Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  What I did like was the free bottled concentrated orange juice, made available by the NHS to boost kids’ Vitamin C levels. It came in a glass bottle with a blue screw cap and it was pure delight whenever I spotted a new one in the pantry. I wasn’t so keen on another free dietary supplement, cod-liver oil, which you’d sup, with a shudder, by the spoonful. But I was quite keen on Virol, a dark malt extract with Vitamin A, which came in a big metal tin. This was sweet and thick, the general idea to give kids more bulk. And luckily, perhaps because I always saw my dad drink a lot of it – he always had a big jug by his bedside – I developed a lifetime tap water drinking habit. It beats drinking milk any day.

  My dad had grown up in a household where typically English food was a Very Big deal – especially things like the Sunday roast. My mother’s culinary upbringing had been the direct opposite: a bit of a health freak, even in those days, my grandfather Oliver had insisted that their family ate lots of fruit and vegetables and very little meat or chicken. Unsweetened yogurt each day was also one of Oliver’s favourites.

  Yet despite this gulf in their tastes, my mum cheerfully adapted to cooking all the food that came through the front door, via Wag’s black-market deliveries: the big joints of beef, legs of lamb, the fresh salmon, plaice and halibut from Petticoat Lane, usually fried by my mum in big batches, making the tiny cramped kitchen reek for hours. My dad was consistently puffed up about the fact that we were eating so well, while others struggled or got poorer quality food.

  ‘It’s the best stuff that only goes to the big hotels,’ he’d inform us proudly, time and time again. I grew up hearing him constantly informing us that he provided ‘the finest and the best’ for our table, just in case we didn’t realise were lucky sods to have so much wonderful food. Alas, it was all lost on me, a skinny kid who’d rather be scoffing sweets, or eating my way through a bag of broken Smith’s crisps (even crisps were a luxury item before rationing ended; the only variety available were the bags of broken ones which were ‘seconds’ that appeared in the shops occasionally).

  As for my mum, she appreciated our good fortune – but only up to a point. Had we just relied, like most people, on rations and the odd bit of ‘extra’ from behind the butcher’s counter, she’d have been just as happy.

  We are at my grandparents’ flat in Stoney Lane. It’s a big family gathering, a late Sunday lunch. Two of my dad’s siblings are sitting with us at the dining table, his younger sister Doris, brother George and their respective partners. The Old Man, in shirtsleeves and braces at the head of the table, is poised to carve the enormous roast chicken that lies, glistening and aromatic, stuffed with Paxo, before him, ready to be devoured by his family.

  Each plate is proffered up to The Old Man who expertly carves huge portions for all. Lips are already smacking, as my grandmother passes round the gravy, the big plates of roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots, peas, onions, stuffing and green pickled cucumbers. Sloppy as usual, I manage to get hot gravy all down my new dress. Molly is furiously dabbing at the dress with her hankie when suddenly, out of the blue, my Aunt Doris flings her knife and fork down on the table. And then she starts crying her eyes out. It’s a sorry sight. Pretty, fair-haired and usually quite passive, this is a Doris I’ve never seen before.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ she screeches between huge heaving sobs. ‘It’s always the same!’ Then she gets up and runs out of the dining room, heading for the outside loo on the landing.

  Everything goes silent. You can hear the big black clock on the wall ticking it’s so quiet. And, of course, in that typically English way when they’re embarrassed, everyone sitting there pretends the outburst hasn’t happened. No reaction. All eyes down. Focused on the Sunday roast. There’s the discreet clatter of cutlery on plates. But no one is saying anything.

  ‘Mm … the skin’s really nice and crispy,’ Molly ventures, hoping to break the silence. My dad looks at her as if to say, ‘shut the fuck up’; even he is keeping schtoom. The Old Man grunts appreciatively but remains impassive behind his big black specs, chomping away relentlessly. Miriam wears her normal face: unsmiling, browned off with her lot, toying with the food on her plate. I am puzzled. Why is my aunt crying so much she has to run away? Is she ill? We’re almost finished when Doris returns to the table and, as if nothing has happened, attacks her plate, though her face is downcast. Nothing more is said. And once the meal is finished, everyone is keen to scatter: my mum quickly buttons up my little beige coat with the velvet collar and we’re off. A cab has been organised to take us home.

