Another little cockney boy found himself isolated in a village in deepest Devon.
When I started at the school, all the other boys kept looking through my hair. I was upset, because I thought they thought I had nits, but the teacher explained they had never met a Jew before and were looking for my horns.
Others remember their experience of being evacuated in a matter-of-fact, almost businesslike sort of way.
In September 1939 [my brother] and I were evacuated with the school. Mum made us haversacks, which had our spare clothes and some other things in, and, with these on our backs, we marched from the school to Bethnal Green Junction and caught a train. I was only nine years old and [my brother] was eleven. It’s only now that I realize the responsibility he had of having to keep an eye out for me. I thought we were going away on a holiday, little realizing how long we would be away from home.
There were only two shops in the village. We went [in one] to buy Gibbs Solid Dentifrice, which we ate instead of sweets, which were rationed. There wasn’t a barber’s shop in the village so we had to go to ‘Smoker’ to get a haircut. [He] did the hair-cutting on a kitchen chair in an alley between the houses, and one of his sayings was, ‘How’s your father’s leg then?’ God knows what he meant.
Being the older boys, we got the job of making all the evacuee labels: cardboard cut up to size on a guillotine – I cut my finger and still have the scar – punches for the eyelets and then folded over, doubled cord for the tie. Indian ink to write the names.
Village life was strange and quiet for children who had been brought up in the bustle of the East End, but we managed to find lots of new things to do. The only sign of the war they knew of down there was if the Germans were trying to bomb the sugar beet factory at Bury St Edmunds, which was five miles away. We would hear the sirens in the distance and go to the Morrison shelter under the living-room table, but I only remember this happening a couple of times. The only other incident happened when [my brother] and I were on holiday in London and a couple of stray fire bombs fell in some bushes but did no real damage, though, of course, the villagers thought it was horrendous.
After six long years, it was at last time for all the evacuees to go home, not just for a holiday but for good.
It was strange at first, being back in London. I’d become a bit of a yokel, I suppose. But you couldn’t beat being home with your mum.
*
Adults too were returning to their East End homes.
One of my earliest memories – I was not quite three – is of my uncle coming home from the war one Saturday morning. My aunt was waiting in our house, and I can remember the excitement but not knowing why we were all excited. Aunt Marie gave a loud scream and a strange man in khaki was running down the street with a kitbag over his shoulder. I rushed ahead, having no idea who he was, [or] why I should be so pleased, and he scooped me up in his arms. I can still vividly remember the roughness of the material of his jacket against my legs.
At last, it was really over, and the celebrations and congratulations could begin.
Luckily, every one of our family came through the war. All six brothers were in the forces. I was doing ‘special work’… making direction finders for the ships and submarines. The work was secret and we had to be locked in the room, unlocked when we came out. We were not to divulge what we were doing. We had our family record in the Stratford Express, the family’s war record. All our names: the six brothers, the three brothers-in-law, and all us girls on war work. We were proud of that.
People must have been preparing for street parties and celebrations everywhere. In a few hours, all the men in our street put together a wooden platform with a stage. Everyone dragged out timber they had been saving for a huge bonfire. We kids had been roaming the bomb sites for weeks, collecting anything that might burn. Every street had a fire. All the neighbours were up on ladders, hanging out bunting and Union Jacks. One neighbour’s piano was pushed out on to the platform. As the day wore on, the preparations for the street party were frenzied. Every household provided something. There were sandwiches, cakes, jellies and trifles, and we children ate until we ached. A fancy-dress competition was announced for the young ones. The bells rang out and, best of all, the streetlights came on. We no longer needed to cover our torches with crepe paper to see our way home in the dark.
We had heard that Walthamstow town hall was to be floodlit and my dad took me for a walk to see it. It’s a plain, municipal building, bureaucratic and boring, but on this night the fountains and the ornamental ponds were all floodlit. After the blackness of the blackout, I thought it was fairyland. Fireworks exploded in the sky above it, searchlights danced around it, and the water in the fountains rose and fell in sparkling drops of light. I was totally entranced and wanted to stay there.
Everyone sat out in the street on chairs or on the windowsills. We saw a bonfire and celebrations at every street corner. Many of them were burning effigies of Hitler. One in particular was most realistic. It had a moustache with black hair plastered down and a full German uniform. He hung on a gibbet over the fire, waiting for dark to fall and the fire to be lit. I shivered, despite all the joy and relief all around me. It had been light when we left home, but as we returned all the fires were up. The sky that was usually so black was now full of dancing sparks, glowing orange from all the thousands of bonfires throughout London. It was magical.
The bonfires burned all night. People brought out the fireworks they had been saving. Us children had never seen fireworks before and we were very excited. Even now I can’t begin to describe the beauty of those fireworks. For all my living memory, until that time, nights had been really black, darkness was really dark, and now it was exploding with light and colour all around me. The war had ended.
