Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (7 page)

I only heard my grandmother tell this story to my mum once – but, unfortunately, I never ever forgot it.

‘They say she was still alive when the copper found ‘er. One of ‘er eyes was still open,’ Miriam told my mum with ghoulish relish.

Trotting along silently, still clutching my mum’s hand tight, scary images like these would flash before me as we negotiated what had once been London’s meanest streets of filth, poverty, prostitution and crime. Bomb damage and destruction all around the area made it even more sinister, if that were possible. So my imagination would be working overtime. What would happen to us if someone like The Ripper saw us as prey? Suppose they had a knife? We could try to run away. But would we be able to run fast enough?

Strangely, though, I kept these childish fears secret, unvoiced, on those scary Sunday trudges. The winters of those years were remarkable in their ferocity; there were killer smogs too: you’d open the front door and be confronted with a thick wall of yellow pollution. I learned to welcome such weather on a Sunday: my parents wouldn’t consider taking me out anywhere if we hit one of those fogs or an exceptionally bad patch of wintry weather.

‘Wanna go, wanna go,’ I’d wail to my mum, stamping my tiny feet bad temperedly whenever we’d be obliged to go out on brief wintry sorties to shop for veggies at our nearby street market in Ridley Road. So she probably thought my silence on those Sunday walks down the Lane were due to my discomfort at the climate. Even if it wasn’t raining, the late Sunday afternoon trudge always seemed to take place under grey, eerie, menacing skies.

Petticoat Lane Market itself, of course, had ceased the day’s frenetic trading and was having its well-earned Sunday snooze: the streets and gutters littered with the detritus of market stalls, rotting fruit, near liquid vegetables, torn, muddy clothing, empty boxes and dirty newspaper wrappings.

Legend had it you could buy anything you wanted in the Lane and years later, a friend told me that once, she’d seen two lion cubs for sale there – but I remained permanently disinterested in what the Lane had to offer. To an overimaginative toddler, this was a murky, fear-filled, dark Dickensian world of grotesque horror. Only infrequent childhood trips to underground stations could match this place as a source of fear in my troubled imagination. Over time, this fear developed into a lifelong abhorrence of dark, enclosed, claustrophobic places. Just one childhood visit to the Angel underground station, where we stood on a platform that was, effectively, a terrifyingly narrow concrete strip with tube trains rattling past us on either side of the strip, was enough to give me endless nightmares as a kid.

Jack and Miriam lived in what they liked to call ‘the buildings’ in Stoney Lane, ancient apartment dwellings with stone stairs and a strange, unidentifiable smell. This sour aroma of a poorly ventilated, tightly inhabited building remained so vivid, so powerful in my memory that decades later, in Sydney, visiting a friend who had just moved into an inner-city apartment in an old building, I smelt that same strange stale stench as I climbed the stairs. ‘Yeah, it’s the smell of the buildings,’ said my friend, a cockney artist from south London. ‘I remember it too from when I was a kid.’

For my grandparents, life in ‘the buildings’ was everything they wanted: they loved being part of the neighbourhood, surrounded by people they’d known for years, a community that remained tight and close, heedless of its dismal, squalid backdrop; here every stallholder, every shopkeeper knew each other, could recite everyone’s history, family, working lives, troubles. It was a lawless place too, of course. My father’s family weren’t crims but came from a long line of duckers and divers. In the Lane, the law was something you could often sidestep, usually with a bung (bribe) in the right place.

Years later, when a well-meaning attempt was made by the Corporation of London authority to rehouse my grandparents, to what is now the Barbican, in the post-war building boom, they refused. Incredible. Perhaps it was an age thing: they were well into their sixties by the time the war ended. Change, comfort and an improved vista held no interest for them. They loved what they knew.

Slowly, resentfully, we’d climb the stairs to their home. They rented what were actually two separate flats on one floor; one flat, kept for family members on overnight stays, had an infrequently used dining room plus a spare bedroom with a scullery on the landing outside. The landing also boasted a toilet cubicle, complete with wooden seat. Newspaper was deployed to wipe yourself: the scratchy Izal paper in its square pack that we used at home was too posh for my grandparents, even though they weren’t short of cash. On the other side of the landing were Miriam and Jack’s main living quarters, a smallish living room-cum-kitchen with a bedroom behind.

