Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (20 page)

What this means to me is, joy of joys, I can throw my own ‘evening in’, as they were known. Essentially an evening in was a group of kids going round to someone’s empty house or flat, pairing off, and mostly snogging with the lights out. How far it all went beyond that depended on the willingness of the girl to move things along; at that stage, it probably did move sometimes into ‘heavy petting’ territory. But only sometimes.

With some careful plotting, Lolly and I let it be known around the club that Jacky will be hosting an evening in. All are welcome. This, I hope, will be my Big Chance with Stephen: the invite has been issued all along the Hill.

About a dozen young girls and boys crowd into my cramped flat that evening and start to pair off. The beautiful Stephen actually turns up, climbs the smelly stone stairs in his immaculate Italian suit and steps into my home. Oh joy. Yet he and Richard Longthorpe take one look around at the snogging couples on armchairs and sofa – and promptly leg it. David, who’d turned up earlier and is still interested, is waiting for his moment and decides to pounce.

‘Come outside to the balcony,’ he begs me. So I do, disappointed by my dashed dreams of Stephen but now open to experience, at least.

And there, on the dingy balcony of our flats, I have my first-ever kiss. It’s all a bit slippery, no tongues deployed yet, but we keep going with mutual enthusiasm. This was it, ‘necking’ they called it (no one had ever heard of the word foreplay). And while I’m pretty indifferent to David generally, I find I quite like being in his embrace: it feels grown-up.

But not for long. In the time-honoured tradition of such events, a big shock: Molly and Ginger trundling up the stairs to our flat hours before they’re expected. The door to their home ajar, they are appalled to step inside to find two couples snogging fervently on the couch and other pairs doing likewise on chairs and armchairs. Luckily, no one has attempted to raid Ginger’s cocktail cabinet for the booze; there hasn’t been enough time. But me, I am caught bang to rights, in the embrace of David, who moves like lightning down the stairs and away into the Dalston night the minute my parents appear on the scene.

David’s vanishing act doesn’t upset me. Essentially, the whole exercise has been purely experimental; I’ve long been desperate to know what it’s like to snog a boy. For my parents, of course, this scenario is proof positive that their daughter is on the road to ruin.

Need I say that Ginger, who isn’t, for some reason, in his usual pissed-as-a-fart state tonight, merely a bit tiddly, goes ballistic? Everything relating to my new teenage world is scheduled to be banned, my nylons, my hoop skirt – the late fifties were the era of full skirts and taffeta petticoats – my Elvis records (which is daft because I can always go to Lolly’s flat to listen to hers). Even Lolly is mooted for the banned list. My dad has recently taken an avid dislike to Lolly’s mum, Fay, though he’s never met her face-to-face, only spoken to her briefly on the phone.

‘She’s a tart,’ he’d fumed to my mum.

Fay loved bingo and went out regularly to play locally. With a cabbie husband working nights, this, according to my dad, showed she was a bad mother. And, of course, in his macho view, this also confirmed her status as a sleep-around gal. And now, of course, my balcony snog has given him ammunition to ban Lolly and her family from my life.

‘You’re not seeing that Lolly, either! She’s a little tart too, a bloody bad influence.’

(The truth was the other way round, of course.)

‘What do you bloody know, all you do is get pissed you bastard!’ is my standard response.

The bedroom door slams. I fall onto my bed, disappointed and embarrassed at being caught, angry at my dad’s typical over-reaction. But part of me, nonetheless, feels a bridge has been crossed: at least I’m now a Snogee.

For about a week after the aborted evening in I am grounded: I go to school, come home, eat my dinner in my room – and stay there. David, apparently, is still keen, undaunted by the spectre of an irate Ginger, which says much for his youthful ardour. But alas, for David, I am lost to him: my experiment over, my dad’s attempts to limit my life soon forgotten, I am in no way ready for a steady situation with a Nice Boy. Oh no. I want something different, more exciting than a rather scruffy Stamford Hill Club boy.

‘He’s not exactly nice looking,’ I remind Lolly as we munch away on our lunchtime bag of potato puffs. ‘And I can’t stand that big jumper he wears, it looks like his mum knitted it and lost the pattern.

