A Real East Ender

I was a child at the time and innocent of such matters, but I believe that just after the 1939-45 War, people had a different attitude towards animals than they do now. Animals were dispensible. They could be given as gifts and set aside if unwanted. Their needs came second to the family's. They were fed on scraps and leftovers. In the austere conditions we lived in just after the war, we were brought up to clear our plates and sometimes even licked them clean. Pets often went hungry.

My Aunty Daisy never quite cottoned on to the fact that her sister, my mother, could barely afford to feed her four children, let alone family pets. Aunt Daisy came to see us nearly every week and always bought us sweets and comics (often secondhand because they were cheaper) from Barking Market. Occasionally she would take a trip to Romford where they used to hold a regular livestock sale in the middle of town. Cattle, sheep, pigs etc., were auctioned off from pens set up in the main street, while little stalls on the pavement sold litters of newborn, kittens, puppies, rabbits, chicks etc., all probably cross breeds and semi wild. Aunty Daisy thought they were so cuddly and cute and could not resist buying one (and sometimes more than one) for us kids.

She would just turn up at the house saying, "Look what I've brought you." We would find and old cardboard box to put the latest animal/s in and spend 20 minutes or so, stroking, petting, prodding, "ooohing" and "aaahing", and deciding on a name. After that we mostly lost interest.

None of these animals was ever taken to a vet for injections or treatment. As they grew bigger, dogs were never taken for a walk, they lived on scraps. Most never reached maturity. They went blind or got distemper or ended up in some other horrible state before mysteriously disappearing. I did actually witness my father drowning one poor creature in a tin bath in the back yard.

I assume the cats ran away as soon as they became adults and started their own wild colonies on the surrounding bomb sites.

When Aunty Daisy presented us with a set of six fluffy little yellow chicks. They were housed in a shoe box by the fireplace. No one expected them to live long. Miraculously they outgrew that box and another larger and eventually Dad had to buy 6 yards of chicken wire to house them in the back garden.

They wandered aimlessly around this little shelterless pen for some weeks and grew to full size. They never produced eggs as far as I know and one by one they disappeared. I never knew where they went. All I remember was that just before Christmas, the last one, a scrawny old cockerel with a diseased foot who hopped around the pen on one leg, keeled over and dropped dead.

When Dad found it he dug a hole at the end of the garden and buried it. A couple of days later, Mrs Appleby, an old lady from across the road, was talking to Mum on the doorstep and enquired about the chickens. When Mum told her the news about the old cock, Mrs Appleby insisted Dad dig it up for her. She and Mr Appleby and their family ate it for their Sunday dinner!!

As I write this I feel ashamed for my family's attitude to animals, but that was the way it was.

My brother Peter was 4 years younger than me, so he was just three when World War II ended. He grew up quickly in post-war East End London.

At the age of six, Pete learned to ride Dad's bike. I had my own bike, a bright red Raleigh with "droop" handlebars (Dad's word for them), a rare birthday or Christmas present and my most treasured possession. Mum and Dad couldn't afford a bike for Pete yet so he used Dad's. Dad called it "The Phantom". It was a very old, sit-up-and-beg ladies bicycle, which he had "aquired" second-hand and used for going to work. Pete's little legs wouldn't reach the saddle, but he could ride by standing on the pedals between the handlebars and seat, since the bike had no crossbar. Pete followed me and my friends round the streets wherever we went and always seemed able to keep up.

One day, Pete and I set off to cycle to Southend-on-Sea, a distance from East Ham of about 25 miles. As a tenyearold with a sixyearold on an adults bike, neither of us doubted that we would complete the trip. The roads had so few cars in those days, it did not seem unreasonable for Mum and Dad to allow us to go. We actually made it to the sea front, but it took so long to get there we only had time to look over the sea wall, buy a bottle of "pop" and start off home. We arrived home at 11 o'clock that night exhausted. Mum and Dad were waiting on the door-step talking to some neighbours. Pete and I were too tired to notice if there was an air of panic about them. We were home ... that was all that mattered. Job done!

Everyone said Pete was slightly deaf, which may account for the way he talked. Loud and excitedly! If Pete went to the "Pictures", he would come home and tell us the entire story line of both films, with the gist of the newsreels and cartoons thrown in for good measure! Any time I took Pete on a bus, to my accute embarrassment, he would entertain all the other passengers with his incessant chatter, revealing our most intimate family secrets. Everyone said Pete was "oblivious".

