Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  But today’s little adventure holds promise, a journey into the unknown. The train seems to take ages. But when we alight, Edie is waiting for us at the barrier, ecstatic to see us. She’s quite plump, untidy, carelessly dressed in a shapeless printed frock and tatty cardi; she’s the same age as my mum, but she looks much older, more careworn. But she’s got a little car, a Morris Minor, and we pile in for the short journey to her terraced house with Edie at the wheel, telling us about her job serving in a local newsagents – ‘the money’s bad but the owner’s wife is good to me’ – her misfortune at being recently widowed – ‘Poor old Wally, never was the same after he came back from Burma’ – and her two kids, Paul and Dawn, older than me and already working.

  ‘Wait till you meet them,’ she tells me.

  ‘You’ll get on like a house on fire.’

  Dawn, sixteen, is at the front door to greet us. As cheerful and friendly as her mum, she’s got a round, pleasant face, dark blonde hair in a pony tail and she’s wearing a neat pleated skirt with a button-down cardigan. ‘Ooh, I like your skirt,’ she tells me, admiring my more fashionable London gear: brightly coloured dirndl skirt with large appliqué pattern, white blouse with three-quarter-length sleeves and beige suede flatties.

  I’m instantly interested in this older girl, already out in the world, as we’re ushered into a small but very neat, spick-and-span living room. Unlike our flat with its bare walls, they have lots of framed prints hanging up, mostly landscapes. And there are loads of cushions and pretty ornaments. It’s cosy, welcoming. Then mother and daughter disappear into the kitchen, clattering around, readying our high tea.

  And then it happens. A young man walks in.

  ‘I’m so pleased to meet you at last, Mum never stops talking about you, Molly,’ he says, shaking Molly’s hand and then offering his to mine, in turn. Weakly, I return his handshake, but I am totally gobsmacked. He is, to me, at thirteen, a love god extraordinaire: over six foot, slim and straight with neatly cropped brown hair (but not brilliantined like the Teddy Boy style, which I hate), hazel eyes and chiselled features, slick in a navy blazer jacket, shirt and tie.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Paul,’ I manage but then I lapse into silence. I am totally, overwhelmingly smitten. Until now, there has only been Elvis, a fantasy idol with looks and a voice that were created to arouse and excite the senses. This is the first time I’ve ever experienced physical attraction to someone in the real world. I am lost. I don’t know how to behave, what to do. So, of course, I stay unusually mute. And I try not to stare at him, Mr Gorgeous, he who has instantly turned my world upside down.

  Now Paul’s mum and sister are bringing in the tea, biscuits, little homemade cakes specially baked for the occasion. And the women start to gossip, to enjoy themselves. Between mouthfuls, they run through a series of stories about their wartime years in Oxford Street, the girls they worked with, who’d run off with whom. (Most of their colleagues wound up in the arms of a free-spending GI, who vanished back to the States, leaving them holding the baby. Or, in one or two cases, having to explain the baby when hubby came home.) Dawn is fascinated by all of this, interrupting the women to ask questions. I’ve heard most of this stuff before. Paul looks at me, puts down his cup, smiles winningly and says, ‘How’s school going, Jacky? Mum says you go to a posh place called Skinners’, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I manage, desperate to impress, yet not knowing how to go about it. ‘They call it Skinners’ School for Snobs.

  ‘The teachers are awful. They’re posh but they’re old. They only really like you if you’re good at sport.’

  Paul leans forward, still smiling. I’ve definitely got his attention.

  ‘And are you good at sport?’

  I shake my head. If I had any boy-catching skills, I’d simper now, smile engagingly. Or tell him what I am good at, English and history. But I have so much to learn and am so self-conscious, I just don’t know how to talk to this eighteen-yearold who has commandeered my heart.

  ‘No. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Never mind,’ says Paul. ‘We can’t all be good at everything.’

  And that is pretty much all we actually say to each other. Paul bids us a polite farewell as we’re finishing our tea; he has to go out and meet a friend. And it is Dawn who shows me round their little terraced house, takes me out into the garden, asks me umpteen questions about London, what it’s like, and says how she wants to come there one day.

