Polly: Memories of an East End Girl

by Jeff Smith

  I suppose Clarnico were, for their time, really good employers. Another of their schemes was a yearly bonus for workers. I can’t remember what you had to do to qualify, but they used to make a great performance out of it. They used to hire the Peoples Palace up the Mile End Road for the occasion and we all had to troop up there to collect our money. The Clarnico band was there to play music all the way through the ceremony and all the managers would be sat up on the platform. Then we would line up and file past one at a time to be given our brown envelope with the bonus inside. One time I got a £5 note and it caused a real stir – nobody in our street had ever seen one before and nobody would change it for me. In the end my Mum went down to the corner shop and told them that if they didn’t change it she would never shop there again. So they changed it – but they also ‘exhibited’ it in the window for a couple of days! It’s a wonder it didn’t get pinched.

  Even though he enjoyed the money, Fred hated the idea of me working but had to put up with it. Because of the extra money we were able to move to a flat in Manor Park. That was proper upmarket then – ‘frightfully, frightfully’ high class. Fred really enjoyed that: as I said, he was a right social climber. Not that I should complain about him because he gave me a good life. He was a compulsive ‘joiner’ but couldn’t join anything without working away until he ran it, and I got all the benefit of the social life that went with it. He was a big wheel in the Swimming Club (local and county), the Freemasons, the Buffaloes and goodness knows what else in his time. Even when he retired and took a part-time kitchen job up in a London Gentlemen’s Dining Club within six months he had his own set of keys, was in charge of the silverware, and was virtually assistant kitchen/cellar manager for their formal dinners.

  Looking back to where he came from, from the very worst bit of Stratford which was itself a pretty rough part of the East End, he made a great deal of himself and in his quiet way was proud of it. He once said to me that there couldn’t be many people from his background who had made a speech to a banquet in the Connaught Rooms, up in the City. And he was right. He was a climber, and was proud of himself, but he always said that his proudest moment was at some formal dinner or other, when he was being installed as President of whatever it was, and in his introduction the Chairman congratulated him that his son had just got a place at Cambridge. He admitted to crying in public for about the only time in his life!

  Anyway, back to Manor Park. We lived there for a couple of years but then my aunt announced she had found us a ‘nice house’ in Keogh Road, back in Stratford. It must have been early 1940. My aunt was full of praises for this house though I think its main attraction was that it was next door to her. Uncle was ill and was getting progressively worse so that he had to go to hospital every couple of weeks. I think she just wanted somebody ‘family’ next door to help look after him. One Saturday we arranged to go over to have a look at the house, though I didn’t feel much like it. In fact I felt decidedly off colour and distinctly sick but I had promised Aunty that I would look. She was right, it was a nice little house and Keogh Road was much the better end of Stratford.

  Being as I was nearby I decided that I might as well visit Mum while I was at it. By the time I got there I was feeling really ill. I knocked on her door and as soon as she opened it I didn’t say a word but rushed straight past and into the loo to be sick. When I felt better I started telling her the story, about looking at the house but not feeling too good and so on and so on. She didn’t say a word until she looked me in the eye and asked, ‘are you carrying then?’ It just hadn’t occurred to me up until then. We had been married for years, never taken any precautions but nothing had ever happened so I had just put such things out of my mind. Anyway, I was carrying so that was the end of my career in Clarnico and also made the decision to take the house.

  I didn’t go back to work until the early 1950s when both boys were at school and I got fed up with being at home all day. I saw an early morning office-cleaning job advertised in the local paper and to me it seemed ideal. It meant the boys would have to get themselves off to school in the morning, but I could be home by soon after nine so I was there pretty well all day in the holidays or if they were off school for any reason. I didn’t say anything to Fred until after I got the job, because I knew he would object. He did object; in fact he never approved and never cooperated with anything to make my working life easier. Even so, the job suited me, suited the family and I enjoyed it, so I stayed there until we moved away from London in the mid-1960s.