Pete had his own set of "party tricks". He could fold both his ears inwards and stuff them into his ear-holes. Then he would sit grinning at you while you waited, in giggly anticipation, for them to pop out. They always flicked out one at a time, making us all roll about laughing! He mostly did it when Mum had told us all to "sit quiet and not make a sound!". I lost count of the times he got us in trouble for that!

Another disgusting little trick he learned was to make a big show of picking his nose in front of you. He would thrust his fore-finger right up his nostril and wiggle it about while secretly licking spit onto another finger. Then he would quickly wipe the wet saliva across your cheek so you thought it was snot! Dirty little monkey!

When he was only 6 or 7, Pete used to go off on his own to East Ham Swimming Baths. If the water in the pool was too cold for him he would sit in the warm water of the foot-bath that everyone had to walk through to wash their feet on the way to the pool. On his way home, sometimes after dark, he would call in at the Fish Shop for three penn'rth of chips and a gherkin and come down the road eating and singing at the top of his voice!

Sadly I haven't seen him for years.

Winter draws on! As winter approached in wartime London and the evenings got darker and colder us kids still played out in the street until the last minute even though we were freezing! When the war ended and street lighting came back on we congregated round the lampposts and stayed out even later. It was very late before our mums came to the front doorstep and yelled for us to "Get in this minute ... you little bleeders!!"

All the kids I knew wore much the same winter outfits, both for school and "playing out". Some better off kids had a "Sunday best". The uniform in the street was: black school shoes, long grey socks pulled up to the knees, short grey trousers (bare knees - only working men wore long trousers), long-sleeved shirt buttoned right up to the neck, Fair Isle knitted sleeveless pullover, tweed jacket (all buttons done up and collar up). This universal kids uniform was usually topped off with a grey or brown knitted Balaclava helmet, a "fashion accessory" of the time, which completely covered the head and neck leaving only a small oval hole in front to reveal the face.

Us kids all went round with our hands thrust deep into our pockets against the cold. We only ever took them out to roll marbles, pick noses, etc. When it was really cold our mums made us wear knitted scarves and gloves. The gloves soon got covered in snot if you had a cold.

All the knitted stuff, Balaclavas, pullovers, socks, scarves and gloves, were hand made by mums, nans and aunties who had no kids of their own. They were always knitting. Clack! Clack! And fast! They could all do it while having a conversation and reading a knitting pattern out of Woman's Own at the same time. If they weren't knitting they were rolling up balls of wool. They bought skeins of the stuff from the Wool Shop and made me sit with my arms outstretched holding the big loop while they unravelled it into a ball ready for knitting.

Sometimes someone would find an old unwanted knitted garment and spend ages unpicking it and rolling up the wool saying gleefully, "This will make Robert a lovely Balaclava!"

I even had a knitted hot-water-bottle cover with draw-strings. We had stone or metal hot-water-bottles and filled with boiling water they were too hot to touch at first. After a while in bed when it had cooled a bit you could take the cover off to get the last bit of heat. Trouble was, in the morning it was freezing cold and if you touched it, it made you jump. Sometimes you kicked it out of bed and it clattered on the hard floor and woke the whole house!
Happy Days!

When I was a child growing up in London's East End, during and just after World War II, summer started in the middle of Spring and lasted to the middle of Autumn. All the days were long, hot and sunny. It hardly ever rained. Or at least that's how I remember it. Winter seemed quite short by comparison but bitterly cold.

I was nine when the winter of 1947 brought the country to a standstill. It was one of the worst winters in living memory. From January to April, Britain was in the grip of arctic weather. Trains got stuck in snow drifts, shipping and air travel were severely restricted. Troops and even prisoners were used to clear snow to rescue people cut off in the countryside. Actually I don't remember much of that either, but I do recall the kind of things that affected our daily lives every winter in those dark days towards the end of the war and the late 1940's.

We had coal fires in every room in the house but usually the only one that got lit was in the back room which doubled as dining room, sitting room and playroom.

Lighting the fire was a ritual reserved mainly for my father. Dad would first rake out the ashes of last night's fire with the poker. They would fall through the slots in the cast iron fire basket in the hearth and collect in a metal tray underneath ready to be taken through the house to the back yard to be "chucked in the dustbin". Everything you didn't want was "chucked in the dustbin".

