Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Page 2

  And so I came into the world as a near miss, almost a vicar’s child by a hair’s breadth. A mistake by a nervous young girl could have led to a very different fate, growing up in a chilly northern parsonage, my early life ruled by the diktat of the Church, rather than an East London Jewish kid growing up in a squalid building abutting a bombsite with doting parents who lived for the moment, without too much thought for the future. Or of God, come to that.

  So there it is, my arrival in a medieval castle, cast into a chilly world where chaos and confusion reigned. The castle, so ancient it is mentioned in the Doomsday Book, is now an upmarket luxury hotel, reputed to be haunted. And guests have been known to report hearing a baby cry long into the night. Even when there were no babies around at the time …

  CHAPTER 2

  A TELEGRAM

  Like millions of other families, our lives were mired in chaos and uncertainty in the months just before the war ended. We too had our share of bad news as we struggled through the early months of 1945 in our temporary lodgings in Roxholme Grove, Leeds.

  In an upstairs bedroom, my grandmother, Bella, lay dying from breast cancer. Molly, helped by her sisters Sarah and Rita, did her best for their mum, helping wash and get her to the toilet, trying hard to tempt her to eat. Outwardly, they acted as if this was a temporary situation – and that she would gradually recover. But everyone knew in their hearts it was hopeless. A doctor had made it clear they could expect the worst.

  ‘Nothing to be done,’ he told them bluntly. ‘Just try to make sure she eats and drinks whatever she can.’ Back then, there was no option of an NHS hospital bed for a sixty-seven-year-old with a terminal illness; indeed, there was no National Health Service, no morphine to dull the pain, no Macmillan cancer nurses; just another war-weary family struggling to cope with a world turned upside down.

  Tears slowly trickled down Bella’s pale, shrunken face the day Molly came home from the castle with her precious bundle. She’d been quite brave up till then, despite the terrible pain. But she broke down when she saw me for the first time.

  ‘I’ll never see her grow up,’ she sobbed, while my grandfather, Oliver, hovered at her bedside, unsure of his place in a sickroom.

  Still fit and dapper in his seventies, Oliver coped with his wife’s distress by leaving the room. In fact, he left the house as often as was decently possible. Ignoring the harsh northern winter, smartly dressed in his pinstripe suit and big overcoat, he went out for long walks most days. He had been a good provider for his family of eight children, working long hours as a tailor and cutter to the fine ladies who shopped in the big London department stores in the early 1900s. Even in the thirties, when times became more difficult, he’d managed to keep working. As a husband, however, he fell short: his daughters knew all too well that their parents’ marriage had been an unhappy liaison, arranged by their respective Jewish families just months before the pair had fled the Russian pogroms (the anti-Jewish violence that swept across Russia in the late 1800s) to settle in England.

  In St Petersburg, Bella, eighteen, had fallen in love with a neighbour, a handsome young Russian boy. But he wasn’t Jewish. So her parents had promptly married her off to Oliver, who was.

  Already in the late stages of pregnancy when the couple boarded the boat for the long journey to England, Bella and Oliver’s first child, Jane, was born prematurely on the boat – and remained stateless throughout her life. Bella had struggled to adjust to their new life in London as pregnancy had followed pregnancy for the better part of fifteen years. Later in life, she’d confided to her daughters that Oliver’s relentless, constant desire for sex, regardless of her own needs or feelings, had made the marriage close to a living hell for her.

  Married to a man she couldn’t love, worn down by his incessant physical demands, she poured all her love and affection into her offspring, spoiling the four older boys rotten – the traditional Russian way – while leaving the girls to help with all the hard work around the home. Except for Molly, that was, the baby of the family, who was almost as spoilt and indulged as the boys.

  Now, with their mother’s life ebbing away upstairs, Bella’s three youngest daughters sat huddled in front of the fire in the living room of their lodgings in the draughty Leeds house, dreading the worst and apprehensive about the future, while I lay sleeping in my tiny cot in the girls’ shared bedroom.

