Getting a prescription made up took a bit more work than it does these days when most items come as pre-packaged pills. Then, all the pills were loose in large jars and the chemist had to pour out the requisite number through a measuring device into a plain cardboard box. There also seemed to be a lot more medicine in bottles rather than tablets dispensed in those days – again poured out of a larger container into the chemist’s own stock of bottles. Ointments and creams too were made up by the chemist, often grinding the ingredients in a pestle and mortar. It seemed a much harder job in those days than just picking the requisite boxes off a shelf.
As well as getting our prescriptions made up here, we used the chemist to get our film developed. This was in the days when photos were taken on 120 or 127 roll film, usually with just eight photos on the roll. After the photos were taken, the roll would be removed from the camera and taken to the chemist who would then send them away for developing. After about a week of eager anticipation, the photos and negatives would be returned in a small paper wallet and collected. All so different from today’s instant digital age!
The baker we used was Carrington Brothers; here we bought Wonderloaf or Carrington’s own baked split tin, which was wrapped in tissue paper. This was on the corner of Chatsworth Road and Rushmore Road.
On the opposite corner was an off-licence and next to that was Harry Shaw’s magnificent corn shop. His whole shop, as well as the pavement in front, was full of sacks of seed and grain, such as barley and oats, which all together gave off a wonderful smell. We frequented the shop often to buy items such as lentils and butter beans and especially split peas, which Mum used to make pease pudding, a staple item of our diet, but you could find all types of food and pet food for sale in those sacks. You bought it by weight and the seeds or beans or whatever it was would be scooped up out of the sack and poured into a paper bag.
Next to the corn merchant was my favourite shop in Chatsworth Road, Willis’s, the sweet shop. Most of its contents were just heaven! My absolute favourites were Refreshers but I also liked aniseed balls, bull’s eyes, Love Hearts, blackjacks, rhubarb & custard and fruit salad (at a farthing each), sweet cigarettes, sherbet dabs, sherbet fountains and Spangles, which were small square boiled sweets in a packet and came in many different flavours, my favourite being the Old English packet containing liquorice, mint humbug, cough candy, butterscotch and pear drop flavours.
When I had a bit of extra cash, I was able to buy chocolate bars such as Fry’s Five Boys, Tiffin, Punch and Milk Motoring. Another favourite was ‘Spanish’, which was what we always called liquorice and it came in various forms including long strings, wheels, pipe-shaped and even liquorice root. You could also buy packets of Smith’s crisps here. There was only one flavour – plain. But they came with a little blue bag of salt that you had to undo and sprinkle over the crisps yourself, except that most times you couldn’t because the salt had got damp and would just fall out of the bag in one lump. But we still loved the crisps whether they were all equally salted or not. Willis’s was also where my parents would buy our Easter Eggs – it was such a thrill to see mine on Easter morning with curly white icing spelling out my name on the chocolate.
A little further along was Arthur Toms, noted eel and pie house. This was where we bought our pie and mash and eel liquor, the only takeaway we had in those days. Whenever we decided to have pie and mash, I would be sent off with a large basin and a jug to buy this ambrosia of the gods. The pies and mash would be put into the basin and the liquor poured into the jug. Pie ’n’ mash and eel liquor was a longstanding cockney tradition dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Originally, the pie filling was eel caught in the River Thames but gradually meat took over as a filling and they were made from any meat that was cheap and available. By the twentieth century, the pie had become standardised to contain minced beef.
The pie itself is a normal pastry but it is important that, while it is firm and crusty on top, the bottom has to be soft. Originally, the accompanying liquor was made from the water used to cook the eels in, flavoured and coloured with parsley. Even after eels were no longer used as the filling, the liquor was still made with eel stock. Before starting on it, the pie had to be opened at the top and a liberal dose of vinegar poured in. The whole meal was then eaten with a spoon and fork, never a knife. In common with all other Pie & Mash shops, Toms continued the eel tradition by selling jellied eels as an additional accompaniment or a separate snack. These were eels chopped into rounds and boiled in water and vinegar and then allowed to cool. As eels are naturally gelatinous the cooking process released jelly, which solidified on cooling. This was bolstered by some aspic jelly made from eel bones and the whole dish was served up in a small bowl with vinegar and a liberal dose of pepper.
