.” I loved my brothers best.

_____________

In the schoolyard too they would dance around me:

Dan, Dan, the dirty old man
Washed his face in a frying pan
Combed his hair with a leg of the chair
Dan, Dan, the dirty old man.

“I’ll do you in, Keith Thomas,” I said furiously. That settled it. Keith and I would lead a procession of whooping boys into the lane and we would threaten each other, spit at each other, and finally swing our fists against the air until by chance one of us would get our face in the way and the fight would end. Fierce it was. Afterwards I would go into our garage so that I could weep alone.

I loved my brothers best. Leo was a Revolutionary. I already knew the “Red Flag” and the “Alphabet.”

A stands for Armaments the Capitalists’
    pride.
B stands for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.

Oh election day was a holiday. I would go over the town looking for a Labor car. I couldn’t find any, so I chased the Liberals instead, and insulted the big slick cars that wore the blue colors.

Vote, vote, vote for Johnny Williams
Kick old Whitey in the pants.

“What are you shouting for?” said my enemy Keith Thomas, leering at me. “Vote, vote, vote,” I shouted. Keith pulled a penknife out of his pocket, unclasped it and tested the edge with his thumb. “It’s sharp,” he said casually. “You broke my fingernail,” I said. An election car passed by. “Vote, vote, vote,” I shouted. “Quiet,” ordered Keith, and he once more tested the edge of his knife ominously. “You coward,” I said, “fight like a Great Britain.” The street was empty. A cat slept on the sunlit doorway.

“Shut up, you podgy Jewboy,” said Keith.

“Podgy son of a whisky man,” I said.

“I’ll slit your throat,” said Keith.

“I’ll bash you on the nose,” I retaliated.

“Shut up, you podgy Jewboy,” said Keith.

“Podgy son of a whisky man,” I said.

Keith slowly came towards me with his penknife ready.

“Fight like a Great Britain,” I said.

Round the far corner ambled Dirty-Face pushing a pram, his dog following behind.

“Gosh,” I said, “there’s Dirty-Face.”

We both hesitated. Then we ran away. We were both afraid of Dirty-Face. In the park I heard Keith shouting, “Podgy Jewboy. Podgy Jewboy. Podgy Jewboy.” I walked home quickly to ask Wilfred to buy me a penknife.

This was all a long time ago: I was ten years high and I lived in South Wales. I was not to play with Dirty-Face, or go down the Docks, or make noises in my belly when visitors came. I was to tie up my shoelaces, be kind to the cat, and wash. But there were more “don’ts” than “do’s.”

And through all this my mother kissed me.

_____________

But later Keith Thomas became my greatest friend, for he with his parents moved to the next street, the other side of the lane. Keith’s father would pass our house at night after the pubs closed, shouting:

“We’re damned, the whole world is damned.” Mother used to say, “His poor wife, what she has to put up with, and her with a weak heart and swelling of the ankles. All his doing, his. Thank God, that’s one thing your father doesn’t do.” “His wife’s condition is nothing to do with the drink,” Wilfred would say, who was a medical student. “Mrs. Thomas had rheumatic fever when she was a child.” “Don’t tell me,” my mother would reply. “If that’s the sort of diagnosis you’re going to make when you’re a doctor your father is pouring money down the drain.” “What sort of a future has little Keith with a father like that?” mother would go on. Later in the night I would wake up and listen to Mr. Thomas swimming home in the dark street outside. Once I crept out of bed to look out of the window. Mr. Thomas was clinging to the lamppost and another man was playing an accordion. The accordion player was singing: “She was a good girl until I took her to a dance, she was a good girl but then she had her first romance”—and tilting towards the moon, Mr. Thomas in his bowler hat was shouting above the accordion and the singing, “Christ is come but I am damned.”

Keith and I used to play hide-and-seek in the nearby churchyard, our laughter resounding all loveliness amongst the somber stone angels. We played cricket in the stretched summer lanes, we fished for minnows in the stream and became cowboys and Indians amongst the bushes and trees of the park. (I was always an Indian because Leo had told me cowboys were Imperialists.)

