Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read online

  During those winters, as I went from toddler to school child, getting me to wear a liberty bodice was just one of the many everyday hassles my mum coped with. Because, like many kids, I was constantly poorly.

  Bronchitis was an annual event, backed up intermittently by the usual childhood ailments like measles, mumps and whooping cough. Fortunately, the arrival of the new National Health Service in the summer of 1948 meant that we had our ‘panel’ doctor, Dr Kinglin, just a short walk away in Sandringham Road. (GPs then were known as ‘panel’ doctors because they were entitled to be on the panel or committee of those providing care under the new National Insurance Act of Parliament.) And all kids eventually got vaccinated for real nasties like TB and polio, which was a really big worry in the 50s. But despite the authorities’ attempts to boost children’s welfare, while ours was a home of plenty nutritionally, the combination of damp walls and coal fires meant it wasn’t exactly healthy.

  My dad’s health too had been damaged from his time in the hot, humid climate of India, where he’d contracted malaria. In the early years after he’d returned, recurring bouts of the illness came on suddenly, without warning. He’d start shivering, throwing up and get bad headaches. The attacks would leave him exhausted, bed-bound and sweating profusely. My mum would have to change the sheets and put them through the kitchen mangle because they were literally drenched in his sweat. Over time, the malaria attacks lessened. The bottles of quinine tablets in the bathroom cabinet had not been very effective in preventing these incidents. But he kept them, just in case. Alongside the bottles of Eno Salts and Andrews Liver Salts, which he regularly used to help cure his morning-after hangovers.

  Those coal fires inside, of course, didn’t help when you considered the terrible fogs and smogs outside, essentially really bad pollution which plagued London’s streets for many years after the war until The Clean Air Act 1956 restricted the pollution with the introduction of smoke-free zones where only smokeless fuels like coke could be burned. At one point before the cleanup, the pea-soupers were so bad and visibility so poor in London’s streets that bus conductors were reduced to walking in front of the bus with a flashlight; an estimated l2,000 people died in London as a consequence of the Great Smog of l952.

  The coal fires, of course, had a dual purpose for families: you huddled round them for warmth, but you also habitually dried your clothes in front of them, thereby absorbing more smoke into your body. And, though we didn’t think or know about it at the time, my dad’s smoking habit, twenty Players a day, plus the odd cigar, all contributed to the general unhealthy fug all around us: my mum too became prone to bouts of bronchitis.

  And so it was regular Vicks VapoRub, Friar’s Balsam (an inhalant), and Eno cough syrup, the main products widely available to ease congestion. And if things got bad, the new ‘wonder drugs’ like penicillin had emerged via the NHS to combat chest or lung infection, which actually saved my life – and probably many others – during the foggy early winter months of 1948.

  I’m in my parents’ bed, semiconscious but vaguely aware of the strangeness of the situation: by now, at age three, my permanent sleeping place is the little front bedroom. But they’ve moved me. It’s serious.

  Anxiously, Molly and Ginger creep in and out to watch over me, voices hushed, their faces grave. A nasty cough has suddenly turned into a fever. I toss and turn, burning hot one minute, teeth chattering the next. So they nervously call Dr Kinglin.

  ‘It’s pneumonia,’ he says gravely, after examining me, his stethoscope cold and probing against my clammy skin. ‘To be honest, Mrs Hyams, it’s touch and go,’ he adds, handing my mum a prescription for the penicillin.

  ‘Get her to take this and if she makes it through the next twenty-four hours, she’ll be OK.’

  And so, for those perilous twenty-four hours, they take it in turns to catch some sleep in the small bedroom while the other holds vigil over my bedside, somehow coaxing me to swallow the precious drugs – luckily, the chemist in the High Street was open – sip water or a few precious spoonfuls of soup before I drift off again.

  ‘Thank you for the hankies, Daddy,’ I tell Ginger at one point.