As an alternative to having cold jellied eels, you could have the eel stewed and eat it while still warm. In the front window of the shop was a large tray of live eels, wriggling away for all they were worth. If you wanted one with your pie and mash, you told Mr Toms which one you wanted and he’d hoick it out of the tray, cut its head off and drop it into a vat of steaming water. A few minutes later, it would be done to perfection, taken out of the vat and chopped into rounds to make a tasty supplement to your meal. Although we usually bought our pie and mash to take home, we did sometimes eat in the shop, and, here again, Arthur Toms followed the age-old tradition of white-tiled walls, a black-and-white patterned mosaic floor and marble-topped tables laid out in rows with bench seats on either side.
I still hold to the view that pie and mash is the best food in the world, even if nowadays you don’t have to take your own jug and basin along to the shop.
There were two more grocer’s shops on the left-hand side of the road, Tesco and Victor Value. When we first started using them, they were just like any other grocer’s shop of the period, with the assistant fetching your shopping for you from the shelf or the stockroom. If you wanted a lot of shopping, it was normal to have it all written down and to hand the list to the assistant. However, quite early on, first Victor Value and then Tesco turned into self-service shops with baskets at the entrance so you could do the shopping yourself and take your purchases to the till. It was a completely novel idea but a sign of things to come. That there was an early Tesco ‘supermarket’ on Chatsworth Road was very appropriate as Jack Cohen, founder of the modern-day, multi-billion-pound worldwide business, began life as a market trader. His first stall was in Well Street in Hackney, his second in Hoxton and his third in this very same Chatsworth Road, some years before he started the famous Tesco brand name.
We probably used no more than three establishments regularly on the other side of the road. Right at the top, where Chatsworth Road changed its name to Brooksby’s Walk, was the laundry where we used to take what we called our ‘bagwash’ once a week. No sitting in front of machines spinning your laundry round in those days. You took your washing in a large bag to the laundry and collected it a few days later, undried and unpressed and reeking of bleach.
Once, the laundry lost our bagwash and, in spite of Dad producing the receipt, they denied all responsibility for losing it. Dad was furious and wrote to our local M.P., Herbert Butler, who took up the case on our behalf. After several letters backwards and forwards, the laundry agreed to pay compensation, though they never accepted liability. It didn’t really matter whether they did or not as Dad refused to use that laundry ever again.
Back in Chatsworth Road, the other two shops I loved were next to each other; the first was called the Biscuit Box, and it just sold biscuits. Like the corn merchant, the shop and the pavement outside were piled high with tins of loose biscuits. These were bought by weight, scooped out and placed in a paper bag. The tins of broken biscuits were our favourites, as you got a big variety of different biscuits for a lower price. Next door was Williams Brothers, a grocery store. They operated a loyalty token system. Every time you bought something, the cashier would give you tokens based on the amount spent and you cou
ld use these towards future purchases in the shop.
The only other shops we occasionally used on this side of the road were Macefield’s, a dark and dingy stationer, and Bowman’s, a clothes outfitters where I was taken every now and then to be fitted up for new shirts and short trousers.
The two shops in Chatsworth Road we fortunately never needed to go into were the two pawnbroker’s shops with their three balls hanging up outside. To many, including my family and our neighbours, they were a reminder of the dark days of the 1930s Depression and most people lived in real fear of having to use their services. The windows were full of watches, rings and bracelets that must have once been someone’s treasured possession. It was all very sad. We never bought anything from them, as my parents were acutely aware that those objects were only there through other people’s misfortune.
