My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  *

  There was a game that, now I look back on it, was bloody marvellous. It was a game of skill called Diablo. You had two sticks, with a piece of string tied to the end of each one and a huge sort of cotton-reel affair – probably got them out of a factory. Someone would put the cotton reel on the sticks, while the other one held them, then they’d move the sticks up and down until the reel was spinning. Then they’d throw it up in the air! And I mean throw it. Right up and down. And, nine times out of ten, they would catch the reel right back on that string. It was bloody marvellous how they did it. Marvellous.

  Tin-can stilts. I loved them. One kid would come out with a pair – empty cocoa tins, with a hole on each side near the bottom to put string through; turn the can upside-down to stand on it, and hold the strings in your hands and just walk up and down, clanking and donking and falling off! One kid would come out with them and you’d all want them. You’d pester your mother: ‘Got any empty tins, Mum?’ They had to be strong ones, like cocoa or treacle tins, or they’d just collapse. We all had to have them. It was terrible if you had to wait a day or so for what was in the tin to be used up.

  We followed all the games in season. There was hopscotch – I wasn’t much good at it, but I loved to chalk the grid on the pavement. Marbles. Good mums made little bags to keep the collection in, but mine never did, and I made do with paper bags and pockets. The marbles themselves gave me a great deal of joy. They came in all sizes and were bought at Woolworths. They were all made by hand and every one was different. Each glass sphere was a tiny world, and the streaks and colours were beautiful. We also played with whips and tops. One of my uncles made me a top, which I thought was craftsmanship beyond belief, and I was so proud of it. We skipped to songs, often made up about the war and its principal characters. I was good at skipping and enjoyed it. We also played Jacks – five stones, gobs – with five cheap clay stones tossed in the air and caught on the back of our hands. The game could go on for hours. The boys played conkers in season. They soaked them in brine or vinegar and baked them to improve their longevity. Any horse chestnut tree was savaged by small boys throwing pieces of wood up to make the conkers rain down. I collected conkers too, not to play with, that was only for boys, but because I was moved to find such beautiful treasures inside the prickly skin. They were polished, silky to touch, a wonderful rich colour, and sometimes marbled with a grain. They always shrivelled and went dull eventually, but there would always be next year.

  Seasons could also encompass special treats.

  Suddenly in the market it would be pomegranate time. The stall-holders would have so many they’d sell them off cheap before they went rotten. Every kid in the street would be spitting out the bitter yellow pith and pips and have all red juice running down their chins.

  One widespread pastime, which was never out of season, was making a nuisance of yourself with the neighbours.

  There was Knock Down Ginger. We used to get hold of a piece of string and tie it on a knocker and trail it across the road and stand around the corner holding the end. You’d just pull it and the knocker would bang on the door. The lady or man of the house would come out and, especially if he was a bit old and couldn’t see properly, he’d be looking all up and down the street. You’d do that about four or five times, and, in the finish, they used to go potty, used to do their nut. They used to shake their fist: ‘I know what you’re doing!’ And snatch the string off the knocker!

  We had a bit of a variation on Knock Down Ginger. The streets were very narrow and you could tie a string from one door to one across the street. Leave the string a little bit slack, then knock on the doors and leg it round the corner and wait for them both to try and open their doors and start going barmy when they couldn’t. That really used to amuse us, that did.

  Aggravating your family could be just as entertaining as causing mischief for the neighbours.

  There were lots of daddy-long-legs under the windowsills in the backyard and [my brother] hated spiders, but I wasn’t frightened and would pick them up by the legs and taunt him with them. One morning, as we were getting dressed, I told [him] that I had seen a spider in his trousers just as he was putting them on. Of course, it wasn’t true, but he created such a fuss, and I was in trouble for upsetting him and telling lies.

  It was a wonder that some amusements, such as the ones described next, did not end in tragedy, or at least in a few more bruises than they did.

