I miss the East End markets. There’s none round our way. You have these boot sales of a Sunday, but it’s not like going for your potatoes and greens and a bit of fruit off the stalls. You’d go most days of the week. All nice and fresh. And you’d have a laugh and a chat.
There was also a perception that any future changes will not be for the better either, that conditions are worsening, that it is somehow ‘too late’.
We won’t ever get them times back that we had in the East End. And it’s frightening but I reckon we’ll be thinking that these are the good times when we look back on them in a few years’ time, when we’re all stuck indoors the whole time by ourselves and never ever go out and see people. It’ll all be everything done by machine, like you see on the telly. You see.
When I first came to work here [as a professional in the East End], I would not have believed in the erosion of the welfare state. I would not have believed in the erosion of provision of education. In the erosion of the NHS. In the erosion of housing. The main problem for people in this area, in practical terms, is not having enough money. It has an economy with a very low wage structure. I really don’t know how they survive. Even if there were jobs for them, people can’t break out of their cycle of poverty.
In some cases, those people are ‘foreigners’, recent immigrants to the East End. This comment was made by someone who is himself from an immigrant family.
You get an Indian or a black person moving in, never white. The balance has gone. One community’s getting built up and the other one is going down.
And not all of the foreigners are from abroad. ‘Yuppie’ was a term used by people I spoke to to describe incomers of any age who were gentrifying homes in east London.
There are a lot of what you’d call more middle-class types moving in here and pushing up the prices. The yuppies come in and buy up the old places that used to house a couple of families, now they’re just a couple living there, not even kids. And look at their motors. Look at the way they drive. Look at him [going past the window]! Speed he’s going down this little turning. How am I meant to walk along here?
The docks. That area has changed into a posh people’s place. I liked it when it was a working area – the docks how they used to be. People working, big ships coming in. The blokes had work. Now there’s the yuppiefied businesses. Marinas and boat-fitting. All geared around people who have got a few bob, rather than normal people who work for their living. You don’t need airs and graces. I don’t think your voice should make a difference. It might make a difference to you getting a job in some places, but it doesn’t stop you being intelligent.
The antagonism to newcomers was described to me as being the ‘last-off-the-boat syndrome’, when earlier arrivals in an area resent the next wave of immigrants, but not everyone felt that way.
My London was a competition between Jews and Mosley, the National Front and ordinary East Enders. Now it has been taken over, partially, by immigrants. But I get the impression that they are part of us, have become part of us, so it is OK. After all, we did take their countries away from them. If only we had thrown all the guns away, what a wonderful world this could be.
I live in a really mixed area. There’s people with a few bob, others with nothing, and all sorts of different colours and backgrounds. It’s great. It’s like being on holiday with all the different things in the shops. I never even saw an avocado till I was in my twenties, and now I see all sorts of things! And there are little shops round our way where you can get anything you want and where you get to talk to people. And buy just a bit of this or one of those, instead of a great big packet of stuff.
But, it has to be said, the majority of older people I spoke to felt that the East End was a place where they were no longer relevant, where they no longer had a say.
It does make me sad that that way of life [associated with the river and the docks] has gone. Since I stopped working there, I have only been down the docks a couple of times, and I’m amazed at the changes that have taken place down there. We went down there when they had the celebration at the new airport. I think the Millennium Dome is going to have a big impact round here. They say people are going to have to park up here, to visit over there. I’d have thought that that amount of money could have been used elsewhere. They’re spending more each week. I’ve always said – if they can make that Channel tunnel, why couldn’t they spend money on straightening the river? Something useful to local people. It would have made easier access and saved the docks. Do that, instead of the Dome. They won’t even allow the council to build their own houses. It’s all housing associations.
They decide who’s going to live where. You start sorting out a life for yourself, after all the changes you’ve had to go through. You think, that’s it, this is where I’m going to spend me last years, and then they come along and muck it all up again. Bring in people with loads of kids, problem families and that. It’s not right. It really worries me. I don’t want to have to start again.
Perhaps it is a function of a world where individuals over a certain age feel increasingly redundant – in every sense of the word – rather than a problem that is limited just to those from the East End. The speed of change is alarming – in one century we have moved from Victorian values to the Internet – so is it any wonder that older people, from all cultures, sometimes feel confused or left behind?
This computer business. I don’t understand none of it. Young children know all about these things, but is it a good thing? Even before computers it was calculators. We had to use our heads. We were given mental-arithmetic lessons. You had nothing to write down or add up on, nothing but using your brain. To me it seems that if children can’t press a button, they’re lost.
I have worked with people from my country [Bangladesh] for many years. If I compare an old man with his son who has become a GP, a dentist, a computer professional, then there are two different pictures. The younger generation’s issues have changed. They are born and brought up in this country, they have become professionals, but they move out to America or Canada. Who loses out? This country is losing out.
