My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  There was no electricity in the house, so all the cooking was done on either the gas cooker, gas rings or the coal fires which were in most rooms. All the lighting was by gas as well, so we had to keep a supply of pennies handy for the meter and gas mantles, [which] were constantly getting broken as you went to light the light. There didn’t seem to be any inner brick walls, they were all either lathe and plaster or wood panelling, so the house wasn’t very soundproof.

  It makes me laugh, the amount of us who lived in our house, two full families, with grandparents, the odd aunt or uncle, all the kids and the parents. All sharing beds, and sleeping top to toe, and they talk about morals nowadays!

  The house was a total slum, already condemned by the council. I have very vivid memories of lying in bed listening to the rats scuttling about in the roof. One of the delights of summer was the bug-hunt, when my nan and I would strip the beds and search for bedbugs and proceed to drown them. We had simple pleasures in my day! The house was three storeys high, with two rooms on each floor and a cellar. On the ground floor my nan and uncle lived, he sleeping in the front room and all the living being done in the back room. I realize now it was very dirty, but then I knew nothing else. A visit to the ‘cleansing station’ to be deloused was a pretty regular occurrence for me. My nan did all the cooking over an open range, and, as all the family worked or lived very close, everyone came there for lunch. I still remember the newspaper tablecloth and eight or nine of us sitting down every day. On the second floor lived a prostitute and her baby. My nan had befriended her while working as a lavatory attendant [at the station, where the prostitute worked]. My nan’s bedroom was at the front and contained a piano which [my uncle] had bought with some workman’s compensation he received for an accident at work. Unbelievably, the accident had caused him to lose three fingers – some pianist he! My mum, dad, brother and I lived in the two rooms on the top floor. The four of us shared the front room as a bedroom, my brother and I sleeping in a single bed until I was eight and he was twelve. The cooker was on the landing outside, but as we all ate downstairs that was fairly academic. There was no running water upstairs at all, so all supplies had to be carried up three flights. The only toilet was in the backyard and at night everyone used a communal bucket in the bedroom. Enough said, I think…

  It was bitterly cold. We used to stuff clothing rolled up like sausages at the door and newspapers into the ledges of the windows. We had no fire or anything. I hate to think of it now, how we used paraffin stoves in there. It used to smell to high heaven.

  By contemporary standards, the conditions in which these East Enders were expected to live were appalling, but because they had nothing to compare them with, they accepted that this was simply the way things were – it was how you lived and you got on with it. There is even a view, such as that voiced below, that life might actually have been better then; not the conditions, but the social environment in which people were made more resilient, more self-sufficient, than those accustomed to a life of welfare dependency.

  It must sound as if we had a dreadful childhood, but you must always remember that we knew no different. When X came out [of prison] he had nowhere to live, so my dad took him in. I remember him living with us but God knows where he slept, there were already four of us sleeping in one room. I also remember Aunt L. spending her leaves from the ATS with us. Where did we all fit in? N. also lived with us for a time. It was when the state did not provide for you if your family possibly could, or even, as in our case, if they couldn’t. But it was a better way.

  My childhood was a very happy one, one I think back on with warmth and pride. In Canning Town the people were poor by today’s standards but rich in love, loyalty, trust and friendship. The houses were mainly used for two families. We had three rooms and a scullery downstairs, and the loo. There were six of us. Mum and Dad, two brothers, my sister and myself. Mum and Dad slept on a couch, bed-chair-type thing, in the front room; my brothers in the one and only bedroom, and my sister and I in a bed-cabinet in the kitchen-cum-living room. We had an old black lead range, no hot water, but a copper in the scullery for the washing.

  As people spoke about their childhood homes, back in the ‘good old days’, they did so with a warm, rosy glow that probably has far more to do with being young and without the cares of adulthood than it does with their acceptance of the conditions of the East End’s housing stock. They also spoke fondly of the ease with which you could get somewhere to live, because either you came from the area or you knew someone who did.

