Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  It’s a Sunday night and I’m at an ‘evening in’ with a new swain, a boy of seventeen called Andy whom I know from the club. Andy is great: tall, blond, attractive and bright, he’s already poised to go to university, a notch up from the likes of Dopey Stephen whom I’d previously paired off with at another ‘evening in’ only to discover that the object of my passion is a rubbish, sloppy kisser – and a bit wooden, a conversational duffer. He looks good, dresses sharp. But that’s it. He has nothing else to offer.

  Andy is a much better bet; he’s knowledgeable and interesting. Necking with him is great, the real deal. He never attempts to fumble with my bra or go any further. And he’s funny.

  I’m sitting cosily on his lap in a big flat in Stamford Hill; the adults living here are out, and around us are other couples all furiously snogging like mad.

  ‘See that girl over there?’ Andy whispers, nuzzling my neck, pointing to a girl draped over a happy youth on the opposite chair.

  ‘She’ll make a good grandmother.’

  ‘How d’ya know?’ I wonder, marvelling at his perspicacity. After all, he’s pointing to a not particularly pretty, straggly-haired plump girl from Clapton Pond.

  ‘Aah, that’s my secret,’ he teases, reaching out for another lingering kiss.

  I don’t dare ask him what my prospects are for good grandmotherhood. I’d be mortified if he said he thought I was a strong contender. Though most of the girls I know are already openly discussing engagements and white-frocked nuptials, the housewife-cum-mother role and all it entails has not taken shape on my horizon. I know it should, of course, given the amount of time and mental energy that goes into boy chasing, speculating on their attributes and now, finally, dating local boys like Andy. But, for me, I know there is too much going on out there in the world for me to experience to fasten firm onto this idea of wife, mother … let alone granny.

  What he meant, of course, was that nearly all the girls in our world would have been devastated not to be married off with kids on the way within the next few years. Being a childless spinster to my contemporaries meant shame, no one wanted you. (It was equally bad to be an unmarried mum, trapped by nature’s whim but a social pariah nonetheless.) Being a granny was seen as the crowning achievement in family life. Having an interesting career, being financially independent and maybe then thinking about choosing a partner – or having kids – was still a long way off as a normal option for young women. Andy, more perceptive than most, saw it all clearly.

  Yet that was our last encounter, our final necking session. Within weeks he’d gone off to university in the Midlands. I then discovered he was already spoken for: a green-eyed blonde girl from Guildford, already at university. I mourned him briefly: for about two weeks. But that passing comment made an impact on me: at fifteen, it helped me understand more about myself, that my horizons were quite different from those around me.

  Life at home was changing somewhat for me because I saw little of my dad, unless I was still awake at night to hear him come in. I was out on the bus to Southampton Row before he rose, and on weekends I mostly slept through the day, a teenage pattern that became a routine until the time I left home. Usually, in winter, I’d sleep through weekend mornings, only stirring to eat – a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was usually taken, sitting up in my bed – then I’d dive out, plonk the plate in the kitchen sink and go back to sleep. Until it was time to go out, get ready, meet Lolly. Or go on the odd date.

  After the David incident, of course, my dad’s attitude to my developing social life worsened. I was growing up, moving towards some sort of independence. Now the rows and explosions were no longer about dragging The Unwilling Daughter to family visits – instead, there was a ludicrous possessiveness about me and the opposite sex.

  I never suggested that any boy that liked me come to the flat; I’d arrange to meet them elsewhere. Often they’d already have a taste of Ginger’s temper if they rang me at home. If I was out and he picked up, he’d yell abuse at them, tell them to eff off and slam the phone down. Sometimes the baffled recipient would tell me about this. Embarrassed, I’d just mumble something and quickly change the subject. I never ever wanted to discuss any of this stuff. Even Lolly, who knew how it was for me with my dad, chose to ring when she knew I’d pick up. But even she wasn’t fully aware of how frequently my dad was plastered. Or abusive.

