My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  They’re all taking drugs and saying it’s the only way they can enjoy their life. They don’t even try to enjoy it any way other than with drugs, drink or whatever. If you’re taking drugs [ you’re not] thinking about your family, what you’re doing to other people. [To get money] today, it doesn’t matter [to them]. You can nick from an old lady out on the street.

  It seems to be a thing that is round every corner now; always somebody that is a child abuser. The community policed itself [then], and if anything happened, they would get hold of them and bash them. If you touched [them] today, they’d have you up. You can’t touch that person because they can sue you. The same as when we was at school, you could be hit with a ruler, pulled up by the back of your hair or your ear. But you do that today and they’ll sue you for it. I think to be able to do that to a teacher is wrong. You’ve got to have some discipline. If you don’t do that, when you let them on the streets, they’ll be hooligans, not decent people.

  We won’t go out of a night-time, not even together. A lot of things you don’t do now, because you are frightened to go out. On the odd occasions you have to go out, I was terrified. To wait outside for a bus, you feel as though you are taking your life in your hands. All these yobs and mobs – just walking past, they frighten you. You didn’t hear of drugs then, did you? Drugs and alcohol, they’re too free to get hold of. Alcohol is just as bad. Even children at school can get hold of it. They’re encouraging youngsters to get hold of it. We got a drop of lemonade powder put in a bottle of water.

  People did not express concern only about the ways in which their own lives were affected by changes in the community.

  *

  I was born here. My family had a shop. [But now] everything is totally unrecognizable. People are frightened to open their street doors. Being the warden of a settlement, I go round a lot visiting pensioners. I do hospital visiting and home visits if needed. Only the elderly people. I go round and visit and you hear ‘bolt, bolt, bolt’. They are petrified round here, the pensioners.

  A lot of the trouble is all the news. They have to fill the papers and the news with something. There’s local papers, local news on the television, local radio. As soon as anything happens it’s a major story. I know it’s their job, but it puts it all out of perspective. You hear people like my dad saying, ‘It never used to be like that round here.’ Yes, it did. You just never heard about it so much. When there was just the one lot of BBC radio news, why would they bother with what was happening in Stepney unless it was something ‘juicy’, like the Blackshirts? A riot, that interested them. Papers need sensation, not ‘Mrs Smith’s lost her budgie.’ So they make something out of what might otherwise have been heard of in passing from a neighbour, not seen in the headlines. Now it’s all happening on your doorstep, all the time. It’s like all the ‘Devil Dog’ stories. There are a few dogs round here, and the panic! It’s terrible that children got hurt, but I’ll bet there were no more than at any other time. Except maybe some nutters saw the stories and thought, ‘I’d like one of them’ and then didn’t know how to handle them or train them, or got one of the really dangerous ones that they’d never have even heard of if it wasn’t for all the panic in the papers. But no one thinks about them now, not now they’re off the front pages. They’re just dogs again. Owned by the people who always had them. Still a bloody nuisance when they poo, but just dogs.

  But there are things of which undoubtedly people have every reason to be scared.

  Drugs is an acute problem here. Not only for white children, but for our Asian children too. The parents have no understanding. Drugs? It is one of those injections. They have no idea about glue-sniffing and things.

  It used to be other parts of London, but the reality is, is that guns are moving to east London. Guns were used for robberies and things like that, but nowadays they buy them to kill each other. I was actually offered a gun the other day. The guy pulled out like a whole panel of the things. He had a little pink lady gun for the ladies. The prices were amazingly low. I think the drug dealers realize that the sentence is going to be pretty much the same [armed or not], so let’s go the whole hog.

  Crime was blamed on greed, selfish materialism being what has spoiled everything: conditions might be better, but the mood, the spirit, has changed.

  People are more interested in what they can get and what they can have, rather than about the people around them. They’re always striving to get something more, rather than [worrying about] their family.

  So many things were different in those days. There was no snobbery like today, no. greed, because people never had much anyway, certainly nothing to pinch. People had time for each other, respect for people and property. Children were more content and loved to spend time with their families. We had no telly until I was thirteen. We’d play games or read or listen to stories about the war. Today, people are obsessed with money and status symbols. They see something and have to have it, regardless of the cost. Kids have no respect, and, yes, I do believe they were the good times. OK, they were hard, and our parents worked and fought like tigers to put a meal on the table, but at the end of the day they were happy. I have nothing against progress, but I despair at how some families go on. It seems the more some people get, the more they want. [People are no longer] quietly content, happy knowing they’ve done the best for their kids, the way our parents did for us. That was the typical East End way.

  It was such a nice feeling that everybody was the same. It is a real sadness that this has changed. You’ve not got the feeling that everybody is the same any more, that nobody’s better than anybody else. They’re all out to do one another now.

  Ours was a big family and they stuck together. There was a family feeling that is not there now. Seems to me that’s the trouble, you know. These children leave home and live on the streets. How can a parent allow that to happen? My mum went without food more often than not to feed us.

  There was also a feeling that the way people are housed has caused yet more change for the worse.

