However trenchantly Aunt Rivke might disapprove of things, like mixed marriages in general and Ellen and David’s in particular, when it came to protecting small children from epidemics, her action was immediate and liberal. The minute she heard there were two babies in the Buildings struggling for their lives with violent sickness, she put on her wig and her second best hat and stomped off to warn her relations. She did a round tour, starting next door with Josh and Maggie, who had already heard and were frantic with worry, then on to Joe in the Wentworth Buildings, and finally to Quaker Street and Ellen.
She came to the point without preamble, even though she could see that the girl was alarmed by her precipitate arrival. ‘Ve got cholera in the Buildings, dolly,’ she warned. ‘Boil all the vater. Don’t drink nothink vhat ain’t boiled. You take my advice, keep your pretty chickens indoors. Ve don’t vant they should catch it. A terrible disease, don’t I tell you. You got kettles, nu?’
The pretty chickens were sitting on Ellen’s latest rag rug directly underneath the open window, now protectively barred by their doting grandfather. They were both in their petticoats because of the heat and to Ellen’s considerable relief they looked healthy as well as angelic.
‘Thanks ever so much er telling me,’ she said to Aunt Rivke.
And Rivke was warmed by her gratitude and clicked her teeth and told her to ‘think nothing of it’.
Ellen was so shocked that it wasn’t until Rivke had adjusted her wig and crashed off down the stairs again that the full impact of the news she’d just heard caught her heart in a vice. Cholera! Dear God! Kids died like flies of the cholera! She looked at Gracie’s pretty round face and little Jack’s thin arms and her mind spun with panic. Outside, the frowsy air of Shoreditch was lethal with lurking germs. She could almost see them circling among the motes in the column of sunlight slanting visibly into her room. We must move, she thought. I can’t stay here and let them catch the cholera. And she made up her mind at once.
‘We’ll go an’ find another place,’ she said to her children. ‘Out in the country, in the fresh air. You’d like that, wouldn’tcher?’ And little Gracie seemed to agree for she smiled and said ‘In a’ tuntry’ most amiably, even though her brother was far more interested in his toes. ‘No time like the present,’ their mother said. ‘Come an’ get yer clothes on, there’s good kids.’
She wrote a note to David, in case he got back before they did, ‘They got cholera in the Buildings. Your Aunt Rivke has been. I have gone to look for a place somewhere else, Love E.’ Then she fed the baby and slung him onto her back inside a shawl and she and Gracie set off to look for the country. And naturally enough they started their search in the Mile End Road, where Ellen had taken her escaping mother all those eventful years ago.
When they left Quaker Street she really had very little idea what she was looking for. It had to be a step up from two rooms in a tenement, and she wanted a tap in the kitchen, because lugging water up and down two flights of stairs every day was no joke, but apart from that the necessities she sought were nebulous things like fresh air and good health, and safety from infection. Her children were in danger and her children had to be protected. Somehow or other they had to escape.
The corner shop advertisements were all for rooms and they all turned out to be in teeming tenements that she rejected at sight. Gracie grew tired of trudging from house to house in the heat, and trailed behind her mother, tearful and weary. It was a long way for a three-year-old to walk, and she was too young to understand that it was all for her own good. ‘We’ll find somewhere soon, lovey, you’ll see,’ Ellen comforted, as the child wept and dragged her feet.
Finally, and in some desperation, she took her problem to an estate agent.
‘Well now,’ that gentleman said when he’d seated her in his office and she’d taken a weary child on each knee. ‘It all depends on what you are prepared to pay.’ He’d been impressed by the information that her husband worked for the Essex Magazine. ‘Good accommodation is usually pretty pricey. I’ve got a very nice house in Mile End Place, clean, immediate vacant possession, twelve and six a week. Would that suit?’
A house, she thought, all to ourselves. We could get right away from the cholera in a house. So although she was rather afraid of the price, she said she’d see it.
‘It’s just along the road,’ the estate agent said. ‘No distance at all, and so handy for the trams.’
