Up West

by Pip Granger

  For the younger children, there were smaller public parks or playgrounds tucked away around the West End. Mike O’Rouke remembers two of them. ‘My mum used to take us to St Giles Gardens, up by St Giles church. It’s quite small, but it’s a nice play area. We used to go there before I started school. And after school she used to take us up there. There was a little canteen where you could get tea or a fizzy drink.

  ‘My mum’s mum used to take me a lot as a child to St Paul’s Gardens. There were grass verges either side of the actors’ church in Covent Garden, and she used to take me up there after school. That was her favourite place to take me. We used to go down St James’s Park now and again, feed the ducks of course, Green Park occasionally: you could get a bus to right outside Green Park.’

  Although Covent Gardeners such as Mike would sometimes play in the royal parks – they were only a stroll down the Strand or Piccadilly away, after all, or a cheap bus ride if you were in funds – Soho children tended to treat St James’s Park and Green Park as their local parks, and would not think of crossing the Charing Cross Road. Janet Vance was typical. ‘We went to the royal parks, but never Lincoln’s Inn or Coram’s Fields. After my mum picked me up from school, we’d either go to St James’s – there was a playground there with swings and that, and we’d feed the ducks – or Green Park. She’d take a sandwich. Or we’d go to Soho Square.’

  Right after the war, Soho Square was a fenced-off jungle. John Carnera and others from St Patrick’s School risked a caning if they were caught climbing in, but the suitability of the overgrown shrubbery and patches of grass for yet another game of Cowboys and Indians often proved an irresistible lure. Eventually the Square was tidied up and officially opened to the public, and the gardens became a cross between a playground and a crèche for the local children, sometimes under the watchful eye of the flamboyant tipster Prince Monolulu. I loved playing there; the draw was the funny little mock-Tudor lodge that was the backdrop for so many games.

  Virtually all of the squares in London have gardens in the centre, but Soho Square was unusual at that time in being open to the public. Andy Pullinger might have lived in St James’s Square, for instance, but he was not allowed in to the locked gardens, as they were reserved for the use of the directors and guests of the companies situated around the Square. Andy went to play in St James’s Park and Green Park instead.

  These two parks were fine for duck-feeding and other genteel pursuits, but the powers that be didn’t look too kindly on muddied oafs banging a ball around, and the footballers had to look elsewhere. Without the Gainsford’s all-weather pitch, games of football that didn’t involve dribbling around lamp posts or skinning your knees by diving on concrete were quite hard to find. ‘Unless you went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a bit of grass,’ Peter Jenkins remembers, ‘or were organized by the school to go up to Coram’s Fields, there was nowhere to go to play football.’

  That wasn’t quite true; although most of the royal parks banned ball games, a ‘coats for goalposts’ game could be very mobile, as Leo Zanelli remembers: ‘In Regent’s Park, we’d get chased away every five minutes, but you just go and play in another part of the park.’

  John Carnera found a solution a little further afield. ‘We went to Hyde Park. We’d get the bus if we had a couple of coppers, but very often we’d walk straight down Piccadilly. About a dozen of us would go, and organize a game of football or cricket between ourselves. We used to get chased out of Green Park. You couldn’t play in St James’s Park, either, but Hyde Park was fine – big, wide open spaces. I still remember going over to listen to the band playing in the bandstand.’

  Most people growing up in British cities in the middle of the twentieth century had their local parks, their places to play, but the West End boasted other attractions, all within walking distance. The parading soldiers always provided a good show at Buckingham Palace, which was but a short walk away. The National Gallery was a great place to go when the weather was bad and the local parks, both royal and otherwise, held no appeal.

  Another local amenity was the British Museum. ‘We’d go there every Sunday,’ Olga Jackson remembers fondly. ‘Straight off to the mummies.’ Her little brother, Graham, wasn’t quite so interested in viewing the exhibits in the echoing halls. ‘We lived just around the corner from the Museum,’ he remembers. ‘Coming home from school we would walk through it, take off our shoes and go and slide on their polished floors in our socks. All through the library, it was shiny lino.’