  I don’t think there is an East End any more. Not as we knew it when I was a kid. I do not like the idea of my grandchildren playing out. They never play out in the street. There is no community spirit any more. You used to be able to have your doors open all the time. No more. Everybody’s got their door locked. Most people don’t know their neighbours for the simple reason that you don’t have long-term neighbours any more. Older people don’t stay in the same house for years, or have their family move into the street with them. They all moved out. Or the council changed. When they built estates or knocked others down, they changed the people that lived in them. They moved them out and moved other people in. You don’t have that same community. The ones that have moved in either don’t want to know you or you don’t particularly want to know them. They have moved in a lot of problem people; they think if they move them in with people that are not a problem, everything will be all right. But, instead of that, it makes everybody’s life a problem.

  And when asked if she was glad about anything that had gone, this same respondent had an emphatic answer.

  No. I think slum streets weren’t slum streets as they called them. They were communities.

  The lack of affordable – decent – housing is what has killed the community off. The kids move away. They have to. They are not going to get housed round here unless they wait. And wait. And wait. Unless they do something about housing, I can’t see the old East End community surviving. People want dignity and a decent place to live.

  The problems that housing policies were seen as causing – children being forced to move away from their elderly parents, the destruction of extended families and the break-up of communities – meant that someone had to be blamed. But instead of demanding that politicians begin acting in the interests of locals, people go by the evidence of their eyes and blame those who are often as badly off, or worse off, than themselves.

  My daughter can’t get a place, yet you see all these forei
gners when you’re queueing up for your pension.

  If one of the neighbour’s daughters needed a flat and somebody had a house with a couple of rooms upstairs, bomp, you moved in there. So you had the mother, the daughter, the granddaughter. But you can’t do that now. The kids can’t get a place for love nor money. They have to move out. They move away and then the nan and grandad either have got to move with them, or stay where they are and just get left. I think that is what has absolutely killed it. You can’t just pop in and know that Mum and Dad are all right.

  The pubs were a focus for the community, somewhere where everybody could go for a chat. But most of them have gone from round our way. They knocked them down when they started the rebuilding. Then they knocked down the local school and put up this horrible-looking thing. Down a rotten alley, where it used to be a big wide alley with shops each side, so when you walked down there you didn’t feel worried, because there was life with the shops. But now there’s two big high walls and one lamp-post stuck in the middle and all wire fencing above it. It looks [sarcastically] really wonderful. Like a concentration camp. No sort of place for people. Just walls and alley. The council did what they thought was making it good. They built all these flats, one on top of another, and greens round them where no one can play ball, because that’s what it says. You don’t know who people are and now you are shut behind a security door. I find it bloody ridiculous. Why build them in the first place? Making you a prisoner in your own home.

  When I see the changes in the street where I was brought up, where there were good, brick, three-storey houses that are now demolished, and what is there now? Flats! It seems absolutely soulless.

  After the war, with its destruction of so much living accommodation, there was a need for quick and durable living quarters, which resulted in the prefab – precontracted dwellings made in sections, which were erected on-site, containing all modern plumbing and toilet facilities, and with a guarantee of at least ten years. These were a masterstroke. My sister-in-law lived in one for twenty-five years, loved it. They even had a little garden.

  Then came the disaster. High-rise flats. There were tragedies in some instances [such as the Ronan Point disaster], with a loss of life. That was bad enough, but what was never considered was the mental effect these monstrous mountains would have on people. They were being asked to live most of their life away from the markets in an environment that was a psychological mind-bender for people who had lived at ground level. Not only the problems caused by lifts not working and having to climb several hundred stairs, but many other characteristics in humans changed because of this new way of life. There was the lack of playing space which affected the young; neighbours becoming a torment because of noisy children; daughters and their families now in another building, or, if lucky, ten floors higher and losing family closeness.

  In the 1950s and 1960s they’d started to knock down all the little roads. All the little back turnings and terraces. The people weren’t rehoused where they lived, but further out. So the people that moved in when the estates were built knew nobody round there and nobody knew them. But when my daughter was looking for a place, I said to them couldn’t she get a place round here? They said, ‘We don’t do that any more.’ Years ago, when you put your name down, you’d get something in the same area. But they said, ‘We don’t do that now.’ You haven’t got priority now. You move wherever they get a place. That breaks the community. If you want to move, you don’t go near the family, you have to go somewhere else. All the families get broken up.

  Moving away did prove successful for some families.

  Why wouldn’t we prefer a nice, clean home, with an indoor toilet, a bathroom and a bedroom each for the kids? I missed things about the East End, course I did, it was where I was brought up, but I didn’t miss trying to keep them bloody old rooms clean. No matter what you did to them, they were slums. My husband would put a coat of paint on the kitchen walls and they’d be mouldy again in a few weeks. You couldn’t keep paper on the walls of the front room, it was so damp.

  We were moved to live on the Becontree Estate. The house, or cottage, as the then LCC called them, was new and seemed like a palace to us after one room, and, best of all, no bugs!

