Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood

by Jacky Hyams

  Even today, it’s a riddle. Were those handsome young men hitmen for hire, baby Mafiosi, sun-kissed killers with white teeth and hip sunglasses? Or was it merely a toy, a joke? Somehow, I don’t think so. My guess is, we were lucky; two silly young girls from Hackney could easily have come a cropper that warm August night. But thanks to the arrogance – and ignorance – of youth, we never waste a further minute’s thought on what the contents of that glove compartment signified. Or if we’d been in any serious danger. At that age, you don’t have the capacity to pause for serious reflection. Everything around you seems to hold far too much promise to concern yourself with worries about whether it might be risky to climb into a total stranger’s car, at night, in a foreign country, at the tender age of seventeen.

  CHAPTER 27

  A FERRY RIDE

  Easter in Paris, 1963: Eiffel Tower. The trio of teenage girls perched on metal chairs are smartly attired, sleek leather jackets (purchased for £20 from C&A), high backcombed hairdos, ski pants with stirrups under the feet. Lolly, Adrienne and I are on a three-day break, a long dreamed of chance to wander round the boulevards, admire the shops and soak up the beauty of the City of Light.

  The trip is not a success. We have not budgeted for a capital city, naively using last year’s Diano trip as a benchmark: surprise, surprise, the city is far too expensive for young typists. Our meagre allowance of French francs flies out of our hands with astonishing speed. Nor are there any friendly, amorous young Frenchmen offering to drive us around or buy us drinks. Paris is crowded, bewildering, its inhabitants mostly bad tempered and rude. Even our attempts in cafés to use French meet with classic Parisian derision: a sneer or a reply in English is the usual response, hardly encouraging to self-conscious teens.

  Passports must be handed over to the hotel on arrival. The owner retains them – and studies the surnames carefully. So when we finally go to check out of our one-star hotel, in a seedy area, we come face to face with the ugly reality of Parisian post-war hostility towards foreigners – especially Jews.

  We’d used the hotel’s ancient phone to make reverse charge calls home, to assure our families we were alive and well, an added expense but, in my case, a necessary cost: it shut my dad up, briefly quelled his paranoia about what might happen to me Abroad.

  The final bill, handed to us by the owner, a grim-faced, rude and intractable old woman, the classic snarly Parisian concierge, takes us aback. It’s an enormous amount for two reverse-charge calls. It will clean us out, leave us without any francs for the journey home, several hours of near starvation and thirst on the train and cross-Channel ferry. So we query it, pointing to the total, making all the signs and gestures that indicate ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’.

  Our suitcases are in the lobby beside us. A nasty argument erupts. We yell in English, she bellows back in angry, rapid-fire French. We’re being ripped off – and we know it. But we’re kids and we don’t know how to handle such a situation, far from home. So we eventually cave in, rummage around between us, pool our dwindling resources and grudgingly fork out.

  But it’s not the end. Without warning, once she’s snatched our money, the woman waddles round from behind the counter, picks up our suitcases and proceeds to hurl them, one by one, out of the tiny lobby, chucking them out into the narrow Parisian street.

  ‘Sale Juif!’ she cries, as our cases hit the pavement. Dirty Jew.

  ‘Sortez d’ici, salauds sales!’ Get out of here, dirty bastards.

  And then, to add insult to injury, as we run out to retrieve our cases, she moves to the hotel door and stands there, quivering with hatred. Then she spits at us, the ultimate street gesture of contempt.

  We are bewildered, shocked beyond belief. She has obviously checked our surnames in the passports and noticed the Star of David that Lolly wears. She’ll take our last penny. But she cannot tolerate the idea of our existence. We understand our history all too well. We know that some people, despite all that has happened, continue to hate Jewish people, want them all dead. But this open expression of hatred, the distant echo of what led to the slaughter of millions, is something we have never known. Only years later do I come to understand the dual nature of the French experience during the war, how some French people resisted the Occupation, while others supported the hunting down of Jews, and collaborated with the Nazis to do their worst work.

