But they could also be surprisingly mature. Here one of the ‘Little Mothers’, girls who minded their younger siblings, describes her outings to the park.
We lived a few yards from the entrance to Lloyd’s Park. By the time I was five, and [my brother] was six months old, I would be in the park all day with him during the school holidays. He had an old-fashioned pram with a well beneath it. We could take out the stiff cover, when he was older, and he could sit up with his feet in the well. From the time he was six months old, I would be sent off with him in his pram to the park. In the well would go two made-up bottles of National Dried Milk for him – the milk fat floated in globules on the top when you mixed it – and a bottle of tap water and a round of jam sandwiches wrapped in newspaper for me. In the park I watched the ducks, played on the swings, allowed other girls to take turns with my live baby doll – rocking the pram and pushing him. There was always summer holiday fun arranged: Punch and Judy, Pierrot shows, concerts and road-safety shows.
Boys, as was then the accepted way, had a more carefree time of it.
We would go along Hackney Road, then across Cambridge Heath Road into Bishop’s Way, which led to the main park entrance, [then] over the canal bridge, stopping to see if there were any barges being towed along by horses, then turn left to the pens where they kept the guinea pigs, rabbits and wallabies, then have a look at all the different birds in the aviary, and, just round the corner from there, the playground with swings, slides, sandpit and other things to ride on. After playing there for a while, we would go a bit further round on to the island with the Chinese pagoda and have a look at that before going on to see the deer. A bit further round was the jetty to the big lake and if we had enough money we could go for a ride in the big motor boat, which took you all round the islands in the lake.
Both boys and girls would play out until it was, by today’s standards, astonishingly late.
We’d go out after school and Mum would just say, ‘Come in when it’s dark.’ In the summer that could be gone ten o’clock, but it was safer then, of course. You had no worries about your kids being on the streets playing.
Off we’d go after our tea and we wouldn’t come back until it was pitch dark. We were gone for hours on end.
It didn’t seem to worry us that we were out and about at night. We’d hang around in a group, sitting on the kerb, usually by the lamp-post. Someone might have some chips if you were lucky. All wrapped up in soggy newspaper with the vinegar dripping out. ‘Go on, give us a chip!’ you’d go. And if it was cold we’d throw all the coats over our legs.
Although sometimes the dark could seem threatening to susceptible young imaginations.
There was a great deal of excitement when a house up towards Claredale Street was supposed to be haunted. The police had come round and closed the street from Old Bethnal Green Road up to Claredale Street, and stories were going round that a policeman was thrown down the stairs by some unseen spirit, and someone from the Home Office was supposed to be investigating the phenomenon. It was some time after this that [my brother] went on an errand one dark evening for Dad for cigarettes. He came running back yelling his head off about a horse’s head in the doorway. Well, Dad went up the street to see what had frightened him and found that in an arched transom over a door two triangular panes of glass had been replaced with wood, giving the appearance of a pair of horse’s ears, so that mystery was solved, but if I ever had to go up there in the dark, I would run like the devil so nothing could get me.
You’d always have one of the bigger kids giving you the willies, telling you stories about the Grey Lady. I don’t know who she was, but I was scared stiff of her!
I can remember being equally scared hearing about Flannel Foot. He was a cunning cat burglar who, according to a girl who lived round the corner, padded his feet with cloths so you couldn’t hear him breaking into your house. I would lie awake, too terrified to sleep, in case he picked our house to burgle.
Scared off the street by such tales or just being ready for your tea, when it was eventually time to go home, getting in wasn’t always an easy business.
To open our street door, there was a piece of string attached on the inside to the latch, and the string then went out through a hole in the door, or was suspended so that it could be reached though the letter box, then you just pulled the string to open the door. [But] if the door was locked, I was too small to reach the knocker, so I would hold on to the door knob and walk my feet up the wall until I was upside-down and I could lift the knocker with my feet.
*
I’d been out playing and I must have come home earlier than my mum expected. But it was all right, I just went along the road to the corner baker’s shop and went in there. They let me go down into the kitchen, where they were getting stuff ready for the next morning. It all smelled lovely. And your mum wouldn’t be worried, she’d know you were safe.
Once indoors, there were some entertainments for the children, although they often required a little resourcefulness for them to succeed as amusements.
We didn’t have an over-abundance of toys, so we had to look after and repair what we could. We had some lead – yes, real lead – soldiers, and a lead bear whose head had come off and was stuck on again with a matchstick. We also had to use our imagination quite a bit to make or improve our playthings. One evening [my brother] and I were playing down in the kitchen, Mum was out somewhere and Dad was looking after us. [My brother] was cutting out a farmyard from newspaper and standing all the animals up. I blew them down by jumping over them. He says I jumped on the scissors, I say he stabbed them up into my foot, but I remember Dad went potty, as he usually did in a crisis.
Some of my happiest memories of childhood are of [Aunt Marie] getting home from work and teaching me to cut out paper doilies and playing Fly Away Peter.
