My Grandmother
Here’s a photo.
It’s of Rose
on board a ship in 1922
from Boston to London
It’s the SS President Harding.
She’s standing next to a ladder
to an upper deck.
With her left hand
she holds my father’s hand
he stands next to her
trying to hide his face from the camera
wearing long loose shorts
and a dark top.
On the ladder
sit baby Wallace
holding Rose’s right hand
and next to him on the ladder
their sister, Sylvia.
This is a journey
that is going to change their lives forever.
Rose will never go back to America.
Wallace has only a few weeks left to live.
My father will go to America
but it’ll be long after his father Morris has died.
Sylvia will be the pioneer
not early enough to see her father
but even so, she’s the one who’ll
discover cousin Ted,
Morris’s nephew
and the family out there in Connecticut
and Massachusetts.
At the end of this transatlantic crossing
Rose will take the children
into a house Whitechapel
that is already full with her sisters
brother and their parents.
It will end up with
11 or 12 of them in a two-up, two-down
terrace house.
Rose looks tired
but whatever’s gone on between her and Morris
hasn’t broken her.
Four years later
she’ll be out on the streets demonstrating
against the ‘baby starvers’ as it says on the banner
supporting the General Strike
and she buys a little brass brooch
which is a replica of a miner’s lamp
to support the miners
who hold out after the other unions go back to work.
Now that’s a thought:
a Jewish woman in London
buying a brooch for the miners.
She can’t really work much herself
because she’s had polio and one of her arms
is weak.
She’s going to have to rely on the family
to help her bring up the children
and some of them are going to resent her for it.
Wasn’t she the clever one
with her nose in a book
politics, politics, politics
can’t keep a husband though,
now look at her!
She brings people to the house:
a Jamaican seafarer,
a grande dame of a woman called Beatrice
who my father goes to see in her flat
in Belsize Park.
Years later
it turns out that Beatrice
was Modigliani’s partner
and he painted pictures of her.
My father will be
the first person in the family
to go to grammar school
the first person in the family to go to university
the first person in the family to be a teacher
the first person in the family to become a professor.
Rose is very proud of him
He calls her Ma
but it’s my father’s sister Sylvia who looks after her
when she gets a stroke,
two strokes actually.
I remember her
coming round to our flat
and giving me a red shoe horn.
My mother, Connie loves her.
My father tells me that Connie
ran away from home
and went to live with Rose
when she was finally able to move out
of the house in Whitechapel
and moved into a flat in White City.
People called her Rosie.
Rosie Rosen.
My mother called my father ‘Rosie’ too.
She’d shout for him, ‘Rosie!’
Or she’d say to us
‘Ask your father what he’s doing
and tell him to stop it’.
And of course
if Rose hadn’t got on that boat
and come back to London
I wouldn’t be here telling you any of this.
I wouldn’t exist.