  I am delirious, raving, my dreams have somehow morphed into a surreal reality. How scared they must be, how powerless they must feel in the face of this unexpected calamity. Oblivious to all fear, I sleep through most of the night. And, the following morning, just as the doctor has predicted, my temperature has dropped, the fever has gone and the delirium has vanished. I’m out of the woods.

  But it’s several weeks before I am fully recovered and they dare to take me out again. ‘Those drugs,’ they tell anyone who will listen, ‘they really are wonder drugs, you know.’ And their trust, in the doctors, the NHS, this amazing new system of free healthcare for everyone, is formed for the rest of their lives.

  If I was cherished and mollycoddled by my parents before this frightening event, it reached epic proportions afterwards, understandable perhaps for an only child, but it eventually left me feeling uncomfortable and, later on, somewhat frustrated.

  Sadly, you sometimes hear people say that they never felt really loved by one or both parents. My problem was the reverse: I always knew I was loved and was the centre of two people’s entire universe, yet the older I got, the more I felt stifled by this overprotectiveness, this fear that harm might come to me, especially via the harsh elements outside the ‘safety’ of our flat.

  Yet the bout of pneumonia had another, more positive outcome. Fully aware that I’d diced with death, overhearing my mum’s phone conversations about it, I became more compliant when my mum suggested I don the dreaded liberty bodice in the winter months. Soon, I was insisting on buttoning it up myself. I continued to wear it throughout my childhood. Though to this day, the very thought of those rubber buttons still has the power to make me shudder.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ASCOT’S REVENGE

  There was a Monster living in our little flat. It had quite a bit of competition, mind you, from the other less-than-appealing aspects of our home. It competed with the damp paper-thin walls – giving me ample opportunity, in my cramped bedroom, to hear my parents performing their daily rituals – the slash-your-wrists-now view from the pocket-sized kitchen (a bombsite that eventually became a very noisy timberyard), and the equally grim vista from my parents’ bedroom and living room – a somewhat sinister sloping tiled roof of what had once been a dairy in Shacklewell Lane.

  The Monster resided in the bathroom, attached to the wall, a smart, shiny white enamel contraption with a blue triangle triumphantly proclaiming its heritage: the Ascot, the ‘water heater’ that didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t deliver the one thing you desperately wanted – constant running hot water for a bath.

  Living with the Monster was an unending battle that went on for years: the on-off pilot light versus my mum. My parents were very proud of it the day the man from the Gas Board came round and installed it over the bath. Essentially, the Monster was a small gas water heater with a spout emerging directly from it. The heater was ignited from a pilot light inside when you wanted to run the tap for hot water. Those modern-day miracles cost about £10 each at the time – a few hundred pounds in today’s terms – so Molly considered herself lucky to have one in the bathroom. Kitchen hot water still came from saucepans heated on the gas cooker.

  Ascots were relatively new then. Introduced into Britain in the late thirties by a German company, for many people they were the first ever source of hot water ‘on tap’, so it’s nice to know that our country’s triumph over Hitler came with a nasty domestic sting in its tail: all over the land, families like ours in the post-war years regularly did battle with the temperamental device and its unpredictable on-off pilot light.

  The general idea was that you’d light the pilot light inside the Ascot with the manual push switch underneath. Then, in theory, the light would go on, ready to heat up the water. Alas, when you let go of the manual switch, the light would all too frequentl
y flicker, weaken – and go off. So no hot water.

  ‘The pipe’s blocked up,’ said the man from the North Thames Gas Board when my mum managed to get him round after we’d valiantly endured our first lengthy running battle with the Ascot, hours of torture which resulted in nothing more than a cold bath.

  After what seemed like ages tinkering in the bathroom, he announced that he’d ‘done his best’.

  ‘If it keeps going out again, you could try lighting it yourself with a match,’ was his passing shot, a pretty useless piece of advice because it still didn’t work. Time and again, he’d come round, tinker and leave, whistling his way down the dirty stone stairs, his pockets bulging with my dad’s cash, our yearning for hot water on tap still largely unfulfilled. Since neither of my parents had a clue about anything remotely practical around the home we were, of course, sitting ducks for this ‘oooh, gonna cost ya’ type of situation.