Miriam, stern and white-haired with a pink, unblemished skin, wearing shapeless floral garments, usually covered by some sort of apron, and with a razor sharp tongue, would always have a cake ready for our teatime visit: usually a round plain cake with white icing on the top from Kossoff ‘s bakery nearby.

Miriam was a toughie, she’d raised five kids in the area while working full time alongside Jack in their Middlesex Street coal shop – my dad, the eldest, was virtually raised by Miriam’s sisters. Her language was colourful, peppered with four-letter words and the odd bit of Jewish slang.

‘Your Jackie’s a little rech (pronounced rosh),’ she’d frequently tell my mum. ‘But I like a kid with a bit of spirit.’

In its Yiddish translation, the word means a devil, hardly a polite observation but she had a point: my temper tantrums if things weren’t going my way could be quite spectacular, though I reserved my best ones for home. For me, the only joy of those visits was the cake, the highlight of the whole exercise. Even if it did sit on a rather odd tablecloth, made up from last week’s newspapers.

Somewhat incongruously, a copy of
The Tatler
, the glossy magazine for toffs, would often be lying on the newspaper tablecloth. Miriam’s tastes were eclectic: she was immersed in the ghoulishness and gore of the Lane’s history, yet she also devoured
The Tatler
each month, the
Hello!
magazine of its day, vicariously relishing the somewhat extreme contrast between her world and that of the country’s privileged classes. (The newspaper tablecloth is an unsolved mystery; they could certainly afford to buy a decent tablecloth. Probably it was sheer perversity on my grandmother’s part, along with the rejection of paid-for toilet paper.)

The visits mostly involved my mum chatting to Miriam across the teacups, while I usually wriggled impatiently in the chair, licking the last crumbs of cake from my fingers and waiting longingly for a second or third slice to be dished onto my plate. Like my dad, my grandfather would lie sleeping for most of Sunday afternoon, so conversation was usually limited to my grandmother moaning, mostly about Jack, to whom she was fervently attached, Superglue like, often following him down to the nearby pub, The Bell, to try to drag him away from the bar if she suspected other women were eyeing him up. Miriam was five years older than Jack. Perhaps it was the Toyboy Syndrome that made her so possessive, so fearful of losing him to another woman’s embrace.

Whatever lay behind her passion for Jack, this fierce, overwhelming obsession with her hubby’s doings had actually brought them to this flat, right at the beginning of the war, just before the Blitz.

In the thirties, Miriam and Jack continued to run their shop on Middlesex Street but, like many other Jewish people who ran businesses there, opted to move away from the market to a house, complete with garden and dog, in Clapton, a few miles away and much more pleasant. But her increasing jealousy of her husband led Miriam to insist that the couple move back to the area to live in ‘the buildings’ once their sons were in the army and their daughters evacuated, so that she could keep a close eye on Jack in the shop, which was now turned into a commission agent’s office.

Thousands of people were fleeing London, heading to safer parts of the country. But Miriam chose the reverse, moving even closer to the heart of the city – and the impossible-to-ignore danger from the Luftwaffe’s bombs – such was her need to watch over her beloved. And there they stayed.

If Miriam wasn’t moaning or complaining about Jack, she’d usually start dissing my father’s nightly drinking habits to my mum.

‘Go through ‘is pockets, Molly, when he passes out, and take what money you want,’ was Miriam’s tip, culled from a lifetime’s experience of pickpocketing her spouse.

‘’E’ll be so drunk he’ll never remember what he ‘ad – and at least it won’t be goin’ down the drain in the pub.’

I don’t believe my mother ever took her advice. My dad was generous, she had whatever she wanted – and she hadn’t grown up in a world where it was acceptable to surreptitiously take money out of a loved-one’s wallet, though clearly in Petticoat Lane the rules of domestic life had to be adapted to the circumstances: Jack was far from the only boozer or gambler in town.

