Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (10 page)

So that’s the story of how my mum nearly got to own a diamond ring.

She did get a mink coat, mind you. But that was decades later, after my dad had died. And yes, you guessed it – she paid for it herself. With a credit card.

M
y dad’s betting business thrived in the post-war betting frenzy: fivers and tenners aplenty for all. We acquired a retinue of ‘servants’ on my dad’s payroll: Annie, our Irish cleaner, The Old Man’s chauffeur, Dave, to drive us around in a big posh Daimler on family outings or holidays at the seaside, Renee, our regular babysitter, plus the ongoing services of a couple of my dad’s runners who doubled up as delivery men to bring us anything we needed, mostly in the food department, direct from the Lane to our front door.

The oldest and most trusted of these, Wag, was somewhat odd. My mum said he looked like a tramp and, indeed, he was pretty unappealing: a fag end permanently clamped to his lips, his long, thin face grey and pockmarked, his attire shabby – usually a long, grey, belted and very tatty overcoat and a flat cap that always covered his head, rain or shine.

I’d sometimes hide behind my mum, peering at Wag in fascination, when she opened the door to take bag after bag of the provisions he had lugged on the bus from the Lane for us. There was little dialogue. My mum would say thanks and Wag would grunt an indecipherable response. He never came in, of course, whatever the weather.

My mum, always fanatical about appearances, would complain about him to Ginger.

‘Does he ever wash, Ging? He looks a bit … pongy.’

‘Dunno,’ my dad would shrug.

‘’E’s worked for The Old Man for years. Never bin known to nick anything.’

These deliveries were usually on a Friday, so my mum could be ready to embark on a big weekend cooking spree, frying all different kinds of fish – halibut, salmon, plaice – preparing big roasting chickens, or unwrapping big joints of beef, peeling potatoes to roast, shelling peas, slicing up cabbages and carrots. They were meals we didn’t always manage to finish because there was always far too much for two adults and a child; cold cooked food is one of my strongest memories of childhood.

My parents were also stepping out regularly by now, enjoying themselves in those years around 1947-1949 when London started to emerge from its blackout curtain, This meant Big Nights Out with my dad’s cronies, going to shows, boxing matches, often getting the best seats for the latest West-End musical. Sometimes my dad would be given free tickets to shows by generous punters so off they’d go in a taxi, all dressed up, my dad in his latest sharp double-breasted suit, my mum in one of her slinky wrapover beaded crepe numbers, worn with platform shoes, hair piled high.

One day Molly told me they’d gone to see
Oklahoma
, the first of the big post-war Broadway musicals to open in the West End and, amazingly, they’d wound up sitting yards away from the Queen and Prince Philip. Only she was Princess Elizabeth back then, a few years before her coronation in 1953.

‘Oh she’s so beautiful, the Princess,’ my mum purred. ‘You should see her skin, perfect, like porcelain. They just came in and sat down two rows in front of us. We couldn’t believe it.’

I was young, but this royal glamour, tiaras and ermine, left an impression on me. The austerity years were somewhat glitter deficient. Real glamour, for the masses, was at a premium. Footballers then weren’t a part of the celebrity circus; even big players earned very little, a maximum of £20 a week, until things started to change in the early sixties. There were movie stars, of course – in the early fifties, the UK version of the American
Photoplay
magazine gave glamour-hungry movie fans a chance to pore over sepia-tinted photos and stories of the big stars of the day like Tony Curtis, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Burt Lancaster and many others. Yet the British Royal Family, buoyed by the huge wave of support they’d garnered from the public during the war, continued to be objects of near worship then, especially with images of a young, beautiful princess inheriting the throne with a tall, blonde and handsome young naval lieutenant by her side.

TV images, of course, weren’t around yet; like everyone else, we didn’t actually acquire a television until the Coronation. So my pre-pubescent obsessions with imagery focused strongly on the two-and-sixpenny best-selling hardback picture books of these glittering, distant creatures at their wedding, with their children and at the big Coronation.

Those photographic images in the pre-Diana/celeb years were equally as powerful, in their way, as the tidal wave of celebrity images we now receive. People needed something glittery and highly costumed to admire then, to look up to, to gaze at in awe and wonder, in total contrast to the grey world of queues and shortages. It was a perfect antidote to the miserable times, helping people forget all about the bleakness of the grey skies, the sheer slog of living. Even if it was a bit ridiculous, worshipping a privileged group of unknown people in ermine who remained firmly on a distant pedestal. But of course, the very mystique of that far-off royal world was what hooked you in the first place …

Money was also thrown at my early ‘education’. Because I was chattering away as a tiny tot, developing an aptitude for words and picking up the alphabet, clearly hungry to learn, my mum enrolled me at an expensive kindergarten for preschool kids on Stamford Hill, a couple of miles away.

Twice a week she would take me there on the bus and I began to read. One day, she was late picking me up and, to her utter amazement, found me sitting there, surrounded by a small group of other kids, listening intently to my words.

‘She was telling them a story, Ging,’ said Molly proudly when my dad came home. ‘I’m sure she’s going to do something big. Maybe she’ll go on the stage.’

Oh dear. Such was my mum’s conviction that I was heading for superstardom, she insisted my dad also fork out for dancing classes for me, though I had no real physical aptitude for dance, just an incessant desire to show off, to throw myself around and pose.

Once a week, we’d trot round the corner to a basement on the Kingsland Road. The dance studio was called Miss Betty’s, and for two shillings a session ‘Miss Betty’, a dark-haired former twenties chorus girl turning to seed, would plonk away on the piano and bark out instructions to her tiny pupils. The classes were very small, just four or five kids. Sometimes it was just me. Which isn’t surprising: we were in Bash Street Kids territory, not posh Richmond or Roehampton.