It was almost as near as he claimed, but at first sight it wasn’t at all promising, for the entrance was through a narrow brick archway beside the Tyne Main Coal Company, and the brickwork was dank and blackened and forbidding. It’ll be another tenement, she thought, as sure as God made little apples.
Nevertheless she followed him through the archway. And found herself in the country. Two rows of neat white cottages faced each other across a cobbled street, each with its own front garden full of flowers, and beyond them, forming the fourth side of the square, was a low brick wall and an open skyline, fringed with thick trees. It was so totally unlike anything she’d ever seen before that for a few seconds she simply stood where she was and enjoyed it. There’s so much sky here, she thought, and the air smells quite different, with all them lilacs and wallflowers. You wouldn’t catch any rotten old diseases in a place like this. It reminded her of Kent and the freedom of the hop fields. She tucked the baby more firmly onto her shoulders and took little Grace by the hand. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This might do.’
It was a lovely house, with its own neat front garden, like all the others, and a fine front door inset behind its own porch, and three white-framed windows, two upstairs and one down. ‘It’s a country cottage,’ she said to her daughter, as the agent eased the key into the lock. ‘Whatcher think a’ that?’
‘Gracie like a tunty cottage,’ the child lisped, and followed her mother happily through the front door.
It was even better inside. The front room was light and airy, looking out over the front garden the way it did, and it had a lovely fireplace, with a mantelpiece and an overmantel and everything. We could get really snug in ’ere of a winter’s evening, she thought.
Between the front room and the back there was a flight of steep stairs leading to the upper floor. They toiled up to inspect the main bedroom which stretched across the front of the house and the back bedroom which had its own window overlooking, wonder of wonders, a real back garden. ‘Look at that, Gracie. Wouldn’tcher like ter play out there? Oh, we shan’t know ourselves in a place like this.’
She already knew that the house was the refuge she wanted, but she decided to look at the kitchen anyway. ‘Might as well, eh Gracie?’ And the kitchen was perfect, a fine modern room, painted a nice brown, and so clean! The wooden table that took pride of place in the centre of the room was scrubbed almost white. She went into the walk-in larder, and admired the Welsh Dresser, and the coal hole and the iron range, which was the most up-to-date model she’d ever seen, with an oven and four hobs. Plenty of room for kettles and irons, she thought. How much easier washday would be in a place like this. Leading out of the kitchen was a narrow scullery with a quarry-tiled floor and its own yellow sink with its own tap, and boxed into a little closet in the corner its own W.C. What luxury! No more emptying chamber pots of a morning or lugging heavy pails of water up and down stairs all day long. I can have all the water I want and boil it up lovely. It’ll be like living in a palace, and even at twelve and six a week, well worth it.
‘Keep it for us!’ she told the agent imperiously. ‘Mr Cheifitz’ll be round first thing in the morning to pay the rent. We could move in termorrer, couldn’t we?’
So it was agreed.
‘Won’t your Pa be surprised!’ she said to Gracie as the tram rattled them back to Shoreditch High Street and the smell of the breweries.
But he wasn’t. He was relieved.
When he came home to an empty flat and her terrifying note, he’d been seized by a panic every bit as strong as hers had been, and had instantly come to the same conclusion. They must put a distance between their children and the infection, and the sooner the better. If she hadn’t found a suitable place, he’d go out himself as soon as the kids were settled for the night, and between them they’d keep on looking till they found somewhere. He kept an anxious vigil beside the bedroom window, worrying and scheming, working out how much rent they could afford, which he estimated would be somewhere between ten and eleven shillings, and trying to remember the sort of places where they could live in safety for such a sum.
It seemed a very long time before he saw his dusty family trailing along the road. He rushed down the stairs two at a time, to carry little Gracie the rest of the way and hear their news. And when Ellen told him about the country cottage, he agreed to it at once, taking twelve and six in his long stride as though it were no more than the weight of his drowsy toddler.
‘The rent’s a bit steep,’ Ellen said, feeling she ought to criticize, as he hadn’t.
‘We’ll manage,’ he said, as they climbed the stairs. ‘I might get a rise. You never know. I’ll ask Mr Palfreyman. No harm in asking, nu? Or we could take lodgers, maybe.’