_____________

One day Keith’s mother, only forty-four years of age, lay gasping propped up in her bed with one side of her face and one side of her body paralyzed. Her eyes were pulled over so that she was forever looking towards her right where normally Mr. Thomas slept. She couldn’t speak they said, though she could hear everything. The doctor reported that she had a large thrombosis in her brain. The following morning at three o’clock she died. That day the blinds were drawn in Keith’s house. Neighbors stood outside their front gates, whispering. Incredulously, maybe for as long as two minutes, each person thought of his own death and in their hearts it was five to three in the morning. “She was a good lady, Mrs. Thomas,” they said. Others said: ”The poor boy.” And there was a sudden indignant anger against Mr. Thomas. Mr. Thomas had been a brilliant architect at one time, of a good family and fortunate in that he had a good education. He could have worked for himself instead of for Tanner & Son. Now he was always afraid of losing his job because of the drink. Poor Blod, she lay there so quiet, so still with her eyes still turned looking to see if he had come to bed. “Blodwyn fach,” he said hopelessly, “it was good at the beginning, wasn’t it? Remember before Keith was born. I didn’t mean harm, Blodwyn.” She still looked to the right in silence. Who had come to live in her? he thought. “She was a pretty,” he said aloud to the doctor as if trying to defend her ugliness in death. “Come away now,” answered Doctor Meadows.

I went with my mother, to give flowers to Mr. Thomas, and he ushered us into their front room (their best room). Mr. Thomas was dressed in black and he received my mother’s condolences quietly. I didn’t understand the slow punctuated conversation that followed. But I remember Keith’s father remark, “I swear to God, I shan’t take another glass till I die. On Blodwyn’s body I swear it.” And he meant it too. I observed a finger of sunlight pointing through a crack in the window blind, its fingernail scratching a round blob of sun on the tawdry deaf carpet. Outside an “El Dorado” man rang his bicycle bell: “Ice cream,” it tinkled, “ice cream.” The dust danced, the dust climbed up and down the shaft of sunlight, the dust settled on Mr. Thomas’s black suit. The piano lid was closed, a coffin of music. And then I heard perhaps what I was waiting for: I heard Keith Thomas whimpering upstairs. Keith’s father said with dignity: “Thank you for the flowers.”

That night when Mr. Thomas came through the road drunk and screaming despite his holy resolution, the whole street locked their doors and pulled down the blinds. The children could hear him from their bedrooms. “Blodwyn my pretty, it wasn’t me at all. Speak, Blodwyn fach, speak. I know, I know, I know,” he yelled. Only Stokes joined him in the street. Stokes who used to go round the town with placards on his back, placards which read: Christ Died For Your Sins on one side, and Repent Before It Is Too Late on the other. “Kneel and pray,” begged the benign fanatic, “kneel and pray.” “I’m damned,” shouted Mr. Thomas. “I’m damned, it’s too late.” But in the end they both knelt in the street under the full moon, one praying and the other crying out, “Blodwyn fach,” between his terrible oaths.

_____________

It was only Uncle Isidore. . . . I don’t think ing on his hands. “No more school till Monday,” said Sidney. It was silly to come home from school tea-time with the lampposts lit to keep away the ghosts. It was that cold: in the middle of the road, steam rose from a drain. We stood there, looking downwards watching the steam rising. “It’s the devil smoking his pipe,” I said.

Adam and Eve and Pinchme
Went down to the river to loathe.
Adam and Eve got drownded
Who do you think was saved?

A policeman came round the corner and we ran and we ran and we ran.

“You don’t believe in Christmas, do you?” Sidney said to me.

“What’s it like to be Jewish?” asked Philip.

“’S all right,” I said.

“What’s the difference?” demanded Philip.

“They puts ‘ats on when they pray, we takes them off,” Sidney said.

“It’s more than that, their blood’s different,” said Philip, “makes their noses grow.”

“Megan’s coming round our house this evening,” I interrupted, making a face. Sidney and I didn’t like girls because they wore knickers and Megan was especially silly. Lots of things were silly. Girls were silly, Miss Morgan our schoolmistress was silly, washing behind the ears was silly, going to bed early was silly. Now Philip was silly, because he didn’t know what it was like to be Jewish. It wasn’t anything really, except on Saturdays. We walked down the street wishing for snow and letting our breath fly from our mouths like ectoplasm. Soon it would be Christmas holidays, and presents and parties. The shops were crowded with voices. We pressed our noses against the window-panes, breathed, and wrote our names with our fingers on the misted glass. “Leo loves Megan,” I wrote. It was all cotton wool in the windows, and the smell of tangerine peel, and a man with a long white beard.

