Polly

by Jeff Smith

  The police were called and had to quell the riot and control the crowd. Mum had sent me up to Stratford on some errand and when I got back there was a rope barrier across the end of Lett Road. I didn’t think about it and ducked under the rope to go home. Suddenly this policeman called out and came chasing after me. I was dead scared, but when I explained I lived there he got another policeman to walk all the way home with me. A little while later there was a man sitting on our front wall, so Mum went to see what he was up to and send him on his way. Instead she took pity and asked if he would like a cup of cocoa. I will always remember his reply – ‘I’d even like a glass of water, lady.’

  He must have been in a bad way because Mum invited him in to sit on the bottom of our stairs while she got the cocoa. Then she noticed his feet. He had the remains of a pair of boots wrapped round them, and inside those were some tatters of an old pair of cotton socks stuck to his feet by the dried blood. So she sent me to boil a kettle, then bring a bowl of hot water, then bring a flannel, then bring scissors to cut off the remains of the socks, then bring a towel. Mum was soft-hearted but never did anything herself – she supervised while others did all the fetching and carrying! To crown it all, she even dug out an old pair of Dad’s socks and an old pair of boots before she sent him on his way. Dad hit the roof when he got home.

  Over the next day or so the men gradually drifted away and the street became quiet again. I will never forget the desperation of those men that brought them from the other end of the country to start a riot in our street.

  4

  A Woman on the Bus

  (1916)

  One day, a couple of years after the war [Editor’s note: Second World War], I was upstairs on the bus and started talking to this woman who happened to be sitting next to me. Goodness knows who she was, I’d never seen her before or since, but she was about the same age as me and grew up in the same places as me, so we had a lot of experiences in common. We were talking about how things used to be, how tough our early lives had been, how grim life had been in the First World War, the Depression, and so on and on, when we passed the City of London Cemetery. The woman looked straight past me at the cemetery and went all misty-eyed. For a couple of moments she sat silently watching the cemetery going past. Suddenly she said, ‘My baby brother is buried in there.’ Well, it wasn’t unusual for little babies to die back then; we didn’t have the medical services to care for babies either during the birth or if they got little colds or other illnesses afterwards. As often as not you couldn’t afford to get a doctor anyway, unless things were really bad, and then it was often too late. Even so, it didn’t make any difference that baby deaths happened so often – they were never any easier to cope with.

  Her brother’s death had obviously affected this woman terribly and so I made some comforting noises about how awful it must have been, and how difficult it used to be for everybody, how babies used to die because we could not afford doctors, and so on, when she broke in, ‘It wasn’t like that!’ And what a story she went on to tell! She admitted that most of her story had been put together afterwards, because at the time she was too young to realise quite what was going on. Her mother had never said anything about it and had refused to talk about it, so she had gradually made sense of the events she remembered as she grew up and her understanding increased.

  Her mother had been pretty young, barely much of a teenager herself, and it seems that she had met this fellow who had a good job and in a matter of months they were married. They moved into a couple of rooms, which was good going when lots of just-marrieds had to live with one or other set of parents. Nine months later the first child was born – the woman that I was talking to. Within a very short time the First World War broke out and the woman’s father joined up. So, within little more than a year, this woman’s mother had met a man, married him, had his child and he was gone again. Looking back, it was clear that she had no idea at all how to cope with her life, though thankfully she still had her mother’s support.

  Anyway, over the next couple of years they had quite a struggle to get by. She thought her father visited once or twice, he must have got leave sometimes, but she wasn’t completely sure. Then she gradually became aware that something was up. Her mother wasn’t very well, was beginning to get fat and there were all sorts of whispered conversations. She could see that her mother was dreadfully upset and she stopped going out. Instead her grandmother used to get all the shopping and she came round for long conversations, sometimes arguments. Her face was always cross and she barely spoke to her granddaughter. Eventually, her mother sat her down to tell her a ‘very important secret’. She was told it was terribly, terribly secret and that she must never tell anyone – not even her father! She was going to have a little brother or sister, but no one must ever know. She could not understand how nobody was ever to know, especially her father when he came home again, but she accepted what her mother had said. Her grandmother kept coming round and doing all the jobs that meant going out, but kept just as stony-faced as ever.

  Eventually the day came; her mother kept getting pains and took to her bed. The daughter, even though she was only a couple of years old, could see that there was something wrong and wanted to get help, but her mother said not to worry, grandma would soon be there. Eventually grandma turned up, went in to see the mother, came out again and set about collecting ‘things’ together. She told the little girl to play, to be an especially good girl, and not to go into the bedroom. The grandma stayed much later than usual, in fact right into the night. At bedtime grandma put her to bed on two chairs in the living room. She didn’t sleep very well and kept hearing shouts and yells from her mother, sobs, grandma’s hardest voice, and eventually a baby’s cries.