  14

  Meeting and Marrying Fred

  (1929–32)

  As mentioned, Mum, Dad and us seven children lived upstairs in half a house in Lett Road. Downstairs lived the Ms, including their son Frank. Looking back, I think that he quite fancied me, but I was too innocent to notice. Mum noticed though, and was forever warning me about him, about being careful, about keeping away from him. I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about – I must have been pretty naïve. Anyway, he was part of a group of friends that included Fred. Looking back on it they must have been a real bunch of tearaways but I never saw them in that sort of way at the time – I suppose youngsters never do. They used to go round to each other’s houses so I saw quite a lot of them, including Fred.

  One day they went swimming at the baths in Jupp Road. It would look pretty crude these days but then it was quite the place to go, with the height of modern amenities. It didn’t have changing rooms as such, but instead had rows of cubicles around the edge of the pool. When a session ended the pool used to be emptied; nothing sophisticated, they just pulled a plug out of the bottom. For the boys this was a challenge, and they used to dive into the ever-decreasing water. To make it really hair-raising they would dive off the top of the cubicles. Well, this time they were doing the performance as usual but just as Fred dived somebody threw a pair of swimming trunks at him. They hit him in the face, and I suppose they blinded him for an instant. Anyway, it completely messed up his judgement and he landed square on his head on the bottom of the pool.

  He was in quite a state with blood everywhere, but he climbed out of the pool and looked at his head in the mirror. As he parted his hair to look at the wound he realised that he could actually see his skull, the skin had completely burst apart. You did not have to be a genius to know that he would have to go to hospital to get it stitched up. So he got changed and trooped off to the hospital with his mates – and remember that there were no ambulances in those days – so he walked from Jupp Road all the way to Queen Mary’s in West Ham Lane, which must have been at least a mile or so. When he got there they stitched him up, but said that he should stay in overnight for observation. It was all a bit of an adventure so he stayed. Next morning the nurses were still not happy so they called for the doctor to look at him again. The doctor prescribed some medicine or other and they prepared to give it to him.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ said the nurse.

  ‘It is open,’ replied Fred.

  ‘Well open it wide,’ she said.

  ‘It is open wide,’ insisted Fred.

  And that was the first they discovered that there was something drastically wrong between what he could feel and what he could control! The doctor came back again and this time, after very careful examination, discovered that he had completely split one of the vertebrae at the top of his spine from top to bottom. They didn’t have all those collars and pulleys and things in those days so they laid him flat on his back and packed all round his head, neck and shoulders with sandbags to keep him totally still. And that was how he stayed for weeks.

  Of course, when I heard the story from Frankie I was really horrified and felt terribly sorry for the poor bloke. So sorry, in fact, that I asked if I could go and visit him even though I barely knew him. Not possible, Frankie explained. Because he must not move at all he wasn’t allowed any visitors.

  ‘Not even his mother?’ I asked.

  ‘He hasn’t got a mother,’ Frankie replied, and then I heard the
story of Fred’s life. It was the sort of story you barely like to think about now but it was all too common in those days. His mother had been the dresser to Kate Carney, who was one of the big music hall stars up in London. His father was taken on as her coachman and I suppose the pair of them spent a lot of time waiting around at theatres and the like so they soon got together and got married. Soon after Fred was born his father died [Editor’s note: according to the Birth Certificate his father died before he was born] but his mother didn’t stay single for long and she remarried. All Fred’s brothers and sisters were by this second marriage and they all took their dad’s name but Fred kept his. Then his mother died! Can you imagine how the poor kid must have felt. Still, all credit to Charlie Paternoster, he brought all those kids up as his own without any favouritism or difference between them. It must have been really hard though, and they suffered the sort of poverty that even I never knew. I can say that because they lived in the part of Stratford that even we looked down on, and never went to because it was so ‘bad’. I suppose it was the circumstances but your dad was always a bit apart from the rest of the family and used to do his own thing a lot of the time. Fair’s fair, though, he always looked after the old man as if he was his own father and in his old age used to visit every week and keep him in tobacco. When the old boy died his real children insisted that Fred was ‘the eldest son’ and should lead the mourners. I think Fred was quite taken aback, but he very much appreciated the gesture. Anyway I, of course, only heard the story as far as his mother dying but that was enough to make me sorry beyond words for the poor fellow and decided I would have to get to know him when he came out of hospital.