  When you were getting married, your mum, or an aunt, or someone, would speak to the landlord. They’d ask if he had a place going that would do you. And you’d take a room or two in a house. Not that special maybe, but it would be near the family. Only a room or two, but in the neighbourhood where you came from. Your neighbourhood.

  Perhaps the arrangements weren’t ideal, but, with a bit of help, you could at least find somewhere of your own that was affordable and in the area where you wanted to be, no matter how primitive it might now seem.

  We got the flat through [someone we knew] talking to the landlord. He knew there would be a couple of rooms there. The only thing was, the landlord had to come in past our kitchen, up three stairs into his room, where he’d got all his tailoring equipment, and next door to that was our bedroom. So we had no privacy. And the thing that was against his ruling in our rent book was: no pets, no children. And, of course, my husband found a stray cat one day and brought it home. He knew how much we both liked cats. The dear little cat got a bit bigger and then I got a bit bigger! When the landlord used to come in every Friday for his rent, I’d be sat there with the table hiding the cat and my lump.

  We had no washing or toilet facilities, but had to go downstairs and out through the back door, which belonged to a husband and wife on the ground floor. Out in the back garden was the toilet. When we wanted a bath we had to walk down to the public baths at Stepney Green. Not very nice in the winter months, especially when I was expecting my first baby. But all the families around the square were very nice to us, even though some paid frequent visits to the police station.

  Not such a cosy memory was having to use the outside toilet. In the winter months it would get extremely cold. We didn’t have toilet paper. We had cut-up squares of newspaper tied to a piece of string hanging on a nail on the wall. As two families shared the toilet the paper wouldn’t last very long, so we would be constantly cutting up squares to use.

  No matter how poor or lacking in facilities that housing was, it still had to be paid for, and no matter how low the rent, it wasn’t always easy to find.

  One thing the old lady always used to tell us: ‘Don’t matter what else you do, boy, always pay your rent, or you’re out.’ And she was bloody right, wasn’t she? She never missed the rent, no matter what happened. She’d be there with her old starched apron on, with her curlers or pins in her hair – or in a bun she’d have it – waiting there with her rent book. ‘Hello, Mr so-and-so.’ She’d see him fill it in. She’d look and see he had. ‘Thank you.’ And away he’d go. He’d had his three bob or his half a crown, and he was satisfied, and we was all right for another week. [Laughing] Bloody house wasn’t worth half a crown, when you come to think of it. Mind you, they never charged us nothing for the mice.

  Sometimes something as little as that half a crown could prove impossible.

  Doing a moonlight wasn’t that unusual. Pack all the stuff in the pram and on a barrow you’d borrowed off someone, and you’d have it away on your toes. No one liked the landlord in them days. They’d keep an eye out for you if they knew what you was up to.

  [Mum] took part of a house with a married sister in Forest Gate. We thought we was right posh. There were six of us still at home at that time and I don’t know what happened, but we were soon on the move again. Probably owed the rent.

  Even ‘doing a moonlight’ or ‘having it away on your toes’ was not always possible.

  Only time I ever saw
any real, nasty violence in our turning was when the landlord sent the bailiffs round to kick this family out on the street. You should have seen the women going for them blokes. But they never stopped them, not in the end.

  We had two rooms in one of them big houses in Bancroft Road, with a stove in one of the rooms. I used to clean all that house – top to bottom. All the steps, all the paintwork outside – so the woman would let me have cheap rent. I nearly killed myself doing it, but he [her husband] didn’t hardly have any work then.

  The landlord of our houses was hated. He would turn up in a flash car, any car was flash looking back then, wearing his Crombie coat – apparently what the nobs wore – and prance down the street with his minder, and us kids would run a mile. I remember Mum having a terrific row with him about the state of the outside of our house and him replying, ‘If you don’t like it – move!’

  This ambivalence about the ‘good old days’ wasn’t related only to not having money for the rent or the state of the outside paintwork.

