Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (2 page)

But while I was born into a black-and-white world where people shivered and could only dream of an era of blue skies and well-stocked larders, I realise that there was colour too in the emerging post-war world. It might not have been instantly visible. But step by step, huge emerging social reforms were to transform lives in ways that would have been unimaginable at the time that photo was taken: free healthcare and education for all, the abolition of hanging, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, the reforms to divorce and abortion laws, the legalisation of homosexuality. Decades of making do – rationing didn’t finally end until 1954 – gave way to full employment, cheap foreign travel, consumer goods for all. It’s a story worth telling for more than personal reasons.

OK, so it was a bizarre childhood in many ways, living in a bomb-scarred street in Hackney with a dad whose wallet was permanently stuffed with notes. But as a child then, you only knew one world, your own streets, the lives around you. You weren’t bombarded, 24/7 with incessant images of other, far more glamorous lives of luxury, endless partying and permanent sunshine, where only fame itself must be sought to achieve the perfect life. I never knew envy or aspiration simply because I didn’t see much that was different or distracting to envy. I took our upside-down world for granted: an abundance of food and black-market goodies; being driven around by a chauffeur in a Daimler, smartly turned out like a little princess with a glamorous mum.

Any fear I might have known existed mainly in my imagination, though being an overprotected child created a curious mix of physical timidity with a somewhat verbose confidence. And whatever the shortcomings of my immediate world, I easily found my escape through the written word: stifling and claustrophobic as the backdrop of childhood was, writing was my key to a future as yet undreamed of.

So this is my story of those years, of that lost world. Apprehensive when I sat down to start writing it, as the memoir grew I realised that a colleague, who’d already gone down a similar route, had been spot-on.

‘Better than therapy,’ he’d advised. ‘You realise when you go there that it wasn’t that bad, after all.’

Technically, I’m not a baby boomer; I miss out by a matter of months. But I’ve always aligned myself with the good fortune of the post-war generation, the kids that grew up to reap the benefit of all those social changes: the full employment, the sexual revolution, the travel, the affluence of the eighties and beyond. When I think long and hard about it, we did, mostly, have it all. It might have started badly. And things may look uncertain right now, especially as the baby boomers are ‘getting on’ in years, not to mention feeling concern for the future of succeeding generations. But luck was on our side. Baby boomers are the historically privileged.

Yet in our nostalgic view of the past, there’s a temptation to believe it was all so much safer, more innocent, a much kinder world then. It was, but only in some ways. Our relationships with each other were quite different. In many post-war families, relationships suffered badly, partly because of the consequences of war itself but also because people’s lives were stifled, held back by convention, lack of communication – and lack of economic freedom as far as many women were concerned. The bad moments, the personal tragedies, the human failings or weaknesses tended to be unacknowledged, hidden, rarely discussed openly. Authority itself was rarely questioned too. You just got on with it.

Today we are so much richer in our awareness of what makes us and others tick. We can ask lots of questions. And we expect good answers. We take for granted the fact that we can, if we wish, engage in open discourse with others about virtually any topic under the sun. You can argue the toss about which way is better. And there are times when that open, frank exchange does go too far: too much information. But I’m firmly on the side of the present passion for disclosure. When it comes to emotional intelligence, we’ve come a long way from those bomb-scarred years.

Finally, writing this memoir has made me understand something quite fundamental: my mum’s optimistic smile was not merely symbolic of the moment, or even her ‘live for now’ nature. That bright optimism was a beacon, a guide, not just for me but for everyone. The future, as always, will take care of itself. But what are we as individuals if we cannot look ahead and hope?

Jacky Hyams

London, January 2011

December 22, 1944

Molly could just about manage to move her feet across the sheet until she came across what she’d been hoping for: a hot-water bottle. But the stone bed-warmer was cold now. They’d given her scratchy woollen socks to wear; yet her feet were still freezing. The nurse, the one who’d been quite nice to her until the unbearable pain really started to kick in, was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere in the background, Molly could hear the sounds of babies crying. And despite the big fire still burning in the grate at the far end of the enormous room with its tall windows and high ceilings – had it been a ballroom at some point in its history? she had wondered vaguely when she arrived – all Molly could think now was, ‘It’s so cold in here. How can they let us lie here freezing like this?’

