Up West

by Pip Granger

  Ronnie elected not to stay in retailing. When he left school he went to work in the market, doubling up with jobs behind the scenes at local theatres. ‘Most of the people in the ’Bury worked locally,’ he remembers. ‘A percentage worked in the market, and a few in the theatres as well. Others worked in the British Museum, the National Gallery or the auction house in Garrick Street. My uncle was a lavatory attendant in Charing Cross Road. I can’t recall anybody having to go more than a small bus ride away.

  ‘Moss Bros employed quite a few people, storemen and drivers – not necessarily serving, that was probably a stage too far for the ’Bury – and the print used to take a lot of people. There was Harrisons bang opposite us, a huge printmakers and stamp-makers. Both my sisters went in there. If you were lucky, you got a job down Fleet Street, or Odhams in Long Acre, where the Daily Herald was printed. Some of the girls worked as waitresses, as Nippies down in Joe Lyons or wherever. A lot of them became sales assistants in the shops around.’

  All this hard work made West Enders appreciate their leisure time, but they tended to spend it close to home. Just as hardly any of my fellow West Enders grew up with a garden, very few of them spoke of going on holiday on a regular basis. I don’t think they were being shy about it: they just didn’t go. Peter Jenkins’s parents presented an exception to the rule. His father insisted on taking his family away for two weeks in a boarding house in Exmouth, every single year. This made young Peter feel very special. ‘So many people did not get away, because they couldn’t afford it. In comparison with the people on the estate, we were well off. Nobody else from round about went away for a week, let alone a fortnight. They stuck around the estate, and went places for the day; Southend, or the south coast from Waterloo, sometimes Sheerness from Victoria.

  ‘We used to take day trips of our own, to Littlehampton, Brighton or Bognor Regis, which was exciting in its own way, but there was such a lot of anticipation about the two weeks in Devon: we sent the trunk ahead for a start. Passenger Luggage in Advance. You’d put the labels on your trunk, and that was ever so exciting, because it meant holiday time was near, and then the week before you were going, you walked across Waterloo Bridge with Dad to the station, to buy the tickets.’

  John Carnera’s father, Secundo, was another who could not bear the thought of going without a holiday, but while the Jenkinses went to Devon, the Carneras had other destinations in mind. ‘My dad only had two places he wanted to go on holiday ever in his life. One was Sequals, in Italy, where we came from. We used to go every three years, because that’s all we could afford, but when we went, it was for two or three months. We’d go in August and stay through the harvest period. That’s when it was best to be in Italy, at harvest-time: the wine harvest, the corn, and all the rest of it.

  ‘And if we didn’t go there, we used to go to Brighton. Dad loved Brighton, and I loved the piers. I used to save up every year to spend time on the penny machines. My week’s holiday at Brighton was spent on those machines. I used to hate the shingle beach, where you were – ow! ow! ow! – limping all the way down to the water’s edge because of the stones, you know, then you’d get in and it was stone cold, absolutely freezing. It wasn’t my idea of fun at all. I just wanted to go on one of the piers and spend all my pennies. I used to love that. There was the Executioner, where they cut off the bloke’s head, shooting games where you had to shoot cats with a pistol, ones with ghosts coming out of cupboards and laughing policemen. One year, I saved three shillings and tenpence. You can’t imagine how rich I felt, like a multimillionaire, and I could not wait to get on those machines. That three and ten was burning a hole in my pocket. I got rid of it in about two days, I think.’

  As I researched this book, I came to realize that I was not only collecting stories about the way people lived in the forties, fifties and early sixties, but also stories of earlier generations, passed down from parents and grandparents and often taking them deep into the area’s past. Ann Lee, for example, can trace an ancestor back to the Bow Street Runners – the family retains custody of the truncheon – and Mike O’Rouke’s family were Covent Gardeners back to at least ‘great-grandfather days’. The Mann family business was set up in Monmouth Street in 1849 by Ronnie’s great-great-grandfather.

