Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (21 page)

Lolly had already left a month or so before. A few girls were openly envious of our freedom but most were quite sniffy about it all: it was no secret that expulsion would have been my fate had my parents not pre-empted the authorities by pulling me out.

So just a week after departing school, I stood, in my little grey-and-white Prince of Wales check suit with its below-the-knee-length straight skirt, topped with my lemon Orlon cardigan and short boxy jacket, waiting for another bus going in a totally different direction: towards the West End.

The 38 bus runs from Dalston Junction, down Balls Pond Road and through Islington, all the way down Rosebery Avenue and along Theobald’s Road to the corner of Southampton Row, where Pitmans College stood.

My life was changing for ever, yet in Dalston itself very little had changed on the surface: Ridley Road was still crowded, dirty and scruffy, the High Street shops still dingy if a bit more well stocked with consumer durables, and Kingsland Road jammed with people who looked a tad brighter, less downtrodden and no longer quite so lean and hungry. The Wimpy Bar was virtually full most days; Cooks Pie & Eel shop, with the wriggling, slimy eels in full view in the front window, did a continuous roaring trade.

Yet if you looked again, the place still bore the scars of the old air-raid and ration-book existence. Many bombsites around Shacklewell Lane remained untouched, merely boarded up. The timberyard opposite our flat was noisily going full tilt. Maisie and son remained, eking out their existence in their hideout. The boys in the car yard still ran out to offer Molly help with her shopping bags. An Irish family in a first-floor flat below moved out, back to Ireland, to be replaced by some friends of theirs, another Irish couple without kids. The rebuilding and re-branding of whole swathes of East London into more fashionable, trendy areas was still decades off. But my dad’s bookie world was changing dramatically.

Street betting was poised to go straight. In 1960, the government announced that within a year, betting shops would be legalised. My dad’s semi-illegal business could now be 100 per cent legit. There’d be no more bungs or grateful rounds in the pub to friendly coppers. More canny operators would have seen this demise of the bung as a real advantage. Not my dad; for him, all the change meant was that the Middlesex Street premises could be vacated. Just around the corner, in Harrow Place, the Hyams name could now be hoisted above a fully fledged betting shop, complete with counter clerk and blackboard with betting prices scrawled in chalk, for all to see, not just the lucky sods with phones who could afford to run an account.

The Day of the Runner was ending; the street corner and public house furtive exchange of betting slips was over. No more newspaper court reports that this or that hapless runner had been formally charged for ‘loitering on the streets for settling bets’ and fined a tenner.

Now, because the people’s passion for betting was clearly an ingrained national pastime, it was a no-brainer for the government to start to clean up, legally, on the betting front: for a canny bookie, the post-war betting bonanza was now a route to greater riches. Or in Ginger’s case, it should have been ….

Why he decided to acquire a partner in his new venture was never clear. After all, the business itself was well established around the Lane. Maybe with his dad gone, he needed the backup of someone with serious cash. In any event, the new partner, a pale, skinny man called Leslie, came on board to help fund my dad’s new venture as a legal betting-shop owner. He’d be a sleeping partner only.

‘It’s gonna be the first-ever betting shop in the City of London area,’ Ginger told everyone proudly.

Well … a distinction of sorts, I guess. Ginger loved the City: bomb scarred as it still was he regarded it as his territory, a significant and fascinating area, a historical landmark of London’s early beginnings. And now we no longer had to make those horrible Sunday treks to the Lane – there were never any enforced visits to my grandmother, now in the suburbs, since most of my dad’s parental affection had been reserved for his father – I started to understand for myself the City’s fascination after a trip to The Monument, climbing the hundreds of stairs right to the top, to gaze down on the vast city streets below. At fifteen, out of school, new and different vistas of London were starting to open up for me – far beyond the mundane confines of Dalston and the Hill.

