Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  Yet when the copper, also new to the area, marched the handcuffed and nervous man into the police station, his sergeant looked up in surprise.

  ‘He works for Jack Hyams, you fool. Get him outta here – or there’ll be trouble!’

  So there it was. Jack wasn’t exactly a mafioso making people offers they couldn’t refuse but my grandfather was well established in his ‘manor’. So I doubt my dad agonised over his career choice. And my mum wouldn’t have tried to dissuade him, anyway. She was happy. Ging was back, she knew he wouldn’t see her short and, joy of joys, she had her little girl to look after. Yet she was determined to stick with an only child. A boy, instinct told her, would be A Bad Thing.

  ‘I’m definitely not having any more,’ she wrote in a letter to Sarah, who’d decided to emigrate to Canada after her time in Germany.

  ‘I always wanted a little girl and I got a little girl. A boy would wind up drinking in the pub all the time, just like Ginger and The Old Man.’

  Such single-mindedness was in contrast to my mum’s easygoing demeanour. Maybe she was already concerned about our less-than-salubrious environment. Two kids in the tiny flat would have been a nightmare – it was bad enough humping a pushchair up and down the stone stairs when I was very little – though many still lived in far worse conditions, of course. But essentially, Ginger and Molly, hugely relieved that the war was finally over, just wanted to get on with life. They didn’t have ambition in the sense we now understand it. It was enough for them that they’d come through it all. The future would take care of itself. And my dad’s cash income as an illegal bookie would see us right.

  And so began a routine, six days a week, that remained fairly unwavering for nearly two decades: each morning, my dad, smartly suited and booted, would take the number 649 bus down the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street and make his way to the Lane and the ‘commission agent’ office, to take bets from the more affluent punters who had a phone, could ring through their bets and run an account: all totally legit. Early evening – and at lunchtime – once the pubs were open, he’d stroll round the corner to Houndsditch and park himself at the bar of the George & Dragon, drinking, wisecracking, swapping stories or taking illegal bets from punters; his usual gang of cronies, small-time crooks, market stallholders and cops around him, ordering big rounds of drinks for all and generally having a whale of a time. The Old Man, now in his sixties, would sometimes join him. But he was slowing down somewhat, hence his need for his son and heir to step in and keep the punters happy.

  The pub doubled as a virtual office. If Ginger had a good day’s wins and came out ahead, the rounds for his gang – and often anyone else who happened to drop in – were frequent and generous. If he’d lost, the rounds were a bit more muted. Then, usually at closing time, he’d hail a cab by Liverpool Street station to take him down the sometimes foggy, almost traffic-free, streets to Dalston and home. On Sundays, when there was no racing, he’d usually venture out to the pub for the 12 to 2pm session, come home, eat lunch and sleep off the week’s transactions.

  This was his working life, primarily a man’s world and a pretty macho one at that.

  The first time he took my mum into a pub and asked her what she wanted to drink, she timorously suggested an orange squash.

  My dad looked at her and started laughing.

  ‘An orange squash!’

  ‘Umm … well, I think that would be nice … or a lemonade,’ said my poor mum, floundering, not really knowing what she should be asking for since it was the first time she’d even been inside a public house. Public houses, East End or otherwise, did not form any part of the world she’d grown up in. They were totally unknown territory.

  ‘Look, I can’t go up to the bar and ask for lemonade,’ explained my dad patiently to this attractive young woman he’d already fallen for. She always seemed to be smiling. Or laughing.

  ‘They all know me in here. They’ll think there’s something wrong with me if I do that. ’ave a gin and it (gin with Italian vermouth), instead.’

  That, in a nutshell, was my dad’s world. Buying stiff drinks, taking bets, having a laugh, taking the mickey out of his cronies – my dad was a terrible prankster, often crudely humorous. The butt of his jokes would often be the neighbours in the Lane and their families. One example was a Polish family who lived around the corner from the office. At some point, the family, whose surname was unpronounceable to locals, had been dubbed ‘The Polos’. Over time, as the mother produced child after child, one each year until there were seven kids, the nickname changed to reflect the popular advert of the late fifties: Polo, the mint with a hole.

