Polly: Memories of an East End Girl

by Jeff Smith

  ‘Is there somebody there?’ it asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I am looking for Atherton Road.’

  ‘Well, you have found it, but where are you looking for?’

  It turned out that she was a midwife who had been called out to an emergency. She thought she knew the area and the house well enough, but this fog had completely caught her out. Not surprising really; I walked this way home most days of my life but I wasn’t feeling at all happy about finding my way.

  ‘Well, hang on,’ I said. ‘I will just keep talking and you come towards me until you find the pillar box. Then you can find your way from here.’ And that was what she did. Eventually she said she had found the box and we felt our way round it until we touched hands. I checked the address with her again and realised that she was looking for one of the larger houses a bit further down on the other side of the street. So I told her that she would have to cross straight over, turn right, and then find the house a bit further down. She assured me that this was OK, and off she went again. I waited for a bit and then called out to see if she was OK. Yes, she replied, she had got over and was just about to head off along the garden fences. So I decided it was time for me to go too, and from there I fairly quickly found my way home.

  A Swimming Club dinner in the 1950s – just one of Fred’s social engagements. Fred is standing third from left and Polly is sitting in front of him. Chrissie (p. 67) stands second from left, Milly sits first from left, while Lucy (see p. 67) sits first from the right.

  You know, I have had that woman on my conscience ever since. I never even saw her face, but I have always wondered whether she found her emergency and whether she found it in time. The houses on the other side of Atherton were all rather big, with big front gardens, so even if she found a gate it would be a difficult job finding the front door. There was no way of knowing what number you were at. To be honest, by then I was quite exhausted with the strain and I just couldn’t face crossing a road again so I left her to find her own way. But I have always wondered.

  It turned out that Fred had been in the club when I passed. His swimming meeting had finished quite early so he invited Milly up to the club for a drink. Milly was one of the other swimming club officials and, I think, she was always a bit soft on Fred. Anyway, while they were in the club the fog came down and by the time they left it was completely undriveable. Milly would have had trouble finding her car, let alone driving it. There was nothing for it and Fred had to invite her home to stay the night. I didn’t usually stay up for Fred to get in, he could be very late sometimes. Next morning, when I got up, there was Milly in our lounging chair with a blanket over her! She was terribly sorry and all that and kept trying to say how bad the fog had been. She didn’t have to tell me because I had been out in it, but I let her keep on apologising.

  24

  The Flats

  (1952–6)

  At Earlham Grove Mrs J had the upstairs half and we had downstairs and the cellar. It had very large rooms and they could be a pain to keep warm. The big problem, though, was that there weren’t enough of them. We had a front parlour, which was used as the bedroom for the whole family, the kitchen in the middle which was used as a family living room, and at the back of the house was the sitting room. It was quite a grand room really, with a conservatory into the garden on the back, but it was expensive and difficult to heat so we didn’t use it much. There was a separate toilet down in the cellar, and for a bath we used a tin-tub in front of the kitchen fire. When we first moved in the house had been used as a furniture store – I suppose for storing stuff recovered from bombed-out houses and the like. Probably some of it was none too clean, or maybe the council was taking no risks, but it was obvious that everything had been sprayed with insecticide and disinfectant. Perhaps we should be grateful because it certainly meant that there were no creepy-crawlies in there.

  Anyway, it wasn’t very satisfactory us all sleeping in the same room, especially when the oldest boy went to grammar school, so we kept pestering the council to get us rehoused but they didn’t seem very interested at all. I remember going down to the council offices one day and the girl behind the counter read me the riot act. She told me all about how lucky we were to have a roof over our heads, and at least we had a separate bedroom, and we had a toilet, and we had a garden, and we shouldn’t be greedy, and we ought to realise that other people had problems, and our children were only small (Robert was eleven or twelve by then) and on and on. I felt about half-an-inch tall by the time she finished with me and decided that I would never again go there to ask. Which was funny, because the next week we got a letter to say we were being rehoused to a modern, purpose-built flat in Stratford. It sounded really good, but looking back, that must be the worst place we ever lived.