A future without air raids, sirens, shelters and shortages beckoned.
I was allowed to stay up as long as I liked and I could eat as much as I wanted. I managed to stay awake until one a.m., protesting, ‘No, I’m not tired. No, I don’t want to go home yet.’ It would not have been any good going to bed anyway. The whole world was awake and singing. The relief was almost tangible. Being woken at night for several air raids was much more exhausting than if we were awake all night long. The prospect now of having unbroken sleep at night was wonderful!
Even after the parties were over, there was more fun to be had for cockney kids liberated from the restrictions and rigours of a London at war.
In the morning, the bonfire was a great smouldering pile of hot ash with a glowing red heart. The streets were deserted, absolutely no traffic on the road, quieter than a Sunday. With a group of friends, I trekked from street to street to see if the other bonfires were still alive. It was a piece of new information for us that fires could burn all night; our coal fires at home always needed lighting in the mornings. For a few euphoric days it felt as if we could do as we pleased. Adults were too tired, relaxed or too hungover to pay much attention to us kids. So we went around collecting spent firework cases and looking for shrapnel, because we knew we would not be getting any more.
If it is inevitable that the number of people who can share their memories of the Second World War is decreasing all the time, how much truer this must be of an even earlier conflict.
While living at Finnis Street [Bethnal Green] the Great War broke out in August 1914.1 was still at school at the time. I remember Victoria Park being taken over by the army and the troops digging trenches, signalling with semaphore flags, and Lord Derby’s army of volunteers marching to Bethnal Green station with their red armbands with a gold crown in the centre, but no uniforms, headed by a band. We had plenty of warning of an air raid, as the lights on the station would go out, then a policeman would ride round on a cycle blowing a whistle to take cover, then the maroons would go off and we waited. The Zeppelins would fly high, but one night a searchlight caught one and it was shot down by Lieutenant Ball of the Royal Flying Corps. The Zeppelin came down in flames near Cuffley and we stood on our l
anding and cheered. The air raids were not as bad as the Blitz of 1940, but bad enough. One Wednesday, in school, there was a daylight raid by German planes and a school was hit. Then, on a Saturday, I was cleaning some knives and forks when I saw six German planes flying over. Again damage was done. These were the only daylight raids I remember. We had potato rationing, so we had swedes instead, which were like turnips. I liked them. In Bethnal Green Road there were some German-owned shops, Stoltes by name, and a pork butcher’s. [When, in 1915,] the Lusitania, a liner, was sunk by U-boats, German submarines, it caused such bitter feelings amongst the public that a crowd of boys smashed the windows of those shops and, before the police could interfere, ran off with legs of pork, sausages and joints of all kinds. There were loaves of bread, cakes and flans scattered on the pavements. Some families had a nice dinner that day.
After 1945, the people of the debris-strewn, bomb-ravaged East End would experience massive changes in their lives. Following the period of post-war austerity, there would be increasing affluence and opportunities for working men and women; promises of decent housing; a National Health Service worthy of the name; universal education and a welfare net to catch those who had previously been in peril of falling through to the bottom of the social heap; and real, if slowly achieved, improvements in living conditions that came with great hopes of full employment and prosperity for everyone.
But not all change was a cause for celebration.
[ 17 ]
I consider myself a thoroughbred cockney. There’s not many of us left now.
By 1950 there was an overall decline in the population of London, with increasing numbers of people moving out of the war-ravaged East End to make their homes on the new, outlying estates which were being built following the London County Council’s promise in the 1930s that the slums would be cleared in ten years.
Regardless of whether you were going to a new home with all mod cons, an indoor lav and a street door that you could call your own, leaving the East End was not always something done by choice. If it had not been for the war, many would not have considered moving away, but with the bomb damage leaving less housing than ever available for rent, and overcrowding becoming intolerable, new lives in places like Dagenham were embarked upon.
This post-war depopulation left the way open for another wave of newcomers ready to take the place of those moving away to the suburbs.
Bengali-speaking workers, at first mostly male, began to arrive with the intention of earning, saving and then returning to their families. But with the tightening of immigration rules at the beginning of the 1960s making the future uncertain, families were sent for and brought to London. It was with the arrival of wives and children that an identifiable community began to evolve.
As the previous residents took the post-war opportunities – and their skills – and started their new lives elsewhere, the movement of manufacture out of the East End, which had begun after the First World War, was accelerated. These changes, followed by a national industrial decline, saw Britain wasting its post-war opportunities and moving away from a manufacturing-based economy to one which focused on service industries.
Traditional East End trades and crafts all but disappeared, or were being shunned by locals and taken over by newcomers. There was a feeling of abandonment among older people, who talked about the loss of their old neighbourhoods. It was not simply a dislike of change but a case of no longer understanding the meaning of what was going on in what had once been their world.