In a way, Pitmans was a significant halfway house between my home life and my subsequent working life in and around the West End. The college was a bustling, busy place with all types of students of both sexes, charging up and down the stairs, racing to be on time for classes, all determined to pick up the rudiments of office skills and finding a niche in the now developing commercial world. Why did boys want to learn to type? Lolly and I wondered. Surely they didn’t want to be shorthand typists, like us? (Mostly, they didn’t, they were hoping to be journalists.) And how come every single day was so crammed? We had shorthand and typing classes twice each day, interspersed with French lessons; we’d already done French at Skinners’ so it made up the curriculum. And, of course, it had been impressed upon us at home that this could not, in any way, be a repeat of Skinners’. There’d be no slacking, no skiving off to the Hill to giggle and munch on pickled cucumbers. We were there to learn important skills that would deliver us into the working world and earn us good money. Our parents were paying: we’d better get cracking.

‘Monty says he wants to see me earning in six months’ time,’ Lolly told me, nervous at the unknown hurdles facing us. I hadn’t been told this in so many words but I was a bit daunted at first too. Ginger was preoccupied with sorting out the new shop, getting everything shipshape, my mum holding her breath, hoping against hope that me going out to work would mark the end of the war between me and my dad (she was seriously wrong, alas).

But incredibly, we did get stuck in, learning to touch type with a big metal cover concealing the keys to the big Royal or Remington typewriter – something I struggled with at first but eventually just about got the hang of – and gradually unravelling the huge mystery of learning to write Pitman shorthand. The whole point of the intensive learning schedule was to keep you slugging away at it, day in, day out, until you got up to speed. And it worked. After a few months of not having a clue what the innumerable shorthand squiggles, pee, bee, tee, dee, chay, some strokes light, some heavy, really represented, one day a little light clicked on in my head and I ‘got’ what shorthand was all about: a phonetic representation of the English language. It all started to flow. In fact my shorthand was better than my typing. I wasn’t nimble fingered at the keyboard. Even when you had some idea of what you were doing, typing by touch alone, clattering away (it was a very noisy business, with thirty or so students tapping away on manual typewriters, hour in, hour out), you had to get up to a decent speed to get your leaving certificate. Employers wanted shorthand typists who could type quickly, spell properly and take down shorthand dictation at a good speed, say eighty words a minute.

The big carrot for all this frenzied activity was the prospect of a choice of office jobs galore in London for kids like us, even though we hadn’t completed our education. Such was the volume of demand, businesses big or small had to compete like mad for competent people: hence the clamour for Pitmans skills, the growing number of employment agencies like Brook Street Bureau and the slow and steady emergence of ‘The Temp’.

Eight pounds a week plus luncheon vouchers for a junior shorthand typist in London’s West End sounds very modest now – but for a fifteen-year-old then it meant real consumer power, new clothes on tap, sharply pointed-toe brown stilettos from Dolcis at £5 a pair. Lolly and I, already eager shoppers with our parents’ money, couldn’t wait to have our own cash: and we were not alone, part of a huge economic wave giving birth to a spending boom spearheaded by youngsters: we, not our parents, who’d struggled through war going without, would never have it so good.

Day after day, we plodded away at the typewriters, took down fake business letters in our wonky shorthand, listened intently as the formally worded documents were dictated to us over and over again. ‘Dear Sir. With reference to your letter of the twenty fourth … we remain, yours respectfully, and so on … It was dull, repetitive and frequently it seemed endless; you never thought you’d get there. But we did. Despite the somewhat disturbing behaviour of one of the typing supervisors, a nun called Sister Brigid who would regularly get behind your chair and literally shove the chair forwards, sadistically propelling you towards the covered keyboard if she felt you were inattentive or losing momentum. Sister Brigid was a bully. There was no doubt of that. But she had no time for the protracted ‘Stand Creature’ scenes of student humiliation that took place at my last school. You just copped it. Your mum and dad were paying. There was no other option but to keep clattering away.

It’s a Sunday night and I’m at an ‘evening in’ with a new swain, a boy of seventeen called Andy whom I know from the club. Andy is great: tall, blond, attractive and bright, he’s already poised to go to university, a notch up from the likes of Dopey Stephen whom I’d previously paired off with at another ‘evening in’ only to discover that the object of my passion is a rubbish, sloppy kisser – and a bit wooden, a conversational duffer. He looks good, dresses sharp. But that’s it. He has nothing else to offer.

