Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  But from then on, it is as if my father can no longer bear to live his life without a constant stream of booze. He was fairly consistently drunk before, with the occasional relatively sober few days in between. Now his heavy drinking, night after night, with only Sundays off, is relentless. And even the embarrassing, yet rowdily cheerful drunk who stood up to sing is gone. He drinks, comes home, is morose – and frequently belligerent.

  The effect on me is dramatic. I can hear all the angry shouting, his outpourings of frustration at his friends, his family, the punters, from my tiny room. But I can’t just lie there, waiting for it to stop, silently stuffing my fingers in my ears, trying my best to endure it as I’ve done in the past. Now, not yet a woman but not quite a child, I erupt in frenzied fury too. I run out into the hallway in my pyjamas, screaming at him.

  ‘I HATE YOU, YOU BASTARD, WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP, YOU’RE DRIVING US MAAAAD,’ I scream.

  This, of course, makes it all so much worse. There is absolutely no point in yelling like this at a very drunk person.

  But I am so enraged by these hellish disturbances in our tiny space, and feel so trapped, so powerless, my only instinct as a means of taking control, getting it to stop, is to lash out. Fire meets fire.

  It’s truly awful. Ginger’s drunken response to my outburst is to be hideously verbally abusive, frequently threatening to whack me for daring to challenge his authority – which he never does – but in truth, threatened physical abuse is still appalling. Having someone repeatedly tell you, ‘You’re not too old for me to belt you one, you little cow’ sears your soul, demolishes your equilibrium. What a dreadful scenario. For we are both frustrated with the confines of our life, both trapped, unable to push out of our individual hells. And, of course, we share the famous Hyams temper, the cause of so many of his parents’ eruptions. Talk about recipe for disaster.

  My mum, as usual, is referee between us, desperately trying to stop the racket – easily heard throughout the flats, down the road – and ease the situation, calm things down.

  But I scream out my frustration at her too.

  ‘WHY DO YOU PUT UP WITH HIM?’ I yell, when he finally disappears into the bedroom and passes out.

  ‘HE MAKES ME SICK!’

  Sometimes, it’s so bad, he staggers out of the front door, giving us, at least, some relief from his presence. Then I go to bed, fall asleep and he creeps back, hours later, having partially sobered up and walked around the streets for hours.

  Even now, I don’t believe that this ongoing scenario, bad as it was, was directly responsible for my failure at school, my open scorn for authority. There were other factors. I was hypersensitive to what went on around me – but I wasn’t a quiet, malleable child. I’d been spoilt rotten. I questioned everything – including our immediate surroundings, which, by now, were starting to trouble me: surely there were more pleasant places we could live? We could afford it, couldn’t we? But it’s clear now that what was happening to my dad was that he was scared silly without his support system. He’d loved his dad, looked up to him. And betting was a dodgy business in some ways. Yes, the bookies usually cleaned up. But you still needed your big cash wad, your front, your status in the local pecking order. And my dad already had a problem with serious responsibility, that’s why it had suited him after the army to just take the easy money, stick to his dad.

  Already a steady, heavy drinker, Ginger was bound to use booze even more to avoid confronting his fears. But, of course, it didn’t work. That kind of over-the-top drinking never does. It creates more depression – which can only be quelled by a top up of alcohol. Mercifully, Molly’s easy-going, get-on-with-it nature, did serve to calm things down somewhat. Till the next time …

  But while the turbulence of my home life continues to wax and wane, the months that follow my grandfather’s demise, the end of one chapter in our lives, bring one or two less troublesome but nonetheless distracting events. Elvis goes into the US Army. His hair is shorn. Will this be the end, Lolly and I fret? Of course, as it always does, the surrounding hype and frenzy over this career milestone only serves to feed the collective hunger; Elvis was far from over, had only just begun. As for me, I too become in thrall to The Bottle.

  Like most girls, I am not at all satisfied with what I have been given – thick light-brown hair with a natural curl. Increasingly conscious of how I look, I want a different look, a brighter, standout colour that makes me look more grown-up. So I embark on a bathroom experiment. Someone at school has told me that liquid peroxide can do amazing things to your hair, change the colour to blonde – all you need do is buy a bottle for a shilling or two from the chemist. This might sound a bit pathetic now. But there weren’t too many hair products available in the shops then.

