The Invisible Wall Read online

  “We will now say the Lord’s prayer,” the headmaster said.

  They did not need prayer books. They knew the words well, by heart, and so would I afterward, though Jewish boys and girls were not required to say these prayers, and remained silent with heads bowed a little, as if this would make us less conspicuous.

  “Our Father who art in ’eaven,

  ’Allowed be thy name…”

  How well I remembered it afterward, and some of the hymns that followed, with the headmaster and all the other teachers joining in, the headmaster beating time with his stick, and Miss Penn thumping out an accompaniment on the piano.

  Finally, and always with a sense of relief to the Jewish children, it was over, and we were able to get off the benches and sit on them. The partitions were pushed back into place by white-haired old Mr. Bell, the janitor, and Cocky Rawlings, the only man who was a teacher in the school other than the headmaster, who taught standard seven.

  Once the prayers and hymns were over, the headmaster seemed to relax, and on this first day of school he began to visit each classroom. He entered with a wink to the teacher, and took over from her to quiz the class. It was the same performance each day.

  “How many doughnuts in a dozen?” he would ask.

  Hands shot up. One was chosen. The answer: “Twelve, sir.”

  “Correct.” This one was easy, but now came the hard one. First, he gave another wink to the teacher, who already had her handkerchief out to stuff into her mouth. Then he asked, “How many thripenny doughnuts in a dozen?”

  There was a lot of hesitation, foreheads creased, puzzled looks on faces, and invariably there was one pupil who answered, “Four, sir.”

  The headmaster made no reply. With still another wink to the teacher, who was already choking on her handkerchief, he turned and marched out stiffly, the wide ears sticking out at the side of his head like wings.

  Eventually, he came to the “baby” class. He had saved us for the last because our teacher was Miss Goddard, a pretty, dark-haired girl of perhaps no more than sixteen or seventeen, unmarried as yet. Even Cocky’s rimless glasses strayed over in her direction through the glass panes in the top of the partitions from time to time. She had a lovely smile and a sweet, gentle way about her. She was less liked by the other women teachers, but unquestionably a favorite with the headmaster, and his visits here were frequent.

  That first morning he gave us a performance that was as much for her benefit as ours. Standing in front of us, he said nothing at first, and then as we looked at him we saw his ears beginning to wiggle back and forth. Slowly, at first, then with gathering momentum, until they actually seemed to be flapping back and forth like wings attached to the sides of his head. It drew gasps of wonder from us, and even little cries of fright from some, so that Miss Goddard had to make him stop with a gentle little reprimand.

  He was about forty then, and a bachelor, and his frequent visits to the “baby” class did not go unnoticed. They were even talked about on our street. But there had been rumors before about him and the teachers, about Miss Penn particularly. Now it was Miss Goddard. There was also a rumor that he had once been a milkman, and had done his schooling at night. In fact, he was supposed to have been our own milkman, the one who came rattling into our street with his pony and cart, ringing a bell and crying, “Mee-ulk! Mee-ulk!” Like Mr. Mellon, the one we had now, who stopped in the middle of the street right opposite our house and waited as everyone ran out with their jugs for a penny’s worth of the fresh, frothy milk that he ladled out of the big can in his cart.

  How true those rumors were about him, I don’t know. But I do know that he liked Miss Goddard a great deal, and his eyes always seemed to light up when he came into the classroom and looked at her. He also liked my sister Lily, though not in the same way, of course. It was he who had encouraged her to take the scholarship exam, and put the notion into her head that she might someday become a schoolteacher. He had also given her some special coaching for the exam, and he had made her his ink monitor, and kept her busy running errands. I saw how busy she was that first day at school. I caught glimpses of her flitting about, filling up inkwells, running to classrooms with notes from the headmaster, dashing down to the cellar to mix some more ink, and it was because of all these duties she had to perform that she was late getting out of school that first day I came, and kept us waiting for her outside.