The process of cleaning out the grate would inevitably send clouds of dust through the air which would eventually settle over everything. Dad would then lay some scrunched up newspaper over the grate and a few sticks of firewood. Dad usually managed to scrounge a bit of old wooden furniture or fencing from some waste ground, which he would chop into "kindling" with a small axe on the concrete at the back of the house. If it was very cold outside he might do this in the hearth itself. Sometimes splinters of wood would fly round the room. After the sticks of firewood he would carefully arrange a few lumps of precious coal on top. Then came the tricky bit!

To light the fire and force it to catch to the coal as quickly as possible, Dad used a highly dangerous trick. After using a match to start the paper burning, he would open out a full sheet of newpaper and hold it over the whole fireplace opening. This would create a terrific draught which would enter under the fire grate and whoosh up the chimney fanning the flames against the wood and the coal. Dad would kneel there with outstretched arms holding the newspaper tight across the fireplace until the glow of the raging fire could be seen right through it. Then we would all get excited as a brown singe mark started to appear and grow and eventually burn through. Dad would hold the paper in place as it burned until the very last moment when he would screw up the last remaining shreds and throw it into the fire. Sometimes something went wrong and bits of burning debris flew out onto the mat in front of the fire and had to be hurriedly stamped out.

Dad being a bit of an inventor, he eventually made a "fire-starter" out of a sheet of aluminium carefully shaped and with a wooden handle. He probably nicked the ali from work where it may have been destined to be part of a Spitfire! Who knows! Everybody had to be a scrounger to survive in those days.

During the Blitz and the years between 1940 and 1944, London's East End bore the brunt of the German bombing. Night raids, daylight raids, then the V1 and V2 rockets, the "Doodlebugs", all concentrated on London's Docks and industrial areas.

Most of my family on my mother's side lived in or close to the East End, in Upton Park, Plaistow, East Ham, Barking, Woolwich etc. Dad, Grandad, Uncle Jim and Uncle Stanley worked in the area. Dad also worked for a time in the London Docks and Silvertown.

I'm glad to say they all survived Hitler's bombing. Though there were a few near misses!

In the garden of our own house in East Ham we had an Anderson shelter. I assume we were given one by the Council on account of being a family with a small child and Dad's income being less than £250 a year. The value of a average Anderson shelter to buy if you were better off was between £7 - £10. The shelters were delivered as a kit of parts consisting, I'm told, of 14 different sized sheets of corrugated steel, some curved, some flat, and a quantity of nuts, bolts, washers and brackets. You had to dig a hole in the garden, ideally 4 feet deep, create a stone or concrete base and assemble the little "tin hut", which looked like a tunnel with flat ends. One end had a small door which I think was about 2 feet wide and 4 feet high. The whole thing was 6 feet 6 inches long by 4 feet wide, which was deemed to be sufficient space for a family of six!

Some people had to install their own shelters but probably got neighbours to help. I believe ours was put up for us by the Council men, but Dad probably had to dig the hole himself and then shovel all the earth back over the top when it was finished.

When the German bombers were spotted coming towards London, the Air-raid Siren would sound to warn people to take to the shelters. This could happen at any time day or night. We had our Anderson in the garden, but some people had no garden or shelter of their own, and so had to make for the nearest communal shelter, often brick-built, above ground in the road or on waste ground. Some people living closer to central London even spent the night in Tube stations, sleeping in rows on the platforms.

The Siren made a scary wailing sound that started low and built up to a crescendo. As soon as they heard it the adults would stop what they were doing and start to gather the things they needed to go to the shelter. Candles, matches, warm clothing, torch, blankets etc., were all kept handy anyway. After checking the fire in the grate was safe and turning off any lights, Dad would wrap me in a blanket and we would all troop down to the Anderson for a few hours or even the rest of the night.

Dad had scrounged some timber (vary scarce in wartime) and made some narrow bunks either side of the tiny space and we shut ourselves in wait to out the bombing and sleep as best we could. I suppose I slept as only a child can despite the noise of planes, bombs and anti-aircraft guns, to say nothing of the damp and the cold and the dank earthy smell of the place. Everyone was relieved when the noise died down and the siren eventually sounded the "All Clear".

As we all climbed out the first thing we did was look to see if our house was still standing. Sometimes the sky was lit up with distant fires. "Looks like the Docks have copped it tonight!", Dad would say glumly as we stood for a while in the garden before going into the house. Mum would always think of my Nan and Grandad. "Hope Mum's alright!", she would say.

