On a visit to the cemetery and the kindness of strangers. Our story for Baby Loss Awareness Week.
The cemetery where our baby son is buried is a relatively new one, and for a number of years his grave lay alone in the children’s section, by the fence on the far side of the cemetery, well away from the small but slowly increasing number of adult graves.
If we decide to visit – which we do once or perhaps twice a year – then we’ll bring our thoughts, some cleaning materials, and four small stones. Our thoughts are our own, but we’ll use the cleaning stuff to clear away the debris and discolourations left by the seasons, the overhanging trees, and the local wildlife – both animal and human.
And when we’re ready to leave, and as flowers are not encouraged, we’ll follow Jewish custom and place the four stones on the grave: one each for my wife, myself and our two surviving children as a sign of respect and remembrance.
Some time ago, at the same cemetery, I attended the funeral of an elderly member of our community. At the end of the service, as people drifted away, I headed across the open expanse of grass towards the childrens’ section and our baby’s grave. We hadn’t visited for a long while, and I was expecting to see the usual untidiness. However, as I approached I noticed that the grave looked particularly clean and tidy. As I got nearer I saw that someone had left a single stone by our son’s name. This perplexed me as I knew that the stones we’d left ages before would have disappeared, and I knew of no one else who might wish to visit.
Standing there, lost in thought, I became aware of someone approaching. I turned to see an elderly lady who must have been at the funeral. She touched my arm and asked, in a precise English still tinged with the German of her youth “Are you the father?”.
Managing to suppress the urge – even in that situation – to make a smart-alec and totally inappropriate response, I answered simply that I was.
She smiled and said, “I’m so glad. I wasn’t sure if there was family, and I couldn’t bear the thought of this little chap all alone over here”.
It turned out that on her regular visits to her husband’s grave, she would come over to our baby’s grave, clean up what she could, say a little prayer, and leave a stone as a sign that someone had visited , that someone cared.
In a time of increasing fear for ourselves and for the world at large, it is all-too-easy to turn in on ourselves and focus on that which is ours. We forget at our peril that it is so often the kindness of strangers, the selfless reaching out to help others, that is a real force for good in the world. If, when doing nothing is by far the easier option, we each made that extra effort to help the stranger, to welcome the ‘other’ then we might go some way to mend at least some of the many wounds and sorrows of our age and our planet.
(We were wonderfully supported by and have supported Sands, the Stillbirth and Neo-Natal Death charity http://www.sands.org.uk)
When Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ erupted after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the party in 2015, Ken Loach, when interviewed on TV at the 2017 Labour Party conference in Brighton, stated that he had never experienced antisemitism in over 50 years of Labour Party membership. Loach’s denial was echoed by Ken Livingstone who added that because someone was offensive to Jews didn’t mean they were being antisemitic.
Then again, neither of them, as I recall, attended the meeting that I attended over 40 years ago.
In 1983, following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon the year before, there was significant anti-Israel and boycott Israel agitation on the Left (plus ça change!). A particular focus for the protest and anger was the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Israeli soldiers, under orders, stood by as the Christian Phalangists entered the camp and slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children.
I was living in Manchester and attended a pro-Palestine meeting that took place at the regional TUC HQ in Salford. It was a well attended meeting, and the speakers were senior trade union and Labour Party officials. There was also a speaker who was announced as a member of the PLO’s national committee, who would speak at the end.
As the meeting progressed, I and some others in the audience – Jewish and not Jewish – began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. The entirely justified anger and criticism emanating from the platform from various speakers about the actions (or non-actions in the case of Sabra and Shatila) of the Israelis was accompanied by familiar and increasingly virulent tropes about the ‘Zionist controlled media’, ‘the powerful Jewish lobby’, ‘Jewish finance’, ‘replacing Israel with a Palestinian state’, etc.