  There was just one setting lotion available, called Amami, which gave you a temporary curl. You wet your hair with it before you set it, laboriously putting it in rollers secured with pins. If you had straight hair but yearned for a more permanent curly mop there was one type of home perm you could buy, the Toni with its memorable advertising campaign, ‘Which twin has the Toni?’

  This gave you a frizzy mess which everyone instantly knew was a home perm. It didn’t look at all natural. In fact, it looked awful because the dampened curls, secured with pins, could only be effective if applied professionally. You couldn’t do it yourself to get the desired effect. But because there was nothing else – other than the power of advertising – women went out in their millions and bought it.

  Hair colouring was something else: for a start, obviously dyed hair was frowned upon, pretty much the mark of a loose woman. Girls risked scorn if their hair was dyed. It screamed: ‘I’m a siren, come on you guys!’

  It was the first-ever DIY over-the-counter home permanent hair colour, Miss Clairol, in the late fifties, that really started a shift in attitude (‘Does she, or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure’ ran the ad campaign). Yet when I embarked on my first peroxide mission, any form of youthful hair dyeing was still largely viewed as A Naughty Thing. But who gave a fig for social mores?

  My first attempt, at the tiny bathroom mirror, is a bit timid. I grab a lock of hair from the front, gingerly pour some peroxide onto cotton wool and furiously dab it onto my hair. Nothing happens (I have no idea you have to wait), so I take another lock from the front and dab on some more. Still nothing. And it stinks to high heaven. Maybe it doesn’t work, after all. So I abandon the task.

  The next day, of course, I see the result. Not a pretty sight. A sort of bright orangey brown – well … more orange, less brown. Still, it does work. So, over a period of weeks, with several bathroom sessions, I turn myself into a carrot top. Despite the orange effect, I mistakenly believe I look more sophisticated, more adult now. Ginger doesn’t notice. Molly, of course, is not at all impressed with what I’ve done. But I’ve done my homework. I’ve discovered a photo of her in the forties. An avid follower of fashion, my mum’s movie-star Veronica Lake upswept Victory Roll hairstyle carried distinct blonde streaks at the front of her dark brown hair.

  ‘Mum, did you dye your hair when I was little?’ I’d asked innocently, before my visit to the chemist shop.

  ‘Hmm … yes, Jac. It was all the rage then to look like Veronica Lake. So I did it with a bottle of peroxide. Took a while to grow out, mind you.’

  Like mother, like daughter. Now, of course, my mum could indulge herself with a weekly shampoo-and-set at the salon on the corner of Kingsland Road. But I had my ammunition: when the air-raid sirens wailed and money was sparse, she too had taken to The Bottle.

  So what could she say when I followed her lead?

  CHAPTER 21

  FIRST KISS

  At long last, I have an admirer from the club. David is sixteen, lives in Clapton and goes to Grocer’s, a grammar school, the local equivalent of Skinners’. He hangs around me like a little dog whenever I’m at the club, buying me soft drinks, making it quite obvious he has A Thing for Jacky.

  B
ut while I’m mightily reassured to find that I have some powers of attraction in my new kitten heels and seamless stockings, he’s definitely not my type – shortish, skinny, pleasant enough but not exactly attractive, wavy hair, unremarkable, but always cheerful, with a smiley face.

  There are two distinct types of boys on the Hill. The first were ordinary, working-class Jewish boys from the area like David, some with pushbikes – offering you a ride ‘on the crossbar’, of course, was an alternative to asking you to dance as a prelude to getting closer – though I always avoided this, since a pushbike ride usually went in the direction of Hackney Downs, the local courting spot, off limits unless you wanted to jeopardise your ‘nice girl’ status.