  In the taxi, Molly starts to grill my dad. ‘What was that all about, Ging?’ knowing that my dad knows all the nuances of his family’s behaviour: big rows and heated outbursts were recurring events over the years.

  ‘Nah, it’s nothing,’ he sighs. ‘OK, I’ll tell ya. You won’t believe it. She’s done it before. She gets all upset because The Old Man carves her a leg. And she really wants the breast.’

  I’m old enough to understand how daft this is and start to giggle. My mum, however, is appalled.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me she gets so worked up about a lousy bit of chicken, she has to have a tantrum about it?’

  ‘Yeah. And The Old Man knows pretty much what’s gonna happen. But I think he does it just to wind her up.’

  So there it is. The country is half starving, still living on rations; even bread is still not yet freely available. Yet my twentysomething aunt looses her cool completely because she gets the wrong part of the chicken on her plate. And, of course, no one else in the family ventures to comment, forever tiptoeing around The Old Man.

  To my mum, it highlights the essential difference between her background and my dad’s. For years, she remembers the incident and brings it up.

  ‘She cried just because she got a chicken leg,’ she’d say, shaking her head and tutting. ‘Makes you wonder what she’d do if she had a real problem in life.’

  CHAPTER 15

  BESIDE THE SEA …

  British seaside resorts started to resurface in the early fifties. Until then, posh people and well-off honeymooners went abroad; the rest either went nowhere – or struggled to a nearby coastal resort when the sun came out.

  Camping holidays started to be popular and big holiday camps like Butlins, Pontins and Warners began to flourish, places where families could have all their needs catered for under one enormous roof: food, entertainment, someone to look after the kids, all for one price, an all-inclusive week with full board costing around £5 a head in the early fifties, a sum families could save up for throughout the year.

  We looked down on Butlins. Far too common. Neither did we save up to go away. We always went to proper hotels in Cliftonville, Kent, places advertised ‘with hot-and-cold running water in the bedrooms’ (en suite bathrooms were still on the far horizon for such places) and also boasting all-inclusive entertainment: by the mid-fifties Cliftonville hotels like The Cedric or the Oval Court laid on three meals a day plus TV, table tennis, films, dancing and bands, all for six guineas per person (six pounds and six shillings) a week. Bedand-breakfast guest houses cost much less, two pounds and five shillings a week per person – with a weekend dinner thrown in.

  Our annual seaside holidays were often subsidised by the betting fraternity around the Lane, in other words, The Old Man’s generosity. My grandparents would book into their favourite hotel for a week or two and my dad’s siblings would take it in turns to join them in the hotel for a few days or, for the duration of my grandparents’ stay.

  In the hotel, The Old Man and a permanently miserable Miriam would hold court, their family around them, while we enjoyed the daytime pleasures of the big sandy beach. At night, after the evening meal, everyone sat in the hotel lounge, a pianist tinkling on the keys in the background while the adults gossiped and chatted over drinks. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label was permanently parked on The Old Man’s table, of course.

  My dad was never able to come with us for the entire holiday because he
’d still be running the betting business back in the Lane. He’d join us for a weekend or the odd day. But really, the whole thing was a perfect example of The Old Man’s control over his family: he called the shots and we paid homage.

  Cliftonville was not exactly a resort in itself, but a coastal area located in the more respectable part of Margate, Kent, just a couple of miles away from Broadstairs, a much quieter place my parents preferred in later years. But while Broadstairs was as English as its most celebrated resident, Charles Dickens, Cliftonville hotels in the fifties catered largely to London Jewish families who liked a bit of comfort with their food and entertainment – and relished meeting up with friends and familiar faces from home.