  Graham was not the only one to use the Museum as a short cut. Tricia Bryan remembers that ‘We would walk home from St Giles, down Museum Street and in to the main entrance of the Museum, walk through, and come out the back for home. While we were in there, we might say, “Let’s do the Egyptian room today,” and that would scare us a lot.’

  Tricia’s friend, Jackie, lived in Museum Street, and was an even more frequent visitor. ‘I remember in the winter actually playing in there when it was cold, because it was big. We were always being told to be quiet, or being thrown out – “oh, it’s you lot again, out you go” – but we used to use it as a playground.’

  Tricia and Jackie were very keen on making the most of the local amenities, and ranged far and wide. ‘On high days and holidays,’ Tricia says ‘there were funfairs on Hampstead Heath we used to go to, and there was Battersea funfair, which was a permanent fixture. And we knew a place in Regent’s Park where the railings were loose and we could get in to the zoo, never paid to get in to London Zoo.’

  There were also the perks that come with being in the right place at the right time. Tricia would hang around Carnaby Street when she was twelve or thirteen, in 1963 and ’64, looking in shop windows. ‘I saw the Beatles filming Hard Day’s Night, playing somewhere up by Goodge Street, Mortimer Street: we were passing, and we were asked in off the street to come in and sit in the audience.’

  Then of course there were the shops, something that most West End kids took for granted. We may not have had the money to pay, but the windows were an endless fascination, a screen to project our dreams on. Like me, Tricia spent a lot of time yearning at the displays at Gamba’s, which sold ballet shoes from a shop on the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street. ‘The people there knew my name, knew who I was, because I was always looking in the window, just hovering around there. I used to love it there. I was going to be a ballerina. I was in Anello & Davide’s almost as much. If they threw me out of one, I would go to the other.’

  The food shops also caught my attention. Hunger had sharpened my nostrils and honed my taste buds, and the windows of Camisa’s, Lena Stores, Pâtisserie Valerie, the chocolate shop and the Algerian coffee store were wonderlands to me. Inside was even better. Salamis and hams hung from metal frames by means of wicked-looking S hooks and scented the air with garlic, paprika, mace and fennel. The spices and herbs mingled with the deli aroma of freshly ground coffee beans and vanilla pods. In the Algerian Coffee store, light gleamed on the copper and glass fixtures and fittings. Exotic printed labels declared the tea to be from India, Ceylon and China, and the coffee from Jamaica, or Central or South America, and gave me a quick geography lesson while they were about it. It was the same with the paper shop up the road. So many different languages and scripts were on display in their newspapers and magazines that outsiders and visitors would be bewildered; they simply couldn’t believe there were so many languages.

  Another memory for me was Hamleys toy shop, especially around Christmas, Easter and Guy Fawkes night, when they had special displays in the store and – most importantly to me – in the window, where I could see them easily. Once rationing was over, the windows were gorgeous to the greedy eyes of toy-starved kids. I remember huge displays of things made with Meccano or Bayko, mountains of cuddly toys, dolls that had yellow hair and said ‘Mama’ and, in the late fifties, lots and lots of things that needed batteries; dogs whose tails wagged and eyes lit up, robots . . . Dolls’ houses were also popular. I remember having on
e that had ‘electric lights’ – torch bulbs that lit up when you connected the wiring to the little battery at the back.

  The swimming pools at Marshall Street and, in the summer, the unheated outdoor pool at the Oasis in Endell Street used to draw kids from all over the West End. Although Graham Jackson lived closer to Endell Street, he always headed for Marshall Street. ‘You had a big pool and a small pool, and they’d alternate, men and women. Sometimes we’d have the whole small pool to ourselves, about half a dozen of us kids. And when you were finished, you’d get an ice cream or something, wander up through Soho, and go home with your towel tucked under your arm.’

  I have memories of going to the Oasis, but not of swimming. All I can remember is people sunbathing, grown-ups mostly, and lots of posing in bathing suits. Marshall Street seemed better suited to swimming and mucking about, and perhaps that’s why Graham preferred it. Children find the courtship rituals of young adults really boring, and that’s how I recall the Oasis, as a place for young grown-ups to eye each other up.