  We played quite a dangerous game of jumping on the back of a lorry when one stopped at the traffic lights. We would ride along [until] we felt it was picking up too much speed and then we would jump off. Sometimes we would hold on to the back and be pulled along by our roller-skates. Luckily we all managed to survive and, what’s more, not get caught. Amazing!

  We would make a pop-gun from a short length of a tree branch. The pith was bored out and another piece of stick was made to fit into the bore hole, then an acorn was rammed into one end. As the stick was pushed in, the pressure sent the acorn shooting out. They could have been quite dangerous, because the acorn went at quite a speed.

  There was a lot of debris from the bombing around our area left over from the war. We all had great fun playing on and around them. My friends and I used to rummage round looking for treasure. Of course, there was nothing but rubble. When I look back on it now, I suppose it was quite dangerous.

  We were fascinated with lighting fires – anything that we shouldn’t have been doing, see – and poking around for rubbish on the bomb sites and in the half-demolished houses. Sometimes a floorboard would give way and it would frighten the life out of you!

  Even team games were boisterous to the point of being dangerous.

  High Jimmy Knacker involved two teams of five or six boys. One team would have one of you being the pillar – you leaned back against the wall to steady yourself – then someone would bend over in front of you, in a sort of leap-frog position, and wedge their head hard into your stomach and grip you round the waist. The others from your team would get behind him in the same position. Then the first one of the other team would come running from the other side of the street and spring forward to get as far along the line as possible – so he was sitting on the back of the one with his head in the pillar’s belly! If he was a bit feeble he’d only get so far along and there was no room left for the others to get a good strong position – that being the idea, how many could get on and stay there, and try and make the ones underneath collapse. If the kids underneath caved in and fell down, you’d shout, ‘Weak horses!’ But if you’d got all the other team sitting on your backs, you’d all holler out, ‘High Jimmy Knacker! One, two, three! High Jimmy Knacker! High Bobbereee!’

  There were some games which were rather less violent, and were seen as almost exclusively feminine.

  The girls used to get a length of rope – wherever they got it from, Gawd above knows – it used to stretch right across the street. They would get four or five girls all skipping together. One would go in and start it. And they’d go round and round, and call out, ‘Come on, Mary!’ And the next one would dive in. Kate would have a go and then Liza. It used to be great. We’d stand there, the boys shouting, ‘Go on, girls, show us your knickers!’ And that would be it. They’d run and chase us all over the place.

  I was born after the war, but my mum taught me a skipping song that we all used to sing, even if we didn’t have a clue what it meant:

  Underneath the spreading chestnut tree,

  Neville Chamberlain said to me,

  If you want to get your gas mask free,

  Join the blooming ARP.

  We all sang it. Like ‘Salt, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper’. You know the one. Sometimes the songs we sang would go with sort of dancing games. They didn’t always make sense either. You’d dance round a circle of other girls, singing:

  In and out the dusty bluebells,

  In and out the dusty bluebells,

  In and out the dusty bluebells,

  Fo-l
-low the master.

  Then, when the rhyme stopped, you’d tap the girl you’d stopped by, and sing:

  Pat a little doggy on the shoulder,

  Pat a little doggy on the shoulder,

  Pat a little doggy on the shoulder,

  You shall be my master.

  Then she’d join in behind you and you’d both dance round singing the first bit. This would go on until there were just two girls left in the circle, and you’d dance under an arch they’d made with their arms – like with Oranges and Lemons. Then, when there was just one left – this isn’t very nice [laughing] you’d kind of pat the one who was left a bit vigorously!

  Girls played five stones – gobs – and would mark out an outline for games of hopscotch, using a piece of old roofing slate for a marker. You’d just look round and find a bit of slate that had fallen off a roof.

  As the girls skipped they would chant ditties. I remember ‘Salt, Mustard, Vinegar, Pepper’. Another one that started, ‘All last night and the night before’. Then there was ‘Oranges and Lemons’ – the Bell Bows song – as well as ‘Handy-pandy, Sugar Candy’.