  I heard about the way people came to England with little or no money and no English at all, looking for work, working hard and setting up businesses. I heard stories of sacrifice, hard work and humour, of people doing the best they could to get by and to bring up families with pitifully few resources. Olga Jackson, for example, remembers how her grandparents lived: ‘My grandfather was a painter and decorator, and my grandmother did anything she could, and must have done that from a very early age, because she was so poor. I think she was a wet nurse at one time. She did everything. They lived in a flat in an apartment house, in Shelton Street. There was no running water, or toilet, or anything upstairs. They were four floors up and they had to go all the way down to the bottom just to get water. Every drop had to be dragged upstairs and lumped down again.’

  Ann Lee told me about her mother’s mother, who had brought up a large family in the Wild Street Buildings, despite being rendered briefly homeless when Hitler demolished J Block. The more I heard of Nan Glover, the more I liked her, and she’ll turn up again in this book. For me, she sums up the stoicism, sensibilities and spirit of the working-class Londoners who lived through the wars and tried to make the best of the peace for their children and grandchildren. ‘My nan was such a darling. Cissie was her name, Cissie Glover. Well, Jessica really, but everybody called her Ciss. She had it hard, but I never, ever, heard her complain. She used to do three cleaning jobs a day to keep her family. Her husband cleared off and left her with seven kids. Well, he cleared off and left her with five, and came back twice and left her with another one each time. And then he cleared off for good, to live, as my mother so delicately put it, with his old tart up at the top of Drury Lane. I never met him, I wasn’t allowed – well, nobody had anything to do with him. But when Nanny talked about it, you could see she still loved him.

  ‘My grandfather died when I was thirteen. And his old tart came to my mum and said, “Your father’s died,” and my mum said, “Yeah, and?” “Well,” said his tart, “he’s gonna need burying.” “Let him have a pauper’s grave then,” my mum said. “We don’t want anything to do with him.” My mum, she hated him.

  ‘But then we went down to see Nanny and my mum told her “The old man’s dead.”

  ‘Poor lamb, I’ll never forget my old nan’s face. It was a mixture of sadness and relief, and I said to her, “Are you all right?” and she went, “I’m all right, love. At least I know where he is, now.”’

  *There were several rookeries in Covent Garden, the most famous being the one huddled around St Giles’s church.

  *Aldridges’ Horse Repository was a very old established horse auctioneers, founded in 1753. Owen remembers that ‘Inside, the stalls where they used to stable the horses prior to them being auctioned – not racehorses, but working horses, cart-horses and so on – were all still there.’

  *The copper was a boiler for heating large quantities of water for wash day. Shaped like a water butt, with a tap to draw off the water, they were heated from below with either gas jets or coal. You got your copper going early, and once the water was hot, drew it off in to buckets and carried it to the sink or tub where you were doing the washing. It was hard graft. The tenements had communal wash houses and a large copper: even new-built council houses in the late forties and fifties had smaller versions, until immersion heaters came along.

  *Seven shillings and sixpence (37.5p) would have been roughly a tenth of the average weekly wage before the war, which for a man was around £4 per week – less for a woman.

  4

  Playing Out

  One of the greatest contrasts between being a child in the fifties and today is how much freedom we enjoyed back then. We roamed all over the place and our free time was nowhere near
as organized as kids’ time is today. Lucky children might have had riding lessons, music lessons or dance, but most did not. The freedom to roam was possible because there was so little traffic. Even in Central London, seeing a car coming towards you as you played hopscotch or football in the street was the exception rather than the rule.

