Spitalfields Life

Anthropologist & Writer Delwar Hussain sent me this latest in his series of pieces, describing his experiences of self-isolating with his mother in the family home in Spitalfields

Portrait by Patricia Niven

Silence is something we have been living in – and some of us struggling with – for many weeks. The house where my mother raised twelve shrieking children, her own and members of our extended family, now holds just her, the cat and me.

Siblings who usually live here are self-isolating elsewhere whilst nieces and nephews are being socially-distanced from Nani. Around us, the streets are silent. The Spitalfields Market has its gates locked and security guards patrol. The Truman Brewery is shut. On Brick Lane, most restaurants and all the bars and clubs are closed. The advertising office opposite our house is deserted. With no one there to do watering, I have observed their once extravagantly coiffed plants die a slow, thirsty death.

For several months before lockdown started, builders had been gutting the house next door. Banging, drilling, sawing, hammering, and demolishing to remove every last vestige of the family who were our neighbours for the last twenty-five years. The developers who have bought the house are not only intent on eradicating the history, but they are destroying the garden in order to build an extension to the kitchen, something every human being needs to live a good life, it transpires. The cost of a floating kitchen island has been the sacrifice of plants and an aged tree. All of the noise, the shuddering and juddering that the destruction causes, has mercifully ceased, if only temporarily.

Yet silence does not mean entirely noise-less. Everyday we hear the whirring of the hospital helicopters, the air vibrating as they fly low over us. The church bells and the azan from the mosque alternate through the day. As talk increases of the lockdown being lifted, people are venturing out more in their cars. The sound of traffic from Commercial St, like the swelling of waves, advances towards us with its foamed edges and recedes again. Then there is the chorus of birds – the cooing of the doves amusing themselves on the flat roof of our neighbour’s house, the drilling of the robin that visits our garden, the sweet twittering of blackbirds, the squadron of high pitched blue tits, the chattering magpies, the marauding gang of seagulls that took a wrong turn somewhere a week ago and barked at the cat, and the ka-ka-ka-wing of crows. This symphony grows from morning to a final crescendo at evening.

I do not know if the birds were always there or, if with less human presence in the city, they too are venturing out more. Maybe it is simply that I am noticing them now? My query was answered soon enough by my mother. ‘Poor creatures,’ she said, looking out of my bedroom window at the doves. ‘Their stomachs must be empty – not a single restaurant open, having to make do with the leaves on the trees.’ I had an image of the birds with napkins around their necks waiting to be served by a haughty waiter. They did not look hungry to me, these doves were as big as footballs. Nonetheless I am guessing that my mother is familiar with them, whereas I have only just become aware of their presence.

The two of us have been living with other sorts of silences or, rather, it may again be just me who has noticed them for the first time. My mother and I, despite our love of chit-chat, gossip, storytelling, and sociality, are silent people. Not quiet nor silenced, we dream, we have voices, we speak, we demand, we see and listen. Yet our tread as we walk around the house is silent. We open and shut doors silently. My mother gardens in silence with only occasional humming, so that you might miss her if you went out to look for her, crouched amongst the branches in her brown cardigan, plucking a leaf here, or pinching another there. I read and write in silence, hence my vexation at the construction work next door. There is no radio in the kitchen.

These are our varieties of silences as we go about the house and exist in the world. Then there are the silent silences, the ones we hold and keep to ourselves. These are the purposefully unspoken ones, the gaps and the omissions. There are silences that are impenetrable, cannot be confronted or broached, least of all when my mother and I are self-isolating with one another.

What is it we each wanted to achieve with our lives? What is it that we did achieve? What are our failures? Whom did we fail? Did we learn from our mistakes? Do we forgive each another’s mistakes? They include unspeakable traumas and unspeakable loves. My mother wants me to marry, but I need her to accept the partner I have chosen. She would like me to cut my hair, shave and get a proper job, while I would like her to recognise her children’s achievements.

We live with these silences. They are solid, ever-present and are not things we can ignore. They are the substance of our relationship as much as what is said, the spoken and the noise.

When the lockdown is lifted, we shall be holding minutes of silence to remember those who have died and are suffering from the virus. These will be public rituals of remembrance and reflection. For my mother and me, remembering and recalling is an everyday act, it is what seeking out and living with silence means.

Portraits copyright © Patricia Niven

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Commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, I publish Spitalfields’ resident Alie Touw’s account of her life in occupied Holland

Centenarian Alie Touw lives in a small flat in Petticoat Lane where she delights in domesticity. The kitchen is clean and well-organised, and Alie is especially pleased to have acquired a new grinder suitable for apple sauce. To impart the ideal flavour to apple sauce – she explains – you need to include the peel but then it raises the question of how to achieve the smooth puree that is the desired texture for proper apple sauce, which is why a grinder is essential.