  Then, somehow, Mrs Polo became known around the place as ‘the bint wiv an ’ole’.

  Having the bookies’ wad of readies to flash around obviously gave my dad a bit of gravitas in the upside-down, post-war East-End world, where one section of the population had very little and really struggled to get by, while the others, the traders, black marketeers or stallholders with cash, traded back and forth in virtually anything portable that you can think of – and didn’t really go without much. Unless, of course, they had a serious betting habit – and many did.

  Even in those cash-poor years, it wasn’t unknown for the occasional dedicated punter to lay down a ‘monkey’ (£500) on a single bet. When you consider that even a ‘pony’ (£25) represented roughly two-and-a-half times the average working man’s weekly wages in the late forties, it’s obvious that some bookies were scoring very high in the prosperity stakes. And quite a few gambling men lost their shirts – and more.

  All in all, accepting illegal bets probably seemed like a soft option when you take into account what so many in the country had endured through the blackouts, the bombs, the devastated lives and epic shortages of wartime – and still continued to struggle with in the years that followed. Is it any wonder that Ginger decided to take the easy option, throw the dice – and hope for the best?

  CHAPTER 5

  NEIGHBOURS

  Our street wasn’t exactly the sort of place you’d wistfully recall as the setting for an idyllic, rose-tinted childhood reverie. No gardens, fields or open spaces. You’d hear the odd sparrow chirping sometimes, but that was the only evidence of nature around us. This place was narrow and bleak, scarred by war damage and years of poverty. In the thirties, the area had been part of the beginnings of slum clearance. But then war broke out. Socially, the street also defied the somewhat sentimental legend that the chirpy, chippy East Enders endured the worst of the war years and beyond by sticking together like glue, helping each other out frequently and popping in and out of each other’s homes all the time.

  Perhaps this was true elsewhere. But it didn’t apply here; the daily struggle to survive, feed the family and keep going took up all of our neighbours’ energy. People would greet each other, chat briefly – ‘looks like it’s gonna rain’ – then go about their business. There were fewer invitations to come round for a cuppa and cheerful, friendly exchanges than my mum had known in Leeds, where locals had made the evacuated family welcome. In any case, apart from our block of 12 flats, built in the late thirties but having mysteriously survived the bombs and the chaos, there weren’t any neat rows of terrace houses to pop in and out of. If you’re living amid ruin, relying on meagre rations to feed yourself and your family, you’re unlikely to be inviting the people next door round for a slap-up meal.

  The tiny street was dominated by the handiwork of the Luftwaffe. Adjacent to our block of flats were the bombed-out remnants of what had once been two modest workmen’s cottages. Inside one of these derelict ruins, living heaven knows how, was a ‘foreign’ couple, rumoured to be from a faraway place called Cyprus. They never talked to anyone. And adjacent to the bombed-out cottages was what had once been a third one, knocked down by the local authority just before the war as part of the planned slum clearance and then turned into a public bomb shelter.

  Almost opposite the old shelter was the front door to the corner house, bad
ly wrecked but still inhabited by the Coopers, their toddler kids Bobby and his sister Mary, the family waiting stoically, like so many others, for the authorities to rehouse them. Their home, though damaged, damp and dark, was technically deemed to be ‘habitable’, so they had to wait a few years. Not surprisingly, all conversations with Mrs Cooper tended to be dominated by this topic.

  ‘I’ve ’eard nuffink from those bleeding bastards down the ’ousing department Mrs ’yams,’ was Mrs Cooper’s perennial greeting.

  ‘ ’Ow do they fink we can bring up two kids in a piss ’ole like this?’

  She had a point. The Coopers had an outside loo but no bathroom; they’d have to go to Hackney Baths once a week, if that, if they wanted a bath, rather than a strip wash. The third bombsite, at the other end of our street, had also been a family house. When we moved into the area it was nothing more than bricks, dust, debris and rubbish; indeed, it gradually became a bit of a playground for local roughnecks, until the authorities constructed a tin wall around it, too high for even the most determined street chancer to clamber over.

