England, My England

‘Where else can you sit out in the sunshine, in a kippa, in England?’

He’s doing just that, a small black kippa atop this serene, grey-bearded businessman.

‘I grew up in the provinces. Remember coming here as a kid, seeing so many Jews around. The whole neighbourhood. Kosher shops, shuls, Yiddish, Hebrew. It’s the Third Temple, is London.’

Spreading out his arms, he takes it all in – the coffee shop, the street, the ten-mile circumference of this very Jewish area. We’re in Temple Fortune, which it turns out, is named for the Knight’s Templar, who in turn were named for Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. That’s the first temple, just to be clear.

Grey-beard adjusts his glasses. Been here his whole adult life. The fancy shul a short drive through lime-green suburbia, early morning starts for prayers, days in manicured boardrooms, cosy coffee shops with a hechsher. In between meetings and bagels, watching the rain slice down the double-glazed windows.

Sun? That comes on trips to Israel. Three times a year. Little place in Herziliya. Oh it’s a perfectly, perfectly nice life. Safe as houses.

The barista serves our coffees, lukewarm. ‘Oh you’re from Reading? I used to know a man from Reading, worked at the university…’

I know exactly which seat that man occupied in shul. Just left of the bimah.

What I don’t tell him is how in my memory that old man blurs into all the other old men from childhood, smelling of almond hand soap from the misty-white men’s bathroom with its aggressively curved pipework and permanently steamed windows. But then I do remember him, that specific old man, the way he started to twitch with Parkinsons until we had to stop shaking his hand, at least not so firmly, only the faintest of touches as his life peeled away like sugar paper.

When the grey-bearded man leaves, I linger. The bakery brims with gossip. An Italian accent regales a nodding head about some solidarity trip to kibbutz Be’eri. At one of the central tables sits a family group, the daughter barely out of her teens, rosy cheeked, wearing a shitel. Is it a shitel? I look again, that’s a real shock of hair. Combed too perfectly to be true. A shitel.

Sure enough, by the time I’ve ordered my second coffee her young husband saunters in, a cocky black hat and a smile pressed to his lips. Life is good, on the inside.

Outside on glass doors and brick walls, posters of hostages. Some in Spanish, some in Hebrew, some torn down. A sticker I’ve never seen before in the usual red and white and black reads, ‘Rape Tunnels, this is where your aid is going’.

Nearby is Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, decked out in IDF green with a hanukkiah on her peaked cap. There’s a dark blue sticker, ‘From its borders to the sea, Israel is democratic, multi-ethnic and free’. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? And yet another, ‘our love is stronger than your hate’.

So far so kitsch, but ok.

What really catches my eye is a horizontal black-and-white page:

‘Take the posters down because you cannot stand
They highlight the barbarity that you support
In the words of Colonel Nathan Jessup

Rip them down, we’ll put them back up
We will do this this indefinitely
You will not silence them or intimidate us
Am Yisrael Chai
The People of Israel Live’

I’m aghast. Someone went to the trouble of taping this up – and managed to double-type the word ‘this’. Is it even grammatically sound? It feels garbled.

The proofreader in me widens his eyes and for a long minute I consider ripping down this badly-written own goal of a sign.

But then what?