  The Old Man’s regular chauffeur, Dave, a youngish bloke with crinkly hair and glasses, would park the hired Daimler somewhat incongruously outside our block of flats, collect our cases, load them into the boot and off we’d go, watched through her ground floor window by a hard-faced Maisie, fag in mouth, whose loathing for us and our lifestyle would surely peak at these times.

  The drive down to the Kent coast was leisurely, with Dave and my mum chatting about the usual inconsequential things, what the weather would be like, the state of Dave’s mum’s health, gossip about The Old Man’s frequent bust-ups with my grandmother. There were no traffic jams or queues of impatient motorists nose-to-tail then because there were relatively few cars on the road. And a Daimler, of course, the top people’s car at the time, gave you a very luxurious ride with its plush quilted red leather seats to sink back into and loads of enticing-looking dials on the dashboard.

  ‘I was outside in the car and I could hear her out the window, screaming at ’im,’ Dave would tell my mum.

  ‘I dunno why she’s so jealous of ’im. It’s not as if he’s one for goin’ after the wimmin. He’d rather be in the pub. Know what? I reckon ’e’s in the pub all the time to get away from ’er!’

  Miriam’s jealous passion for The Old Man was consistent, unrelenting, the talk of the Lane. It never ever stopped. It ruined her relationship with her offspring, even when they were small, because her sole focus was Jack, what Jack was doing, what he might be doing, how much he might be drinking, what time he came back from the pub or, worse, whether he was chatting up Another Woman. All her emotional output went into her obsession with Jack. Tragically, the result of this was that scant maternal affection was bestowed on the children; they’d been brought up mostly by aunts, because Miriam had worked alongside Jack in their coal shop while her children grew up. When the business focus switched, for some reason, from coal to betting just before the war, the jealousy darkened: betting, with all its attendant ducking and diving on the street and contact in pubs meant that unlike in the shop, she couldn’t keep an eye on hubby all the time, hence their somewhat crazy move to Petticoat Lane during the Blitz years.

  Now, both in their sixties, the hard war years behind them, their children grown up and settled, it could have been a good time to let up, relax, enjoy the fruits of Jack’s dodgy labours. But even on those seaside trips, Miriam would be stern, her smooth pink face never breaking into a smile, her white hair piled up in a bun, her black beaver lamb coat on her lap (somewhat incongruous in the summer months but this was England, after all), her big black leather handbag parked on the table. Impassive at best, usually simmering with resentment by her hubby’s side, she would glare at any woman who might venture to talk to her man or engage him in conversation.

  Since Jack’s main preoccupation was Black Label, it was usually the hotel waitress or barmaid who got it in the neck. Even if they did nothing at all but serve.

  ‘Just put it down and piss off!’ she’d tell the bemused girl trying to lay out the contents of a tray laden with cups and saucers for the couple’s after-dinner lemon tea, no milk.

  The Old Man, of course, would pretend to ignore all this. That was the public face of their relationship. Indoors, it was heavy duty, really nasty screaming matches, according to legend. But outwardly, socially, they were A Happy Couple, Darby and Joan. And he, at least, though as undemonstrative as his missus in terms of open signs of affection for his family, had reached the stage in life where he’d slowed down and appreciated what he had. As I’ve said, I wasn’t the kind of kid who’d deliberately engage with him, perch on his lap or ask to play with his fob watch. But he eventually began to relish this sort of engagement and encouraged it when other grandchildren came along in his later years.

  Most kids’ memories of seaside holidays are idyllic: mine are similar. The tensions and shortcomings of adult relationships couldn’t diminish the sheer joy of the whole thing, simply because we were in such a different environment, far away from the grit and grime of Dalston. When it was fine, you went to the beach clutching your bucket and spade, dug around in the sand for hours, made usually lopsided sandcastles, ran in and out of the water, splashed around and hunted, for ages, when the tide was out, for interesting looking shells.