  Over time, this site became a sort of tumbledown car yard, run by an older man called Charlie and his son, Len. It was never really clear what they actually did inside the yard – or how they’d come to acquire the site from the authorities – but from time to time, as I grew up, you’d see them tinkering with various kinds of vehicles in the yard, sometimes at night.

  Len and Charlie were unfailingly polite to my mum when she passed, always greeting her cheerfully, sometimes even offering to help her if she had heavy shopping. But there were no proper conversations. In a way, their attitude to us was more like a bit of forelock tugging, respect for your betters, than normal everyday neighbourliness. We stood out like sore thumbs in our milieu: smartly dressed, well fed, living a well-shod life in these squalid surroundings.

  As for the other flat dwellers, we mostly just glimpsed them in passing. Families came and went in some of the other dwellings without us ever exchanging more than the odd hello. Apart from Maisie and Alf in the centre ground-floor flat, that is, who were pointedly ignored by us after the Chocolates Incident. They’d drawn a bit of a short straw when they moved in: their front entrance was directly behind the entry door for all the rubbish that poured down from all floors via The Chute.

  Everyone in the block had one thing in common: we detested everything about The Chute, an unsanitary and unsavoury repository for the block’s rubbish. Each floor had access to a wall-mounted square metal opening to The Chute; you climbed up or down one flight of stairs to get to it. Yet the opening itself was badly designed and far too narrow for the amount of rubbish that got chucked down it. As a result, The Chute was frequently blocked. To compound matters, rubbish collection from the tip that piled up behind the ground floor door was pretty unreliable. So in summer you frequently held your nose as you clambered up the stone stairs as a couple of weeks’ worth of rubbish lay festering behind the door. The block stank to high heaven – and buzzed with flies.

  In the flat directly above us lived Mary, a blind woman in her late fifties, alone and cut off from the world. Relatives would shop for her and bring the necessities to her door or give her a hand once a week. And about once a year, someone would collect Mary, help her down the six steep flights of stone stairs, and take her out for the day. The rest of the time she lived there, frustrated with her lot – who can blame her? – but venting her spleen by using the only resource available to her: making our lives miserable with noise, banging about her tiny kitchen, thumping around in her bedroom at odd hours of the day and night. Noisy housework at midnight was a perennial favourite.

  ‘I’m gonna fucking go up there and sort ’er out,’ Ginger would threaten when Mary’s banging and thumping reached crescendo levels. The poor construction and paper-thin walls of the flats made it very easy to create havoc this way – and Mary knew this, all too well. She’d managed to survive in her top-floor flat right through the Blitz – time enough to practise her banging and thumping act to perfection.

  ‘Don’t, Ging, she’s a lonely old blind woman,’ my mum would plead and, most of the time, my dad would relent and keep the peace. But there was the odd occasion when the noise from above would be too much, especially if it interrupted my dad’s slumber. Then he’d stomp up the stairs in rage and hammer on her door.

  ‘Whaddya bloody well think you’re doin’ you stupid cow! Stop that bloody bangin’ or I’ll ’ave the coppers on ya!’

  This was, of course, an empty threat. Rousing the coppers of Dalston was not part of my dad’s repertoire. And Mary didn’t even come to the front door. Yet my dad’s aggressive tactic was effective. The banging would stop, sometimes ceasing for weeks on end. Until the next time frustration at her existence would overwhelm her and the noise would start up again. Eventually, she moved out. Rumour had it she went into an old people’s home, only to be replaced by an amorous young couple who spent most of their waking hours humping and grinding, puffing and panting, in their bedroom, creating an even more sensitive noise problem that was more or less impossible to resolve. (Even my dad would have baulked at climbing the stairs to yell, ‘Stop bloody knockin’ ’er off!’)

  The only neighbours we had anything to do with were the married age-gap couple in the flat next door. Harry, a skinny, moustachioed, somewhat seedy man in his fifties, a fancy-goods dealer, and his rather svelte blonde wife Sophie, whom he’d met at a West End dance hall just after the war.

  Sophie was in her twenties, a half-Jewish refugee from Austria. And my mum became quite friendly with her over time; mainly, I suspect, because they had a common dislike of their environment – and couldn’t quite understand how they’d wound up there.

