The sort of mid-Autumn day which makes poets warble saw us wend our way to Birmingham for the saddest, most tender of family reunions.
The diminished ranks of the Wood and Hawkins families were gathering to pay tribute to two family matriarchs who had been loved nearly as much by assembled cousins and friends as by their own children. Both Audrey and Cynthia, though some years my parents’ senior, had survived them by more than a decade and as the veils were removed from their respective double headstones it was like watching two marvellously burnished pieces of toast pop from the manicured earth.
The stones bore so many names, so many lives of which I’m barely aware...yet Birmingham’s Jewish community is tiny compared to those of Manchester and London and the one Jewish cemetery is an elaborately gated property spanning two sides of a road.
The ‘new’ section, which I’ve visited twice in recent years, displays carefully mown lawns and well-preserved graves which survived a hate-attack in 2004 when 60 headstones were either destroyed or defaced with swastikas.
I wondered briefly if this senseless rampage had been perpetrated by the sort of louts we saw performing Community Service at nearby Brookvale Park earlier in the afternoon. What I noticed also made me muse on the use of such sentences: One of the lads was sitting unnoticed and smoking under the arch of the bridge he was supposed to be painting!
It might do such kids – and community relations – more good if they were sentenced to help maintain the cemetery, which also boasts a graceful Grade 11 listed ohel (prayer chapel) of Moorish design.
The chapel’s wooden memorial boards and their gilt and black lettering belie the wicked canards often retold about the Jewish contribution to past British war efforts.
Fifty-two local Jewish soldiers served and returned after The Great War while 28 came home after serving in World War II. One of those serving was a grenadier, and another man died later in ‘The Malayan Emergency’ - a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army from 1948 to 1960.
Article comments