  All this was sheer heaven for an inner-city child, the only point in my childhood when I had anything like a link with nature and the elements. And my brief career as a performer moved up a notch on these holidays: even the unfortunate Rat episode didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for stepping up to the stage. In the evenings, I’d often wind up reciting or singing in the hotel, at the microphone in my white organdie dress with its big frill and red velvet trim, mostly tolerated (‘another spoilt kid’) by the other holidaymaking families and their kids, none of whom I chummed up with. A self-contained and spoilt little girl, certainly, but with books, reading and words for sustenance, by now I had my own little world to sustain my imagination and feed my thirst for some sort of self expression.

  Watching me perform on those holidays, Mum would glow with happiness and pride at my facility for words. So they were, as summer holidays should be, good times for us. Perhaps the sun didn’t actually shine every day. But it didn’t matter, though my memory now is only of sunny days and childish pleasures. For I was at my happiest then, secure in my own little bubble: an only child who was used to getting all the attention. As they say, what was not to like?

  CHAPTER 16

  THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT

  I am tucked up under the blankets in my little bedroom. It is late, but I am not yet ready to sleep because my dad has just come in from work for a goodnight kiss. But I, of course, about five years old, want more from him, this man who has travelled so far across the world. ‘Tell me about India, Daddy,’ I ask and he obliges, yet again, with the stories I love hearing: the weeks spent in rough, perilous conditions on the huge troopship, escorted by destroyers all the way across the Indian Ocean to Bombay; the huge shock of the intense, searing heat as the troopship arrived through The Gateway to India – ‘just like going to the Turkish baths but worse’; getting used to being called ‘pukka sahib’ (Hindi slang for true gentleman) by the Indian helpers; watching the Indian mess boys knead the dough for the troops’ food with their bare feet; how the searing heat would actually melt the coating on the carbons they’d use for copying their work.

  These snippets of information from this exotic, far-off world, never failed to set my imagination on fire. ‘More, Daddy, more,’ I plead. For in my childish world, these extraordinary tales of distant, hot, mysterious places make my dad unique, special, a giant amongst men. No one else had done the things he’d done, had they?

  Like many kids, I don’t see that much of my father. He works six days a week, often arriving home by the time I’m asleep, only joining us for the odd day or two on seaside holidays. Even on Sundays, he is only home for part of the day and then he’s usually asleep. My mum, of course, is my permanent anchor, warm and loving, always there. But because I see him in brief snatches, understandably I hang out for precious quality time alone with my dad. Can’t he take me out one day, just the two of us, somewhere nice? By now, I’ve developed a bit of a habit of nagging him about this, whenever I spot a chance.

  ‘OK,’ he says, after I’ve asked
him to take me out somewhere for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s Good Friday coming up and there’s no racing, so I’ll take you out, I promise. How about we go on the bus down to the Tower of London?’

  I’m thrilled to bits, can’t believe my luck. I know that we live just two bus rides away from the historic heart of London, but the prospect of a trip to see the Tower with its Beefeaters and ghostly past – every kid then knew the Stanley Holloway song ‘With her ’ead tucked underneath her arm’, which told the story of how the ghost of the beheaded Anne Boleyn haunts the Tower – is exciting. Especially if I’m going there with my dad.

  Soon he closes my door and I snuggle under the blankets and drift off to sleep, one happy little girl, buoyed by the promise of this longed-for outing.

  The next morning, I’m already on the case.

  ‘Dad’s taking me to the Tower!’ I tell my mum, who’s in the kitchen, washing up.

  ‘We’re going on Good Friday!’

  At that moment, my dad emerges from their bedroom. He’s dressed for work, smart, perfectly pressed suit trousers, neatly ironed shirt, patterned silk tie. His clothes are immaculate – he’s very careful about his appearance, like my mum – but he looks pale, somewhat bleary. He’s in Bad Hangover territory, the place he inhabits virtually every day. But, of course, at five years old, I don’t have a clue about this.