Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

They were on speaking terms again. Monosyllabic, but at least speaking. She had given him an old faded pink and yellow candlewick bedcover to spread out on the stall. Even before he’d drawing-pinned it on to the trestle table there were women fighting for it. That was how good a gaff Stockport was.

And he sold it? Of course he sold it. ‘I’d have sold my own gatkes,’ he said, ‘if anyone had asked for them.’

A salesman suddenly.

His other advice to me in later years was, ‘Always make a nice flash.’ He made a nice flash, a lovely flash, that morning. The proof of which was that by midday it was all gone.

A tycoon suddenly.

True, he didn’t have, as he put it Mancunianly himself, ‘a very lot’ to get rid of. All the soft toys he could squeeze into a couple of cardboard boxes that weren’t too bulky to carry on a bus. Not his bus. He no longer had a bus. On a red, double-decker public bus. Which he had to wait for in the cold at five in the morning. On two red, double-decker buses, because the first one only took him to Cannon Street, from where he had to shlepp his boxes up Market Street to Piccadilly and wait, still in the freezing cold, for the second one to take him to Stockport. No picnic. No picnic, having a wife who loses you your job. And a son who’s never out of the Benghazi.

He’d bought the toys from a warehouse near to where my grandfather used to labour in the shadow of Strangeways, imagining he could hear the sirens signalling knocking-off time. In those days all the warehouses were owned by fellow refugees from the Podolski Plateau. Asians qua Asians hadn’t even started on the markets yet. One muffled-up Indian selling nylons on a scrap of waste ground behind Victoria Station, that was the extent of their penetration. Otherwise all unserer — one-time beetroot farmers rising from the Podolian swamps. Peddling, markets, wholesaling, importing, next generation in the professions — that was the way of it. The old merry-go-round. That it was a cycle not a progression, that mud-nostalgia would once again exert its shtetl pull, none of us could ever have imagined. We were on the move then, upwards and onwards, conscious of not a single impediment. If anything, we Walzers were slower than many. My father started markets when other Yiddeles his age were opening cash and carries, and I was playing ping-pong when others my size were preparing themselves for the law. But then we had big hearts, we Walzer men.

And big ideas.

If soft toys weren’t quite a big idea they were certainly a bright one. Christmas was coming, the season of soft toys. And my father was good with toys. He understood them. Could relate to them. Tsatskes, remember. Had things panned out differently he might have made it as one of the world’s great puppeteers. Or ventriloquists. At Stockport he sat a stuffed parrot on his shoulder, called out ‘Aha, Jim lad!’, and engaged in proxy conversation with mothers trundling their trolleyloads of snot-strewn progeny. Why northern gentile children were always snotty in those days I don’t know. It might have been a parenting fad. But the sight of them never put my father off. He was a humanitarian. Few other Bug and Dniester marketmen had such a natural way with the big-spending northern proletarian poor. ‘I say! I say, Mrs Woman!’ he’d get the parrot to squawk. ‘Take me home with you and I’ll keep you warm at night. I’m very cheap, you know. How cheap? Cheep-cheep. Love you.’

And Mrs Woman would glow with the compliment, tell the proxy parrot he was cheeky and open her purse.

‘The one thing you never do even when you’re selling toys,’ my father used to tell me, ‘is appeal directly to the godforbids themselves. I don’t approve of that.’

By the time the Christmas tree had gone from the market square and the little lights no longer twinkled under the tarpaulins he’d earned enough to put a deposit on a small van. Had found a second market in Garston at the Speke end of Liverpool. And had hit upon another bright idea. What were these soft toys anyway? Half a yard of furry Draylon, a fistful of flock filling, a couple of buttons for the eyeballs and a triangle of scarlet felt for the tongue. Machining was in the family. Why give the money to a wholesaler when he could knock up the gear himself? By he he meant we.

At first the cutting-out was done by my grandfather on my father’s side. He was retired now and sitting staring into space. Now he really did have a grandfather chair. But he hadn’t lost any of the old mind-numbing skills. He’d cut out and partially machine; then the toys would come to us to be stuffed and to have their features sewn on by hand; then they’d go back to my grandfather to have their remaining seams stitched up and, where necessary, their looks improved; then they’d come back to us for bagging. That was my job: blowing open the polythene bag, popping in a yellow Gestetner’d WARNING slip giving notice, as was required by law, that the toy was not fire-proof, that the dye was not suck-proof, that the eyes were a danger to children under twelve, that the bag itself presented a threat to the life of anyone idle enough to think of putting it over his head, and then sealing it with a sufficient number of staples to rip open the hand of any ordinarily inadvertent adult,

Clearly we couldn’t go on like this. The toys were flying there and back so often they were virtually second-hand by the time I came to bag them. But it wasn’t only the wastefulness of our system of manufacture that finally decided my father against going on employing my grandfather. Not aesthetics exactly, but something like aesthetics also had a bit to do with it. No matter what animal he was meant to be machining, my grandfather couldn’t stop himself turning it into a version of a golliwog. Not just the monkeys, but the pandas and the kittens and the polar bears too, the whole bestiary, came back with fuzzy hair and rolling eyes and white Mr Interlocutor gloves on their paws.

The times were less nice then. Amos and Andy were on television once a week. A Black and White Minstrel show still turned up regularly at the Ardwick Hippodrome and drew large audiences of utterly well-meaning Stephen Foster fans. My father could have specialized in golliwogs and got away with it in Stockport. But somehow or other one of my grandfather’s creations landed on the desk of Robertson’s Jams and Marmalades who came carrying briefcases to see my father on his market stall and threatened him with a lawsuit for breach of copyright. And you know by now how little my father liked upsetting people.

Queer, the trouble we always seemed to be having around jam and marmalade. And we didn’t even touch the stuff. Cheese — that was what we put on our toast. Melted killer cheese.

Without my grandfather we were stymied as far as soft toy production went. My father had tailoring skills himself, but he couldn’t be expected to make the stock and sell it. And the few he did try his hand at all came out hunch-backed. Buy me and I’ll keep you warm at night, cheep-cheep, I love you, was all very well, but not if the bunny-wunny with a pink ribbon round its neck looked like Quasimodo. He ran my mother up a pair of curtains for their bedroom with what was left of the spotted furry Draylon and that was it with the cuddly stuff. Soft toys don’t sell that well after Christmas anyway. Besides, my father had already come up with another bright idea. Coffee tables. He’d seen them in the warehouses, he’d seen other grafters pitching them out on Garston, and he couldn’t see why he couldn’t make them himself. What was a coffee table when all was said and done? An oval of chipboard, four screw-on angled spindle legs, a sheet of glass and a strip of plastic beading. He could do it easy. By he he meant we.