  DARK, HEAVY CLOUDS WERE GATHERING. Already lights were being turned on in the shops in St. Petersgate opposite the school. It looked as if a downpour might start any minute. Children were still swarming out of the school yard.

  “Where the bloody ’ell is she?” muttered Joe.

  His face was pale with worry and fear, and he could not stand still. It was not the threat of rain that bothered him, but rather that all the other Jewish children had left. As a rule, they went home together, because this was the time when the batesemas, freed from the restraints of school and the sharp eyes of Cocky Rawlings and the headmaster, went wild in the streets and launched their worst attacks on the luckless Jewish children who were caught alone. As a group, we were usually able to fend them off.

  The other Jewish children had waited for a while, grown impatient, and gone off without us. There was still time to catch up with them if we hurried. Joe was frantic with impatience and kept glancing at the school door and walking to the windows to peer inside. Saul and Rose were fuming also. Rose, never fond of her older sister, was saying unpleasant things, and trying to get us to go on without her. Perhaps, if it hadn’t been for the strict warning our mother always gave us to stay together, we might have done so.

  At last, she came hurrying through the door, and the three of them began attacking her bitterly, accusing her of putting their lives in danger.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said, contemptuously. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Just follow me.”

  She took the lead, walking in front with me, holding my hand, her head held erect defiantly, with her long, silken hair flowing behind her, her pace brisk. The other three followed, casting fearful looks about them. The other Jewish children were not in sight, and it was clear that we were not going to catch up with them.

  In our hurry we failed to keep our eyes open as we passed the cab stand, and Joe suddenly let out a howl and clutched his ear. One of the idly swinging whips had caught him on the edge of the ear. Then, to make matters worse, we heard jeering laughter behind us.

  We swung our heads around, and there they were, the same four who had pounced on us in the morning from the vicarage wall. They were walking behind us with arms linked, full of glee at Joe’s mishap, and it was clear that they were up to no good, and probably had been waiting for us to leave the protection of the school.

  “Don’t pay any attention to them,” Lily hissed. “Just keep walking, and don’t look back at them.”

  I was frightened. I’d had less experience than they, but I was already familiar with these situations. I clung tightly to Lily’s hand. The other three were walking so fast they were almost crowding on top of us. And the four batesemas were maintaining the same pace. They had begun their favorite verse:

  “The rabbi, the rabbi, the king of the Jews,

  He bought his wife a pair of shoes.

  When the shoes began to wear,

  The rabbi, the rabbi began to swear.”

  Howls of laughter following, hoots, jeers, cries, words. Kikes. Sheenies. Yids. Bloody Jews. Who killed Christ? They went through it all. And they were getting closer and closer.

  “Don’t run, don’t run,” Lily hissed at my siblings over her shoulder. “That’s what they want you to do. Then they’ll be on you. Just keep going.”

  It was a lot easier said than done. Lily was almost running herself, and I was too, terrified already by what I sensed was coming. It was just as we reached Daw Bank, and were approaching the Devil’s Steps, that my brothers and sister behind us broke ranks and ran, stumbling into us. Lily and I began to run too. Then, with
wild yells of glee, they were on top of us. Just as I was going down, screaming, with someone on my back, I caught a flash of someone else flying out of the Devil’s Steps. The next moment, as I was being pummeled, I heard a voice yelling, “Get off ’em, you bloody little sods.” There was a thumping sound, and then the weight lifted off me, and someone was helping me to my feet.

  Tears streaming out of my eyes, I looked up at my rescuer. It was Arthur Forshaw.

  “You’re all right now, ’arry,” he said. “They won’t hurt you anymore. The little buggers have gone.”

  He also helped the others up, all of them crying and more frightened than hurt. He dusted off their clothes for them, and then picked up his books. They were scattered over the ground, and one of them that he still held in his hand he had used as a weapon on the heads of our attackers.