  I remember the friendliness, but I’m not sure that I miss the old days; we lived in a terraced house with no bathroom and had to go to the public baths, which we did once-weekly. There were three boys and five girls in our family and the only place to wash in the house was in the kitchen. We had to have rotas for use of the sink, and it was a sink, not a basin. And no central heating, you just hoped your underclothing was dry enough to put on.

  There was, however, always someone poorer than you in the East End, and a neighbourhood which was considered rougher, even less desirable than your own.

  We had a road near us which was out of bounds to us as Mum said the children there had fleas and weren’t clean. I used to walk down there without Mum knowing and felt so sorry for the people there. The majority had no shoes and wore really raggy clothes. The houses were without windows and had sacking nailed up instead. There were always kids fighting and women shouting. I learned later that they were people who had been evicted from elsewhere and were put in the bomb-damaged houses at very low rent.

  Regardless of how bad the conditions were in those rented rooms, there was a reluctance to living in flats, even before the advent of the high-rise blocks of the 1960s.

  I dreaded the thought of having to go in those flats. I preferred to stay where we were in the sparse, overcrowded, part-furnished rooms, with its shared toilet, than to have gone there. Living in flats in that area was no life for children. There was a survey done while we lived there by a schoolteacher and they got children to write a little bit about their family background. He could tell those that lived in the flats by how restricted they were from those that lived in rooms in houses like we did, where you could come and go out of a front door and sit on the step and talk to your neighbours and run around. I was so relieved that we didn’t have to go to the flats.

  With the lack of private facilities, local authority provision for bathing and laundering was welcomed, and the recent closing down of many of the public baths and wash-houses has been met with emotional, though sadly often unsuccessful, opposition.

  We managed to get old bicycles and once a week we would have a ten-minute ride to the public bathhouse for our weekly clean-up. We had a number given to us as we went in and paid our money. When the number was called, we were shown into a small cubicle. The bath was filled by the man with levers outside. If it was too cold you would have to call out, ‘More hot in Number 6, please!’ then call out again once it was hot enough.

  Despite the lack of bathrooms, bathing at home was not unusual. The tin bath would be fetched in from the yard and filled with hot water boiled on the stove or in the copper. The younger members of the family, being the lowest in the pecking order, would be the last to go in the bath and were left with rapidly cooling water made filthy by a whole week’s worth of dirt washed off parents, brothers and sisters, and any other family members who happened to be lodging with them at the time.

  There were other problems with bathing at home, especially in the winter.

  It was all very nice having the tin bath in front of the fire, but your back used to freeze. The places were so draughty. No central heating of course. In the mornings you’d have ice inside the windows. Ice. Inside. We all had chilblains. My nan reckoned that if you stuck your feet in the po the wee would cure them. I must say, I never tried it myself. Others would rub on an onion.

  Back to the bath – you’d have to take your turn. All right if you was first in. Lovely, nice and clean and warm. But in big families like our’n, and a lot of them was big families up until the war, you’d come a long way down the list. The water’d be all grey and scummy. Horrible. And the bath would have to be emptied. I’m glad it wasn’t my job. Poor old Mum again. They worked like donkeys, the old girls in them days.

  It wasn’t only the absence of decent bathing facilities that resulted in hard manual work; most domestic chores were either physically hard or relentless, or both. The continual battle against vermin was just one of the many unpleasant tasks which took time and effort.

  If it wasn’t the nit comb to sort your hair out, it was the Flit spray to get rid of the bedbugs. Never-ending.

  If they found you had nits at school they dowsed you with Lysol, and then [back home] Mum used to have us on our knees, with a sheet of newspaper on her lap, and she’d get out the old nit comb.

  With the crowded conditions and lack of hygiene, there was always the threat of infestation with fleas, bedbugs and black beetles, mice and rats from the sewers. I saw my father painting the bedsprings with spirits of salts to deter them.

