Toothache

Robert sat waiting in the barbers on Mile End while his father, Michael, had his hair cut. Before Robert was born, his father had been to that very salon to have out a bad tooth. On that occasion, an assistant had held Michael’s head still by pressing against it with two hands interlaced, as the barber – known as Sweeney Todd – tugged, one knee to the chest and… heave. And … heave. The rotten molar had pinged across the room like a seed discharged from Molly Moore’s infamous long rubber peashooter. A bizarre though not altogether uncommon sight at that time.

           On the way home, Robert said nothing as his father was in a stinking mood. Michael was not a rough or hardened man considering his challenging life (partly of his own making), but he was irascible at the best of times. Robert knew better than to aggravate his father. Thus he often remained quiet and so did on this occasion also until they arrived back at their tenement flat on Wapping High Street – a small bedroom, kitchen and with ceilings almost too low for Michael’s six ft. body to travel un-stooped but which had been home for Robert his entire life.

           “Michael?” enquired Lily from the kitchen, standing by the small tin sink as the two males entered inside. “Can I get you anything to eat?” Lily was the gustatory custodian of what little there was which she offered to Michael and then Robert in that order. Robert’s vest rode uncomfortably up his back as he respectfully said no to bread and butter, adjusting his singlets which hung so baggy because the vest was once Michael’s. Robert had two sets of each undergarment: the ones being washed and the ones he wore.

           “More bleedin’ bread and butter!” Michael growled, while Lily flinched briefly, although she was no push-over. A short woman and always wearing an apron as if conjoined, Lily was nevertheless formidable. And if Michael hadn’t been so depressed of late, she would no doubt have reacted as she had done only a few months ago. When the Black shirts marched by Cable Street and she had bravely hurled herself at Mosley’s darkened fascists with empty milk bottles and ended up spending the night in a local police cell.

           Robert was fairly intrepid too, but at only ten years old he was little more than a tiny fingerling. His father had sent him to boxing lessons so as to learn how to fight while his mother gave him so many clips as to make him hardened. As such, Robert spent his time away from home – which was often – out on the streets either fighting or watching others fight. As did most on the streets around Bromley and Bow.

           Michael duly headed off to bed without supper while Robert was forced to eat the bread and butter his mother had dutifully prepared before his weekly bath in an old cut-down barrel which once contained pickled green cucumbers.

*

In the Spring, Robert’s Aunty Eva and Uncle Jack came to stay, as they did often. His aunty spoke German and together with Michael, they would speak in this alien tongue whenever Robert was ‘lurking’. “He’s got bleedin’ great taxi doors,” Aunty Eva would say disparagingly, meaning Robert had big ears and would too often than not eaves drop. “Grober fleisch mit zwei eyes!” was another one of his auntie’s infamous invectives aimed at the offspring of her closest relatives. Eva didn’t much like children, not having managed to ever produce a rascally dustbin lid of her own. Not surprisingly, it never made Robert feel particularly comfortable whenever she was around.

           On this occasion, Aunty Eva had some news. Or perhaps rather a proposition. She wanted Michael to reconsider joining her and their father (Maurice) and their brother (Dickie) in the expansion of the family business. In fish, the trade of which was positively booming. Indeed they had even just recently received their first order from no less than the Duke and Duchess of York. “We could do with a blocksman for the new shop in Chipstead? You were always so good at filleting Moshe,” said Eva in English.

           Michael dropped his head and placed his hands on each of his densely constructed knees. “Bleedin’ hell Eve. Leave it out won’t ya. Always bleedin’ pecking.”

           Eva, in retaliation, pulled a face like she had just licked urine off a water closet floor on the old stygian black streets of Commercial road. She knew she would not, on this occasion – as was the case on so many occasions previously – succeed in changing Michael’s mind and so left once more empty-handed. Robert lurked by the kitchen as his aunty Eva left the tenement building.

*

“Fish and politics,” Michael would say to Robert at various random times. “Stay away from bleedin’ fish and politics.” Michael was not an uneducated man, but he hated, as he put it, ‘getting his nose in other people’s business.’ Or else involving himself in things that shouldn’t concern him. He very much followed in the Babylonian Talmudic tradition discussed in Yoma: “Woe unto the enemies if the scholars, who occupy themselves with the Torah, but have no fear of heaven!” Unfortunately, in the populous East End especially, there was always so much (unnecessary) aggravation and political in-fighting one might be drawn into. Like a medieval blood-letting – also once-upon-a-time performed at the barbers of Sweeney Todd– the whole thing could simply drain you. If you let it.

           For example, a few years before Robert was born there was great controversy amongst the community of Jews to which Michael, and now Robert, belonged. A rabbi by the name of Shaposhnik, at Black Lion Yard, which ran north-south from Old Montague Street, had decided to run his very own Beth Din in defiant opposition to the Chief Rabbi of the Unified Synagogue. And yet, despite his rather exuberant kashrus-stamping tendencies, the rabbi’s surgery for herbal remedies had been somewhat popular amongst certain ‘progressive’ Shul-goers. One such visitor being a certain swollen-toothed young Jew who had been in so much discomfort he would have tried almost anything. His endeavours, on that occasion, would prove largely unfruitful.       