(Some comments on the last post brought back further memories)

My mum used to smoke Turf cigarettes. She only ever bought them in packs of ten. I was delighted because each pack had a "fag card" printed on the back of the slider. Lots of kids had collections of fag cards but most had been obtained before the war as production more or less ceased in 1939. Turf cards were not like the old cards, which were shiny, printed in colour and had lots of information about the picture on the back. The Turf pictures were single sided, mostly printed in blue monochrome, and had to be cut out of the slider with scissors.

I think each set had about 25 or 50 pictures to collect. There were series like "Famous Footballers" etc. The kids with collections of the old coloured cards didn't think much of Turf cards, but sometimes you could con them into doing "swapsies" with a few Turf for a coloured one they had duplicated. They were also OK for playing "fagcards" with, where each of you flicked a card against a wall and whoever got nearest picked up all the cards. This was a juvenile form of gambling and was sometimes played with pennies. Though not often as we rarely carried money.

Mum often sent me to buy her fags at the Tobacconist on the next street corner. There was no problem selling to kids. Sometimes she could only afford two or three, but the man in the shop was happy to break into a pack and sell them singly. He'd pop however many you asked for into a tiny white paper bag. Sometimes Mum had no money at all and I'd have to ask for a couple on the slate. I don't remember being particularly embarrassed by this, it was part of life.
Sometimes I would be sent to a neighbour, "Mum says can she borrow a fag till Dad gets home?"

Dad smoked heavily too. I remember him grumpily shivering and scraping around in the cold ashes in the fireplace on a Sunday morning trying to find a few dogends to make into a roll-up when he'd smoked his last fag the night before and needed a puff to start the day.

When I was about six years old in London's East Ham (Newham now) it was quite normal for me to go off on my own on the bus to Barking to see my lovely Aunt Daisy. She had no children so I was the apple of her eye.

Aunty Daisy and Uncle Pat were both heavy smokers and used to buy Craven 'A' in packets of hundreds. Nevertheless she still collected any decent sized dogends she saw in the gutter at the edge of the road. If ever I was out with her she always kept one eye on the pavement and often said," Look Robert, there's a lovely big one in the gutter by that drainhole. Go and pick it up for me." She would produce an Old Holborn tobacco tin from her handbag and pop it in with all the others she had found.

When the tin was full she would let me sit at the little folding card table in her kitchen and pick open all the fagends and tip out the remains of the tobacco onto a sheet of newspaper. Once I'd picked out the burnt black bits and fluffed up the pile between my fingers she would get out her little cigarette machine and a packet of Rizla papers and let me make a whole load of new fags using the little machine to roll the paper round the tobacco and licking the sticky edge just before rolling it inside. We'd never heard of hygiene!

I was no stranger to the gutter. Since most adults smoked, believing the practice to be not only sophisticated but positively beneficial to the health, and since the throwing of litter in the streets was perfectly acceptable so long as you aimed it at the gutter to make it easier for the army of road sweepers to gather it up, the gutter was a treasure trove for collectors of empty fag packets and match boxes such as me.

Mundane examples of Weights, Woodbines, Players and Senior Service were ten-a-penny but there were a few rare gems which were always exciting to find such as the beautifully colourful Passing Cloud. I kept my collection in a large cardboard box which I frequently got out to impress my friends or negotiate "swapsies" with other collectors.

Everyone collected something. Comics, fag cards, marbles, tin soldiers (actually made of lead), bus tickets, bottle tops, the list was endless. We made our own entertainment in those days.

As a child in wartime East London I learned lots of swear words but also learnt that only grownups are allowed to say them. Every time grownups spoke they said things like Christ Almighty! Fornicating Sod! Sod off! Arse'oles! Bugger it! Fornicating seemed to be my mother's favourite word. She used it a lot when referring to my father.

I used to love listening to Uncle Stan's wireless at Nan's, or Aunty Daisy's wireless whenever I went to Barking to see her. I remember Vera Lynn singing "There'll be Blue Birds Over, the White Cliffs of Dover ..." and Tommy Handley in ITMA, "It's that Man Again, it's that Man Again ..."