I spoke to a group in a library in Newham who were not alone in expressing regret that Neighbourhood Watch has to exist.
I’m in it, but I think it’s sad. It’s bad enough we need it to stop the little buggers breaking into our places in the first place, but what’s sadder is we’re not looking out for each other without having it as a sort of club. You used to look out for one another because it’s just what you did – the right thing to do. What’s happened to people?
It makes me sad and all, these Neighbourhood Watch schemes. Not only the fact that there’s so much crime that you practically live in a bank vault, with the number of bolts and chains on your door, but the fact that you need to actually ask people to keep an eye out for you. That should be done automatically, not because you’ve got a sticker in your front window.
But, as the history of the East End shows so clearly, communities do change: they grow, evolve and, in some cases, dissipate. In the autumn of 1991, the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor in Brune Street, Spitalfields, was closed, after operating on the site since 1902 and having served the needs of locals for over 130 years. From the Second World War, hot meals had been replaced by weekly food parcels and then, as the Jewish community grew smaller still, the final blow came, with the premises being closed and the food replaced by monetary payments. The money no doubt filled a need, but, as an elderly local, Leslie Simmons, said, when interviewed in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘You can’t talk to a pension.’
The Soup Kitchen is now a private apartment block. Of course, memory is selective, and we are maybe forgetting the shame of having to queue for charitable hand-outs, but it is the meaning, the understanding, of that lost past which highlights people’s anxieties about what is happening to them today.
The following quote is from a woman I interviewed who had moved from east London to Kent to settle in the area she had grown to love while hop-picking in her youth. She missed the community that she can now observe only second-hand through soap operas.
You know, you coming here and talking to me like this, it’s the first time in I can’t think how long that, once it started getting dark, I didn’t lock up, draw the curtains and sit and watch the telly for the rest of the evening. I like telly, [laughing] EastEnders and that, but you can’t beat sitting having a chat like this, can you? We used to go round one another’s houses and play cards and have a laugh. Nothing special. Might cut a few rounds of sandwiches and that. Nothing special, like I say, but we’d just enjoy the company and having a laugh. We got together round here for the street parties, for the Jubilee and Diana’s wedding, but that sort of thing’s once in a blue moon. Not like just going round and having a laugh of an evening.
She wasn’t alone in her feelings of isolation and regret.
I feel we were better off in them days. There was more community spirit, more give and take. Today, you only got to say something out of the way to your neighbour and he’ll punch you in the earhole. Them days, there was nothing like that, was there? I worry about my grandchildren. I’ve got twenty-six grandchildren and twenty-seven great-grandchildren. In days gone by, the mum and dad used to take their kids round their grandad’s three turnings away. My relations are all over the place. In future, we’ll be going to visit them on the moon.
I think the people who moved just a little way out, to live in blocks of flats, would have been much happier if they’d stayed in the heart of the East End. The people that moved right out, to nicer homes and pleasant scenery, would probably prefer their surroundings now. In many ways, I think they left because it seemed ridiculous not to try and better themselves. But are they happier? If they went back now, they certainly wouldn’t go back to what they left thirty or forty years ago. The old community spirit, from what I can make out, is not the same. I know that, as much as I had a wonderful childhood growing up in the East End, there is no way I would ever go back there to live – even if it hadn’t changed so much. The fact is, it is not the same as it was.
What I miss about the old days is the genuine care of one neighbour for another and how they would all help in times of trouble. You can live in a place now and not even know your neighbours’ names. Everyone sits indoors watching the telly. I don’t want people in and out all the time, but a friendly word wouldn’t go amiss. It’s moving away, you see. You leave all your old roots behind. It takes time to put down roots. It was good when you could get a place near your mum and dad, and see all the old friends and family, but people move away. They want different
things. And then there’s the waiting lists. It’s so hard to get a place now.
When people look back, I suppose it’s to their time as a teenager, or a young married couple just setting up home. For them it was good, it was their youth. [But] I also think people appreciated things far more then. For one thing, you made more of your own entertainment. It was many years before I had television. And people didn’t shut their front doors, did they?
The fear of crime – the need to ‘lock up’ once it gets dark and to ‘shut your front door’ – is a real concern. Statistics suggest that it is young males who are most at risk from violence, but it is older people who are frightened by the representations of reality presented by the press and on television – in drama and Crimewatch-type programmes – a world where there are masked muggers and housebreakers lurking in every shadow.
This is not to deny that terrible crimes do occur. I spoke with one woman whose elderly mother had died as the result of a street crime which netted the perpetrator a few lousy pennies. But it is the frequency of such events which can become exaggerated and make people prisoners in their own homes, believing that the East End has become a lawless place, a place of fear and lack of control.
My East End Page 29