  The flat was the top corner of a block of six – three floors high and two flats on each floor, either side of a central staircase. The block had a flat roof, so our flat had three outside walls and a flat concrete slab roof. On top of that, it faced straight down a long wind tunnel of a road. It really was the coldest place on God’s earth. In the winter we used to wake up to ice on the windows ¼in thick. In the living room we arranged the sofa and an armchair tightly around the fire with the television making the fourth side of the square, and that was the only comfortable place in the flat. Even walking over to the window was like walking into a fridge. At least we had two bedrooms so that the boys could have their own room. There were three other, larger blocks of flats and they were arranged as sides of a large courtyard that we called ‘the Square’, though I suppose that really it was a rectangle.

  Opposite us on the top floor, just across the landing, was Mrs H. She was a funny woman, and full of airs and graces. We used to call her ‘the Queen’, ever since she told us that although it was a small flat, they had done it up like a palace and everybody who visited said how wonderful it was. Not that we ever saw many people visit. She would also tell anybody who cared to listen that she had married below her station. Her husband and daughter were both quiet and pleasant, but very much dominated by the Queen.

  I never got her full story, or rather, I got so many stories that I was never sure which one was true. She had an older daughter who didn’t live with her but came to visit very occasionally. Mrs H said that the girl’s father was a rich Jew who was also a famous fighter pilot in the war, but as a Jew ‘his people’ wouldn’t let him marry her. I don’t know. Towards the end of the war she had met Mr H when he was serving in the army near Great Yarmouth somewhere. They, in turn, had to get married and that was their daughter, S. The Queen had a sister who visited on very rare occasions. Once she came when the Queen was out. She was knocking on the door as I was coming in, so I told her that Mrs H was out – ‘What, looking for another man I suppose,’ was her only response. I don’t know what lay behind the remark but I guess it meant something about the background story.

  Fred and Polly outside the flats in about 1955.

  Once when I came in from shopping the door was open and I could hear sobbing inside. I was a bit worried so I stood at the door and called in to ask if everything was all right. The sobbing got louder and more panic-stricken. I called again and it got worse again. So I put down my shopping and gingerly went in, calling out all the while. I soon found S in the small bedroom, laying on her bed all bloodstained and sobbing uncontrollably. I asked her all the obvious questions; what was the matter? where was her mother? was she in pain? and all the rest, but she just kept on sobbing. I spent a long time sitting on the bed trying to calm her down and eventually she began to get a bit more sensible. Between the sobs she eventually told me that her mum had just run out, which all seemed very odd. I decided that I would have to do something so got up and, looking out of the window, saw her mum coming slowly across the Square with Mrs B. At that time the Bs were the only people in the Square with a telephone and all emergencies were taken to them for a phone call. Talking to her
later I got the other half of the story. The Queen had turned up on her doorstep gibbering away in hysterics. Eventually she calmed Queenie down enough to discover that ‘S was haemorrhaging’ and so she phoned for the doctor. Even then the Queen wouldn’t go back home, she just wanted to wait until the doctor had called, but Mrs B managed to persuade her that she should go home and see how her daughter was. That was when I saw them. So I waited until they arrived and then left. The doctor eventually arrived and it turned out that she was just having a nosebleed but her mother had panicked.

  The Queen was a diabetic and around the time we moved away she started to be very ill and have all sorts of complications. She was in and out of hospital and died very soon after. I have often wondered what happened to Mr H and S – they seemed such nice and inoffensive people to have to share a home with the Queen.

  I can’t remember who was in the flat under the Queen when we first moved in, but after a couple of years the Ws moved in. They also had one daughter, named after her mum. They were a nice couple and I still get a Christmas card from them every year. We had one close run in with them, though. One day I was coming in from work just as Mrs A (who lived in the bottom flat) was coming out of the door complaining about the smell of gas. She was right, the smell was awful! I made my way upstairs, trying to work out where the smell was coming from but it didn’t seem so bad upstairs. I was only in for about ten minutes because I had some errands to run. I went straight out again, through the smell, downstairs, out and around the corner. For some reason I just glanced back at the flats, and noticed that the Ws’ curtains were still drawn. Well, they weren’t that sort of family at all so I went back and knocked up Mr K opposite. He was on afternoon shift that week and he knew the Ws a lot better than me. I must admit I was getting worried by now, and even more when he told me, in confidence, that Mrs W had left her husband a few days previously. So I looked through the letter box. The smell was awful, and sticking out of the kitchen was a pair of feet! Mr K grabbed the spare key he kept for them and we went in, turned off the gas cooker, opened all the windows, then called the ambulance. It was all touch and go, but he lived. Later they got back together again, and they still are.

