Open Writing

1930 –1932 at 48 Sach Road, Clapton, London E 5

48 Sach Road was a palace compared with where we had come from. It was a nice terraced house with four bedrooms in a tree lined road, with an interior toilet and bathroom, front ‘best’ room, rear dining room, kitchen and scullery and a pleasant rear garden overlooking a green open space.

Both of the downstairs main rooms had marble fireplaces and, when we first moved in I recall standing under the mantelpiece shelf trying to reach the underside with the top of my head. Before we moved out two years later I achieved that ambition. The back room, used as a dining room on special occasions, had a multicoloured glass partition leading to a covered conservatory area, through which the sun would shine showering the room with a coloured flickering light on those mornings it shone through.

Also living in the house was an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Bye (that is how it was pronounced) who presumably shared the cost of renting the house from its owners. When they moved out, our cousins Aunty Lil and her daughter Bertha – aged I guess about twenty or so – came to live with us. I loved Bertha and called her Darling! She knitted me a beautiful cardigan that I loved to wear.

The kitchen had a big black coal-burning stove in it, and a table under the window opposite. A door lead to a scullery area at the back of the house in which stood a massive stone boiler where, presumably, dirty clothes could be boiled. The door to the rear garden was here and I loved to play out there where, each year, flowers of all kind seemed to arrive without help from anyone. Behind the garden was a large pleasant open space.

The house itself had no heating system, which necessitated the lighting of fires in the grates of individual rooms when warmth was required, and with the use of one or two strategically placed portable oil heater stoves. That first winter, when bath time came, I was placed in a tin bath in front of the black stove in the kitchen where it was nice and warm. On Friday evenings my mother would light the Sabbath candles on the table. But on one such evening, the net curtains on the windows over the candles caught fire and, upon my screaming, mother came running into the kitchen, bravely pulled the curtains down, and extinguished the flames. We never had candles on Friday nights after that, certainly not lit ones anyway!

I soon became friendly with a little boy, Stanley Jacobs, who lived not far from me with two maiden aunts (I never knew what happened to his parents,) near a church with a churchyard in which there were gravestones dotted about in it. One day, when I was going to visit Stanley I saw a figure cloaked in black moving around the gravestones. I thought it to be a ghost and ran home screaming my head off because of what I had seen. I never attempted to visit Stanley again, although he came to me often enough.

Our nearest big shopping area was Ridley Road Market in Dalston, and mother and I would take a journey there when necessary. I liked the outing with its ride on the buses and the sights, sounds and smells of the market. However, on one occasion mother and I got separated. This did not bother me and I made my way towards home, walking the perhaps three miles to the junction where we would have changed buses. In those days, no one concerned themselves at the sight of a little four year boy trudging along by himself but, at the point where I had to change direction and, with mother, would have boarded another bus, I became lost and started to cry, soon to be surrounded by kindly well-wishers. When asked if I was lost and following my affirmative answer, I was sent into a terrible panic when told not to worry because a policeman was coming for me. No one of course knew that my parents had always used that phrase when I was naughty, and to be given that information now simply petrified me.

Somehow he got me to Stoke Newington police station where, no doubt because of my screaming, they put me out in their back yard storage area where there were mysterious shapes of things covered by tarpaulins. I can remember banging on the door to be let back in screaming, “I’ll be a good boy!” Eventually they did so, probably with me verging on the hysterical. I managed to negotiate a truce whereby I was permitted to sit on the steps at the front of the building under the watchful eye of a constable until my mother arrived. I was supposed to sit on the top step but, by the time she did, I was sitting on the bottom one. I wanted to get as far as possible from the police. Eventually, when I saw my mother crossing the road towards me, I ran to her admonishing with “You lost me!”

I was always a helpful child, and one of my regular tasks was to help our milkman with his daily deliveries in our area. It was on one such occasion when I was knocked down by a passing lorry. I was not injured and was carried home in someone’s arms. I did have a few bruises however and my mother, wanting to ensure my physical well-being, arranged for me to be inspected by her lady doctor. This, in fact, displeased me greatly and I refused her attentions shouting, “man for man and woman for woman!” The doctor was apparently quite shocked, wanting to know what my mother had been telling me as a four year old. Perhaps it was a little of what I learnt in Watney Street. In any case I soon recovered without her help!

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If you wish to make a donation to the Elsa Benedyk Memorial Fund, set up by her friends and colleagues entirely without Raymon’s knowledge to provide funds to support the children's ward of the Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem to commemorate her life of work with children in her nursery schools, it would be most gratefully received. The amount that you give will not be revealed to Raymon. He is not a trustee of the fund. Your cheque, payable to the Fund, should be sent to the fund's Treasurer Mrs I Dokelman, 14 Charville Court, 30/32 Gayton Road, Harrow, Middx HA1 2HT.