Eventually the PLO representative stood up to speak. He first turned to the speakers sitting up on the platform and roundly criticised them for their blatant antisemitism and their betrayal of socialist values. He pointed out that the Palestinians were involved in a political not a religious struggle, and that their struggle for national determination was with the Israeli government not world Jewry. He reminded them that 20% of the Israeli population within the old Green Line were Christian and Moslem Palestinians – at which point, in order to demonstrate the nuanced complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, he reached in to the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his Israeli passport.
There is a long, ignoble and well-recorded history of antisemitism on the Left*. Ken Loach may never have experienced it, and the Labour Party likes to think it is immune from the virus. It isn’t.
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* Colin Talbot -The Left’s Problem with Antisemitism
(This is an adaptation of a piece written for BBC Radio and first broadcast in 2000 as the Radio 4 Listeners’ Christmas Message. At the time we received wonderful support from Sands – the UK charity that provides support for bereaved parents and their families, which we now, in turn, support.)
Thirty years ago, on a bright, blue, cold winter’s morning, I walked out of the maternity hospital in the city where we live, and headed towards the registry office in the centre of town. I went there to register the birth, and death, of our first child, a baby boy who had been born and who had died a few hours previously. I had to be there in order to complete the paperwork that would allow us to bury him within 24 hours according to Jewish custom.
I remember, in that rather dark, forbidding wood-panelled waiting room, sitting next to a happy young couple who had come to register the birth of their new baby, who lay sleeping happily in his mother’s arms, and opposite a family, all dressed in black, grieving for a close and dear relative. I also remember, with immense gratitude, the kindness of the official who carefully and sympathetically took down all the necessary details. She was only doing her job but doing it in a way which make me feel – for the moment at least – a little bit easier with myself and with the world.
Now, thirty years later, though the number of years is wholly immaterial, amidst the hurly burly and complex logistics of daily life – juggling home, work, family, friends – rarely does a day go by without something or someone causing me to think back to that cold, blue morning.
The death of our child made me acutely aware of just how thin and fragile is the surface covering everyday normality, and how easily the fabric of that covering can be torn and ruptured…sometimes in seconds.
In particular I’ve come to understand the real importance of small acts of kindness. Those spontaneous, generous, unselfish acts that help to maintain that fragile fabric. I’ve learned – though sometimes it’s still a struggle – to give people the benefit of the doubt, to try and be more tolerant, to try and listen more. I’ve learned that others, too, may have large cracks and holes in their lives, and they – like me sometimes – are relying on that fabric not being torn in order to just get them through the day. The smile, the greeting, the welcome, the thank you, the helping hand, the small talk before getting down to business are all, in their way, small acts of kindness that bind us together and strengthen the fabric of our lives.
But before I am accused, in the face of a harsh and sometimes brutal world, of a utopian let’s-just-all-be-nice-to-each-other idealism, our baby’s death, conversely, made me less tolerant…of arrogance, ignorance, triviality and sheer stupidity. If there’s one quality we need, sometimes desperately, to develop, it is an active, rigorous tolerance, which is not the same as prejudiced silence or passive indifference. Understanding and respect for others grows out of a willingness to engage actively with the world. But it also means knowing, recognising and, importantly, doing something positive about not only those things that will make the world a better, happier place but acting to prevent those things that make it worse.
May the support of friends and family, and the kindness of strangers bring some comfort to you at this sad time.
As a Jewish family, we don’t really do Christmas. Yes, we’ll gather together, have a big meal, play board games, and watch far too much television. But that’s because it’s a holiday, everything is closed, and there’s not much else to do. Coming up to Christmas that year we’d just had some building work done, and there was still loads of cleaning up, making good, re-decorating to do. So it was looking like a DIY Christmas and new year.
As it happens, the builders had found an old, crumpled newspaper stuffed into the gap between the window and the wall our bedroom. When I first saw it lying on the floor where they had dropped it, I thought they had found a dead bird.
