My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  The argument for integration with a new community or for celebrating diversity is, undeniably, a complex one, but good hearts can cross barriers. Here, ‘Nurse Hebrew’ speaks of the importance to her of getting to know people from different backgrounds rather than just observing their difference.

  I trained at the London Hospital between 1932 and 1936. The first three years were pure slog and I don’t even like to think about them. The fourth year, however, gave me the experience of a lifetime. I became ‘Nurse Hebrew’ – the ward was called Hebrew and so was I! – in charge of a male medical ward run on orthodox Jewish lines. There were four Jewish wards, male and female, medical and surgical, on the top floor. My year as Nurse Hebrew was the best of all my training. The patients were wonderful to me; one boy of eighteen years offered to take me to Brighton when he was discharged! They loaded me with chocolates [and] one of my patients – a very poor, elderly man – got his wife to make me a bookmarker. I still treasure it. To me, therefore, Whitechapel meant Jews. Door after door had a mezuzah [a small box holding a parchment scroll inscribed with the Shema, a prayer from Deuteronomy, found on every doorpost in orthodox Jewish homes except the bathroom]. On walking from the hospital to the nearest Woolworths at Aldgate one seldom met non-Jewish people. On Sunday there was a street market run by the local Jewish population, where I learned to haggle! But there were obviously some non-Jewish people around, [particularly considering] the large attendance at the nearby Great Assembly Hall – reduced to rubble by Hitler – on Sunday afternoons for the service and the free tea. Possibly the reason for the large attendance! But, to me, Whitechapel and the Jews and the London Hospital will always be connected. I was Nurse Hebrew and I got to know – and love – my patients and their relatives.

  The reason for suspicion within a community was considered by this woman to be based, first, on difference between cultures and then, when it became more hostile, on envy.

  It was when the Jews began buying the best houses and so on that people began being resentful of their success.

  Other people were more intrigued by the foreigners in their midst. My father, Tom, who was born in 1919, remembers as a boy seeing groups of what were then called Lascars – Asian sailors – doing business with the ‘old girls’ who stood with their bundles of secondhand clothes in Chrisp Street – always known locally as Chris Street – selling occasional odds and ends to passers-by. With the Lascars the women had hit the jackpot, as the sailors would buy everything they had, then walk off in a line, one behind the other, carrying their spoils, or balancing them on one of the second-hand bikes they were always eager to buy.

  I was fascinated by their little hands. They seemed so small compared to the great big forks the men had in my family. I’d watch them as they’d be going along the street, back to the docks, with six trilby hats stacked on their heads, a couple of suits thrown over each arm, and piles and piles of shirts and jerseys. ‘Who wants this for a penny?’ the old girls would say, pointing to their bundles, and the Lascars, they’d buy it all up and carry it back to their ships that were going back to India. They had their own lavatories, you know, at the docks. Ones you had to squat over. Much more hygienic when you think of it than ours were. And they used to carry these little cans of water, to wash themselves. They had to have the right kind of facilities.

  For some the difference between cultures was of interest because of the potential it provided for a welcome source of childhood income. For instance, the fact that orthodox Jews were forbidden to carry out any kind of ‘work’ during the sabbath gave employment to the so-called Sabbath Goys.

  In the 1920s and early 1930s, we never thought about people being immigrants. All we thought was that the Jewish families would pay us a few coppers to do jobs for them on their Sabbath. We didn’t understand why. It was a way of getting money to get something more to eat. We’d fight to do it. We never thought they shouldn’t be here. They were just people. But us kids did wonder why they couldn’t turn their own gaslights on and that.

  Differences within the community could also be a potential source of confusion.

  My mum always thought my husband was Jewish, because he was dark and had big brown eyes, and he was smartly dressed and used to speak Jewish. I went into hospital in Stepney Green [the Jewish Hospital] and when I was in the ward there, of a Friday they used to get one of the Jewish people to break off a bit of chollah loaf and drink a drop of wine for the Sabbath. They’d come over to me because the rabbi there liked my husband, and used to speak to me in Jewish. He always picked me out.

  My mother would be there and she’d say, ‘I don’t care whether you married a Jew or not, but he is Jewish, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘he’s from quite a strict English family. How can you say they’re Jewish?’

  ‘English’ as an alternative to ‘Jewish’ was a distinction often made by people I spoke to who were in their seventies or older, people who could still remember first-generation Jewish immigrants speaking in foreign accents, so they had not been classed by them as ‘English’.

  The complications surrounding the ambiguous pedigree of the possibly Jewish son-in-law multiplied.

  I only had one child then, he was about four. The Jewish people that lived upstairs used to burn candles of a Friday. And my son always used to say, ‘Light candles!’

  I used to say, ‘We’re not Jewish, we don’t burn candles on Friday.’

  But my husband would say, ‘It if pleases him, burn candles.’

  One day, I said to my mother, ‘I’m frying some fish tonight. Bring Aunt P. round and I’ll do us some fish and chips.’