*

“Why don’t you consider it?” asked Lily a few weeks later. “Chipstead. It would mean we wouldn’t have to struggle on as we are. We could get out of these stinking tenements.”

           “Lil, we have everything we need don’t we? Don’t I provide for us?”

           Michael was a hard working man and had plenty of stamina. Not a pugilist and certainly not all that handy, he was nevertheless a steady grafter and a skilled if unwilling fish monger. Currently he was working for the Electric Lighting and Power Company which was a respectable enough job, albeit his role there quotidian and relatively junior.

           But Michael categorically did not want to join his family’s fish business. His now elderly father, loud and indomitable, was still every bit as cantankerous and controlling. His sister and brother similarly had big ideas. And often they would all argue like Jacob and Laban. The conflict, the drama, the in-fighting. Michael wanted none of it.

“But you very nearly wasn’t,” said Lily, sheepishly, as though her words might be construed – and, in part, was construed by her – a betrayal. She was referring of course to when, only a few months ago, Michael had tried his arm at tailoring and was so soon made redundant and forced to head to North Thames Gas in search of yet more tailoring work before eventually deciding himself that the whole sorry world of deep carpets and windowless workshops was not the place for him. He blamed it on the lack of light.

“All I’m saying is tha’ a family business is not to be sniffed at. It would give us tha’ extra security.” Lily passed a querulous gaze.

           Michael raised his hands as if to say ‘tha’s quite enough’ and retired to his bedroom at only 7pm. Again, he skipped his white bread and butter tea, preferring instead to spend the extra time hungry and alone.

*

Robert had a pal called Harry whom he’d schooled with at Stepney Juniors and who was in the same class as him now at the Jewish Free School. Best mates, they hung about together outside school also, swinging on lamp posts and playing ‘Knocking Down Ginger’ with lads from the tenement. 

           “You reckon that Hitler is gonna march into Poland? You reckon us over ‘ere could be at war?” said Harry sitting on a filthy brick wall outside the young Communist League along Whitechapel road one afternoon and reflecting for just a few moments in between pranks and play-fighting. 

           “Maybe,” said Robert. “But I would fight him Harry. Hitler that is. You just see that I wouldn’t. And tha’ Mosely too.” 

           “My dad reckons it’ll end in war despite what Chamberlain says. Me dad says Hitler’s pact with Stalin is cobblers. Tha’ we’ll be plunged into chaos he says. With bleedin’ soldiers on the docks; bayonets and everything.”

           Robert’s dad, by contrast, said little on the subject. He didn’t like to cast too many aspersions. And whenever Robert brought it up, Michael would wave him away and raise his newspaper to signify the end of the discussion. Whatever was going on in Europe could not be influenced by speculation. His mum, less disparaging though similarly mistaken, said it was probably all just a storm in a teacup anyway…

Robert was the only one who thought vehemently to the contrary.

*

Just before Robert was born, Michael had been to see a proper dentist at a mobile surgery. A ruddy faced, bearded man, he sat on his very own dentist stool next to Michael, a separate cuspidor, wash bowl and basin to Michael’s right while, all the time, the trepid patient lay on a specialist chair of white lacquered metal above a garish yellow inlaid linoleum floor. Gum disease was the issue. Fifty fresh organic sage leaves gargled in boiling water and a more mineral-rich diet was prescribed. Plus, brushing teeth in circular motions. Not across. Never across. When the ordeal was over, the final rotten tooth extracted, Robert spat out excess blood and saliva in an old-fashioned brass bowl, wiped his moistened mouth and cheeks and left in a daze. 

           In time, and by the time Robert was a few years old and with false dentures eventually introduced to his once ailing mouth and following investment in a new three-row bristle brush for the entire family, Michael’s gums were cured. But a pain endured. As did the haze. What had been put down to chronic toothache was something else entirely. A black mist, darker and thicker than the fog over London’s docks. Michael realised then, for the first time since his oral ordeal began, that the lightening of his hard palate would not correspond to a lightening of his mood. He was, in every sense, as miserable now as he had ever been. For now, at aged 28, he was a father, with parental responsibilities but still with little money or skills. Every day he felt guilty and inadequate for not taking his place in the family business. For letting down Lily, ten years younger than him, who was always so brave and selfless. And, of course, for letting down Robert.

           Michael would feel this way, on and off, for the next decade.

