Walking to Hollywood

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At three minutes past noon on 8 October 2007, I found myself standing listening to Sherman Oaks beside a dew pond on the crest of the South Downs in Sussex. A single cramped ash was reflected in the gunmetal disc of water, a disc that was ringed with pocked earth and cupped in a fold of cropped turf. Had an eavesdropper crept up on the pair of us, they might have thought Sherman’s magniloquence prompted by the very finitude of this watering hole, that the way he lectured not only me but the thrushes flitting overhead was an attempt to break free of this claustrophobic scene: the sky closely sealed by a lid of cloud, cut-outs of hedge and woodland stuck on the receding crests of the downs.

I knew this not to be the case.

Sherman had always been a big talker. I remember him aged seven or eight, rolling around in the boot of my mother’s car when it was her turn to do the school run, spouting a stream of wisecracks and making razor-sharp observations on the foibles of the world. A precocious anarchist, at thirteen Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski’s, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this — in a thick, mittel-European accent: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

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