Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  ‘Len-from-the-caff said it was about time I got you one of these,’ said Ginger, producing a small black velvet box from his jacket pocket and plonking it down, without ceremony, on the living room table.

  Len, one of my dad’s older cronies who liked a bet or two, had known my father’s family for years because he ran a busy little café near their shop. He also knew that my parents had had a rushed register office wedding the year after the war started – and that as a consequence, my mum had never had a proper engagement ring.

  ‘So this is it, Mol, your engagement ring,’ said my dad with some pride.

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when my mum reached out to prise open the little black box and remove the sparkling object.

  ‘Oh it’s GORGEOUS,’ she cooed, setting the ring on her finger and holding it out with considerable delight.

  ‘And it’s so BIG’. I daren’t go out with it around here, Ging. The neighbours would have a fit if they saw it. Still … I can wear it for that big wedding next month, can’t I?’

  ‘Course you can, Mol,’ shrugged my dad, heading for the bedroom to change out of his suit into his pyjamas, his nightly after-work ritual.

  Typically, nothing was said about what he’d paid for the ring or where it came from. In all likelihood, the ring had been passed to him as collateral by a hard-up punter who’d had some serious losses; probably, the punter, desperate for something to trade, had nicked it from his own wife or girlfriend’s jewellery stash without her knowledge. (The world of the heavy gambler is defined by such acts of spontaneity, as anyone who has lived with a compulsive gambler will confirm.) Len was probably just the saloon bar ‘middleman’, encouraging my dad to take the ring, rather than wait for the cash he was owed, which after all, might never materialise.

  But my mother was not troubled by the ring’s provenance. She was far too delighted to concern herself with the details. The next morning, she was on the phone to her best friend from schooldays, Evelyn, regaling her with the news.

  ‘Wait till you see it, Eve, it’s the real McCoy,’ she trilled. ‘I’m sure it’s worth hundreds.’

  Evelyn was not impressed. She didn’t like Ginger one bit. A single mum with a small son, born after a brief wartime fling with a pilot, she had to live with the somewhat difficult status of unmarried mum which, in those days, carried a heavy penalty of social condemnation, even though illegitimacy rates had soared during the war years. So the official cover-up story was that Evelyn’s ‘husband’ had ‘gone to live in Canada’.

  Evelyn accepted her lot. But she still resented the fact that while she had to slog away, six days a week, in her brother’s West End shop, my mum didn’t need to work. Ginger, according to Evelyn, was a n’er-do-well with a shady livelihood. In reality, of course, the two women were in a similar boat, coping as best they could with what life had dished out to them in the aftermath of war. In fact, Evelyn’s wealthy brother had helped her with the down payment on a small house in the suburbs. So to some degree she could look down on Molly, stuck in a pokey Dalston slum with a boozy street bookie, while she struggled to bring up her illegitimate son respectably in a Neasden semi.

  ‘Did you ask him where he got it from?’ enquired Evelyn, who was always ultra bitchy when the conversation turned to my dad.

  ‘Why should I?’ said Molly, undaunted. ‘It’s a diamond ring and I know he paid for it.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ snapped Evelyn. ‘I’d watch it if I were you, wearing something like that without knowing where he got it from.’

  ‘Ginger’s not a thief, Evelyn,’ was Molly’s parting shot. ‘Anyway, I’m going now, just wanted to tell you my news. Bye!’

  Conversations with Evelyn frequently ended this way. Her bitterness at her tough situation soured their exchanges. And my mum, kind and easy-going, was a moving target for her friend’s sharp tongue. Yet Evelyn was cannier than my mother, who blithely took each day as it came. And she was right – you could never be too sure what kind of shenanigan was going on with my dad. And, true to form, my mum’s newfound delight in actually owning a big diamond sparkler wasn’t destined to last very long.

  Two days later, my dad came home from work and said he had to take the ring back. He gave no reason.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mol,’ he consoled my crestfallen mother. ‘I’ll get you another one, promise. But you can’t have this one.’

