Mark Glanville - The Goldberg Variations

‘You gotta move it ap an’ down!’

Clarinet in one hand and cock in the other, I had the restorative and the nostrum.

I integrated successfully into my new form with the aid of an image change. I’d outgrown the flannel blazer, and was able to persuade Mum that the commonly worn woollen variety would be warmer. I wore the fashionable attire of the terraces; pleated Ben Sherman or Brutus shirts, blue and green two-tone tonic trousers and tassel-loafer shoes. To top it all I had a navy blue, knee-length crombie, complete with red silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket.

‘Glanville thinks ’e’s a skin’ead!’ sneered one of the bitchier girls in the class, hitting the target with painful accuracy. Soon after a group of the genuine article surrounded me on the tube, swiped my handkerchief, and sat opposite, gloating over its quality and discussing how they’d pick the embroidered initials out of Mum’s gift.

Every penny I had I spent on jazz, generally at HMV on Oxford Street, a twenty-minute bus ride away. One afternoon, with King Oliver’s Dixieland Stompers and Jelly Roll Morton already in the bag, I headed for the cassette department. There it was, winking at me from the tidy rows, The Dutch Swing College Band, as if it knew I had no money left to buy it with. Mum, a huge jazz fan, had raved about them. I’d been trying to find one of their records for months. I glanced behind. Two shop assistants were chatting by the till. I looked left, right, in the mirror above. A short man in an old, brown mac stood next to me and began extracting and replacing cassettes aimlessly. Like me, I thought, up to no good. I felt very self-conscious and hot in the crombie as I turned the cassette round and round in my hand, peeling off the cellophane nervously before plunging it into the depths of my coat pocket. I walked through the store in a daze, my stomach tingling uncomfortably, until I was out in the dazzling autumn sunshine and someone gripped my shoulder. It was the man in the brown mac.

In the manager’s office they kept me waiting half an hour while they debated whether or not to call the police. In the end I was released. As soon as I was home I rushed into Mum’s arms and burst into tears, and, before you could say Carl Jung, I was flicking through Country Life in a Harley Street waiting room.

Sigmund Freud was one of the household gods. Handsome green volumes of his oeuvre lined the drawing-room bookcase, the works of the disciples by their sides. We were encouraged to read them almost as soon as we were out of nappies, not just the theory, but also its application in works such as Moses and Monotheism or Civilisation and its Discontents. My parents accepted his precepts unquestioningly. Theory was also put into practice. Mum was in therapy with a brilliant polymath in Reading, learning as much about zoology and Shakespeare as she did about herself. My brother and sisters all had counselling at one time or other. Only Dad didn’t. He just sent everybody else off to be cured, hoping his life would be made easier once we had been. Had he been analysed himself we might all have benefited. Freud was good enough for us, but the barbs in his beard might spike Dad’s muse.

My own analyst, Dr Woodhead, was a proper Freudian, old enough to have known the great man and grown up with the passion of a new faith. I’d lie on the couch while she sat behind me, white-haired and elegant in county tweeds, stopwatch ticking for fifty minutes, both happy with silence, and content to bounce questions back at me with a sure forehand. Our sessions were twice a week. I was ferried from school and then home by Douglas ‘Buzz’ Wells, an ex-racing driver, golfer and boxer with a toothbrush moustache who referred to her as Timbernut. The expensive navel-searching must have seemed indulgent to a man who’d resolved his own frustrations in the ring or on the racetrack. Our laddish conversations lifted the damp, analytical gloom my sessions left me wrapped in. A couple of visits a week to his place in Norland Square, just round the corner from my parents, might have benefited me more.

To the left and to the right of Sigmund Freud stood Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce. Together they comprised a Jewish atheist’s trinity. A diet of the sayings of these three topped up with a daily Holocaust catechism constituted our religious education. Hatred of our enemies defined my Jewishness as we weren’t kosher, and didn’t observe any of the holidays or festivals. In fact adherence to the central part of the Trinity deprived me of the sacred B’rith, the covenant of circumcision that binds all Jewish men to God. My Freudian parents thought it would lead to a castration complex. Dad certainly had one. He regularly informed me that Jewish women were domineering shrews to be avoided at all costs. He could get away with saying this as Mum was only half Jewish.

A central event in family lore was the Kossoff trial. The broadcaster, David Kossoff, had accused Dad of writing anti-Semitic handbooks, a slander that deeply upset both my parents. Mum’s tears drove Dad to a court action which he won, conducting his own defence. It was a case that made the front page of the Evening Standard. Kossoff’s main target, The Bankrupts, was in fact an unremittingly scathing and negative account of the idolatrous, philistine suburban Jewish world of ritual without religion that public school had allowed Dad to escape. ‘Who likes the Yiden? The goyim hate the Yiden, the Yiden hate the Yiden. Nobody likes the Yiden,’ my great-grandmother apparently used to say.

The only Jews I knew were Dad’s friends from the literary and intellectual world like Frederic Raphael and Isaac Bashevis Singer, fascinating, charismatic people I could listen to for hours who would have shared his view of the environment he’d had to escape in order to define himself. Jewishness seemed synonymous with non-religious values and aspirations (embodied by these people) which I cherished and admired. We saw little of Dad’s family. His beloved father had died when I was a baby and his mother lived in Hove with her second husband Bobby, known to us as Uncle Booby, and there, as far as Dad was concerned, they could stay.

There had been plenty of Jewish kids at The Hall. At Pimlico I couldn’t name one, which might explain why the words Jew and Hymie were bandied about so readily, demonising the absent race, substituting the Jew of anti-Semitic gentile folklore for the reality.

‘’Ere, Froggy! Gi’s back that twenty pence wot I borrowed yer!’

‘Ain’t go’ it, Dave?’

‘Nah. Course you ain’t, ’cos yer a fackin’ Jew, incher?’

‘Don’t call him a Jew.’

Alan and Froggy stared at me, bemused.

‘Why? ’O says ’e ain’t?’

‘If you want to say someone’s mean, say so, but don’t say they’re a Jew.’

A smile stole across Alan’s podgy, red face.

‘Alright, Hymie!’

‘Can we have silence over there, please?’ yelled the teacher.

‘Hymie, Hymie Goldberg.’

The silly, and basically harmless refrain spread across the row behind me, but I’d made them conscious of a usage that came too trippingly off their tongues. Now I’d got it out in the open there was more chance of being able to tackle it. It amused me they’d actually hit on my real name. I turned round.

‘Just don’t call someone a Jew if you want to say they’re stingy.’

Again the refrain.

‘Oy, Hymie!’ Alan smiled. ‘Comin’ out to play football?’

As the pips went for the end of break and the drudgery of geography beckoned, I heard someone call out ‘Nice goal, Hymie!’

It was Klewer. Twice the size of anyone else in the class, well liked for his friendly, open nature, but considered to be one of the best fighters in the school.