Better Late Than Never

by Len Goodman

  In the back yard was an outhouse, but to me at five years old it seemed more like a barn – in reality it was just a big shed. Inside was an outside toilet – the only one we had; the whole family shared it. We didn't have loo paper: we had bits of torn-up newspaper that was kept on a spike. You had a read while you sat doing your business and if you came across an interesting bit that you hadn't finished reading by the time you'd finished, you put it back on the spike but behind loads of other bits so no one else got to use it before you were back in there again. When I say the whole family I mean Nan and Granddad; Mum and Dad; my uncles George and Albert and my Aunt Ada. I never knew my Mum's sister Aunt Gladys because she married Harry, a Canadian soldier, just after the war ended and they went to live in Vancouver.

  Years later my dad told me there was a lot of animosity towards Jewish people before the war. My uncles George and Albert were both members of Sir Oswald Mosley's Black Shirts; they used to go off on marches with them and attend rallies. There was a huge one in Bethnal Green in 1936 that they were almost certainly at. By the time war broke out Mosley's party was largely discredited but it didn't stop some people in the East End retaliating against those that had supported his views. On the day war broke out our house in Harold Street was attacked, presumably because of my uncles' involvement with the Black Shirts. It was only the fact that my dad was there at the time that worse things didn't happen; he reckoned my uncles would have been stoned to death. In the event, the air-raid sirens went off and everyone cleared off. Even so every window in Harold Street was broken, because most people in the street were sympathetic to the Black Shirts. When George and Albert were called up they wouldn't go to war: they said they were conscientious objectors. Obviously some people said they were cowards to which their answer was, 'No, you're cowards because you don't want to go to war, but you ain't got the balls to say I'm not fighting.' Whatever the whole truth, because I got all of this second-hand from my dad, this was a big issue around Harold Street; once the war got under way things settled down as it became clear that there was a bigger threat.

  Another thing I learned from my dad was about a tragedy that hit Bethnal Green during the war. It was one of those events that probably touched every family living in the area in one way or another. It is known as the Bethnal Green tube disaster and it occurred on 3 March 1943. It's a defining moment in the history of the East End of London and it touched our family. In many ways it represents the complete opposite of what happened at the outbreak of war and the smashing of the windows in Harold Street. This wasn't the East End divided; it was the East End united in sorrow.

  Our family's connection to the disaster goes back to before the war when my mum and dad were first married. Mum had two cousins, Harry and Dickie Corbett, who had been boxing champions; Harry was the older of the two, but Dickie the more successful. When Dickie won some money from the fight game he opened a snooker hall in Bethnal Green Road, not far from where Granddad had his stall. He put Harry in charge of the hall even though, or perhaps because, he was a little punch-drunk from having taken too many beatings while he had been fighting. Dickie would sometimes come round to the Harold Street house where Dad and him would spar in the back yard. Now my dad was my size, about 14 stone, six feet tall and he'd done a little bit of boxing, although never professionally. Dickie on the other hand was a bantamweight, who weighed about eight and a half stone; he also had a lisp. According to my dad he packed the punch of a 20-stone man. His fists were lightning fast and when he caught you with a punch you knew all about it.

  My dad was mad on snooker so he would also see Dickie sometimes up the hall. One day Dad was playing on a table with a couple of mates when two spivs came in looking for a table. They were big guys and dressed the part in camel coats and trilby hats. Once they started playing they also started taking the mickey out of Harry Corbett, who was small like Dickie. They asked for a cup of tea and because Harry walked a little funny they started telling him not to spill it. As time went along they became even more ugly. Dad said he could see that things could get out of hand but was worried about getting involved because these two geezers looked pretty handy. Harry was obviously getting fed up with it too, and when he was bringing over another cup of tea he spilled some of it on one of the two spivs. This sent them over the edge and they started to really have a go at Harry. One of them said:

  'I hear you used to be a fighter, bit effin' pathetic now, ain't yer.'

  With that the other spiv stuck up his fists as if to square up to Harry. 'Come on, you stupid worthless git, show us what yer made of.'

  In an instant Harry went from being a shambling shadow of a boxer to the real thing; his fists came up and he hit this guy with such force that he literally did a somersault over the snooker table, landing in a heap on the floor on the other side. He was out cold; my dad said it was like something out of a film.

  Work began on Bethnal Green tube station in 1936 when the Central line was been extended from Liverpool Street; when war broke out the line was not quite finished. Throughout the Blitz it was used as an air-raid shelter; inside were 5,000 bunks; in all over 7,000 people could be accommodated in it. By March 1943 the bombing of London was not so intense, but after the RAF had bombed Berlin on 1 March there was an expectation that the Nazis would retaliate; when the sirens sounded two days later there was little surprise. As they were wailing three buses stopped and their full loads of passengers began hurrying for the safety of the underground station shelter. Apparently as they did a woman holding a baby fell down the stairs that led to the platforms, a man tripped over her just as there was a shout from the top of the stairs that bombs had started falling. At the same time there was a deafening noise that was not actually a bomb landing at all but a new kind of anti-aircraft gun that was firing from close by. All this led to panic. There was pushing and shoving and, with 300 or more people stuck in the stairwell, the inevitable happened: people started to fall as more and more people crammed into the confined space. When it was all over 101 adults and 62 children were dead from suffocation; 60 more people were taken to hospital. Dickie Corbett was one of the dead. He had been called up during the war and joined the army, but was home in Bethnal Green on leave. He left a wife and three children, one of whom also became a professional boxer – he was known as 'Harry Boy' – who also appeared in a film called The Square Ring. Years later I found out from a lady who is helping to raise money for a permanent memorial that Dickie's real name was Richard Coleman, and it's that name that will appear on the memorial.

