When I Lived in Modern Times Read Online Free

had placed a blue and white collecting tin for the Jewish National Fund, in which we put our halfpennies, pennies, threepenny bits and sometimes even a shilling. Every birthday Uncle Joe pushed through the slot, to commemorate another year of my life, a whole half a crown.
    “So part of little Evelyn,” he said, “will make things grow in the earth of the Jewish home.” In the office at the back of his cigar shop hung framed posters of noble, muscle-bound figures tilling the soil of Palestine. A new one arrived every year. I imagined of myself as a flower or a tree in the hands of a Jewish farmer. It was quite a thought.
    On a wet Sunday afternoon in 1938, when London smelled of damp tobacco and sodden gardens and unwashed flesh, my mother and I got the tube to a cinema in Hendon and saw a film called
The Land of Promise
. We saw the Western Wall and pioneers dancing on the deck of an immigrant ship. We saw the laying of the electrical grid, drilling for water, farming on a kibbutz. We saw Jewish newspapers, a Jewish bank, a Jewish medical center in Jerusalem, and we heard Haydn’s
Creation
performed in the Mount Scopus amphitheater. In a fiery speech at the end spoken by a trade-union leader, we were told that the Zionist homeland was Utopia Today.
    My mother and I were awestruck. A Jewish land! Everything Jewish! How could it be? We saw Uncle Joe in the audience with his other family, the four girls yawning with boredom. But Uncle Joe was the first to rise to his feet when the curtain closed and applaud and cheer. “Next year in Jerusalem,” he shouted.
    Once he showed me in a newspaper an advertisement seeking recruits for the Palestine Police.
    If your health and intelligence are good, if you’re single and want a
man’s
job—one of the most vital jobs in theBritish Empire—if you like the glamour of serving a crack force in a country of sand dunes and olive groves, historic towns and modern settlements—if you prefer this type of life on good pay
that you can save
…here’s how you can get into the Palestine Police Force.
    There was a drawing of a man in shorts and knee-length socks directing traffic. A car was coming in one direction, a donkey in the other. Below this, another picture depicted Arabs riding on camels.
    “Where’s the Jews, Evelyn?” Uncle Joe asked.
    “Nowhere, Uncle Joe,” I replied.
    “Then this picture is a lie, for Palestine is
full
of Jews.”
    Of course he was a Zionist. Who wasn’t back then?
    Sometimes my mother and I went to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, and I would try to distinguish between those who talked sense and those who were merely crackpots—religious maniacs, vegetarians. We knew that Jews were being beaten on the streets of Vienna and Berlin. “Down with the appeasers,” I shouted, at twelve. My mother shivered in her coat.
    “What is to happen to us?” she whispered, on the bus home.
    “Don’t worry, Mummy,” I told her. “I’ll protect us,” for I was fierce and my fists were bunched together in fury, inside my mittens. I looked at her beloved face and thought, “Neither of us will ever die.”
    When the war started my mother and I held each other tightly as we lived through the convulsive shaking of a city tormented by air raids, passing houses turned into sticks, seeing the ruins of the white Georgian terraces near Regent’s Park which when I was a child had seemed to me like high, white cliffs, hard and permanent and unscalable.
    “Why can’t things be nice?” my mother asked me. “Why does someone have to spoil everything? Why can’t we all just live, and be happy?”
    I thought this was simple-minded but I only said, “Because there are unjust people in the world and they have to be fought.”
    “If only we had gone to America,” she replied. “There’s no war there.”
    The bombs got on her nerves. She was a wreck. Last thing at night she sipped milky drinks but they did not help. She lost weight and the plump cheeks receded in