Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  ‘What do you bloody know, all you do is get pissed you bastard!’ is my standard response.

  The bedroom door slams. I fall onto my bed, disappointed and embarrassed at being caught, angry at my dad’s typical over-reaction. But part of me, nonetheless, feels a bridge has been crossed: at least I’m now a Snogee.

  For about a week after the aborted evening in I am grounded: I go to school, come home, eat my dinner in my room – and stay there. David, apparently, is still keen, undaunted by the spectre of an irate Ginger, which says much for his youthful ardour. But alas, for David, I am lost to him: my experiment over, my dad’s attempts to limit my life soon forgotten, I am in no way ready for a steady situation with a Nice Boy. Oh no. I want something different, more exciting than a rather scruffy Stamford Hill Club boy.

  ‘He’s not exactly nice looking,’ I remind Lolly as we munch away on our lunchtime bag of potato puffs. ‘And I can’t stand that big jumper he wears, it looks like his mum knitted it and lost the pattern.

  ‘Anyway, he’s got a big nose, he looks SO Jewish ….’

  How superficial can you be? Instead of appreciating David’s loyalty after the embarrassing denouement, the shape of his nose and his baggy knit are sufficient to consign him to the rubbish heap. He takes it well, stops hanging around me and quickly moves on to another girl from the club who goes to Laura Place school. Recently I learned that he became a highly successful multi-millionaire businessman. Who would have known it, eh?

  Lolly, too, is starting to conduct her own youthful experiments around this time. And we learn a valuable lesson from what happens next: ‘Loose Talk Costs Lives’ proclaimed the posters plastered all over the country during the war years. In this case, of course, lives were not imperilled. But Lolly’s reputation around the Hill is about to take a bit of a nosedive via some serious blabbing.

  Lolly has long had a suppressed passion for a boy called Malcolm. He lives near Hackney Downs in the same block of flats as Lolly’s grandparents. She visits her grandparents regularly, so this gives Lolly ample time and opportunity to smile encouragingly at Malcolm, who is exceptionally good looking and, at sixteen, already something of a Hackney heartbreaker. One girl in our year, Susan, has already set her sights firmly on Malcolm and they’ve been an item for a while, so Lolly has kept very quiet about fancying him like mad.

  One summer evening, as Lolly leaves her grandparents’ flat, she finds Malcolm at the bottom of the stairs, leaning on his pushbike and flashing her a come-hither grin. Two of his mates are with him: Don, another good-looking local boy, and a fat boy called ‘Buddy’, nicknamed because he wears big black-framed glasses à la Buddy Holly.

  ‘Goin’ home, Lolly?’ coos Malcolm the Charmer, who knows the estate where Lolly lives about a mile or so away.

  Lolly nods, afraid to say much. This is the closest she’s ever got to Malcolm. But she’s heard through the Skinners’ grapevine that he and Susan aren’t courting right now. They’re having ‘a break’.

  Throwing caution to the winds, she says its OK for the trio, pushing their bikes along the pavement, to accompany her home. Yet minutes into their stroll, Malcolm seizes the initiative.

  ‘Look, we can cut across the Downs here and get there quicker,’ he tells Lolly, a signal to his mates to leg it, buzz off. Which they promptly do.

  Lolly knows perfectly well she should now make some excuse and walk off, get away from the Downs. But this doesn’t happen. A few minutes later, they’re sitting on the Downs, Lolly chattering away nonstop to cover her nerves.

  ‘Everyone says that Skinners’ girls are snobs,’ she prattles.

  ‘You can’t be a snob if you live in council flats, can you?’

  Malcolm doesn’t answer. He just smiles beguilingly – and promptly grabs Lolly for a kiss. She does not pull away. She’s been kissed before by a boy she didn’t like much. This is Malcolm! Much more exciting. More kisses.

  ‘This is niiice,’ thinks Lolly dreamily.

  Then, predictably, Malcolm lunges and tries to grab Lolly’s boobs. She is quick to push him away. She knows she’s already in trouble for going on the Downs and just necking with Someone Else’s Baby. Anything else is unthinkable.

  Malcolm jumps up. He can’t be bothered to try again.

  ‘Come on, let’s walk you home, I’ll be late for tea.’

  Silently they trudge all the way back to Lolly’s estate. He says goodbye without attempting another kiss.