  I fried the fish and my husband liked this chrane, beetroot and horseradish mixed in a jar, that you could buy. So I got the fish on the table, this jar of relish, and I got these candles burning – it’s Friday.

  And my mother and her sister waltz in.

  ‘Look,’ said my mother, ‘he’s Jewish. The candles are burning and that red stuff’s got all Jewish writing on it.’

  I’d already got the chicken on the stove, stewing for the next day, so I went over and scooped up all the lokshen [thin noodles used in Jewish cookery, especially with chicken soup]. ‘We put vermicelli in our stew,’ I said. ‘Jewish people cook their lokshen separate.’

  My mum was watching all this and she said, ‘I don’t know why you don’t say he’s Jewish. That’s given the secret away, that has.’

  It wasn’t just the ‘English’ who reacted to the presence of foreigners.

  My only real experience of racism as a child was when a family of Mediterranean people – they may have been Greek – threw their shoes at us as we walked home from school. One assumes that ethnic minorities would be more tolerant. Nothing of the sort, we are all intolerant. It seems to me the original sin is intolerance and prejudice.

  And it is that prejudice which fuels the belief that the majority of people from ethnic minority groups are scroungers who come to live off our benefit system and rake in huge amounts of money. I spoke to someone who is herself from an immigrant background who works in Newham.

  There probably are examples where [a family] has nine, ten, eleven children, and with yourself, or your partner, or a child who is entitled to disability living allowance, and your entitlement to attendance allowance [then] there will be people entitled to several hundreds of pounds a week. But if you divide that by the number of people it is meant to feed and clothe, and all the rest of it, it is not unreasonable. But it must be extremely difficult for people not to have these reactions. Especially if people appear to be different in clothing, in accent, in colour, in religion. It is a natural reaction to blame other people when they themselves are badly off. And many people here are badly off.

  Despite there always seeming to have been some wariness between different cultures, the anxiety within the community as a whole, which results in the world outside the home being seen as a threatening and dangerous place for the elderly and for children, appears to be a mo
re recent phenomenon.

  After school you didn’t come indoors at all. I suppose we put our things in, but then you were out again. Out playing with all the kids. No one seemed to worry about you, because nothing happened to you. You never felt there was someone round the corner waiting to take you away. You did have it around, I suppose, but you knew everyone in your community. You knew you were safe.

  People who spoke to me certainly remembered the East End as being one big playground. In the next chapter, they share their recollections of a childhood world – unregulated and alarmingly dangerous by today’s standards – of tarmac and lamp-posts, barges and canals, larks and mischief, games and pranks.

  [ 8 ]

  We’d be out from first thing till it got pitch dark.

  Children in east London spent much of their spare time outside amusing themselves: raking the streets and playing games with their friends, making do with few toys and little purpose-built equipment, using, instead, their imagination and surprising inventiveness to create things to entertain them. It is amazing the uses to which old wheels can be put – everything, apparently, from making hoops and carts to constructing canal-dragging equipment.

  As can be seen in these stories and memories of childhood, the phrase ‘we made our own fun in them days’ is a cliche which actually reflects the truth.

  We made our own games then. Didn’t cost nothing. Fashion a cricket bat out of something or other and play cricket in the middle of the road, using a manhole cover for a wicket. The only thing you had to watch was the windows, cos the streets were very narrow. Or we’d draw three lines across the street and make that a tennis court. We had an old ball and used our hands for bats. The game I really enjoyed – there were so many it’s hard to choose – was called Release. There were probably about a dozen of you split into two teams. You’d spin up or whatever [toss a coin to decide] and six would run and the other six would try and catch them. You’d mark out a space on the pavement to use as a gaol. If you were caught you’d get put there; stand there until everyone was caught on your side, then you’d change over and chase them. That used to be good, because if you used your loaf you could hang about round corners and dodge them. You’d wait till they had about four of your mates imprisoned on the pavement, then while they were distracted, looking for you, you’d run across to the pavement gaol and shout out, ‘Release!’ And the ones who’d been captured would run off in all directions, all over the place. You’d run miles. Tire yourself out. It was great.

  Mostly we just played out. Marbles in the gutter, hopscotch on the pavement, football in the road.

  We had group games like cricket, with a home-made bat and three sticks for a wicket. These were physical, rough and tumble games which sometimes resulted in a severe reprimand when you got home. There was not a lot of money for new clothes and we were threatened with not being allowed out because we would have nothing left to wear.

  The toy I played with most was a hoop, which was a bicycle-wheel rim with all the spokes taken out. I would get a stick which fitted the hoop and just run all over the place.

  My childhood was happy. We were not surrounded by a lot of children with wonderful toys making us envious [and] there were no big stores filled with unobtainable goodies. The only shop we knew with anything like wonderful things was Woolworths. [Instead] we made our own amusement. We had marbles, some clay and others more valuable, called glarnies, made of glass, which we put a value on depending on size. One enterprising invention with marbles was [to] get a shoebox and cut small, arched holes along one edge that would allow a marble to pass through; mark a series of numbers over each one, up to ten, then put the box upside down on the pavement. [The object] was to get your marbles through the arches, from several feet away. Those that didn’t get through were taken by the owner of the box. The size of the arch with ten above it was just about legal. We also used to gamble with cigarette cards. Each lad would have four or five, and you would flick them in turn along the ground towards the wall. When finished flicking, the nearest to the wall took the lot.