We didn’t like being stuck indoors in the wet weather, as our flat was small, but we would always find things to do. We had board games, and sometimes would do drawing or colouring. We used to collect hundreds of different buttons, which we kept in an old tin box. We played a game with them by throwing several of them on the table, then, licking the thumb to make it moist, we would try and pick up as many of the opponent’s buttons as we could without rewetting our thumb. The one that could pick up the most in one go would win the game and all the buttons on the table. My parents would save their cigarette packets and we would make a little house or a handbag out of them or anything that caught our imagination. A teacher at school made Buckingham Palace out of hundreds of cigarette packets, which was very impressive.
A real indoor treat was going to the cinema – the ‘flicks’, the ‘pictures’, the ‘bug house’.
I loved the Saturday morning flicks. If you were lucky and had a few coppers to spend that you’d earned running errands, you could pay to get into the pictures, buy a lump of honeycomb, a few ends of sweet rock, and even a little celluloid fish that told your fortune, and see the serials!
We always went to [children’s] Saturday morning pictures. Prior to the film starting there would be some form of entertainment. At one time there was a man showing us what he could do with a yo-yo; another time we had a woman showing us different animal shapes that could be made out of balloons. If there was nothing special on, then a pianist would perform until the film started.
On Saturdays we were given our pocket money; this only happened if Dad had a good week. We would go to the Excelsior Cinema to the ‘Tuppenny Rush’, as it was called. On the way we would go to Meads, a shop in a ground-floor flat with a wooden box over the windowsill to serve as the counter. We would get two ‘Ha’penny Bags’, which contained a mixture of broken biscuits and sweets that had become unwrapped; we thought these were great value. We mostly saw serials on these cinema visits. I don’t ever remember seeing a full-length film. The other kids would flick milk-bottle tops up through the light rays so they looked like shooting stars. The usher would walk round the side balcony calling, ‘Watch it! Wa
tch it!’ Though whether he meant ‘Watch the film’ or ‘Watch out’, I don’t know. They were mostly cowboys or science fiction, with such stars as Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, Roy Rogers, Rin Tin Tin, ‘The Lightning Warrior’, or Buck Rogers in Space. On the way home we would pretend to be riding a horse, galloping along, slapping ourselves on the backside.
If the projector broke down you should have heard the ‘cheye eyeking’. Riots practically used to break out, with all the kids pelting stuff and hollering. And, when the film started again, you’d get this commentary, all the kids offering advice to the hero up on the screen: ‘Look out, he’s got a gun!’ The serials always ended with a cliffhanger. But you knew the goody was going to be all right, and he’d live to save everyone again next week, but you still got really caught up in it. And you could tell what sort of a story we’d all seen by how we were acting when we came out. Whether you were from space, a soldier or a cowboy, or whatever – or even a horse! We’d make someone be the baddy and all pile in on him on the way home.
Despite claims, and a genuinely held belief, that ‘it was safer then’ for children to go out and about, there were instances when it certainly wasn’t, although the seriousness of the threat to their well-being varied considerably, as the following memories show.
It seems incredible now, when children are perceived as being in danger whenever they are out alone, that my mum let me go to the park from the time I was four and a half years old. There was little room to play in the garden, which was all taken up with the air-raid shelter. I would roam the park, attaching myself to bigger girls. On one occasion I wanted to get on a swing, which was like a bench and took six or eight children. There wasn’t room for me, so I decided to hang on the end. This was fine and exciting while my feet touched the ground. As the swing went higher, so I went up with it, and [I felt] a great sense of exhilaration. But my little arms would not support my weight and I let go, falling on to the concrete below. A gaggle of girls took me home in someone’s pushchair. I had a bump on my forehead as large as a hen’s egg that was all the colours of a rainbow. A wet flannel was put on it and the doctor called. He gave us something in a dark-blue ribbed bottle labelled poison to put on it. I was very afraid I might accidentally drink the poison or that the baby would.
One day I went with some other kids who were going dragging down the Regent’s Canal. Dragging was done by wrapping a sack round an old bicycle-wheel rim after the spokes had been removed so that it was in effect a large sieve, then it was tied to a piece of strong string and thrown in the water and dragged out, hopefully with some tiddlers caught in the sack. The time passed and I was enjoying myself, even though I had lost a shoe in the water and my socks were soaking wet. By the time we decided to go home it was getting late. Mum had called the police to look for her ‘missing’ child and, when I turned up, I got a good hiding and sent to bed.
I was six [and we were living] in Leyton, near to the Hollow Ponds. One day, I was playing by the edge of the water and a man came up and talked to me. I had stepped in the water and had got my stockings wet. They were horrible thick, black woolly ones, held up by elastic garters. It was a sunny day and he suggested I took them off and hung them on the bushes to dry. He insisted on helping me. As he did so he put his fingers in my knickers and touched me in a way which made me squirm and feel very uncomfortable. When the stockings were finally dry he ‘helped’ me put them on and touched me again in the same way. All the while, my mind was working overtime in an effort to get rid of him. I instinctively knew it was wrong, what he was doing, but I felt I could not tell anyone, especially not my parents. I lived very near and was afraid to run off in case he should follow me. The terror I felt is still so vivid. I remember I invented an address in case he should ask me where I lived. It was 9 Happy Villas. When I did finally get home I began to have nightmares about it.
