Bras, bat mitzvahs and Bereshit: it’s all part of a working girl's day - The Jewish Chronicle

We hit the ground running on Sunday, after disembarking from the Queen Mary 2 – coming home to an empty fridge and exhausted washing machine, and welcome-home visits from at least 17 assorted kids and grandkids.

Oh and, that same night, a very jolly bat mitzvah, with lovely erudite speeches and lots of giggly girls in colourful trainers, making emotional speeches about the delightful bat mitvzah who was always “there for them”. The DJ was fab but I was hoarse from saying “pardon” at the top of my voice and my ribs were hurting from the choice of underwiring I had chosen for the occasion (more on that to follow). At some point I believe I laid healing hands on someone I saw doubled over with back pain. All part of a working girl’s day. The lovely holiday was definitely over.

Of course, in my day, girls didn’t have one – a bat mitzvah. It was another source of sibling conflict like my brother’s use of a pimpled, sponge table tennis bat to destroy the one sport at which I was passable. I actually wanted the fountain pen, not the big day in shul. To this day I can’t read Hebrew because I spent so many hours sitting outside the cheder in disgrace. Dumb insolence was my major. At my brother’s bar mitvah, the rabbi publicly awarded him a book saying: “Geoffrey, this is a book for a lazy Jew.” My dad was the shul’s president. Tongues wagged. I think my mother fainted. I can see her, hat of pink petals lying on the floor of the women’s section.

Having thrown caution to the Humberside wind, he moved to South Africa – the rabbi, not my brother. My brother stayed around until university, then moved to Montreal, Geneva, Madrid and his present domicile in Brussels. The rabbi was accurate about Geoff’s lack of attention to traditional faith, but his attention to tikkun olam has been exemplary. He has been the secretary general of WTO, warned the world about climate change for 30 years, and now runs Sun X in Malta, teaching eco-tourism to young people from struggling countries. He has brought up five kids, including two adopted children from an orphanage in the Philippines. I reckon God is pretty happy with Geoff’s particular form of laziness.

Back to my ribs. My highlight of the week was shopping for a new bra in Peter Jones on my way to a rehearsed play-reading at the Royal Court Theatre. I was standing in a cubicle when it struck me that you could increase the national sales of British goods in one fell swoop with a change of lightbulb. Because if I hadn’t been crunched up under terrible grey gloom, I would have left with a hot receipt and a big hole in my debit card.

Why do they make changing rooms into chambers of horrors? Why is the over-head lightbulb made to turn your face into Myra Hindley’s and your lower half into that of a very hungry caterpillar? The assistant had handed me a bra called Fantasy, saying: “You have to step into it.”

“Er…really?” I said, dubiously, “Er...ri-ight...”

So, now, here I was, trussed up like a piece of topside. The bra, in its ascent up my body, had essentially taken my jersey trousers up with it. And the elasticated waist was around my neck. I started to get hot and hysterical in my two-metre hell hole. I scurried away, never knowingly underwired, to a kinder fantasy world. The theatre.

We had one day to rehearse the play, a rather good one called Memorium by Israeli writer Noga Flaishon, about a moral dilemma. Should an elderly survivor give access of her Holocaust experience to her granddaughter’s workplace for a public virtual experience? The reading was startling.

Six actors, who had never met before, sat around a table preparing to read aloud for the first time, before the audience arrived that evening. The theatre administrator came in and asked us to stand up. I thought maybe Queen Camilla was going to walk in – she likes a laugh. But no, she announced the schedule for the day, the coffee dispenser location and then asked us to announce our names and our pronouns.

I sat down. For 57 years in showbusiness I have regarded my pronouns with as much interest as my gerunds. But the actors calmly went around the table reciting: “she her, he him, they their,” until it got to me. Was I to say thee/ thou, me/ mo, or hee/ haw? Or should I say “I identify as a dame and a commander? So just just use the royal ‘we’”.

“My name is Maureen Lipman”, I murmured, “and I don’t have pronouns. Just grammar.”

You could almost touch the hiatus that followed. I may have become an elective dinosaur. I may soon be as cancelled as a ticket for Hugh Jackman in Hyde Park or HS2 to Birmingham.

On Tuesday night we were at Mill Hill shul for “engagement with Israel”, a beautifully curated evening (by Orly Lang) for Yom Hazikaron. The speeches were short and deeply felt. Listening to a young Israeli reserve soldier Major Aaron Bours telling us how he was shot in both his legs and rescued by his comrades was stunning. There was no trace of bitterness. Just gratitude for his life, in the face of so many who have fallen. Watching the kids from the Jewish school singing brought a smile to my face and a lump to my throat. You just see the adult so clearly in the child. The daydreamer, the eagerly expressive, the yawner. The ones with itchy feet in patent leather shoes – bought large enough to last a while. Not for the first time I wondered where the years had gone.

I tried to express in my speech that just as at Passover, we tell the story as if it were happening to us, now, these lost young soldiers are our children. The Jews have given and continue to give a disproportionate amount of good to the world. One can only conjecture how much virtuosity would have been added had we not been culled in every generation.

At another school on the other side of town, I watched my 13-year-old granddaughter explain her HPQ on the subject of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Her 2,000-word dissertation took the angle: “Was Eve disobedient or just curious?”.

I watched in awe as she reasoned that God gave us free will so that we should question him. Bereshit will be the portion for her own bat mitzvah in October. It is a mystery how this child, whom I love so much, can understand so many complex philosophical concepts when she doesn’t seem to read continuous Lorna Hill books about horses and ballet, as I did. Her teacher some years ago explained to me: “Oh I love Ava, she can explain the maths to the children in class so I can just sit, and have a cup of tea.” I’m secretly waiting for her to heal the world.

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Israel