  Games had rules and a vocabulary, and there were rhymes to pronounce you ‘out’: ‘Eeny-meany-miny-moe’, ‘One potato, two potato, three potato, four’. And crossed fingers and ‘fainlights’ gave you protection.

  A game, described below, which would raise a few eyebrows if children were caught playing it nowadays seems to have been played in all innocence in the 1920s. When I asked the respondents about whether they really were more naive during their own childhoods than youngsters would appear to be today, the general view was that although people lived on top of one another, children were apart from the adults, leading almost separate lives, with their own childish and childlike concerns. It wasn’t only that children were expected to be ‘seen and not heard’ but that grown-ups had little to do with, and often knew even less about, the carryings-on of the kids during both their school and their leisure time. It was this partial segregation that resulted in children being able to avoid more mature matters and sophisticated issues for far longer than those who are now exposed to an almost constant diet of adult concerns, worries and behaviours through the mass electronic and print media. Television, as will be seen in later chapters, was often cited as being a major source of change for the worse in all kinds of situations.

  One street game was called Undercover. There was a crowd of girls and a crowd of boys. Some of one lot would get under a load of old coats, while the other lot were hiding. Then they used to come back and guess who was under the coats just by touching.

  A very popular pastime that was both creative and money-earning involved setting up grottoes. There was a general agreement on what they should be like, but the particulars varied according to what was available and how artistic you were.

  You’d upturn an old crate or a box and cover it with a cloth. Then you’d lay out all your treasures on it. Postcards, stones, beads, anything you could find. You’d have to shield it with your arm so no one could get a look unless they paid to see it. Ha’penny a look they’d charge. And the kids’d pay it if they could. There wasn’t all the stuff kids have now to amuse themselves. It was something special.

  We always had a grotto. It was usually on someone’s step so you could build it up. You’d get a farthing sheet of coloured tissue paper. You’d put the paper all over the step and you’d get a board or a stool. Then you’d get anything like shells or beads or anything colourful or shiny – we used to save old beads and make butterflies with them on fuse wire, tiny beads – and you’d set it all out. We used to ask for money to see the grotto. Then we’d share it out amongst us and go and buy sweets or something to eat with it.

  When you’d made your grotto – it could have anything on it from old postcards to a bunch of weeds in a jam jar, anything a bit attractive – you’d shield it, with your arm round it, so no one got a free look. If they didn’t pay their ha’penny, then they didn’t get a look. I’m not sure why they were called grottoes, but the idea probably came from the shrines that the mums from the Catholic families used to set up by their street doorstep when it was the day of the local Catholic church’s parade. Whatever the reason for them being called grottoes, they brought in a nice few coppers for us for sweets, like doing Penny for the Guy.

  Going out ‘guying’ was done by most children in the weeks leading up to Bonfire Night. There was no adult apprehension about whether such behaviour would be construed as begging, or about what the little devils would get up to once they had collected their spoils -buying a few loose fags in the corner shop or a pocketful of bangers to throw at passers-by was practically a traditional rite of passage.

  The effort put into the enterprise varied from the production of half-hearted affairs with heads made from brown-paper bags and a few scribbled crayon features to the rather more creative undertaking of this young man and his friends, who based their ‘guy’ on a popular wireless programme, guessing, rightly, that it would go down well with potential penny-givers.

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sp; One Guy Fawkes day they dressed me up as an Arthur Askey character, Nausea Bagwash, sat me in a pushchair and wheeled me round collecting money for the guy – which was me. I was dressed in an old bagwash sack, with holes cut for my arms; they put make-up on me, and a scarf tied round my head. This got a lot of laughs, and it also got us money for our fireworks.

  There was work other than collecting pennies to be done before the big night and children would haunt local markets, timberyards and waste ground for old boxes, scrap timber or anything else they could set light to. Organizing the fire was a serious business.

  There was hardly any traffic down our little side turning, so we’d start building up the fire a good few days before Guy Fawkes. Like a great big wigwam sort of a shape we’d build. You could get all sorts of odds, stuff that would burn well, and from all the little firms round there. [Laughing] Sometimes we even used to ask if we could take it! That’ll do, stick that on the barrow!

  As with the annual preparations for Bonfire Night, games and pastimes often ran in what were called seasons, what we would now call fads or crazes.

  I remember we had what were known as seasons for games. There were cigarette card seasons, marble and glarney seasons, peg top seasons, and, in the autumn, the conker season, with horse chestnut battles, quickly followed by collecting for Guy Fawkes and Firework Night, with the street fires on 5 November.

  At voting times, there was a regular kids’ activity – you’d have a rolled-up newspaper tied up all over with string. That was your weapon. And you’d go round to another street and find another crowd of kids. ‘Who do you vote for?’ If they didn’t vote the same as you, you whacked them!