  One Sunday night, not long before I leave Pitmans, I’m out with a Hill boy called Stan: tall, dark, handsome – but mostly silent. Conversation with Stan is minimal. He’s so good-looking, a real hunk, and I don’t really understand that it’s actually shyness that keeps him so quiet. We’ve gone to the cinema at Stamford Hill to see Psycho, which has managed to scare the life out of me – and Stan has attempted a tentative bit of hand-holding – a sign of life at least! – but nothing more. Afterwards, Silent Stan accompanies me, still saying very little, on the bus to Shacklewell Lane – and offers to walk me to my door.

  I can hardly refuse, though I know my dad might be home as it’s Sunday night. Worse, it’s now well past my curfew time, 10pm, when we eventually get off the bus and stroll down Shacklewell Lane, hand-in-hand, towards my street.

  Oh no. It can’t be happening. A furious Ginger, enraged that I’m still out, already suspecting A Boy is involved, is standing on the corner of our street. He’s not visibly drunk. But he’s steaming with suppressed anger.

  ‘Whaddya think you’re doin’ you little cow?’ he yells.

  Before I can respond, he walks up to me – and promptly slaps me across the face.

  It’s a devastating shock, your dad whacking you like this in front of a boy. I’m not really hurt. Just humiliated beyond belief.

  ‘Sorry, sorry – er Mr Hyams,’ says Stan, stumbling, incoherent, clueless as to how to react. At well over six foot – he towers over my dad – you might expect him to stand his ground, defend me. It’s all perfectly innocent. But he’s far too intimidated by my dad’s rage, his hideous invective.

  ‘Get outta here you cow’s son before I kick you up the ass!’ he bellows at the rapidly departing Stan. Then, damage done, he turns and stomps off in the opposite direction, knowing damn well he’s gone too far this time.

  Sobbing with shame and rage, I stumble down the street, up to our flat, banging at the door-knocker like crazy. My mum, already expecting trouble, is nonetheless shocked at my state.

  ‘He bloody hit me!’ I scream at her.

  ‘That bastard hit me! I hate his fucking guts! I HATE HIM!’

  My mum hugs me close, does her level best to calm me. Distressed at what has happened, she is nonetheless powerless to control my dad’s over-the-top behaviour.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jac, I’m sorry I gave you such a rotten dad,’ she tells me.

  ‘SO WHY DO YOU STAY WITH HIM? WHY DON’T YOU GO?’ I scream.

  We’ve been here before: this pokey, noisy place, the boozing, the unreasonable rages, my constant feeling of being stifled, hemmed in. But we both know the answer. My dad earns ‘a good living’. He reminds us of this frequently in the midst of his angry tirades, with his perpetual mantra: ‘I work my balls off for you, you have the finest and the best’ and so on. So without any sort of economic freedom from our dependence on this ‘good living’ where would we go, how could we survive?

  This is the only time my dad displays any physical violence towards me, though heaven knows he’s threatened it often enough in outbursts. So bad has it been between us lately, my mum, trapped fast in the midst of our stormy natures, had even resorted to leaving me a begging note on my bed a few weeks before.

  ‘Please be a good girl, Jac,’ the note said. ‘It would be so much easier for us if you didn’t keep rowing with your dad.’

  How desperate must she have been to see an end to this constant turmoil, the regular ding-dongs, the shouting, yelling and screaming that punctuated our lives so frequently. I never forgot that pleading little note. Yet at the time, of course, I ignored her plea: the cal
lous teenage tyrant who only cares about her own needs, her own wants; undisciplined emotionally, I don’t know how to stop myself reacting to his behaviour, his very presence in our lives. But I vow, there and then, that if he ever does anything like this again, I will flee, run away, no matter what. I’ll go to Lolly. I’ll find a way to get away from this somehow …

  Finally, I cry myself into sleep, exhausted by my frustration at our lot. I have no idea what time my dad creeps back, ashamed, into the flat. There’s no apology, just a few days of relative calm. As for Silent Stan, he never phones me again. I’m not surprised. But now I have something to hang onto: very soon, at least, I’ll have my own money from work – and be out, spending as much time as possible away from this place. Escape will be my salvation.

  Only I don’t quite understand exactly how long that’s going to take.

