The thing that can take me right back to nursery school – I went just after the war, when there were still nursery schools all over the East End, set up so that the women could do war work – is the smell of Bakelite. We used to sit with our little overalls on at tables of four for our lunch – we used to call it dinner – and with a beaker of water each. It was the smell of that beaker I remember. I’m back there in that nursery when I recall that smell.
I’ve never slept that well, even as a child, but every afternoon we’d be expected to have a nap. The blanket on your little cot had a little appliquéd badge – a house or a tree or a lamb – that matched the one on your coat peg and the badge on your overall. I would lie on my cot, fed up, staring up at the glass and cast-iron roof, high overhead, wishing it was time to get up and play again. I hated being there doing nothing. I’m still the same, but there was no accounting for difference in those days. It was nap time and that was that. And as for not liking what you were given to eat! Forget that. You ate it, no questions.
The classrooms were heated by coal in a big black stove; on this a crate of milk would stand ready for us to drink mid-morning. The school was lit by gaslight and the teacher would light the lamps with a long wick as it started to get dark.
Why did they always keep the milk near the radiator? Warm milk! Yuch!
In rows we’d sit, behind lift-up-lid desks, with a china ink-pot set in the top and a ridge for your dippy-in pen. You’d learn things by rote. Repeating them over and over again, and God help you if you got it wrong. I suppose you learned your tables and the counties of England and stuff, but you had no idea why you were learning it, what use it would be. You wouldn’t dare ask.
Discipline was a grim and unyielding business, with punishment being brutal yet accepted as part of education.
From what I can remember, most of the teachers did not like children. I remember going to school one day when I was about seven years old and a boy had been caught with a pet mouse in his pocket. The headmaster had just seen the boy as I arrived. He callously took it off the boy and whipped it several times on the ground until there was blood everywhere and the poor creature was dead. I was always far too frightened to speak up if I didn’t understand something for fear of ridicule [from the teachers]. When it was play time or home time a boy or girl would be given the job of ringing the bell. This I always wanted to do, but never did.
No disruptive activities of any kind were allowed while lessons were in progress. No talking, not paying attention and certainly no familiarity with the teacher. The cane was a thing that we had a fear of, administered across the palm of each hand and in front of the class. It was a physical and psychological hurt, because you had to get the cane and punishment book from the headmaster’s study.
[In 1937] I started in the same class that [my brother] had been in two years earlier. The teacher was a bald-headed, cross-eyed Welshman. I hated him because he frightened the life out of me, he was so stern, and especially after I saw him give the cane to [a boy]. There were bits of cane flying past my ears as he brought the cane down each time [on the boy] and when we saw the great weals he had raised.
[When] I went back to school my new teacher would grab you by the hair and push you back over the desk and tell you off very quietly. He was another sadist.
We had this teacher – he’d be called a psychopath today – he used to throw the blackboard rubber, heavy wood with a metal hook on the end, directly at your head. You only had to displease him in some little way and you’d get a swipe round the ear. Not gentle, a real crack He was the type who seemed to take pleasure in humiliating you. He’d read out things you’d written in a stupid, sneering voice. How can children respect someone who humiliates them? The only control he had over us was by fear. You couldn’t ask him if you didn’t understand something. You understood first time or you were thick. What a way to educate children.
But some recalled the rewards that there were to be had from attending school.
My schooling prepared me nicely at the age of fourteen, in 1930, to go out among the grown-ups and work, earn money, but still have respect for the older person. Business must have benefited by our indoctrinated obedience and respect for authority. Likewise, the government should have recognized, when war came along, that it was this discipline and regimentation that enabled myself and thousands of my generation to be drafted into the armed forces with a built-in respect for discipline and an ability to take orders.
Prize-giving day – what an incentive that was, with all the school present and you being called up to receive your nice shining new book or box of paints, things our parents could not afford to buy us.
However, the rewards were not always quite what children might have hoped for after doing their best.
I was thrilled. I was about six and I’d done really well at school and I was told I was going to get a prize on this special day, when these important people were going to come to the school, and I had to go up to the stage, curtsy and say, ‘Thank you.’ Well, I went up on the stage and I did as I was told and I was given this whole pile of books. I was so pleased. Books weren’t things many people had at home in the East End. But when I came off stage, one of the teachers explained that the prize was given to me for what I had done, but they were to be kept for all the class. She took them off me and put them in the cupboard. God, I felt cheated.
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I was allowed to sing a solo at our infants Christmas concert – in the nativity play – as a treat for doing well. A treat? I went through agonies singing that carol.
Some of the misunderstandings probably arose from the teachers not being part of the local community and coming from quite different backgrounds from that of the children. This difference worked better for some children than for others.
I was a scholarship girl and they [the teachers] were more interested in trying to make me ‘speak proper’ than in showing me how to develop my brain or my character. I hated every minute of it.