  Skipping encapsulated one of the most important features of any type of childhood amusement: it cost nothing, or very little, to take part in and enjoy.

  We used to play with old cans. Line them up on the wall, and you had to knock them down. You made do. You never had anything bought for you.

  My favourite game by far was a rope tied around the top of the lamp-post and just swinging round and round, or climbing to the top without falling off.

  Some activities took the children much further afield than their immediate neighbourhood. Life was very different for youngsters unhindered by parents’ anxiety about what they were up to every moment of the day, and children could also take the opportunity to exercise their resourcefulness to earn a few extra pennies.

  There was part of the Hackney Marshes that was used by the council as a rubbish tip, but it was also our adventure playground. It was about four miles away, but to us with our one skate or home-made cart – a box on four pram wheels – we would spend all day searching among the rubbish and using the mounds of smouldering waste in our games, and still have energy left to race each other home. Our parents never worried too much about what we were doing, and only started to be concerned if we didn’t turn up for meals.

  The most popular toy was a cart we built from planks of wood and pram wheels on which we used to travel for miles. Most Saturday mornings we used to visit [the] market and collect old wooden boxes, which we chopped up and sold as firewood. Many miles were also travelled hanging on to the back of horse-drawn vans. Many a time we were forced to abandon our ‘transport’ on hearing the shout from some unfriendly individual, ‘Whip behind, guv’nor’, at which the driver would flip his whip to get rid of us, his unwanted cargo.

  As there wasn’t much money about we had to try and earn some ourselves to get pocket money, so with all the horses about we would go and collect the manure and sell it to anyone who had a garden. One day [my brother] was going out with his mates [with a] handmade cart collecting manure and he had to take me, so when I got tired [he] sat me on top of the pile, while he pulled it along. [We also] made bundles of firewood and sold them. We had to go round the streets getting the wood to chop up. Some of it was old fish boxes – I reckon some of the fires smelled a bit choice. We also kept our eyes open for when the roads were being repaired, because the original surfaces were made up of tarry blocks, which were wooden blocks soaked in tar. If we got a load of these we could either sell them or take them home for our own fire.

  It was not only money they were after. Cigarette cards were a valuable commodity that could be collected, swapped and even used as currency in gambling games.

  We would go to the Salmon and Ball on a weekday evening to catch the men coming home from work. We waited at the bus stop and, as the people got off, we would say, ‘Got any cigarette cards, mister?’ There were lots of different series to collect: film and radio stars, footballers and cricketers. Each different brand had its own collections. Some of the more expensive brands had silk cards in their packs and today would be worth quite a bit of money.

  Because the grown-ups were all card players, we were well versed in games of chance from an early age, and many hours during dull winter days were spent using cigarette cards as collateral. There were thousands of cigarette cards around. I remember having boxes filled with cards in different states of condition, from dog-eared to mint.

  We would go and stand outside a cigarette shop and ask the man leaving with his pack of cigarettes if we could have the picture card inside. Most young men would give it to you; older ones kept them for their own children.

  Even something as apparently worthless as a used bus ticket or a pile of cherry stones was much sought after by children who were expected to amuse themselves and whose parents would have been puzzled by children hanging around the house complaining they were ‘bored’ or had ‘nothing to do’.

  We collected old bus tickets. There would be some way of adding up numbers on them, and we would claim we had a ‘lucky’ ticket. They weren’t even ours, just rubbish we’d scrounge or pick up off the ground near the bus stops. Probably because we had so little of our own, everything was precious, nothing was wasted. You could make a game out of nothing – hanging around bus stops and collecting old tickets! And asking strangers for them!

  We would play cards and use cherry ‘ogs [stones] as money. I don’t think we even washed them!

  We would also try and get the different kinds of maps from the conductors on the bus, tube and Green Line. I don’t know why, but it was something else to collect.