  Lolly doesn’t tell a soul about what has happened, not even me. But within a day or so, the news is out: Gallant Malcolm, so handsome, so treacherous, has delightedly rushed back to his mates to boast: Yeah, he went on the Downs with Lolly who then, shamelessly, let him unhook her bra.

  ‘That Lolly’s a right goer,’ he tells them.

  ‘Reckon she’d probably go all the way if you wanted ….’

  It’s both unfair and cruel. The lie spreads around the Hill, all the way to Skinners’ and the ears of Susan, who confronts Lolly after class.

  ‘I hear you’ve been after Malcolm,’ she sneers bitchily.

  ‘So what?’ says Lolly shakily, attempting a defiance she doesn’t really have.

  ‘Malcolm’s not interested in little TARTS,’ she hurls at a crestfallen Lolly, who soon gets the full story of what Malcolm has been saying from one of the other girls.

  Lolly is shocked and bewildered. She doesn’t deserve this. In one fell swoop devious, two-timing Malcolm has somehow cleared himself with his beloved. And upped the ante as a Lothario with his mates. Now, whenever she runs into Susan and her gang, there are bitchy whispers and gales of spiteful laughter. Who can underestimate the cruelty of young girls? Or the perfidious behaviour of young men?

  But if our random experiments with boys are taking up much of our time and energy, our school careers are now in freefall. After-hours detention is now de rigeur, as are summons to the headmistress, Miss Gray, for a talking-to. On one memorable if shameful occasion, Lolly and I wind up in detention together – and spend an entire half hour standing before the teacher, giggling incessantly. It’s all so hilarious for us. We look at each other, that makes us giggle. We look at the teacher, more fuel for snickering. It’s outrageous – and also a bit tragic. Because it is crystal clear to the teachers that it’s a waste of time trying to teach girls like us. Time to talk to The Parents.

  Molly and Ginger are invited to a session at the school with the headmistress. They dress to the nines, as usual, my dad, unbelievably sober in his new Savile Row tailored ‘whistle’, white neatly pressed shirt and silk patterned tie. Molly dons her new yellow wool jigger coat, a loose three-quarter-length style very popular in the fifties. Miss Gray, however, is not interested in presentation. Their daughter, she explains, is a hair’s breadth away from expulsion. She is bright but she doesn’t study at all, and her insolent attitude is disrupting the class. What do they have to say?

  There have already been heated discussions at home. Lolly’s family are clubbing together to pay to send her to secretarial school so she can leave Skinners’ after turning fifteen and learn shorthand and typing. I, of course, demand this too. It means several months more of study – then out into the world, a job, earning money. Freedom. As usual, my parents are caving in to me. Anything for a quiet life.

  ‘We think if she goes to secretarial school when she’s fifteen, there’s quite good opportunities for her, there’s a big demand for office workers and secretaries,’ explains Ginger.

  ‘And the money’s very good.’

  He’s right, in a way. Better a teenage typist, earning money, than a reluctant stroppy schoolgirl, wreaking havoc, ignoring her studies.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not the same as the sort of career she could have if she worked hard and studied,’ sighs Miss Gray. ‘The money might be good now. But it will never really go up.’

  What she means, of course, is that study, ‘A’ levels and university could lead to a Civil Service career, or teaching – where salaries, plus pensions
would climb, albeit slowly.

  None of this is likely to mean much to my parents. But they somehow respect Miss Gray’s quiet authority and her words are mulled over afterwards.

  ‘It’s funny she said that about the money, Ging. How does she know?’ mused Molly.

  ‘Dunno. I reckon she has to say that, anyway. Can’t be seen to encourage people to let their kids out at fifteen, can she?’

  I am fortunate that Ginger’s wad of readies can easily be deployed to fork out the twenty-two guineas per term it will cost to send me to Pitmans College in Southampton Row for a year. Though at the time, of course, I don’t fully perceive this: it’s just another thing I have to have because a) I hate Skinners’ and any attempt by authority to regulate my behaviour, and b) my friend is doing it, so it’s a must-have.

  But the Pitmans decision, unbeknown to all of us, carried with it a huge advantage for me down the line. For while shorthand and touch-typing were the prerequisites to a secretarial route back then, they could also prove to be very valuable tools for anyone wishing to work as a journalist. None of us, of course, had any idea that my path would eventually lead to a lifetime in journalism. But this time, the spoilt child who stamped her foot and yelled until she got her way had unwittingly hit upon something of lasting value.