  Who knows what the dodgy deal had involved? Maybe my dad needed to quickly trade the ring for cash himself. There were occasionally times when he placed his own bets and lost heavily, so then he needed to replenish his wad of cash quickly to keep working, though he could always rely on The Old Man for cash if his own stash ran down. Maybe, this time, he just didn’t want to ask for a helpful handout. There were often fallings-out and rows in The George and Dragon with The Old Man that we heard about in snatches.

  My own theory is that my dad had consumed several large Scotches when he did the deal via Len-from-the-caff and took possession of the ring – and in the cold light of dawn, had mulled it over and decided to turn it back into cash as quickly as he could. Knowing my dad, he may even have lost on the deal.

  All I knew then was that he reneged on his big promise: my mum never got a diamond ring from my dad again. But typically, she didn’t complain or start bawling him out, not when he took the little black box from her or even afterwards. She said nothing, just took it all in her stride and got on with the routine of her life, fussing around me, dressing me beautifully, cooking our meals, making sure she looked svelte and immaculate before taking me out and about on Kingsland Road.

  Those grey years with their power cuts, food shortages, fogs and freezing winters seem overwhelmingly drab and wretched nowadays. But my mum’s bright, positive, uncomplaining nature ignored the backdrop – and the worst of my dad’s rackety behaviour. And, of course, she never had to worry about bills or money: my father’s cash stash continued to see to all that.

  Throughout my childhood, Ginger walked about every day with considerable sums of money in his pocket as he went about his bookie business. On some occasions it would run into the hundreds. Had he seriously considered it, he could easily have afforded to buy my mother a piece of good jewellery after a good week’s takings or a big win. Over time, my mum did acquire a few nice things in her jewellery box – a pearl necklace and a couple of decent watches. But no gold or diamond rings. For while he was generous and incredibly free and easy with the cash in his hand, it never occurred to him to put any of his money into something that might endure – or, indeed, be of value if times got tough.

  When you consider that in 1955, an eight-room house in Victoria Park, Hackney could be purchased for £2,000, with a deposit of £175 – a sum my dad would probably blow in the pub during a few weeks’ heavy drinking with punters – it’s clear that the opportunities were always there for him to improve our lives and give us a more spacious, pleasant environment. A thirties suburban house outside London with a garden cost more, say £3,500 back then. But even this he could have easily afforded, both deposit and repayments.

  Certainly, the street bookie of that era always needed cash for punters, bungs and, in my dad’s case, big rounds in the pub. Yet that, for him, was enough. It all stopped there. Things like mortgages, insurance policies, even savings accounts didn’t exist for my dad, probably because his father didn’t ‘believe’ in such things. Even with his clerical worker’s background, working with figures, adding up day in, day out (personal calculators were unknown then) he just didn’t see any merit in looking ahead financially. And Molly never ever nagged him to make any changes; they both lived for the here and now. Perhaps this was a consequence of coming through the uncertainty and fears of war. But I suspect it was also to do with their personalities; in that way they were well matched.

  So that’s the story of how my mum nearly got to own a diamond ring.

  She did get a mink coat, mind you. But that was decades later, after my dad had died. And yes, you
guessed it – she paid for it herself. With a credit card.

  CHAPTER 10

  A RAT’S TALE

  My dad’s betting business thrived in the post-war betting frenzy: fivers and tenners aplenty for all. We acquired a retinue of ‘servants’ on my dad’s payroll: Annie, our Irish cleaner, The Old Man’s chauffeur, Dave, to drive us around in a big posh Daimler on family outings or holidays at the seaside, Renee, our regular babysitter, plus the ongoing services of a couple of my dad’s runners who doubled up as delivery men to bring us anything we needed, mostly in the food department, direct from the Lane to our front door.

  The oldest and most trusted of these, Wag, was somewhat odd. My mum said he looked like a tramp and, indeed, he was pretty unappealing: a fag end permanently clamped to his lips, his long, thin face grey and pockmarked, his attire shabby – usually a long, grey, belted and very tatty overcoat and a flat cap that always covered his head, rain or shine.

  I’d sometimes hide behind my mum, peering at Wag in fascination, when she opened the door to take bag after bag of the provisions he had lugged on the bus from the Lane for us. There was little dialogue. My mum would say thanks and Wag would grunt an indecipherable response. He never came in, of course, whatever the weather.