  The Ks were a nice family. They had lost their first baby and now had one boy, little T. He became a hairdresser and did quite well for himself. He bought a house out in Essex somewhere and later on his parents moved out to be near him. I don’t know what became of them.

  At the bottom were the As on one side and the Ms on the other. The As were older than everybody else in the flats, in fact the old man took his pension not long after we moved in. They had one grown-up son who used to visit quite often and keep an eye on them. Mr A died of a heart attack some time later, but then he always looked like a heart-case; short, fat, florid and always catching his breath.

  The Ms weren’t a happy family. They were Catholics and went to Mass every Sunday, but everything else about them seemed to be trouble. Mr M had the most awful temper and was always going on about somebody or something, shouting his mouth off, yelling at the kids in the Square and all the rest. Really he was a nasty piece of work. They had one daughter who they held up as the example of how children should be brought up, until suddenly she had to get married. The old man was beside himself, literally threw her out on the street and refused to speak or have anything to do with her or her husband. For years she used to visit her mum only when he was out of the house. Still, she seems to have made a decent marriage, and the last I heard she too was living out in Essex somewhere and her parents had moved out to be near her. I suppose there must have been some sort of reconciliation.

  The Square was meant to be a sort of general community area and all the kids used to play there. It even had a basic kids’ playground with a roundabout but they soon outgrew that and played on the grassed areas. At least it kept them off the streets, but there was always somebody ready to complain about the noise, or the danger of flying balls, or that they were ruining the grass or whatever. Looking back on it we had a taste of everything around that Square: friendships and feuds, romances, marriages and marriage break-ups, births and premature death, an attempted suicide, kids going into a life of crime and kids going to university and burglaries and great generosity. All in all, though, I wasn’t one tiny little bit sad when we got the opportunity to move away into rural Essex. At least, that is how we thought of Basildon in the early 1960s.

  Postscript

  Mum’s influence was long-lasting. Her grand-daughter Ruth read English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University (1996–9). In 1998, as part of its celebration of fifty years of women receiving degrees, Cambridge University invited essays about the contribution of women to its development. This is an extract from ‘Bounteous Mothers’, Ruth’s prize-winning essay.

  * * *

  Since the history books do not offer details of the lives of any of the women who served Cambridge in previous centuries, it is necessary instead to turn to a more recent example. Such an example is as valid as an older one, because even in this century, women have contributed to the successes of their sons, brothers and husbands more often than they have had the opportunity to earn those successes themselves. The woman in this example happens to be my grandmother, although many people in Cambridge today could probably tell their own equivalent stories.

  My father came up to Cambridge in 1964. His parents were as nervous for him as they were proud; being working class people born and raised in the East End of London, Cambridge University must have seemed to them like a different world. Neither of them had stayed in school past fourteen. My grandmother had actually turned down a scholarship to the local girls’ grammar school because her mother had insisted that ‘no good ever came of book-learning’. Unfamiliar as the university system was to them, they supported my father in his application, and when they learned that he had been given a place, my grandmother used what knowledge she did have of Cambridge to give her son the best possible start at university. Having been evacuated to the village of Six Mile Bottom, near Cambridge, during the war, she had seen something of student life in the city. She had noticed that the students came up for term with their belongings packed into sturdy carriage-trunks, and so when my father took up his place at Cambridge in 1964, she used the money she had earned working as a cleaner to buy him a trunk just like those she had seen twenty years earlier.

  Fred and Polly at their Golden Wedding anniversary party in 1982.

  Having gained his degree from Cambridge, my father was later able to send all three of his children to university. I am the last of them, and the trunk is still in use. It carries my belongings to and from college and then sits in my room all term serving as a coffee table. As the weeks go by, it gradually disappears under a growing mountain of unwashed mugs and unfiled lecture notes, but it is always there. It is, to me, a symbol of what one woman did, not only for her son, but for subsequent generations of her family and for the university itself, simply by supporting her son’s wish to come to Cambridge.

  The trunk is heavily battered now, and unlikely to survive beyond my graduation, but the legacy of my grandmother’s support certainly will. Everything that I achieve in my life thanks to my education will also be thanks, in part, to her. So, too, will be any credit that the university gains from those achievements. She, and countless others like her, are the bounteous mothers of the alma mater.

  Copyright

  First published in 2012

  The History Press

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  © Jeff Smith, 2012

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