by Victor Gregg
‘Sammy sent me round,’ I said to the woman behind the counter. ‘Leaving it a bit late, ain’t yer?’ she replied. ‘’E only just sent me round.’ ‘What is it then, breakfast?’ ‘Yes please, missus.’ ‘I like the “please”,’ she quips back. ‘Don’t ofen ’ear that in ’ere.’ Up came a huge plate with enough food to feed an army. It was all there: two eggs, bacon, black pudding, tomatoes and a couple of doorsteps of bread, fried almost black – the whole lot emptied out of a seemingly yard-wide frying pan. I found a seat and was tucking in when she came over with the biggest mug of steaming hot tea I had ever seen. ‘Fergot yer tea,’ she said.
After I had gulped the whole lot down and nearly recovered from heaving the heavy sacks about, I staggered back to the shop. The shutters were up and locked, and Sammy and his wife were sitting inside drinking a cup of tea. ‘That’s it then,’ said Sammy, ‘another day done.’ ‘You can turn up tomorrow if you want to,’ said Maisie.
I didn’t need to think twice. ‘Yes please, missus, I would like to.’ ‘Right,’ she says. ‘We open up the shutters at as near as dammit three in the morning. You and Sammy ’ave a break at about six, then you get a breakfast about ten, finished for the day by eleven. Today’s Wednesday, so we will pay you daily until next week and if you’re still with us at the end of the week you can start regular like, two pounds ten shillings a week. We pay for your breakfast and you can take all the veg your mum needs, providing yer don’t get greedy. I’ll pay yer twelve shilling a day until Saturday. And it can be bloody cold at three in the morning, Victor. ’Ave you got a better pair of boots than those you’ve got on now?’ ‘No, I ain’t,’ I said. ‘Well, we’ll see what we’ve got at ’ome. Don’t come in after three thirty, get orf ’ome wiv yer now and get some kip.’ And that was it. I’d got another job.
Maisie was dead right. I staggered off home, dropped on my bed and conked out. Mum woke me up when she came home from work. ‘What’s the matter, Victor, you feeling ill, like?’‘No, Mum, just knackered.’ I told her about the new job. ‘You’ll be the death of me, Victor,’ she said. ‘How on earth are you going to get up at two in the morning?’ Mum had hit the nail on the head. Three o’clock hadn’t sounded so bad, but I hadn’t reckoned on the time I would have to get up in order to get to the Garden by three. ‘Is it a good job then?’ she asked. ‘Best yet,’ I said and told her about my morning’s experiences. ‘The lady who runs the shop says these clothes ain’t no good for the job but I fink she’s going to sort somefink out. You know what, Mum, I think they need someone to ’elp them out, I don’t think that this bloke Sammy is in the best of ’ealth.’ ‘Well, get to bed by nine at the latest. I’ll see what I can rake up to keep you warm and we can borrow Granddad’s alarm clock until you get your own.’ Mum disappeared downstairs to break the news to my granddad and grandmother. I had no doubt that I was in their bad books yet again. ‘Didn’t give ’im the strap enough when ’e was young, no discipline, think they can come and go as they like.’ All the usual stuff. I’d show ’em.
Grandfather’s alarm clock was a real contraption, a huge clockface with two bell-like things on either side and a sort of clapper that hit the bells when the alarm went off. Enough noise to wake the dead. It could have woken up half of Holborn. When it did go off, could I find the button to switch it off ? Neither me nor my mum had given that little matter any thought, so I shoved it into my bed to try and smother the noise.
By the time it had stopped I had given myself a lick with freezing cold tap water, Mum had cooked a bacon sandwich and I was pedalling as fast as I could, steering the bike with one hand and finishing off the remains of the bacon sandwich with the other. I arrived in Long Acre as the church clock chimed 2.30. Mum had put the alarm clock on half an hour: ‘Just in case.’ But, even so, the whole area was alive – shutters were being opened, chains being taken away from the lines of sack trucks and barrows, some men were having their last lounge about and a fag before the real work of the morning began.