‘Not till there’s no more cholera, though,’ she said, her eyes fearful again.
‘Nu-nu, bubeleh,’ he reassured. ‘We’ll stay in our own house all by ourselves till there ain’t a trace a’ … that.’ It was too terrible to name.
‘I done the right thing, ain’t I, Davey?’ she asked as they closed their front door behind them and were alone at last in the privacy of their flat. Fatigue had brought a sudden uncertainty with it.
‘I’d a’ done the same if it’ud been me,’ he said. ‘I think you’re a giddy marvel the way you look after us, an’ that’s a fact. I’ve never known anyone so quick off the mark.’
It was the same fiery protective instinct that had made her oppose the brit so passionately. But that was forgotten. For this time he agreed with her.
Which was more than all his relations did. Dumpling was impressed, of course, especially by how quick she’d been, and Emmanuel said she was a woman of sense, and he wasn’t a bit surprised, and he’d be round on Sunday to fix up a little gate across the stairs and to see if the windows needed bars. But Rivke and Rachel were annoyed.
‘Rushing off vidout a vord!’ Rivke snorted. ‘Davey, she don’t tell even.’
‘He should a’ married a nice Jewish vife,’ Rachel said. ‘A nice Jewish vife vould a’ know’d better. For vhy she got to go rushing off all that long vay? Vhen ve was young ve stayed vhere ve vas. Spending good money, rushing off!’
‘She got money to vaste, maybe?’ Rivke said. ‘Vonce a shiksa, alvays a shiksa!’
‘A house!’ Rachel said. ‘Ay-yi! She get above herself that shiksa. So vhat’s wrong vid rooms, I ask you!’
‘A house!’ her sister-in-law agreed. ‘They should be so lucky!’
David and Ellen knew very well how lucky they were. Even if they did have to pay twelve and six a week for their good fortune. As May blazed into June and infant cholera continued to rage in the tenements they’d left behind, Jack and Gracie bloomed. Soon their cheeks were as pink as the roses in their front garden and Ellen was relieved to notice that the baby’s legs were growing fatter by the minute. Even David’s initial disquiet over the rent was eased, for Mr Palfreyman gave him a rise, at the first time of asking and without consulting a single matchstick. The terrible apprehension that had precipitated them into their new life gradually eased a little.
They made friends with their next door neighbours, a family called Streete on one side and a nice quiet lady called Mrs Brunewald who lived with her bachelor son on the other. And they were pleased to think that they weren’t ‘all living on top of each other’ and that their landlord was somewhere on the other side of London and wouldn’t be watching them every minute of the day the way Mrs Undine had been just a little too fond of doing. But the most rewarding privacy of all was a separate bedroom for the kids.
Dumpling came to see them two or three times every week, to check that they were all still healthy and to play with her ‘chickens’ while Ellen nipped down to the shops. They would have their dinner out in the garden under the shade of a sprawling bush laden with sweet-scented white flowers. Mrs Streete, who was knowledgeable about such things, told them it was called a syringa, and offered to show them how to prune it when the time came, and Mr Streete, who ‘took the air’ in his own back garden every evening, told them they’d got a nice little plot of earth down the end there and gave David a box full of seedlings to grow in it.
‘Ol’ farmer Giles at work in his vegetable garden,’ David said happily striking a pose, trowel in hand. It was the first time he’d clowned about like that since Rivke brought her awful news. Things were getting back to normal.
‘What are they?’ Ellen asked, looking at the little green shoots.
‘I dunno,’ he had to admit. ‘I didn’t like to ask. Never mind. If they’re edible we’ll eat ’em.’
‘An’ if they ain’t?’
‘We’ll stick ’em in a vase and put ‘em on the table.’
‘We ain’t got a vase.’
‘A jam jar then.’
‘Oh Davey!’ she said, throwing her arms round his neck. ‘Aintcher glad we come ’ere?’
They were so happy they almost forgot about the cholera, and the brit, and the fact that she wasn’t Jewish, and that he didn’t like English food and she couldn’t cook kosher, and that his mother didn’t approve of them.