An East End Farewell

by Yvette Venables

  ‘Haven’t I got time for a quick cuppa?’

  ‘No, you haven’t. Get down to Abbots Road. Wally Turpin the greengrocer died yesterday afternoon, apparently lifting a sack of spuds off his cart. His wife’s waiting for you. The only reason I’m telling you to go now is that all of her kids will be at school and you’ll have a bit of peace to sort things out,’ he explained.

  ‘OK, I’ll get going, see you later.’ And with that I turned around and headed off.

  I could see his point: Mrs Turpin had thirteen children. ‘Steps and stairs’ we used to call them in those days, as they tended to have one a year so, if you stood them in a line, each one was just slightly taller than the next. It would certainly be easier to sort everything out if they weren’t there.

  I got to the front door, which was already open. I called out, ‘Anyone in?’ I could hear banging from inside.

  ‘Who is it?’ a woman’s voice called from the back.

  ‘It’s Stan Cribb, from the undertakers,’ I shouted back.

  With that she peers around the hall door, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Come in, love,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want me to shut the door?’ I asked.

  ‘Na, leave it, the catch is broke and once it’s shut it’s ’ard to open. Gotta fix it. Wally was gonna do it but now he’s . . .’ She trailed off, lifted her apron and wiped it across her eyes. ‘Can’t believe it, tell ya the truth. I was just getting the tea ready while he was outside unloading his cart . . . now he’s gone, ’ow I’m gonna manage wiv thirteen little ’uns, God only knows!’

  We walked into the sparse living room and I saw that the noise was coming from a small boy of around three years old, sitting on bare floorboards, bashing the living daylights out of a saucepan with a wooden spoon.

  ‘Stop it, ’orace,’ she shouted at the boy, who didn’t take a blind bit of notice; in fact he hit it even harder. She grabbed the spoon off him, waving it in his face. ‘I told you STOP IT. We can’t ’ear ourselves bleeding fink, ya drivin’ me round the bloody bend!’ With that he gets up and walks outside.

  Thank the lord for that!

  ‘Sit down, Mr Cribb,’ she said, pointing to one of the two rickety wooden chairs placed either side of an old table. It was a common sight to see houses so sparsely furnished. When you had that amount of children, putting food into their mouths was more important than furniture. I knew that upstairs the children would all be sharing a couple of beds between them; they would sleep like sardines, top to tail, many of them infested with fleas.

  ‘Thank you, now let me get my paperwork out and we can get everything sorted.’

  Just as I’d pulled it from my bag, a commotion starts outside in the backyard. Horace walks back in with a duck under his arm, which he can hardly carry. He walks up to me, grinning, and the duck goes into a frenzy and starts fighting to get out of his grip. Horace lets it go, and suddenly it’s flapping and quacking around the living room.

  The mother shouts, ‘Get that thing out! How many times do I ’ave to tell you to keep the duck out of ’ere!’

  It finds its own way outside and Horace is now standing next to me, just staring. It’s unsettling, as he’s got a strange look in his eyes as if he’s deciding what he can do next to cause havoc, but at least he’s quiet. I look at him and smile. A trail of something truly revolting is leaking from his nose, and I wanted to gag when his mother says, ‘Wipe ya nose, ’orace, it’s disgusting!’ With that he wipes his sleeve right across it, spreading it over his face; his eyes never leave mine, as if he’s mesmerised.

  I certainly wasn’t mesmerised. I couldn’t bear to look any longer. I could feel the muscles in my face had fixed into a look of revulsion and I didn’t want Mrs Turpin to see it. God only knows what it was like when the other twelve were there.

  ‘If you don’t behave, ’orace, you know what you’ll get!’ she threatened. At least this broke his trance-like state.

  ‘No!’ Horace shouted, turning to glare at her.

  ‘You wait and see then, I’ve warned ya,’ she said, shaking her finger at his face.

  Horace ran off towards the backyard again, and this threat, whatever it was, had seemed to work, so we carried on.