Sometimes there’d be other visitors joining us at the newspaper-covered table: my father’s lively dark-haired sister Deirdre, and her son, Anthony, two years older than me and a pale, shy kid. We did not click, Anthony and I. He too was an only child, pampered by his mum and beautifully turned out, a right little Lord Fauntleroy in tiny tailored suits and cute little bow ties. Deirdre made all his clothes.

But he had made something of an enemy of me right from the start: at one of our early encounters in the Stoney Lane flat, he’d unexpectedly thrown up at the table – and managed to be sick all over my little buckskin shoes. Molly was horrified. I started wailing. Deirdre dragged him, his trousers covered in sick, outside to the loo. My grandmother seemed to enjoy the unexpected diversion as she helped Molly mop up my shoes and socks: a never-to-be-forgotten, oft recounted family moment.

Anthony also seemed to have a morbid fascination with the adult conversation. Mutely, he’d sit there, ears flapping, taking in every word. I wasn’t especially interested in what the adults said or did; I was far too focused on my own preoccupations, which were usually along the lines of ‘When can we go home?’ once the cake had been demolished.

Occasionally, Jack, or The Old Man, as my parents called him, would emerge from the bedroom and join us. Round faced with big black-framed glasses, he was an amiable if gruff sort of man. I wasn’t a spontaneously affectionate kid and never attempted to openly woo or charm either of my grandparents: they weren’t exactly the cuddly sort and to me, at that stage, they were kindly but nonetheless unappealing figures, mainly because I sensed, even then, that they were East End toughies of the old school and I recoiled, through over-sensitivity, from the harshness of this dark world they were so attached to.

So it tended to be cousin Anthony who would play up to his granddad and ask to play with his fob watch, schooled by his mum to ‘be nice to gramps’ in order to be rewarded with a parting gift of a pound note or two. Back home later, after another scary walk through the Lane’s dark, deserted streets to the bus home, my fears somewhat tempered by relief that it was nearly over, my mum would comment on this to my dad.

‘You should have seen the way Anthony was schmoozing The Old Man today,’ she’d tell my dad, who was as equally immersed in family politics as he was in the rigours of betting six days a week. ‘It made me sick the way he was playing up to him. Jac would never crawl round anyone like that.’

She was dead right there. Crawling round anyone for a quick quid was definitely not an option. And by now, little Jac was mighty relieved to be back in the damp, pokey, familiar space of our flat. For now, all thoughts of The Ripper, the Lane and the strange newspaper tablecloth could be banished from my mind. Until Sunday afternoon came around again …

W
herever you were living in the freezing snowbound British winter of ‘47, you were probably cold.

To add insult to injury, there was a fuel crisis. Coal – the source of heat for many – was in short supply because the roads and railways were blocked by heavy snow. Stockpiles at depots or pits froze and could not be moved for weeks. (Central heating was pretty much unheard of.) The roads got so bad, transport sometimes stopped completely. Power cuts were frequent, even radio broadcasts were kept brief. Without candles in the house, you were stuffed.

People were frequently heard to mutter, ‘this is worse than the bleedin’ war’ as they huddled at home or in the streets, wearing as many warm clothes as they could lay their hands on. In some cases, people worked in their offices by candlelight and high-street shops were lit by candles and gas lamps. And if you think that sounds romantic, forget it. Going outside could be treacherous. Even when the snow melted, the icy slush meant it could be perilous just venturing across a main road.

With my dad’s cash and contacts we’d managed to stockpile extra bags of coal in the bathroom cupboard for such emergencies. The little fireplaces in the flat had fires going constantly, which kept us warm but didn’t do much for our health, given the amount of coal dust generated.

People wore quite heavy outer clothes, woollen coats, suits, to protect themselves – men and women alike frequently wore hats or scarves as streetwear – but for children, serious protection from the cold meant piling on as many warm clothes as possible plus paying close attention to underwear. Especially the liberty bodice.