*
There was this one time when a man was hanging around by the school. He was like a sort of tramp. One afternoon, I was sitting in the cloakroom with my friend – we were meant to have gone home, but it was freezing out and we were sitting on the hot pipes chatting. Well, he only came into the cloakroom – little juniors, we were – and his what’s-it was hanging out. He was disgusting. He asked us if we’d touch him. We were petrified. We’d been warned that there were ‘nasty’ men about but had had no real idea what that meant. We knew then all right. We scrambled under the rows of pegs and ran for our life. Lucky there were two of us. The daft thing is, we told all our mates, even sort of bragged about it, full of ourselves, you know. But neither of us told an adult. It was too dirty, if you understand what I mean. It wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about with adults then. Not a teacher, not even your mum. Mind you, if I had told my mum, she’d have been after his bits with a bread knife. She was very protective.
I was playing with a friend on a bomb site and a man came up to us. He was furtive, looking intensely at his fingers. He asked us if he could show us his prick. I had never heard the word [used in that way] and didn’t realize that he meant his penis. I thought he had a splinter in the thumb he was staring at so intensely. I was ready to go and get a needle to get his ‘prick’ – or splinter – out. Just then my dad came for us and the man scarpered. When I found out what the man meant, I thought we should tell the police – we couldn’t tell our parents – and I thought out a description we could give to the police. I could give it now, I remember it so well. But we couldn’t go to the police station without an adult and we were too scared to tell anyone, so the incident just passed by.
Even without the threat of playground accidents and threatening strangers, not all childhood memories are happy.
My uncle bought me a beautiful porcelain doll from wherever he was serving in the war. It had translucent skin, long lashes, tiny fingernails, real hair, and was, to me, an absolute idea of beauty. I was rarely allowed to play with it in case I broke it, so it was kept in a box in my bedroom, where I peeped at it with love. One day, when I had not possessed it very long, my aunts and uncles all came to our house, maybe it was my brother’s first birthday. The doll was brought out for them all to admire. My mum allowed me to dress it in my brother’s christening robe, which fitted it perfectly. It lay on the table with the long silk train reaching nearly to the floor. In that week [my brother] had begun to walk. Taking one or two steps, he would suddenly sit down or grab at a chair or table to support himself. On this day, everyone was laughing at him, clapping and encouraging him as he tottered forward. He reached the corner of the table, walked along one side of it, tottered, grabbed at the christening robe to support himself, sat down abruptly and there was my precious doll – no one else in our street had one anything like it – in tiny, sharp shards on the floor. My aunties told me endlessly, ‘He couldn’t help it’, ‘He didn’t mean it’, but none of that helped. I knew no one would ever buy me a doll like that again. [But] years later, when I was twelve and desperately unhappy in a children’s home, when my dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said I wanted a doll. It was to be a secret – girls of twelve didn’t play with dolls, that would be too babyish. But he took me seriously, didn’t ridicule me, recognized I needed something of my own as I was so lonely there.
When a childhood treat as rare as an outing was so anticipated, the actual event could prove to be very disappointing.
We didn’t have holidays. The most I can remember was a day’s outing, when Nanny was taking me out on a trip to the seaside to Southend. We got there and walked down the front and I wanted to go in paddling straight away, but Nanny said we had to go and have our dinner first, which we did. But when we went back to the beach, the tide had gone out and all there was was a long stretch of mud as far as I could see. I cried my eyes out.
*
For some children there was a more regular disappointment: the agony of having to go to school every day.
The East End has had a tradition of schools being supported by guilds and companies, primarily as a way of ensu
ring a literate workforce, and there have also been charitable and religious foundations, and other private patrons concerned with the education of the children of the labouring classes. From 1833, there were the beginnings of a formalized financial commitment to an embryonic state system which would provide schooling for the poor; then, with the 1870 introduction of free, universal elementary education, the opportunity for basic learning was put in place, and with it the London School Board.
Despite such provision, literacy remains a problem for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. When a child is needed to contribute to the family budget, or to mind the other children while their parents are working – as my own mother had to – education comes further down the list than it does in more financially privileged families.
For those who did attend school, the experience of being educated left varying impressions.
I consider the education we, the children of Bethnal Green in the 1920s, received was sound, well balanced and expertly imparted by the teachers. Discipline and obedience were maintained from an early age and the method of teaching known as the Three Rs has been proven by my achievements and those of schoolfriends in later life. The times tables was most effective. Some critics of the system called it brainwashing. [But] I have always been thankful, after seventy years, I do not need a calculator to tell me what seven times nine adds up to, and know immediately if I have been given the right change after a purchase. Spelling bees, handwriting and composition exercises, with good old lines for impressing a wrong-doing. A hundred lines could do more good for learning right from wrong.
My East End Page 14
