5. SWIMMING

The beginning of his life was, to Henry, occluded, not remembered so much as imagined, pieced together from other people’s memories and stories he heard. Loving mother, poor tradesman father, hills white with snow from October to April, the shtetl, Shadowa, not far from Vilnius. What he did remember was Liverpool. They’d left Lithuania when Henry was three, and subsisted in the port city while his father tried and failed to land a lucrative job. A year after they arrived in England, his mother’s brother, Isaac, followed.

It was there, on a hot day in the summer of 1934, just after Henry’s eighth birthday, that Isaac Dvoretsky knocked on the door of the narrow, woodwormy flat on the second floor of a stone building that rattled every time a car or horse-drawn cart rumbled past. Musty rooms with low ceilings, their dark wooden floorboards nicked and marred by thousands of boots and shoes; narrow windows hoary with snow and ice in the winter, and grimy in the summer months. In the kitchen a coal fire burned half the year, and it was in that kitchen, in front of the biggest window in the flat, that Eva spent most of her days, caring for Henry, cooking for her husband, or just sitting, allowing her body to nourish and warm the baby in preparation for its descent into the Liverpudlian cold and grime.

Isaac asked his sister if he could have Henry for the day. She was tired, worried about the rent as usual, and pleased, no doubt, that the boy would be out, helping with coal deliveries, as she believed. She made Isaac a cup of tea, apologising that there was no bread or cake.

Eva buttoned Henry’s jacket and kissed him on the head. “Have him home before dark,” she told her brother.

For nearly a year now, Henry had accompanied his uncle once a week, holding his big hand as they crossed the streets together and zigzagged their way down to the docks. The clatter of the tram behind them as they crossed Lime Street, Henry running to keep up.

Together they threaded through the narrow alleys around Saint James Street, the row houses rising steeply on either side of them, dark and solid beneath the pale sky. At the market on Penny Lane, Isaac sometimes haggled or traded all manner of items, from the whimsical—silk flowers or perfume for a lady; to the essential—shoes for Henry, a teapot for their mother. Sometimes he did deliver coal, but mostly he delivered food, blankets, and clothes.

And at the dockside, Henry would wait, kicking stones or watching the steamships at the landing stage while Isaac engaged in negotiations with sailors who spoke heavily accented English. Henry was always on the lookout for beer and lemonade bottles, which he sold back to the shopkeepers. He’d watch as his uncle opened little packages, chatting amiably with their bearers, nervous Litvaks and Poles just off the boat, and then give them an envelope or a tightly rolled wad of notes in return. Something about his manner seemed to reassure them, and the hunched immigrants always took their leave walking a little taller, faces more relaxed, after Isaac had shaken hands and clapped them on the shoulder.

Liverpool was dark and muck, cobblestones and stench; street vendors with handcarts; street urchins running in the alleys. In the company of his uncle, Henry traversed the city, rode the tram, saw men and women from all over the world—Germans and Danes, Frisians and Negroes, Jews from all corners of Eastern Europe, sailors and fish merchants, wealthy ladies with silk dresses, and barefoot orphans begging in the streets. Uncle Isaac even knew a Chinaman. He said that not all Chinamen were opium dealers. As it happened, this one was.

Liverpool was shipyards and soap factories, the smell of fish and bilge water and cold tenements buckled together, privies and ash pits and dank docks, men looking for work or not looking for work. Grey skies and tenebrous streets. Of course, there was sunlight on the sea and on the big ships with their soaring prows, and there was the stately Athenaeum Library that charged two guineas for admission, the Princes Road Synagogue and the tall cathedral off Hope Street. But mostly it was dark, the streets and tenements tangled and grey.

Henry. Shock of brown hair, green roaming eyes, small and lean, in a coat many sizes too big. He didn’t go to school, the only boys near Captain Wilson’s building where his family lived were older. When he appeared carrying a box or bag of groceries or goods from Hibbert’s, they taunted him and threatened to rob him, and sometimes they did. Uncle Isaac was his constant companion. It was Isaac who told him about Big Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world, and Harry Houdini, who could escape locks and chains, the Wright brothers who built a flying machine in Kitty Hawk, America, and Amelia Earhart who flew across the Atlantic. Henry dreamed of boxing, magic, of flying across the wide blue sky, or, like Harry Houdini, escaping.

Uncle Isaac. Six feet tall, thuggish and sweet, woolly beard, soft green eyes. A seafarer’s face, though he’d never worked on a ship. Isaac, whom Henry’s mother called Itzchak. At the end of a day spent at the docks, or wandering in and out of taverns, or making deliveries to scattered locations, they would dart into a lane and find a coal hatch where they blackened their hands and clothes, with a dab on the face or neck, before Isaac returned his charge to his sister. If it had been a good day, Isaac might sing as they walked home, sometimes a sailor’s tune, but more often a snippet of an aria or symphony, a wordless Ya de ya da dem, his head bobbing, sooty hands rising in the air to conduct an invisible orchestra.