  I like her, probably because she’s older, more grown-up – and, of course, she’s His Sister, a link, a tie. Oh how I long to ask her about him, does he have a girlfriend? Would a nearly fourteen-year-old have a chance with him? Could I ever see him again? I discover that they do have a phone, a party line (a major frustration of the fifties, where people actually had to share their phone line with another household, though we always had our own line) and we swap numbers.

  ‘I’ll save up and come down to London!’ she assures me as Molly and I say goodbye to them at the station.

  But Dawn never does come to London. Nor do I ever see Paul again. Leicester, then, might as well have been another country. He was as remote and unattainable to me as Elvis, really. And I am left with my endless dreams and fantasies about a virtual stranger. What would happen if I got to meet him again? Would he like me? What would it be like to actually touch or kiss him? Such thoughts are usually accompanied by mental images of Paul and I, alone in his house, embracing passionately on their living-room sofa. I confide in no one about all this; I’m pretty sure my mum hasn’t even picked up on my fixation with her friend’s son. But hope still burns in my heart.

  One evening, a few weeks later, the phone rings. My mum is in the bathroom, my dad still out working. It’s Dawn. She’s got a new, better job, yes Mum’s OK, the Morris Minor’s packed up, but Paul knows a man who can fix it. I take the plunge.

  ‘How is Paul?’ I venture.

  ‘Oh he’s fine. He liked you, Jacky,’ she giggles.

  ‘Really?’

  I’m taken aback. I’m not expecting such wondrous news but my heart leaps, just the same.

  ‘Yes, he told me not to say anything to Mum. He thought you were really pretty. He’s definitely interested! I said, “Paul, you’ve got no chance, what with her being down in London with all those other boys.”’

  There are, of course, no other boys to speak of beyond my incessant reverie about her brother. But I don’t give myself away. Vague promises are made, maybe I’ll persuade my mum to get us up there again for another visit. But we never do hear any more from them – and I don’t dare bring the subject up to Molly, for fear of betraying myself. In those days, of course, if someone rang and you were out, there were no answering machines or voicemails to take messages; people just had to keep trying until you were in.

  So maybe there were more attempts to phone us. But the Paul-the-lover fantasy endures for quite a while. Until something quite different, but nonetheless disturbing, happens the following spring – and makes me understand just how little I know about the opposite sex.

  Lolly and I are at Earl’s Court, at the Ideal Home Exhibition. It’s the school holidays and we’ve made the bus and tube journey here for our first-ever visit to the show. Someone has told us that you get lots of free food at the show, a real novelty for us and incentive enough to incite our curiosity – we certainly aren’t there to look around at the interiors, way too aspirational for two Hackney fourteen-year-olds living in homes that are functional but hardly the stuff of gracious living.

  And, sure enough, as we wander around the enormous space, we get to scoff the tiny samples, teeny sausages, small bits of white bread with dabs of sickly paste, as offered to us by smiling, attractive young women. We enjoy the delights of Getting Something For Free – we’ve never known anything like this before and, of course, it’s an adults’ world, a budding, emerging world of being able to buy what you want. And in our small way, without even being aware of it, we understand that we want all of thi
s, choosing and buying, this is the future.

  But there are other things we’re not aware of. Wandering around, chattering, giggling loudly in that irritating, nigh-on hysterical way of young girls, reaching out excitedly to pick up the samples, we easily stand out among the largely adult crowd milling around. We are out of school uniform in neat little pleated skirts and blouses, carrying our precious wicker baskets. We think we look so grown-up. But anyone looking closely can see us for the school kids we are.

  And someone does. Someone in the crowd is poised to pounce, watching us, two silly young girls, patiently waiting for their moment of opportunity. An unknown, faceless, devious pervert with a twisted mind has targeted us.

  For when we leave the show and fish inside our baskets for our purses and tickets home, we both discover a printed sheet, folded once, inside. It has been run off on a Banda (an early printer of sorts, where you wrote onto a special kind of carbon paper which was wrapped around a drum and run off to produce somewhat faintly printed copies, smelling of solvent).

