It's strange and obvious that 62 years after I left the north London flat where I grew up, I still consider it home. I still remember the phone number: Pinner 1826.
You can walk around the apartment in your head, tracing your hand over the “distemper” on the bathroom wall or another Parisian wallpaper. You can hear the sound of a “geyser” splashing hot water into the bathtub and smell a dying cat on a bed with a red “hospital” blanket. In Bruegel's painting “Dutch Proverbs,'' a man can be seen urinating on the moon on the inn's sign. wall of the front room.
My parents, Harold and Connie, moved to Pinner from London's East End. My mother loved living in Pinner, but my father was frustrated. As we walked together down a suburban street, he said: “Why do we live here?” And I say, “Why do we live here?” I'm 7 years old. How do I know? ”
We mainly lived in two rooms, separated by a hallway, which my brother and I used to race our Dinky toy cars. At one end was the kitchen where we ate and hung our wet clothes on the drying rack, close enough to the rice cooker that I went to school wearing a shirt that smelled of liver and onions. . The room on the other side was the vestibule that also troubled my father with its “fake bloody Tudor windows.” “Hundreds of diamond-shaped windows. They all let drafts in!”
To prevent these drafts, my father spent months installing a Cloutier stove with a beautiful black enamel front and two doors, each with a mica window. It was my job to empty the ashtray. All other stove work was undertaken by my father. My father knelt in front of the stove as if it were a household altar, polished it, tapped it, and repeated, “Old fire isn't bad, young man.'' We shortened this to NABOFTL.
My parents each had an armchair. My mother would sit and knit us jumpers and socks. My father sat and read, took notes, and smoked a cigarette. As the ashes fell in front of him and on the sides of his chair, his mother said, He won't do anything until he steps into it. once he gets the tuk [bum] Now that I'm sitting in that chair, I can't get up from it. ”
In winter, the kitchen was heated by a coke fire lit by a perforated metal tube that emitted a blue flame. The window looked out into the backyard with the coal storage, and I climbed up there and pretended I was going to the moon. Beyond the garden was an alley paved with brown pebbles, where I played ball with the butcher's son, Keith. The United Dairies milk cart horses stomped and snorted. And my brother named the antique shop owner who speeds into a dead end “the one who accelerates past the trash can.”
There was a handmade surface called a “flap” under the window that would fold up and go outside to help my mother make fruitcakes, pickles, and jam. My mother said there was a pantry in the corner to keep the milk fresh. That didn't happen. It turned sour, but it reminded me of my mother's Smetana. Smetana was a sour cream made in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, a faraway place my father called “Heim.”
Moments of tingling can occur due to food. My father often remembered the Bab's cholent, a lamb and barley dish his grandmother used to make. Then my mother said: Don't expect to stand by the rice cooker 24 hours a day…your bub spoiled you. Remember, I'm not your bub. ” my father asked, looking at us. What did I say wrong? ”
We had Christmas. The present mysteriously appeared next to me and my brother's bed. Every year, a new puffin picture book is published, followed by a book of puffin stories. One Christmas, the walls of our apartment were covered in glittery dragons made by the art group at my school (where my father taught). My friends used to say, “Why is there a dragon on the wall?” They loved coming here to see the guy peeing on the moon.
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