HOME IS AN EMPTY HOUSE

I never even saw him leave. He had been told to go and I never knew why. Not for certain anyway. It left a vacuum in the house and in my life. But no one asked me, a mere child, what I thought then of the expulsion.

Albert Spear was big in a way my father was not. He stayed in a small room, sharing its landing with the cupboard of death. Occasionally as children we would dare to clamber into its confines, in amongst the broken picnic table and mildewed tent and wait for the counting to stop. Otherwise it was just a landing, a necessary staging post on ones journey from the second to third floor where our attic bedrooms were.

Childhood games, stories read by my grandmother and adult tension, in a house without Television or Radio: These were the things of my childhood as a young boy in the 1960’s. And then one day there was Albert, bearded, that great stomach under those shapeless jumpers and the powerful Jewish drawl, foreign as Israel. I had no idea where he came from. At six years old I only knew he was from a different place where people were big and gentle, somehow blown in by the wind, a Mary Poppins from the world of giants.

It was only years later that I realised the incongruity of the name. But then I suppose he was born before the horror. My family was pockmarked and lame and from time to time folks would come to live in the gaps and craters of our home: In amongst the conflict, witnesses who never spoke of it. Not to me at least.

One day, early on, Albert caught me on the stair. He beckoned to me. Though he was huge, with the growl of a bear, I wasn’t frightened of him. And me, so timid. I was making my way downstairs and he stopped me on the landing.

“Come in.” He said conspiratorially. “Let me show you something.” He took a small disk from a paper sleeve and fiddled it over the awkward spindle of his gramophone. Penny Lane was in my heart and in my ears for the first time. And from that point on I would go to his room whenever I could and enter another world. His world. The world out there, separate from the family.

What had seemed so strange at first: this man, his gramophone; slowly started its journey to normality in my heart and somewhere on that path it met my home life, with its disjointed elders, coming the other way. I found myself looking at my father, my mother, my grandmother and wondering who they were, if perhaps Albert was my real father. Maybe he was the emotional normality that all children crave without knowing it.

One day I announced to the dinner table repeating something I had heard.

“I hate Jews.” And Albert in his big, soft, gravely voice said.

“I am a Jew.” And I was mortified. And I said.

“But I love you Albert.” Which I had never even said to my father. And he had said.

“And I love you.” And after that I never saw him again. The vacuum he had filled, he left behind him. And that September I was sent away to school.

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