  Her grandma was still there next morning when she woke up. Grandma made some breakfast and told the girl that every thing was alright and that her mother would just need a couple of days’ rest.

  ‘What about my little brother?’ she asked (she said that she ‘just knew’ it would be a little boy), but grandma just said something about not being a time for silly questions and she should eat her breakfast. And that was that. For the next couple of days grandma was there for almost the whole time. The girl went in to see her mother a couple of times but she looked perfectly well enough to a three-year-old. Then her mother got up and grandma went home. The girl kept asking about her baby brother, but only ever got answers to completely different questions.

  The day after her mother got up for the first time she woke her daughter very early and said they were going for a walk. They were going to take her baby brother out – and this was the first and only time the baby was mentioned – but it was all still ‘a great secret’. Her mother said that she would have the special job of looking after her brother, but still she must not tell anybody about it. After a quick breakfast her mother dressed her up very warmly – it was winter – and put her in the pushchair. Her mother then tucked a very tight bundle in beside her, and somehow she realised this was her brother but couldn’t understand why she could not see his face. Her mother then wrapped and tucked her and the bundle into the pushchair with two or three blankets. She had never been so tightly wrapped in and could barely move. With one more warning about ‘the secret’ they went out. It was very early, in fact it was still dark and there weren’t many people about. They, or rather, her mother, walked for miles and after a while it began to get light. It was a cold, drizzly, dreary, morning but her mother didn’t seem to notice and just pushed on as fast as she could walk. They were walking up a long, tree-lined, street when a lorry went past them and then stopped a few yards ahead. There were a lot of soldiers in the back and they started calling out to them.

  ‘Come on!’ they shouted, ‘jump in, we will give you a lift, can’t have a good looker like you wandering the streets this time of the morning,’ and so on. Her mother looked terrified. She made an excuse about the pushchair but that was no problem and two soldiers jumped down and lifted pushchair, th
e girl and her unseen brother into the back of the lorry. There was nothing for it and the mother climbed on the back of the lorry and sat in the space the soldiers had made for her. She grasped the handle of the pushchair and looked at her daughter with a combination of utter terror and direct threat to keep silent. Looking back, she realised that her mother must have been thinking about these soldiers and worrying about whether they knew her husband. Suppose they talked to him and told him the story? Really, it was totally stupid. When you think how many soldiers were fighting the war it was unbelievable that these men would somehow come across her husband, but she was young and naïve and thought that all the soldiers knew each other! She got more and more agitated with each minute that passed and looked as though she was going to cry.

  They didn’t stay on the lorry for long. Her mother suddenly said this was where they were going and the soldiers helped them off again. They shot off in the opposite direction, round the first corner, and stopped. After a couple of minutes her mother looked back round the corner and, seeing nothing, they set off on their way again. Eventually they reached some gates, which she now realised belonged to the cemetery. They were closed, I suppose they weren’t unlocked until 8 o’clock or something. They stood in a doorway up the road until the gates were unlocked and when the keeper had walked away they went in. Her mother pushed her somewhere far from the gates to where there were some trees. She parked her daughter under the trees looking down one of the roadways and said she should watch to see if anybody came. Then her mother disappeared into the trees, urgently digging down into her shopping bag. After some while she came back, pulled out the blankets, took the bundle and disappeared again. After a bit longer she came back again, obviously crying, tucked her daughter into the pushchair and they retraced their steps back home, this time rather more slowly.

  Her baby brother was never mentioned again. She had kept the secret until today, talking to a total stranger on top of a bus. She could only wonder at the terror of her poor young mother trying to work out what to do with this unwanted unwelcome baby and the desperation of that journey to the cemetery. But she could never stop wondering about that baby’s cry in the night.

  5

  Standard of Living

  (1920–8)

  I do get fed up with all these scientists who find out that this or that food is bad for you. Every type of food seems to take turns at being bad for you – nowadays coffee is one of the big villains but when I was at school it was tea, and I once won a prize for an essay about the dangers and evils of tea drinking. The teacher gave us a lesson about it, full of warnings about the tannin and how it attacked the lining of your stomach, and goodness knows what else, and then everybody in the class had to write an essay for the competition. It was for all the schools in London. As far as I can remember it wasn’t the first prize that I won, but it was something.

  Mind you, tea in those days was always terribly stewed and I dread to think what was in it by the time you drank it. You see, tea was expensive so it never got wasted. Instead, when tea was made the teapot was put onto the hot plate and just kept going with more tea and water all day so that when anybody came in they were immediately offered a cup of tea. Old Mrs M used to go even further and every night she would pour the remains of that day’s tea into a jug, which she kept on the dresser. Anybody who turned up was then offered a drink from the jug – cold stewed tea! It was absolutely foul.