  These boys were mostly quite aspirational, studying hard at grammar school, some the offspring of shopkeepers, market traders or tailoring workers, living locally in flats in rundown Victorian houses or on big council estates. You frequently hear about the grinding poverty of the East End (which was true to some extent), but, in fact, by the fifties huge numbers of people were continuously employed in the many clothing factories in and around Hackney and Stoke Newington, well into the seventies. Many of these boys wound up as accountants or cab drivers in and around the Essex suburbs, or West End retail managers, saving up every penny in order to run their own business. They weren’t particularly stylish or sophisticated – their parents’ means were modest – but these were the boys we were more or less expected to pair off with.

  The other group were different, and mostly out of our league. They didn’t hang out at the club; mostly they just hung around the Hill. They were much more sophisticated, sharply dressed Bad Boys, a few years older than us.

  Lolly and I, our heads already turned by the smouldering sexual promise of the Ultimate Bad Boy (the man with the swivel hips across the Pond) found these boys more attractive, if dangerous. They openly looked for ‘charver birds’, girls who played fast and loose, willing to go all the way.

  After school one day, while I stand at the bus stop, munching on a pickled cucumber, one of these sharp-suited Bad Boys, whom I know by sight but not by name, approaches me.

  ‘How about it, two bob for a wank, yeah?’

  I dive onto the stationary bus, shocked but laughing just the same. Upstairs, the risqué offer is an immediate topic of discussion with sisters Sylvie and Barbara, who have clambered up the stairs after me.

  ‘Yeah I did that once,’ says sullen Barbara, much to our amazement.

  ‘Whaaat? You did it?’ I say, mouth agape. Sylvie says nothing. She’s silently hoping that this is just another one of her sister’s sick jokes.

  ‘Well I did it the once – but only half,’ confides the enigmatic Barbara, leaving us even more baffled by this unfathomable statement.

  Later, I ring Lolly and repeat the story. She is equally perplexed.

  ‘Maybe she’s just lying, you know what she’s like …’

  The Bad Boy at the bus stop was just chancing it, even if Barbara’s story had some truth in it. But mostly these guys were flash types from more comfortably off families, some living in posher areas like Hendon, Golders Green or Hampstead, hanging out near the Hill because cute young Jewish girls congregated there. Some had fathers who had already started to make property fortunes (London’s property boom started, low key, in the late forties as whole swathes of bombed-out areas started to change hands, to be developed decades later), while others ran successful retail businesses or factories.

  Yet these slicker, more sophisticated boys with their winkle-pickers and Italian mohair suits with short, three-button jackets and narrow trousers, were out of our league for one very good reason: the kosher class divide. Hackney girls, like Lolly and myself, were sought after by these boys simply because we existed as attractive young teenagers. But neither their families nor ours expected us to form lasting relationships.

  In late-fifties East London, everyone still had their place. Crossing the divide, from poorer working class to solid middle via a huge diamond engagement ring and a big ‘do’ in a West End hotel wasn’t likely to be on the cards for us. The aspirational, hard-working Jewish families who had already ‘made it’ and moved out of the East End in the pre-war years to forge successful lives only wanted equally comfortably off partners for their kids. To these posher Jews, the fact that you still lived in Hackney marked you firmly within the ranks of the lower orders.

  In fact, my mum had female cousins who having married up beyond their wildest dreams – from the poverty-stricken depths of Hessel Street, one of the East End’s murkier quarters, to the leafy, quiet enclaves of Hampstead Garden Suburb – would not only ignore Molly’s very existence but if closely questioned would immediately deny they’d ever even lived in the East End.

  In my topsy-turvy world, of course, we lived like lords in a slum. I got whatever I wanted, when I asked for it. But I was firmly defined, on the social scale, by Hackney, the grim alleyway we lived in the mean streets of Dalston Junction. This class divide didn’t bother Lolly and I at this stage, I might add. We were too young to give it much thought. But we certainly understood it, were conscious of it.

  In my last year at Skinners’ I develop an intense fascination with a posh good-looking Hill boy called Stephen, quite short, brown eyed and part of a group of Bad Boys with very dodgy reputations led by a non-Jewish boy, Richard Longthorpe, an early Mod ringleader. All are snazzy dressers: sharp Italian mohair suits with narrow lapels, button-down shirts from Cecil Gee, pointed-toe winkle-pickers, handmade in a shop down the Lane.