  Rita, the oldest of the trio at 32, had already been married twice. Her first somewhat reckless marriage, to a Russian Communist called Georgy, had ended in divorce. Her second husband, Hans, an academic, had died unexpectedly from a brain tumour. Undaunted by her misfortune, she was the most restless and adventurous of the girls.

  ‘I’ve had a letter from Hans’s parents in Kenya,’ she told her sisters, in an attempt to break the gloom.

  ‘They want me to go and see them when the war’s over,’ she confided.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see Africa, so this is my big chance.’

  ‘You can’t start making plans about something like that now,’ snapped Sarah bitterly. ‘You mother’s dying – or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Molly peered at her older sister. ‘What’s got into Sarah?’ she wondered. But by the look on Sarah’s face, she figured it was best to keep quiet. The outburst was completely out of character. Normally, Sarah was quiet, shy, even withdrawn. She kept herself to herself. Molly couldn’t ever remember her sister shouting or snapping like this at anyone.

  ‘You’re acting as if the war’s going to be over any minute!’ Sarah said loudly, her face starting to redden with anger.

  ‘No one’s really sure what’s going to happen. My friend Vera in London says the Germans are still dropping those horrible V2 bombs all over the place and some people are saying the Allies are stuck in Italy. Why can’t you think a bit about what’s going on around you, you stupid woman!’

  Rita shrugged. Unruffled by Sarah’s retort, she dipped into her handbag and took out a powder compact, clicking it open to check her make-up.

  ‘You’re right, Sis,’ sighed Molly, getting up to go upstairs to peek into my cot, wondering what the hell was wrong with Sarah but anxious to leave the room before things got too heated. ‘They keep telling us it’ll be over soon but we’re all in the dark really. God knows when Ginger will be coming back from India.’

  My dad, Ginger, had been serving in the Royal Army Pay Corps, stationed in Foots Cray, near Sidcup in Kent, ever since the call-up, not long before he and my mum had married in the spring of 1940 after a courtship of over four years. They’d met in a youth club in Clapton, East London, where both their families lived at the time. But after his unexpected posting overseas in April 1944, when Molly discovered she was expecting me, she and her family chose to move to the comparative safety of Leeds, rather than continuing to risk facing the chaos of the London bombings.

  Not exactly the patriotic type, Ginger had originally toyed with the idea of deserting – 20,000 men who couldn’t face the idea of being in the armed forces did just that – but Molly, normally easy-going, had put her foot down when he’d suggested it.

  ‘I’m not going to be a deserter’s wife, Ging,’ she’d said with typical good sense. ‘You can’t go on the run like that. It’s not fair on me.’

  And so my dad reluctantly did his duty. An eye injury as a child meant he wasn’t deemed fit for combat so he remained in a Pay Corps clerical desk job in Foots Cray throughout nearly four years of war. He’d been working alongside his father Jack in the family business in the East End just before war broke out. Jack was a commission agent (a polite word for bookmaker) so my dad, technically a commission agent’s clerk, was accustomed to a desk job. But the sudden posting overseas with the Pay Corps, destination unknown – until his first letters had started to arrive from faraway India – had been an unexpected separation. They’d hoped to see out the war together in London.

  But while Molly shared with millions the all-too-common uncertainty of a loved one thousands of miles away, what
no one knew that cold January night was that Sarah was quietly nursing a tragic secret, one she couldn’t bring herself to reveal to anyone.

  Just a week before, there’d been an unexpected knock at the front door in the early afternoon. Apart from her bedridden mother, no one else was at home. Rita was at the shops and Oliver had gone for one of his long walks; Molly had taken me to briefly visit a friend living in separate lodgings in a nearby street.

  Sarah stared at the man on the doorstep. He’d arrived by bike; he looked terribly young. He had a telegram in his gloved hand.

  ‘Are you Mrs Lang?’ he said, his voice low, hating his job, the war, the winter.

  ‘Yes I am,’ said Sarah, the fear and dread already rising in her, wanting to slam the door shut in the young man’s face and run away for ever.

  Sarah knew exactly what this meant. You heard about it often enough. Sometimes you dreamed that it was happening to you.