  And so the nightly bathtime ritual when I was aged five or thereabouts went something like this. I’d stand there in the little bathroom in my pyjamas, watching and waiting, heart in mouth, as Molly, ever the optimist, would gingerly turn the manual push switch on. Ginger never got involved. He’d still be out ‘at work’ (a euphemism for the George and Dragon pub) most nights.

  Whooosh! The blue light had come on! Carefully, not daring to believe her luck, my mum would then turn the tap on. First a trickle, then a gush, yes! It was hot water! The prospect of a lovely hot bath, with me splashing around in delight, had me hopping up and down in anticipation.

  ‘Mum, Mum, it’s working, it’s working,’ I’d chirp.

  But my innocent joy was frequently short-lived. For, as we eventually learned, life with the Monster was never going to be as simple as that. Gradually, it dawned on us that once we’d watched the trickle turn to a flood, we could never risk leaving the bathroom to happily assume the flow of hot water from the Monster would result in a steaming hot bath. The Monster was far too cunning for that. If we stepped out to just leave it to its job, the Monster took umbrage. And it promptly stopped heating the water. All too often we’d nip back to the bathroom to find the light out, the water now tepid. Over and over again, our dreams of a hot bath were a fiasco, a disaster. The Monster was spiteful. It toyed with our hopes, our dreams, in a sadistic way. For while there were times when it let us have what we wanted, all too often the Monster won the war of nerves and didn’t perform. Welcome to the Ascot’s Revenge.

  And so I grew up understanding that to be really sure of a decent hot bath there was only one true way: you deployed endless saucepans of heated water, dashing back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom (one advantage of having such a pokey flat meant there was virtually no distance between the two), tipping the hot water into the bath, then running back again to collect another saucepan from the kitchen to fill with more cold water to be heated. This, of course, took some time because the gas cooker took ages to warm the pans.

  In my early years, Mum would give up trying to get the Ascot to work and with a sigh, she would get the matches, light the gas on the kitchen cooker, and wait for the saucepan to boil to make me a bath. (Like many of their generation, my parents grew up with the ‘strip wash’ over a basin full of warmed-up water, so my little baths, somehow, tended to take precedence over their own requirements.)

  Then, as I grew bigger, I was allowed to ‘make’ the nightly bath myself, carefully taking each heated saucepan into the bathroom to slosh it into the bath, nervously testing the hot water to see how much cold I could add to move things along and allow me get into the bath to finally splash around.

  Only when I’d reached my early teens did things improve, and better, more efficient water heaters were installed in the kitchen and bathroom, as well as new gas fires that replaced the coal fires in the other rooms. But for me, bathtime as a kid will always be associated with trying to wash myself in a less-than-satisfactory amount of tepid water, always watched by the white Monster over the bath and the flickering pilot light, taunting me endlessly with their power.

  CHAPTER 9

  A DIAMOND RING

  Not everyone in our street was as involved as we were in acquiring goods via the thriving black market through the early post-war years. The family who inhabited the condemned house on the corner, the Coopers, and their boy Bobby, or our downstairs’ neighbour Maisie in the ground-floor flat, weren’t likely to splurge on any of the black-market luxuries found in our home: you needed hard cash to continuously take advantage of it.

  While the post-war black market still prevailed across the country, in London’s Petticoat Lane, the city’s oldest, established, unruly trading post, it boomed. All sorts of things found their way to the Lane, virtually everything you couldn’t officially buy in those times of lean living, to be sold with a nudge and a wink: ciggies, nylons, off-ration expensive clothing, small items of furniture, booze and all kinds of tinned foods were frequently available – right up until the time rationing officially ended in 1954.

  In my dad’s bookie world of punters, spivs and runners, ignoring the regulations and using black-market goods to trade for favours was as normal as going to the pub, picking up bets and boozing.

