Chapter One Continued of Exits and Emtrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes Continued by Dave Jaffe

    Chapter One Contsinued


        Tensions. I'm aware of tensions that hang in the air in this house on Alexander Avenue in Willesden. One morning while playing in sthe nursery, I see my mother say goodbye to may father as he goes to work.
    "Mont" she says to my father as he goes to work. "How will we pay this bill?" my father looks troubled too. Both his businesses, a travel agency and a clothing factory rest on very shaky foundations. Soon in about 1950  both businesses go bankrupt and my father vanishes for months.
     "We must sell this house and move to Barnet," my mother says. Her troubled blue eyes look even more anxious now. Yet she rises to the challenge. The house is sold and my mother moves us to an apartment in Barnet, a growing suburb just to the north of London. Joan the nanny vanishes. So does Mrs. Cox the cook. I stop going to the London Jewish Day School which my father founded, but I didn't like.
    Now my father comes back to our family. Yet the five foot six inch frame of my dad, Montague Jaffe seems to have shrunk. And for the first time I start to doubt his advice and views. "Never take the dole," he says to me. "Never buy anything second hand and never read newspapers that someone else has bought."
    25 years later in Vancouver I flout or break all my father's rules. I live on welfare or "the dole" as it was called in great Britain. I haunt Sally-Ann stores looking for clothing and book bargains, and dip into recycling bins for old newspapers. I love doing this. Yet my father would never do any of these things.
     He could have got seven pounds a week from welfare. Instead he borrows money or takes it from his brother Ted or his sister Hannah Stern. His small mail order business produces no money week after week. He also borrows or takes cousins and friends. "A schnorrer", Jews would call my dad which in English and not Yiddish means "a beggar." That is what he became in Barnet.
      But meanwhile I love Barnet. I go to soccer games, play soccer, fight with my classmates in brutal playground scraps at Christchurch School and shine in exams where I often lead the class which is an all-male set-up. The teachers we have often cane and beat us.
     My mother, a brown-haired daughter of a deaf mother and a tyrannical jeweller father, rarely hugs or touches me. Yet she dips into her small trove of shrinking cash to pay my way to see Tottenham Hotspurs, my favourite professional soccer team. Sometimes I go with my father when he makes some money. Like many fathers he bonds with his son around sports. Long after I have forgotten my soccer spectator days my father remembers them. And I had other  sports favourites too.

         (To be continues).