When I Lived in Modern Times Read Online Free PDF

They explained, patiently, that the British were only giving out fifteen hundred entry permits and that hundreds of thousands of DPs were ahead of me in the queue. Were I of potential use to them, they could, of course, obtain one of these permits for me, but I was no use at all, as far as they could see.
    The rich are not used to taking no for an answer. “Is there any other way?” Uncle Joe asked, taking his checkbook from an inside pocket of his jacket and unscrewing the cap of his gold-plated Parker fountain pen.
    They replied that they would think about it.
    A week or two later, he telephoned them. Had they had any ideas? Yes. They suggested that I present myself to the Mandate authorities at the Foreign and Colonial Office and explain that I wished to enter Palestine as a tourist, a pious young Christian wanting to visit the Holy Land. I could take a perfectly legal passage on a perfectly legal ship and cruise pleasantly through the Mediterranean to Haifa. It was something that other people did all the time.
    “How about this?” said Uncle Joe. “I will sell the salon. Your mother worked there for twenty years and you’re entitled to something. Suppose I buy a ticket and give you a banker’s draft to cover your first three months?”
    “It’s very generous.”
    “The future belongs to the young people, Evelyn. I’m too old to go but you…”
    Did he really see me as the future hope of Jewish humanity? Or was he just getting rid of me? Still I don’t know.
    First, I had to obtain a passport and endure the icy politeness of the officials when, looking at my birth certificate, they observed the space where my father’s name should have been. Then I dressed in a hot brown scratchy tweed skirt and a modest cream blouse with a peter-pan collar for my interview at the Foreign Office. I borrowed a gold cross from Gabriella who was working in one of the newly reopened Italian restaurants and hung it round my neck. She had great sympathy with my cause. A lot of people did in those days. She gave me a rosary of brown wooden beads too which I put in my handbag. I went with no lipstick or rouge and my hair, which reached to my shoulders, was screwed into a bun with tight fingers.
    I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue where the cleaners were busy on the steps of the theaters, to Piccadilly Circus. Past Lilly-whites, where there was an artful arrangement of cricketing paraphernalia in the window, then down Lower Regent Street, into Trafalgar Square and across the Mall. Walked along Horse Guards Parade, where on my right the swans and mallards and Canada geese made their way across the lake in St. James’s Park, and I saw one rise from the water and take wing above the bare black twigs, and turning saw it fly over Buckingham Palace with the flag ripping against the wind to tell us that our King and Queen and princesses were at home. A car passed and a somber profile that I recognized from the newsreels looked straight ahead. The might of the British Empire was burnished in the frail sunshine of this morning in February 1946, when London had never looked lovelier. The grandeur and majesty of England bore down on me.
    I was trying to make myself feel as I appeared to be: a modest Christian girl hurrying through Whitehall, perhaps to polish the candlesticks on the altar at Westminster Abbey or to commune with the tombs of English poets, four hundred years dead. Or whatever it was people did in churches. The rosary beads lay in the darkness of my handbag, clicking against each other. A man passed me in pinstripe trousers and a morning coat and wing collar and he lifted his bowler hat and said a courteous good morning. I smiled back. Across the city, the East End and the docks were flattened, in ruins, but here nothing had changed.
    Inside my head the kings and queens of England were stacked like pancakes in chronological order going back to the Wars of the Roses but no one I was related to had ever set foot on English soil until