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.
]]>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.
]]>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!
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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!
]]>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!
]]>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!
We moved in with the barest of furniture, enough for one back living room. We had two small easy chairs, a table and four dining chairs in the back room. The front room was the bedroom with Mum and Dad's bed and mine. Then there was the kitchen, no bathroom, a ramshackle lean-to (make-shift conservatory), an outside lavatory and a small garden with a dugout Anderson shelter.
When we moved in, the front garden, as we laughingly called the three feet of mud between the front room window and the pavement, was enclosed with ornate cast-iron railings fixed into a low brick wall, and our own gate. Very posh! However, we had no sooner taken up residence when some men came round from the council armed with hacksaws. They cut down the railings from the entire street, loaded them onto a lorry and took them away for the war effort. I would like to think they were melted down and made into bombs and dropped right on Adolf Hitler! Everyone hated Adolf Hitler of course, including me, though I wasn't exactly sure why!
I was quite happy about the railings going because it gave me extra space to play "out the front" on the beautifully tiled path leading to the house. Set in this path was a round cast iron cover to the "coal hole" about 12 inches across. This was where the coalman tipped his sacks of coal into the cellar and I soon found I could use it as another entrance by sliding down the shute onto the pile of coal then feeling my way to the cellar steps and up into the house. No one seemed to mind the filthy mess this made of my clothes. We weren't so fussy in those days.
The upper part of the house was occupied by an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Self. They were very kind to me and often invited me up to see them. Mr Self seemed to spend most of his time fiddling with his Crystal Set, a crude radio which he tuned somehow by scraping a needle on something that looked like a piece of coal and listening to some crackly noises on headphones. Sometimes he would put a headphone up to my ear and let me listen too.
Mr and Mrs Self, soon moved away to another house near the Gasworks. I rather think we made too much noise for them with Mum and Dad arguing and shouting at each other, and ME!!
We were glad of the extra space though, particularly as my brother Pete was on the way.
]]>What I do know, is that I was conceived out of wedlock, and my parents were married on 1st January 1938, just eight months before I was born, weighing a bonny 8lbs 11oz.
It must have been a hurried and unpublicised wedding as there were no photographs and no one in the family ever spoke of it, except once when I was about 7 or 8, when my Aunt Daisy, in a moment of mild vindictiveness, confided in me, "Of course you know your mother and father HAD to get married!"
I seem to remember understanding at the time what she meant and also not being particularly surprised. Mum and Dad never celebrated their wedding anniversary and it was only some years after she died that he told me the actual date of their marriage. For nearly fifty years it had been a guilty secret for the whole family.
When I was born there was no such thing as an unmarried mother and, looking back nearly seventy years on, I can understand some of the confusion I felt as a child; for instance that my father seemed to be tolerated by Mum's family rather than accepted into it; that I was on the one hand loved, but somehow regarded as the cause of some subdued bitterness and shame.
Regardless of their ignominious start, and many setbacks along the way, my Mum and Dad stayed together for 52 years until she died, though I never understood why, because they spent half their time having violent rows.
The culture and attitudes to marriage were just so different in pre-war Britain.
Stanley was a typical East Ender. An unskilled manual worker, rough and ready, with little to say for himself. He spent most of his meagre wages (probably about £2 a week) on drink and gambling.
I mostly remember him sitting by the fireside, opposite Grandad, reading a newspaper or dozing. If he ever spoke to me it was usually to tease me or pretend to chase me away by growling "Gertcha!" (get out of here). His favourite word seemed to be "Arse'oles", which he used to answer almost any question put to him by my Nan, like, "Ow long you gonna sit readin' that paper?"
"Arse'oles!"
On one occasion, which sticks in my memory because of its rarity, Uncle Stanley took me for a walk up to the pub. He bought a bottle of stout for Nan, a bottle of Tizer and, to my amazement, a MARS BAR!