  Although all that was a long, long way ahead ….

  CHAPTER 22

  THE APPRENTICE

  The sixties dawned. By the end of 1960, Elvis was out of the army, growing his hair and warning us: It’s Now or Never. And in a way, he was right; who imagined we were heading into the definitive post-war decade of explosive social change?

  For me, the era began by saying farewell to school, an unmemorable transition. I just left class, as usual, bundled all my stuff into a carrier bag, and waited impatiently at the bus stop opposite the hated Victorian building, the scene of my Great Failure, to board the 649 bus home. There was no ceremony, no real sense of moving on to pastures new, other than briefly saying goodbye to my cronies. (No teacher had much to say to me.)

  Lolly had already left a month or so before. A few girls were openly envious of our freedom but most were quite sniffy about it all: it was no secret that expulsion would have been my fate had my parents not pre-empted the authorities by pulling me out.

  So just a week after departing school, I stood, in my little grey-and-white Prince of Wales check suit with its below-the-knee-length straight skirt, topped with my lemon Orlon cardigan and short boxy jacket, waiting for another bus going in a totally different direction: towards the West End.

  The 38 bus runs from Dalston Junction, down Balls Pond Road and through Islington, all the way down Rosebery Avenue and along Theobald’s Road to the corner of Southampton Row, where Pitmans College stood.

  My life was changing for ever, yet in Dalston itself very little had changed on the surface: Ridley Road was still crowded, dirty and scruffy, the High Street shops still dingy if a bit more well stocked with consumer durables, and Kingsland Road jammed with people who looked a tad brighter, less downtrodden and no longer quite so lean and hungry. The Wimpy Bar was virtually full most days; Cooks Pie & Eel shop, with the wriggling, slimy eels in full view in the front window, did a continuous roaring trade.

  Yet if you looked again, the place still bore the scars of the old air-raid and ration-book existence. Many bombsites around Shacklewell Lane remained untouched, merely boarded up. The timberyard opposite our flat was noisily going full tilt. Maisie and son remained, eking out their existence in their hideout. The boys in the car yard still ran out to offer Molly help with her shopping bags. An Irish family in a first-floor flat below moved out, back to Ireland, to be replaced by some friends of theirs, another Irish couple without kids. The rebuilding and re-branding of whole swathes of East London into more fashionable, trendy areas was still decades off. But my dad’s bookie world was changing dramatically.

  Street betting was poised to go straight. In 1960, the government announced that within a year, betting shops would be legalised. My dad’s semi-illegal business could now be 100 per cent legit. There’d be no more bungs or grateful rounds in the pub to friendly coppers. More canny operators would have seen this demise of the bung as a real advantage. Not my dad; for him, all the change meant was that the Middlesex Street premises could be vacated. Just around the corner, in Harrow Place, the Hyams name could now be hoisted above a fully fledged betting shop, complete with counter clerk and blackboard with betting prices scrawled in chalk, for all to see, not just the lucky sods with phones who could afford to run an account.

  The Day of the Runner was ending; the street corner and public house furtive exchange of betting slips was over. No more newspaper court reports that this or that hapless runner had been formally charged for ‘loitering on the streets for settling bets’ and fined a tenner.

  Now, because the people’s passion for betting was clearly an ingrained national pastime, it was a no-brainer for the government to start to clean up, legally, on the betting front: for a canny bookie, the post-war betting bonanza was now a route to greater riches. Or in Ginger’s case, it should have been ….

  Why he decided to acquire a partner in his new venture was never clear. After all, the business itself was well established around the Lane. Maybe with his dad gone, he needed the backup of someone with serious cash. In any event, the new partner, a pale, skinny man called Leslie, came on board to help fund my dad’s new venture as a legal betting-shop owner. He’d be a sleeping partner only.

  ‘It’s gonna be the first-ever betting shop in the City of London area,’ Ginger told everyone proudly.

