the five sisters

Life was not easy for the five Ginsberg girls when they first arrived in England. Anti0Semitism was rife and they also suffered from the anti-German mania of the time, because the Yiddish they soke was mistaken for German. Stones were thrown at them and the window of their home was broken, too.
But that was the least of their worries - their real problem was Grandpa. He was a master Cabinet-maker, specialising in bureau bookcases, and he worked in the basement of their home. Grandpa always treated the girls as if they were sons. He put them to work, shifting heavy loads of wood, sweeping up the wood shavings, and keeping the gluepot filled and on the boil.
My mother used to tell of her journeys with a push cart to the timber yard to fetch the wood; of how heavy it was to push, and how ashamed she was when her schoolfriends saw her. She also told me of grandpa's strict discipline. Even when the sisters were grown up yong women, already at work at the age of 14, he used to stand behind the front door with his buckled leather belt at the ready to beat them if they entered the house even just a few minues later than the 9 o'clock curfew he imposed.
Mum wanted desperately to leave home. She was ambitious but frustrated, knowing she could not leave home until she was married. That was the tradition of those times and it meant that she would have to wait until her older sisters, Annie, Bessie and Mary, were married. She did not wait. She forced their hand by deliberately becoming pregnant with me. She was married hastily, borrowing a dress from her cousin Nancy and with no dowry to set her off in life.
From the start the marriage was stormy. My father was a furrier. It was seasonal work at the best of times. But dad, true to his nickname of "Bolshie" was always arguing with the bosses and getting himself slung out of the workshop. Mum would lash him with her tongue when he got the sack, and the story goes that one time he retaliated by hitting her across the stomach with a fur pelt. Being pregnant with me at the time, she was absolutely certain that I would be born hairy like the fur, and terrified that i would have a "hair" lip. Such were the old wives tales of the day.
Mum had been out at work from the age of 14, yet even after a heavy day she would attend evening classes to learn shorthand and typing. A job in an insurance office was her reward. Very proud of herself she was, and rightly so. Few immigrant women managed to acquire sufficient education to find work in an office in those days. Her sisters, like most immigrant Jewish women, worked as seamstresses in the sweatshops. But despite the pride and the status that the office job offered, it was still only a means to an end for my mum. The sisters also had plans for their future. Gradually, through working overtime at their jobs, and then working weekends in the market, they saved enough to pool resources and start a millinery business together.
The first shop they rented was in Islington Green. Being Jills of all trades they got stuck in and did whatever was necessary, learning on the job. Gradually they made enough rofit to spread their wings. Annie retained the Islington Green shop; my mother started up in a shop near Chapel Street Market; and lily and Bessie shared a shop in the Holloway Road, near the Nag's Head. Mary never left home. She had poor health and was destined to look after her mother for the rest of her life, even after her marriage to Ben. Despite her health problems she outlived them all.
Mum and dad lived above the shop and my life revolved around it. I would sit at the workbench with the young milliners who never seemed to sto talking and laughing. There was always a kettle steaming away to soften the felt hoods that they pulled into shapes and stretched over wooden blocks. With pins flashing from mouth to felt hood and scissors snipping away at the brims, they transformed the plain felt of velour into wondrous shapes, on which they then sewed or glued feathers, flowers, bunches of cherries and ribbons, topping the whole creation with a beautiful hatpin. I spent a lot of time sitting under the bench picking up the pins they dropped and annoying them by tickling their legs.
The workshop smells were overpowering: the adhesive they used really stung your nostrils; the damp felts smelt slightly of rotting vegetables; the perfumed make-up of the milliners themselves was quite heady. Then there were the customers, the market women in al-enfolding pinafores with large money pockets in front. They smelt of the fish or fruit and vegetables they sold. Though I tried hard i could never escape the bear-hugs they wanted to give me.
Once a week Grandma Ginsberg would pay a visit to each of her daughters' shops to collect her share of thier good fortune. Every now and again she would plead with them for more money to send back to Russia where her brother Rudaev still lived with his two daughters Rosa and Miriam. When Aunty Mary got married Grandma made her daughters send the fare to Rudaev to enable his family to come and celebrate with us. They kept up a correspondence with Grandma when they returned to the Soviet Union, but it stopped without any explanation in the early 1940s