THE PATRIARCH DIES

This day the 25th August 2006 I became the older generation, thankfully not the oldest in the family but close enough, with the passing of my Mothers Brother, Uncle Herbert, at the ripe and spectacular age of 95.
What can one say “but well done and long life” and wish for the same, so in that rare sense this is an occasion to celebrate a life well lived rather than to mourn times missed as is so generally the case.
Good old Herby, a long life!
As you expect from a man who has lived so long, he seems to have always been there, he was my mother’s rich big brother who lived on the hill, and visited for occasional Sunday lunches, a distant and rather formal presence in the background of my life, the sole male of the family who sadly saw in me, my father, whom he detested, for the shabby way he treated his sister and for being a Catholic to boot, both unforgivable sins.
He only really featured for me after we returned from England after my parents protracted and loveless separation with all the injury and disgrace this entailed, sentencing us to a position as mere supplicants to the cold charity of the exalted Unky Herby, who was furthermore tiresomely gracious and kind, which just rubbed salt in the wound.
He and I had many an embarrassing interview, particularly after I was released from the confinement of my boarding school onto an unprepared world, which reacted with all the predictable rage and irritation that a longhaired hippy engendered in those dark days of the 60’s! He had to bail me out of some deep poo poo for which I should be eternally grateful, but what with his inevitable and predictable inclination to make me feel like the biggest stupid arse hole that ever lived, he elicited little more than grudging civility.
Shabby on my side.
The truth be told I harbored a strange and illusive ill will to this fine Jewish gentleman, which within the scope of his personality, water under the bridge and my intransigence, was perhaps misplaced. As I grew older and I hope a little wiser I found my own attitude towards him less and less appropriate, but nonetheless I was never able to put aside the feeling that he owed me something. What, I did not know, but I imposed on him an expectation of something that even I did not understand. Damn odd.
So we bickered and pecked at each other over the years with no real outcome, and even got to amuse each other with our mutual distrust, when our paths crossed, which we were both thankful for its rarity!
And so there it would have stayed had not my dear friend Howy invited me to attend his eldest unmarried son’s Barmitzfa.
At this point I need to digress to a little background material. Being a Jew boy, born and bred, mothers Jewish, that’s that so are you, it’s a tribal thing, my father was a Catholic which even confuses them, so in the end I was christened Church of England under the logic that ‘ if you are Catholic or Jewish you got problems but no one gives a shit about the Cof E.
I was initially inducted into my fathers family of soldiers and the white memsahib of the British Empire, of which I had been promised a privileged place, if I would but speak proper, play rugby and cricket, and tolerate the constant flogging the young and the privileged that empire received before being put in charge of the heaving masses. Cool think I and just as I am getting my teeth into that, I was taken away with no consultation and sent to a military rugby school in South Africa where I was persecuted by boys and masters alike for being a mouthy cheeky very small and skinny little turd, I was not pleased, but as there seemed no choices, I stiffened the lip and plotted vengeance on who I knew not, but someone had to pay. I am sure you know the feeling.
I soon got it into my head that I was alone and not part of any tribe or nation and only a token and vaguely tolerated member of a family, the English crowd were far away and distanced further by the indifference of my father, who consisted of two quid for Christmas, not a formidable presence, so one way or another for better or worse I drifted, it is true quite gaily, through a life that had no commitments or responsibilities on the edge of society, in retrospect a good thing but still lonely, boo hoo.
So back to the barmitzfa where for the first time I attended an actual public service at a Jewish Temple on a Friday night, quite an experience, never before had I been in a room with so many Jews before, and the scary part was that I could recognize them all, and saw for the first time that I was after all a part of something bigger than my group of one, that I could be one of them if I wanted. Suddenly I realized what I had missed for all these years. Came as quite a shock to the extent that I was quite struck down with a deep, deep feeling of being bereft of something of great value, of having been denied my birthright. I finally understood what I resented old Unky Herby for.
It was his job as the bloke and boss man of the family to have made sure that I became inducted into the society of Jews.
So the next time I saw him I confronted him with this reality, and bless me if this fine old fellow agnoledged his failure in this and a great weight fell from me, this small conversation took from me a weight that had burdened me for so many years, and I think for the first time he and I became friends and forgave each other.
Thank god I already had a circumcision, not that I was about to buy a seat at the schule, learn Yiddish or at this late stage become a practicing Hebrew, but it was good to feel that I was a member of the pyramid builders and Red sea pedestrians. I will never really understand the services like I do those of the goyem but if I wanted to make the effort that comfort zone was mine for the taking, so Salaam and long life to a great old guy, Herbert Meyersfelt my Uncle.