  We helped him pick up the books, all of us grateful, Lily effusive in thanking him. “You saved our lives,” she said.

  Arthur grinned. “I wouldn’t go that far. I just bashed a few heads, that’s all. Never knew books could be useful that way, too.”

  We began walking home, with Arthur and Lily walking in front, and the rest of us following. Lily seemed to have forgotten altogether about me, and she and Arthur talked steadily and animatedly as they went along. I watched them from behind. They seemed to have so much to say to each other, and they made quite an interesting picture, the two of them, Arthur tall and towering over her, and Lily looking up at him as she spoke or listened, her long silken, brown hair flowing down to her slender waist, bobbing with her quick, eager movements.

  Rose was noticing them too, and could not hide her jealousy. “Just look at her,” she muttered. “Look at the way she’s sucking up to him. You’d think he was a prince or something, or a lord or a duke, instead of just a common bates from our street.”

  “He saved our lives,” Joe reminded her, echoing Lily’s words. “And he goes to the grammar school.”

  “Anybody can go to the grammar school,” Rose said contemptuously. “It’s not like Eton or Rugby. Those are the real high-class schools. He’s just a bates, and she’s in love with him. Anybody can tell that, and I’m going to tell her.”

  By “her” she meant my mother. Ever since she had lost her imaginary drawing room to the shop, she had refused to talk to my mother, and she referred to her always as “her,” just as we referred to our father as “he.” And this jealousy of Lily was nothing new; it had been that way from birth almost and it would always be that way. This, together with her new attitude toward my mother, would continue well into adulthood, and would be a source of constant pain to my mother.

  My mother was waiting for us outside on the corner as we approached along Brook Street. She was searching anxiously into the distance, with one hand cupped over her eyes, even though there was no sun out. In fact, it had begun to rain, and she was holding an umbrella over her head. She had started worrying ever since she saw the other children come home without us. She had been about to set out in search of us.

  Joe, Saul, and I ran up to her, and excitedly poured out the story of the attack. She listened in horror. She put an arm tightly around me. “That this should have happened on his first day,” I heard her mutter. “Why didn’t you come home with the others?” she asked.

  Joe, our spokesman, said, “We couldn’t. Lily had to do something for the headmaster, and she kept us waiting.”

  “Where is she now?” Mother was a little bewildered too. Rose had walked straight past her and gone into the house—that was to be expected. But somehow, with her attention focused on us, she had not noticed Lily walk by with Arthur.

  “She’s over there,” Joe said, pointing.

  Lily and Arthur had come to a halt in the middle of our street, and they were both still talking in the same animated fashion. The rain was coming down quite heavily by now, but I doubt if either one of them noticed it. Our eyes swung over to them, and in my mother’s eyes there appeared a different sort of expression. She was about to call out to Lily, but Joe interrupted.

  “Arthur saved us from the batesemas,” he told her. “He saved our lives.” Joe went into details, explaining the rescue.

  It made my mother hesitate. “That was wonderful,” she said. “I’m going to have to thank him for what he did.” But aside from that, it made no difference, and she called out, “Lily!”

  Lily, interrupted, turned her head. “Yes?” she called back.

  “It’s raining hard. You’d better come in.”

  “I will in a minute,” Lily said, impatiently.

  “No, I want you in now.”

  She said something to Arthur, and then they separated, he going toward his house, Lily to ours. We followed Lily inside. She was excited.

  “Oh, Mam,” she burst out, “guess what? I was just talking to Arthur Forshaw, and I told him how I planned to take the scholarship exam this winter, and he said he would help me prepare for it. He’s still got the books he used to study for the exam, and he’s going to let me have them, and he said I can come into his house after school and he’ll go over the studies with me. Isn’t that wonderful? I’m bound to win now.”

  “Yes, it’s very nice of him,” my mother said, slowly. “But I don’t think—”

  Before she could finish, Lily had remembered something. “Oh, Mam, the headmaster gave me this paper that he has to sign. It’s for the exam. The headmaster says it should be done as soon as possible, and unless he signs it I won’t be able to take the exam.”