  My mum, always fanatical about appearances, would complain about him to Ginger.

  ‘Does he ever wash, Ging? He looks a bit … pongy.’

  ‘Dunno,’ my dad would shrug.

  ‘’E’s worked for The Old Man for years. Never bin known to nick anything.’

  These deliveries were usually on a Friday, so my mum could be ready to embark on a big weekend cooking spree, frying all different kinds of fish – halibut, salmon, plaice – preparing big roasting chickens, or unwrapping big joints of beef, peeling potatoes to roast, shelling peas, slicing up cabbages and carrots. They were meals we didn’t always manage to finish because there was always far too much for two adults and a child; cold cooked food is one of my strongest memories of childhood.

  My parents were also stepping out regularly by now, enjoying themselves in those years around 1947-1949 when London started to emerge from its blackout curtain, This meant Big Nights Out with my dad’s cronies, going to shows, boxing matches, often getting the best seats for the latest West-End musical. Sometimes my dad would be given free tickets to shows by generous punters so off they’d go in a taxi, all dressed up, my dad in his latest sharp double-breasted suit, my mum in one of her slinky wrapover beaded crepe numbers, worn with platform shoes, hair piled high.

  One day Molly told me they’d gone to see Oklahoma, the first of the big post-war Broadway musicals to open in the West End and, amazingly, they’d wound up sitting yards away from the Queen and Prince Philip. Only she was Princess Elizabeth back then, a few years before her coronation in 1953.

  ‘Oh she’s so beautiful, the Princess,’ my mum purred. ‘You should see her skin, perfect, like porcelain. They just came in and sat down two rows in front of us. We couldn’t believe it.’

  I was young, but this royal glamour, tiaras and ermine, left an impression on me. The austerity years were somewhat glitter deficient. Real glamour, for the masses, was at a premium. Footballers then weren’t a part of the celebrity circus; even big players earned very little, a maximum of £20 a week, until things started to change in the early sixties. There were movie stars, of course – in the early fifties, the UK version of the American Photoplay magazine gave glamour-hungry movie fans a chance to pore over sepia-tinted photos and stories of the big stars of the day like Tony Curtis, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Burt Lancaster and many others. Yet the British Royal Family, buoyed by the huge wave of support they’d garnered from the public during the war, continued to be objects of near worship then, especially with images of a young, beautiful princess inheriting the throne with a tall, blonde and handsome young naval lieutenant by her side.

  TV images, of course, weren’t around yet; like everyone else, we didn’t actually acquire a television until the Coronation. So my pre-pubescent obsessions with imagery focused strongly on the two-and-sixpenny best-selling hardback picture books of these glittering, distant creatures at their wedding, with their children and at the big Coronation.

  Those photographic images in the pre-Diana/celeb years were equally as powerful, in their way, as the tidal wave of celebrity images we now receive. People needed something glittery and highly costumed to admire then, to look up to, to gaze at in awe and wonder, in total contrast to the grey world of queues and shortages. It was a perfect antidote to the miserable times, helping people forget all about the bleakness of the grey skies, the sheer slog of living. Even if it was a bit ridiculous, worshipping a privileged group of unknown people in ermine who remained firmly on a distant pedestal. But of course, the very mystique of that far-off royal world was what hooked you in the first place …

  Money was also thrown at my early ‘education’. Because I was chattering away as a tiny tot, developing an aptitude for words and picking up the alphabet, clearly hungry to learn, my mum enrolled me at an expensive kindergarten for preschool kids on Stamford Hill, a couple of miles away.

  Twice a week she would take me there on the bus and I began to read. One day, she was late picking me up and, to her utter amazement, found me sitting there, surrounded by a small group of other kids, listening intently to my words.

  ‘She was telling them a story, Ging,’ said Molly proudly when my dad came home. ‘I’m sure she’s going to do something big. Maybe she’ll go on the stage.’

  Oh dear. Such was my mum’s conviction that I was heading for superstardom, she insisted my dad also fork out for dancing classes for me, though I had no real physical aptitude for dance, just an incessant desire to show off, to throw myself around and pose.