  And what we read on these printed sheets, slipped surreptitiously into our baskets without our noticing, reveals a shocking, overwhelming truth: someone, somewhere is getting off on the idea, the thought of us actually reading their filthy, provocative, quasi-pornographic questions, neatly typed in capitals, question after question about our bodies, our sexual awareness, our underwear, our parents, whether we masturbate, our toilet habits, nothing is missed.

  Yet though it’s a struggle for us, with our fairly limited knowledge when it comes to sex, we vaguely understand their purpose. We are, of course, stunned by this. Whatever little we knew about sexuality before, we know a bit more now. And it’s very, very nasty. But such is our relative innocence that by the time we take our seats on the tube and make our way home, we’re OK, though somewhat soiled by knowing we’ve brushed shoulders with something so awful. Yet what to do?

  ‘Maybe we should show it to our parents?’ asks Lolly, who is far less rebellious than I, much more conscious of doing the right thing.

  ‘Nah, they’ll only say it’s our fault for going to the Ideal Home in the first place. And my dad would go potty,’ I remind her, ever-conscious of the permanent state of war between me and Ginger and not wanting to even bring up the topic with my mum.

  It doesn’t occur to us to contact the police. Such was the semi-furtive, secretive nature of sex in those days, the idea of approaching a group of strangers with this dreadful anonymous document wouldn’t even get a look in, one reason why this kind of sex pest could operate in the crowd in this way without fear of being caught.

  ‘Look, let’s just tear ‘em up and chuck them in a bin,’ I suggest.

  And we do. Though of course, we cannot entirely forget the contents, their implication. Going ‘all the way’ sexually, in the jargon of the times, is still a long way away for us. But our naivety has been tarnished. And even though there is little consequence for us, the typed sheets aren’t mentioned to anyone we know, even other girls at school.

  But I do wonder what kind of harm those questions might have done to the minds of other kids back then when sex was still, for so many, such a taboo, unspoken topic? We wouldn’t have been the only ones to get that printed sheet, after all …

  CHAPTER 20

  AN ENDING

  School lunch break, sitting opposite the deserted netball pitch: me, Lolly and Brenda, whose parents run a sweet shop in Mare Street. We’ve just finished our school lunch, a mountain of gloppy mash, some watery carrots, an indefinable grey mess classified as ‘mince’ and, of course, the ubiquitous overcooked cabbage, virtually reduced to slime by the time it reaches our plates.

  The others eat up but as usual, I cannot abide the mash and have developed a clever wheeze to avoid any attempt by nosy teachers to get me to clear my plate: whatever I don’t like is surreptitiously scraped into a small brown paper bag, which then goes into my grey skirt pocket, where it often remains for days, until Molly decides to wash my things – and discovers the sickly, rotting mess.

  Naturally, I consistently ignore her entreaties to stop this somewhat unhygienic habit.

  ‘I can’t stand the food, Mum, who cares if I don’t eat it?’ is the gist of my rationale.

  Those lunches were the sole option, food-wise, in or around the school building. There were no vending machines, campus cafés or even handy corner shops to pop out to for sweets, crisps and fizzy drinks during school hours. Yet this afternoon, there’s a development on that front: Brenda has started to pop modest supplies of Burton’s Potato Puffs from her parents’ stock into her schoolbag to sell at school for tuppence a bag. Lolly and I are the first of her lucky customers.

  ‘Oooh they’re gorgeous,’ says Lolly, popping one of the delicate, round, air-filled puffs into her mouth.

  ‘They sorta … melt in your mouth, don’t they?’

  ‘Mmm …’ I agree, greedily popping the last handful from bag to mouth, savouring the last little scrunched-up bits, already wishing Brenda had brought more packets with her so I could stock up for the bus home.

  ‘MUCH better than crisps, I reckon.’

  Brenda is a quiet, pretty girl, never rude, and never in any kind of trouble. Yet this is quite an entrepreneurial feat for a fourteen-year-old.

  After school, I quiz Lolly about it all, she knows Brenda quite well.