Our children are taking advantage of the changes in society. They think their parents are from a seventeenth-century background. ‘What does my dad know? He can’t speak English. Me, I’m a cockney, man.’ As a result there are changed ethics in society, and problems which mean you and I have to pay more taxes.
How many children from our families [Indian] know about their responsibilities as a citizen of a responsible society? It is the mother, your house, who should teach all these things. Your house should be the finest school for all those things. The children are showing no respect for this.
There were other, more encouraging, hopeful comments, with some people feeling that not all change was bad but could be a move forward into a better, modern world.
Some things that have disappeared for the good? Children playing outside pubs, waiting for their parents, in some cases to be fed, and workhouses, where the elderly were put away and forgotten, with very little done for their comfort. Poverty caused by parliamentary mismanagement. Having to pay for the doctor to visit.
In the field of health, I give thanks for the wonderful progress that has been made. Even as children we were made aware of the scourge of tuberculosis that was rife among all ages. People spoke in hushed voices when speaking of someone with it. It was commonly called consumption. I think the medical profession did their best with the limited knowledge of the time [but] people seemed to accept then what ailments they had [and that] nothing could be done.
I’ve not been hungry for years. Not like we used to be as kids, when finding that bit extra to eat was all you could think of.
Having a warm house and not having to chuck all the coats on the bed to stop yourself freezing!
And not everything from the past has disappeared or is even changing. The Widow’s Son, or the Bun House, is a pub in Devons Road, Bow, on what is known by older cockneys as the Widdersun
Bridge. Built on the site of a widow’s cottage that once nestled in a landscape of meadows and country lanes, the pub hosts an annual ritual said to be over 200 years old.
The story goes that the widow had baked hot cross buns for her sailor son, due home from sea, as a Good Friday treat. When he failed to return, the widow did not despair; instead, she kept hoping that one day he would turn up, alive and well, at her cottage door. She continued, each Good Friday, to add a fresh bun to those which were hanging from her rafters, ready for her boy to enjoy.
The pub, which had survived both the Blitz and the post-war developers’ bulldozers, was burnt out in December 1995, but by Easter 1996 it was reopened and the widow’s tradition was back in place, with a new bun being added to the few that had survived the fire.
Whether or not it is true, as some cynics have claimed, that the custom was invented as a marketing ploy in the late Victorian period, and whether or not it is true that there was a devoted widow who refused to admit that her child was dead, it is a good excuse for an old-fashioned knees-up.
In 1998, I arrived at the Bun House early, by mid morning, to watch the formalities that were going to be carried out by Able Seaman Russ Abbott, and the celebrations were already well under way, with everyone drinking, eating, singing and dancing.
The quaint, possibly hokey, ceremony in that little Devons Road pub is also a sign of hope for today: a worthwhile symbol of the East End itself, a place that, despite disruption, change and, too often, neglect and destruction, knows all about regeneration, and has been, and still is, the home of a sometimes unregulated people who are maybe not quite like others, but who enjoy having a good time, who can be generous and kind, and who will never, ever be ordinary.
PART 4
Post-war, Post-imperial, Post-industrial, Postmodern, Post-East End?
Things just aren’t the same any more. Isabel Pam
[ 18 ]
Do you know, Kelly’s pie and eel shop in the Roman Road is doing a veggie alternative? I can remember the shock when they first started selling tea in the pie shop, and selling afters, and then putting knives in the cutlery tray instead of just spoons and forks. But vegetarian pies? That doesn’t seem right to me.
The image of the East End as a place where extended families lived a street-centred, neighbourhood-based life has, for those whose relatives lived there for generations but who have now moved on, gone for ever.
It is hard to imagine the bustling scenes on the river of only a few decades ago and the romance of living in a place that, though shabby and down at heel, was the gateway to every port in the world, and where a young man could go down to the docks and jump on a ship just because he didn’t want stew for his tea. With the world there for the taking, how could you feel you were isolated or were missing out on the good life?
The sounds of dock workers shouting to one another over the din of the machinery, as they loaded and unloaded ships from all over the globe, and the sounds of the workers in the victualling yards, the ship-repair works, the hostels, pubs and cafés, competing with the cries of the foghorns downstream, were familiar, commonplace noises. Now men and women travel into the area in a hushed, cocooned world of mobile phones and lap-top computers, on an automated train that doesn’t even require the employment of a local person to drive it.
Aspirations for a better, if different hie are not, of course, bad per se; any child or grandchild can hope that a more desirable place exists, somewhere nicer to raise their own children, with a little garden and a bit less street crime. But the nostalgic draw of the idea of the East End remains. Shopping malls, such as the Lakeside centre in Essex, offer just about everything that the dedicated consumer could hunger for, yet the street markets in east London flourish, and it is not only locals who are going there to shop, browse, gossip and have a laugh. As I queue in an eel and pie house for my take-away pie and mash, I am surrounded by similar ex-East Enders waiting to buy their own little bit of ‘up home’ to take back to their families; and while the stalls in the street outside might now take credit cards for their knock-off designer clothes, the barrow boys’ patter is still as cheekily entertaining as ever.
