PART THREE (written 1960 but first Published in DAVNOB in 1988) PART ONE PART TWO
Annie Salit was now a member of the Hull community, and before very long she was found a job in a slipper factory. I have never clearly known just what she did in this factory, and I should think that my brothers and sisters would have the same difficulty in imagining her in factory surroundings.
Here she met two friends, Pechy and Annie, and this trio became, during the years that followed, inseparable.
For about two years the three friends worked the hours usual to workers in those times, from eight in the morning to seven at night. The five day week was still just a beam in the eye of the most imaginative of social reform dreamers. (Yet from all I have heard of this period, and indeed from my own very early experiences of it, providing you had a job - however lowly a job - there existed a sort of warm, human happiness in these workshop relationships. One must remember that within the workshop you had people of generally the same educational standards, the same hopes, the same fears; they were participants in the same simple pleasures and subject to the same type of all-too-frequent misfortune.
There was therefore a closely-knit and somewhat interdependent community of interests between them.
My mother always thought and spoke of these two short years with a certain wistful yet pleasurable glow.
In the October of the year 1898 there happened what was to be perhaps the most wonderful moment in all my mother's life, for there came the meeting with the man who was destined to be our father.
He was some ten years older than she, of a far higher level of education and experience, and had travelled much in America and Europe after having left his native Poland. Whilst our mother had come from a poor and working-class background, our father had enjoyed in his childhood and youth the comfort and considerable refinement of a middle-class and fairly moneyed background. I rarely remember him speaking of his own parents and family. Some deep quarrel seemed to have caused an irreparable rift between them, and had caused him as a very young man to leave his home and seek a livelihood in America. During the next few years, both in America and later in France, he seems to have met with little success - a situation which seems to have continued when he eventually came to Hull. At the time of his meeting with our mother he had become a liner in the tailoring trade - a machiner. He was an extremely handsome man, and in those days would have stood out among his contemporaries, not only for his looks, but for his obvious refinement in outlook and behaviour.
They must have achieved love at almost first sight for within six months - in the following March - they were married and set up home in a small four-roomed house. They were ideally happy in their love, despite the insecurity and irregular employment.
Here in the following December, I was born, and I was named after my mother's father.
During the next two and a half years their life followed the normal pattern of the Jewish working-class people of those days - long hours of work for a pittance in the short period of the year when tailoring was busy, interspersed with long stretches of unemployment, and no work aT all for at least half a year. How they lived, even for those who experienced it, was never quite explainable. This was a condition suffered by so many that a philosophy of resignation seemed to apply itself
to this perpetual condition. The one substantial security in this great welter of insecurity in which our parents lived, was the love they had for one another - this was real, constant and never in any danger, no matter how hard and unkind material fate may have from time to time smitten them.
It is from this noble and lovely element in the lives of our parents that l trace the pattern so beautifully woven into the family lives of all my brothers and sisters. It is ingrained in the very tissue and is consciously, or subconsciously, the first principle in the shaping of all that happens m every family situation.
A little over two years after my birth, our brother Moishe came into the world. According to my mother, however great the happiness my birth brought her, this was transcended by the joy of her second born, for it appears that this second child - blue-eyed, golden-haired and of such perfection - had all Hull talking about him.
I have always felt that although each one of her children was precious to her, our brother Moishe was perhaps closer to her heart than was any other. There no doubt other reasons for this, but these I will write about as they enter chronological rhythm of this saga.
Sufficient for the moment if I allow myself a few saddening reflections on the impermanence of physical beauty!
So bad had unemployment become in Hull at this time that within three months of our Moishe being born, our father left his wife and children and travelled to Bristol, where he had heard that there was some hopeful prospect of a job. After a short time so unbearable to both of them had this parting become, they decided, despite all the almost insurmountable difficulties of doing so - and they can be well imagined that Mama and the two children should go to Bristol. This they did, and being again united, they faced a strange and perhaps uncertain future, having left behind them relations and friends, and having started a new life amongst complete strangers. For here in Bristol it seemed that there might be hope.
Did Bristol enfold this little family with a kindlier embrace than that which they had found in Hull? All our father wanted the chance of working, no matter how hard, for what God knows was just a meagre living even by the impoverished standards of 1900.
But it was not to be. For here in Bristol they found the same insecurity and hardship. Here in Bristol they learned the bitter lesson that hardship and insecurity were the twin emblems of the working-class order in the tailoring trade. Geography made no difference.
After twelve months in Bristol, and having established the great truth that Bristol and Hull, and indeed every other town, afforded the same ample opportunity of achieving uniformity in the Spartan virtue of doing without, by dint of Heaven knows what means, we returned to Hull.
During the years that followed, my mother often spoke of her days in Bristol with an emphasis from which we were always quite certain that her memories were tinged with a bleak and barren joylessness. The story of her journey to Bristol, of having to change trains somewhere, of the kindly stranger who helped her in this nightmare journey with her two young children, and her cases, on a cold winter's evening, is very familiar to all my brothers and sisters. If it is possible to feel a great debt of gratitude to an unknown, then I believe that this feeling resides permanently in then hearts of all her children. Ancient and Unknown Stranger'. From the columns of DAVNOB however belatedly, we, the Davidsons, salute you, for you deserve an honoured place in this, our saga!