Manchester Life

Mom's Memoirs:

I think I got  a room of my own the next day, but we did not stay there much longer, my parents had already rented an apartment for us, anticipating my arrival. 

That apartment is a story in itself: It was half of a large “semi-detached “, i.e. 1/4 of a house. Housing after all the air-raids Manchester had gone through was very scarce, so people became quite creative! This house, 12 Palatine Road, very conveniently located near a bus stop of a direct route to downtown, near the “White Lion” and two other pubs, the “Red Lion” and the “Golden Lion”, was totally crazily divided: it had a staircase which went upstairs directly from the front door, with rooms on both sides of it; so the landlady simply encased the stairs, which meant the door to the stairs to our part of the house was right in the middle of the landing of the downstairs flat (English for apt.). and thus we had to go through the downstairs apartment to get to ours. At first it worked out great: downstairs was a young woman my age with her little boy; her husband was away in the army. Her family was delighted that there was just a regular family upstairs, and we got on famously. 

My father was already sick when I returned home. He suffered from  high blood pressure, but there was no medication yet for that condition, the advice was to eat garlic! My father would have mini strokes, from which he would recover, but after each one  he was left  in worse condition than before. It affected his walking and his speech. We took him to the hospital, but after a few days they sent him home, saying there was nothing they could do for him.  His employers were wonderful, they kept him on even though he came to work very irregularly , and paid him his full salary. I believe towards the end they cut it  somewhat. I was working and got a decent salary, and my mother was giving Russian and Polish lessons -yes, Polish! Remnants of the Polish Army were stationed in Manchester and dated   (and even married) English girls, who then wanted to learn Polish.

...

The girls [at Lankro Chemicals] couldn’t wait until the evening when they would post themselves at the RR station under the clock, and pretend they were waiting for their dates (i.e. American soldiers , who flocked into the city for the evening). The Americans were only too happy to pick up the ditched girls. The question asked in those days was “what have the American boys got that the English don’t have” and the answer was: “”they’ve got it here”! Not only that: American dates were much more attentive than English ones, they had lots of candy and cigarettes and got much bigger paychecks! They even got preferential treatment as I can personally attest: my newspaper agent from whom I regularly bought “The Statesman and Nation” produced cigarettes for Henry, English ones, not the lousy French ones that were more often available. I was a smoker in those days, as most people working in laboratories were; in fact smoking was so prevalent that even my mother puffed on a cigarette occasionally , albeit  she had no idea how to do it: she would hold a cigarette in a cigarette holder (I don’t believe these exist any more) very daintily between index and middle finger, pulled a little air in and puffed, intently watching the smoke come out. My father smoked Egyptian cigarettes which I disliked, I smoked something called “Senior Service” when I could get them; later the Americans introduced us to Camels. As tobacco supplies got scarcer and scarcer, I even smoked some French ones, "Caporal” or something like that [presumably Gauloises Caporals], which were lousy. Yet I smoked relatively little, half a pack a day, the average for most smokers was 2 packs a day! The trouble was , of course, that smoking was permitted everywhere, public transportation (on a double-decker bus upstairs, on one level buses in the back like on airplanes). I restrained myself to the extent that I did not smoke before midmorning! Then one of the guys I was going out with berated me that “you don’t smoke cigarettes, you spoil them”, so that started me on inhaling! When the supply got really low, I even tried a pipe (they made cute ones for ladies), but that was awful. 

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The war  in England was more or less over by then [after D-Day], “black -out” (when not a chink of light was allowed to be seen from outside the houses) was changed to “dim-out” and Civil Defense duties were curtailed[1]. I am mentioning my father in these early letters and said then already what preoccupies me still now, sixty years later: that I never had the opportunity to get to know my father. I left for boarding school in England when I was not yet 16; when I came home to stay I was 22 and he was not himself any more... In between I had only been at home for very short vacation periods  

 On Oct. 12, 1944, Manchester  had its “lighting-up”. Street lights came on again, albeit not at full strength, and Manchester was celebrating at Peter Square! I was among the celebrants, to the best of my recollections I was alone, but I may have been with Hedy Frenkel (Edith’s younger sister)   

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I got ahead of myself, so I better return to the end of the War in Manchester. My father died in our living room - we could not manage to get him to bed and the hospital had refused to take him back! We could not get an ambulance until he had passed away for all intents and purposes. That was March  1945, the war in our part of the world was all but over.  President Roosevelt died the same week as my father. 

As soon as we had peace it was another story altogether: Eileen's husband was “demobbed” and they bought a house of their own and moved away. Their place was rented  to a number of Indians (India Indians), who seemed to run a brothel down there; people were constantly running in and out, the place stank of curry, the oddest women came and went. We talked to the police who were very sympathetic, but they said they could not do anything unless they saw money changing hands. For several nights we had a policeman sitting at the bottom of our stairs, hidden by the enclosure, and although he shared our suspicion, there was not enough evidence for an arrest , since he did not see a monetary transaction. 

Notes:

1. Mom only alludes to "Civil Defense" in her writing, but she had mentioned at times her duties with the A.R.P. In an email to Magdalen (January 4, 2003) in relation to a school project, she wrote:
   
   "It was spring 1944, I lived at my parents' house, in suburban Manchester, the war was in full swing, in Africa, Italy.. The bombing of Northern England had petered out. I was working in a lab of a factory and was exempted from military service because I was working for an "essential" industry. I was on duty one night a week for the Civil Defence, at a Mobile First Aid Post[2]. (Uniform was awful: a big apron-like thing, a navy blue trenchcoat and a black felt hat, just like English school hats)."