  If we weren’t at school, we spent very little time amusing ourselves at home. It wasn’t just a case of there being no such things as computers or video games; lots of people didn’t even have a television. Because television had been in its infancy when the war began, and the authorities had simply switched it off for the duration, it took a while to get going again. Most people had no access to one at all until Coronation year, 1953. Even if your family did own a TV, there was hardly anything on. In the fifties, broadcasting hours were very limited indeed. Toys were at a premium, too, because materials and labour had been missing for so long. Once again, it took a while for imported materials to come through, although limited production did begin again in the late forties. Indoor space was limited for many families, especially those who had taken in homeless relatives who had been blitzed out of house and home. All these factors meant that the fifties child was an outdoors child.

  Allowing your children to play and roam about outside must have come as a huge relief for parents, too, especially those who had watched their children being menaced by the Blitz. Children were taught to be wary of strangers, men mostly, but there wasn’t the dreadful anxiety that there appears to be today. I understand that the actual numbers of children being abducted by strangers has not changed radically since records began, but back in the forties and fifties, when the media was restricted to newspapers, radio and newsreels at the cinema, we really didn’t hear about such things very often. That also contributed to our freedom. Our parents were less afraid for us, especially once the bombing stopped.

  Ann Waterhouse had a fairly sheltered upbringing in Knightsbridge, and went to school in Mayfair. ‘I saw quite a lot of the West End area,’ she remembers. ‘In those days, we had the freedom to roam around in our dinner hour, more than would be considered safe these days.’ Where Ann lived, there were no other children, and excursions with her school friends, or visits for tea, all tended to be arranged and scheduled. She was an exception, though. Almost all of the people I talked to spoke of the joy of spilling out on to the pavement on the morning of a school-free day not knowing what’s going to happen, but knowing you have the whole day to find out.

  London’s children had, of course, always played out in the streets, back alleys, parks (in those they were allowed to enter) or, where it could be found, waste ground. In the first decade or so after the war there was a lot more waste ground around in the West End, courtesy of the Luftwaffe. Some of the bomb sites were put to use. Many, for instance, were turned into car parks, while one in Dean Street was used as the venue for the annual Soho Fair, which in those days lasted a week. Janet Vance, who grew up in Frith Street, remembers this well: ‘There would be floats going around the streets and a proper fairground, with stalls and rides, on the car parks, on the old bomb sites.’

  Those sites unsuitable for car parks tended to become impromptu playgrounds, and soon became irresistible attractions to local children. Ronnie Mann, from his base in Bedfordbury, east of Trafalgar Square, got to know them all. ‘I reckon we played more in bomb sites than we ever played in normal games. There was a big one in St Martin’s Lane, and the other side of the Strand was bombed from Villiers Street all down to the Embankment Gardens. Leicester Square was bombed, Shaftesbury Avenue was bombed, Floral Street in the market was bombed, so you had huge, massive areas that didn’t completely disappear until – well, in the case of Floral Street, not until 1970.’

  John Carnera came from Italy soon after the war to live in Dean Street. ‘There was a bomb site straight across the road from us,’ he remembers. ‘On one side they’d made it into a car park, but the other remained as it was, no building, just basements and cellars, all bombed out. It was just this hole in the ground, and we used to run up and down playing Cowboys and Indians in it. We used to have stone fights on the bomb sites. Chucking them at each other. Ludicrous.’

  It never occurred to children that they were playing in the ruins of people’s lives, homes and workplaces. Why should it? Ignorance of the past is one of the joys of being young. ‘We’d go to a bomb site,’ remembers Ronnie Brace, ‘put two coats down for a goal, and there we were. Playing among the debris was part of our lives. We didn’t know about the war. I mean, I remember it, but I didn’t know the context. Bombs, well, they were just a frightening noise, going under the bed, knocking over the piss pot or something; going down in the tube and all that, but it didn’t ring, not at that age; I mean, at school, you have people you like and don’t like, but you don’t think of nationalities fighting.’