  In fact, Mod fashion, which only really got going commercially later, in the sixties, is reputed to have kicked off via such Jewish middle-class groups like these. And as schoolgirls, Lolly and I already admired this ‘cool’ style of dressing. It appealed to us. We weren’t keen on the slicked back hair, jeans and leather jacket biker look. So Stephen, a cool dresser and looker if ever there was one, is top of my hit list. But beyond the odd hello or glance, it never goes any further. We don’t even know where he lives.

  Then comes a window of opportunity. I discover, a week or so in advance, that Molly and Ginger are going out to a big bash, a West End party with some of my dad’s punters. The details are vague but they’ll be gone for several hours, leaving me, they innocently believe, home alone.

  What this means to me is, joy of joys, I can throw my own ‘evening in’, as they were known. Essentially an evening in was a group of kids going round to someone’s empty house or flat, pairing off, and mostly snogging with the lights out. How far it all went beyond that depended on the willingness of the girl to move things along; at that stage, it probably did move sometimes into ‘heavy petting’ territory. But only sometimes.

  With some careful plotting, Lolly and I let it be known around the club that Jacky will be hosting an evening in. All are welcome. This, I hope, will be my Big Chance with Stephen: the invite has been issued all along the Hill.

  About a dozen young girls and boys crowd into my cramped flat that evening and start to pair off. The beautiful Stephen actually turns up, climbs the smelly stone stairs in his immaculate Italian suit and steps into my home. Oh joy. Yet he and Richard Longthorpe take one look around at the snogging couples on armchairs and sofa – and promptly leg it. David, who’d turned up earlier and is still interested, is waiting for his moment and decides to pounce.

  ‘Come outside to the balcony,’ he begs me. So I do, disappointed by my dashed dreams of Stephen but now open to experience, at least.

  And there, on the dingy balcony of our flats, I have my first-ever kiss. It’s all a bit slippery, no tongues deployed yet, but we keep going with mutual enthusiasm. This was it, ‘necking’ they called it (no one had ever heard of the word foreplay). And while I’m pretty indifferent to David generally, I find I quite like being in his embrace: it feels grown-up.

  But not for long. In the time-honoured tradition of such events, a big shock: Molly and Ginger trundling up the stairs to our flat hours before they’re exp
ected. The door to their home ajar, they are appalled to step inside to find two couples snogging fervently on the couch and other pairs doing likewise on chairs and armchairs. Luckily, no one has attempted to raid Ginger’s cocktail cabinet for the booze; there hasn’t been enough time. But me, I am caught bang to rights, in the embrace of David, who moves like lightning down the stairs and away into the Dalston night the minute my parents appear on the scene.

  David’s vanishing act doesn’t upset me. Essentially, the whole exercise has been purely experimental; I’ve long been desperate to know what it’s like to snog a boy. For my parents, of course, this scenario is proof positive that their daughter is on the road to ruin.

  Need I say that Ginger, who isn’t, for some reason, in his usual pissed-as-a-fart state tonight, merely a bit tiddly, goes ballistic? Everything relating to my new teenage world is scheduled to be banned, my nylons, my hoop skirt – the late fifties were the era of full skirts and taffeta petticoats – my Elvis records (which is daft because I can always go to Lolly’s flat to listen to hers). Even Lolly is mooted for the banned list. My dad has recently taken an avid dislike to Lolly’s mum, Fay, though he’s never met her face-to-face, only spoken to her briefly on the phone.

  ‘She’s a tart,’ he’d fumed to my mum.

  Fay loved bingo and went out regularly to play locally. With a cabbie husband working nights, this, according to my dad, showed she was a bad mother. And, of course, in his macho view, this also confirmed her status as a sleep-around gal. And now, of course, my balcony snog has given him ammunition to ban Lolly and her family from my life.

  ‘You’re not seeing that Lolly, either! She’s a little tart too, a bloody bad influence.’

  (The truth was the other way round, of course.)