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two puppy dogs meeting nose to nose.
    Then I asked, “Where you off to?”
    â€œT’yours,” he said. “Me Mam sent me to borrow a shilling for th’ rent. Where you off to?”
    â€œT’yours,” I said. “Me Mam sent me for a shilling for th’ rent, too.”
    â€œThen I’ll see you later,” he said. “Ta-ta.”
    â€œTa-ta,” I said.
    Off we went in opposite directions, too innocent to realize the futility of our respective errands. My mother and his mother were also close friends, and later when they met and discussed this episode, they burst into gales of laughter, doubling over until tears came to their eyes.
    It was strange how they could laugh over their misfortunes, and yet they did often, but just as often they wept. I know my mother did. Never in front of us if she could help it. But I sometimes saw her surreptitiously wiping her eyes. Perhaps she was a little worse off than some of the other women, because my father gave her only a small portion of the little he made. The rest went for drink and gambling. He gave her only a little love, as well.
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    HE WAS A STRANGE MAN , not at all like other Jewish men, who rarely drank or gambled or swore as he did. He was like a boarder in our house. He came and went. He was big and dark and surly, and always wore a cap pulled low over his brow so that you could hardly see his face. He left early in the morning to go to his tailoring shop, came back late in the evening, and ate his supper alone at the table with his head bent low over his plate, never saying anything to us. When he spoke it was only to my mother, and always with savage curses.
    Barely had he finished his supper than he pushed his chair back with a scraping sound and was off in such a hurry that one sleeve of his coat was left dangling behind him. He fumbled for it as he rushed out. When the door closed behind him, with a bang, we were all relieved. He was off, to a pub or some card game, and would not be back until late.
    We always fought with one another when it came to taking his tea in the afternoon. This was a daily routine among all the Jewish children on our street. The Christian children did not have to do this. The mill workers were not allowed to take time off to have tea. They had no union as the Jewish tailoring workers did. About four or five o’clock you would see a long line of boys straggling along Brook Street in the direction of Daw Bank, where the workshops were located, all of them carrying steaming cans of tea and little packages of bread and butter, enough to tide the men over until they came home for supper. The other boys went eagerly, glad for a chance to see their fathers, but in our family there was a constant battle over who would go. We hated the job because we feared being with the man who was our father even for the few moments it took to deliver the tea. We sometimes cried and pretended to be sick, and indeed my mother herself would often have to go, tearing herself away from her numerous other chores to rush to the shop.
    Now that I was grown up I had to take my turn. I always went shivering with apprehension, tagging along after the other boys, and as we approached Daw Bank my fears grew. It was a disreputable neighborhood to begin with. The rows of houses, probably built long before ours, were in a tumbledown state, doorways leaning, windowpanes missing. The middens were in the front here, giving off a foul stench that sickened us the moment we turned into the street.
    Worse than anything else was Old Biddy, a huge slattern of a woman with stringy unkempt hair dangling down the sides of her face. She came out of the dark hole where she lived, looking like a huge bear emerging from hibernation, glaring at us as we came along with our tea cans, and muttering, “Bloody Jews.”
    I would never have dared go by there alone. I was terrified of this woman, and I clung closely