The first part of the day had already happened with the arrival from the railway stations of the carts that delivered the hundreds of different sorts of vegetables to the big wholesalers who were based in the market itself. Just before the church clock struck three, a horse and cart drew up outside the place of my new employers, and down jumped Sammy and Maisie, while the driver of the cart tethered the horse to the lamp post outside the shop. Maisie gave me a hug. ‘You made it then, Victor, bit cold in them clothes, ’ain’t yer?’ ‘Ow long yer been ’ere then?’ Sammy chimed in, and he also seemed glad that I had turned up. I told him. ‘Come on then, Victor, let’s get the shutters down and then Maisie will ’ave a nice cuppa ready. By the way, this is Maisie’s bruvver Bert. You won’t see much of ’im except when we unload the goods.’ Bruvver Bert looked older than his sister. It turned out that it was Bert who did all the buying from the big wholesalers. The goods were stacked up in bushel and hundredweight sacks. A shouter yelled out the price of the commodities, up went the hands and a call was made for whatever quantity was desired. Once the deal was done the market porters carted it around to the premises of the buyer. There was no haggling about how much the porters were paid; there were unwritten laws about all of that. Maisie looked after the booking side of the deliveries, Sammy, and now me, stacked the orders on to the cart. While we were doing this, Bert disappeared round the corner to Bernie’s where, with the other carters, he tucked into one of their enormous breakfasts.
‘Vicky boy,’ says Sammy, ‘yer got to learn to stack the cart in the proper manner. Bert’s got to be able to get at the order when he gets to the customer.’ Sammy let me into the mysteries of loading a horse-drawn cart. As for the horse itself, it was a huge beast, contentedly eating away at whatever was stashed inside the nosebag that was permanently fixed to its head. In the gutter there was evidence of the gallons of water the beast had supped up en route from Stepney to Long Acre. Bert came back from Bernie’s, Maisie gave him his orders and off he trotted.
Bert delivered to some of the biggest hotels in the district, anywhere that had a large restaurant. With Bert gone, Sammy and me prepared the orders for the customers with smaller establishments who turned up with their own form of transport. By now it was eight o’clock – what with loading the cart and the comings and goings of the other customers the time had passed in a flash.
Maisie sold only the best. Any item of vegetable that was deemed not up to standard was thrown on the waste pile, and by the amount of rubbish that was collecting along the side of the road it seemed that this is what was done by the market in general.
By nine thirty things began to slow down a bit. ‘I’m off, then,’ says Sammy to his missus and he disappeared around to Bernie’s.
I sat down on a sack of spuds and Maisie came over. ‘Yer done well, Victor, we’re all pleased wiv yer. Now look ’ere, I’ve brought some of Sammy’s bruvver’s clothes, if yer want ’em. ’Is bruvver died a couple of weeks ago, that’s why we were short’anded.’ She produced an old potato sack with a pair of heavy boots, a couple of pairs of thick twill trousers, a thick shirt, a leather apron and a big iron hook. ‘We wasn’t going to give ’em to yer until Monday,’ said Maisie, ‘but if yer keep at it like you bin, then you can consider it that you’re well in. Don’t worry, all the gear ’as bin washed and scrubbed. Seeing it’s not far out of our way we’ll give yer a lift ’ome on the cart. Now, as soon as Bert gits back you go an’ eat.’
I was dumbfounded. ‘I’ll tell yer what, missus,’ I said. ‘I’m not very good at keeping jobs, but I promise to do my best.’ I’d never spoken to anyone in that way before. It was like I was talking to my mum. Then Maisie said: ‘And between you and me, Victor, Sammy ain’t too well neither. If yer see ’im struggling, barge in and give ’im an’ ’and, and fer gawd’s sake stop calling me missus. My name is Maisie and proud of it.’
After I had returned from the café, Sammy gave me instructions on how best to use the hook. ‘Just stick it in the sack and �
��eave,’ he said, ‘much easier than tearing yer fingers to bits, don’t take the ’ook ’ome, if the law catches you wiv it it’s an offensive weapon.’ I could well believe it. What a weapon: stick it in anyone’s head and you’re on a dangler (the end of a rope).
Bert returned to the fold having finished his part of the day’s work. I put the bike on to the tailboard of the cart and off we trundled, up Drury Lane along Broad Street into Kingsway, Russell Square and home. ‘Bit of a posh neighbourhood this, ain’t it, Victor?’ said Maisie. No one had ever called it posh before.
Maisie was right about the clothes. My mum didn’t have to alter anything: even the boots fitted. ‘They seem to be good people,’ said Mum as she surveyed the clothing and the fresh veg I had brought home. ‘’Ard work, is it?’ ‘Very ’ard, Mum, but the time goes quick.’