  But like the polite, self-contained woman she was, she took the envelope, thanked the man politely, closed the front door and walked slowly into the kitchen to read its contents. At first, she just stared at the words in the telegram. Then she reread it over again. But she didn’t cry. She just heated up some water in the kettle, lit the gas and made herself a cup of tea. Later, she tore the hated piece of paper into a hundred tiny pieces. It would be months before she let herself weep. And then, of course, she couldn’t stop.

  Sarah was thirty, with a career in the Civil Service. The very opposite of my mum who was pretty, lively and flirtatious, Sarah was studious, serious and quite prim; by then, no one had really expected her to marry. Yet until the telegram arrived, she’d been a married woman for six months. She had met Anton, an Austrian Jewish refugee who’d enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, at a dance in London. In typical wartime fashion, there’d been a rushed courtship and a proposal just before he was due to be posted overseas.

  ‘But what if you don’t come back?’ asked Sarah when they discussed it all.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come back,’ he said confidently. ‘The war will be over soon, anyway.’

  After their register office wedding, Anton was posted overseas, somewhere in Europe. They’d managed just one weekend together in London as man and wife. Now he was dead. Killed by a devastating V2 rocket attack on a packed Antwerp cinema, while on brief leave visiting his brother in Belgium. 567 people died in that attack on the Rex in Antwerp, the highest single death toll from one rocket attack during the war in Europe. It happened just four days before I was born in the castle.

  Sarah kept her sad secret through that miserable Leeds winter of 1945. Only after Bella’s funeral in April, weeks before VE Day in May signalled the official end of the war, did she blurt out the truth to her family.

  ‘I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it what with mum lying there in such pain and you with the baby,’ she told Molly.

  Shocked, Molly had comforted her widowed sister as best she could. At that point, it looked like tears and sorrow had virtually engulfed their life. Nursing Bella through her last few weeks of pain and anguish, helpless at watching a loved one suffer, would haunt the sisters for many years to come. Yet somehow, like the rest of the country exhausted by the daily struggle of wartime existence, they had no option other than to put their feelings aside and get on with the business of living.

  With his wife gone, Oliver wanted to remain in Leeds, as did their older sister Jane. ‘I’m too old to start again in London and Jane will be here,’ he told his family.

  And so the family started to splinter: Rita did go to Africa in 1946; she never lived in England again. Sarah too would eventually strike out for the unknown in Canada after the war, never to return.

  With her other siblings scattered – two brothers still posted overseas, the other two married with young families, far away from London – Molly had to make her own plans for us. And sure enough, days after their mother’s funeral, a letter arrived from her father-in-law, Jack, known as The Old Man by his family, in London’s East End.

  ‘I’ve managed to find a flat in Hackney, off the Kingsland Road near Dalston, for you and the baby,’ he wrote. ‘The rent’s one pound a week. It’s only temporary but it means you’ll have a roof over your head for when Ginger comes home. I’ve paid the key money, so you don’t have to worry.’

  Molly could only feel grateful and hugely relieved. Finding a habitable flat to rent anywhere in London was a monumental and daunting task, with so many bombed-out ruined buildings everywhere and some homeless families with no option other than to live temporarily in rest centres, temporary shelters set up by the authorities (often in school buildings) to house those whose homes had become uninhabitable due to enemy action and who could not make any alternative housing arrangements.

  And, even if you were prepared to get up at dawn to stand in a queue of hundreds if you managed to spot a flat up for rent, you still needed hard cash to hand over to greedy private landlords: a bit of a problem for Molly with her tiny soldier’s wife’s allowance.

  Ginger’s mum and dad, poles apart from her own more cultured, Russian-born parents, were Jewish cockneys from Petticoat Lane, with a fierce attachment to their patch of London; they’d toughed it out in the very heart of the devastated city, blithely ignoring the Blitz, the bomb craters, the blackouts and the wrecked buildings around them.

  Now, in typically resourceful fashion, they’d given their eldest son’s wife a helping hand just when it was needed most. Molly hadn’t even asked for help – The Old Man just did it. Though Dalston, with its shabby East London surrounds and badly bomb-damaged houses with rubble everywhere, wasn’t exactly Molly’s first choice as a place to raise a family; she’d grown up in the slightly more respectable confines of West London.