I walked home with him in an ecstasy of anticipation. A MARS BAR! I think this was the first one I had ever seen. My experience of sweets up till then had been loose in paper bags, shaken out from large glass jars and carefully weighed by the ounce by the lady in the sweet shop.
When we got back to Nan's house, all the family gathered round the table in awe as Uncle Stanley carefully unwrapped the bar and ceremoniously sliced it into about eight equal pieces, one for each of us.
We all nibbled and sucked at our tiny fragment of chocolatey sweetness trying to make it last as long as possible. What a treat! Uncle Stanley was my hero after that!
]]>Fortunately they all came through the Blitz unscathed. The worst thing that happened was when Aunty Dolly, who lived south of the river (Thames), had her windows blown in when a bomb fell nearby.
My Nan also had a lucky escape when a bomb fell in Blenheim Road and completely destroyed three houses opposite hers. This had already happened by the time Mum and I went to live with her on our return from Scotland, and most of the rubble had been cleared away. Weeds and grass had started to grow around the scattered bricks and lumps of masonry that remained, and the area became a kids playground.
This was my introduction to "bombed buildings". I would later discover there were many thousands of such derelict bomb sites around London, providing places of fun and adventure for kids like me. At the age of 4 or 5, I was too young to consider the implications of death and destruction as I played happily amongst the ruins.
I was allowed out of the house whenever I wanted and roamed freely around the area. The only friend I made in the street was a boy about a year older than me called Terry Hobdale (I think). All the other children had presumably been evacuated to the country.
Terry's family must have been pretty well off because his dad had a motorcycle with a sidecar. No one else in the road had any kind of vehicle in those days.
]]>One of my jobs around the house, as a 4 yearold, was to help make the "toilet paper" for the outside lavatory. This consisted of cutting up Grandad's copy of the Daily Mirror, once he'd read it from cover to cover, into sheets about 5 inches by 7 inches. These were collected into a wodge and a hole made in the corner with a meat skewer so they could be tied together with string and hung on a nail within reach of the lav seat. Many a time I sat with my little legs dangling over the edge of the wooden seat reading the adverts and cartoons as best I could before putting a couple of sheets to their final good use.
I also remember hearing the plaintiff cry of "Paper ... Pa-a-a-per!!" echoing from the half open door of the lavatory when someone had forgotten to check the supply before sitting down. Everyone giggled, but it was not so funny for me as I knew it would be my job to take out some replacements!
]]>In the back room, apart from Grandad and Stanley's easy chairs, there was one large built-in dresser in the alcove to one side of the fireplace and the remainder of the room was filled with an enormous scrubbed pine-topped table with a long bench down one side and as many curved back dining chairs as would fit round the other three sides. This was where everyone else sat all the time.
My Nan had brought up at least six kids in that house. I say at least because I remember sometimes overhearing the adults talking in hushed tones about some not making it through infancy. I hardly understood anyway but they always changed the subject if they thought I was listening. There seemed to be lots of secrets which kids like me were not supposed to know about. Anyway before they all found partners and moved out there were at least eight adults living in this tiny house with no bathroom and just the one outside lavatory.
The strange thing was that they all managed without ever using the "front room". Nan's parlour was immaculate. It had a massive floor to ceiling fireplace and marble mantelpiece with so many shelves and gold pillars. A beautiful chiming clock stood in the centre above the fire and on either side were black statuettes of men trying to control prancing horses. There were other expensive looking ornaments on display and an aspidistra in a large pot on a spindly high stand in front of the square bay window. There were comfortable armchairs either side of the fireplace and a chaise longue opposite. A deep fur rug lay in front of the fender in which were arranged a set of enormous polished brass fireside tools; poker, coal shovel, tongs, hearth brush, toasting fork etc. Then there was my favourite piece, the piano! Light coloured inlaid wood with ornate candle holders which swung out on hinges. Whenever I could I would sneak into the parlour and stand looking at the piano. If only I dared open it I knew in my innocent mind that I would be able to play a tune on it, but someone would always come and pull me out and close the door. No one was allowed in the parlour! Keep out of it!!