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I decided to have a go at ‘uncrumpling’ it using our steam iron. It turned out to be the Lancashire Post from 30th September 1943. The paper was very fragile – I suspect they didn’t use the best quality newspaper during the war years – and I became absorbed in the task of slowly but surely flattening the paper one careful centimetre at a time. I wasn’t even aware that the radio was burbling quietly away on the other side of the room.
As each piece revealed its flattened secrets, I read about the Fifth Army’s losses in North Africa, the Russian advances along the Dneiper, a successful bombing raid over Germany (only eight missing in action). I also read about a local woman fined for fiddling ration books, and a Polish aircraft man convicted of drunk driving.
There was also a small item about how the German U-boats had failed to sink a single ship in the previous month. 70 years later, on Christmas Eve, the newspapers and television were full of the news about the Royal pardon given to Alan Turing, the man who had ‘cracked’ the German Enigma code used by the U-boats and, by doing so, had in no doubt saved thousands of lives and perhaps helped to end the war. But Turing was gay at a time when it was illegal, and had been found guilty of gross indecency, jailed, chemically castrated, and forbidden to undertake any work linked to national security. He was and should have been hailed as a national hero. Instead, he committed suicide two years later in 1954.
Those U-boat failures, reported on the front page of that 1943 Lancashire Post, were a direct result of the work Turing had undertaken at Bletchley Park.
Absorbed in the task and on this fascinating window on history, I suddenly became aware of a beautiful, solo treble voice filling the room, singing ‘Once in Royal David’s City….”. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the start of that wonderful, traditional Christmas Eve ‘Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols’ from King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. And as that pure, high voice soared…..I burst into uncontrollable sobs. A veritable tsunami of grief poured over, into and through me; disturbing and disruptive in its power and intensity.
It took me a while to realise what it was.
When my mother died the year before, I cried no more than a couple of times, and that was around the time when it all happened and in response to an individual’s kindness and sympathy. But nothing like this.
Though, obviously, Jewish and very proud of her traditions, my mother also had a deep love for many things that were quintessentially English. Among them she had a particularly high regard for and interest in the great cathedrals and churches of England. After she passed away I discovered, amidst the thousands of documents she left, a neatly stacked pile of guides to virtually all the English cathedrals and some other churches, all neatly annotated with her distinctive handwriting. I always smile when I see those guides as my father did not approve of my mother’s interest in Christianity, and I know he would not step inside a church. So I have a very clear picture of my mother wandering around inside with her guide, no doubt quizzing whoever she could find about the history of the building, while my father is sitting on a park bench nearby doing his Times crossword.
Just before three o’clock in the afternoon on Christmas eve, without fail, and though Jews – on the whole – don’t do Christmas, my mother would sit herself in her favourite chair, turn on the radio, quite loudly, and wait until that beautiful, soaring, solo treble voice filled the room, singing the first verse of the carol, followed by the choir and then the congregation. Earlier in the day she would have called me to remind me NOT to call her between 3pm and 5pm.
As that deep pang of grief and my sobbing subsided, and I was able to collect my thoughts, I wondered how that boy’s voice could trigger such intense emotion. I remembered the reports of how some of Mark Rothko’s last paintings, those gigantic fields of deep colour, have a similar effect on some individuals. I recalled that in some therapeutic contexts music and song are used to enable individuals and groups to confront severe trauma.
In my case, it triggered an intense ‘remembrance of things past’ and a huge sense of both loss and love. I suspect we all have those triggers, those Proustian ‘Madeleine biscuit’ moments, when something – perhaps completely unexpected – plunges us into the deep well of memory, love and loss.
That afternoon, as I ironed that old newspaper (something my mother would have loved – the newspaper not the ironing!) and listened to that young boy singing those famous words, I probably missed her more than I’ve done at any other time.
How well do we know the life stories of our parents?
Obviously most of us will know some details of their lives before they were our parents: place of birth, schooling, career etc., and as children – and we will always be their children – we will, of course, know much of the middle and latter parts of their stories. There will also, usually, be some documentary record of their lives e.g. photos, letters, various official documents, kept – perhaps – in a drawer, box or folder. But how often do we have access to the detailed narratives and minutiae of their entire lives?
