"Simcha," my grandmother called from the front room, "schnell!" I closed my book and ran out of the kitchen. "Quick!" She repeated her cry before I arrived at the front window. She was staring out at the street, one hand behind her waving in circles, pulling me to look also.
She tapped her finger anxiously against the window. "Look!" When she was excited her rudimentary English shrank to single words. I wiped a clear circle in the fogged glass and looked into the misty morning. Directly in front of our house stood a white wagon, a brown horse standing patiently in the traces. The horse's ears drooped, her matted coat glistened with condensed fog. As I watched, her body seemed to shorten and then lengthen, and a flume of brown cascaded from her rear end. The pile of manure grew as I watched, rich steam rising in the cold air. My grandmother's finger tapped as if possessed. "Run!" I saw the milkman in his white coat, walking to the street from the house opposite. I ran for the broom closet.
In those days of war, manure was gold. Like everyone else on our street we grew a large vegetable garden and managed a compost pile. A load of horse manure was an unexpected gift, a stimulant to keep the compost pile hot and active during the cold English winter. I had to claim the manure before any of our neighbors saw it.
There was no commercial fertilizer available in the early 1940s, certainly nothing for city-dwellers like ourselves. Carrot tops and potato peelings went to feed our chickens, then the chicken manure went into the compost. Any scraps the chickens wouldn't eat we chopped fine and added to the pile. One of my jobs was to turn the decaying pile periodically, and use the mature compost as a side dressing for new plants.
My grandmother and I lived on potatoes, carrots, turnips, greens – anything we could raise in our backyard garden. The government rationed each person to one egg a month, four ounces of meat a week – when you could find such things in the shops at all. The milkman brought two pints of milk once a week, and we used this only for our tea. To supplement our diet my grandmother kept chickens. When our hens were laying I ate an egg each morning; as the only child in the house I had first claim on the protein. Once in a while my grandmother would slaughter an old chicken and make a pot of soup to last a week.
My mother and my aunt lived in the house but I rarely saw them. They left early each morning, after gulping a cup of tea in the kitchen. Fluent in Polish and German, they had found work in government ministries soon after we – mother, aunt, grandmother and myself – arrived in 1939. They managed to eat most of their meals in the office canteen. My grandmother and I ate lunch and dinner by ourselves, except on Sundays. Then the four of us gathered at midday for a family meal. In the afternoon we'd sit in the front room; my aunt sang while my mother played the piano.
My father and my mother's brother had escaped Poland a few years before us and were now with the British army in Europe. They hadn't been home in four years. My uncle had been in the North African campaign. "Africa" was a word exotic to my ears, and I spent hours over maps of the desert, tracing with my finger the campaigns of Rommel and Montgomery. My father's old one-volume encyclopedia reproduced a few photographs: date palms in an oasis, coconuts and bananas growing in lush valleys. I had never seen any of these fruits. They were too frivolous to import into England in perilous times. At Christmas 1944 I received an orange in my stocking – the first real one I had ever seen.
It would be another year before I saw a banana. My uncle brought some home six months after the war ended. He handed me one. I held it by both ends and bit into the middle. The adults in the room howled with laughter. "No, Stephen, like this." My uncle took the banana and peeled it from one end. Everyone laughed again at the astonishment on my face.
As we entered 1945 it was clear that the Allies were winning, but our situation at home had not improved. My grandmother had started the war fat and rosy; she was now thin and wrinkled. At seven years, I was sturdy but small. As I raced out the front door the milkman clucked to his horse and flicked the reins. The wagon wheels rattled and clanged as the horse swerved around the bomb craters in the street.
The manure pile was huge and hot. I sweated in the cold January air as I carefully shoveled the treasure into my bucket. Down the street one of my friends emerged from his front door carrying a brush and pan. He saw me laboring at the pile and turned back into his house. My grandmother waved at me from our front window.
As I lugged the bucket into our garden, I remembered a song my aunt often sang on Sunday, in a fair imitation of an Irish brogue.
I was old enough to understand, to laugh with my aunt about the gullibility of the Irish immigrant. But as I dumped the manure onto the compost pile, I said to the chickens, Well, I'm an immigrant, too, and Look, I have indeed found gold in the streets of London.
This story appears in the September 2008 issue of The Sigurd Journal.