So now I was hard at it, dressed like a market man, slaving like a market man and knackered when I’d finished for the day. I had never grafted as hard as this, but it was certainly toning me up, and all the while I was learning a completely new way of life.
I found out that all the market traders were family enterprises, almost all of them come from areas east of Aldwych – Stepney, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and the like. Some of them could trace their history at the Garden back two hundred years. The porters were the top dogs. These men, when not pushing a barrow piled up with veg, put the stuff in round baskets piled up on their heads; they could carry as many as ten baskets at a time. I was a gentile in the middle of a crowd of Yiddishers. There was no friction; the whole system worked like a well-oiled machine. With every day that I worked, the more I enjoyed myself. As well as which, I was putting on weight and growing stronger. Maisie was delighted when, one morning, we had to open up and the rain was coming down by the bucketful. ‘We’ll ’ave to pull the blinds down,’ said Sammy. I’d often wondered about these blinds. The other shops pulled them down at the slightest excuse but this was the first time they had been mentioned in the three weeks I’d been there. Sammy got a long pole with a massive metal hook on the end. ‘It takes three of us to pull them down,’ said Sammy, at which I hooked the pole into the slot in the blinds and with a hard pull down came the whole long blind which covered the entire front of the shop. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Sammy. ‘What you been putting in your porridge?’ It was a really great feeling getting praised for doing those blinds. I could feel my muscles rippling under the weight of adulation.
34
Boxing Clubs and the Palais de Danse
For a year, Roscoe, a couple of his mates and me had been members of a sporting club in Islington which specialised in boxing. One of Roscoe’s pals, a chap who went by the good old east London name of Ruby Bernstein, had a brother who worked in Jack Solomon’s office in Great Windmill Street. Jack was the number one promoter of the day, and if by chance you passed by the ‘shop’, as it used to be called, you could see groups of hopefuls waiting to be introduced to the great man himself, and with a bit of luck get on to a programme as a filler, the small six-rounder fights that kept the punters amused before the main event.
Ruby’s brother could be relied on to get tickets for any decent fight we wanted to see, usually at the local baths, sometimes up the Cally, sometimes in Hoxton. He could even wangle seats for the Ring at Blackfriars, which, after the Harringey Arena and the Royal Albert Hall, was the main fight arena in London. We loved everything about boxing. Of all the clubs to be found in the back alleys of working-class areas, it was the boxing clubs that attracted the young boys the most. Here was a way of climbing out of the dirt and grime and into the big time. All you had to do was to get in the ring and destroy anyone who stood in your path to fame and glory. Young men would pummel away at each other trying to get noticed and get on a programme. They got knocked down, got hurt, came up for more – and each one kidded himself that he was the best.
So the four of us used to spend our evenings up in Islington watching the young hopefuls sparring with each other. One evening, the four of us were in a corner of the gym, supping bottles of almost non-alcoholic light ale, when one of the trainers sat down among us and asked, ‘When are we going to see which of you lot is any good? When are you going to get in the ring and ’ave a dust-up, you’ve bin comin’ ’ere long enough, we ain’t yet seen what you’re capable of?’
Well, none of us four were going to start walloping each other, so Roscoe ups and suggests that he find someone about eleven stone, and ‘Vic will sort ’im out’. The trainer gives me the eye. ‘OK wiv you then, mate?’ ‘Sure,’ says I, feeling my new-found strength. In no time at all the chairs are gathered around the ring and I’m beginning to have second thoughts as I make my way to the dressing room where I’m kitted out with a singlet and a pair of gloves. In the meantime the trainer has produced the lad he wanted to get the fight for in the first place. He weighed in at just under twelve stone; I was giving away about ten pounds plus my complete inexperience. I wasn’t too bothered by what I was giving away, and I was bolstered by the shouts of my gang of supporters. I had no doubt that the hulk having his gloves tied up would soon be sitting on the floor wondering what had hit him.
They didn’t have a proper bell so one of the club sidekicks bashed two plates together and we went at it hammer and tongs. I managed the first, second and third rounds with only a small amount of blood coming from my nose. Between the rounds Ruby fanned me with a scruffy bit of towel, telling me that this bloke ain’t going to last another round, ‘’E’s ’ad it, Vic. One good wallop and it’s all over.’