My mother, Shirley, passed away peacefully, aged 86, with her three sons and daughters-in-law by her bedside,on Friday 2nd November 2012. She was buried, according to Jewish custom, on Sunday 4th November next to her beloved husband Alfred who had passed away in January 2006 after a long illness. She was a remarkable woman, much loved and admired, as testified by the hundreds of people who attended her funeral and who visited the family during the shiva (the seven days of official mourning).But I, along with my two brothers and our respective wives, only discovered quite how remarkable she was when we tackled the Herculean task of clearing her apartment.
Photos of Shirley 1929 – 2012 (taken three weeks before she died)
We always knew she kept a diary, and that no day was complete without her making a diary entry before she went to bed, always after midnight. We could always phone her to ask when a particular childhood or family event occurred. She would inevitably return the call giving chapter and verse on the event in question. She also wrote notes to herself, normally in the form of a ‘to do’ list, usually on small pieces of paper held together with a paper clip, and would fret if she mislaid them.
My mother liked to have things ‘so so’, and disliked causing upset, and so although her was death was unexpected, she had already ensured that there were lists and instructions to cover any and all eventualities.
I ought to add at this point, as the above makes her sound like some sort of obsessive-compulsive,that she wasn’t at all – or certainly not obviously. She was delightful company; always elegant, gracious, a wonderful host, full of intelligent conversation whether discussing the latest bookshe’d read or play she’d seen. Sheeven suffered fools withregal politeness…at least until they had left her presence. But when she was alone, and when my father was alive that would usually mean late at night after he had gone to bed, or in the years after he had passed away, she became what might have been her true vocation if her life had taken another direction: a highly skilled and dedicated archivist.
What we didn’t know, and what we discovered when we started clearing the apartment, was that alongside the carefully stored schoolgirl diaries that she started in 1941 when she was 15 years old and the page-a-day diaries that she started in the 1950s, she had recorded, labelled, catalogued and archived what appeared to bethe documentation of her entire life: letters, postcards, photographs and slides,study notes, maps and guides, newspaper clippings, certificates, theatre and concert programmes.
Some of it was contained in two huge files each labelled ‘My Life’, each of which contained hundreds of documents. There were also dozens of files and folders with labels such as ‘Holidays’, ‘Trip to Far East’, ‘Film Work’ (she worked in the British film industry in the 1940s), ‘Family Documents’ (some of which went back to Russia in the late 19th century). There was one file that was labelled ‘Rememberings’ which really caught my eye. I opened it to find a series of typed pages that were almost a stream of consciousness about my mother’s early life. The first one ‘Deptford High Street’ recalled in as much detail as she could remember when in her 80’s, growing up on Deptford High Street in south-east London and describing the people and the shops, cinema, goods yard etc. as she walked to school. Another was a much earlier ‘Remembering’ from when she had asked her own mother to describe the family’s origins in Russia and their early life in England in the early 1900s.
Virtually every personal letter my mother had ever received or written (shealwaysmade carbon copies until the advent of computers, when she’d simply print it out twice)had been carefully sorted into either years or particular individuals or topics. Each bundle was held together by an elastic band, and on the top of each bundle, held in place by the elastic band, was a small piece of paper which had the contents of the bundle written on it in her distinctive handwriting e.g. ‘letters to/from Alfred in Hong Kong‘ or simply ‘Letters 1983’.
There were also small bundles of papers, usually small and clipped together, of what she called her ‘journals’. Whenever she travelled anywhere, she would not take her actual diary with her. Instead she would write her thoughts and observations on any piece of paper she could find, clip them all together, and then bring them home to be transferred into the diary or kept together in a file somewhere.
