can staunch them. I had never heard the word staunch pronounced out loud before. We were at that moment playing billiards in a bar. Don’t forget to chalk the cue, he added.
He read to me in Spanish a poem by García Lorca, who had been shot four years earlier, and when he translated it, I believed in my fourteen-year-old mind that I knew, except for a few details, what life was about and what had to be risked! Perhaps I told him so, or perhaps some other rashness of mine provoked him, for I remember him saying: Check out the details! Check them out first not last!
He said this with a note of regret as if somewhere, somehow, he himself had made a mistake about details that he regretted. No, I’m wrong. He was a man who regretted nothing. A mistake for which he had had to pay the price. During his life he paid the price for many things he didn’t regret.
Two girls in long white lace dresses are crossing the far end of the Place Nowy. Ten or eleven years old, both tall for their age, both become Honorary Women, both, as they cross the square, stepping out of their childhood.
La Semaine blanche, Ken says. Last Sunday kids across the whole of Poland took their First Communion. And every day this week they do their best to get to a church and take communion once more, particularly the girls – the boys too but they are less noticeable and there are fewer of them – particularly the girls, who want to step out in their white communion dresses once again.
The two girls in the square walk side by side so they can scythe down the glances they are attracting. They’re going to the Church of Corpus Christi where there’s a famous Madonna in gold leaf, Ken says. All the girls of Kraków would like to take their First Communion in Corpus Christi because the communion dresses their mothers buy there are better cut, have a better length.
It was in the Old Met Music Hall on the Edgware Road, sitting beside him, that I first learnt how to judge claims to style, learnt the rudiments of criticism. Ruskin, Lukács, Berenson, Benjamin, Wölfflin, all came later. My essential formation was in the Old Met, looking down from the gallery onto the triangular stage, surrounded by a noisily receptive and unforgiving public, who judged the stand-up comics, the adagio acrobats, the singers, the ventriloquists, pitilessly. We saw Tessa O’Shea bring the house down, and we saw her booed off stage, her hair wet with tears.
An act had to have style. The audience had to be won over twice a night. And to do this, the non-stop sequence of gags had to lead to something more mysterious: the conspiratorial, irreverent proposition that life itself was a stand-up act!
Max Miller, ‘The Cheeky Chappie’ in a silver suit with his hyper-thyroid eyes, played on the triangular stage like an irrepressible sea lion, for whom every laugh was a fish to be swallowed.
I’ve got my own studios in Brighton, and a woman came to my house on Monday morning – she said, ‘Max, I want you to paint a snake on my knee.’ I went dead white, honest I did. No, well I’m not strong, I’m not strong. So, listen – I jumped out of bed, see … no, listen a minute … so I started to paint the snake just above her knee, that’s where I started. But I had to chuck it – she smacked me in the face – I didn’t know a snake was so long – how long’s an ordinary snake?
Each comedian played a victim, a victim who had to win the hearts of all those who had bought tickets, and who were also victims.
Harry Champion came downstage, hands out, begging for help, on the verge of tragedy: ‘Life is a very hard thing – you never come out of it alive!’ When he said this on a good night, the whole house put itself in the palm of his hand.
Flanagan and Allen rushed on, as if on urgent business and late. Then they showed, at high speed, that the whole world and its urgencies was based on a profound misunderstanding. They were young. Flanagan had soulful, naive eyes; Ches Allen, the straight one, was dapper and correct. Yet together they demonstrated the decrepitude of the world!
If I could sell my taxi I’d go back to Africa and do what I used to do.
What’s that?
Dig holes and sell them to farmers!
The microphone is going to kill their art, Ken whispered to me in the gallery. I asked him what he meant. Listen to how they use their voices, he explained. They talk across the whole theatre and we’re in the middle of them. If they use a mike, this will stop and the public will no longer be in the middle. The secret of music hall artists is that they play defenceless, like we all are. A player with a mike is armed! It’s another ball game.
He was right. The music hall died during the next decade.
A woman, carrying a basket of wild sorrel, passes the table in the Place Nowy.
Could you make us some sorrel soup? Ken asks me. We could have it tomorrow instead of borsch.
I guess so.
With eggs?
That I’ve never tried.
Well, he shuts his eyes, you prepare the soup, serve it, and in each bowl, you put a hot hard-boiled egg. You have made sure that beside each bowl there’s a knife as well as a spoon. You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.
Of home?
Certainly not, not even for the Poles.
Of what then?
Of survival, perhaps.
It seemed to me that Ken always lived in the same bedsit. In reality, he moved often, but the moves were made when I was away at school, and on returning and going to see him, I would find his same few possessions piled up on a similar table at the foot of a similar bed, behind a door with a key, which opened onto a staircase, overlooked by a landlady, worrying in the same way about the lights being left on.
Ken’s room had a gas fire and a tall window. On the mantelpiece above the gas fire he stacked our books. On the table by the window was a large portable wireless (the word radio was rarely used) to which we listened. 2 Sept. 1939: the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht invaded Poland without warning this morning at dawn. Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were going to lose their lives during the next five years.
In the room’s wardrobe he kept not only clothes but food: oatmeal biscuits, hard-boiled eggs, a pineapple, coffee. Attached to the gas fire was a gas ring for heating water in a saucepan that he kept on the windowsill. The room smelt of cigarettes, pineapple, and lighter fuel. The toilet and washbasin were on the landing either above or below. I tended to forget which, and he would shout after me: Up not down!
His two suitcases, which he left open on the floor, were never entirely unpacked. At that time nothing was unpacked, even in people’s heads. Everything was in store or in transit. Dreams were kept on luggage racks, in kitbags and in suitcases. In one of the cases open on the floor there was a jar of honey from Brittany, a dark fisherman’s sweater, a volume of Baudelaire in French, and a table-tennis bat.
Give you a lead of fifteen plus service! he proposed. Ready? Serve! Fifteen, love. Fifteen, one. Fifteen, two. Fifteen, three. He was beating me like that in 1940.
By 1941 he was still beating me two games out of three, but he was no longer giving me a lead.
He was now working in some capacity, about which he would say nothing, for a foreign service at the BBC. He often came back to the room after work in the