“There’s daft, in it?” said Philip. “Look, Father Xmas!”

“Where do flies go in the wintertime?” asked Sidney suddenly and we all laughed sharing a secret.

When I arrived home, my brother Leo was squeezing a blackhead from his forehead; then he combed his hair.

“Megan Davies,” I shouted at him, “Megan Davies!”

“Do your homework,” he said.

“Who loves Megan Davies?” I cried. He hit me harder than he meant for I fell against the wall and a bruise came up like an egg on my head.

“Put some butter on it,” my brother said, “and stop crying.”

“Bloody, bloody, bloody,” I screamed.

“Now then, enough of that,” he thundered. But the front doorbell rang and he thought it was Megan, so I was given a penny to shut up.

_____________

It was only Uncle Isidore . . . I don’t think I’ve told you about him. I’d like to tell you. Of course, he’s dead now, but I remember him quite well. He’s become a sort of symbol really. You know, my parents still live in Wales, but we children have grown up and left home—as much, that is, as anybody can ever leave home. Anyway, when old Daffyd Morgan comes round the house at Cardiff these days, he and my parents get to talk about the kids.

“And what about Wilfred, your eldest son?” Old Morgan asks.

“All right,” says my father; “not just an ordinary doctor but a psychiatrist.”

“Fancy,” says Morgan. “Wilfred not just an ordinary doctor! Now my son Ianto, ‘e ‘ad the gift do you know, just like his mother before she caught pneumonia, before she was . . . exterminated, God rest her soul.”

“And Leo, my second son,” interrupts my father.

“Ah yes Leo, Leo, there’s a boy for you,” smiles Morgan. “A boy in a million. Very spiritual. And a credit to you, goes to chapel, I mean synagogue, regular, I understand.”

“A solicitor, Mr. Morgan, very clever.”

“Yes, very clever. Fancy, a solicitor! A very spiritual solicitor, I should think. Pays, I always think, to go to chapel—I mean synagogue. The connections do you know? Apart of course as a remedy for the spirit. What about your third son, the youngest?”

“Our third son, Daffyd Morgan,” says my mother, “is no good. Won’t do any work.”

“Just like Uncle Isidore,” exclaim my father and mother in unison:

“Fancy,” says Morgan. “Now my son Ianto. . I. .”

_____________

Uncle Isidore wasn’t exactly an uncle. Nobody knew his exact relationship to the family; but my parents called him “Uncle” and my cousins called him “Uncle” and my uncles called him “Uncle.” He used to visit our home regularly once a week, to collect his half a crown and eat a bit of supper. He went around all my relations’ houses to receive a silver coin and grumble. It wasn’t even as if he were a religious man. He just lived that way and the rest of the time he would read at Cardiff Central Library, or return to his dingy bed-sitting room and play his violin. Not that he was a competent musician. On the contrary, he would scrape the easy bits and whistle the difficult phrases. That was his philosophy and his life. He always looked as if he needed a good wash, a shave, and a haircut. Uncle Isidore would pick me up and rub his face against my cheek. “Like a baby’s bottom,” he used to say to me. He smelt of dirt and tobacco. Eventually he died of kidney trouble following an enlarged prostate gland. That’s all I know about him. It doesn’t seem very much. Uncle Isidore was just an oldish untidy man, a sort of amateur beggar, who wouldn’t work but read in the Reference Library and forever played his violin. It used to disturb people that he didn’t have a reason for living. Daffyd Morgan would lecture him, beginning with the inevitable sentence: “The purpose of life is . . .” and end up his discourse hopelessly saying: “The Jews, bach, are generally an industrious people.”

Nobody listened when Uncle Isidore played, even the cat would rush for the door. So we say, he had no purpose in life. He was contemptible, a rogue, an outlaw. I never cried when Uncle Isidore died. Nobody did. There was a small funeral and my father and my uncles gave some conscience money for his burial. I remember asking what a prostate gland was.