Such culinary matters are important to Alie Touw, not because she is a pedant or unduly house proud but because she believes in the significance of small things. Alie understands that the culture of keeping house is the basis of a civilised life, she knows this because she has experienced the disruption when a family home is destroyed and the domestic world is displaced by chaos and violence.

When I visited Alie to hear of her experiences during the war, we sat together in conversation on either side of her kitchen table as the dusk gathered in the late afternoon. ‘I don’t like taking about the war,’ she confided to me with a frown, ‘My father lived through two wars but he would never speak about it.’ Only after she had finished telling her story did I fully understand her reluctance but, now that I know what happened, I am grateful to her for her astonishing testimony.

“We had a hard time in Holland during the war, especially the last winter of 1944, it was terrible. We were occupied for more than five years.

At that time you could not even trust your own neighbours. I was twenty-six, I had been married two years and I had a one year old baby. I had a pro-German neighbour living next to me in our house in Arnhem near the Rhine. He was from Germany and he had ten children who had to fight for his country. His wife was Dutch but she was even more pro-German, so we had to be very careful what we said to them. I never spoke to her anymore, just in case.

People were bringing Jewish children over the bridge, arranging for them to escape from Germany, and sometimes they stayed with me overnight before catching the train next morning to London. Another of my neighbours who I was very friendly with, she had five Jews hiding in the loft of her house. On the other side of me I had an old couple who knew I was alright, that I would never reveal anyone for the sake of a reward. He was in the resistance and every morning he listened to Radio London. He would tell me, ‘It’s going well, it’s going well’ and I would say, ‘Fine, fine.’ But then we all had to leave.

We had to leave our home on the 23rd September, two days after my birthday. Everybody had to leave or they would shoot us they said. We had no telephones at that time, so had no idea what was going on. Arnhem was not a small village, it was big town and everyone had to leave. There were dead soldiers lying in the street. My father went to look in the pockets of the dead soldiers and took their addresses, so he could inform the families. There was shooting through the streets and in the windows. Nothing was safe anymore. There was fighting everywhere and every night the sky was red with the buildings near the bridge over the Rhine burning. We saw people running through the street and we asked, ‘What’s happening?’ and they answered, ‘Our house is gone!’

The Red Cross gave us addresses where we could go to, so we started walking from town to town. I had to walk for hours with my baby. At first, we were staying with my parents, but we had to leave them. Me and my husband and his sister, all of us went walking until we came to the place. The weather was so bad and all we had was a bicycle. It was raining and there was thunder, everything. We got soaked. All we had was a small suitcase for ourselves and a big one for the baby. It was all we could carry, since they told us it would only be a fortnight, so we did not take much with us but it was nine months before we could come back, after the war ended.

They expected a fight over the bridge over the Rhine which was the border with Germany – they called it the Battle of Arnhem. The Germans wanted to hold it but on the other side were the English, American and Polish soldiers. There had been fighting in the streets. The British and the American and Polish wanted to cross the bridge over the Rhine but the Germans would not give up, and so many people died. The Dutch blew up the bridge.

On the first night, a farmer took us in and we had to sleep on the floor because they did not have beds for us. We did not know how long we could stay or how long the war would go on. They were very kind and they had plenty of food for us. We brought what we had with us but we did not have much.

We slept on straw on the floor of the stable with a blanket over us. After five or six weeks, my husband said, ‘We have to go, we are eating up all their food.’ So we had to leave and, one afternoon before we left, we were having a cup of tea and we looked outside and saw a familiar face, my brother-in-law. I rushed out and he told me he had been made to digging holes in the streets for people to jump into if a bomb fell. He had never lifted a spade or done physical work in his life before. So we brought him in and gave him a cup of tea, and he told us my father and my sister and her three little children were sleeping on the floor of a school.

We went to join them and stayed overnight. Of course, we had to ask permission and we asked to stay but we were told, ‘No get out, get out! There are too many here and we don’t trust you.’ So we had to go back.

We had to find a place to stay. My father-in-law contacted his daughter who lived in Aalsmeer near Amsterdam and she said, ‘Come over here.’ The Germans told us we could go to the north or the west. It took us four days to walk there. Every night, the Red Cross gave us an address of a place we could stay. I still cannot understand how they organised it, but there were so many who wanted to take in people who had been evacuated. We could not always stay together. It was November when we started walking, and it was raining and raining for days. We had no raincoats.

Everywhere the Germans stopped us to check our identities. From the beginning of the war, we had to show it wherever we went. We were not free any more. There was a curfew every night between ten and four o’clock when we could not go outside.