  *

  In the summer the bugs used to crawl out of the walls and we killed them by squashing them on the walls. Their eggs got into the wooden sides of the bedsprings and they multiplied in two hours. It was not unusual to see a bug on someone sitting indoors. [You could see] fleabites too on the necks of some children. Many people sat outside their street doors on summer evenings just because the bugs disturbed their sleep. The only way to get rid of them was to burn their eggs and, believe me, that took some doing.

  ‘Put a penny in the gas, quick, it’s going out!’ You couldn’t let it go out, otherwise there’d be bleeding mice running about all over the place. At night, you’d put the lights out and the bleeding house used to come alive! Still, fact was, we didn’t live far from the stables, see, and I didn’t mind the mice so much, but I didn’t like the big fellers [the stable rats] flying about the house.

  At a time when domestic work was carried out without the labour-saving devices which are now practically taken for granted, children, even the very young, were expected to do their share of the chores. They did so, more or less, willingly.

  I used to stay at home and clean the house – anything rather than go to school – but I used to hate shaking them coconut mats, because you got smothered in dust. And they was a ton weight and I was only a little thing. We didn’t have no vacuum cleaners, nothing like that. Not until Mum bought us a beater and then you could put them on the line and whack them. We did graduate from floorboards and that, on to mats and lino, but you still had to scrub everywhere.

  It was hard graft, but Mum expected us kids to do our bit. It was the only way she could keep things nice, the way she liked them.

  And there was a real pride taken in keeping those youngsters, as well as your home, as ‘nice’ as you could. Having little money and few material possessions did not stop mothers wanting to give a good impression regarding their conscientious approach to domestic duties. Being respectable was important and cleanliness was closely associated with self-respect.

  My mum would go barmy if you went anywhere near her clean step. It was a matter of pride, like sending us out in clean clothes. Even if they were raggy and old, they were spotless… Well, when we went out they were. I’m not so sure about when we came back in from playing out.

  The passage [had] shiny lino and coconut mats in lovers’ knots.

  Nanny and Grandad C. lived with their ever-increasin
g family – eleven of them altogether – in the downstairs part of the very small terraced artisan’s house in Custom House. Upstairs lived Mr and Mrs N. – eleven of them too – and everyone shared the spotless scrubbed-pine lavatory seat out in the backyard.

  When Dad was painting the front door, he used to make an artificial grain in the paint by putting on a light coloured undercoat then a dark coat on top of that and, while the second coat was still wet, he had a metal comb and this was drawn over the surface, twisting it to scrape the top coat away and looking like proper wood graining.

  In the spring, Grandad would whitewash the backyard wall and the outside lav, and put a few plants in a tub by the back door. Used to look all lovely and clean and fresh.

  You didn’t have to be lousy just cos you were poor. Soap don’t cost much. But I’m not saying it was easy keeping yourself or your place nice. It was hard work, but you didn’t lead off about it or nothing, you got on with it.

  Doing the laundry presented its own problems. Week in, week out, the same back-breaking, hand-chapping, sopping-wet job had to be done, regardless of weather or time of year; although in those pre-man-made fibre, pre-washing-machine days clothes were not changed nearly as often as they are now. Laundering anything was too much of a demanding, lengthy rigmarole for clothes to be tossed into a laundry basket after just a few hours’ wear.

  The scullery was distempered or whitewashed and was the scene of much activity on Mondays, which was washing day. There was a large copper in the corner with a small iron door at the bottom which led to the fireplace underneath. This was no machine wash of about an hour! Oh no! It was a whole day’s washing. First you had to light the fire with wood chips or a bundle of firewood, which cost a farthing. Then, of course, there was no hot water, just cold. When the washing was under way, the steam would cover the scullery and the women would sweat after scrubbing the clothes up and down the washboard and wringing them in the mangle, then they hung the sheets and so on out on the line in the yard to dry again. No tumble-dryers. If it was a rainy day the washing was hung in the kitchen to dry, where you had to dodge the stockings, towels and underwear.