  I don’t tell my parents when we get home, of course. I don’t want to say or do anything that might jeopardise any future travel plans. Nor does the incident make me wary of future travel, going abroad. But the incident is never forgotten, a brush, a glimpse of what could easily have happened to us, our families, our classmates, had we been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  By now, my frustration with living at home frequently approaches a point of despair. Throughout that year, I am absent as much as is humanly possible and my weekend avoidance routine, either asleep in my room or getting ready to go out, mostly works. I hear my dad, of course, discussing things with my mum in their room. But my contempt for him and his way of life now knows no bounds. I’ve started to see a bit of the world around me and cannot understand why we must remain living in this awful flat, in this miserable street, when he has all that cash nestling in his pocket.

  I never talk to any of the neighbours, even if I come face to face with them. I hate where I am. I thirst to escape. But I don’t know how to go about it; I’m still too young to fend for myself, to find a path that takes me away from my environment.

  Many young girls who seek escape from a less-than-happy home life find it in pairing off with someone. This never figures as a wish, a hope, even an idea in my thinking. I’m fixated by my attraction to men, worry frequently about still being a virgin, have occasional, fleeting crushes on some of the boys I encounter but am far too fickle and immature for anything beyond that. I only hunger for freedom itself. I don’t want to hitch my star to someone else’s life to achieve it and anyway, that wouldn’t be freedom, would it? Round and round it goes in my head, the slow, painful, embryonic process of puberty, not a child any more, not really a woman yet. Emotionally, it’s hell. I type, I dance, I flirt, I shop. But internally, all I really want, dream of, is to get the hell out of Dalston. For good.

  There is a recurring nightmare I have time and time again throughout 1963. It started the year before, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world hung on the brink of nuclear war, a brief but nail-bitingly tense standoff between the US and the USSR after the discovery of Soviet missiles, aimed at the US, in Cuba. Over a two-week period in October 1962, the conflict between Russia and the West seemed to put all our lives in jeopardy: would the Russians use their nuclear arsenal to attack the US? And would the US retaliate, and blow us all into oblivion in the process?

  News travelled much more slowly then. Radio and TV reports were quite different, no 24/7 rolling news media as we now know it, no worldwide web; information released to the general public was much more tightly controlled. Day after day, as the crisis worsened, it was the newspaper headlines warning us of the threat of total catastrophe that we largely relied on to feed us the story. And so, as the crisis reached its peak, there was one unforgettable night when the entire nation went to bed wondering if we’d wake up to be told that the nuclear button had been pushed – or, indeed, if we’d even wake up at all. It was that bad.

  My nightmare is always the same: I am in the flat with Molly and Ginger. It is quiet outside, eerily calm, and we are waiting. Waiting for the world to end, sitting in our lounge, staring at the slate roof of the building behind our living room, waiting for the nuclear bomb to drop. And I am trapped there with my mother and father, the life I am about to begin, the adult experiences I hunger for, now snatched from me forever by nuclear war. There will be no escape …

  It’s said that this was the closest the world ever knowingly came to nuclear war, so my fear, fuelled by a series of ‘the end is nigh’ newspaper headlines, is understandable. But to me, the d
ream demonstrates my deepest fear that I will never break free, that fate – or the unknown – will snatch my future from me. It’s just a dream. But the effect on me is profoundly unsettling. When will I get out?

  Two girls are sitting, somewhat dejectedly, on the upper deck on a cross-Channel ferry from Calais making its way back to Dover. It’s September, the weather is already autumnal, the sea is choppy and the girls’ somewhat sombre, flat mood matches the cloudy skies. Soon, they’ll be back in grotty Hackney, going to the office each day, the excitement of their precious foreign holiday behind them for another twelve months. And, as usual, they are skint. All their lira have gone, mostly spent on strappy shoes and silky Italian tops from the local market. Tired, hungry and with that horrible end-of-a-good-time feeling they dig around in their handbags: just enough English money for two soft drinks to get them through the next few hours.

  Lolly and I are on the return leg of a three-week trip to Pesaro, Italy, a resort on the Adriatic Coast. We’ve travelled by boat and plane because it’s cheaper than flying – and allows us to have that extra week. We’ve had an OK, if uneventful time, chatting up the locals, being whizzed around by eager young Romeos keen to practise their English and, hopefully, improve their seduction techniques. But the holiday does not manage to recapture the lustre, the sparkle of the previous year’s fortnight in Liguria. Could the attraction of Italy be starting to fade?