  Big bottles of whisky, expensive French perfume, packs of shiny seamed stockings, tins of red salmon or canned sliced peaches, different kinds of cosmetics, soaps and toiletries frequently found their way into our little flat, luxuries my mother soon took for granted, along with the large wooden boxes of the finest Havana cigars that took pride of place on our mantelpiece, or the curved white containers with brightly coloured plastic labels containing exotica like sticky dates, that sometimes piled up in our pantry.

  Even with coupons, you couldn’t buy these things freely in the shops. But Ginger frequently reached for his wad of cash to peel off a few notes for such items when they were offered to him by stallholders or drinking pals, even if we didn’t really need them. Sometimes, of course, we wouldn’t see the things he had purchased in our home: they’d form part of a trade-off for a favour my dad had done or owed someone.

  But while passing over black-market goods as tips was one thing, my dad had a consistent habit of getting whatever he wanted: the ‘bung’, cockney slang for a bribe, cash slipped into the right hand to open a hitherto closed door or facilitate a favour. Bungs were a way of life on his territory.

  My dad used the bung in various ways. He was a generous tipper too, beloved by the cabbies who brought him home nightly, but primarily, his philosophy was using the bung to cut all corners, get you whatever you wanted or needed fast. And because you’d paid for a favour in cash, you could always come back for another – with yet another bung, of course.

  As a child, of course, I had no real idea what this really meant; I just heard about it, absorbed it in passing chat between my parents. The legendary world of the poverty stricken East End – where everyone had very little, but helped each other out just the same – didn’t seem to operate that way in our case. Virtually everything my dad did was a trade-off; favours were always paid for in hard cash.

  So while much of the country scrimped, saved, queued and generally endured a bleak, miserable post-war landscape, people like my dad were living it large after the war, simply because they always had the ‘readies’. And, of course, this time was very much a cash culture, though my dad was a big fan of the relationship forged with the bank manager – and postdated cheques. The bank manager too was a frequent recipient of my dad’s largesse. Frequent double scotches in the pub and the well-placed supply of boxes of Havanas were another way of cementing the ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ relationship.

  Officially, my dad and The Old Man ran the formal side of their business from their tiny office, taking telephone bets from customers who ran an account with them. But the lucrative side, of course, was taking cash bets on the street or in the pub, helped by their small team of trusted ‘runners’. A lot of this illicit exchange of cash and betting slips actually went on in the men’s toilet in the p
ub.

  This way of life, while not actually observed by myself or my mum, still got absorbed into our home life. Knowing and hearing about it as I grew up made me streetwise, to an extent, because all around me the official rules were being broken – with no obvious consequences. But there was one consequence – I grew up with the somewhat warped idea that if anyone did you a favour, big or small, somehow you ‘owed’ that individual, even if the favour was given carelessly or meant little to the other person at the time. You never forgot that personal debt. One good turn deserves another, certainly. But not for ever.

  This distorted belief dominated my life far into adulthood. I firmly believed that if someone did you a personal favour, you were indebted to them. This meant that I was unable to clearly discriminate between a genuine gesture of helpfulness or friendship and one which was primarily made out of self interest, unhelpful, to say the least, in the cut and thrust world of journalism where ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ behaviour is all pervasive. Time and again I’d be shocked to realise how misplaced I’d been in my belief that certain individuals were ‘friends’ because of one helpful, spontaneous gesture which, while I’d clung to it as proof of friendship or loyalty, merely turned out to be directly related to my place in the editorial pecking order. Yet only quite recently did I fully realise where this misplaced view came from. Maybe there were a few genuine cash-free favours around us when I was a child. But I never saw evidence of this.

  Yet there was one memorable occasion when what fell off the back of a lorry, or came into our home from heaven knows where, really did make a big impact on my child’s view of my dad’s wheeling and dealing. It was the night he came home from the George & Dragon with a big diamond ring in his pocket.