  Molly was convinced Sophie had married for reasons of security only.

  ‘He did well during the war with the black market, so she must’ve thought he’d be a safe bet, what with having no family here and not wanting to go back to Austria.’

  She was probably right. Yet the marriage, like other similar hasty liaisons of the time, was doomed to be quietly unhappy. Sophie was alone for much of the time – Harry frequently travelled around the country for work – and the pair had little in common. She fruitlessly craved the childhood joys of her cultural background, things like classical music and ballet; he preferred Vera Lynn and, later, Dickie Valentine records: you’d always know when Harry was back from a trip because you’d hear Vera belting out, ‘There’ll be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover’ from their front room. Harry had also made it plain he didn’t want kids, so Sophie envied my mum, having a little girl to love and look after.

  ‘I make a big mistake – and now I pay for it,’ she’d tell Molly.

  When Harry was away, Sophie initially babysat me for my parents a few times. But while my dad liked Harry, a fellow traveller in the East End world of ducking and diving, he had an uninhibited aversion to ‘the German cow’. To my dad, there was no distinction between the Austrian and German population, even though Sophie said she’d come here to escape persecution. As far as he was concerned, they were all, men and women alike, tarred with the same brush. He even suspected Sophie’s half-Jewish status was a ruse, to make her more acceptable as a refugee.

  ‘Irma Grese was a woman,’ he’d remind my mum if she tried to protest on behalf of her neighbour (Grese, executed for war crimes at the age of twenty two, had sadistically killed hundreds of inmates during her time as a warden at Belsen concentration camp), and in due course, Ginger stopped the babysitting.

  ‘It’s bad enough she’s living next door,’ was his rationale. ‘I don’t want her in my home looking after my kid.’

  In fact, my dad didn’t like anyone coming into our home. OK, it was small and damp and a tad depressing. But that wasn’t the reason why I grew up in a place where we never entertained or rarely had visitors. The truth was, Ginger was somewhat possessive: he wanted his wife and kid right there, away from everything and everyone else.

  No one,
neighbour or relative, was actually invited into our home. Even when he wasn’t there, my mum wasn’t encouraged to invite people in for a cuppa or a chat. As I grew up, the only other person who’d come to our flat regularly would be Annie, our Irish cleaner.

  Sarah, of course, had been around, visiting us occasionally after Ginger returned from India. But in 1947 she went off to live overseas permanently. And my mum’s family had scattered, some abroad, the rest to other parts of the country. As for my dad’s parents, we always went to them. They never ever came to us.

  The one thing my dad couldn’t control, however, was the unexpected occasional knock on the door out of the blue. Although we’d had a big black Bakelite phone in the living room from as far back as I could remember, many people then didn’t have a home phone. So an unexpected knock on the door was a pretty normal occurrence for everyone else.

  When we did get a rare, unheralded knock at the door from one of my mum’s UK-based brothers, either bachelor Eddie (whom Ginger disliked because he was a habitual gambler and often on the scrounge) or Joe, my mum’s favourite brother, who ran a gift shop in Brighton and had two daughters, my mum would be delighted. She’d rush into the kitchen, raid the larder and prepare all sorts of delicacies, egg or smoked-salmon sandwiches, teacakes, biscuits, drinks. Generous and open-hearted, she loved pulling out the stops to entertain for these unexpected rare visits; if my dad was there, he’d grit his teeth and keep up the façade of hospitality.

  As for me, I was only used to being the sole focus of two people’s lives and found such unexpected visits uncomfortable. I lived in the glow of my mum and dad’s attention, taking it for granted that I was the centre of the entire universe. Adjusting to other people’s company in the small confines of our flat, even briefly, seemed strange, an unhealthy beginning, which didn’t do me any favours when it came to relating to others’ needs later in life. So all I felt back then, once the visitors had departed and I’d been given the obligatory hug and kiss (which I hated: I was not a kissy-feely child) was an overwhelming sense of relief. ‘I hope they don’t come back,’ the little voice inside me said. ‘I don’t like them coming round here.’