Looking back [I was born in 1915] I realize we had very good schools. I was supposed to go to the convent in East India Dock Road, but I refused to go in the door when I saw a nun. [Later] I passed to go to the Central School. We had every facility there: French, algebra, geometry, maths, English, shorthand and typing, and good strict teachers. There was even a flat where we went every week to learn housekeeping and cooking. We had drill and netball [and] were trained to earn a living in the outside world.
So many of us could not spell as well as we should, because of our cockney way of speaking.
We were very fortunate, our local elementary was superb. From [there] we took exams for entry to the Central or the secondary school. That was in 1932, the first year that the secondary, which until then had only had ‘paid for’ pupils, allowed scholarship girls to enter their portals. We called it the Roedean of Bow. In fact, it was Coborn School for Girls. The standard of education was just superb. It helped round off my cockney accent, which hasn’t totally gone, of course.
There were things remembered about schooldays which would appear archaic and even a bit strange if they were encountered today.
My mum took me to school on the first day, showed me where I had to go, then that was that, I took myself off every morning by myself. Parents weren’t expected to go inside the school gates, that would have been interfering, and East End mums and dads used to be of the opinion that the teacher always knew best, and their own children’s education was nothing to do with them.
[While we were evacuated] me and another boy were supposed to be helping another boy to learn to read, but every time he made a mistake we would hit him with a ruler on his head or his hands. We were vicious little sods and must have made his life hell. Whenever [the teacher] left the room, he would leave one of us in charge of the class, and one day, when he went out, everyone started messing about and someone shouted, ‘Let’s pretend a fire bomb has come down the chimney.’ At that, one of the boys started peeing on the fire, but, as luck w
ould have it, [the teacher] came back and caught him. I can’t remember who the boy was, but I do remember he got a right caning for it.
History was a very serious subject in order to give pride to and for the country. We had special teachers for this type of lesson, with songs to learn for Empire Day and national songs.
My best friend was a Sikh, she was from the first Indian family in our school, and her birthday was on Empire Day. It was strange, I suppose, her joining in celebrations for the Empire. But that was what we did in those days. Without ever questioning what or why. It was just another celebration, like wearing light or dark blue on boat race day. We knew as little about Oxford or Cambridge as we did about the rights and wrongs of imperialism. And if we had known we wouldn’t have questioned any of.it. You didn’t question anything at school, not if you valued the skin on the palms of your hand.
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Some things about the more disciplined schooldays were recalled as working well.
Absenteeism [was] taken very seriously by the authorities. No child could be allowed out of school without a note from its parent. A rigid roll call each morning and after lunch would be taken and any child absent would warrant a call from the school board inspector. The truant man was known by everyone in the street. Parents were anxious [regarding] their respectability, even though they were poor. There was no arguing with authority [and] you could be sure of another chastisement from Dad or Mum.
You were scared of the school board man, if he caught you in the street. You didn’t have to wait for the police to come up to you and say, ‘What are you doing home from school?’ If you saw the school board man, you bolted.
From the window of our flat, I could see the school I was to attend. September seemed an age to wait, I was so keen to go. Finally, the great day came. I remember the classroom vividly. There were small tables and chairs, coloured friezes on the walls, charts with numbers and dots, large charts with small-case letters to copy. It was an old school, with high windows. Then there was Miss Brown! I knew at once that my teacher was a film star. I had never been to the pictures or seen a film, but I knew what a film star should look like. My Uncle Dave had married a glamorous younger woman who, my mother always said, was like a film star. Miss Brown was as glamorous as anyone I’d seen before. She had large breasts, a tiny waist, slim pencil skirt, high heels and a shining fall of brown hair worn over one eye. What’s more, this vision of loveliness was kind and encouraging, and I was instantly her slave. Even in the infants there were jobs to do in the classroom and I asked to be chosen to help give out the milk and change the weather board. Milk came in little squat bottles with cardboard lids. The lids had a central circle that could be pressed out and a straw inserted. Resources were short in wartime, so everything was saved to be used in the classroom. We learned to make woolly pom-poms by winding wool round the washed milk-bottle lids, cutting it and tying it up. Miss Brown thought of countless things to do with straws: plaiting and painting, blowing ink, printing. I had always drawn at home [but] Miss Brown encouraged in me a passion for drawing that later led me into becoming an art teacher.
The school authorities catered for more than the intellectual and creative sides of their pupils’ lives; the health and hygiene of young Londoners were also accepted as being their concern.
I loved the malt we all got given every day, but I didn’t like the cod liver oil so much. Do you know, we all had our spoon of malt off the same spoon! All the mothers would be up the school complaining if they tried to do that now.
There were regular visits by trained nurses to inspect for cleanliness and general appearance. To the children she was known as Nitty Norah, with her steel comb and bowl of disinfectant, to combat lice in the hair.
You could tell the kids who had nits. The nit nurse would shave all their hair off and paint this red sort of coloured stuff all over their head. We used to really take the mick out of them. [Laughing] Kids are horrible little monsters at times!