On 5th December, we arrived at my sister-in-law’s house. We had been travelling since September. My husband had made a little cart for wood which we put the baby in and attached to the back of the bicycle. When we still had five kilometres to go, a farmer with a big cart stopped. He said, ‘Put the whole lot on board, where do you have to go?’ It was evening already and he took us to my sister-in-law. She was standing outside and my father-in-law was there already. They took us in and we stayed there until the war was over.

In January, my husband said, ‘I am going to see what is left of our house.’ I do not know how he ever dared, we were not supposed to go there. It was so near the end of the war that I do not think the Germans had any ammunition in their guns to shoot you. There had been fighting in the street and lots of houses were damaged. He found our front door open, there was no glass left in the windows and the house was empty. When they blew up the bridge in Arnhem, all the windows in the nearby streets were broken. I had been saving up since I was eighteen and I had some lovely things, some brand new furniture, bed linen and cutlery. There were no curtains left, they even took the curtains off. All my husband found was some baby clothes and a little cot in the loft.

Food was very scarce at that time. The winter was long and cold, and food became so scarce that some people died of hunger. We had no money but you could not buy anything – the Germans stole everything. Every morning we went to farm to see if they had any food and they asked us, ‘You’ve come all the way from Arnhem, we don’t know who you are – we want to know if you have been with the Germans?’ There was a list of people who collaborated with the Germans and, after the war, they got those people. They shaved the heads of girls who had been with German soldiers.

At the farm, they said to us, ‘We will find out who you are, come back tomorrow.’ Next morning they saw us coming and gave us a sack of flour. My sister in law took us in even though she had hardly any food herself. There was almost no electricity or gas to cook but there were these communal kitchens and people brought what food they had to share. My husband said, ‘I will go and try to help out.’ My father-in-law went with him and they came back with soup.

Then the Germans became desperate. They could come to your house and if you said, ‘No you cannot come in,’ they would shoot you. You had to let them in. They went in all the houses looking for radios, although we had already got rid of them because we were not allowed to have radios. We were not supposed to listen to London but people hid radios.

All the young men were summoned to the quay on Saturday afternoon and were taken to Germany. My husband had to go. They were put on a boat to Amsterdam and from Amsterdam sent by train to Germany. It was April and the war was nearly over. I went to the quay to say goodbye to him and he said, ‘Don’t cry.’ They were told, ‘Take a blanket with you and a spoon and a mug,’ so that if somebody came to the train when it stopped they might get a drink or some food. The Dutch people did this. But my husband said, ‘I’m not taking a mug or a spoon, I’m going to escape.’

The train stopped at the border with Germany and my husband saw a familiar face. His brother lived there and he recognised his sister-in-law, going round with a kettle giving everyone on the train a drink. There were soldiers on the train and they were at a station. She saw my husband and said, ‘Peter, what are you doing here?’ He told her, ‘They took me, we have to go to Germany.’ She said, ‘You’re not, here’s the kettle,’ and she took him home. My brother-in-law was in the resistance. They stole German uniforms and put them on and went to the gaol every evening with a list of names from Aalsmeer. They said, ‘These people have to come out.’ Each time, they took a few out. It was unbelievable really what they did.

I did not know when my husband would come back, if ever, but one day the baker returned to Aalsmeer. The shortage of food got very bad and there was no soup kitchen anymore. It was just at the end of the war and my husband was still not back. There were no dogs and cats, people were eating the animals.

My son got very ill because he had no fruit, no vitamins. My sister was a nurse in another town and, before my husband left, he put the child on his bike to take him to the hospital where she worked and asked, ‘Can you take care of your nephew?’ They admitted him to the hospital and I did not see him for a fortnight. The hospitals still had a little food. They were able to make him better but he cried, ‘Mama, mama,’ day and night. He was just two years old and when the doctor saw him, he said, ‘This child is so ill.’  I had to send him to bed without any food. The boy should never have been born then, but what can you do?

My brother who lived in Amsterdam was in the resistance and he had a typewriter to type pamphlets for the underground secret service. One day he had a knock and the door and he had to chuck the typewriter out the window. If they had found a typewriter, they would shoot you.

By 5th May (VE Day), it was over. My husband came back home on a bicycle all the way from the east. He had to travel all the way across Holland on his bicycle, but he came back. There was no money and no jobs but my husband went to the bakery and repaired some bicycles and they gave him a loaf. Sweden sent us flour and bakers started baking. There was no butter but bread tasted like cake for us.

The Red Cross made up wooden boxes of food. We saw the planes came over flying low and dropping the boxes in the fields. Each family got a case containing bacon, beans, sardines, flour, yeast, egg powder, biscuits and chocolate. Those planes were all coming from Lincolnshire and people spread out sheets on the ground with the words ‘Thankyou boys!’ We were so grateful. Today my son lives in Lincolnshire and is married to the niece of one of the pilots who flew those planes.”

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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Alie Touw, Centenarian

Alie Touw’s Life in Britain