_____________

When the front doorbell rang, Leo gave me a penny to shut up. He thought it was Megan Davies, but it was only Uncle Isidore.

“Workers of the world unite,” grinned my uncle at my brother.

“You should talk,” Leo said.

“Leo hit me,” I said.

“What?” cried Uncle. “That is coercion. We can’t allow coercion.”

“But he gave me a penny,” I said.

“Then you’re rich, lad,” he exclaimed, and looked so dismal that I offered him the coin.

“That’s all right, lad,” he said to me. “I’ll live without it.”

“Go on,” I insisted. “Mama says you need it. Take it.”

“Ah,” said Uncle, “your mama is so right. She’s a gentlewoman she is, and do you know, lad, she used to be the prettiest girl in South Wales—Jewess or goy.”

“She still is,” I said big-eyed.

“No, no,” said Uncle. “Now she’s the most beautiful.” Yes, Uncle Isidore had the soul of a gentleman. The doorbell rang again.

“Megan Davies, Megan Davies!” I screamed.

Leo rushed to the door and I heard their voices together, and then the door slammed. I was left in the house alone with Uncle Isidore. He kicked the fire and the flames spat out of the coal, curling round his black boot. Mother would return soon and cook the dinner. Philip was silly asking me what it was like to be Jewish. Uncle Isidore stared into the fire with tremendous sadness. It was silent in the room but for the ticking of the mantelpiece clock. Suddenly he turned his head toward the window.

“You could stand there,” he said vehemently, “all your life and look out.” And then he stared into the fire again. I walked over to the window, almost on tiptoe, afraid to disturb him. I gazed out. Down the road I could see snow falling under the lamppost, and above, between the clouds, a few stars in the cold sky.

“Uncle, what’s it like to be Jewish all your life?” I asked.

“S all right,” he said, and for a moment we smiled at each other.

_____________

My Mother seemed very angry. She kept on talking and talking.

“Not in front of the kinder,” my father pleaded.

“Where’re you going?” she barked at Leo.

“Out,” he said.

“Out where?”

“I’m eighteen,” he replied obstinately.

“You’re not too old to put across my knee,” father said.

“I’m nearly eleven,” I said.

“I’m going to a political meeting, if you must know,” Leo lied.

“That girl, that shikse. I’ll throw a bucket of water over her, that’ll cool her, my lad.”

“Which girl, mother?” asked Leo innocently.

“Megan Davies, Megan Davies,” I cried joyfully.

“You be quiet,” my mother said.

“My God,” said Leo. “What sort of house is this? There’s no privacy at all.”

“I’ll give you privacy.”

“Hell, Dad-can’t I even. . . .”

“Who do you think you’re speaking to?” It ended up with my father chasing Leo round the table, swearing at him. As Leo went around the table for the third time, he grabbed the bread knife. I stood behind my mother in the corner. Leo’s face was white, my father’s purple almost.

“The neighbors, what will the neighbors say?” shouted my mother.

Leo took the opportunity to dash for the hall, and in a flash the front door had banged behind him. We remained there very quiet and still, but for my father who was breathing heavily.

“You wait till he comes in,” said my father. “I’ve had enough of his nonsense.”

There was a curious noise from the front door. Leo had pushed the bread knife through the letter box. . . . Later when my elder brother Wilfred came in he asked what had happened. My father leaned over the fire silently and mother went on with her knitting. My brother Wilfred was a medical student at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated.

“Leo chased Dad with a bread knife and tried to kill him,” I volunteered. “I think you ought to operate.”

“Go to bed,” said my mother.

“There’s blood on the floor,” I continued. “They tried to murder each other. Dad swore.”

“Go to bed,” repeated my mother. “It’s after your bedtime.”

“Will Wilfred tell me a story?”

“Yes. Up you go.”

“Good night Mama, good night Dada, good night table, good night walls, good night. . . .”

“Up you go.”

And up I went, piggy-back, up the stairs one by one on Wilfred’s back; and I went to bed with the story of David and Goliath, of Jews and Philistines, and my brother’s gentle, responsible voice.