  I had explained virtually everything to her and was just finishing up the paperwork when I heard a clip-clop coming from behind me. I turned around and saw Horace leading a donkey into the room. I wasn’t sure what I should do, as Mrs Turpin didn’t seem overly concerned, so I just carried on talking. Then it was behind me, hot breath on the back of my neck, and my hair being ruffled by its lips. I sat forwards to get away from it when Mrs Turpin says, ‘Don’t worry, she’s alright, Mr Cribb, it’s only Gracie, Wally’s donkey. He used to go out with ’er every day on the cart. He was with ’er before he met me. They’ve been together for donkeys’ years.’ She paused. ‘You know what? I’d laugh at that if it wasn’t so bloody tragic! I think she knows what’s ’appened, look at ’er little face, she’s so sad.’

  I looked at her face but I couldn’t tell. Donkeys always looked sad to me. I didn’t want to upset her, so I agreed. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. I can see there’s sadness in her eyes.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ she said, pleased that she’d thought I’d noticed.

  With that, Gracie laid her head on my shoulder.

  ‘Aw, look!’ she says. ‘She taken to ya. Give ’er a little scratch on ’er nose, she likes that.’

  So I there scratching Gracie’s nose while I continued finalising the arrangements. Horace, now bored that his introduction of the donkey hadn’t caused pandemonium, wandered off again.

  As I was scratching her nose I heard an enormous rumble coming from the donkey’s belly. You could sense she was uncomfortable, the way she shifted; she started lifting her back leg up as if she wanted to reach her stomach, and you could see she was distressed. Her stomach was now gurgling, and it was disturbingly loud. Her tail was swishing backwards and forwards. Something was brewing in there and I didn’t like the signs one bit!

  ‘Calm down, Gracie!’ Mrs Turpin said. ‘She’s upset, Mr Cribb, that’s what it is.’

  ‘I know a bit about animals, Mrs Turpin. She seems to be having a problem with her stomach. It’s as if she’s got the gripes or something.’ I was trying to warn her.

  ‘Gripes? She can’t ’ave the gripes! She hasn’t eaten anything different. No, it’s not that,’ she replied, looking the donkey over.

  Just then, Horace walks back in, the contents of his nose now dried all over his face. Walking up to Gracie, he holds out his hand and commences to feed her, but I can’t make out what it is.

  ‘What ya been giving ’er, ya little sod?’ his mother shouts.

  ‘Nuffink!’ the delightful Horace shouts back, jumping up and down clapping his hands.

  ‘You’ve given ’er something . . . now what is it?’ she screams.

  Gracie is now extremely agitated and prancing up and down like she’s on hot coals.

  Horace skips outside and comes back holding a packet. He hands it to his mother, whose hand shoots up to her mouth as she lets out a stifled scream.

  ‘Dear God in ’eaven!’She’s now looking panic-stricken. ‘Have you given her the whole sodding packet?’

  ‘Yeah . . . all gone!’ Horace laughs, opening his hands.

  She grabs his hands, pulling him towards her. ‘When did you give ’em to ’er?’

  ‘She liked ’em, ’ad ’em for breakfast,’ he answered, still laughing.

  ‘Breakfast!’ She quickly looks around at the mantelpiece clock. ‘That was six hours ago!’ She looked horrified.

  ‘What’s he given her, Mrs Turpin?’ I asked, leaning forward trying to see what was on the packet.

  ‘Senna pods!’ she screams, holding up the packet to show me.

  I don’t think in my entire life I’d ever moved so fast.

  I grabbed my papers under my arm; I didn’t even stop to put them in my bag.

  ‘Well, I think
we’ve finished everything, Mrs Turpin, I’d better be off now.’ I turned to Horace. ‘Cheerio, Horace, be a good boy for your mum.’

  The little sod only turns and gives me the ‘soldiers’ farewell’. At least, I think it was; it could have been the ‘V’ for Victory sign and he was too young to realise he’d got it the wrong way around but, knowing Horace, I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

  If you don’t know what the ‘soldiers’ farewell’ is, it’s the two-finger salute. You wouldn’t think a child of that age would know such things, would you?

  I shot out of the room like greased lighting; having had many years of suffering at the hands of the senna pod, I knew by the way Gracie was behaving exactly what was coming and it was imminent.