  Well … a distinction of sorts, I guess. Ginger loved the City: bomb scarred as it still was he regarded it as his territory, a significant and fascinating area, a historical landmark of London’s early beginnings. And now we no longer had to make those horrible Sunday treks to the Lane – there were never any enforced visits to my grandmother, now in the suburbs, since most of my dad’s parental affection had been reserved for his father – I started to understand for myself the City’s fascination after a trip to The Monument, climbing the hundreds of stairs right to the top, to gaze down on the vast city streets below. At fifteen, out of school, new and different vistas of London were starting to open up for me – far beyond the mundane confines of Dalston and the Hill.

  In a way, Pitmans was a significant halfway house between my home life and my subsequent working life in and around the West End. The college was a bustling, busy place with all types of students of both sexes, charging up and down the stairs, racing to be on time for classes, all determined to pick up the rudiments of office skills and finding a niche in the now developing commercial world. Why did boys want to learn to type? Lolly and I wondered. Surely they didn’t want to be shorthand typists, like us? (Mostly, they didn’t, they were hoping to be journalists.) And how come every single day was so crammed? We had shorthand and typing classes twice each day, interspersed with French lessons; we’d already done French at Skinners’ so it made up the curriculum. And, of course, it had been impressed upon us at home that this could not, in any way, be a repeat of Skinners’. There’d be no slacking, no skiving off to the Hill to giggle and munch on pickled cucumbers. We were there to learn important skills that would deliver us into the working world and earn us good money. Our parents were paying: we’d better get cracking.

  ‘Monty says he wants to see me earning in six months’ time,’ Lolly told me, nervous at the unknown hurdles facing us. I hadn’t been told this in so many words but I was a bit daunted at first too. Ginger was preoccupied with sorting out the new shop, getting everything shipshape, my mum holding her breath, hoping against hope that me going out to work would mark the end of the war between me and my dad (she was seriously wrong, alas).

  But incredibly, we did get stuck in, learning to touch type with a big metal cover concealing the keys to the big Royal or Remington typewriter – something I struggled with at first but eventually just about got the hang
of – and gradually unravelling the huge mystery of learning to write Pitman shorthand. The whole point of the intensive learning schedule was to keep you slugging away at it, day in, day out, until you got up to speed. And it worked. After a few months of not having a clue what the innumerable shorthand squiggles, pee, bee, tee, dee, chay, some strokes light, some heavy, really represented, one day a little light clicked on in my head and I ‘got’ what shorthand was all about: a phonetic representation of the English language. It all started to flow. In fact my shorthand was better than my typing. I wasn’t nimble fingered at the keyboard. Even when you had some idea of what you were doing, typing by touch alone, clattering away (it was a very noisy business, with thirty or so students tapping away on manual typewriters, hour in, hour out), you had to get up to a decent speed to get your leaving certificate. Employers wanted shorthand typists who could type quickly, spell properly and take down shorthand dictation at a good speed, say eighty words a minute.

  The big carrot for all this frenzied activity was the prospect of a choice of office jobs galore in London for kids like us, even though we hadn’t completed our education. Such was the volume of demand, businesses big or small had to compete like mad for competent people: hence the clamour for Pitmans skills, the growing number of employment agencies like Brook Street Bureau and the slow and steady emergence of ‘The Temp’.

  Eight pounds a week plus luncheon vouchers for a junior shorthand typist in London’s West End sounds very modest now – but for a fifteen-year-old then it meant real consumer power, new clothes on tap, sharply pointed-toe brown stilettos from Dolcis at £5 a pair. Lolly and I, already eager shoppers with our parents’ money, couldn’t wait to have our own cash: and we were not alone, part of a huge economic wave giving birth to a spending boom spearheaded by youngsters: we, not our parents, who’d struggled through war going without, would never have it so good.

  Day after day, we plodded away at the typewriters, took down fake business letters in our wonky shorthand, listened intently as the formally worded documents were dictated to us over and over again. ‘Dear Sir. With reference to your letter of the twenty fourth … we remain, yours respectfully, and so on … It was dull, repetitive and frequently it seemed endless; you never thought you’d get there. But we did. Despite the somewhat disturbing behaviour of one of the typing supervisors, a nun called Sister Brigid who would regularly get behind your chair and literally shove the chair forwards, sadistically propelling you towards the covered keyboard if she felt you were inattentive or losing momentum. Sister Brigid was a bully. There was no doubt of that. But she had no time for the protracted ‘Stand Creature’ scenes of student humiliation that took place at my last school. You just copped it. Your mum and dad were paying. There was no other option but to keep clattering away.