When we started dipping into the odd diary or two, there were frequent references to ‘see my commonplace book’. It was a term we were all unfamiliar with, so naturally I googled it. According to what seemed a perfectly sensible article in Wikipedia:
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe…Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests… the value of such collections is the insights they offer into the tastes, interests, personalities and concerns of their individual compilers. From the standpoint of the psychology of authorship, it is noteworthy that keeping notebooks is in itself a kind of tradition among litterateurs….Some modern writers see blogs as an analogy to commonplace books.”
We eventually found my mother’s commonplace books, and they were almost exactly as described in the Wikipedia article. Whenever she had read, seen or heard something of interest, whether it was in a book or newspaper, on the radio or television (usually BBC Radio 3 or 4, she was not a great fan of television unless it was a factual programme), or at the cinema or theatre, she would write it down or cut it out and place it in one of her commonplace books.
The amount of material we had uncovered was extraordinary, both the sheer amount of it and the quality of contents: my mother wrote beautifully, often with great style and wit, and in great detail.
When we told people about it they all said “what are you going to do with it all?”. There were one or two who said we should just throw it all away. But I don’t think they had any sense (how could they?) of what we had in front of us. The more I read, the more I became determined to ‘do something’.
The final piece or decider of the ‘what to do with it all?’ question fell – literally – into my hands some weeks after we had started clearing the apartment. I was in the room known as the ‘office’. It was the room in which my parents had worked for nearly 30 years, mainly in their role as editors of their local synagogue magazine which was a large, serious, glossy bi-annual publication. Before he retired, my father also ran his textile merchant business from there, and the shelves were full of files and all the paraphernalia of a working office.
I had decided to ‘have a go’ at clearing the office, and was sorting through and preparing to put into rubbish bags a whole set of files related to the magazine. As I pulled one box file off the top shelf, another file fell out which I managed to catch. This was not a ‘business’ file. It was one of those ‘concertina’ files with about a dozen sections, held together by a band. The handwritten label on the front said: “Special Letters and Journals”, and it only took a glance at the first bundle of documents from the section labelled ‘1940s’ to realise just how special the contents of this file were.
It became clear to me that, particularly since my father passed away in January 2006, my mother had gradually worked her way through all the documents she had written and/or kept so assiduously throughout her long and active life, and had carefully arranged them in some sort of order. It was fascinating to see a note or clarification, written relatively recently, next to some diary entry or letterfrom 50 years ago. It was also clear that she had left it to be read, and what convinced me that something ‘needs to be done’ with it was finding something she had written in the back of one her early schoolgirl diaries. Alongside the list of books she had read that year and the list of films and concerts she had attended, was a quote from the writer Giuseppe de Lampedusa:
“It should be an obligation upon every citizen, imposed by the state, to keep a record of their lives. Because, if they do not, who will know they ever existed”.
I felt it was important not to leave the record of my mother’s life hidden away in a cupboard. So I determined to find a way to bring her life story to life. It was obvious from the start that writing any form of linear narrative was out of the question. What I had before me was a giant jigsaw and I realised that notion of a website, with its layers, sections, mutiple entry points etc. offered a real opportunity to slowly – in fact very slowly- define and create the various pieces that, together, formed the picture of my mother’s life. So that’s what I did and continue to do.
At the present time the website is not for public access, although members of the close family have access. I occasionally, however, publish various sections when there is sufficient material to justify it, and there have been some articles in newspapers and magazines. Last year (2017) BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme did a feature on the diaries and letters my mother wrote when she worked in the film industry in the 1940s*, and a lot of that material is eventually going to be deposited in the National Film Archive. My mother would have been absolutely chuffed!
Not long after my mother died, aclose friend, whose mother had also passed away recently, said to me with a hint of envy, “you don’t just have the things of her life, you also have access to her mind andher heart”.That is certainly and wonderfully true: from the vibrant, idealistic, politically-engaged young woman of the 1940s who looking forward to the future, to the still vibrant, still idealistic, still politically-engaged family matriarch of 2012 looking back on a life not only livedbut also documented to the full.
* You can listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer. The section starts at c. 10.45min, straight after the Stanley Tucci interview. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0910p23
Stumbling with Confidence 