I think, as far as possible, the school officials kept an eye on the general well-being of the children. [By means such as] the free milk which was given daily. We all took advantage of this, getting a third of a pint at morning break. Most of the children at school were poorly dressed, clothes being a low priority in a poverty area such as Bethnal Green. I saw many children’s funerals when I was at school, large families and much unemployment. Because of the poverty, schools had to supply every item. There was no expecting the parent to provide pens, pencils and exercise books, all had to be provided, including hundreds of educational books, one for each child.
But school was still school.
The only thing I liked about school, the only thing, was the malt. I couldn’t get enough of that, but I could get more than enough of school. I couldn’t wait to get home of an afternoon. It was like being let out of prison.
When he speaks about being so eager ‘to get home’, the man above was actually talking about being eager for liberation from the discipline and rigours of the school day, and for the freedom of the streets. Much as he probably loved his family, he would not have been exactly eager to go home, as such. Overcrowding and slum housing were almost as much of a problem in the East End of living memory as they had been back in the dark Dickensian days of the nineteenth century. But, as I was told:
It wasn’t much, only a few rooms, and a shared cooker out on the landing, but it was our home.
And many others felt the same.
[ 9 ]
Our backyard had a few chickens; the pigeon loft; a rabbit run – they were to eat, like the chickens, but we still gave them names; my old pram – I was the youngest, but I don’t suppose Mum wanted to risk getting rid of it, just in case; the tin bath, hanging from a nail on the wall; the outside lav; the dog’s kennel; my little trike and my brother’s home-made cart; and a lean-to scullery with a stock of fuel for the copper – which was also in there – along with the mangle, the scrubbing board, the chickens’ and pigeon food. And hanging up outside the back door was the meat safe. All in that little yard.
At the beginning of the century, living conditions, for the majority of working people in east London, were very basic indeed. Overcrowded housing had been a problem ever since the area had first started to become urbanized and, with growing industrialization, the East End would become associated in popular imagination with soot-covered, terraced houses lining streets of dung-slicked cobbles, and with thick, choking fogs in which the criminal and the dangerous could stalk their unwary prey. That image was not far short of the actual experience of those who lived in the area up until the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s.
The lack of regulation and the ad-hoc nature of development only added to the problems of the people who had to pay rent for the privilege of living in those slums. But the poor and the needy were, as ever, attracted to a place that held the possibility of work, and they had to be housed. It was the availability, rather than the condition, of the housing – often cheap, insanitary lodgings – that was the major concern for tenants and landlords alike.
This description of a family home is given by a man born at the end of 1903.
[Our street] comprised a school and rows of houses of the two-up and two-down variety, no bathrooms [and] a trip to the toilet in winter was no pleasure as it was outside in the yard.
There were very few gardens then, just yards. Our house had the usual passage done in brown walls and with no lighting, bare boards and stair treads. No gas or electricity, only paraffin lamps which had to be cleaned before use.
My mother used to work on uniform overcoats and many a coat has kept us warm in winter as we only had wood fires. I remember my mother used to put a hot poker into her pint of beer on the trivet of the fireplace.
Even for those born in the 1930s and 1940s, conditions remained stark.
[Our] terraced house consisted of, on the ground floor, two large rooms, one of which was our living room and the other was the ‘front room’, but at times both of them doub
led as bedrooms. Down the passage to the back of the house there was a small kitchen and behind that was the scullery. The kitchen had a coal range with an oven at the side; there was just enough room in the kitchen to hold a table and a couple of chairs. The scullery had a copper built in just behind the door from the kitchen and this was used for the weekly washing. There was also a small butler sink with a cold tap above it. Next to this was the gas cooker, which sometimes got wet because above it was the back of the tiles and rafters for the roof and the rain would blow in underneath. There was no hot water in any part of the house. Doors from both the kitchen and the scullery led out into the backyard, where there was another cold tap. Out there was the toilet and a coal store, which we didn’t use for coal but more as a junk store, because the coal was kept in an indoor cupboard under the stairs. Also in the yard was a big cast-iron mangle with wooden rollers and the tin bath which hung on the wall. At one time there was a cane kept there, which we would get threatened with, but we were never hit with it. One day I wound the cane into the cogs of a mangle and then tried to pull it out and of course it was all zigzagged where it had been in the cogs.
Upstairs there were two big bedrooms and at the top of the stairs a small boxroom which was also used as a bedroom. The front bedroom was let out sometimes, once as a bed-sitting room to two old ladies who both worked in a pickle factory and consequently both permanently smelled of pickles; another time [it was let] to Bill and Daisy M.
While the front room was let out, Mum and Dad had the upstairs back bedroom, my two sisters were in the boxroom, and we three boys all slept together in a big iron-framed double bed in the downstairs back room while we lived in the kitchen and the front room was kept as ‘best’.
My East End Page 15