Andy is a much better bet; he’s knowledgeable and interesting. Necking with him is great, the real deal. He never attempts to fumble with my bra or go any further. And he’s funny.

I’m sitting cosily on his lap in a big flat in Stamford Hill; the adults living here are out, and around us are other couples all furiously snogging like mad.

‘See that girl over there?’ Andy whispers, nuzzling my neck, pointing to a girl draped over a happy youth on the opposite chair.

‘She’ll make a good grandmother.’

‘How d’ya know?’ I wonder, marvelling at his perspicacity. After all, he’s pointing to a not particularly pretty, straggly-haired plump girl from Clapton Pond.

‘Aah, that’s my secret,’ he teases, reaching out for another lingering kiss.

I don’t dare ask him what my prospects are for good grandmotherhood. I’d be mortified if he said he thought I was a strong contender. Though most of the girls I know are already openly discussing engagements and white-frocked nuptials, the housewife-cum-mother role and all it entails has not taken shape on my horizon. I know it should, of course, given the amount of time and mental energy that goes into boy chasing, speculating on their attributes and now, finally, dating local boys like Andy. But, for me, I know there is too much going on out there in the world for me to experience to fasten firm onto this idea of wife, mother … let alone granny.

What he meant, of course, was that nearly all the girls in our world would have been devastated not to be married off with kids on the way within the next few years. Being a childless spinster to my contemporaries meant shame, no one wanted you. (It was equally bad to be an unmarried mum, trapped by nature’s whim but a social pariah nonetheless.) Being a granny was seen as the crowning achievement in family life. Having an interesting career, being financially independent and maybe then thinking about choosing a partner – or having kids – was still a long way off as a normal option for young women. Andy, more perceptive than most, saw it all clearly.

Yet that was our last encounter, our final necking session. Within weeks he’d gone off to university in the Midlands. I then discovered he was already spoken for: a green-eyed blonde girl from Guildford, already at university. I mourned him briefly: for about two weeks. But that passing comment made an impact on me: at fifteen, it helped me understand more about myself, that my horizons were quite different from those around me.

Life at home was changing somewhat for me because I saw little of my dad, unless I was still awake at night to hear him come in. I was out on the bus to Southampton Row before he rose, and on weekends I mostly slept through the day, a teenage pattern that became a routine until the time I left home. Usually, in winter, I’d sleep through weekend mornings, only stirring to eat – a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was usually taken, sitting up in my bed – then I’d dive out, plonk the plate in the kitchen sink and go back to sleep. Until it was time to go out, get ready, meet Lolly. Or go on the odd date.

After the David incident, of course, my dad’s attitude to my developing social life worsened. I was growing up, moving towards some sort of independence. Now the rows and explosions were no longer about dragging The Unwilling Daughter to family visits – instead, there was a ludicrous possessiveness about me and the opposite sex.

I never suggested that any boy that liked me come to the flat; I’d arrange to meet them elsewhere. Often they’d already have a taste of Ginger’s temper if they rang me at home. If I was out and he picked up, he’d yell abuse at them, tell them to eff off and slam the phone down. Sometimes the baffled recipient would tell me about this. Embarrassed, I’d just mumble something and quickly change the subject. I never ever wanted to discuss any of this stuff. Even Lolly, who knew how it was for me with my dad, chose to ring when she knew I’d pick up. But even she wasn’t fully aware of how frequently my dad was plastered. Or abusive.

One Sunday night, not long before I leave Pitmans, I’m out with a Hill boy called Stan: tall, dark, handsome – but mostly silent. Conversation with Stan is minimal. He’s so good-looking, a real hunk, and I don’t really understand that it’s actually shyness that keeps him so quiet. We’ve gone to the cinema at Stamford Hill to see
Psycho
, which has managed to scare the life out of me – and Stan has attempted a tentative bit of hand-holding – a sign of life at least! – but nothing more. Afterwards, Silent Stan accompanies me, still saying very little, on the bus to Shacklewell Lane – and offers to walk me to my door.