Out we came for the fourth go at each other. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself when the stupid sod in front of me led with his left as if to give me a cruncher in the gut, and as I went down to cover he brought over a right that connected with the middle of my face. Back I went under the impact, back and back until I was sliding down below the ropes. I thought I’d been hit by a bulldozer. I could dimly hear Roscoe and his mates yelling for me to get up and ‘kill the sod’. When I finally tottered to my feet the bloke refereeing had sent the other lad back to his seat and declared me dead, game over sort of thing. Then the lad who’d been responsible for the damage to my face came over and asked me if I was OK. ‘Yep, I’m OK, see you another time,’ I says. ‘Not before you learn to keep yer guard up,’ he says.
‘You don’t ’arf look a bit ropey’, said Roscoe on the tram back. ‘Thanks to you lot,’ I said, and they laughed all the way home. When I turned up for work on the Monday morning and they all asked how I got my face done up, I had to endure another bout of hilarity. ‘Who was yer fighting, wasn’t Kid Berg was it?’ The only one who didn’t see the funny side of all this was Maisie. ‘I bet yer mum told yer orf then, that’s all you men think about, sex and fighting.’ I was in her bad books for a few hours but by the end of the day she had relented. ‘You won’t get anywhere by fighting, Victor.’ It was as if I was listening to Mum.
After that I was determined to learn to keep my guard up, not because I was interested in boxing as a career, but just in case I ran across the hulk who had tried to alter the shape of my face. As it happened I had the last laugh. Roscoe got hold of a couple of tickets to the Royal Albert Hall for a battle royal between his idol, Harry Mizler, who was having another go at defeating Jimmy Walsh. This was early in 1937. Harry won the fight and, as we were celebrating, a gang of Jimmy’s supporters started wading into us. Roscoe came away from that little fracas with his big Jewish conk bent almost backwards, from which it never seemed to recover.
I was now working in the market as though I had done so all my life. To Maisie’s delight Sammy was doing all the light work while all the heavy lifting fell on my shoulders, which were getting broader by the day.
One morning when we were alone, Maisie said: ‘You know, Victor, I’m real pleased that you’ve taken all the ’ard work off of Sammy, but you got to be gentle about it. If he starts thinking that ’e carn’t pull ’is weight any more it will effect ’im. Let ’im do a bit now and
again but, like yer doing now, keep an eye on ’im.’ And then, as if on impulse, she bent over and planted a kiss on my forehead.
‘Sorry about that, Victor, but the good Lord never saw fit to bless us wiv a little one and you’re the only one we’ve met that would fit the bill.’ After a slight pause and a little wipe of her eyes, ‘There, Victor, I’ve only said what the pair of us have been thinking, perhaps I’ve upset you?’ ‘No, you ’avn’t done that, missus, I was thinking all along that Sammy would ’ave made a nice dad.’ Whereupon Maisie burst into a flood of tears.
Later that year, some time in May, Sammy dropped to the floor while we were loading up Bert’s cart. In no time the ambulance arrived and Sammy was on his way to Charing Cross Hospital. Maisie wanted him to stay off work for at least a week after he got out, but as soon as Sammy could get out of bed he was back on the job and Maisie’s face was lined with anxiety. By now I was earning the enormous wage of three pounds a week, almost as much as my granddad. Maisie and Bert didn’t want me to leave; as it was they were just hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
The days were getting warmer and Sammy’s health improved although, when we were in the shop by ourselves, Maisie kept on about not letting Sammy do too much. ‘Let ’im think ’e’s doing it, Victor, but I’m relying on you to make sure he don’t do too much.’ ‘Don’t worry, Mum.’ I’d started calling Maisie ‘Mum’. I don’t know why; it just seemed to be the right expression, and she never challenged me about it.
By now Maisie knew all about my life. During the slack periods she used to ask me about my family: what it was like living in Holborn, what school I had gone to and so on. I told her everything – about my dad leaving home, the months I’d spent in the Shaftesbury Home, about my mates and the way we all stuck together, being frightened of no one. I told her how I wanted to make my fortune and how I liked working for her and Sammy. She said, ‘You don’t need to make a fortune, Victor, all you have to do is to play it straight with those around you, never tell lies and, if you do wrong, face up to it and admit it. Live like that and you will have a happy life, maybe not rich, but happy.’