When I first read in the Routledge Tabernacles machzor that “seven days shall ye sit in booths”, my infant mind wondered how we would all fit into that red box on the street corner, the one with the black appliance and two buttons marked A and B. If you’re under 35 you won’t have a clue what I’m on about so I’d better explain that, before smartphones, the red booth was a fixture in our lives, with free calls to 999 — that’s 111 to you — and a B button for your pennies back if the other party was not at home.
Like other fixtures I grew up with, the booth has gone the way of the stone horse trough, an oblong object that stood at the end of the street for the refreshment of beasts of burden that delivered our coal and other essentials. Another world? You’d better believe it.
I once took a stroll in Regent’s Park with a composer in his 90s and my five year-old daughter, who asked why some roses had no smell. “It’s because the horses are gone,” sighed Berthold. The horses, it seems, attracted sparrows who fed off undigested wheat husks in their droppings and went on to do whatever birds and bees do to give the flowers their fragrance. Think about it: what did you last see a sparrow in north London? They used to be more common than robins.
As a toddler, I could walk along walls from one end of our crescent to the other, walking at the same height as adults and feeling no deference towards them in regard to our respective heights. The walls had no railings because the government had sheared them all off to make guns in the first year of the war and no-one in the 1950s had the ration cards to replace them.
Walk down the same crescent now and there are no walls left to walk on. Stoke Newington has become so fashionable you can pay £5 for a coffee, £500 for a haircut and half a million for a one-bed bachelor pad with chi-chi curtains and “original features”. The house where I grew up last sold four years ago for £1,582,500. With white walls and carpets on the rightmove.com website, its airy expanses evoke no memories in me of the linoleum-floored, wintry-cold Victorian pile where I grew up, with one or two rooms on every half-landing and a great-aunt in the attic, a Frankfurt refugee. I feel no nostalgia for this house, no tug, no sense of loss.
The last owners kitted it out with colour-magazine window-boxes, a Japanese rear garden and purple sofas. Central heating on every half-floor. The scullery where we salted meat for kashering is now a conservatory. No curtains. Blinds from Home and Garden (how unhaimishe is that?). The only memory trigger in the photo pack is the pattern of floor tiles leading to the front door, a crisscross of yellow and brown starbursts that would have been familiar to Charles Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody (1892) or to JB Priestley in Angel Pavement (1930), the novel he set around these barely-desirable residential streets.
It is the streets and their features I want to preserve, not the house itself. Kids find it unbelievable that I remember lamplighters, men from the council who wobbled around the district on old bikes, carrying a long pole that they used at dusk to light the lampposts on either side of the street. How do I remember them? I can tell you precisely.
It was a late November afternoon in 1956. Our strictly Orthodox community was filling up with families who fled Hungary after the Soviet invasion. They differed from us in many ways. Most men wore Chasidic garb of long black gabardine; some wore white. Their customs were strange. In a young couple’s lodgings I saw amulets hung around the cot of a newborn baby to ward off the evil eye. We western Jews regarded such practices as superstitious.
Be that as it may, we welcomed the newcomers as best we could, knowing that they had survived Nazism and Communism with their severe faith intact. One of their rabbis was installed as head of our Beth Din. I was taken, that November afternoon, to be among the crowd greeting his arrival at our shul on Green Lanes. It was a chilly day and the courtyard was packed. My short trousers chafed the inside of my legs. It got dark. The lamplighter rode past, kindling each streetlamp one by one. I was told off for stamping the ground with impatience and cold. I saw the lamplighter ride off, the last I ever saw.
Then the great rav arrived, surrounded by a phalanx of Chasidim. In that moment, I knew that our Jewish London had changed forever. Nothing would ever be the same again.
