And yet aother girl is born

I am committing to this blog selections from the memoir written by my mother Zelda Curtis who died 31st January 2012. Zelda attended an open university women's studies course back in the 1980s and she read "ordinary people do not consider their lives of sufficient importance to spend time in writing them down". Zelda decided she would write it down, if only to let her grandchildren know that she tried to change the world. So what follows charts a woderful life and is a tribute to Zelda.

And yet another girl is born.....

I loved my grandparents' house. It nestled in a terrace of decaying Edwardian houses, all with bright shining brass knockers. It was a to u two down with an outside lavatory. There was a wash-house with copper and mangle, and a stone-flagged yard where I could play ball. A typical Hackney house, but with two unusual features. One was the shed at the far end of the yard where grandpa Ginsberg stored his wood and where Grandma kept half a dozen chickens. The other was the basement workshop where my grandfather made his bookcases.
I would stand for hours down there, up to my ankles in sawdust, breathing in the smells of glue and wood-stain. With boundless admiration of his strength, I watched the handsomely whiskered man lift the large planks of wood effortlessly. To me he seemed ancient, but I realise now that he could only have been in his fifties. And Grandma? She sat in the parlour upstairs, in a black dress and shawl, smelling of wintergreen ointment lavishly rubbed in to relieve her rheumatic pains. She liked reading and I remember her sitting at a table covered in a deep red chenille cloth fringed with little bobbles, reading her Yiddish books by the light of the gas mantles. The light they gave out was yellowish and they made a hissing noise all the time.
When dad took me to visit, Grandma Ginsberg would have a potato pudding with prunes ready for me to eat whilst dad and Grandpa discussed the news in the Yiddish papers. How I wished I could understnad what they were saying. But they spoke only Yiddish. On Sundays the five Ginsberg girls (as my mother and her sisters were called) gathered there as well. They laughed a lot as they talked. The conversation flowed around me - too grown up for me to comprehend but the sound of their voices reassured me that all was well with the world.
Upstairs the two bedrooms were cheerless, cold and damp and sparsely furnished. Grandpa slept alone in the small bedroom while in grandma's bigger room there were two beds, one a single for Aunty Mary and one double for Grandma. I was frightened in that room. I have often thought it had something to do with the trauma of my birth - a difficult one I was told.
I was born i Grandma's bed on December 26th 1923 - an occasion I was ever to be reminded of by my mother. It was the worst moment of her life, she complained. How she had suffered, how she had screamed with the pain! She had banged her head against the wall shouting "Let me die!" The doctor who was calle out that Christmas night was a little drunk and furious at the interruption to his festivities. All mum's sisters were there, sharing her agony, and I was never to be allowed to forget the anguish I had caused them all.
A large wardrobe drawer had been lined with clean linen for me to lie on when finally dragged into this cold, unfriendly world. Grandpa, as you can imagine, was none too pleased to have yet another girl in the family - another Ginsberg girl.

The next section tells of the lives of the five Ginsberg sisters, their early days in England, having arrived from Russia, and their struggles with anti-semitism and a violent father.

I am happy for people to contribute to this blog their own memories and anecdotes and photos. Sorry not to have put any photos on yet, but when I get my scanner working I have a good range of photos to share.