What did you do in the war, Grandpa? Dear Lauren, Alice, Grace, Louis, Noah, Jonathan and Liz Here is an old and not very funny Jewish joke: A Jewish man stands his small son on a wall and says to him 'Jump off! I'll catch you!' The boy jumps. The man puts his hands in his pockets. The boy falls on the ground. 'There,' says the father 'is a valu- able lesson. You can't trust anyone in this life.' Then he picks the boy up and buys him an ice-cream. The original joke doesn't have an ice-cream at the end of it. That's my improvement on the old story, because I like my jokes (even bad ones) to have a happy ending and everyone knows that, just as chicken soup is Jewish penicillin, so ice-cream is Jewish baby aspirin. So the little boy wasn't really hurt. You may have expected my usual letter on Lauren's birthday and you didn't get it. Maybe you felt like the little boy who jumped off the wall? Maybe you thought I'd put my hands in my pockets and walked away? Maybe you never even noticed? Anyway, the real reason I didn't write on the correct date was not to teach you any lessons; it was just that I didn't feel up to writing any- thing - I wasn't quite as well as I should have been. Now I feel much better, thank you, so here's this year's letter. Think of it as the ice-cream. My, how the years roll by. Maybe you don't feel that yet. After all, if you're Noah and only one, you really don't have much ex- perience of the speed with which time passes. Even now that Lau- ren is seven, I guess the days still seem endless and the length of time between birthdays is still interminable. Well, as I (and some other guy) have said before 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may' because, when you get to my time of life, the days really do roll by, rosebuds are few and far between and, when you do find them, it hurts your back to bend and gather them. If you want a visual aid, by the way try: www.jwwaterhouse.com/view.cfm?recor- did=95 If you want to read the poem, try: www.luminari- um.org/sevenlit/herrick/tovirgins.htm but if I were you, I'd leave it for a year or two. I'm not sure what I want to write to you all this year. You can't help but be aware that the last couple of weeks saw Holocaust Day and the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz- Birkenau camp. A couple of weeks ago, I intended to take this as a theme for my letter but, as it turns out, after recent media coverage, I have nothing more to say at present. Another time maybe. Instead, how about a little more family history? So, to- day's topic is 'cousins'. My cousins, that is. Well, one cousin. Does one cousin constitute a theme? About three months ago, I got a phone call from my cousin Ronnie Sherman. I hadn't seen or heard from him for many years. Not since my mother's (your great grandmother's) funeral. Strange re- ally. We used to be inseparable when we were children. We lived one street away from each other and, when my mother was out at work, his mother looked after me. When I say 'one street away from each other' really we lived in the same block of back-to- back houses. I may have told you about them before, but even if so, here it is again. 'Back-to-back' houses are blocks of about twenty-four or twenty-six houses, built in a joined-up row with twelve or so facing one way and the other twelve butted up against then, facing one hundred and eighty degrees the other way. Oh, if you don't follow that (and I wouldn't blame you) ask me and I'll draw a picture. Anyway, I lived half way up one side and he lived almost at the top of the other side. During the war, we used to have air-raids most nights, when bombs were dropped around us. Fortunately, none of them ever came close enough to cause us problems but, every night, when the air-raid alarm sounded (a long, loud klaxon horn noise), a sound which would have awakened us if we hadn't already been awake waiting for it to sound, we trooped down into the cellar, which was rigged out as an air-raid shelter. There was even a bed there for me. Howev- er, I don't remember using the bed very much. You see, back-to-back houses only had entrances on one side - you only had a front door, because behind you, there was another house stuck on. And, unless you lived in one of the end houses, you had another house stuck on each side of you. So, in the in- terests of safety, in case there had been a bomb which made an exit impossible, everybody in the block of two dozen houses had broken a small hole (maybe a metre square) between adjoining houses, as an escape route. Except that we kids didn't see it as an escape route. We saw it as a link. We saw it as a play-device. I don't know what the occupants of the other houses found most trying - sitting in the cellar in the middle of the night, wait- ing for a bomb to drop on them or sitting in the cellar with a constant stream of children passing through. 'Hello, Mrs Forster, just going to see Leon?hello, Mrs Daniels, can I just come through? hello Mrs Fields, can Leon come with me to see Ron- nie?.....' I've just worked out that I would have to pass through eight or nine neighbours' cellars to get from our house to Ron- nie's. And, of course, there'd be traffic going both ways all the time. It was a strange time for children during the war. It started in 1939, so I was only four years old. Quite suddenly, one day, all the street lights were turned off and all the houses had black- out material draped across every window every night - paper blinds or thick curtains which kept all artificial light off the streets. If you had to be out after dark, it really was dark. Lamp posts which used to guide you along the streets simply stood gloomily and menacingly, waiting for you to walk into them. So we had to carry a little torch. The problem with a torch, though, was that it emitted too bright a light, so we had to cover the lens with sticky brown paper. That worked very well in cutting the light down to a mere glimmer. So well did it work that the torch no longer gave enough light to be of any use. So we used to walk into lamp posts whilst shining our torches at them. Never- theless, we still carried our torches everywhere. Another thing we used to carry everywhere was our gas masks. At the beginning of the war, there was a widely held view that the Germans were going to pelt us with gas bombs, so we were all is- sued with gas masks. They were awful. Made of rubber which fitted closely to your face, they had a small clear plastic