  Eventually he did come out of hospital. Then the boys were all into motorbikes, which was something else my mother warned me about. The very next day after he came out of hospital he went down to Eastbourne on somebody’s pillion. You would have thought he would have been more careful. Talking of which, one of the boys was my friend Lucy’s brother and he got engaged to a girl named Chrissie from the other side of Stratford. He was killed in a motorbike accident but Lucy, Chrissie and I remained friends ever since [Editor’s note: in fact until they died], though Chrissie never took up with anybody else and stayed single. I think that Fred got well known in the hospital and he certainly appreciated all they did for him because he went onto their blood-donors panel. Those were the early days of blood transfusion when you laid side-by-side with the person you were donating to, and got a certificate to tell you the outcome. I’ve still got one of them somewhere. Anyway, I made the effort to meet Fred, talk to him, and eventually we got together. That quite upset my mother, especially because of his accident. She firmly believed it must have caused some weakness and always maintained ‘that he wouldn’t make old bones’ so you can guess how she reacted when I told her we were going to get married!

  Anyway, we got married on 20 February 1932. It was a bit of a shock when we woke up to find thick snow on the ground, but it did not deter Mum from any of her plans. Nobody could afford to hire halls or anything like that for the reception, and so we got married from home. The first job, then, was to make room for the party and, never mind the snow, we carried most of the furniture out into the backyard. In fact, pretty well everything except Mum’s bed – her bed wasn’t going to stand out in the snow! We also needed somewhere to hang the coats, but that too was easily solved. Mum bought a couple of ounces of 6in nails and simply drove them into the wall of the small bedroom.

  Certificate of direct donor-to-patient blood donation.

  We got married in St John’s Church, Stratford. Fred was ever so well known around Stratford, and as we drove back from the church all the stall-holders and quite a few of the passers-by stopped to cheer, shout their best wishes, and all the rest. It really was quite some fun. Back home, Mum had laid on a full hot meal wedding breakfast. She bought and cooked two aitch-bones of beef and two hams all in our tiny little kitchen, while Dad had used his market job to get loads of potatoes and fresh salad, including cucumbers and tomatoes. That might seem pretty ordinary now, but back in 1932 fresh salad in February was almost unheard of.

  The big disadvantage of having the reception at home was that it was too small for everybody to sit down together so we ate in two sittings! Dad, as ever, hadn’t come straight back home from the church and instead stopped at the pub on the way. Just as the first sitting was finishing its meal he arrived back, already well drunk and in high spirits. He was also terribly pleased with himself.

  ‘’Ere Doll!’ he shouted up the stairs as he came in, ‘look who I ran into on my way home. We stopped for a drink at the pub and I bought them home for a meal.’ ‘They’ were Fred’s mum and dad (well, his step-mum and dad) so where on earth did he think they were going before he waylaid them into the pub? The party went on well into the night and spread all over the house, up and down the stairs, and out into the road. Just across the road from our house was a cast-iron public urinal and my lasting memory of that day was seeing everybody linking hands around this urinal to play ring-a-ring-a-roses.

  15

  The Second World War

  (1939–45)

  I suppose it sounds like a joke, but I actually do remember the day that war broke out. Every Sunday we used to go over to the City of London cemetery at Manor Park to visit Dad’s grave and then go on to Mum’s for the afternoon. Of course, on this particular Sunday there was all sorts of tension in the air and we wanted to wait for the Prime Minister’s broadcast at eleven o’clock on the radio. Sure enough, the broadcast came and it was war. Suddenly, all the old routines went out the window. We decided to go over and see sister Doll instead. By now she had two children and had been told that if there was war she would be evacuated. We wanted to see her before she went. It sounds silly now; as if anything would have got sorted out on the first afternoon of the war. Still, we were young and naïve, and at first you thought that the government knew what it was doing. We learned pretty quickly, but these were early days. So we walked round to Doll’s, but she wasn’t there. It turns out that, because of the children, she had been told to report to the school around the corner to arrange for evacuation.