‘Anyway, he’s got a big nose, he looks SO Jewish ….’

How superficial can you be? Instead of appreciating David’s loyalty after the embarrassing denouement, the shape of his nose and his baggy knit are sufficient to consign him to the rubbish heap. He takes it well, stops hanging around me and quickly moves on to another girl from the club who goes to Laura Place school. Recently I learned that he became a highly successful multi-millionaire businessman. Who would have known it, eh?

Lolly, too, is starting to conduct her own youthful experiments around this time. And we learn a valuable lesson from what happens next: ‘Loose Talk Costs Lives’ proclaimed the posters plastered all over the country during the war years. In this case, of course, lives were not imperilled. But Lolly’s reputation around the Hill is about to take a bit of a nosedive via some serious blabbing.

Lolly has long had a suppressed passion for a boy called Malcolm. He lives near Hackney Downs in the same block of flats as Lolly’s grandparents. She visits her grandparents regularly, so this gives Lolly ample time and opportunity to smile encouragingly at Malcolm, who is exceptionally good looking and, at sixteen, already something of a Hackney heartbreaker. One girl in our year, Susan, has already set her sights firmly on Malcolm and they’ve been an item for a while, so Lolly has kept very quiet about fancying him like mad.

One summer evening, as Lolly leaves her grandparents’ flat, she finds Malcolm at the bottom of the stairs, leaning on his pushbike and flashing her a come-hither grin. Two of his mates are with him: Don, another good-looking local boy, and a fat boy called ‘Buddy’, nicknamed because he wears big black-framed glasses à la Buddy Holly.

‘Goin’ home, Lolly?’ coos Malcolm the Charmer, who knows the estate where Lolly lives about a mile or so away.

Lolly nods, afraid to say much. This is the closest she’s ever got to Malcolm. But she’s heard through the Skinners’ grapevine that he and Susan aren’t courting right now. They’re having ‘a break’.

Throwing caution to the winds, she says its OK for the trio, pushing their bikes along the pavement, to accompany her home. Yet minutes into their stroll, Malcolm seizes the initiative.

‘Look, we can cut across the Downs here and get there quicker,’ he tells Lolly, a signal to his mates to leg it, buzz off. Which they promptly do.

Lolly knows perfectly well she should now make some excuse and walk off, get away from the Downs. But this doesn’t happen. A few minutes later, they’re sitting on the Downs, Lolly chattering away nonstop to cover her nerves.

‘Everyone says that Skinners’ girls are snobs,’ she prattles.

‘You can’t be a snob if you live in council flats, can you?’

Malcolm doesn’t answer. He just smiles beguilingly – and promptly grabs Lolly for a kiss. She does not pull away. She’s been kissed before by a boy she didn’t like much. This is Malcolm! Much more exciting. More kisses.

‘This is niiice,’ thinks Lolly dreamily.

Then, predictably, Malcolm lunges and tries to grab Lolly’s boobs. She is quick to push him away. She knows she’s already in trouble for going on the Downs and just necking with Someone Else’s Baby. Anything else is unthinkable.

Malcolm jumps up. He can’t be bothered to try again.

‘Come on, let’s walk you home, I’ll be late for tea.’

Silently they trudge all the way back to Lolly’s estate. He says goodbye without attempting another kiss.

Lolly doesn’t tell a soul about what has happened, not even me. But within a day or so, the news is out: Gallant Malcolm, so handsome, so treacherous, has delightedly rushed back to his mates to boast: Yeah, he went on the Downs with Lolly who then, shamelessly, let him unhook her bra.

‘That Lolly’s a right goer,’ he tells them.

‘Reckon she’d probably go all the way if you wanted ….’

It’s both unfair and cruel. The lie spreads around the Hill, all the way to Skinners’ and the ears of Susan, who confronts Lolly after class.

‘I hear you’ve been after Malcolm,’ she sneers bitchily.

‘So what?’ says Lolly shakily, attempting a defiance she doesn’t really have.

‘Malcolm’s not interested in little TARTS,’ she hurls at a crestfallen Lolly, who soon gets the full story of what Malcolm has been saying from one of the other girls.