At Aunt Daisy's it was always nice and warm and if you went there on a Sunday you could sit on a comfortable leather armchair and listen to Two-Way Forces Favourites and smell the dinner cooking. Aunty Daisy always cooked lovely hot dinners swimming in gravy, very tasty and served up on willow pattern plates. Much better than Mum's cooking, which was always cold by the time you got it after all the fiddling about swapping bits of potato and carrots and peas
from one plate to another to even things out.

Mum told me stories about when she was a child my grandmother would send her to the greengrocer late on a Saturday night with a farthing to buy a bag of Specks, a carrier bag full of leftover fruit and vegetables which were slightly damaged and would otherwise have been thrown away. She also told me my grandfather had been a bookie's runner and sometimes came home with the money he had collected to count it and would cover the kitchen table with gold sovereigns. I was never sure how true that was, but as poor as we were, it was lovely to imagine it!

During the war I think my whole family were obsessed with constipation and determined to avoid it at all costs. Every Friday night my brothers and sister and I joined Mum and Dad in the ritual taking of a dose of Brooklax to "keep us regular" whether we needed it or not. Brooklax was a laxative which came in the form of a miniature bar of chocolate. Mum would line us up and poke half a tiny square on each of our tongues. It tasted chocolatey and was actually quite a treat.

The other "medicine" she doled out at the same time was Cod Liver Oil and Malt, and Scotts Emulsion. The first came in a large jar and Mum would stick a dessert spoon into the thick brown tar-like goo and wind it up until a massive dollop formed and shove it into our open mouths. You had to hold the spoon and lick it clean before handing it back for the next dose. The Cod Liver Oil and Malt didn't taste too bad but the next one, Scotts Emulsion, was ghastly. It was an off-white thick liquid poured from a large bottle into the same dessert spoon and ladeled down our throats while we held our noses against the vile smell. We swallowed it quickly because it tasted of rotting oily fish, and each of us shuddered and nearly gagged as it went down. "It does you good!" snarled Mum, daring us to complain.

At Nan's house about one and a half miles away, they were slightly less concerned about constipation, but nevertheless always kept a ball of Doctor's Liquorice in case anyone got "bound up". This was a black gobstopper nearly the size of a golf ball which had laxative properties. It was kept in an open bowl on the dresser among a collection of other nick-nacks such as winkle pins, needles, buttons, pencils, string, nails, collar studs, etc. Anyone who felt in need of a bowel movement would take out the lump of Doctor's Liquorice, pick off any fluff or dead flies, suck it for a while for its laxative juices, and then return it to the bowl for the next person.

I used to climb up to the dresser and have a lick occasionally but only because I liked the taste!

So here we were in 1943 finally living in our own little house in East Ham, London E6. The upstairs flat had been vacated and we had the house to ourselves. Unfortunately Dad immediately upset Mum by offering the rooms to a friend and his pregnant wife. They took up residence straight away. We probably needed the money.

However, this arrangement didn't last long as they had to share the kitchen. Mum fell out with the young girl when she found she was using one of our saucepans first to boil her husbands underpants, then to make his porridge. They soon got their marching orders!

The time came when I had to start school. Mum took me on the first day to Altmore Avenue Infant School and shoved me through the iron gate into the playground. That was it. Thereafter I had to make my own way there and back; a distance of about a quarter of a mile. My first teacher's name was Miss McGrath and my best friend was Roger Banks, who always wore a black beret and a rather posh fawn overcoat. Roger taught me how to play Kiss-chase and always work it so that you caught a girl right behind the brick air-raid shelter at one end of the playground. Don't ask me how I can remember these details from over sixty years ago when today I can't remember where I left my glasses.

By now my baby brother Pete was a year old and we had spread our meagre possessions to the upper part of the house. I finally had my own bedroom, the "box-room", the smallest room in the house, barely big enough for a single bed, a chair and a small built-in wardrobe that looked more like a shed!

We also could now use the bathroom instead of the old galvanised tin bathtub that hung on the wall in the "conservatory" and which we brought to the kitchen floor and filled with kettles of water and all shared every Friday night, whether we needed a bath or not!

The bathroom had an ugly old gas Geyser over the bath. When our Friday night bathing ritual switched upstairs, Dad would light the geyser with a long taper made of folded newspaper through a square hole in the front.
As the gas caught, there would be a bang, a whoosh!, and flames would shoot out and singe the hairs on the back of Dad's hand if he didn't pull it away quick enough.
The smoke and smell of the fumes spread through the house as hot water gushed into the bath. We thought we were living in luxury!