  CHAPTER 23

  PARTY WITH THE KRAY TWINS

  It is white, tight and made from beautiful guipure lace. It has a shiny satin band round the waist and thin satin spaghetti straps, a figure-hugging sheath dress to knock ‘em in the aisles, the sort of dress that Marilyn Monroe wore. My mum, champagne glass aloft, teetering on her high-heeled silver sandals, postures and preens in front of the living-room mirror.

  She’s had the dress made to measure, as usual. She looks like a pocket Venus: it shows off her slim, flat hips and full bust to perfection. And tonight is the debut of the lace dress, its first ever outing. A party, in posh Knightsbridge at a place called Esmeralda’s Barn, to celebrate the acquittal of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the East End’s most famous sons. Yet again, for the umpteenth time, the naughty Twins have wriggled out of trouble; charged this time with ‘loitering with intent’ to steal parked cars in Hackney, they hired a top female barrister to defend them. And wouldn’t you know it, the court has dismissed the charges. Krays: 1. Coppers: Zilch.

  ‘Whaddya think, Ginger?’ says Molly, twirling round, fishing for compliments as usual, knowing full well she looks fabulous. The lace alone, sourced from a pricey West End fabric emporium, has cost my dad a wad of notes, let alone the cost of getting it made.

  ‘Fantastic, Mol, fantastic,’ says my dad, grinning, opening his cherished cocktail cabinet and pouring himself a pre-party double.

  ‘The boys’ve invited all sorts of people this time, film stars, posh people, you name it. It’s gonna be a really big night.’

  I’m not really interested in all this – but I do like my mum’s taste in dresses; it’s bang up-to-the-minute fashionable, even better than the white tasselled sheath with diamanté straps also hanging in her ever-crowded wardrobe.

  I’m desperate for them to go out and party because it means the luxury of having the flat – or rather, the phone – to myself for a few hours, rather than having to duck down to the draughty phone box on the little roundabout in Shacklewell Lane for one of my lengthy phone calls to my friends. By now, I’m at that stage where I don’t want my phone conversations overheard, so the freedom of the flat tonight is a bonus for me.

  As a child, of course, my folks would often use the services of Renee, a teenage babysitter who lived round the corner in the Arcola Street council flats. She loved babysitting for us, mainly because my dad, typically, was over-lavish with the ‘bonuses’ that usually came along with her hourly rates.

  ‘Treat yourself, gel,’ he’d say, pissed as a newt, stuffing an extra ten-shilling note into her hand on arriving home. What an easy gig. All she had to do was get me into my pyjamas and bed. Then she’d plonk herself down on the couch, tune into the radio, listen to the Billy Cotton Band Show or, on Sundays, Sing Something Simple, knit, and plan what she’d do with my dad’s bonus.

  I’m aware, of course, that they are partying with two of the East End’s most celebrated, notorious crims. My dad’s relationship with the Twins has spanned many years. He’d first known them as teenagers when they’d worked on their grandad’s stall on Petticoat Lane. And he’d watched them, at eighteen, when they boxed professionally at the Royal Albert Hall with their older brother, Charlie.

  ‘The twins were good little boxers,’ he’d recall wistfully, as if a totally different kind of career had merely been snatched from them by a cruel twist of fate. He knew their dad, Charlie, quite well too; like my dad, Charlie had worked ‘on the knocker’ flogging clothing and buying gold and silver from door-to-door all over England. He was also a heavy gambler. And a serious drinker.

  The twins, however, didn’t think much of their dad, in complete contrast to their relationship with their mum, Violet, whom they worshipped. They were known to be very respectful towards women generally. Yet it was also common knowledge around the manor that they’d been known to beat their father up. Rumour had it that on one occasion, they’d hung him upside down, from a fourth-floor window, repeatedly threatening to let him go. In the pub afterwards, Charlie, however, wasn’t in the least bit nonplussed about this, telling people like my dad exactly what had gone down.

  This violence, of course, was pretty much par for the course in their East-End world. And my dad had grown up amidst it. Men went to the pub, fought each other sometimes, went home and, in some cases, beat their kids – or the missus. Women stoically put up with it, mostly for economic reasons – changes to the divorce laws were decades away. And, of course, the law didn’t fully recognise domestic violence then. It was just something that happened. Frequently.

