‘1954: Pirate country!’
The driver led me from place to place feverishly, describing each landmark in its heyday: the naughty casino, the ballroom once so lively, the best chalets set apart from their neighbours in the camp and turned towards the sea that lay beyond a rise and out of sight. He was not animated by nostalgia but by rage and outrage: a rapacious invader had snatched all the gay days from him, from him alone, from him and nobody but him. He told me that in his youth he had worked here to earn extra money during the summer holidays from school.
In my day and my place, students on summer break used to work at hotels in a region of the Catskill Mountains known as the ‘Borscht Belt’. On the wall of my London flat is a photograph of my father’s first Buick with its long sleek running-board like a stowed gangplank, and me, about three, grinning out of the window. Behind us is one of the long white buildings that housed the busboys and waitresses at the Borscht Belt hotel where my grandparents spent the summer. Called ‘hotels’, most of them were in fact a collection of dedicated buildings older, prettier but along the same general lines as those at Warner’s abandoned holiday camp on the Isle of Wight. Nice old Jews from New York used to go to the Borscht Belt to escape summer in the city. They rocked on the porches while competitively enumerating symptoms of their ailments. They splashed in the pools awkwardly, not a generation of swimmers. Some of them remembered and would tell a visiting grandchild how more than half a century earlier when they were little they used to tremble in the dark pits full of stored potatoes where their parents hid them from Cossacks on the rampage. Of course, they did not yet know and could not imagine – who could? – that an infinitely more efficient machine was even then slipping into gear, preparing to exterminate friends and relatives left behind in the cities and shtetls of Europe.
‘You’ll find a nice Jewish boy some day, Irmele,’ the old ladies used to say, stroking my hair, trying to console me for being born female.
Then the men maybe played pinochle, a card game incomprehensible to us little Americans raised on gin rummy and canasta, while the women boasted about sons and grandsons, and tried to arrange a few marriages: what’s the harm? Big kosher meals were the main event of the day, and live entertainment in the evening featured sharp, satirical jesters in Yiddish and English, sentimental balladeers and, occasionally, a world-class violinist with a repertoire heavy on Brahms.
The driver was furiously trying to dismantle a barricade so he could show me the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Empty swimming pools are creepy; they put me in mind of murder and accidental death. Besides, I had not packed my little bag and locked my door behind me to go out in search of his memories, thank you very much. Admittedly the Isle of Wight might seem an odd starting place for a repeat of my first journey to Europe; nevertheless, it had been our stunning landfall after many days at sea, and I hoped to find there a glimpse of myself and England as we were fifty years ago when the Castel Felice sailed by on its way to port.
‘Please don’t bother! Please don’t!’ I said twice as he beavered away at the fence, and once again before it got through to him. ‘Please! Stop!’
He remembered that pool from the old days. Oh, the old days! Oh, what times they had! Oy, what times! Like the boys and girls employed at Borscht Belt hotels, he in his youth got up to no good at this holiday camp, you can be sure. Here he had probably loved for the first time. Was it the loss of innocence or the failure of love that fuelled his anger now? It is generally perceived failure that maddens men in middle age. And sexual menace attaches to a grown man’s anger, be he lover or stranger, or father. Back when I was an urban kid with a developed alarm system, I would never so gormlessly have trailed any big, angry man into a lonely place. Not unless I trusted him. Or fancied him. Was the driver any threat to me now that I was old and of no account to questing males? Not unless he was crazy. Or I was. It struck me then, as I watched him fulminate, that the lust of strange men was going to be missing this time from my repeat odyssey. My years would protect me on the road even when I returned to sexy old Italy, the most overtly flirtatious country in Europe of my youth. The driver, shaking his head now, perplexed as a bull, would never have had the temerity to take a young woman to such a desolate location and show her the source of his anger. No adult male with half an ounce of sense would dare embrace such a dangerous test of his self-control with an inadvertent temptress looking on. So my age was going to protect men, too, on the journey to come. I was as near as a woman can be to absolutely safe. At last. Alas.
We stood side by side looking through an open door into a ruined bedroom full of erotic rustlings. All around us, fattening on silence, were memories: not the memories I had come for – not my own.
‘You should write about what’s happening here,’ he said. ‘The waste.’
‘No, no. Not me, you,’ I said and, sounding dismissive to my own ears, I added as gently as I could, ‘They are your memories. You have to write them.’
We made two more stops on the short trip back to Yarmouth. The driver, apparently known locally and fearful of being recognised, stayed in the car and sent me out alone to scout functioning holiday camps, he said, and see for myself; I wasn’t sure what or why. They were certainly underpopulated, but it was very early in the season, and even though the few guests in residence were pretty much of the Zimmer frame generation, the grounds were well equipped and well tended. Was it age itself and the ruination of all things that surprised and enraged him to such a degree?
On the outskirts of Yarmouth at last, we passed a number of little shops that were boarded up. ‘Closed. Closed. Closed,’ he hissed at each ‘to let’ sign.
His anger started to change its nature; no longer raw or personal, it slowly became political, until by the time we neared Yarmouth it was hardly more than pub moaning over beers with like-minded mates. His mobile rang once and he spoke to his wife about some necessary shopping on his way home. When he told her he had taken his big-city fare to observe the sorry state of the island, I matched her undoubted gaze heavenward. By the time he and I shook hands in Yarmouth my mind was practically made up to leave the Isle of Wight on an early boat. First, however, I wanted lunch.
And it was there, as the only customer in a café on a side street in Yarmouth, I found my own memories, and to spare. As memories often arrive and always will, they came in a bottle.
‘9 July 1954: So this is England! London, at last! Englishmen walked by in black bowlers, even some old fellows with mutton chops. This evening the three of us went to Marble Arch, a corner of Hyde Park where complete freedom of speech is practised. Men on soapboxes were advocating points of view as disparate as misogyny is from Communism! There were some ferociously witty hecklers. The bobbies were strolling about but there were no disturbances. We met a wonderful Englishman who walked back with us and outlined an elaborate plan for the assassination of Senator McCarthy. I wish! He said everyone could tell we were American because of our trim clothes and sparkling eyes. But we heard some cruel things said about us, too: “Overlords of Western Europe …” Could that be right? Perhaps! I hope not. I want the lovely differences to last. Midge and Evelyn and I went out to eat. Most odd! There was something on my salad that was sticky and sweet and tasted like a big mistake. Why put sugar in salad dressing?’
Oh, so much to discover! Men of the far left, for example, were – still are? – more overtly male chauvinist pigs than pigs of the far right. In Communist households I visited hopefully when I was young in New York and later in Paris, the food was always prepared by silent women and dished