  A fair, good-looking man in his twenties in a black polo-neck cotton top and white slacks strides by, glances briefly at the two girls, and comes back, wants to chat. They immediately brighten. Michele is a waiter at the Savoy, returning to London after a holiday visiting his family in Bari, right down in the south of Italy. Funnily enough, the girls vaguely recognise him as one of the off-duty waiters they know from the basement dancing at Les Enfants.

  ‘You DANCED with him, Jack,’ Lolly hisses at me later in the loo before the ferry docks, after Michele has very generously bought us all badly cooked chicken and chips. I hurriedly apply some pink lipstick. I know this guy’s face from Soho – he doesn’t really look typically Italian – but that’s it.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ pushes Lolly. ‘You came back afterwards and said, “What a miserable bastard.”

  ‘Nah, don’t remember. But I’m glad he bought us a meal, I was STARVING.’

  We take the train back to London with the handsome, courteous Michele whose heavily accented English is nonetheless quite good. He’s twenty five, has already worked his way up through the catering trade, learning it in Switzerland and Rome, a man of the world, who often misses Italy, his mama and his ten siblings. At Victoria Station, he sees us into a taxi, pushes a £5 note into Lolly’s hand. ‘I call you,’ he promises, having carefully taken note of Lolly’s number.

  We sit back in the cab, pleased with ourselves for having cadged a final meal and ride home out of one more Italian charmer. Michele’s attentiveness has brightened up the end of our holiday.

  A couple of weeks later, Lolly and Michele are engaged.

  A week after we get back, he rings Lolly briefly, suggests we both meet him for coffee at Les Enfants before he starts his evening shift. There, he invites us to a party in Victoria the following weekend.

  ‘Italian boys ’ave a small party,’ he tells us. ‘I take you there.’ We nod eagerly. Italian boys. Party. Right up our street …

  At the party, we are the only girls. Four deeply unattractive Italians are lounging around, noisily debating god-knows-what in Italian. The shabby flat boasts a small record player and Rita Pavone is belting out ‘Cuore’ (Heart), the love song heard on every jukebox in every Italian beach resort that summer.

  I survey the unappealing flat feeling distinctly deflated. Nothing here for me. Not even any grub. By now, it is obvious that Michele is after Lolly. On the somewhat battered sofa, he has his arm around her, is whispering sweet nothings into her ear. I am a tad annoyed. He may be after Lolly but he’s lured me here on false pretences. Why didn’t he just ask her out? So I stomp out, hail a taxi and head for Dalston.

  The next day, Lolly rings me, unhinged, flustered – but smitten beyond belief. Michele has proposed!

  ‘He took a ring from his pocket, put it on my wedding finger and said, “This my gran’ mother ring. I wan’ us to be engaged.” Then he kissed me; it was incredible. So romantic. And then … someone took a photo!’

  Wow. Could it get more like a fairy-tale romance? You meet a handsome, dashing young Italian on a boat, after a few weeks he proposes – then he kisses you for the first time ever as someone records the moment for posterity. Incredible.

  ‘What you gonna do?’ I query.

  ‘I dunno. I’ll just have to see … my mum and dad will go mad … he’s gorgeous, though, isn’t he?’

  Early in ’64, Larraine, her hair piled up in fantastic coils, wearing a stunning knee-length white feathered coat dress from Galeries Lafayette, stands on the steps of Hackney Town Hall with her handsome new husband, Michele. Later, they have a wedding feast, mostly prepared by Michele, now Mike, at her parents’ flat. I am working, so can only join the celebration that evening; wearing in my new blue crepe trumpet-sleeved dress I join her family and friends to wish the newlyweds well, toast them with champagne. Yes, there was quite a lot of carrying on and shouting when Lolly told her family she’d fallen for Mike. But somehow they’ve shelved their prejudices and warily accepted the newcomer.

