The poet’s parents
by Christopher Norris
This is a poem about Emma Vetterlein, a Jewish East-End Londoner and dedicated Communist Party member and union activist whom I now recall as a fairly frequent dropper-in at our family home during my childhood and early teens. That home was in Manor Park, London E12, hardly ‘East End’ but in outer London on the verge of Epping and inhabited for the most part by (real or aspiring) lower-middle or middle-class residents. Her droppings-in were occasions that I now recall as variously strained, baffling, disruptive, intriguing, educatiional, and – though increasingly so with benefit of decades-long hindsight – a great source of social and political insight.
In writing about her I’m aware of also writing about perplexities, limits and blind spots in my parents, as well as my own process of discovering what matters in lives both personal and collective. I can find no mentions of Emma on Google though it’s a rich source of information on more prominent Jewish East End activists before, during and after WW2.
As the world moves onto its dark side yet again with fascism resurgent in so many quarters, her example is more than ever worth recalling as a summons to resistance and the powers of re-awakened memory. The eggs come in by way of post-war neighbourly mutual aid along with – poetically speaking – their ubiquity as metaphors for a whole range of moral, social, political, and other such strongly evaluative modes of discourse.
1
‘No revolution without cracking some’,
That’s what Red Emma often said,
Half-hoping Dad or Mum
Would take it up, or shake their head,
Or else contrive to thumb
The Telegraph for its big spread
On ‘how they’d blow us all to Kingdom come,
Those Commies’, filling me with dread
While Emma would play dumb,
Keep her eggs safely cosseted
In the one basket, drum
Some other topic up, and shed
That hitch in friendship’s long continuum.
‘A good egg’, Dad opined; ‘the curate’s sort’,
Mum didn’t say, although I knew,
As kids do, how she thought,
Despite the rotten ones they threw
At Emma, those she fought
Back then, the fascist Blackshirt crew,
Whose ‘cause’ that daily rag would once report
Dismissively. ‘Just through-and-through
Fifth-columnists, distort
It as they may, that longed-for coup’,
She’d say and cut them short,
Whoever’d egg her on to do
Her ‘thing’ – their weird idea of comic sport.
Yet all the egg was on their faces, those
Who took him for the goose that laid
The golden one, that Mose-
Ley rabble-rouser who betrayed,
Not least, my Dad who chose
To face the medics down and made
It through in Burma though he saw God knows
What dreadful things while Mum, who stayed
In London, plied the hose
As Blitz fire-watcher and displayed,
Like Emma, all that goes
To show two eggs that make the grade
Yet seemed, at times, as if they’d come to blows.
Like walking on eggshells it was when she’d
‘Drop in’, Red Emma, or ‘call by
For a quick chat’, and we’d . . .
Not egg them on, of course, but try,
Let’s say, to see what need
It satisfied, or what might lie
Behind it when the two of them agreed
To disagree, to have that tie
Not witness a shared creed
But more what often seemed, as I
Did my poor best to read
The signs, a way to certify
The bond held good should rocky times succeed.
A kind of nest egg, you could say, but held
In trust implicitly between
Those two as if it spelled
Détente, or might turn out to mean
What her namesake excelled
In showing: Emma Goldman, queen
Of all those who instinctively rebelled
Against the puritan routine
Of commissars who quelled
The joie de danse, just as she’d been,
Our Emma, jet-propelled
To her revolt by what she’d seen
Of human lives laid waste as profits swelled.
2
This egg-stuff you may deem a jeu d’esprit
In dubious taste, except that lack
Or surfeit seemed to be
What mostly brought Red Emma back,
Eggs taken, offered free,
As if with values you could track
In terms of use, not exchange-currency,
And thereby open some small crack
For shared humanity
To cultivate the neighbour’s knack
(Or chicken-sexer’s key)
To making sure the life-odds stack
In ways less sure to pile the life-debris.
I’d sit through Emma’s visits half-aware
Of all this going on and how
She’d say odd things right there,
In our backroom, that I’d hear now
As partly meant to bear
What hopeful gist bad times allow
To realists like her who’d had their share
Of grief, and partly to avow
What might head off despair
Or just avert some looming row
That might put paid to their,
My parents’, vague wish to endow
Their lives, through her, with lungfuls of fresh air.
Think back now to my early teens and it’s
Red Emma, Jewish, ‘Vetterlein’,
So exile, life in bits,
Then East-End London, ’39,
The war, and soon the Blitz,
And after that – but this part’s mine
To tell, or sort-of, since her memory sits
So centrally, so much in line
With all that nicely fits
The preferential light I’d shine
On – truth be told – the glitz
Investing her who could combine
Such talk with such a life and call it quits.
I think of Ruben, two doors down, who’d play
Me LPs (‘classical’) and nursed
The love of music they,
My Mum and Dad, tried hard at first
To treat the usual way –
Piano lessons – till the thirst
For hearing works and what he had to say
About them had me sit immersed
In his front room array
Of speakers (monaural), well-versed
In all that the home sway
Of decent taste would count at worst
‘Third programme stuff’, at best a touch outré.
‘She’s no spring chicken’, Mum once said, but who’d
Keep lines away with all she’d known,
The fears, the war, the food
So scarce she’d save a twice-boiled bone,
And all those books they chewed
So fiercely over, comrades thrown
Just briefly out-of-kilter by some skewed
Account of Marx or danger zone
Where new class conflicts brewed
By management were swiftly shown,
Through Emma’s aptitude
For knock-down talk, with covers blown
And her in union-buster-busting mood.
3
I see them now, both wary, each alert
To any sign the other might
Betray of feeling hurt
By some imaginary slight
Or wishing not to skirt
Some deep-laid clash of views despite
My looking on, engrossed. ‘The little squirt
Can learn from it, the one we fight
Where people put their shirt
Not just on getting Karl Marx right
But striving to exert
Their mental muscles to the height
Of salving all that capital would pervert.’
‘Chicken or egg?’, I wondered – how explain
Not just their differences but that
Convergence of the twain,
So odd, so fraught at times, so flat
Against the household grain
That Dad’s response ‘I’ll eat my hat!’
Seemed a good vantage-point from which to gain
Some sense of how a habitat
Like ours, a home-domain
So lower-middle-class, could at
Red Emma’s call attain
A fluid state no Apparat
Could theorise or prior state ordain.
I’d say it shows how mother-wit recaps
What Marx revealed of all we’ve missed
In life and shrewdly taps
The remnant longing to enlist
Some far-back homely scraps
Of truth half-known that might assist
Our quest to fill the intervening gaps,
Turn new-leaf kid-psychiatrist,
And reach across the lapse
Of years with this, my grown-up twist
On memories that perhaps
Red Emma, Mum’s own Bolshevist,
Would likely file with faded holiday snaps.