viewing pan- el right in front of your eyes. Because the mask fitted so close- ly, the first time you breathed out, the plastic panel steamed up and stayed that way until you took the mask off so you could wipe away the steam. Needless to say, it wasn't much good as a gas mask as long as you were cleaning the viewing panel. Whilst you were wearing it, though, I'm convinced it would have been totally effective at filtering out any gas. Any gas. Including air. It had a filter which seemed to work by not letting anything through, either way. It's a good thing we never had to use them (except for very brief practices at school, where the teachers would reward you with a sticky sweet if you managed to get the gas mask on your face; of course, you couldn't get a sweet into your mouth when you were wearing a gas mask). So I don't think they'd have been much use in case of gas. Never- theless, we had to carry them everywhere. It was the law. They were supplied in a cardboard box with a long piece of string to use as a shoulder strap and wherever you went, everyone was wear- ing a brown cardboard box, like a style accessory. Eventually, people being people, some started to replace their cardboard box- es with designer gas mask cases. I seem to remember there were some pretty smart gas mask cases around - shiny, furry, mock leopard-skin, plastic. I don't know where the materials came from. I suppose people used to cut up old clothes. Eventually, I had to have a replacement case for my gas mask because mine just fell apart. I suppose it might have been because I scraped it on the ground all the time I was walking. Wisely, my parents got me a tin box to keep it in. I can still remember it. Yellow, cylin- drical, long strap on the top. It only had one design fault. The lid on the top was so tightly fitted that I could never get it off. In fact, I think that from the day I got my new gas mask case, I never saw my gas mask again. Anyway, back to Cousin Ronnie. I suppose I used to see him every day during the war. We went to school together. When not at school, we played together. We had tea together. Now and again I spent the night at his house, so we slept together. I guess that's a good definition of 'best friends'. Although he was my best friend, I always envied Ronnie. The main thing is that he was called 'Ronnie'. I always wanted to be called 'Ronnie' when I was small (we're talking from about age four or so). I didn't like being called 'Sydney'. Well, most peo- ple don't like their own names I think. I used to think that we should all be given a number when we were born and then allowed to choose our own names when we got a bit older. I'm glad now that this revolutionary idea wasn't adopted because I'd certainly have chosen 'Ronnie' and I wouldn't really like the name for me any more. Another thing I envied was that he is a year and nine months older than me and that gave him great wisdom and authori- ty. When I was four, he was five and three-quarters and knew so much more than I did, had so much more life experience. Now that he's seventy-one and a quarter and I'm only sixty-nine and a half, I feel that, at last, I have the edge on him. I used to think (when I was four) that he had my name. I used to think that it was only because he was born before me that he got to be called 'Ronnie' and I had to settle for 'Sydney'. Of course, now I am sixty-nine and a half, I know I had absolutely no reason to believe that my parents would ever have wanted to choose any oth- er name for me. And I suppose I wouldn't have been a different person. 'A rose is a rose is a rose' said Gertrude Stein; Shake- speare said 'What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet'. Ronnie's mother, by the way, was called 'Rose'. I haven't wanted to be called 'Ronnie' for about sixty years, but some things just stick in the mind. Another thing I envied was that Ronnie was clean and tidy and I was not. I suppose, really, I didn't envy it very much because, if I had done, I could have been clean and tidy myself. All I re- member is that if ever we were out together - say, walking to- gether to the park with our parents - by the time we got there I was dirty and had my shirt hanging out (we wore our shirts tucked in our trousers in those days) and my socks round my ankles and a grazed knee and straggly hair, whilst he was immaculate. I'll bet his cardboard gas mask case never fell apart. Now I know that some are tidy people and some aren't but, in those days I used to think - and this was an impression reinforced by my mother - that I had the choice of being tidy or not. Anita still thinks I have that choice. They're all wrong. Believe me, there is a tidy gene (or maybe there's a scruffy gene) and I know where I stand. Now they are working on stem-cell research, maybe as a spin-off from finding a cure for diabetes, they'll come across the solution to scruffiness. It'll be too late for me, though. Anyway, despite his virtues and my faults, he was my best friend for many years - through primary school, through grammar school where, of course, he was always a couple of years ahead of me. We often went on family outings when we were young and didn't know how uncool it was to be seen out with parents and even had family holidays together. We lost touch, I guess, when he went to university to study law and then into the army. We had conscription in those days, when every young man had to do a couple of years of military service. I don't think we were fighting anyone or, indeed, even expected to. It was just felt to be a good thing to teach young men the rudiments of killing people, I suppose. This is the only time that his year and nine months start on me acted in my interest. By the time I reached the age when I would have had to go, they'd scrapped the whole idea. So they left me alone. However, those who were already there had to finish their time. But, as Cicero has it, o tempora, o mores: After that, we saw each other quite infrequently. Why did he phone in October? For no other reason than to make contact again. I was really happy that he did. We arranged to go out to dinner, Anita and me, Sheila and him, and we've done that a couple of times now. I guess we'll keep in touch and meet from time to time. I hope so; it's rather like having a lost bit of my life returned to me. Well, descendents, that's about it for this year. Like I said, sorry I'm late. I'll try to be on time next year. Much love to you all Grandpa Sydney