On Saturday, the streets would be lined with all manner of market stalls. We bought smoked haddock from the fishmonger’s stall, and Mum used to linger for ages at the haberdashery stall, where she would buy sewing materials and wool. The wool came in twisted skeins, so when she bought some I knew that would mean that some time later in the day I would be sat in an armchair with the skein draped round my outstretched arms while she unwound it to make it into a ball.
Mum spent most of her evenings knitting things for Dad or John or me, but very rarely for herself. She also darned all our socks. It’s easy to forget in today’s throwaway society that socks were hardly ever discarded. If a hole – known as a ‘potato’ – appeared in the heel, it was darned, and if a hole appeared in that it was darned again and again and again. It was very rare for a pair of socks to actually be thrown away. Dad always wore what he called ‘army grey’ socks.
One stall I particularly remember was the one belonging to the cat’s meat man. This wasn’t an open stall like all the others but a narrow enclosed trailer with a counter cut into the side. Here you could buy fresh meat for your cat, liver and such like, but our cat preferred Kit-e-Kat.
After returning from shopping on a Saturday morning, Dad and I would usually watch sport on television. They had some really interesting sport in those days which you never see onscreen now, such as hill climbing, when cars would try to get up a steep muddy hill and whoever got the furthest won. There was a driver and a passenger and the car would always start off okay, but would then reach a particularly muddy or steep part, at which point the driver and passenger would bounce up and down in the car trying to get some grip, but usually to no avail as it slid gracefully back down the hill. Motorcycle scrambling was another favourite of mine.
The unfaltering routine was that, at about three o’clock, Dad and I would go to visit his parents, known to me as Nanny and Grandpa Jacobs, while Mum usually visited her parents, Nanny and Grandpa Sinnott. I never ever went with Mum to visit them – it was always off to Chingford Hatch with Dad.
In fact, I never saw much of any of Mum’s family. They hardly ever visited us and we rarely visited them either. She had five brothers and sisters but I only ever met three of them. Her father’s side were from Co. Wexford in Ireland. My great-great-grandfather had been a blacksmith but my great-grandfather was a bit of a rogue and had spent a year in prison for getting married bigamously. On release, he went off with his ‘second’ wife and no one in the family ever saw or heard from him again. My grandfather was from his first marriage and he and his five brothers and two sisters lived with their mother in Hoxton in London. He was a naval man and had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War. After the War, he became a lockkeeper with the Port of London Authority. Nanny Sinnott was born in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1890, but her parents were both English and had only moved to America the year before her birth. Her male ancestors had been in the carpentry trade for at least two hundred years. When she was four, the family, which consisted of her parents, her three sisters and her twin brother, returned to Britain.
Very shortly after I was born, as part of the re-housing programme, which saw us get our prefab, Dad’s parents, along with their two remaining ‘at home’ children, Uncle Bob and Aunt Clara, also moved out of their Bethnal Green flat. No prefab for them, they were housed in a new London County Council estate called the Friday Hill Estate in the leafy suburb of Chingford Hatch in Essex. Unbeknown to them I am sure, the building of the estate had been the subject of great controversy when first mooted. The good citizens of Chingford were not overjoyed at the prospect of a beauty spot being turned into a housing estate for East Enders, especially as many of them were ‘not of British origin’, which was a polite euphemism for being Jewish. However, in spite of the opposition, the estate was built and my grandparents now found themselves in a luxurious three-bedroom terraced house with a ground-floor passageway leading to a substantial back garden, making it semi-detached downstairs. The house was a far cry from the cramped conditions that they had known for all of their married lives, surrounded by flats and more flats in the heart of the East End. These houses even had an inside toilet and bathroom, an unheard-of luxury.