  The Thames, the Lea and the canals were dangerous magnets for London children, who could get up to all sorts of mischief in the water and mud.

  Our Georgie was a real devil. He had no fear. He’d dive in off Stink House Bridge for ha’pennies people threw in, and go swimming off the waterman’s stairs in Wapping. Didn’t care how dirty the river was.

  We used to go down to the river Saturday nights and watch the pleasure boats come up the Thames. All lit up. Dancing, there used to be. We used to sit there watching them, thinking, ‘Ain’t it lovely to be old? We could do that then.’ We used to go down to the river at other times and watch the steamers coming up to the Pool of London. The old tug pulling them up river, belching thick black smoke out of the funnel. And we used to stand there looking. We knew what most of them was carrying – you’d be used to it over the years, growing up there – especially at Christmas time. One boat used to come loaded with tomatoes. And we used to wait outside the dock gate for the vans. It was mostly horses and vans then, there wasn’t that many motors or lorries. We used to wait for these vans to come out of the gate and they’d be loaded sky high with tomatoes. They was only light, wasn’t they, but we never used to think that. We used to say, ‘Look, the poor horse has got to pull them up the hill.’ But it didn’t make no difference to what we did. We still used to run along behind and hang on the tailboard, put our hands through the paper covering the boxes or trays and get a few tomatoes. Put them in our shirts and drop off again. Someone would shout, ‘Get away from there!’ and the old carman would look round and out would come his whip. And over it would come. If you was cute, you’d duck underneath while the carman pulled away from you and you’d have it away with a shirt full of tomatoes. You’d either take them home or, if it got around you had them, you’d share them with your mates. Sit down and have a good feed of tomatoes.

  The East End actually had its own beach on the river, at the Tower of London, created from 1,500 tons of sand along 800 feet of the shingle foreshore. King George V gave his approval for the supervised beach, following a campaign to protect cockney children who, sometimes fatally, used the Thames as their playground.

  The King officially opened the beach in July 1934, declaring that young Londoners should be given, when the tides allowed, ‘free access for ever’. From the
beginning it was packed, and not only with children; whole families turned up to make good use of deck chairs, buckets and spades, and even to enjoy Punch and Judy shows.

  Being right by Tower Bridge, the beach revellers, on their man-made playground, could watch the passing pleasure steamers taking other Londoners to the ‘real’ seaside at Southend. But the sand by the Thames was just as good.

  As well as the beach, the children of east London could enjoy open spaces and entertainments in the various parks, and, as the man speaking next explains, some ‘rural things’ could be appreciated well into the 1930s.

  We may have lived in the East End but there was still some rural things around us. Horses were stabled [nearby] and there was a forge where they were taken to be reshod. We would watch as the smithy hammered the red-hot shoes to size and shape, and I can still smell the odour as it was pressed on the horse’s hoof. There was also a dairy which kept its own cow in the yard so that it got fresh milk. Pasteurized? Never needed it! [But] for open green fields we had to go to one of the parks. I suppose the nearest to where we lived was the Bethnal Green Gardens, which were next to the museum in Cambridge Heath Road, or there was the ‘Barmy Park’ outside the library a bit further along. Then there was Meath Gardens in Green Street, [now called] Roman Road, where we could go in the season to collect ‘Hairy Jack’ caterpillars in jars.

  Young cockneys could find opportunities for making a bit of mischief even in the gloriously pastoral surroundings of Victoria Park.

  As kids, we would stand on the bridge that spanned the lake in Victoria Park and, of course accidentally, spit on the rowers in their double sculls or the lads showing off in their single sculls. Only sixpence an hour!

  When the holidays came for us kids, Vicky Park was the target. Off in their thousands went the young ones, in groups up to a dozen; laughing, crying, shouting and hollering kids with their bottles of tap water made tasty by bunging in a spoonful of cheap lemonade or sherbet powder, or even the exotic taste of liquorice powder. For kids visiting the park, one penny’s worth of sweets would do a fine job.