  But despite his origins and his love of the bottle, my dad never attempted to hit my mum, even when frustration and anger overwhelmed him later in life. OK, the furious verbal exchanges when he was badly drunk demonstrated a violent aspect of his life, surely the same kind of abuse he’d heard as a kid. The language was certainly coarse, ugly. But I never saw any punch-ups, men fighting each other, as a child. The violence and intimidation that was the darker side of the criminal East End world was around us, but me and my mum didn’t get to see it.

  To my parents, the Kray Twins were part and parcel of the East End world, usually a focal point for gossip and stories about their exploits; by the sixties, a kind of seedy glamour was attached to actually knowing them. The twins admired Ginger. Because my dad was known around the Lane to be a whizz with figures and a bit of a scribe and skilled letter writer, one day a youthful Ronnie had turned up at my dad’s office with a special request.

  ‘Can ya write us a letter, Ginger, to the court?’ he’d asked, wanting a carefully worded testimonial to be read out in court, a common practice at the time. Literacy was not the Twins’ strong point and truth, of course, had a way of disappearing whenever they wanted to make a point.

  My dad complied. He more or less had to do it. Even then, long before their crimes got completely out of control, few in the Lane refused the Krays a favour. And they, in turn, never forgot if you’d helped them out. Which was a double-edged sword, because there was always a chance they’d ask you again. And again.

  In the late fifties, when their firm was on the rise, the Krays had even invited my dad to leave the bookie business and join their coterie of hangers-on. By then, illegal gambling was really popular; it was known that legalisation wasn’t far off, so there’d been heavy investment in gambling clubs and casinos. Ginger, they thought, with his betting nous and literary skills, might be useful. He could go on the twins’ payroll, couldn’t he?

  ‘We’ll see that the missus and the little ‘un are looked after, Ginger,’ they told him, offering my dad a huge weekly cash stipend to climb aboard their roller-coaster ride to terror and mayhem. (What his precise role in their world might have been has always remained a mystery, since his skills, by then, were very much deskbound. Maybe my dad had been a nifty fighter in his slimmer youth, but by now good living and booze were taking their toll and he was distinctly overweight and porky.)

  ‘I knew what you’d say, Mol,’ my dad told my mum, after he’d politely declined the kind offer, deftly claiming that The Old Man ‘wouldn’t be too pleased’ if he quit their betting business.

 
No self-respecting East End bloke would cite their missus’ opinion as a potential barrier to an opportunity to up the ante financially. But the solidly macho code of the Krays world understood all too well that upsetting The Old Man, who garnered formidable respect in all quarters, wouldn’t be right. So Ginger was off the hook.

  ‘There’s no way I’d get that involved with those boys,’ my dad sensibly concluded.

  ‘Best to keep on their good side – from a distance.’

  So that’s how Molly and Ginger came to be invited to the Big Bash at The Barn, along with all the others that knew them, from a distance or otherwise. Of course, I heard all about it from my mum afterwards.

  ‘There was every kind of food and drink you could think of, Jac, pastries, gateaux, smoked salmon, big dishes of fresh salmon, prawns, chicken, turkey, beef, I’ve never seen so much food in one place, not even at a big wedding,’ she told me. ‘And they had loads of waiters and waitresses running around, pouring drinks for everyone all night, the minute your glass was empty, it was incredible.’

  The assembled company, like the food, had been eclectic. Clergymen and cops, writers, glamour girls and bank managers, costermongers, stallholders, bookies like my dad, one or two local bigwigs, hundreds of people had turned out to party with the twins. There was a band, and a crooner, singing mostly Sinatra. (‘My Way’ was sung at both twins’ funerals.) The hosts, of course, didn’t boogie on down. They just sat there, at their table, immaculately clad as usual, surrounded by minions, smiling and greeting everyone, a bit like visiting Royalty at a Command Performance. Like many of their big bashes, the party was an excellent example of skilful public relations: the lavish hospitality for which they were renowned gave their underworld exploits a sheen, a gloss that never quite faded.