Number of days since I started this blog: 90

Number of times I have felt like deleting the whole lot: at least 90

Number of times I have been glad I haven’t: at least a few

I have said this before, but lockdown and what comes after lockdown brings out the best and the absolute worst in people.

Take Saturday night.

Lydia, Mum and I had a bit of a lie-in on Saturday morning after the funeral. And then we sat in the garden having a late breakfast and Lydia broached the subject of the little photograph. Mum got a bit huffy about me poking through her stuff, and I apologised and said that what she had said about being born Jewish and wanting to die Jewish had bothered me and I just felt that I needed to know. And so she relented.

And for the first time in 62 and 58 years respectively, she told us about her childhood.

Hannah Ruth Weiss (Mum) was born in the Jodenbuurt (Jewish Quarter) of Amsterdam in 1932. She was the oldest child of Jakob and Ruth Weiss, both Ashkenazi Jews whose families had moved from various parts of Eastern Europe to Amsterdam during previous persecutions of Jewish people. Hannah/Mum went to a small school near The Rembrandt House. She had two younger sisters and a baby brother called Isaac – he was either not yet born at the time the photo was taken, or too young to be included. Photos were a big deal in those days; this one was apparently taken by a neighbour who worked as a photographer. Mum thinks there were several prints, and that her mother put this one inside a tiny copy of the Torah when she packed her things into a brown cardboard suitcase ready for the big journey to England.

Mum’s father was a clerk, according to what was recorded on the census, and her mother was a housewife. They did not have much money, and buying a place on the kindertransport was not only dangerous but expensive. By 1939, thousands of Jewish children had already been sent to safety in England to stay with strangers, and Mum said she remembers her parents discussing what they could sell in order to be able to afford to buy a place for one or more of the children. But time started to run out and in the end they sent Hannah on her own. According to the only letter that Mum received from her parents after she arrived in England, the one I had seen in the drawer, there was a plan for her parents to follow with the younger children when they could raise the funds.

But in 1940 the Nazis invaded Amsterdam, and the Jewish Quarter was shut off.

Then Mum said, and if you are going to start talking about Anne Frank, I don’t want to listen. And we said why not, and she said that she was sick of hearing about her, because most people didn’t get the opportunity to hide like her family did. And I said but she was captured in the end, and Mum said yes, but not like my family. They were just sent by train straight to the death camp.

And then Mum told us about a visit she had made to Amsterdam in 1978 to look up her family records. This was when she found that her parents and sisters had died in 1941 only 2 days after arriving at Belzec, an extermination camp in Poland where half a million Jews were murdered by the SS. The reason why camps like this are not as well known as the more famous Belsen and Auschwitz, where Anne Frank and her mother died, is because their sole purpose was extermination, rather than concentration. In other words, there were no survivors, and therefore no-one to pass on the horror of what happened there.

And there was no record at all of baby Isaac.

While Mum was talking, Lydia and I took turns to hold her hands. The little hot circles that appear on her cheeks when she is excited or unwell burned brightly, and her eyes were shining but not in a good way. She didn’t cry once. But we did.

And that wasn’t everything. When Mum got to England, she was allocated to a family from East London who had been hoping for an older girl to help with the housework. They were devout Christians, or as devout a Christian as you can be if you take someone else’s child, refuse to allow her to follow the religion she has known since she was a baby and which is the only thing she has to connect her with her parents, change her name so she doesn’t sound Jewish, half starve her and turn her into your unpaid scivvy. And when she is 13 and some disgusting family friend starts interfering with her and she finds the courage to tell you, choose to believe him rather than her and send her away as a punishment to a very nasty Christian boarding school. It is no wonder Mum wants nothing to do with them and won’t even tell us their names.

It was now past lunchtime. Mum said she wanted to show us some more photos and copies of the Weiss family records. And as Lydia was due to go back to London, we grabbed a sandwich and decided to drive over to Waylands Heath in convoy. When we got there, Lydia helped Mum upstairs while I took on the job of clearing out the fridge and making the kitchen a little bit less of a health hazard. (I should have done this weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit busy.) They were upstairs for ages, by which time the dustbin was full of environmentally unfriendly plastic bags full of out-of-date food and I had started clearing some of the other cupboards, where I came across an ancient carbon monoxide detector which I tried to dismantle using the wrong sort of screwdriver. It seemed to be fused shut, and was obviously defunct, so I slung it in the bin with the other rubbish.

We then sat around the dining room table and peered at a couple of tiny photos of Mum’s parents when they were young. Her father was dark with glasses, and we thought he looked rather intellectual. And Mum was almost identical to her mother who was tall, fair and rather beautiful. The other Ruth.

Eventually we bade a tearful farewell to Lydia, and Mum and I set off home.

Later that evening, we were watching Gardener’s World on catch up when the phone rang. It was one of Mum’s neighbours, who was phoning to report that there was something in Mum’s dustbin that had been going off for three nights and it had kept the whole neighbourhood awake and if someone didn’t come and sort it out she would have to call the police.

I knew immediately what it was, of course. I said who am I speaking to please, and she said I am not prepared to give you my name. So I said, but you have phoned me up and you seem to know my name. And she said, are you going to come and deal with this bin and I said, did you know that my father has just died and my mother who is 88 has been in hospital, and anyway, the bin can’t have been going off for three days because I was only there this afternoon and I know what it is, it is just an old carbon monoxide monitor. Maybe you could get it out of the bin and deactivate it? And she said, I work in healthcare and I know how dangerous dustbins can be, especially with the virus. I’m not touching it.

So I said, Thank you. And put the phone down.

It was nearly 10pm so I helped Mum upstairs and said please don’t move and I drove over to Waylands Heath and only broke the speed limit once or twice, and I emptied the bin on to the driveway and found the carbon monoxide monitor which seemed to have been brought back to life by a very smelly bag of potatoes that had gone slimy from being left unopened for 10 weeks and was emitting a very small beep every ten seconds. And I stamped on the monitor until I heard it go crunch while hoping the horrid lady was looking out through her nasty net curtains. And then I drove back home again and went up to see Mum and sat on her bed and we talked about her mean-spirited neighbour who had nothing else to think about other than a slight beep emanating from a dustbin. And then we started laughing and we laughed and laughed and the next thing I knew, we were both crying. And we cried for quite a while.

The next day I messaged Lydia and told her about my late night dustbin drama and she said, look Sadie, I think you need a rest, I am going to take next week off and I will come and collect Mum and bring her back to stay with me. You have done more than enough, OK? And I was going to say no, I am fine, but then I thought about having a lie-in and maybe being able to have a long leisurely bath, not to mention whatever Brian means by creating a social bubble.

So I said yes please.

And as for Brian, I was going to write about what happened when we met on Sunday but then I noticed how much I have already written. So you will just have to wait until tomorrow.

Who says I don’t know how to do suspense, Ericka the Literary Agent??

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