Whatever happened to Larry?
Simon Jarrett writes: Danny Braverman’s ‘Wot? No fish!!’ is a brilliantly performed solo show about the family life of his great uncle Ab Solomons, told through hundreds of doodles and drawings that Ab left behind. The family’s story includes the sad tale of their son Larry, admitted to a long-stay institution when he was 18 years old.
Some years ago, producer, writer and performer Danny Braverman was given some dusty old shoeboxes by his mother. They had belonged to his great uncle Ab Solomons, a shoemaker who had lived most of his life at the heart of London’s Jewish East End and who had died in 1986. What Braverman found inside was astonishing. Every week, from 1926 to 1981, Ab had drawn a sketch on the back of a small wage packet. Each sketch recorded some aspect of the daily life of Ab, his wife Celie, and, as time went on, their two sons. Each week he had given the sketch to Celie and now here they lay, many hundreds of them, dusty but intact.
These delightful drawings are a half-century chronicle of a marriage, its highs and lows, laughter and sadness, but most of all the enduring love that sustained it. Around a small family, who manage to be both ordinary and extraordinary, swirl momentous world events. Nazism rises in Germany, posing an existential threat to this Jewish family. All through it Ab produces his weekly drawing, often wry and humorous, on a wage packet. From this, Braverman has created a beautiful show which has toured the whole of the UK and around the world, telling the story, with projections of the drawings, in a way that has charmed and touched audiences of all ages wherever it has played.
Part of the story involves the couple’s oldest son, Larry, who was born in 1932. There are early indications that Larry was a little ‘different’. A rare photo survives showing Ab and Celie on their annual holiday pilgrimage to a south coast beach. Ab sits in a deckchair, tightly gripping the four-year-old Larry, who seems to be straining to get away and stares off to the side. Celie’s hand rests lovingly, but also anxiously, on his arm. The two young parents smile bravely.
Life gets harder
Larry was epileptic. He also had a ‘strange’ gait, and ‘odd’ behaviours, such as spontaneously bursting into song for no apparent reason, evoking hostile reactions in public. One drawing shows Celie conducting Larry, his brother and father in singing ‘Give a little whistle’ – perhaps an attempt to soothe the upset after such an incident. As Larry gets older life gets harder. One night Ab and Celie are shown sitting bolt upright in bed, clearly in the middle of the night, as Ab shouts ‘Shut up!! Larry!!’
A sketch of a holiday shows a defeated looking Ab and Celie walking through the rain with an equally forlorn Larry, now as tall as both of them, walking between them. Years later an uncle would tell Braverman that no one would visit Ab and Celie at home because Larry ‘was always throwing food about’.
Relentless honesty
In 1950, aged 18, Larry was admitted to Napsbury, a long-stay hospital in Hertfordshire. It was the normal thing in the 1950s and it was encouraged, almost demanded, by the medical profession. The drawings that record Larry’s life from this point, and his relationship with Ab and Celie, take on a sombre, desperately sad tone. Ab Solomons might have been doodling mostly humorous sketches on the back of wage packets but he was an artist and was compelled to record his world with relentless honesty.
They began the long ritual, in common with hundreds of other Londoners, of the weekly Sunday afternoon bus journey to the Hertfordshire countryside, to spend one or two hours with the son they loved but with whom they could not cope.
The first drawing of this sad pilgrimage shows Larry, dressed in his typical hospital-issue Sunday-best ‘visiting suit’, pointing accusingly at his parents. ‘WHY ARE YOU LATE?’ he shouts. Ab and Celie stand, heads bowed, hunched with guilt, sad and miserable. In another, he opens the food parcel they have brought him and exclaims, ‘Wot? No fish!!’, the phrase that gave the show its name.
In later pictures he calls an end to the visits: ‘WELL!! YOU CAN GO HOME NOW!!’ Ab gazes helplessly at the hospital building, Celie looks anxiously at her son and starts to turn away for the sad journey home. The aftermath of one of those journeys is also shown; Ab and Celie sit in their living room, a brick wall dividing them, a literal representation of the wall of silence between them.
Palpable grief
Larry died in 1978, in the hospital, aged 56. The compulsive artist in Ab had to depict the last, horribly sad moment. He and Celie stand at the end of an empty bed in the ward. The bedside locker has been removed, and a doctor stands meekly behind them. The caption reads ‘may his dear soul rest in peace, and release Mum.’ They are old, bent, their grief is palpable. No trace of Larry remains. If any picture captures the history of the asylum in 20th century Britain, it is this one.
Celie died three years later in 1981. Ab survived until 1986, but never drew another sketch after her death.
They left behind this wonderful treasure trove of social history, which Danny Braverman has brought brilliantly to life. He has done full justice to the funny, sad, hard-working, unassuming and fundamentally decent lives that they led, and beneath which Ab Solomon’s amazing creativity bubbled away. Amidst all of this he has brought us the life of Larry Solomons, which otherwise would have been lost in nothingness, along with the countless other thousands who lived unnoticed lives in the asylums of ‘modern’ Britain.
With thanks to the Braverman family for permission to use the illustrations.
‘Wot? No fish!!’ continues to tour nationally and internationally. For more information about Danny Braverman and the show see www.wotnofish.com