  ‘Tuppence a bag is what they cost in the shop, why doesn’t she sell them for less?’

  ‘She can’t. She has to give the money to her parents,’ my friend explains.

  My background, the world of duckers and divers, wheelers and dealers, is starting to show. I’d assumed she was nicking the goods, pocketing the cash. Now I can’t, for the life of me, see the point of her endeavour. OK, we get to buy the puffs and that probably makes her more popular – but she doesn’t make anything on it.

  ‘Doesn’t she mind, not getting anything out of it?’

  ‘No, Jack. You don’t understand, do you? Brenda’s a good girl; she’d never do anything to upset her parents. She’s not like you and me!’

  Wise words. By now, our brief grammar school careers are jointly on the decline. Lolly’s not as insolent or sarky as me. But she chatters incessantly, is always being sent out of class for this and, like me, hands in poorly finished work. Easily led, Lolly, the bright star of her family, has gradually started to follow me down the road to perdition. The teachers don’t seem to dislike her as they do me: she’s good at sport, especially netball, which counts for a great deal at Skinners’. I hate sport so much that I’ve taken to painting fake verrucas (warts) onto my feet and forging letters from home to get out of participating. Gradually, my influence results in Lolly bunking off sport too. And now, with my encouragement, we are occasionally sneaking out of school itself, after the afternoon register, changing out of our uniforms in the public toilet near the Regent Cinema and wandering off on the bus to Mare Street to hang around the shops.

  Things are changing at home too. That December, around my fourteenth birthday, I’m through the front door from school to hear some unexpected news.

  ‘The Old Man’s had a stroke,’ Molly tells me sadly.

  ‘He was fine one minute, now he’s in Barts. Your dad’s with him now.’

  I don’t see my dad that night. I quickly fall asleep and in the morning wake up in time to hear the front door slam behind him. Molly fills me in.

  ‘Ging is in a terrible state, Jac. It’s touch and go with the Old Man. So you’d better be good. Don’t do anything to upset him.’

  Alas, within forty-eight hours it’s all over for my grandfather. He’s gone. Miriam is distraught; her sons whisk her away from the Lane for good and she is quickly ensconced with Neville’s family, in his house in Mill Hill. We don’t go to the funeral; kids didn’t in those days anyway, and my mum, for some reason, opts to stay home to be with me when I get home from school.

  Later, she tells me that a distraught Miriam tried to throw herself onto the coffin, giving a
Command Performance. Ginger is subdued for a few days over Christmas, working on Boxing Day because there are race meetings, and for a short time, he comes home after work and goes straight to bed. I don’t know what to say to him when I do see him; he’s quiet and withdrawn. I’m shocked in one way, but I know that a turning point has been reached: my dad now runs the business alone.

  Secretly, I’m relieved, of course, because there are no more enforced trips to Stoney Lane ahead. Though in one way, I liked my grandfather more than Miriam, I usually saw his benign, benevolent side and he was pretty generous with cash birthday gifts, and, on one occasion, he gave Ginger a pretty topaz and gold ring for me (still in my jewellery box but never valued).

  But now he’s gone, there’s an embarrassingly acute lack of communication between me and my dad. The Old Man’s demise is never discussed, never mentioned at all. But within a few weeks, the heavy boozing returns. It’s around 10pm but I’m wide awake in my bed, dreading the sound of the key in the lock as usual. I hear him come in, then there’s a muffled silence for several minutes. Since this leaden, thick silence usually presages an explosion of shouting, I become unbearably tense, unable to relax or drift off to sleep. What is coming next?

  What comes next is the sound of my father, wretched, distraught, sobbing his heart out, my mum desperately trying to comfort him. The loss of The Old Man has devastated him. I have never heard my father cry before. It is a pitiful sound.

  ‘My poor father,’ he sobs, barely coherent. My poor father. ‘He liked the man that sold the hot peas … the hot peas …’

  (I had no idea what he was going on about then, since hot-pea sellers had already vanished from London’s streets but, of course, my grandfather, born in the late 1800s would have grown up with the sight and sound of men selling hot green peas in a round or oval tin on the streets in and around the Lane.)