Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  Yet this place, for some reason, seemed especially desolate. And the second-floor flat, with its narrow hallway and small, dingy rooms, seemed so pokey after all the rented flats in the big high-ceilinged Victorian houses she’d grown up in. The flat was damp too; Hackney, built on marshland, was always one of London’s dampest boroughs.

  ‘I know I should be grateful, Sis,’ Molly told Sarah after we’d moved in.

  ‘Without The Old Man, we’d have been stuck. People are queuing up everywhere to rent places much worse than this – and paying over the odds for it.

  ‘But it’s so … depressing. I want the baby to grow up somewhere nicer. But we’ll just have to be patient, I s’pose.’

  Sarah thought Molly had a raw deal, though she didn’t say so. She stayed with us frequently in the flat, helping my mum with me and generally making herself useful until getting a post in Berlin, to work with the Control Commission.

  Though we’d moved in with just a few suitcases, in time a few sticks of furniture were acquired, mostly with the help of The Old Man, who had useful contacts everywhere.

  Furniture, like many things, was rationed. So, like the bombed out or evacuated masses, we made do with the bare minimum, mostly second-hand: a rickety wardrobe, an ancient gas cooker, some crockery, linens, mostly sourced from nearby market stalls, a few ornaments the sisters had managed to pack up and bring from Leeds.

  My little cot was in the corner of the main bedroom where my mum slept. When with us, Sarah slept in the tiny damp second bedroom facing the street – the space that eventually became my room.

  Heating in the flat came from small coal fires, tiny grates in thirties-tiled fireplaces in the living room and the main bedroom. The flat had a bathroom with a bath, toilet and sink. But constant hot running water was an undreamed of luxury. All hot water was boiled on the gas stove. (Our Ascot water heater didn’t arrive until quite a few years later.) The pocket-sized kitchen boasted very little, no fridge, microwave, washing machine or dishwasher; these were, of course, light years away. The main household appliance, apart from a kettle, was the mangle, the contraption you had to have to wring out the washing and get it to a semi-dry state.

  Basically, the kitchen was just a sink with cold running water, the gas cooker and a pantry with several shelves for storage of crockery and food. Had you peered inside our pantry in those days you’d have found gold-coloured tins of powdered eggs from the US and sickly sweet orange juice bottles amid the meagre assortment of vegetables, mostly potatoes, which weren’t rationed but were still hard to find sometimes, and carrots, which were also not rationed and were plentiful (people believed that eating carrots helped you see better in the blackout years); plus small amounts of butter and cheese, carefully wrapped up in crumpled greaseproof paper.

  I bonded with Sarah in those early months; for a while she and my mum formed my entire world. One day, without warning, at just over a year old, I stood up in the little cot and opened my mouth.

  ‘Sis,’ I ventured, my mum’s nickname for Sarah, much to the sisters’ delight. It wasn’t long before I was proudly informing passers-by, ‘I’m 18 months.’ BBC radio, of course, was an early educational and musical influence: along with 26 million others, we tuned in to the Light Programme record request show Two-Way Family Favourites each Sunday at midday; the signature tune ‘With a Song in My Heart’ was the prelude to the traditional Sunday roast across the country throughout the late forties and fifties. My first ever attempt at recitation came after I struggled to mimic the announcer reading out the Shipping Forecast: ‘Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger’ – faraway places that were meaningless to us. Yet the sounds, heard day after day, week in, week out, meant the words were processed, fixed firmly in my memory.

  Money was tight. My mum’s sole income as a soldier’s wife with a child was a small allowance, so we were heavily subsidised by my dad’s parents. Each Friday, they’d organise a major food delivery – carrier bags from Petticoat Lane delivered to our front door by one of her father-in-law’s army of ‘runners’ from the ‘Lane’ as we called it, men who worked as casual delivery men, mostly for The Old Man’s betting business, usually collecting cash or betting slips from punters in pubs and on street corners. Inside the carrier bags were all manner of foodstuffs mostly off the ration books via the ‘black market’: fish and meat, eggs, butter (the ration of two ounces didn’t go very far) and any delicacies they could procure along the way like tinned peaches or salmon.