  Ronnie Mann made the trip across Charing Cross Road with some of the other ’Bury kids: ‘We used to go swimming up Marshall Street, then nick stuff coming back through Berwick Street market, anything you could get; apples, ice creams, bananas. [laughs] It’s a wonder we didn’t all end up on bleedin’ Dartmoor.’

  Angela Rashbrook and Andy Pullinger both made their way to the baths through Soho from their homes in St James’s, where their parents were housekeepers. ‘My friend Liz lived in St James’s Palace, also in tied accommodation,’ Angela remembers. ‘She and I and both our mums would spend Saturday afternoon at Marshall Street baths. We would swim while our mums sat and knitted and nattered. When we were older, we would be allowed to go alone, and would stop to buy chips in Berwick Street on the way home.’

  And, of course, there was something else we had in the West End that no other kid in the country had: Soho. Andy Pullinger remembers that, ‘I was an altar and choirboy at St James’s Church, Piccadilly. Morning and evening, every Sunday. After the evening service, the choir went to sing for the patients at the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, Soho Square. When we had finished singing, my friend, Robert Hoyles and I would roam around Soho looking at the working girls, wondering what they did, and play pinball in the arcade on Greek Street. We did this every Sunday. It seemed to make up for the rest of the day.’

  The West End provided its children and young people with seemingly endless opportunities to explore their world. It is hard to imagine a playground that offered more opportunities for fun and games, even the innocent ones. If it snowed, the London child could head off to Hampstead Heath or Primrose Hill with a tin tray for a toboggan. If they had to travel, buses were cheap for kids and scooters, gokarts and skateboards – literally, a roller-skate with a board attached – were knocked up in yards and the raw materials filched from Covent Garden market at night, from the alleys behind shops or from those mother lodes of useful bits and bobs – bomb sites.

  And if it was too cold, wet and grim to play outside, there was still no need to go home. The galleries, museums, churches and department stores offered sanctuary, lots of stimulation and even a little education.

  *‘Six of chips and crackling’ was sixpence (old pence) worth of chips etc.

  5

  School Days

  I didn’t go to school in the West End. My parents split up just before I was due to start, so school was somewhere I went to from the string of houses my mother rented in Essex, while my father’s flat in Old Compton Street, Soho, was my home at weekends and in the school holidays. I can’t help but think that things would have been better if I had gone to school in Soho, because I never fitted in in Essex.

  Virtually all of the people interviewed for this book, though, did go to one of the many primary schools in the West End. I was surprised to find just how many schools there were in the area, tucked away down side streets, out of sight, or indeed my memory. Ironically, all of them – in what outsiders insist on seeing as a godless and sinful place – were associated with churches. The people I spoke to went to St Martin’s (just off Trafalgar Square); St James’s and St Peter’s (now known as Soho Parish) in Windmill Street; St Giles-in-the-Fields in Endell Street; St Clement Danes in Drury Lane; St George’s (Hanover Square) in South Street, Mayfair; St Patrick’s in Great Chapel Street, Soho: Notre Dame in Leicester Square or St Joseph’s in Macklin Street, Covent Garden. The last three were Catholic schools. St Giles, Notre Dame and St Patrick’s have since closed, but the others remain.

  All of the schools had been built in the late nineteenth century, and thus had to be fitted in to a neighbourhood that was already crammed full of buildings. This meant that they were short of space, especially outdoor space for the children to play, which led them to embrace some ingenious solutions. Leo Zanelli, who was born in 1930, had experience of three of them; ‘I was at Notre Dame in Leicester Square in the war. A landmine landed on the roof, so for a few days we went to the school at Windmill Street, and then we ended up at St Patrick’s. I went from a school with its playground in the basement to one with a playground outside, and from there to a school with one on the roof, completely caged in.’