Once, Henry asked his uncle what he was singing, and Isaac replied, “Bach, beautiful music, boychik.” And taught him a passage, and they sang it together, louder and louder, walking down Rathbone Street, puffing tiny clouds in front of them, like little ghosts dancing and collapsing in the cold air. The next time he visited, Isaac brought his violin, let the boy press and pluck the strings, tap the bow and run it across the strings and make high-pitched screeches, which Isaac applauded. Small, pale Henry held the instrument under his neck the way he’d seen Isaac imitate violinists. For even though his Great-Uncle Zalman had been a celebrated musician, Henry had never actually seen anyone play the violin. “Here, Henry, you draw the bow across the strings,” his mother urged. The next attempt was, if not music, certainly a more bearable screech. “You’ll be a great violinist one day,” Isaac promised. He left the instrument with them, and Henry occasionally produced a sonorous note.

He sometimes played for his mother in the afternoons, just the first bars of a Bach adagio, stretching the notes, pulling the bow until the sound warbled and faded, then bowing the next note, the fingers of his left hand moving slowly, steadily, feeling the shape of the music on the violin’s neck. When they put on a gramophone record he would often play along, picking out a few notes of the melody and repeating them. He was no Zalman, but the accompaniments he played were, in their own way, soothing and stirring in their slow methodicalness. He didn’t hit many wrong notes or make the instrument screech any more.

That hot summer day in 1934, Henry’s father, who had owned a leather shop in Lithuania, was working on the docks, unloading crates for a shilling a day. It was a matter of time before he’d quit, or get fired, and then drink and grumble for a few weeks before finding another job. He was impatient and inventive, having made his way in Shadowa by being the first to learn what styles were in vogue in Saint Petersburg and Paris and engaging a seamstress to copy them—elbow-length flapper gloves for the ladies, thick stitching with plaid lining for the men. Nor was he above sewing a French label on the inside of the wrist. Duluc. French gloves, alevai. And now here he was in Liverpool, doing manual labour. Jakub was not a big man, and despite having strong leather-workers’ hands, the work tired him and made his back ache so that he couldn’t sleep at night. Then he would shout, at his wife, his son, anyone within earshot, and go drinking with the other Litvak shlemazels.

After waving good-bye to Eva, Isaac and Henry picked their way down Cecil Road, walked past the Sailors’ Home and along Pitt Street, past the Clarence, and boarded the bus to Bootle, disembarking in the midmorning sun. They crossed the busy high street, away from town, seeking the shade of trees as they walked. They passed rows of new houses, emerging at last on a grassy bank of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, near a bridge. There was no one about. Moss and lichen on the stones; a ripe, rotty smell rose from the brown water.

Isaac folded his jacket and lay it down under an oak tree, then slowly undressed until he stood in his undershirt and drawers. Henry copied his uncle, standing in the shade. Slimy grass and rocks slippery and warm bordered the water into which they carefully stepped until it covered their feet, then their ankles, and then it was above Henry’s knees, warm mud sliding between his toes. Isaac took his hand and led him along the muddy path to the spot where the embankment rose to its highest point above the canal.

“Come on,” Isaac called, and Henry felt his hand let go and watched his uncle dive into the water, felt the splash. The water coiled and rippled, and then Isaac was up above the surface, his dark hair wet and shiny, his white undershirt gleaming.

Henry watched from his perch on the mossy bricks, muscles twitching, then reached forward and lunged, landing belly first in the water, eyes closed, legs pumping. He didn’t stop thrashing until he felt Isaac’s big hands surround him, hoisting him up. The water was cool, and the sun made diamonds of light on their water-speckled chests and in their eyelashes.

The next dive was easier, the water did not sting so much, and the time after that was more fun than scary. “Like French aristocrats on the Riviera,” Isaac said. “Come on, watch me.” And he would dive gracefully into the canal, surfacing some distance away. “Come on, Hen. Arms out in front of you, now fly.”

Soon they were diving in side by side, arcing into the sunlit canal, aloft together in a silent floating moment, then drawn down into the water. When they surfaced a few seconds later, spitting out twin plumes of water and laughing, Isaac exclaimed, “You’re a natural, boychik.”

THERE WAS a heat wave that summer, and twice they rode the train to Southport, taking a bus from there to the beach at Ainsdale. They walked the crowded esplanade, past women under broad parasols and men in striped shirts and plimsolls. Henry could smell not just docks but the sea—salt and brine and magnitude. They stripped down to their baggy drawers and ran into the water. Cold waves crashed loudly, and together they jumped in and out of the salty surf.

Wherever they swam, wherever they travelled, on the way home they always stopped at the grocer’s on Richmond Road. Milk and a Nestlé bar for Henry, tobacco and a bottle of Threlfalls Blue Label for Isaac, as well as a loaf of bread, lamp oil, sweets, and soap for Henry to take home. They would sit on the steps, and Henry would drink his milk and eat his chocolate and feel his uncle’s smiling eyes on him, and the warm stirring inside him was something he would later come to call happiness.