  Molly wasn’t a big eater so the combination of what was officially available to us on the ration books plus the extra black-market goodies from the Lane meant we were well fed, at least.

  As a toddler, I was crazy for anything sweet, an inheritance of my mother’s own love of sweets and sugar. (Late in life she confessed that she’d eaten mainly ‘nosh’, or sweets, throughout her pregnancy.) Chocolate spread was my particular favourite, ‘bread and bread and chocolate spread’ an early mantra. Since both bread and sugar remained on ration long after the war ended (bread until 1948 and sweets until l953), my endless cravings for sugar were sometimes satisfied via the black-market goodies that arrived in those weekly deliveries. But even so, a whole block of chocolate or a proper box of chocolates was virtually unknown. You didn’t ever see such things.

  And so it turned out that when my father finally did get his demob papers and came home to us in the flat, his arrival from overseas and into our lives was somewhat overshadowed – by a big box of Cadbury’s.

  It’s spring and I am wearing a little white dress with smocking, sent to us by my mother’s sister, Rita, who knitted and sewed beautifully and supplied my mum with regular clothing items for me before she left for Africa.

  The front door to our flat is open and a strange man walks in, flinging his bags down in the narrow hallway.

  I run, curly-haired and chubby-legged, down the hallway towards the man. I know who it is, because I’ve been primed in advance.

  ‘Is my daddy!’ I shout, my claim to the man who until now had lived on the mantelpiece.

  My dad, thin and pale from bouts of malaria, his civvies virtually hanging off him after his epic sea journey from India, throws his bags on the floor and scoops me up for a welcoming hug, the baby he’s seen in pictures, already a chatterbox toddler. He’s got a present for me. ‘Wait till you see what I’ve got for you,’ he chuckles. Then he lugs the bags into the bedroom and emerges, minutes later, beaming all over and sporting his Big Homecoming Gift.

  For a first effort, it was outstanding. Never in the history of post-war gift giving has a small child been so thrilled, so enraptured by a homecoming offering.

  Looking back, it was magnificent booty for the times. How did he manage to obtain this astonishing gift? Even now, in my mind’s eye, I see it as an enormous box. And inside the prized purple square box are what seem, to me, to be hundreds of Cadbury’s chocolates, delights of all shapes and sizes – square ones, thin ones, hard toffee, oozy caramel, orange flavoured, ginger, soft and hard centres, chocolate after chocolate after chocolate. A sugary bonanza. I’m squirming, squealing with delight.

  My parents, together at last, carelessly let me take ownership of the box. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so distracted by the occasion – it had been over two years since they clapped eyes on each other – they might have thought to take the box away from me and hide it somewhere safe, away from prying little hands. But this is their reunion, their big day. It’s a lot to cope with, seeing each other again and meeting a toddler you’ve only known through photos.

  So that’s how the chocolates became mine and mine alone. I was destined to be a spoilt only child, indulged by parents who adored me and never really knew how to say no. And the indulgence all started the day Ginger came home from the war with that big box of chocolates. Because once I have the sweets to myself, there’s no stopping me. Greedy isn’t the word. I determinedly chomp my way, choccy after choccy, through the lot. Like most greedy guts, the more I eat, the less I taste or savo
ur. I just cram them into my tiny gob, one after the other, an orgy of sugar. Until there are no more chocolates left nestling alluringly in their little dark-brown paper homes. And my pretty white dress is ruined with stains, an early sign of the slobbery that never quite left me.

  ‘Oh God, Ging, she’s eaten the lot!’ moans Molly.

  ‘Aah, don’t worry Mol, I knew she’d love ’em,’ says my dad, who at thirty four knows a lot about doing arithmetic and placing bets on ‘geegees’, but has much to learn about raising kids.

  But the reality is, of course, I have eaten far too many in one go. And the consequences of this are dramatic, if somewhat delayed.