That room remained unused and immaculate until years later when, sometime after Grandad died, Nan and Stanley moved away and went to live in a caravan at Bishop Stortford.
]]>Nan and Grandad lived along with their youngest son, my Uncle Stanley, in his late twenties but unmarried, in a tiny two-up, two-down terraced house in Blenheim Rd, East Ham. When Mum and I came "home" we took over Nan's bedroom in the front of the house. Nan, Grandad and Stan slept in single beds crammed together in the back bedroom. There was no bathroom in the house and the only lavatory was a dark and dingy affair outside in the backyard so the three adults kept a large white enamel bucket just inside the bedroom door for "emergencies". I only ever saw this bucket full to the brim with bright orange pee! How my Nan ever managed to get the bucket down the steep narrow stairs to empty it remains a mystery. You can bet your life the men in the house never lifted a finger to help. It was the accepted norm that when working men came home they sat by the fireplace and were waited on "hand and foot" by the womenfolk.
Nan spent most of her time in the scullery at the back of the house, cooking, washing, ironing, sewing, polishing etc. Grandad and Stan sat either side of the fireplace, in the only two small wooden armchairs, reading the newspaper or dozing. The only time they spoke was to demand another cup of tea, or grumble about something. In the fireplace was a large black range which burned coal. Grandad would occasionally open the door in the front and stir the fire with a big iron poker which hung on a stand on the hearth inside the polished brass fire surround or fender. Sometimes he would call out to Nan, "Fire needs bankin' up!"
Nan, who was probably up to her elbows in a tub of soapy washing water in the scullery, would dry her hands on the apron she never ever took off, and come through to collect the small shovel which hung next to the poker.
The coal was kept in the cupboard under the stairs in the hallway oposite the front door. Black dust would billow out as Nan scooped a heap of coal onto the shovel. After she'd chucked it onto the fire and poked it about a bit she would go back to her chores. Hardly a word passed between any of them.
Once in a while Grandad would sniff hard up his nose like a pig snorting, make a loud hawking noise, and collect a great gob of phlegm in his mouth. Then lifting the round lid off the top of the range with the special cast-iron handle, he would spit it violently into the flames. I loved the sizzling noise it made as it instantly vapourised!
I seem to remember thinking,"When I grow up I'm going to be a great spitter just like Grandad!"
Memories of that time with my Scotish grandparents are sketchy but a few painful episodes stick in my mind to this day. Like the time I got hold of Grandad's gold hunter watch, somehow opened the back and crammed the works full of plasticene. My backside was sore for a while after that! On another occasion, against parental rules, I climbed on top of the coal bunker and knelt on a rusty nail which penetrated my shin. I bore the scar, and the "serves you right" guilt, of that for many years. Then there was the time my father boarded a tram to go to Glasgow with me in his arms. The tram suddenly lurched forward and Dad, unable to hold on because of me, crashed against the rail on the tram deck and badly hurt his back. Somehow I was made to feel to blame for that also and carried the guilt for a long time.
Although I believe the few months I was "evacuated" to Scotland were generally happy ones for me I later heard my mother was very home-sick for her family in London and wanted to return despite the Blitz and so some time in 1940 Mother and I caught the train south again.
I remember a little of the journey back to London. The train was packed, mainly with men in uniform, soldiers, sailors, airmen, many of them made a fuss of me. Of course, I didn't realise it at the time, but I suspect they fancied my mum! I believe the journey was rather tedious with the train having to stop several times because of air raid warnings etc., but my last memory of it was holding Mum's hand, crossing the cobbled street outside the station at Stratford, East London, on the way to my Nan's house near Upton Park, the home of West Ham United football club. Mum was carrying all our wordly possessions in a small suitcase and juggling with my only toy, a Mickey Mouse tricycle. I was wearing a "siren suit", a one piece woollen outfit modelled on the one favoured by Winston Churchill.
And so began my life as an East End kid!
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