  These days you just don’t appreciate just how tough times could be. When I was a little girl we used to live upstairs in the house and there was a couple living downstairs with two kids. One day the wife came up to ask if Mum would like her to go and buy some cheese or something for her ‘for thre’pence’. So Mum prodded and probed and eventually discovered the reason. Apparently the husband had finally got a job, but would have to go out very early the next morning to start work. The wife wanted to buy some tea, milk and sugar so that she could send him to work with a cup of tea inside him, and she quite literally didn’t have a penny in the house. He would do the whole day’s work on that cup of tea. Mum gave the woman sixpence to buy some lunch as well. Mum was like that. I can remember times when she sent me round to Mrs Somebody-or-other with a bag of potatoes, carrots and a few onions and the firm instruction that ‘even if she offers, you must not take a penny for bringing it; not even a ha’penny!’ She realised the woman was short and did something about it!

  I will say this for Mum, whatever her many faults, she was generous and would not see anybody go hungry. And in those days people could go hungry and get into the most terrible state for the want of very little money. A couple of years after the war I was walking through Stratford and I met a girl I used to go to school with. After we had talked for a little while she said, ‘Do you realise your mum saved my life?’ I didn’t, so she told me the story. Soon after we had left school she had to get married and they had one kid, but her husband couldn’t get work and they just got deeper and deeper into poverty. Eventually they were just completely out of money, out of things to pawn, out of things to sell, and had borrowed as much as they could stand from friends and relatives. She had just had enough of the struggle and decided that she couldn’t go on. So she was walking through Stratford trying to work out how to kill herself when she met Mum. They started talking and slowly the story came out about how desperate the family was. As they parted Mum gave her half-a-crown and that bought food for another day. After that, the mood of desperation passed and gradually things began to look up. As far as she was concerned, even looking back twenty years or so, she insisted that on that one day Mum saved her life for half-a-crown.

  People were simply poor, and poor in a way you just don’t see these days – and nor would you want to see it again. We were alright because Dad always had a job and was able to walk straight back into it after the war. That was leaving aside that because of his job he got us all the vegetables and fruit we wanted either free or cheap.

  You could see barefoot children in the streets. Fred told me once that when he was in the senior class at school his teacher used to buy biscuits out of his own pocket and gave Fred the job of finding out who hadn’t eaten any breakfast before coming to school and giving them a biscuit each. It could be awful, but you just had to get by.

  Mary and Horatio Barker – the granpdarents – in about 1925.

  The Bacon family used to live a few doors from us when I was a girl. It was a second marriage for the wife, which was pretty unusual in those days, and from the way she spoke and acted I think she must have come down a lot. She was a bit classy, if the truth be told. That aside, though, they were ever so happy but very poor and so were always looking for ways to make money. Apart from anything else Mrs Bacon had a baby every year so it was a big family to feed and clothe. Anyway, I remember the time when they made a rag rug. These rugs were made by knotting together strips of rag in a particular sort of way and were very popular, I suppose they were cheap and nobody could afford carpets. Anyway, the Bacons sat round as a family and made this quite large rug. Then Mr Bacon went round the street selling tickets to raffle it. It was pretty good, well made and with good colours, so Mum showed a bit of interest. From then on she got the hard sell. He even cleared a space in front of the fire and showed her how good it looked. She agreed it looked good, but that was no help because she couldn’t be sure of winning – at which Mr Bacon said he was sure she would win if she bought a ticket for five bob! Sure enough, she did win the rug, but she never took part in any more of the Bacons’ money-making schemes because she didn’t know who else had bought a ticket for five bob.

  Life in the East End in the Depression wasn’t easy, but we had our moments. I suppose in lots of ways we enjoyed even the simplest things more because they were so special and so unusual. The highlight of every year was Christmas and going to the Christmas pantomime. The rich people went on Boxing Day, because that was always a bit more expensive, but we used to go a day or so later. We always went to the Borough Theatre on the cor
ner of Bridge Road – it was turned into a cinema later [Editor’s note: the Rex]. The other theatres in Stratford were the Empire in the Broadway, but that was very posh and too expensive for us, and the Theatre Royal in Angel Lane [Editor’s note: later the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, famous for Joan Littlewood’s work], but that was too rough. The outing to the pantomime was a big event shared by all the neighbours. We always went to a matinee and us kids were sent up to the theatre to queue straight after breakfast. We would stay there all morning until lunchtime when the mums (and sometimes dads) would come up and bring sandwiches to eat. By the time we had eaten them the doors would open and in we would go. While the mums bought the tickets us kids had to run upstairs as fast as we could go to grab the right number of seats on the front row of the ‘gods’. We would watch the show from there.