  For the very next morning, as the returned soldier lies sleeping, my mum decides to pop out with me to the newsagents in Shacklewell Lane. ‘We’ll go get daddy a paper,’ she tells me.

  But on the way back, just as we reach our block of flats, I start to wail. To put it in the simplest terms, my body decides to shed itself of the unaccustomed load. Right there. All over the pavement.

  Up the stone stairs Molly drags me, screaming like a banshee, a hideous yellow trail of smelly poo in our wake. Not only have I managed to shame us publicly on the first morning of my dad’s return, the evidence is there for the delectation of our neighbours.

  ‘Now I’ll have to go down there and clean it up,’ Molly fumes, before marching me into the bathroom to hurriedly clean and change me.

  And later, as she kneels on the stairs with brush and pail, furiously scrubbing the evidence of my greed away, sure enough, our most detested neighbour, Maisie the ground-floor shrew, stands there and takes a pop.

  ‘Gotta bit of a tummy problem your little Jacky, eh Mrs Hyams?’ she lobs at my mum.

  My mum doesn’t answer, just carries on scrubbing, seething inwardly. It’s a nasty, if somewhat unhygienic, task, removing the evidence of your daughter’s greed, there for all to see. And she feels slightly guilty for not realising beforehand the implications of indulging my chocolate frenzy.

  ‘Shame, really. And your ‘usband just back ’ome, is ’e?’ continues Maisie, determined to exploit every second of our shame, already planning to circulate the latest morsel of gossip about that snooty woman and her little curly-haired brat.

  Right from day one, we’d stuck out like sore thumbs in the confined, narrow street – far too well dressed, too many overflowing carrier bags coming to our door – and this is a triumphant moment for her. In fact, it’s the defining moment in our relationship for the years ahead.

  ‘Yeah, Ginger’s back now,’ says Molly grimly, longing to throw the contents of the smelly bucket right in her neighbour’s face but just about managing to contain herself.

  ‘We’ll probably be moving soon,’ she says, half to herself, half to her loathsome neighbour.

  ‘Hah! You’ll be lucky!’ spits Maisie as a parting shot before retreating to the murky interior of her ground floor cave.

  They never spoke again, not once in the decades that followed. Maisie’s son, Alf, a scrawny scruff around my age, was pointedly ignored by us too if we encountered them on the stairs. I never had a conversation with him, nor did I want to; he was a bit too smelly, too much of a ruffian, for comfort.

  Yet Maisie was a bit of a witch in some ways. Her prediction was eerily accurate.

  There never was a move from the damp flat for my mother, not until forty-four years later when the removal van arrived to help move her to a better, warmer flat in a nearby security building.

  And while other post-war kids might remember the day their unknown soldier dad came home with delight or bewilderment – the divorce rate in England and Wales soared once the demob was over, from l2,314 in 1944 to 60,190 in 1947 – my memories are only of a strange, skinny man with an enormous box of chocolates. And a vivid lesson in the nasty consequences of overindulgence.

  CHAPTER 4

  BETS ARE ON

  My dad was one of the later returnees to civilian life post World War II. Five million men and women had served in the British Armed Forces. The somewhat slow, frustrating process of ‘bringing the boys home’ started mid-1945, but it wasn’t until early 1947 that the demob finally ended. Exhausted, broke and surrounded by the debris of nearly six years of war, what were my dad’s career prospects?

  A knockabout East-End roisterer who’d only opted to settle down when war broke out – ‘Ginger and I got married because everyone else was doing it’ – was my mum’s somewhat romantic take on their courtship, which had started in the late thirties and had been, for much of the time, an on-off situation.

  A steady bloke he wasn’t. The younger Ginger often worked ‘on the knocker’, selling goods door to door all over south-east England, so he was frequently away. He’d only reluctantly joined his dad in the betting business just before war broke out, preferring the freedom of the road to any real commitment.