_____________

Saturday mornings I used to climb into my mother’s bed and lie between my parents and ask questions:

“Who made the world?”

“God.”

“Who made God?”

When Mom would go and prepare breakfast I would lie on the warm part where she had been. My father snored with his mouth ajar. His face was turned towards me and I could see the individual pores in the skin over his nose clearly. His skin was like a used dartboard. He opened one eye fishily and saw me upside down. “What are you looking at?” he said sleepily. “Tour nose,” I said. He closed his eyes again. The wallpaper in the bedroom was pinkish, so warm and kindly. He opened his left eye once more: “What’s wrong with my nose?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said, but he turned over and I gazed at the back of his head. “You’re going bald a bit on the crown,” I remarked. Father grunted, but he soon moved again, this time on to his back. “You have quite a prominent Adam’s apple,” I said. “Be quiet,” he said. “You have hair growing in your ears,” I continued. He pulled the bedclothes over his head. “What are you doing that for?” I shouted.

Saturday was a grand day for there was no school . . . not until Monday. Saturday mornings Leo would often read me poetry from a little blue book.

“The one about the Merman, our kid.”

“No. And don’t call me our kid.”

“The one about the Merman, and call once yet before you go, Margaret, Margaret.”

My brother sat up in his bed so I lay down.

“This is by Gerard Manley Hopkins,” he said.

“Is he a revolutionary’?” I asked.

“Well . . . in a way.”

“You always read revolutionaries,” I said.

Outside it was raining. They say that Manchester is rainy. Have you ever been to Cardiff? It’s the rainiest city in the world. Wilfred told me a story about that: When Noah looked out from his Ark so many years ago, he patted the nearest giraffe and said: Soon it will be dry everywhere except of course in Cardiff. In 1934, one Saturday morning it was rain over my home town and my brother Leo was reading me poetry from a little blue book: “Glory be to God for dappled things,” he read. Mama was downstairs cooking breakfast; in the front bedroom Dad lay back snoring, his arm dangling over the side of the bed near an empty teacup. Keith’s mother was dead in the wet graveyard and Uncle Isidore was still alive reading Karl Marx in the Public Library.

_____________

When breakfast was over, I had to go to the synagogue, rain or shine, for it was Saturday morning. I used to sit next to Bernard and Simon. We would wear our skullcaps and whisper to each other beneath the chant of the Hebrew prayer. A man with a spade-shaped beard would stutter and mutter at us now and then and again.

“Shush, shush,” his eyes said. These times we would stare at the prayer book and giggle. It seemed natural that the prayer book wasn’t in English, but written and told in some strange language one read from right to left, some mystical language one couldn’t understand. Obviously one couldn’t speak to God in everyday English. We stood up when the congregation stood up and sat down when they sat down. The men were segregated from the women lest they should be distracted from their spiritual commerce with God. The women prayed upstairs nearer to heaven; the men downstairs nearer to hell. The sermon would begin and I would stare at the red globe that burned the never-failing oil. The Reverend Aaronowich, a man with an enormous face, gave the sermon. Usually his tone was melancholy. Every New Year, Rosh Hashanah, he would begin his speech, raising his hands, eyes round, mournfully direct: “Another year has passed . . . another nail . . . in the coffin.”

However, this Saturday morning in 1934, the Reverend Aaronowich was almost gay. I stopped staring at the red globe and ignored the scrubbings and scratching of Simon and Bernard. He spoke in English, with a Russian and Welsh accent, throwing in a bit of Yiddish when his vocabulary failed him. I think I could understand what he was saying. I believe he proclaimed that it was an honor to be alive, good to breathe fresh air, miraculous to be able to see the blue sky and the green grass; that health was our most important benediction and that one should never say “no” to the earth. (Also, that the congregation should as Jews avoid ostentatiousness). Never to despair, for when one felt dirty inside or soiled or dissatisfied one only had to gaze at the grandeur of the windswept skies or at the pure wonder of landscapes—one only had to remember the beauty of human relationships, the gentleness and humor of the family, the awe and tenderness when a young man looks upon his betrothed—all things of the earth, of the whole of life, its comedy, its tragedy, its lovely endeavor and its profound consummation—and I understood this for only that morning my brother Leo had read me from a little blue book words that sounded like “Glory be to God for dappled things”—though then I didn’t know what

“dappled” meant. And the Reverend Aaronowich spoke such beautiful things in such a broken accent that his voice became sweet and sonorous and his huge masklike face rich, ruffled, handsome.

