Gerry Kutchinsky and marriage

Hebrew marriage certificate of Gerald kutchinsky and Zelda Brown




Left -Gerry, Zelda and me as a baby, 1948
Right - Gerry and Zelda





When I was 19 the familly became anxious that I might marry a non-Jewish man. They went on the offensive, desperately trying to find me a nice Jewish boy. I managed to thwart most of their plans, but I succumbed to their pressure one Sunday afternoon when I had nothing else special to do. My Aunty Ann took me with her to have tea with soe new friends of hers, who she assured me were very rich and had a young brother who was an admiral in the navy or something like that.
Bored with their coversation at the tea table, I volunteered to do the washing up. I as in the kitchen when I heard the front door open and in walked a handsome, bright blue-eyed young sailor - a steward not an admiral!
He started to chat me up and I realised that he thought I was the daily help. Imagine hs embarrassment when I went into the lounge to join the others and they introduced me to him. The year was 1942 and he told me he was stationed at Gosport, but was able to get up to London most weekends. He told me with ride that he had joined up right at the start of the war. His tales of dangerous missions, of Atlantic crossings when his ship had been bombed, of minesweeping around the coast and of havin to swim ashore when his ship sank, kept me wide-eyed with wonder, but remained sceptical.
He had been in the merchant navy before the war, serving on the P & O line doing the South Africa run and sometimes to the Caribbean. But what really boosted his image in my eyes was that he had been gun-running to Bilbao, helping the anti-fascists dring the Spanish civil war.
The merchant navy, he told me, had been his escappe from an unhappy period at home. He had rebelled against family expectation that he would go into their workshop to work on the buttonhole stitching machines. He felt exploited by his mother, who treated him like an idiot.
He went out and got himself an apprenticeship in a local engineering firm, but his mother taunted him when he came home with dirty hands saying "What sort of job is that for a jewish boy?" Nothing he did ever pleased her. He felt very unloved.
When younger, he attended Jewish Free School which had a very good reputation. Some of the East End's finest sons were taught there. It certainly gave him a good grounding, and he was particularly proud o one episode in his years there. After the Kristalnacht in Germany the whole class demonstrated their hatred of the nazis by refusing to learn German any more. One of the teachers he had at the Free School was the father of Roger Woddis of Unity Theatre - strange how our lives intertwined over the years. [Roger was a poet who contributed regularly to New Statesman and was Zelda's lover for many years, both before and after her marriage]
Jerry could reel off pages and pages of Shakespeare's plays and could recite nearly every poem in the Golden Treasury of Verse. He was good at maths and loved music, but it was practical tasks that he excelled in. He was very inventive and given a problem he would always find some way of solving it, even if he had to design and make a tool for the job himself. He was what people would call a rough diamond He had not finesse, no social graces, and was honest to the point of rudeness. But what most people remember about jerry was his humour, his puns and quick repartee. Both our daughters, Sue and Joan, take after him in that. The tradition continues. His forte was telling Jewish stories. He could keep an audience laughing all evening with his reminiscences of characters from his East End childhood.
Jerry was not ambitious but he did want to iimprove himself, or perhaps I should say prove himself. He attended evening classes and gained the higher National Diploma in engineering. hat was no easy task after a hard day plus overtime in the factory. Once he had passed his exam he came off the factory floor and found a job as a draughtsman with Standard Telephones in Southgate. Eventually he cliibed the ladder and became a trainer at their factory in Woolwich. Whatever his position he remained an active trade unionist throughout his working life, being a shop steward at one time and a convenor at another, as well as being branch secretary of his local AEU branch for many years.
However, recognising tht he had never fulfilled his own potential, Sue, Joan and I encouraged him when he said he would like to go to University as a very mature student. He joined a Fresh Horizons course at the City Lit and right from the start you could see the pleasure it gave him. With that tucked under his belt and his Higher national Diploma to back it up he applied for and gained a place at the University of East Anglia at the age of 56.
The next 3 years were probably the happiest of his life. He was a great favourite with the young women students who treated him as a surrogate father to turn to and they rewarded him by making him an honorary member of the Feminist group.
His last years were spent in a Tottenham school teaching woodwork and metalwork to youngsters who had been ill-served by the education system. They had little knowledge, few skills and no prospects for the future. Jerry was saddened and frustrated. he wanted to open up their minds to the beauty in the world rather than the dirt and squalour of their immediate environment. He wanted to show them what pleasure could be had through working with their hands and making objects of use as well as beauty. He wanted to help them develop skills that could give then some hope for the future. But he was banging his head against a wall.
The strain of it all culminated in a heart attack at the age of only 64, from which he did not recover.

But I was not cut out for marriage - or perhaps I was just too young and immature, being married at just 20 years old. Certainly my independent streak was a problem. I felt trapped. I could not bear anyone having control over my life. I wanted to make my own decisions and the more Jerry tried to look after me, the more I fought him off. I'd had enough of my mother controlling my life to allow him to take over when she stopped.
I couldn't understand why loving each other should mean always lviing in each other's pockets and doing everything together. I felt hemmed in, taken over. His love was suffocating. He was always there, needing me, needing my attention, needing my presence. He offered devotion and wanted it from me. I wanted passion and excitement, not everyday routine. I wanted to be out there doing things in the world, not staying home to do housework. I suffered that "nameless aching dissatisfaction" that Betty Friedan described in her "Feminine Mystique" In one way or another I was always trying to escape but never quite making it.
Our life was beset by many financial problems, too. When Jerry came out of the navy he went to work for his brother Louis. That was a disaster. It ended with Lou giving jerry the sack just as i became pregnant with my second daughter joan. Jerry toured the local area looking for work and eventually found a job in a factory on the Edgware Road. He had to work in a terrible atmosphere of chemical fumes on day and night shifts, fortnight on fortnight off. It wasn't easy trying to keep the two children quiet whilst he slept during the day. I walked the streets with them for most of the day. With factory wages so low, we soon had to give up our bungalow near the Welsh Harp, as we were unable to keep up the mortgage payments. We moved to East Finchley into a very cramped first floor flat in an old house.
Our early married life was circumscribed by what we saw as our duty to our respective families. Eash Saturday we visited Jerry's mum and on Sunday we went to my mum. Those years when the children were small and I was not able to work outside the home, were difficult times for us. We had little money and little time together, as Jerry worked overtime in an effort to get us out of our financial problems. For a small sum I used to look after my fellow communist party comrades' children while they went to work. I also did home work like pressing skirt hems for a manufacturer, doing mail-outs for offices, a bit of typing or anything else I could get. But none of them paid well. Sometimes Mum and Aunty Ann needed help in the shop on Saturday and they paid me 30 shillings for the day to act as a sales lady. I quite enjoyed it and I was fairly good at it too. While I was there Jerry would take the children to the cinema. They were brought up on the Disney greats and the musicals of their times. They loved them all, from Snow White and Bambi through to Brigadoon, Oklahoma and Carousel.