‘Get your sister to bring you a blanket,’ came a voice from the next bed. Molly couldn’t remember the girl’s name, though they’d been quite chatty in the morning, just before Molly actually went into labour. ‘She can’t come … my mum’s really bad,’ was all Molly could manage; and only then, once she’d spoken the words, did it all start to sink in: the rushed farewell, hugging her frail and emaciated mum, Bella, back in the Leeds house they’d been evacuated to; the lonely taxi ride in the blackout along the narrow meandering road to the outskirts of Tadcaster until they finally reached the maternity home, a 700-year-old castle with ancient grey stone walls. The castle had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Health to be used as a safe haven for expectant mums when World War II broke out.

Then the last twenty-four hours came rushing back: the increasingly scary labour pains that took over her whole being without warning, until there was nothing else in the world but Molly screaming and shouting, hearing nothing but ‘push, push, push, mum’ for what seemed like forever until, finally, the words she’d always secretly known she’d hear one day, ‘You’ve got a little girl, Mrs Hyams, a lovely little girl …’

It was all over. She had her little girl! Ginger, of course, wanted a boy, someone to teach football and take to the pub. ‘I want us to call him Jack, after Dad,’ he’d written confidently from India in his last letter. ‘Well, it’ll have to be Jacqueline,’ thought Molly, struggling to ignore her frozen feet and the soreness and pain all over her body. ‘Thank God, there’ll be no going down the pub with Ginger and Jack.’

All of a sudden, a flurry of activity on the ward. Three nurses march in across the vast expanse of wooden floor, holding the tightly wrapped newborns for their mothers. It had been busy here last night, three babies born within hours of each other. A starched, trim figure stops at Molly’s bed, a nurse she’s never seen before, holding the tiny, precious bundle aloft. ‘Here you are, Mrs Hyams. Come on, sit up and say hello to your baby,’ a voice says briskly.

Slowly, Molly manages to ease herself up. The soreness is awful. But the desire to hold her longed for little girl close for the first time is more powerful. Reaching out, still shaky, she just about manages to get the tiny bundle into her arms. And the exhausted new mum looks down lovingly for the first time into the screwed up, tiny red face of the sleeping infant …

‘THAT’S NOT MY BABY!’ screams Molly.

‘YOU’VE GIVEN ME SOMEONE ELSE’S BABY!’

At first, the nurse won’t have any of it. The new mums are not always easy. Hardly surprising with most of the men God knows where and the war still going on. But these women are lucky to go through the ordeal of childbirth in a maternity ward with doctors around – other women have no choice: childbirth frequently happens at home, with help from a local midwife.

‘Mrs Hyams.’ she soothes. ‘This IS your baby.’

But, just to reassure herself, she checks the tiny tag on the baby’s foot. Then, without another word, she snatches the tiny bundle from the distraught Molly’s arms, and rushes off with it down the length of the vast, chilly room.

Minutes later, she is back at my mother’s bedside with the bundle, accompanied by the stern figure of Matron.

‘Sorry, Mrs Hyams, it seems there was a bit of a mistake,’ explains Matron, dryly, not quite managing to conceal her anger at the mix-up. There will definitely be hell to pay behind the scenes later on.

‘Look, Mrs Hyams, here’s your little girl now …,’ she coos as a relieved, bewildered but nonetheless delighted Molly finally gets to see and cuddle me for the very first time.