_____________

Afterwards there was nothing to do but . to stare at the red globe again, as the congregation offered thanks to God. In that red globe the oil of Jewish history burnt, steadily, devotedly. Or was it blood? Blood of the ghettos of Eastern Europe. My brother Wilfred said a world flickered in that globe: the red wounds of Abel, the ginger hair on the back of the hands of Esau, the crimson-threaded coat of Joseph, the scarlet strings of David’s harp, the blood-stained sword of Judas Maccabeus—David, Samson, Solomon, Job, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, my brother said lived in that globe. Gosh.

The service seemed interminable, the swaying men, the blue and white talleisim around their heads, the little black yarmelkes, the musty-smelling prayer books, the wailing cry of the Reverend Aaronowich, the fusty smell of Sabbaths centuries old. Thousands of years of faith leaned with the men as they leaned. Their naked faces showed history plainly. As they murmured their long incantations I saw in their large dark eyes that infinite, that mute animal sadness, as in the liquid eyes of fugitives everywhere. I was eleven years old then: I could not have named all of this but I knew it.

How different seemed the synagogue when empty. With people in it I felt safe—as if God were far away. I was wrong, of course, but that was how I felt. Once I entered the synagogue on a weekday, when no one was about. It was almost dark inside: the light glimmered through the stained windows, the red globe burnt outside the Ark in which were kept the scrolls of the Torah. The darkness had weight but the weight had stillness. It was so silent that I tiptoed. I was an intruder in the House of God. I was afraid. I wanted to run out, escape. Supposing God rose out from one of the corners, from the stillness, from the silence, from the dark. I thought I heard a motion from the other side of the synagogue. My heart turned over beating fast. Were there not footsteps coming towards me? He was behind me, I knew it, I was afraid. I ran out from the silence, from the

dark, into the glittering sunshine and the loud street. I didn’t want to see the face of God.

_____________

When the service was over we walked the three of us into the late morning rain of a Saturday in 1934, and Sabbath or no Sabbath we boarded a tram. We held our pennies tight and tried to look away when the conductor shouted: “Any more fares, please?” It was to no purpose: we bought the yellow penny tickets and looked at their numbers. “I’ve got a seven on my ticket,” I said. That was lucky. And the tram lurched down St. Mary’s Street. “There he is, there he is,” shouted Simon. We poked our heads through the window and the wind and the rain blessed our faces. Sure enough, there he stood, as usual opposite the Castle, selling papers.

“Paper Sir?. . . .Thankyou Sir.”

“Paper Lady?. . . . Thankyou Lady.”

“Taper Sir?. . . . Thankyou Sir.”

Taper Lady?. . . . Thankyou Lady.”

“Paper Sir?. . . . Paper Sir?. . . . Paper Sir?. . . . Bastard!”

“Bastard, bastard,” we yelled.

He smiled back at us. “You little bastards,” he grinned. In Queen Street, an ex-miner played an accordion, a tombstone in one of his lungs. The music soared plaintively, insistently across the rainy street: give, give, give, give, give. The traffic lights changed to green—the orange reflection rubbed off the wet surface of the road and a blue-green smudge usurped its blurred place. And the traffic passed on, passed on. The rain, thin and delicate, lost from the damp sky, sullenly fell forever. A car back-fired. Still as the tram blindly hurled its way towards Newport Road, in the distance like a frail echo I imagined the accordion music, its sad dark melodies of give and give and give and give.

“Bastard.” I liked that word. I used it on my brother Wilfred: “You big bastard,” I said affectionately. Astonished he made me promise not to speak it again. So I looked it up in a dictionary.

We sat down to eat: Leo reading the News Chronicle, and Wilfred and my mother chatting. The meal was good. Cold Meat and Pickled Onions and Chips. A meal with shape to it see. Saturday. Cardiff. Rain. Glory be to God for dappled things.

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