all wildly popular operettas with lush romantic scores by European composers. Sadie would come up on the excursion train, and she and Solly walked and talked along the Thames riverbank, saw the show, visited Johnny Isaacs’ fish and chip shop in Mile End and sometimes, rather daringly, drank coffee at a Kardomah café, before he took her to Paddington to catch the train home.
The Thames Embankment always had a special significance for Sadie, and Rosa can now understand why. It was dreamtime: a time when she and Solly might forget duty and family obligations, when they would be something other than just the children of poor migrants, when they could imagine a life beyond the East End, maybe on a new estate among ‘the English’. But it was always going to be hard to get away – as hard as it would be for Rosa in 1957.
Sadie and Solly were a sentimental couple and in later years would go for an ‘outing’ to Paddington Station – not to buy a ticket and embark on one of the new diesel trains, but to sit on a bench and remember the times when he would wait there for his ‘Welsh lass’ arriving on the steam-driven excursion train. Sentimental and romantic. Solly wrote a poem about it all:
I carried a cane then with a silver knob,
we thought it was smart, it was just the job.
She carries a cane now on which to lean,
she’s not quite so agile as at seventeen.
The seat that we sat on marked ‘GWR’
has now been removed, so has the bar,
And the lounge where we met and agreed what to do.
I wonder how many of those dreams came true.
‘I’m the eldest, Mother’s almost blind and the family all depend on me,’ Sadie told him.
‘My father died last year and my mother and five sisters all depend on me,’ replied Solly.
‘Would you like to come to Cardiff and meet my family?’ asked Sadie.
It was only four hours on the train but it might as well have been a trip to Paris, so different was travel in the 1920s.
Sadie always referred to Nathan and Eva as ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ and the house in Plantagenet Street as ‘home’. Solly wrote that he was cordially welcomed, but eighty years on Rosa wonders about the family dynamics and what her father might have diplomatically omitted.
‘My brother Will isn’t here, he’s “on the road”, a commercial traveller,’ said Sadie, making the introductions. ‘Next year he’s getting married to the sister of a rabbi in London and he’s going into business on his own. These are my other brothers: Jimmy, who’s married, helps Father in the workshop, but he’s more interested in selling insurance. And this tall young man is my “little” brother Gus.
‘My sister Rosie has a boyfriend in London and we think they’ll get married, as she’s very popular; she’s gone out tonight but you’ll meet her when she gets home. This is Dora who does all the cooking since Mother can’t see well any more and she’s very good at it. And these two are my youngest sisters: Dinah’s just got a clerical job and Rachel’s still at school. Father said she could have an extra year because she’s so clever and pretty.’
Was there a tinge of envy? Rachel was Nathan’s favourite; he paid for ballet shoes and he sent her for lessons at the local church hall. Was Sadie thinking of the brown paper she put in her shoes to keep her feet warm when she worked at the market stall?
The Samuel parents eyed twenty-two-year-old Solly cautiously and weighed up the odds. Their daughter was nine years older than this young man, and to her siblings it seemed an unlikely pairing; they’d always assumed that Sadie would never get married. It was strange to think of her not being there sitting at her machine in the workshop, or looking after the market stall. And who would wash and mend their clothes, polish the brass samovar and see to all the household chores? With Will and Jimmy leading independent lives, and Rosie already determined to get away too, the family would be struggling. Gus would probably want to leave soon. Dora, who was shy, might stay for longer; Dinah and Rachel, young and rebellious, were saving hard to move out.
Every passing year made her age more of an argument that could be used against her:
You’re already thirty-one, it’s embarrassing for all of us if you marry someone nine years younger, cradle-snatching.
If you really want to get married why don’t you find yourself a nice widower who needs someone to mind his children?
You can’t expect the rest of us to look after Mother and Father as they get old, it’s your job.
Solly’s situation was not much better. Regina, his widowed mother, also laid it on the line:
You must take your father’s place now.
You must help run the workshop and take care of your poor orphaned sisters.
We will starve if you desert us.
Loyal and devoted, Sadie’s friends urged her to accept Solly.
‘It’s so romantic!’ said Leah Gordon.
‘It doesn’t matter a bit about the ages – he adores you!’ said Rosie Posner.
‘His sisters will give you hell but he’ll stick up for you,’ said Doris Glassberg.
It took three years for Solly to persuade Sadie. If she refused again, he threatened to throw the tiny engagement ring into the river Thames, and as she abhorred waste, she gave in.
‘We won’t be able to go to the wedding,’ said Leah. ‘Too expensive and there’s no place for us to stay in London. But we must get a present.’
It was a Sunday and the girls were all sitting in the sunshine on the bank of the Taff, looking across the bridge to Temperance Town.
‘If we all put our money together, we could buy something really special,’ said Doris. ‘Sadie’s never had a “hope chest”,’ said Rosie. ‘Why don’t we get Dafydd Thomas in the market to make her one? We could put some nice things inside, tablecloths and towels maybe?’
The cedar box was in the luggage van of the train that brought Sadie to London for her wedding. She was all by herself, sitting on a wooden seat in a third-class carriage. On her lap she carefully carried a basket of eggs as a gift for Aunt Annie, her mother’s sister-in-law, who would prepare her for married life.
This is what escape looks like, thinks Rosa.
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