Later on, Molly found out what had really happened from the woman in the next bed. A new nurse had been taken on not long before I was born that day in late December. Somehow, in a fit of nerves or sheer panic, she’d mixed up the newborn baby tags. I had been labelled with the surname of the local vicar, and Baby Vicar, in turn, had been labelled ‘Hyams’. The vicar’s child was a boy, so the mistake would surely have been spotted even without my mother’s instinctive reaction. Had the vicar’s child been a girl, however, it’s quite possible that Molly would have innocently gone back to Leeds with the wrong baby.

And so I came into the world as a near miss, almost a vicar’s child by a hair’s breadth. A mistake by a nervous young girl could have led to a very different fate, growing up in a chilly northern parsonage, my early life ruled by the diktat of the Church, rather than an East London Jewish kid growing up in a squalid building abutting a bombsite with doting parents who lived for the moment, without too much thought for the future. Or of God, come to that.

So there it is, my arrival in a medieval castle, cast into a chilly world where chaos and confusion reigned. The castle, so ancient it is mentioned in the
Doomsday Book
, is now an upmarket luxury hotel, reputed to be haunted. And guests have been known to report hearing a baby cry long into the night. Even when there were no babies around at the time …

L
ike millions of other families, our lives were mired in chaos and uncertainty in the months just before the war ended. We too had our share of bad news as we struggled through the early months of 1945 in our temporary lodgings in Roxholme Grove, Leeds.

In an upstairs bedroom, my grandmother, Bella, lay dying from breast cancer. Molly, helped by her sisters Sarah and Rita, did her best for their mum, helping wash and get her to the toilet, trying hard to tempt her to eat. Outwardly, they acted as if this was a temporary situation – and that she would gradually recover. But everyone knew in their hearts it was hopeless. A doctor had made it clear they could expect the worst.

‘Nothing to be done,’ he told them bluntly. ‘Just try to make sure she eats and drinks whatever she can.’ Back then, there was no option of an NHS hospital bed for a sixty-seven-year-old with a terminal illness; indeed, there was no National Health Service, no morphine to dull the pain, no Macmillan cancer nurses; just another war-weary family struggling to cope with a world turned upside down.

Tears slowly trickled down Bella’s pale, shrunken face the day Molly came home from the castle with her precious bundle. She’d been quite brave up till then, despite the terrible pain. But she broke down when she saw me for the first time.

‘I’ll never see her grow up,’ she sobbed, while my grandfather, Oliver, hovered at her bedside, unsure of his place in a sickroom.

Still fit and dapper in his seventies, Oliver coped with his wife’s distress by leaving the room. In fact, he left the house as often as was decently possible. Ignoring the harsh northern winter, smartly dressed in his pinstripe suit and big overcoat, he went out for long walks most days. He had been a good provider for his family of eight children, working long hours as a tailor and cutter to the fine ladies who shopped in the big London department stores in the early 1900s. Even in the thirties, when times became more difficult, he’d managed to keep working. As a husband, however, he fell short: his daughters knew all too well that their parents’ marriage had been an unhappy liaison, arranged by their respective Jewish families just months before the pair had fled the Russian pogroms (the anti-Jewish violence that swept across Russia in the late 1800s) to settle in England.

In St Petersburg, Bella, eighteen, had fallen in love with a neighbour, a handsome young Russian boy. But he wasn’t Jewish. So her parents had promptly married her off to Oliver, who was.

Already in the late stages of pregnancy when the couple boarded the boat for the long journey to England, Bella and Oliver’s first child, Jane, was born prematurely on the boat – and remained stateless throughout her life. Bella had struggled to adjust to their new life in London as pregnancy had followed pregnancy for the better part of fifteen years. Later in life, she’d confided to her daughters that Oliver’s relentless, constant desire for sex, regardless of her own needs or feelings, had made the marriage close to a living hell for her.

Married to a man she couldn’t love, worn down by his incessant physical demands, she poured all her love and affection into her offspring, spoiling the four older boys rotten – the traditional Russian way – while leaving the girls to help with all the hard work around the home. Except for Molly, that was, the baby of the family, who was almost as spoilt and indulged as the boys.