  She had been fishing in the pocket of her pinafore, and she brought the paper out and handed it to my mother, and I could see the uncertainty with which my mother took it from her, and the unhappiness on her face. “Can’t I sign it?” she asked.

  “The headmaster said he has to sign it.” Then she asked, “Mam, can I go over to the Forshaw’s house now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you going into a Christian’s house.”

  “Oh, Mam,” she wailed. “Mam, Mam, what’s wrong with it? Why can’t I go into a Christian’s house?”

  “Because you’re Jewish, that’s why.”

  “Well, then, can he come in here? He said he would if I wanted to.”

  “No, he can’t come in here. I don’t want a Christian in my house.”

  “But you let Mrs. Green come in. And Annie, too. And you have Christians coming into the shop.”

  “That’s different. I don’t want Arthur to come in here.”

  “But if he can’t come in here, and I can’t go into his house, then how is he going to be able to help me? Don’t you realize what this means to me? If Arthur helps me, I’m bound to pass the exam, and I’ll get the scholarship and I’ll be able to go to the grammar school, and then maybe I can become a teacher, and I won’t have to go into the tailoring shop.” She was desperate, pleading, and suddenly she remembered. “Mam, do you know what Arthur did for us today? When we were coming home from school there was a bunch of batesemas and he—”

  “Yes, I know,” my mother interrupted. “Joe already told me. I’m very grateful to Arthur. I think it was a wonderful thing that he did, and I’m going to make up a basket of fruit for him. But he’s a Christian, and I don’t want him in the house and I don’t want you in his house.”

  Lily let out a cry of anguish. “Oh, you,” she spluttered, “you’re just what Rose says, you’re, you’re—” She could not say it, and she burst into tears and dashed upstairs.

  Chapter Four

  WELL, NOW, THE AUTUMN DAYS HAD GONE BY BEFORE YOU KNEW IT, AND winter came on with the cold weather that brought us to school shivering. We had coats, some of us, and hung them in the cloakroom with our caps, hoping they would still be there when we left, for there was a good deal of stealing at St. Peter’s, and you guarded your lunch, too, very carefully, the slices of bread and butter that our mother wrapped for us in newspaper.

  It rained a lot still, and sometimes the cloakroom would smell like
a laundry with all the damp clothes drying. The lights were on all day in school because the rain and the perpetual clouds brought early darkness. Sometimes, too, heavy fog rolled in, covering the streets like gray shrouds, so dense you could not see an inch in front of you. The headmaster would send us home early when this happened, and we would grope our way homeward like blind people, and now and then we’d be guided by the red bobbing lanterns on the back of some clop-clopping cart in front of us.

  It was a relief to get home, to burst into the house, all of us simultaneously, to rush to the fire in the kitchen and thrust our hands toward the red-hot coals. And then to stand there letting our clothes dry and eat the slices of bread and jam that our mother had prepared for us.

  The days were much shorter now. You no longer saw the people when they came home from the mills, the women in their striped petticoats and shawls and little bits of white fluff stuck in their hair, the men carrying their dinner pails wrapped in big red-and-white-spotted handkerchiefs. Darkness came on early, and yellow lights showed in all the houses as the workers came home. You simply heard the hurried clattering of their clogs, and then the doors opening and closing, and a bit after that smelled frying fish and chips and bacon and lard.

  I was busy all the time, it seemed. Soon after tea was over, I was on my way to cheder with my two brothers and all the other Jewish lads from our street. We had to go every day after school. We were taught Jewish history and the Hebrew language, together with religion. We went together in a noisy, chattering group, carrying our little black Hebrew books that we were supposed to have studied. We loitered a lot along the way, peering in shop windows, kicking some empty can we’d found back and forth among us, and invariably Sam Roseman would treat us to his famous performance.