Life
Frummer driving brings the Wild West to N16
Take it from a Stamford Hill native: the stereotypes about Jewish drivers carry weight
September 26, 2024 12:11
Take it from a Stamford Hill native: the stereotypes about Jewish drivers carry weight
September 26, 2024 12:11“My dad never ever said anything remotely racist in his whole life,” said my boyfriend of his late father. “Never. Except for one thing. There was just one single thing which he used to sometimes say and it would always shock me because it was so strange and out of character for him to say something racist."
So what was the shocking thing he said?
“He said that the Jews were terrible drivers…”
I laughed very loud when the boyfriend told me this and how he’d felt a little hurt and surprised by his dad’s assertions. Surely his father, who worked in Stamford Hill, hadn’t been an antisemite? He would ask his dad how he knew the terrible drivers were Jewish and his father, very uncomfortably, would mumble something about them all driving Volvos, never German cars, but said nothing of their clothes. Or the fact there were seventeen people in each car.
The boyfriend only mentioned it to me because shortly after we first started dating we were driving through Stamford Hill on a Saturday and I made a joke that Saturdays were the safest days to drive in that part of London because there were no frummers driving.
My boyfriend was so taken aback that I said this. To be fair, he’s discombobulated by most things I say to him, but that’s another story. I explained to him, helpfully as ever, that Frummer Driving is not like regular driving – you know, with rules and laws and suchlike. Frummer driving is like being in the Wild West in the 1880s. There are no laws and them there big dented station wagons are wild. From sunset Friday to sunset Saturday the mean streets are just a little bit safer. I even have my own little song about it, to the tune of Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. “Safer, are the
streeeets…”
My boyfriend had one of his occasional, slow moments of realisation. A happy one. Perhaps his father, a quiet, reserved, tolerant Englishman, hadn’t been a raving Jew-hater after all because here was I, a Jew, casually and matter-of-factly telling him the same thing. Because despite growing up in north London, going to school in Edmonton, regularly going to watch Spurs play in Tottenham, and spending much of his time in central London, he had never in his life been to Stamford Hill and really had no idea there was a thriving and badly-driving Orthodox Jewish community there.
I, however, grew up in and around Stamford Hill and Stoke Newington, where the frummer drivers never had an inkling what the yellow double yellow inkings on the roads were, or that double-parking might be frowned upon by people from outside the Orthodox community, or that sometimes it might just be safer to check there were no cars coming before you pulled out of a side street. Having grown up the way I did, very regularly dodging out of the way of a frummer car to save my life without so much as a blink, a raised pulse or the tiniest bead of sweat, I am unfazed by bad driving. Come at me, Uber drivers, Deliveroo bikes, and all the rest of the mad melee on modern London roads. I feel no fear. I have even driven in Naples and laughed at their sweet attempts to alarm me with their driving. Mates – amici –I grew up in Stamford Hill.
I’ve been thinking about all this because one of my children is hoping to take her test soon and, telling a friend this, she started telling me about her own driving test traumas. Although Jewish, my friend, like my boyfriend, grew up far from Stamford Hill and was therefore not accustomed and inured like myself to the craziness. She’s convinced she failed her driving test three times back in the 1970s because of frummer driving. She took those tests in Golders Green and still shudders when she recalls the horrors of the failures: her inability to cope with doors suddenly being flung open in front of her, cars cutting her up left, right and upside down, and the roads being blocked by double-parking on both sides near Kosher Kingdom and the Carmeli. She passed her test the fourth time – when she took it in Bounds Green.
This weekend, as a pre-Rosh Hashanah treat, the family and I are going to see Fiddler on the Roof in Regent’s Park. The boyfriend is coming too. I hope he’ll happily singalong to my unique version of Sunrise, Sunset with me.
Happy New Year to everyone. And stay safe.