So, every Saturday afternoon, we would get the 35 bus at the stop on Lea Bridge Road and make the thirty-minute journey to visit my grandparents. We always took a small box of iced cakes as our contribution to the tea we would be getting when we arrived. In the early days, Grandpa, Uncle Bob and Aunt Clara were still working, and weren’t always in when we arrived. Saturday was also visiting day for my uncle Albert and his wife, Aunt Evelyn, and eventually their children, my cousins Barbara and David, so I got to know them very well. But because Sunday was the day set aside for Uncles Joe and David to visit I never saw much of them. Dad had two more siblings who didn’t have a regular visiting day, so I didn’t see much of them either during this period. They were Aunt Julie, who lived with her husband, Isaac, and their four children in a prefab in Bethnal Green, and Uncle Bill, who was registered blind and was going through a lot of domestic difficulties at the time, eventually leading to a divorce from his wife, Sally. Following the divorce, he moved to a flat in Clapton, which meant that I did get to see more of him later on.
My memory of those afternoons and evenings in Chingford is that they always followed the same pattern. First, we would get a cup of tea on arrival and then a bit later, once Grandpa had arrived home, full tea would be served. The tea would consist of rollmop herrings, gefilte fish, bagels (pronounced ‘bygles’, please!) with cream cheese and smoked salmon. There was a big plate of watercress, bread and butter and, of course, our plate of cakes, all washed down with copious cups of tea. My favourite thing to do at those Saturday teas was to make myself a watercress sandwich.
Although not in the least bit religious, my grandparents were very proud of being Jewish and clung as much as they could to their roots, even though they were now probably the only Jewish family in the street. They still spoke some Yiddish and words like Mazel Tov (good luck), nosh (used both as a noun meaning a snack or as a verb meaning to eat), schlep (used as a noun to mean a long journey or as a verb meaning to carry something for some distance), shtick (used by us to mean laugh) and many others were in everyday use at my grandparents’ house.
There was another discrepancy in their language compared to that used in our house, which was that they were not averse to using the odd swear word, something Mum and Dad never did. Never once did I hear them swear when I was growing up, but my nan in particular was forever calling someone an ‘old bugger’, while my aunt would join in with the view that someone was a ‘cocky sod’ or some such.
One thing that wasn’t different about their language was that they spoke a lot of cockney rhyming slang but this was nothing new to me as Dad used it all the time. Words and phrases such as ‘Almonds’ [almond rocks] for socks, ‘Sky Rocket’ for pocket, ‘Mincers’ [mince pies] for eyes, ‘Barnet’ [Barnet Fair] for hair and many more were commonplace in both our houses.
As well as language, there were other big differences between their house and ours. The first was they had an upstairs, which was where their toilet wa
s. In my young days, I was a bit scared of going upstairs as it was usually quite dark and my imagination conjured up ghosts that could jump out at me. I used to avoid going to the toilet as much as I could. There was one occasion when I really wanted to go but was trying to put it off. Dad noticed this and said to me, ‘He’s gone on holiday. I saw him packing his case earlier and going out the front door, so he won’t be there tonight if you want to do a wee.’
The second difference was that my grandparents, aunt and uncle all smoked. Nan in particular was a chain-smoker; she was hardly ever without a Player’s Weight or a Woodbine in her mouth. (In case you’re wondering, she lived until she was eighty-nine!) My aunt favoured Bachelor’s, while Grandpa and Uncle Bob preferred to roll their own. Neither of my parents smoked, so there was an unusually foggy atmosphere inside my grandparents’ house.
The third difference, and one that continually amazed me, was that there was not a single book in their house. The only reading material they had was the Daily Mirror, with the ‘Old Codgers’ letters column. We had hundreds of books at home. As well as Dad’s classical literature, my brother and I had lots of children’s books of our own. I could never understand how my grandparents could possibly go through life without reading anything. Even at a very young age, this struck me as being quite strange.
One final difference between their house and ours was that they had a telephone. We never had one all the time we lived in the prefab, but Nan and Grandpa had one right from when they first moved to Chingford. Their phone number was Silverthorn 6290. If we wanted to use the phone when we were at home, we had to use one of the red telephone boxes that were then common around the streets of East London. Outside Rushmore Road School, there were two red boxes with a blue police box in the middle – not the TARDIS, but a real phone box used by the police.
Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs Page 8