  As I reached the front door, which was fortunately open, I heard Mrs Turpin shouting to Horace: ‘Get ’er out of ’ere now . . . quick . . . go on!’

  I managed to get to the pavement when I heard a scream, followed by Mrs Turpin’s cry of ‘Gawd almighty!’ followed by Horace’s hysterical laughter.

  I stood there listening to her yelling at Horace. I was guilt-ridden. I’d left her right at the critical moment but knew there was nothing I could’ve done to have stopped what I imagined to be Gracie’s enormous expulsion. I did feel sorry for her. Not only had she just lost her husband but she now had to clear her living room of half a ton of donkey diarrhoea.

  The funeral was held the following week. Mr Turpin had left specific instructions that Gracie was to pull the cart that took his coffin to the church. We made arrangements that we would take him most of the way in the hearse with Gracie (who had now fully recovered) and the cart waiting by the cemetery gates would take him the rest of the way. The cart had been beautifully decorated with wild flowers that the family had picked, as they couldn’t afford anything else, and Gracie looked far perkier than the last time I’d seen her. It seemed that being ‘purged’ had done her the power of good. In fact, she looked a picture. Her head halter had been entwined with daisies, which his daughters had created, and his eldest son Cyril led the procession up to the church.

  They were absolutely delightful children; all dressed in their Sunday best, they were a credit to their parents. Cyril told me he’d now taken over his father’s business and his brother, Alf, who was fifteen, had secured a job as a runner in the docks. I was relieved; at least their mother would now have their wages to help her along. Fortunately there was no sign of Horace. I was told he was at home being looked after by a neighbour . . . all I could think was God help them!

  Animals were a common sight in a lot of households. As I explained before, they were normally kept for food but the ‘totters’ – who were rag and bone men, greengrocers, knife grinders – all of these professions would keep a donkey or pony to pull their carts.

  When I married Joan on 17 November 1950, our house turned into a menagerie too, and that was well before our three children, Graham, John and Susan came along.

  Mum and Dad had decided to retire to the Isle of Wight, to live in my paternal grandfather’s old house, so I was then able to buy our old house from them.

  Dad had left a couple of chickens for us but we decided to buy a few more. I contacted a breeder in Alton Hampshire, and ordered twelve Rhode Island Reds. They were about sixteen weeks old and at the ‘point of lay’, which meant we only had to wait around two to three weeks for them to start supplying us with eggs. This is something I’d always wanted to do ever since I was a boy. It was all very exciting!

  Over the course of the next few years, I had twenty-four Rhode Island Reds, twelve Barton’s Miniatures, and a few Cuckoo Marans, that laid the most unusual chocolate-brown eggs.

  Joan’s dad worked with a Dutch antique dealer in town, and in conversation one day he told him about our smallholding. When he mentioned the unusual chickens with their oddly coloured eggs, he became quite emotional. The dealer explained to him that when he was a boy his father had kept Cuckoo Marans, and he’d always remembered the wonderful flavour of their eggs and he’d not had another since those days.

  Joan’s dad took him half a dozen as a gift and, the following day, he told him that while eating them for his tea, all his childhood memories had come flooding back. He said he’d found them delicious and he’d happily pay £1 for a regular order of a dozen per fortnight. Now, for somebody to pay £1 for a dozen eggs in those days was astonishing!

  In October we’d buy in around twenty capons, to get them ready for Christmas. Capons are actually cockerels that have been doctored by injecting a small pellet into their necks. This stops them having any sexual urges, so they stop breeding and, fortunately, it stops them from crowing, too, which the neighbours certainly appreciated. Their only interest in life is to eat, which they quite happily do all day. This fattens them up so, by Christmas, you have a chicken which is very similar in size to a small turkey. Joan and I used to prepare a capon, a rabbit and half-a-dozen eggs in a basket, which sold like hot cakes at Christmas.

  Having spent two years on the farm, Joan was a dab hand at preparing the animals for food. I must confess that she used to ‘draw’ them too (this is cleaning them out, but I could never bring myself to do it). Slaughtering, plucking, skinning – not a problem, but drawing I just couldn’t do; it made me feel ill. She used to take the micky out of me all the time over that. I suppose she was right in a way. It always puzzled me how I could do what I did all day and not bring myself to ‘draw’ a rabbit.