  I am thrilled for my friend, dazzled by the glamour of the reckless whirlwind courtship. And, without even acknowledging the shift in tempo, now that my best friend has signed a piece of paper to show she’s an adult and has moved into Mike’s tiny bedsit off the Earl’s Court Road, I too am soon reaching out for adulthood – and my first ever lover.

  He’s a cliché, a hero delivered straight out of Mills & Boon, dark, skinny, utterly charming and meltingly dashing, and found on the dance floor at the Whisky a Go Go in Wardour Street. Paolo is twenty six, from Ferrara, not a waiter but a wealthy Italian medical student in London for a few months to improve his near-perfect English. Green eyes. Leather jacket. I fall for his physical charms pretty quickly. He doesn’t have to do much to convince me either: intuition tells me this is it. I’ll willingly throw all caution to the wind and lose my virginity to this man. For by then, I am desperately eager for the experience itself. While we were still emerging from an era of ‘nice girls don’t’ unless they’re engaged, semi-hitched, there was no way in the world I was about to allow the conventional wisdom to curtail my need to find out more about sex, life, you name it. Unable to swim, I dive in headlong anyway.

  But of course, the first time isn’t always a passport to ecstasy. Leaping into Paolo’s arms, after a slow courtship (about a week) mostly spent after work in or on the tiny bed in his little studio flat in Holland Park, building up, bit by bit, to the big event, until we finally go All The Way, isn’t quite the intensely passionate earth-shattering experience I’d been reading about in trashy American novels since my early teens. It’s exciting, no question. And it is only, briefly, painful. But the whole thing has been marred somewhat by medical student Paolo’s terror of getting me pregnant. So our lovemaking is a case of coitus interruptus. Paolo refuses to use a condom, though, of course, even using the hit-and-miss method meant I still risked pregnancy.

  ‘You have Pill in England, no?’ he’d asked me when it was obvious, after the second date, where it was all heading.

  ‘Yes but I can’t get it,’ I told him and it was true. The Pill had been available on an NHS prescription since 1961, but I’d heard the prescription came from your GP and there was no way the family doctor in Dalston would have given me the precious piece of paper. So my first time, like many, was far from ideal. But … I’d done it!

  ‘He’s going back to Italy next week so I don’t know if I’ll see him again,’ I tell Lolly over the phone.

  ‘I’m SO pleased I’ve done it. But I wanna do it again … with someone else.’

  ‘Are you sure,
Jack?’ says Lolly, unable to conceal her shock at such calculation. ‘I thought you really liked him. He sounds like he really likes you.’

  She’s right. Paolo is attentive, affectionate and is talking about coming to see me again in a few months’ time. But with the fickleness of youth, my mission accomplished, my period on time, I don’t particularly want to be Paolo’s girl. We talk on the phone. But I avoid seeing him again. And so he returns to Ferrara, no doubt pleased with his conquest. But somewhat puzzled by the behaviour of these strange English girls.

  CHAPTER 28

  A PLAN

  For once, I actually like the new job: secretary to the sales manager of an electronics company off the Tottenham Court Road. The company market innovative new products: telephone answering machines, which can only be rented out on an expensive five-year leasing contract. This is no easy sell, so the company employ freelance salesmen or agents to market the machines, paying the agents £100 per sale, a huge sum for those times.

  The place is swarming with hungry salesmen, all ages, motormouths with fast patter, keen to chat up virtually every woman on the planet – especially the girls in the sales office, me and my colleague Denise. This is much to do with our close relationship with the sales manager, Mrs Burton, whose husband is one of the company bosses – and partly to do with the ultra-fashionable short skirts we are wearing.

  The miniskirt was now in danger of taking over central London, giving every red-blooded man a daily peepshow of flesh to ogle, a distraction that is fast transforming the daily commute, the office grind.

  Today it would be labelled harassment, men in the office commenting endlessly on how you look, how they fancy you, how they can see your knickers if you bend over to retrieve a piece of paper. We called it having a laugh, giving as good as we got with a saucy retort or a well-aimed insult. Many modest girls held back, of course, sticking to the primmer, longer hemlines. But those, like me, who instantly adopted the ‘pelmet’ look, took the attention for granted.