  Once a week, we’d trot round the corner to a basement on the Kingsland Road. The dance studio was called Miss Betty’s, and for two shillings a session ‘Miss Betty’, a dark-haired former twenties chorus girl turning to seed, would plonk away on the piano and bark out instructions to her tiny pupils. The classes were very small, just four or five kids. Sometimes it was just me. Which isn’t surprising: we were in Bash Street Kids territory, not posh Richmond or Roehampton.

  ‘Bra-bra, gateway – up to the skies,’ she’d instruct the little Dalston wanabee Markovas like myself as we struggled to move our arms and legs to copy her. (These odd phrases were descriptions of the shapes we were meant to be making with our arms.) Alas, I never had the makings of any sort of ballerina, though I loved the pink satin shoes with their blocked toes that my mum bought me specially from Freed in Covent Garden. Standing ‘en pointe’ was a buzz – if you could manage to stand on your toes for more than thirty seconds, that is, which I couldn’t. My tap-dancing skills – jump, shuffle, jump, shuffle, toe-heel, toe-heel in my little black shoes with metal toe pieces – weren’t much to write home about either. Yet I was OK at singing, mainly because I could remember all the words perfectly and just about follow a tune. So by the time I was heading for primary school, such was my mum’s conviction that fame and fortune lay ahead that I’d started to believe in my own hype. If someone keeps telling you and everyone else how wonderful you are, your self-belief soars. And so singing, dancing, reciting and performing became a big part of my life, along with reading, until I was close to my teens. And so did a certain sort of self-confidence, the confidence of the overindulged …

  However, this over-eagerness to perform and mouth-off got me into trouble when I was about four years old.

  It is summer and we are at the seaside, on our annual holiday at Cliftonville on the Kent Coast. I am wearing a pink ruched swimsuit, a stripey taffeta bow holds up my unruly mop. Molly and I are in an outdoor pavilion, in the audience, watching other holidaymakers, mostly kids, take to the stage. They are supposed to be performing, strutting their stuff for their mums and dads, but, as is sometimes the way with small children, most find themselves tongue-tied and reluctant when actually faced with an audience. One
boy is hauled onto the stage, bursts into tears and has to be quickly yanked off.

  ‘I can do better than that!’ I declare, bored and fidgety as usual when confronted with a situation where nothing much seems to be happening. Everyone, every holidaymaker, parent and kid, focuses on me and my mum. And the MC, beret on his head, mike in his hand, figures he’ll use this and teach the little brat a lesson into the bargain. It might get a few laughs. In his line of business, you have to work with what you get.

  ‘OK, if you can do better, come up here and show us,’ he says, fed up with his day job, coaxing free entertainment out of noisy holidaymaking Londoners.

  Molly looks at me nervously, wanting to rescue me from my Big Mistake. I’ve opened my trap and set myself up good and proper.

  But I don’t shrink back or cling to my mum, for some reason. Nor do I cry. The desire to get up there and show off, despite the unexpected summons, is now powerful in me.

  So my mum guides me to the side of the wooden stage where someone lifts me onto it.

  ‘So what’s your name, then?’ says the MC.

  ‘And what are you going to sing for us today that’s better than that?’

  Everyone laughs at the tiny tot with the inflated ego.

  ‘My name is Jakerlin,’ I tell him seriously, unsure of my ground now I’m faced with the awesome reality of an audience somewhat bigger than I’m used to at home. ‘Don’ wanna sing a song, wanna say a poem,’ I say, somewhat defiantly.

  ‘OK Jakerlin,’ he sighs. Another ripple of laughter goes through the watching crowd. A photographer takes a snap of the tot who thought she could do better. I still have it.

  And I get through the four-verse poem, called An Old Rat’s Tale. ‘He was a rat and she was a rat and down in one hole they did dwell …’ I make a pretty poor fist of it, frequently pausing to remember lines, and get more laughs than claps when I finish. My mum doesn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed for me when she yanks me off the stage. But I know I’ve blown it, one of the first times in my life that I begin to realise I should have kept my big mouth firmly shut – and stayed on the safe side.