But, as diverting and colourful as that might be, what, if any, is the future of the East End when a visitor, returning to look for the glorious Victoria Park lido, now finds only a tarmacadamed car park? And then experiences other changes that cannot be quite so easily identified, but which can be felt or sensed in other ways. We are discomforted, as we long for the ‘good old days’ when ‘we was all one’, had a knees-up every Saturday night and never locked the street door, when we realize it is a world that is fading fast, a series of sepia-coloured memories being swallowed up by change. It is not simply the fact that change occurs that is alarming but, as the people explained in the previous chapter, that it does so with such rapidity. One of the defining features of the twentieth century, this can both excite and cause great stress. Is it progress or destruction? Are there ever more marvellous improvements on the way or are we plummeting headlong towards consumer obsolescence? Having just mastered the answering machine, along comes the fax, and, before we know it, we are being given e-mail addresses to write to and websites to visit. If we can be nostalgic for just a decade or so ago, when those machines belonged only in offices, is it any wonder that we long for a slightly more distant past, when we knew the members of our local community and looked out for one another as a matter of mutual survival rather than being persuaded along to Neighbourhood Watch meetings, with people we have never spoken to before, a sticker in the window declaring our watchful, yet isolated participation?
But those who retain their community roots can be as disappointed as those who leave. I spoke to a man in Shoreditch who was fuming about newcomers in the area. He was Jewish and had lived there all his life, his grandparents having come to the East End at the tail end of the last century.
*
These people who have moved in round here, did you see in the papers? They said there’s more artists here now than anywhere else in the world. Artists? Whatever they are, all I know is it’s obvious they don’t come from round here. You should see them. Terrible. People round here have always tried to look nice, not like something out of the rag bag. Even if you didn’t have much, you can afford a bar of soap. They poke about on the stalls for all sorts of old rubbish – things we’d throw away. That’s up to them, but where are our kids meant to live?
In the introduction to his book 1963. Five Hundred Days: History as Melodrama, John Lawton wrote:
A common, corny opening for works of recent history is to refer to ‘a world we have lost’ and then to dribble down into nostalgia – the world as it was in 1962 is not a world we lost, it’s one we threw away.
After speaking to the people who contributed their stories to this book, I would argue that they do not believe that they threw away their old world but that it was snatched from them – by bombs and housing policies, other people’s notion of progress and the pressures of consumerism. It is these which have destroyed their communities and left them stranded.
I was in an East End information centre, close to the City, when a well-dressed man in his thirties came in to inquire about the ownership of the ‘derelict’ houses in the area. When asked by one of the workers why he wanted to know, he explained that he could maybe ‘pick up’ one of the beautiful eighteenth-century houses ‘for a song’ and ‘do it up a bit’. When he learned that any property in the area that wasn’t either social housing or privately owned had, long ago, been snapped up by property developers and speculators, he seemed surprised that somebody had had the idea first. He was, to his credit, shocked when we told him about the historical pressures on affordable housing in the borough and the ever-present problems for local residents and their families. He hadn’t found the answer he was looking for, but he had discovered something about the community – that it is a place where people have always wanted to live.
The old East End, it was great. The smell
, sights, sounds. In the summer, you know, you could smell the smells coming from the river. Not bad smells. No, no, no. You could smell when the sun was on the tarpaulin sheets on the lighters, the barges…[Sighing] I’ll never forget that smell. I can smell it now, after all these years. It was beautiful. And the bloody ships going up and down. The tugs. It was so good, the East End.
This woman recalled a resilience she feels is missing from the society in which she now lives.
The thing I miss about the old days was the light-heartedness of the people. Most of my family and friends were fairly hard up, but they tried to make a living the best way they could. There were no free hand-outs… they knew there was ‘nothing for nothing’, so this gave them an ambition which came out of need. This purpose made them busy and, to a certain extent, content. This happy contentment is something I miss.
But the point she went on to make explained much about what she feels.
I must express, however, that this was seen through the eyes of a child! I feel very nostalgic when I think about the East End, especially when sad events take my mind back to the past and my childhood. When my mother died a few years ago, I found I kept thinking about my time as a child in the East End, because it brought back happy memories. Words that crop up from time to time like ‘pie and mash’ ‘wally’ [pickled cucumber] or any rhyming slang which my uncles used. They take me back. This all sounds very nostalgic, which, of course, it is. But I do think I might have had a different view of things if I had been an adult living in the East End.
My East End Page 31