  There were other rooftop playgrounds, at St Giles and St Clement Danes. In the latter, boys were confined to the ribbon of tarmac playground that ran around the tall school buildings while the generally more decorous girls were allowed free rein on the roof, which was fenced, but – because girls don’t play ball games – not caged in. There was a strategic advantage to this that had not occurred to me. ‘When it snowed,’ Barbara Jones remembers, ‘we used to make snowballs and lob them over the fence, in the hope they would land on the boys in the playground. We’d make them at break, then lob them over at lunchtime. It was a really cold winter in 1947.’

  No boy I knew would let such an insult go unavenged. Barbara agreed. ‘The boys made theirs at lunchtime, and under the old system they got out five minutes before us, at three thirty. And there they would all be, waiting at the gate laden with these iceballs. But I would just walk away with my nose in the air because I had Owen, my knight in shining armour, who would just bat them all away from me.’

  Although I heard tales of strict discipline at some of the schools – child cruelty by today’s standards – St Joseph’s in Covent Garden, a school run by nuns from the Sisters of Mercy, had by far the worst reputation. Mike O’Rouke was a pupil there from 1949 to 1955. ‘It was certainly run by sisters, but they weren’t very merciful. The headmistress down there, when I first started – my father remembered her well from when he was there – was called Sister Camillus, and her nickname was Sister Come-and-kill-us. That tells you something about them, doesn’t it?’

  Margaret Connolly, who grew up in Northington Street, in Holborn, remembers Sister Camillus’s successor, Sister Dominic. ‘School was a very long walk away. My mother, with three or four children in tow, had to get the pram across Theobald’s Road, en route to Macklin Street. She was invariably late getting us to school, and Sister Dominic would be there with the cane, ready to hit us across our knuckles. My mother never made any comment – in those days the Church was always right! My form mistress was Miss Angel, and she was OK. Less aggressive.’

  The nuns’ fearsome reputation spread beyond St Joseph’s. Olga Jackson, who went to St Clement Danes, was ‘terrified of the nuns from that school in Macklin Street, if we saw them out. The kids who went there, they used to say how strict they were. Barbaric.’

  The Sisters’ savage discipline often proved counterproductive. Ann Lee, who went to St Clement Danes, remembers that ‘My mum was brought up a Catholic, but the minute she was able to change her mind, she did, because she said the nuns at Macklin Street school were evil. They were supposedly Sisters of Mercy but there was no mercy at that school. My mum said they would hit you across the knuckles with a ruler, but the edge side, not the flat side.’

  One of the transgressions punished at the school was left-handedne
ss, which was seen as a devilish characteristic. It wasn’t only the Catholic schoolteachers who saw the red mist rise when children picked up pens or pencils with the wrong hand. ‘I wrote left-handed,’ Janet Vance recalls, ‘and they used to put the cane across my knuckles. Even in the senior school, they would take my pen out of my left hand and put it in the right.’

  Janet’s primary school was St James’s and St Peter’s. ‘The headmistress was Miss Hudson. She was an evil cow. Once, when I was five or six, I was running from the playground to the loo, and she caught me running and stopped me and gave me such a clout across the back of the legs that I wet myself. So I ran out of the school and went to my dad, who was working in Bateman Street. When I got there, I still had the finger marks on my legs. That done it. Dad marched me back to the school, went in to the office and got hold of her by the lapels of her jacket and said, “If you want to hit her in future, you keep your hands to yourself. Otherwise I’ll do exactly the same to you.”

  ‘Afterwards, Mum and Dad talked about taking me out of there, but it was handy for my mum’s work and that, and they thought she wouldn’t touch me again. Well, she didn’t, but she had to put her hands down a few times.’

  I can sympathize with Janet. A headmaster at one of the primary schools I attended would walk in to a classroom and whack the head of whoever was sitting by the door, on general principles. He was also a firm believer in the ruler, edge side on: he thought a few thwacks across the knuckles was a handwriting aid. We were supposed to be learning the Richardson style of cursive script, and because of all those assaults with the ruler, I still don’t write that way. It is the first time I can remember being wilfully disobedient. Nothing that monster could do would have made me write the way he said. I was quite firm about that.