  By the time I was five years old the shed in our back yard also housed a horse for a while. The horse was a sign of Granddad's growing business empire. Soon after getting the horse Granddad moved up in the world from being a costermonger to a real greengrocer when he got a shop on Bethnal Green Road. Not that he got rid of the stall; it was kept and my Aunt Ada and Uncle Albert ran it.

  Our back yard was integral to the running of Granddad's business; the shed was always stacked full of potatoes, carrots and beetroot or whatever other vegetables were in season. Besides the shed there was one other thing out in the yard that was vital to the running of the business: the beetroot boiler, which provided me with one of my fondest memories of my early years. My nan was in charge of the boiler. It looked a bit like a cauldron or one of those old coppers that people used for washing their clothes. By the time I was a little kid money was a little easier than it had been before and during the war, and so Granddad was able to buy a sack of beetroot every Monday. It was my nan's chore to cook them in the back yard. Underneath the copper was a large metal ring with eight burners that was connected by a long pipe to the gas supply, somewhere in the house. Besides cooking the beetroot in it Nan also used it for doing the family's washing. As the water was heating up, before she put the beetroot in it, Nan would strip me off and put me in it while it was still tepid. She'd give me a bloody good scrubbing down while I stood in the cauldron – I must have looked a bit like a cannibal's lunch. After I go
t out, the water was heated some more and then in would go the beetroot for cooking. By then the water would have a kind of scum floating on the top of it after the washing and cooking had finished. I can honestly say I never did pee in it. Customers always commented on how good Granddad's beetroot tasted.

  Probably one of the reasons the beetroot water is so imbedded in my memory is because of what Nan used to do while she was washing me – she would sing to me. They were mostly silly little rhymes but they are etched on my mind:

  There's a man who came from Norway,

  shooting peas up a nanny goat's doorway.

  Another one was when she walked her fingers down my little body, going,

  Eyes, nose, mouth, chin

  walking down to uncle Jim.

  Uncle Jim sells lemonade.

  As she said this she'd wash my willie and then my bum:

  Round the corner sausages are made.

  Another like that was when she washed my chest, tummy and willie while saying:

  Breast of mutton,

  belly of pork,

  vinegar bottle without a cork.

  If I was naughty or played up, Nan was forever saying. 'You'll have me in the workhouse if you're not careful.' She would say this as a threat to persuade me to be good. By that time the chances of such a thing had long gone but I'm sure that some of my ancestors probably ended up in one. One day my nan taught me a new rhyme.

  Mary where art thou,

  sitting on a dust pail,

  eating mouldy cheese.

  Along came a copper,

  hit him on the nopper

  made him shit brown cheese.

  When I sang it to my mum – I was probably four – she said, 'Where did you learn that from?'

  'Nan taught it me,' I replied.

  That was it: they started on each other with Mum telling her to stop teaching me things; Nan didn't, though.

  There was a little boy and his name was Lenny Good.

  His mummy gave him sixpence to go and buy some wood.

  Instead of buying wood he bought a little toy,

  wasn't little Lenny Good a very naughty boy?

  Daft but lovely.

  Granddad certainly knew his way around a pound note. Besides the beetroot he had another good money-making idea for the business, which was to make their own vinegar. In those days, with no supermarkets, people bought vinegar from their local greengrocer. Vinegar was in far greater use than it is today, as it was an important preservative in the days before every home had a fridge. Every greengrocer had these lovely little barrels with a tap in the side from which they dispensed vinegar into the bottles that customers brought in with them. Sarsons was the main supplier of vinegar and Granddad thought that he could make a bob or two if he could sell vinegar at a price that undercut them. There was only one problem: he would have to make it himself and he didn't have a recipe. From somewhere or another he got hold of a formula for producing it and 'Eldridge Vinegar' went into full-scale production – not quite as catchy as Sarsons, I agree. I seem to remember it involved citric acid and molasses amongst other things. The concoction permanently fermented away in the back yard in a great big barrel, at the bottom of which was a tap from which the smaller barrels were filled and taken to the shop. The tap on the big barrel constantly dripped, which meant that after a few months of making the stuff there was a ruddy great hole in the concrete where the drip landed. God knows what it was doing to people's stomachs, but like the beetroot it seemed to go down very well with the customers. My nan used it at home and it didn't seem to do us any harm either.