  But it was not the answer for everyone. As people usually moved with only their immediate nuclear family, there was an absence of a wider familial and social network, and, with the need to travel considerable distances to work, life on the new estates presented problems that did not start to disappear until roots took hold and the next generation had been born and had grown up there.

  So many people thought they were moving to little palaces when they moved out. They were going to have a fitted kitchen, with lovely hot water and central heating, which they’d never had before. In their terraced houses they’d had an outside toilet and a scullery. Them people died when they moved. They’d got nothing. What can you do in your palace? You can cook a dinner, you can go to the inside toilet, you can be warm. But you ain’t got nothing. You can’t sit at your door, sit there shelling peas, talking to people.

  When I was [a girl of] about eight [in the 1950s] the council rehoused us in one of the brand-new slum-overspill estates that they had started building in the then countryside. It was very typical of the period that the reason given wasn’t that our current house was bedbug-ridden, rat-infested and home to various species of flea, but that my brother and I shared a bed. It meant that I was torn away from my beloved nan and transplanted into the countryside. We went to a new estate in Aveley, Essex, which at that time consisted of about four roads surrounded by fields. It was a complete trauma. I was enrolled in a small country school with only two classrooms and must have looked and seemed a complete freak to the other children, who had probably never left their village. I was a smelly, dirty cockney child with no social graces, but an awful lot of street ways. Imagine their reaction. I can remember wearing a pair of fur boots all through summer term because we couldn’t afford sandals. When I mentioned to my mum that I was getting stick for wearing fur boots in July she [said] that the other kids were jealous. Probably my only advantage at school was that I was obviously clever. We all know how other children admire you when you’re clever, don’t we… Because of the rush to rehouse Londoners after the war, houses were being built in satellite towns like ours, but there was no work, so both Mum and Dad continued to work in London. The only transport was a coach which left at about six a.m. and arrived back at about seven p.m., so I hardly saw either of them during the day. Faute de rnieux, at the age of eight, I had to take responsibility for my brother and myself. I got us both up for school, did toast for breakfast and prepared toast for our tea in the evenings. In retrospect, we seemed to live on toast, usually burnt. I also washed and ironed our clothes: very badly and very infrequently. It was here that I began to realize that other children didn’t normally have potatoes in their socks or holes in their shoes. They also bathed occasionally. It was here I started to play truant, because there was no one at home to stop me or even know, and I could forge my mum’s writing easily. If mugging had been invented, I would probably have ended up in jug.

  Moving to Dagenham was the worst day’s work I ever did. It was a lovely little place, the house, but I didn’t know a soul. It was lonely. No friendliness. I tried, but it wasn’t like living up home. You felt you needed a long-service medal, that you had to be one of them who moved in at the very beginning to fit in. And the ones who had jobs in Ford’s – the better jobs – had cars, which was very unusual for an ordinary person, and they’d be out there night and day, polishing. Right snobs. But they were only the same as us, they just thought they were better. Full of old bounce, you know the type. I was glad to get back. Got myself an exchange.

  Those who stayed behind in the East End had some strong views about those who had left.

  Corned Beef City we called it, because a lot of them who moved down there [to Dagenham] thought they were it, but we all knew they lived on corned beef, because
that’s all they could afford. Kippers and curtains, see. They’d have nice lace curtains up [at] their windows – that’s important, because it’s what people see – but then they have to have kippers every night to pay for them. All show.

  There was the story that the families who moved on to the estates from the East End kept their coal in the bath, because they weren’t used to having a bathroom. You could believe anything of some of those families.

  The isolation, the absence of community, was not blamed solely on housing. How people were now expected to shop was also a cause of concern.

  Think about it. You can shop in supermarkets without saying a word to another living human being. Put your shopping in your basket, carry it round, not know a soul, go to the till and the girl runs it over the light. That’s it. Not so much as a ‘Good morning’, never mind a ‘How are you feeling now? Is your chest better?’

  You went up the corner shop and bought a bit of cheese, the bloke behind the counter used to have a chair. You could go in there and sit down. He’d serve other people and it would go backwards and forwards. ‘Here, did you hear about so-and-so over the road?’ You’d go in there and get your gossip. But there’s not even any talking in the supermarkets.

  I worked in shops and restaurants and you made contact with people. I enjoyed it. You had all kinds, good and bad, stroppy ones and not so stroppy. But you was integrated with people and not a machine all the time. One day I went down [the supermarket] and it was all closed up. I asked what was going on and they said the computer had gone wrong. That put the whole shop out of action. When I worked in [a grocer’s shop] it was the old type, where you chopped the butter and cut the cheese with a wire. You served people. And there was a seat for you to sit on while you were being served. And you could have two ounces of butter, when they didn’t always want a whole block, or couldn’t afford it. You could have two ounces of this, a quarter of that. It was lovely, serving people. You talked to them. You wrote [the prices] down and added it all up in your head as you went to the till. Nothing was done for you, you used your brain. I think that’s why I can talk and think as well as I do now. You had interesting conversations with people. Now you walk all the way round the supermarket in a daze looking at all the stuff, [worrying about] sell-by dates.