           Thirteen years on from that horrific dentile tribulation, and the hottest summer’s day had brought about the darkest mood of all. At least, for the world at large. Huddled round a Philips radio in next door’s kitchen, Michael, Robert and Lily listened fixedly to Chamberlain say, “I’m sorry to tell you, we are now at war with Germany.” Michael, unlike everyone else who had plenty of opinions, said nothing. And as the days passed by, loose talk soon turned to frenzied activity. Theatres were closed. German boats were impounded. And an Anderson shelter had gone up just outside Michael and Lily’s bedroom window in the smoke-blacked communal courtyard, blocking out all of the light which should, Lily thought, have driven Michael to distraction but somehow didn’t seem to bother him much at all. Indeed, Michael even seemed to quite like it. “It’s strangely uplifting,” he confessed out aloud one evening in bed. Needless to say, Lily thought this pretty peculiar.

*

“I insist Robert stay with us,” said Eva as she pushed her way into the place a few months later. No German was used, and Robert could hear every unpalatable word.

           “No!” Robert shouted. “I want to be here. With you and Father. I don’t want to leave.” He pleaded with his mother, his loose singlets as low now as his frame of mind as he stomped his feet petulantly in and out of the kitchen. Lily, with a tear in her eye, all the while boiling up milk on the stove to prevent it going sour, said it was for the best. That London City Council had already agreed to start evacuating all the school children. Moving away, one way or another, was an inevitability. Robert stormed off. The decision had been made. Meanwhile, Michael looked on, unsure quite exactly what to think or quite how to feel about his sister Eva’s newest proposition.

           “It’ll all be OK Lil, you’ll see.” Michael rolled over on their broken spring bed, an upholstered foundation, and put his arm round Lily. They hadn’t touched each other properly in close to five years. Not that Lily felt the paucity of carnal embrace to be overly incommodious but the odd touch, the casual brush against her body, her hair, certainly would not have gone a miss and so did not that night as she drifted off in Michael’s arms. It was the best night’s sleep either of them had had in ages – considering it was wartime – and, when Lily awoke the next morning, feeling strangely comforted, she knew better than to put a bok on it by making too much of a fuss.

*

It was a few weeks later, Michael had been walking home from the Electric Lighting and Power Company, through Aldgate, when he saw tatterdemalions fleeing from the site of slow-burning incendiary explosions; a row of terraced houses, rooves ablaze. Like burning bushes on their respective sacred mounts; scattered tenants, awed, like Jethro’s flock. Michael – translated from Moses – almost instinctively approached one of the houses, out of which an old man suddenly staggered and fell by his front door, mosaic glass panes, still intact, covered in Splinternet tape. Michael sped over, double quick, at the sight of this. And, finding strength through adrenaline, scooped up the effete old codger in his arms, immediately running to the nearest shelter. There, Michael handed over the man to an AFS officer in a steel helmet and rubber boots who slapped his face and tried to get him to drink. The old man came around and thanked Michael so profusely, the latter could barely obscure, even through the blackest face, his swiftly reddening cheeks.

           That night, Michael had a special bath with warm water, soap and even some talc for under the arms. Afterwards, he and Lily made love for the first time in almost as many years as Robert had been alive.

*

A few days later, Michael stepped outside of their tenement whereupon he saw Robert alone, flicking spare buttons at the old stock brick wall of their grubby little courtyard. Harry, his best friend, was gone – evacuated. As were fifty percent of kids from the tenement by this time. Michael walked over to his son, gingerly. The muddy streets, the skirting pools of brown water (despite being in the middle of a heatwave), the dilapidated tenements in every direction and the quieter-than-usual but nevertheless acute clatter of children playing. A shiver of crystalline meaning came over Michael like nothing he had felt in years. Suddenly he seemed to know what to say. 

“’You’re a brave lad, a mensch,” Michael said, placing his hand on Robert’s shoulder. “And I couldn’t be prouder.” Robert looked up to his father who was now smiling through a small cordage of tears. He didn’t know what to make of his father’s words, but it was nevertheless a pleasure to hear them. And nothing Robert was used to. Michael reached out both arms and the two embraced. And for the first time in so very long, the killer fog which encumbered their hearts as much as the city of London, began slowly, gently, to lift. 

Letting go of Robert, Michael walked back up to their tenement and appeared at the entranceway to the kitchen where Lily was boiling up yet more milk. She saw him through the corner of her eye as he moved closer, gently holding on to her by the waist, through her apron. “Lil,” he said. She baulked slightly. “Lil, I need to talk. I need to tell you… I’ve been doing a bit of thinking.”

“You have?” said Lily, shaking Michael loose to attend to the milk.

“Yes, Lil. About you and me. And the boy. About the future. Well maybe, you know… maybe we could consider it... Chipstead. Watchya think…”

There was a pause. For a moment neither of them knew exactly what to say or where to look. Until, all of a sudden, as if on some sort of clockwork fuze, Lily flung her arms explosively around Michael’s neck, the strings of her apron now flailing in the air behind her. The unattended milk meanwhile bubbled over just as violently onto the linoleum floor in the background. Lilly had never been more thrilled to hear Michael say anything at all – well, aside from ‘I do’ under the chuppah of Spitalfields Great Synagogue – and a feeling of hope rose inside of her; after so very many months of pain and lamentation. She took the pan off the stove and wiped up the spilled milk with an old vest belonging to Michael.