  There were no such things as sell-by dates and food hygiene regulations in the post-war years. If it looked okay, and when you sniffed it it smelled okay, it probably was okay – so you ate it. After getting in from playing or coming home from school in the afternoon I would usually have a slice of bread and jam, or bread and dripping or, best of all, a sugar sandwich for my tea. If it fell on the floor Mum or Nan would say:

  'Go on, eat it up, Lenny, a bit of dirt'll do you no harm.' It helped build your immune system – at least that was their theory, although I'm sure neither of them knew what an immune system was.

  When I was a kid there was still rationing in effect even though the war had ended. However, having lived through the war the Eldridge clan, by this time, had become experts at working the system. We were fortunate because there were deals going on between all the traders – the greengrocers, the butchers and the grocers – meaning they used to swap things that were rationed. At the same time Granddad always made sure that anything that was not saleable to the punters came home for us to eat. They called slightly mouldy or damaged fruit and vegetables 'specks', originally costers' slang for a damaged orange that ended up being applied to everything. If an apple or whatever was bad you just cut away the damaged bit and ate the rest; that way you avoided having a maggot.

  In the midst of all the costermonger-ing and greengrocer-ing I did go to school, but me and school never did mix that well. My first exposure to education was Cranbrook School, which was a funny place just a couple of streets away from Harold Street. It was a four-storey building and the playground was on the roof – it was all netted and fenced in to stop us falling off. The school's no longer there but the building still is; it's been converted into a block of flats. I first went to school in 1949 and during my first few days there I remember a boy being sent home because he didn't have any shoes to wear. Just like the school, Harold Street is gone and in its place are several blocks of flats.

  Having a shop as well as a barrow meant the family's fortune started to improve, due in no small measure to Granddad's business nous. The shop was kitted out with large metal bins into which potatoes, oranges, apples, cabbages and whatever other fruit and vegetables were emptied for display and sale. Potatoes used to come in hundredweight sacks and one day I watched my Granddad hump one into the shop on his shoulders. First of all he emptied half of the potatoes from the sack into one bin and the other half into the next-door bin. He then reached over and took a card on which he wrote 'Selected – one penny-halfpenny/lb' and stuck it on one of the bins. On the next-door bin containing potatoes from the same sack he stuck another card saying 'Regular – one penny/lb'.

  'But Granddad, they're all from the same sack...'

  'Yes, my son, but you watch – the penny-halfpenny ones will all go before the penny ones do; that's a little lesson you'll learn, Lenny. If you undersell yourself, people sort of don't respect you quite so much.'

  And he was right; all the more expensive ones went first. It was another great lesson, one I still think about. While the world's gone logo crazy I still try to think about what's good value for money – whether it's cars or clothes. My runaround car is just a cheap old banger; I don't care if it gets knocked or bashed in the car park when I leave it at the station or wherever. I bought it a few years ago when it had already done 50,000 miles – it cost me 1200 quid. Best of all it never goes wrong.

  The variety of shops on Bethnal Green Road and the barrows in the market sold amazing things, especially to a kid. My favourite was a fish and chip shop called Lydons that was run by two old girls; we used to think that their fish was fantastic. One of the old girls did the frying while the other took your money.

  'Whaddya want, boys?'

  'Rock salmon and chips, please.'

  The amazing thing about the one that did the frying was that she always had a dewdrop on the end of her nose. We'd always watch her closely because as often as not it would drop off the end into the batter. Us kids were sure that it gave the batter an extra crispy feel to it.

  Another favourite was Kelly's pie and mash shop with the sign in the window saying, 'Kelly's for Jelly' – the jelly meaning jellied eels. There was also a bloke who came round the streets on his bicycle with a large box on the front from which he sold synthetic ice cream. He was called the Okey Dokey Man and he had this little song he'd sing at the top of his voice. 'A halfpenny a half. A penny a
large. They're all big pennences and large papers here.' There was another man who came round the streets with a tray round his neck on which there were dozens of little paper objects that he made himself. They were all tiny little things that were made from folded paper. My favourites were the little paper boats he made. They, like everything else he made, he sold for two pins. He'd walk along the street saying this little rhyme. 'Two pins for one, two pins for one, ask your mother to buy you some.' All the kids would run into their house asking their mother for two pins. I've no idea why he wanted pins for payment.

  Harold Street was in a rough area: the houses were shabby; no one had a car parked outside their house, because no one owned one. Despite it being a poor street no one's door was locked, so if you wanted to be really secure, you'd shut the door, but the key was always on a bit of string hanging down the inside. All you had to do was to reach through the letterbox and haul out the string and unlock it – everyone did it. As kids we were in and out of each other's houses. If you were round at a friend's home his mum would give you, along with whatever other kids were there, a slice of bread and jam. If my friends were over playing at our house they'd get fed. No one kept score about whose turn it was to do the feeding. One day three friends were at our house and my nan had just given us bread and jam sandwiches when in walked Granddad. I now realise something must have been stressing him because he was normally a really nice easygoing bloke to us kids.