  As we were walking back home the air raid alarm went off. Of course, it was a false alarm but we didn’t know that at the time. You wouldn’t believe the panic and confusion, because nobody had the faintest idea what to do. Then somebody said it was a gas attack. This was always the great fear at the start of the war; I suppose it was a hangover from the stories of the First World War. We had already been issued with gas masks so lots of people put them on. I can still remember walking up the street with people standing at their doorways wearing gas masks and looking up at the sky searching for the bombers.

  Anyway, Doll told us later that she had gone round to the school and was waiting in the playground when the warning went off. They were all hustled inside ‘for protection’, I think that later on that would have been seen as a mistake – if you couldn’t get into a proper shelter it was better to stay out in the open. Just as she reached the door of the school the excitement, the heat, and no doubt the worry of the two kids, finally got the better of Doll and she fainted. Apparently, a man rushed off to get her a drink of water but had no idea where the kitchens or anything were and so, in desperation, grabbed a vase of flowers, threw out the flowers and gave Doll the water! She still remembers waking up with little leaves stuck all around her mouth.

  In fact, Doll soon got a house out in Buckhurst Hill so she was out of the real danger. Her husband was called up into the army straight away at the start of the war and was soon away in France. One day Doll was cleaning her windows when she saw this soldier coming up the street. He was in a dreadful state; a total wreck, scruffy and staggering all over the place. He looked more like a tramp than a soldier. She assumed he must be totally drunk and was quite scandalised, but she watched him steadily making his way towards her. Eventually he stopped at the little wall in front of the house and looked up at Doll, who w
as still standing at the window watching him.

  ‘Let me in, Doll,’ he said.

  It was her husband just back from Dunkirk. The effect of the exhaustion, the strain, the battering and all the rest had changed him so much that she hadn’t recognised him. He had got back with nothing except the clothes he was wearing – he had even lost his tin hat. It must have been bad, because my brother Bob always maintained that the one thing you never took off, never let go of, hung on to at all costs, was your tin hat. Your rifle might get ‘too heavy’ or ‘get in the way’, but you wore your tin hat to the last.

  Those early days were pretty chaotic and Hitler could have had anything he wanted if he had bothered to turn up. Fred’s brother George was working down on the south coast, where he joined the Home Guard. He was given a large spike and told to protect the coast from invasion! Nobody told him what to do with this spike if the invasion did come, but he still swears that he saw it approaching at least half-a-dozen times on his first night of sentry duty. My sister’s husband-to-be, also a George, was also in the Home Guard. They had an anti-invasion exercise one night and he was ever so excited because his platoon had been chosen as one of the attackers. With all the anti-German feeling around we couldn’t understand why anybody would even want to play-act being a German. But, he explained, the defenders were on duty all night while the attackers were sooner or later rounded up and then sent back to the HQ where they could have a cup of cocoa. It was much better to be an attacker.

  Fred and Polly at about the time of their wedding (1932).

  The war took quite a toll, though. Fred was in a reserved occupation – he was a toolmaker – though he was silly enough to volunteer. When he told the recruiting officer what job he did he got sent home with a flea in his ear for wasting their time! Apart from him, though, all my brothers, and most of the other men I knew, ended up in the forces. None of them was killed, in fact none was physically wounded, but looking back most of them paid a high price for their service. Daisy’s husband John was blown up in the desert. He was in the artillery and his gun got a direct hit. I suppose it must have set off some of the ammunition because there was an enormous explosion and all that was left was a hole in the ground. Anyway, John was assumed dead, along with all the other blokes who were never found, but a couple of days later he wandered in from the desert. He didn’t know who he was, what he had done, or where he had been. He was eventually invalided home but was always a bit vacant, and had to be told what to do next. If they were going out he had to be told to put his shoes on because otherwise he would carry on wearing his slippers. He became a bit of a joke among people who had not known him before the war. But honestly, when he went off into the army he was the finest man who ever walked God’s earth; the man who came back was nothing like the man who went out. It was heartbreaking.