Lolly is shocked and bewildered. She doesn’t deserve this. In one fell swoop devious, two-timing Malcolm has somehow cleared himself with his beloved. And upped the ante as a Lothario with his mates. Now, whenever she runs into Susan and her gang, there are bitchy whispers and gales of spiteful laughter. Who can underestimate the cruelty of young girls? Or the perfidious behaviour of young men?

But if our random experiments with boys are taking up much of our time and energy, our school careers are now in freefall. After-hours detention is now
de rigeur
, as are summons to the headmistress, Miss Gray, for a talking-to. On one memorable if shameful occasion, Lolly and I wind up in detention together – and spend an entire half hour standing before the teacher, giggling incessantly. It’s all so hilarious for us. We look at each other, that makes us giggle. We look at the teacher, more fuel for snickering. It’s outrageous – and also a bit tragic. Because it is crystal clear to the teachers that it’s a waste of time trying to teach girls like us. Time to talk to The Parents.

Molly and Ginger are invited to a session at the school with the headmistress. They dress to the nines, as usual, my dad, unbelievably sober in his new Savile Row tailored ‘whistle’, white neatly pressed shirt and silk patterned tie. Molly dons her new yellow wool jigger coat, a loose three-quarter-length style very popular in the fifties. Miss Gray, however, is not interested in presentation. Their daughter, she explains, is a hair’s breadth away from expulsion. She is bright but she doesn’t study at all, and her insolent attitude is disrupting the class. What do they have to say?

There have already been heated discussions at home. Lolly’s family are clubbing together to pay to send her to secretarial school so she can leave Skinners’ after turning fifteen and learn shorthand and typing. I, of course, demand this too. It means several months more of study – then out into the world, a job, earning money. Freedom. As usual, my parents are caving in to me. Anything for a quiet life.

‘We think if she goes to secretarial school when she’s fifteen, there’s quite good opportunities for her, there’s a big demand for office workers and secretaries,’ explains Ginger.

‘And the money’s very good.’

He’s right, in a way. Better a teenage typist, earning money, than a reluctant stroppy schoolgirl, wreaking havoc, ignoring her studies.

‘Yes, but it’s not the same as the sort of career she could have if she worked hard and studied,’ sighs Miss Gray. ‘The money might be good now. But it will never really go up.’

What she means, of course, is that study, ‘A’ levels and university could lead to a Civil Service career, or teaching – where salaries, plus pensions would climb, albeit slowly.

None of this is likely to mean much to my parents. But they somehow respect Miss Gray’s quiet authority and her words are mulled over afterwards.

‘It’s funny she said that about the money, Ging. How does she know?’ mused Molly.

‘Dunno. I reckon she has to say that, anyway. Can’t be seen to encourage people to let their kids out at fifteen, can she?’

I am fortunate that Ginger’s wad of readies can easily be deployed to fork out the twenty-two guineas per term it will cost to send me to Pitmans College in Southampton Row for a year. Though at the time, of course, I don’t fully perceive this: it’s just another thing I have to have because a) I hate Skinners’ and any attempt by authority to regulate my behaviour, and b) my friend is doing it, so it’s a must-have.

But the Pitmans decision, unbeknown to all of us, carried with it a huge advantage for me down the line. For while shorthand and touch-typing were the prerequisites to a secretarial route back then, they could also prove to be very valuable tools for anyone wishing to work as a journalist. None of us, of course, had any idea that my path would eventually lead to a lifetime in journalism. But this time, the spoilt child who stamped her foot and yelled until she got her way had unwittingly hit upon something of lasting value.

Although all that was a long, long way ahead ….

T
he sixties dawned. By the end of 1960, Elvis was out of the army, growing his hair and warning us: It’s Now or Never. And in a way, he was right; who imagined we were heading into the definitive post-war decade of explosive social change?

For me, the era began by saying farewell to school, an unmemorable transition. I just left class, as usual, bundled all my stuff into a carrier bag, and waited impatiently at the bus stop opposite the hated Victorian building, the scene of my Great Failure, to board the 649 bus home. There was no ceremony, no real sense of moving on to pastures new, other than briefly saying goodbye to my cronies. (No teacher had much to say to me.)