Brownlow Hill. Red- and yellow-brick houses, each with a shop opening up to the street selling something or offering a service. People living there who had failed to get to America. Some had been sold a fake ticket back home in Poland or Romania and found themselves duped and dumped, unable to get any further. Some lost heart at the sight of the vast cold turbulence of the ocean and would not move another inch. Some were swindled out of their savings. Some saw a lucrative opportunity to set up in business selling supplies for the journey and for landfall in the New World. Some had got all the way to Ellis Island and been turned back for having tuberculosis or smallpox, never even setting foot on real American soil.
Brownlow Hill had once been part of King John’s hunting ground in the township of Toxteth, but what these Hetties and Moishes had to do with English history was anybody’s guess. The teeming life of the Hill was a microcosm of whole societies left behind at various homes on the planet, intermingling with the bedrock of who was there already, because as well as the Jews there were the Welsh and the Irish and the Scots and the Germans, all living cheek by jowl, hugger-mugger, doing one another favours and the little ones scrapping in the streets.
Lia had rightly assessed that there were enough small businesses in the neighbourhood to temporarily support a young man with brains assisted by an ambitious wife. She tramped the streets of Brownlow Hill, up and down, up and down she trod on her broad feet, taking down names and addresses in a fancy notebook she had once thought she would use for love letters. He should start at the top, with Dr. Arthur Hurd’s surgery, one of the few educated Jews from a generation of earlier arrivals, whose popularity, she learned, was based on always making sure you got your money’s worth, coming away with a bottle of coloured water whatever was the matter with you – your head or your heart or your gizzards or your knees. At the other extreme was the notorious shtarker Osher Blackstone, famous for hitting you first and asking questions later; she did not add him to her list. But what about Tower’s Scientific Apparatus next to Narefsky’s sweet shop, which was next to Kantarovitz’s, the Hebrew bookseller, which was next to Tessie O’Gorman’s, who made the best home-made ice cream, then Owen Jones’ pawnshop, where you took your suits and your jewellery?
And Selig Dover and his dairy cows and Blackledge’s grocery. Sam Gordon, the all-rounder who mended your boots, repaired your watch and made you a pair of trousers. Kesselman’s chip shop. Silver’s the grocers, where you went for black bread, bagels, smoked salmon and sprats. Aronovitch’s Vorschte Company. The Tailors’ Union headquarters, a big filthy room full of tobacco smoke and men playing cards, the cutters and pressers from the workshops all bent over the tables.
Eighteen Brownlow Hill, the place you went for puch; the feathers they plucked from the hens ended up here, you took a pillowcase and filled it and got a good night’s sleep. Kron’s olive oil shop, which supplied rubbing oil to the football teams. Pearson’s cap shop, Ginsberg’s bakery, and on Back Great Newton Street the main business of Friday night was managed, the place where the chickens were slaughtered and plucked and with the doors closed the scene resembled a snowstorm.
Lia sent her husband out every morning with his collar spotless and the crease in his trousers sharp. As he approached another door he stiffened himself, he braced for refusal, then relaxed his face into a fake smile. Expecting to be turned away, but often invited in for a glass of tea and a negotiation that ended with a handshake. Lia was right, it was possible to build up a regular living through ledgers. They just had to wait out the war; when the war was over it would all be different. Lia, cut off from her father, who was settled in the Bronx, accepted this temporary condition but only as a stepping stone to a respectable profession with an office and a secretary, for as far as she was concerned a professional man had a girl with a clean white collar and white cuffs to do the filing and bring in her boss a cup of coffee mid-morning.
In the yard at the back of the rooms they rented, the landlady kept hens. Every Jewish family, every Friday night, ate a hen in assorted ways, boiling the bird and eating the flesh, removing its livers and turning them into a nutritious pâté, the carcass rendered into soup; every part of the chicken ruthlessly exploited. On Friday mornings the women of the street would assemble in the yard and select their hen, which would be taken to be slaughtered. Small children would adopt and love a favourite fowl not realising that in a few weeks it would be served up with carrots and celery and lokshen pudding. These were the people Mina and Lia were mixing with now. If they’d gone ahead on the ship like they’d planned, it would have been a week in their company, now they seemed to be serving a life sentence.
Lia said, ‘How long can this war go on for?’
Jossel replied, ‘Sooner or later they’ll get fed up with killing each other, and we can make our move.’
‘If we must wait, then we must prepare. We will go to night school, we will learn the best English; when we get to New York they won’t believe their ears how beautiful we talk.’
‘Call me Lily, I’ll call you Joe,’ Lia said to her husband after the first lesson. ‘Mina, you’re Millie now. We should all get used to it.’
But behind closed doors Mina and Jossel went on calling each other by the old names that they had brought with them from the old lands.