‘Bra-bra, gateway – up to the skies,’ she’d instruct the little Dalston wanabee Markovas like myself as we struggled to move our arms and legs to copy her. (These odd phrases were descriptions of the shapes we were meant to be making with our arms.) Alas, I never had the makings of any sort of ballerina, though I loved the pink satin shoes with their blocked toes that my mum bought me specially from Freed in Covent Garden. Standing ‘en pointe’ was a buzz – if you could manage to stand on your toes for more than thirty seconds, that is, which I couldn’t. My tap-dancing skills – jump, shuffle, jump, shuffle, toe-heel, toe-heel in my little black shoes with metal toe pieces – weren’t much to write home about either. Yet I was OK at singing, mainly because I could remember all the words perfectly and just about follow a tune. So by the time I was heading for primary school, such was my mum’s conviction that fame and fortune lay ahead that I’d started to believe in my own hype. If someone keeps telling you and everyone else how wonderful you are, your self-belief soars. And so singing, dancing, reciting and performing became a big part of my life, along with reading, until I was close to my teens. And so did a certain sort of self-confidence, the confidence of the overindulged …

However, this over-eagerness to perform and mouth-off got me into trouble when I was about four years old.

It is summer and we are at the seaside, on our annual holiday at Cliftonville on the Kent Coast. I am wearing a pink ruched swimsuit, a stripey taffeta bow holds up my unruly mop. Molly and I are in an outdoor pavilion, in the audience, watching other holidaymakers, mostly kids, take to the stage. They are supposed to be performing, strutting their stuff for their mums and dads, but, as is sometimes the way with small children, most find themselves tongue-tied and reluctant when actually faced with an audience. One boy is hauled onto the stage, bursts into tears and has to be quickly yanked off.

‘I can do better than that!’ I declare, bored and fidgety as usual when confronted with a situation where nothing much seems to be happening. Everyone, every holidaymaker, parent and kid, focuses on me and my mum. And the MC, beret on his head, mike in his hand, figures he’ll use this and teach the little brat a lesson into the bargain. It might get a few laughs. In his line of business, you have to work with what you get.

‘OK, if you can do better, come up here and show us,’ he says, fed up with his day job, coaxing free entertainment out of noisy holidaymaking Londoners.

Molly looks at me nervously, wanting to rescue me from my Big Mistake. I’ve opened my trap and set myself up good and proper.

But I don’t shrink back or cling to my mum, for some reason. Nor do I cry. The desire to get up there and show off, despite the unexpected summons, is now powerful in me.

So my mum guides me to the side of the wooden stage where someone lifts me onto it.

‘So what’s your name, then?’ says the MC.

‘And what are you going to sing for us today that’s better than that?’

Everyone laughs at the tiny tot with the inflated ego.

‘My name is Jakerlin,’ I tell him seriously, unsure of my ground now I’m faced with the awesome reality of an audience somewhat bigger than I’m used to at home. ‘Don’ wanna sing a song, wanna say a poem,’ I say, somewhat defiantly.

‘OK Jakerlin,’ he sighs. Another ripple of laughter goes through the watching crowd. A photographer takes a snap of the tot who thought she could do better. I still have it.

And I get through the four-verse poem, called An Old Rat’s Tale. ‘He was a rat and she was a rat and down in one hole they did dwell …’ I make a pretty poor fist of it, frequently pausing to remember lines, and get more laughs than claps when I finish. My mum doesn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed for me when she yanks me off the stage. But I know I’ve blown it, one of the first times in my life that I begin to realise I should have kept my big mouth firmly shut – and stayed on the safe side.

Did someone say that lessons like this teach you how to control your emotions, measure your reaction, think a bit before verbalising your feelings? I’d like to tell you that this little seaside episode taught me a valuable lesson. But I won’t lie. It was only the beginning of a life spent all too frequently regretting my over-enthusiasm to say exactly what I think, the minute I think it. You do improve a bit with age, of course. But I still blame the parents.

They never knew when it was time to tell their little darling to sit down and shut up.

W
e are in a big white house, somewhere in a place called Surrey.

I have never been inside a house like this, so I am entranced, if somewhat awed, by everything around me: the thick, plush, pale carpets, tall vases on polished surfaces containing huge colourful blooms, exquisite antique chairs with silk cushions, elegant long windows with velvet drapes overlooking an immense garden that seems to go on for ever … such a plush, quiet, different world from the one we inhabit.

We’ve been driven here in a very big chauffeur driven car, my mum and I, all the way from home to meet our host, Lol, a good friend of my dad’s from the pub. Lol and his wife Maggie have invited us here for high tea. My dad, of course, is working. He’s been pally with this couple for ages, sometimes going to West-End shows with them. Lol and Maggie, who don’t have any kids of their own, have insisted we come over. They want to meet me – and show us their lovely home.

Lol, a very handsome man in his forties, with slicked-back dark brown hair, and a look of Robert Taylor, a movie favourite of the fifties, had been a publican before the war. Now, we don’t know what he does. Or rather, no one is saying. But this big house, with its own driveway, seems to confirm what my mum has always told me about Lol and Maggie. Whenever they’re mentioned, she says, ‘They’re very rich. He owns a Bentley, that’s one of the most expensive cars you can buy. And she gets all her clothes from abroad, can you believe that? She had this beautiful white organdie blouse on; I had to ask her where it came from. “I think it’s from Paris,” she said, like she’d just picked it up off a stall in the Lane!’