  Of an evening, I used to love sitting at the dining-room table going over my books. It was a good job Uncle never saw me, as he would’ve definitely thought I’d turned from Uriah Heep into Ebenezer Scrooge. After a few years, our smallholding in our tiny garden was almost making more profit than the undertakers!

  What made life even more arduous was rationing, and it would last another four years. It was such a testing time for mothers, who had to try and feed their families on the meagre portions handed out by the government. Trying to plan weekly meals was a mission in itself, but I think having us there to provide the odd chicken, rabbit or half-a-dozen eggs made life a bit easier for them.

  We even had rationing books for the animal feed too – that’s how hard it was. But because the neighbours were so keen for us to keep going, they would always leave their potato peelings and scraps wrapped in newspaper on our doorstep, which I’d then turn into feed for the chickens. If it hadn’t been for all those scraps I doubt we could’ve carried on. Everybody tried to help each other out. They were tough old days but the team spirit was remarkable.

  As Charles Dickens said: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .’

  11

  The Great Smog

  1952 (age 24)

  I will never forget 1952 for two reasons: our first child Graham was born in the January and, secondly, it turned out to be the year when ‘The Great Smog’ engulfed us. Both events are indelibly imprinted on my memory.

  As I left the house the morning of 6 December 1952 I’d picked up the hurricane lamp I used at night to go and check on our menagerie. Why I’d picked it up I don’t know, but subconsciously it must have had something to do with the thick fog or ‘pea-souper’ that had started the previous day.

  Us British had been used to bouts of fog over the years; since Roman times we were famous the world over for our mists and fog and it was rumoured that tourists even took jars of it home with them. Records dating back to the 13th century recognised that air pollution was a public health problem, and the burning of coal was the main source. Around 1807 our smoke-laden capital came known as a ‘London particular’ and Charles Dickens used the term in his novel Bleak House, where he describes fog-bound London. Robbers in those times loved the density of it, as it allowed them to seek out travellers who had become disorientated and lost their way, making them easy-pickings.

  Robbers might have loved it, but in the early 1950s a certain undertaker was cursing the weather. Uncle had picked me up to attend a funeral in Leytons
tone; stupidly I’d tried to sneak the lamp into the hearse, but it was a waste of time trying to do anything without his beady eyes seeing it. ‘What you bringing that thing with you for?’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know, just thought we may need it if the fog thickens up.’

  ‘Daft bugger, it won’t get any worse than this,’ he said. But little did we know the events over the next five days would prove to be the worst peacetime catastrophe of the twentieth century, and would become known as ‘The Great Smog’.

  We went to St Patrick’s Church in Leytonstone and the funeral went without a hitch. We had one hearse and one limousine for the family. We left the cemetery and were travelling along Leytonstone High Road and had just reached Maryland Point when it engulfed us, and not only us, but London as a whole. We had never witnessed anything like it. It was as if someone had set fire to a heap of tyres and let them burn – it was that black, and not only that, the smell was awful, sickening, like rotten eggs.

  Freezing conditions had hit us that winter of ’52. Everyone had coal fires and families were keeping them stoked up all the time, as their homes were so cold. The soot from all the chimneys and of course the factories, which daily belched out 1,000 tonnes of smoke, combined with the fog was how the word ‘smog’ came about. The smoke was made up of 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid, 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds and 370 tonnes of sulphur dioxide. These became a deadly cocktail and, when mixed with the moisture in the air, 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid was formed.

  Let me try to describe what it was like. Imagine if you held your hands out in front of you and they disappeared – that’s how thick it was. It was horrible and filthy. It killed 900 people a day during those five days, 4,000 in that first week, 8,000 in the following fortnight and around 12,000 in total. It was black and evil and crept silently under doors and through windows and suffocated you in your sleep. Within a few days, undertakers all over London, including us, had run out of coffins and were working as hard as they could under dire conditions to make as many as was physically possible.