A small boy arrives home from his first day at school and is asked by his concerned mother if he has made any friends.'Yes, I've got a new best friend, and we played together all day' he tells her happily.
'That's wonderful news. What's your new friend's name?' asks the boy's mother, to which her son replies 'I don't know, I'll ask him tomorrow'.
The following afternoon, the boy rushes home again and tells his mother that his new best friend is called Babatunde.
'Oh' she says curiously, 'Is he black?'
To which her son replies 'I don't know, I'll ask him tomorrow'.
How was I supposed to know that despite being in Britain for over forty years, my thoroughly anglicised grandparents, Andrew and Betty Flower were as unmistakably Jewish as a hundred rabbis playing furiously on a hundred fiddles on a hundred roofs! They were still as Yiddish as pickled herring bagels .........................or beigels, as my grandmother still called them.
We didn't have any Jews where I grew up in Essex (except for us as it turned out!), so how was I supposed to spot the differences. There always seemed to be a perfectly logical explanation for the small things which made my grandparents slightly different (and far more fun) than everybody else's. What could make eating more enjoyable for a ten year-old than purple soup that stained everything it touched, or yellow chicken soup with spaghetti in it that splashed everywhere as you sucked up the long strands. Unlike eating at home, or at my father's parents, where meals were silent and functional, we were permitted and even encouraged to make frequent and positive eating noises. Oooohs and ahhhhs, loud slurping of soup, and even the occasional small burp (unthinkable at home) were met with joy from my grandmother who took that as vocal confirmation that her meal was a success. We were given funny slippery rolls with holes in the middle, which squirted cream cheese when you bit down on them, and huge square crackers that shattered into a hundred pieces as soon as you tried to eat them. How was I supposed to know that whilst we were happily crunching on huge, sour pickled cucumbers that made your teeth go numb and gave you mouth ulcers, my friends were licking fruit-flavoured, space-rocket ice-lollies on Sunday visits to their grandparents. While our friends were nibbling on one of Mister Kipplings exceedingly good (but exceedingly small) apple pies, we were about to burst after our third slice of cinnamon-laced, syrup-sodden Polish apple cake. It all seemed so normal at the time.
With the exception of my father's strict, and oddly Victorian, parents who we thought were the exception, I never visited anyone else's grandparents, so I didn't realise that it wasn't perfectly normal to be cajoled, begged, and lovingly bullied into eating from the moment you stepped through the front door to the moment the car finally pulled away. My grandmother would prepare food for ten times the number of people present, and then insist that it would all spoil instantly if we didn't have another helping. There was no escape from being fed. Claiming not to be hungry was a sure sign of illness for my grandmother and would bring her rushing with the thermometer and cries of 'He needs soup, he's too thin!' Even leaving was futile. She would trot alongside the car as it pulled away, trying to push brown paper bags of food through the car window. So determined was she that we should 'have some for tomorrow', that it's a miracle she was never dragged under the moving car.
Although we children warranted an especially intense level of feeding, even my mother couldn't escape the food-frenzy.
'Oy! Tell her Daddy' my grandmother would say to my grandfather. 'She's nothing but bones already, doesn't eat enough to nourish a bird. Have some more, I made it especially for you. One more piece, you need the nourishment, it's almost winter' (even though it was May). It was like trying to get a limpet off a smooth rock with a cotton bud.
My grandparents were a well-oiled and time-tested partnership. It was like good-cop, bad cop. My grandmother would batter, and bargain, and plead, and threaten, and my grandfather would sit and watch silently. Then just when you though he was going to step in and rescue you by 'pushing his foot down', he would shrug and agree with her. 'Mummy's right, you're too thin, take the cake'.
We knew we were beaten, so we always took the cake.