  ‘Oh well, whatever the flat’s like, it’ll be a start for us,’ mused Molly, picking me up to cuddle me for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s just temporary, anyway.’

  A few weeks later, my mum, Sarah and I boarded the packed train from Leeds back to London, joining the melee of other families, evacuees and soldiers heading back to the capital. Trains were so slow and infrequent then you had to get to the station several hours before the departure time just to make sure you’d actually get on. And the journey took nearly 10 hours.

  But the long hours on the train didn’t seem to matter to the two dark-haired slender women who eventually struggled out of the carriage with their heavy cases and a tiny baby onto the crowded platform at King’s Cross Station.

  Peacetime lay ahead. What could be better than that?

  CHAPTER 3

  A HOMECOMING

  We are on a crowded trolley bus, seated near the door, en route to Ridley Road market. It’s only a few stops but today, Molly doesn’t fancy carrying me, less than two years old, all the way down the narrow reaches of the Kingsland Road and back, especially with a shopping bag.

  At the first stop, a tall, thin man jumps on. He’s in uniform, maybe newly demobbed. He plonks himself down on the seat opposite us. I peer at him with considerable childish curiousness. Then, as recognition dawns, I start waving a chubby fist in his face.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ I yell at the top of my voice.

  ‘Is my Daddy!’

  Heads turn. A few people get what’s happening and start to smile. Someone even titters. So many children with dads they’ve never met only know him as a photo, a man dressed in Forces uniform. But Molly is awash with embarrassment.

  ‘Ssh,’ she warns me. ‘It’s not your daddy, Daddy’s in India.’

  I ignore this. ‘Daddy!’ I squeal, reaching out my little arms to the uniformed man, eager to establish a connection.

  For months, a black-and-white photo of Ginger, proudly posing in his Pay Corps uniform, has stood on the mantelpiece. On the back, my dad’s scrawled inscription: ‘To my darling wife and baby daughter, with all my love and devotion, Ging’. It was one of several photos he’d posted from Meerut, India, the administrative centre where the Pay Corps were ba
sed.

  Now the man is smiling. He’s admiring my mum, her Victory Roll hair, bright red lipstick, earrings, smart tailored suit, slim ankles and siren’s slingbacks. She’s a dish, my mum, a petite glamour girl lighting up the post-war gloom. All around us, harassed women duck down the Kingsland Road in scarves, curlers and drab, shapeless utility gear. But not Molly. Even without my little outburst, she’d be turning male heads today.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind being your daddy,’ the man mutters, at which point the bus jerks to a stop. Molly pretends not to have heard him, scoops me up in her arms and we’re off the bus and on the pavement.

  ‘Daddy’s in India,’ she tells me again.

  And to herself she sighs, ‘And it’s about time they let him come home.’

  By now, we’ve more or less settled into the flat that The Old Man found for us in a three-storey brick block with a curious turret shape, in a tiny, narrow street, practically an alleyway, just off Shacklewell Lane, a winding road that meanders down towards Hackney Downs.

  Molly hadn’t exactly been overwhelmed with joy the day she saw our new home. The block, in the middle of the narrow street, had bombed-out houses each side. One house on the corner of Shacklewell Lane was badly damaged but seemed to be inhabited still; Molly spotted a pale-faced boy peering at her from a window. There was some kind of wrecked yard directly opposite the block of flats. Everywhere you looked, there was rubble and damage.

  Before the war, this part of London had been very much a rundown industrial area; clothing factories abounded in Shacklewell Lane and around Kingsland Road. Now it was like so much of East London: a shattered, wrecked wasteland. A few factories had survived and were running, though. Somehow, people continued to live, work and love amidst this chaos. Molly was as familiar with the landscape of wartime havoc as any other Londoner who’d remained there for most of the war; she’d worked as an underwear saleslady in Jax, in Oxford Street, only to turn up for work one morning to find the shop a smouldering ruin. And even in Leeds, which had suffered comparatively few air raids, bomb damage was still evident.