  While some sites were clear enough to serve as a rather bumpy impromptu football pitch, others were better suited to more adventurous – in fact, downright dangerous – games. Ronnie Mann again: ‘St Martin’s Lane was like an assault course – talk about training commandos. You had to climb up the scaffolding and go across, probably a 20-foot drop, on to stone. We all did it. It was a wonder no one got killed.’ The element of danger and foolhardiness was something everyone remembered, although they didn’t seem to have thought about it at the time.

  Peter Jenkins, who lived in the Peabody Buildings in Wild Street, recalls that, ‘Me and my mates used to use bomb sites for exploring and making dens and playing adventure games. How on earth we ever survived I don’t know, what with all the health and safety risks, all the smashed glass and of course run-ins with the down-and-outs, who were using the ruins as dosshouses.’

  It wasn’t just the boys who were attracted to these melancholy relics of the war – girls were also drawn to the large crater left by part of Newport Dwellings that took a direct hit. ‘We used to play in it,’ Sonia remembers. ‘My mum used to go mad and shout at me to get out of there, but we really enjoyed it. Once, we were moving some bricks and wood, and we saw this box: Ooh, what’s in this box? So we got it out of the rubble and opened it up, and it was a whole box full of make-up – mascara, rouge, lipstick, hairbrushes, everything to do with what women wanted in those days. Somebody said we’ve got to call the police, and they came and they looked at it. They thought it had been looted from somewhere during the Blitz, then dumped, so they told all of us kids to share it among ourselves. That was my first taste of make-up. It was brilliant. You just thought, “Oh God, I’ve got some make-up”. I must have been all of nine. I remember it very vividly: we thought all our birthdays had come at once, having the hairbrushes, everything – brilliant!’

  Sonia also remembers the ruins of St Anne’s Church. ‘We used to go in over the gates in Shaftesbury Lane. There was like a little chapel and, as children, we used to go in there and play priests and congregation. We’d go in there from school, and one of them would be the priest, standing at the altar, and the rest would be on the few pews that there were. Then, one time we went in there, someone kicked some wood and there was a dead cat underneath, full of maggots. I never went there any more.’

  In the fifties, West End streets were full of children. Most of them were as streetwise as they needed to be and as grubby as they could get away with. Today we might call them street kids, but that phrase wasn’t in use then. Nor was ‘streetwise’, come to that. ‘Urchin’ was the word Raye Du-Val used to describe his youthful self, while Ronnie Mann recalls with laughter that ‘we used to play with the kids of a posh family, somewhere round the Adelphi. It never lasted long. The family didn’t want us there. There’s a limit to what you’ll put up with from ruffians and guttersnipes, as we were called.’

  Out in the streets, then as now, there were boundaries that some children and young people – posh kid, guttersnipe, urchin or one of the many shades in between – did not cross: some young Covent Gardeners, for example, were forbidden to go in to Soho, while several Soho
ites knew nothing of the territories across the Charing Cross Road, partly because the busy road was a formidable barrier to young pedestrians, and partly because it was the dividing line between catchment areas for schools.

  In the heart of Soho, though, virtually all the streets were safe to play in. No buses and hardly any trucks ventured within the area bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Regent Street, and although there was traffic in the main streets through Soho, it was moving slowly enough not to cause a problem. In Covent Garden, much the same applied. There were lorries in the streets around the market in the mornings, but for much of the afternoon and evening there was little to worry about, particularly in the backstreets. The estates had it easy. Peter Jenkins remembers that ‘we didn’t play too much in the streets because we had this whacking great space in among the blocks. We could play football, although you had to be careful because of the windows. Our ball games were played in an enclosed space, looked down on by a whole community. No cars came in: we were safe.’

  Mike O’Rouke grew up in the Seven Dials and played in the streets around his home. ‘You had to be a certain age,’ Mike remembers, ‘before you could go out and about. My grandfather bought me a little three-wheeler, a tricycle, for my fifth birthday, and that was my prized possession. I used to go up and down Mercer Street on that. One of my relatives would be sitting on the doorstep while I rode up and down.