  Yet as they courted in the late thirties, he became fiercely attached to my mum, who was five years his junior; petite, dark, slim and fashionably turned out, she was a bit of a man magnet. And her cheerful, easy-going manner was equally attractive. As their relationship developed, my dad had a somewhat disturbing habit of sending one or two close friends to my mum’s house to ‘keep an eye on Molly’ when his knockabout life meant he’d be unavailable. Even during the war, when they’d started married life in a bedsit in Finsbury Park in London, his posting to Kent meant they weren’t together very much. On leave, he’d head for the pub most nights. So in a way, he’d led a semi-bachelor existence for years, his passions typical of the times: boxing, soccer, pubs, and lots of laughs. Even in Meerut, he’d managed to indulge himself with visits to the races, placing bets and playing soccer. (He sent us many photos to prove it.)

  Now here he was in his mid-thirties, living full-time with a wife and a small child. One hundred per cent responsibility, which I suspect gave him the willies.

  Though he’d left school at fourteen and was poorly educated, my dad had a head for figures and a talent for words – his letters home to my mum from India were beautifully written – so he could, at a push, have found steady work in a clerical position in an office after the war. He’d got brownie points from his superiors in the Pay Corps. ‘The Army always wanted Ging,’ my mum would frequently tell me as I grew up, her badge of pride that his destiny as a street bookie could easily have been otherwise.

  But, of course, as a typical East Ender who’d grown up in Petticoat Lane around long-term duckers and divers with varying degrees of commercial success, the disciplined confines of army life, regular if low pay, and with some sort of permanence ahead, had scant appeal for my dad. And he needed cash. Fast. There was a wife and kid to consider now. So he took up the first offer that came his way – to work alongside his dad in Jack’s betting business.

  The betting laws of the time were draconian: technically, it was only legal to place a bet if you were at the racecourse or the dog track. Well-heeled punters could legally run an account and have credit with a ‘commission agent’ working out of an office – but the commission agent was only permitted to take bets by phone. Out on the street or in the pub, handing over cash to place bets on dogs or horses was technically illegal, right up until the early sixties.

  But there was a great deal of money to be made illegally because back then, betting on ‘the geegees’, or horses (and, to a lesser extent, the dogs) was more or less a national pastime. Gambling a few bob from their weekly pay was the working man’s one and only chance to improve his lot. The football pools had also started by then – but the daily or weekly bet was incredibly popular everywhere, just like the Lottery is nowadays.

  This national passion for the odd bet meant that Ginger and The Old Man were in a prime position to exploit the post-war hunger for illegal betting. For a start, they were in a very good spot, in the heart of bustling, busy Petticoat Lane, renamed Middlesex Street in 1830 (by the Victorians who wanted to avoid references to women’s underwear), though everyone continued to call it by its or
iginal name. Their little ‘commission agent’ shop on Middlesex Street was very close to Houndsditch in the City of London precinct, the junction where the time-honoured East-End hustlers or traders and the more respectable City gents, or ‘bowler hats’, merged. Consequently, the law wasn’t much of a problem: a friendly bobby from the local constabulary would usually turn a blind eye to cash being handed over for bets in the pubs and streets nearby: a well placed ‘bung’, or cash bribe, usually also handed over in the pub, saw to that little fly in the ointment. And while it was all fairly new to my dad, The Old Man knew the terrain well; he’d been running a family business in the Lane for most of his life.

  Before the betting business had been launched, the Middlesex Street premises had been a coal shop: this, in turn, had morphed over time from a local horse-drawn delivery business, though Jack’s dad, my great grandfather, had gone bankrupt more than once. So the network of contacts, both legal and otherwise, that Jack had made through a lifetime there meant my dad had a Chief Fixer to back him up if there were any problems. And as a Fixer, The Old Man certainly carried a bit of clout in the area.

  One day, not long after my dad came home, one of the newer runners that Jack had employed to take bets and pay punters was picked up by the police. A lone copper spotted him carrying an unusually large bundle down Middlesex Street and, as suspected, further investigation revealed it contained some black-market ‘gear’, in this case, several dozen pairs of trousers, all new, sourced from who knows where. Clothing, of course, was still rationed then. This was definitely a ‘sus’ package, a discovery that could lead to a court appearance and a hefty fine.