Perfectly Ordinary People(9)

Anyway, your grandmother Genny hated him and almost from day one she desperately wanted to leave. But jobs were few and far between after the war, and what with working six days a week she didn’t even have time to look for another job. So for a long time – about a year, it was – she was stuck there, working for Rashid.

Anyway, one day they fell out big-time because old Rashid said she didn’t work fast enough, so she decided to leave. She’d saved up a little money by then so she thought she could survive until she found something else.

They’d been sewing men’s suits all week. When the soldiers came home from the war, the government gave each of them a suit to wear. It was called ‘getting your civvies’, and you got a choice of single or double breasted, and pinstripes or Prince of Wales check. That was it. Those were the choices.

Anyway, your grandmother knew she was leaving and decided to get her revenge.

So that final day, from dawn to dusk, she sewed all the arms the wrong way round, so they stuck out backwards, like this. When she finished each piece, she folded it neatly and added it to the pile, and no one could see that anything was wrong. And then at the end of the day she went to Rashid, thanked him profusely for everything, and left.

Apparently old Rashid was so angry when he found out that he collapsed and had to be taken to hospital. But don’t worry, he didn’t die. Within a week he was back slave-driving your grandmother’s replacement.





Ruth. Part One (continued).

Once Grandpa had finished his tale and vanished to the loo, Jake leaned in to speak to me. ‘Didn’t Dad tell us that same story, only it was Mum who worked there, and the owner was a horrible old Jew called Elijah?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, Jake,’ I said. ‘Please don’t go off on the whole Jewish thing again.’

‘Then tell me that you haven’t heard it before. And tell me that Dad didn’t make it about a horrible old Jew. He had loads of stories about old Jews. And jokes, too. You do remember all the Jewish jokes, don’t you?’

The problem was that what Jake said was true. There had been a glut of Jewish jokes over the years. I had heard the story before, too. And it had been about our mother, sewing dresses, in a Jewish-owned sweatshop.

‘It was dresses, not suits, wasn’t it?’ I said, trying to sidestep the Jewish thing. ‘And didn’t he say that she sewed all the buttons on backwards?’

Ethel, who was standing nearby, came to my rescue.

‘Actually, he was Jewish,’ she said. ‘And he was an old bastard.’

‘It’s a true story then?’ Jake asked.

Ethel laughed. ‘Well, it was me working there, not your grandmother. And it was during the war, not after. And we were sewing uniforms, not suits. And the reason we fell out was nothing to do with how fast I was working. But you know . . . why let the truth get in the way of a good story?’

‘God, it was you!’ I said. ‘And did you really sew all the arms on backwards?’

‘Only on one jacket,’ Ethel said. ‘And only the last one I did. I wouldn’t have dared to ruin any more. I was brave, but I wasn’t that brave! Plus, it was uniforms. I would have felt like I was sabotaging the war effort.’

Grandpa Chris returned then, and proceeded to tell everyone the wolf story, which seemed a shame as I’d been hoping to talk to him.

Instead, I tried to ask Ethel how distant a cousin she was to my grandmother, but she merely laughed as if the question was frivolous, and shushed me. ‘This is a good one,’ she said, nodding in Grandpa Chris’s direction.

Jake, who, like me, had heard the story many times before, picked up his drinks and went outside, and when Grandpa finished, I jokingly asked Ethel if she knew whether that one was true as well.

‘Bits of it,’ she said, then intriguingly, ‘It’s just how he deals with the past. There are worse ways to do that, believe me.’

Tony and Glen muscled in on our barely initiated conversation at that point, and began to talk about an upcoming party.

Ethel said that she didn’t think she’d be able to stomach parties for some time and Tony insisted this was nonsense, and it was what Genny would have wanted.

It was one of those moments in life when, watching from the outside, you can see that two people really aren’t listening to one another, and they’re totally out of sync, Ethel being utterly serious that this was not the moment to talk about parties, and Tony insisting it would be just the thing to cheer her up.

Because their increasingly heated conversation made me feel uncomfortable and in some way voyeuristic, I slipped outside to join my family.

They were in clusters having varied, more-or-less rowdy conversations about football and kids and holiday destinations, and I drifted between them for half an hour. But ultimately because none of their conversations seemed entirely funeral-appropriate – having nothing whatsoever to do with Genny – they also made me feel uncomfortable, and I wished again that I’d brought Gina along for company.

In the end, I made my goodbyes and phoned for a taxi. I asked the woman driver to take me to the train station, but when I caught a glimpse of the sea, shimmering on the horizon, I changed my destination to Brighton Pier.

There, I climbed out, bought a greasy, sugary doughnut and walked to the far end, where, leaning on the railings, a funfair ride spiralling around above me, I peered down at the grey, swelling sea for a bit before looking out at the horizon and wondering once again why I hadn’t come to see my grandmother here while she was alive. At that moment, unexpectedly, she appeared in my mind’s eye so vividly that I felt like I was a child again.