Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (23 page)

A
fter six months at Southampton Row, I am out, clutching a piece of paper confirming that I have achieved Pitman shorthand speeds of sixty words per minute and can type at a speed of thirty words per minute. Within a week, I have been offered my first office job – junior shorthand typist at an oil company in Savile Row.

‘They’re American,’ sighs the rather snooty agency woman at Brook Street Bureau, Mayfair, her hair swept up in an impressively slick blonde chignon.

‘They need a junior. The boss keeps coming back from the States with extra work, so the senior secretary needs more help,’ she informs me, reading out from the card she’s plucked from a jam-packed box of similar job descriptions.

‘The salary is seven pounds a week with two weeks’ paid holiday a year. And you’ll also be getting ten shillings’ worth of Luncheon Vouchers every week.’

LVs, as they were known, were an important incentive for office staff in the early sixties. After all, it was less than a decade since rationing had ended. So the government saw it as a priority to ensure that every worker had a proper meal every day. The employer footed the bill for the vouchers, which were tax free; someone in the office would hand you the precious little book of paper vouchers each Friday, to use in exchange for your daily lunch at a nearby café through the next week. My first ever LVs were for two shillings a day, plenty enough to buy a sandwich, soft drink and Crunchie bar. (The luxury of having my own money at last meant far too many Crunchie bars were consumed before and after work in those first months. Result: a slightly overweight sixteen-year-old.)

Carrot topped, chubby faced with cropped hair but quite smartly turned out in my bouclé wool coat and Dolcis stilettos, I found it all a bit daunting at first, this adult world where you turned up on the dot of 9am, waited at your desk to be handed a task, usually dictation or copy typing from someone’s handwritten scrawl, working on it until you were free to duck out for an hour on the dot of one. Then more of the same for another tedious three hours until you were released again, out of captivity, into the heady excitement and bustle of the West End and Mayfair.

Being ‘up West’ every day, people watching, checking out all the well-dressed business types strolling around the department stores, inhaling the glamour of posh Mayfair, popping in and out of the cafés, was infinitely more interesting than school and less frenetic and pressurised than Pitmans – but the downside was that in the office you had to behave carefully, be polite and watch what you said to the adults, a huge stumbling block for me, given my sarky teen rebel demeanour.

And as a junior, the kid in the office, I hadn’t understood that the job also meant menial tasks like making cups of tea or coffee if required. (Coffee machines were still in the future at this point.) Since my domestic skills were zilch, I initially struggled to manage even this. And I deeply resented it, the spoilt child who never did anything for anyone. ‘I’m not their bloody servant,’ I’d whinge to myself in the tearoom, waiting for a tin kettle that never seemed to boil.

My immediate boss was a thirty-something dark-haired woman called Ruby with whom I shared a small office overlooking Savile Row Police Station. Ruby was kind, vivacious and took me under her wing immediately, explaining that she commuted daily on the Piccadilly line from somewhere called Ruislip and giving me the general rundown on what was expected.

‘We do all the correspondence for Hank and look after him,’ she revealed on my first somewhat bewildering day. ‘I do the bulk of it but sometimes I’m so snowed under, I need a bit of help. Hank does a lot of travelling to the States, so when he’s here you’re expected to jump.’

She wasn’t exaggerating. Without Hank, the day would pass easily enough. I’d be given a bit of copy typing, usually letters from Ruby’s own scribble or there’d be a handwritten report to be typed up, complete with messy carbon papers that meant you’d usually wind up in the ladies, furiously scrubbing the ink off your fingers by lunchtime. In between typing, I’d make Ruby the odd cup of tea, waiting impatiently at my desk for the longed-for release hours of one and five pm. There was a black Bakelite phone on my desk, just like the one we had at home. It never rang. So I didn’t attempt to use it. And on Friday, just before lunch, a girl from accounts would come round with the little brown pay packets containing your week’s cash. Pound notes. Bliss.

Lolly had also found a similar job, working round the corner in Clifford Street, for a firm of accountants. Mostly, we’d have blown our entire wage packet by Monday or Tuesday and have to nag for handouts at home to get to work until the next little brown packet arrived.

When Hank was in town, things changed. Hank was extremely tall and commanding, with an ugly college-boy crewcut, pretty much what you’d imagine an American oilman to be – a loudmouthed master of the universe who expected everyone to bend to his will – and you’d better be fast. (Think J.R. in
Dallas
and you won’t be far off.)

Mysteriously to me, Ruby’s demeanour would change when Hank was around. She’d be all flushed and jittery, get in extra early, stay late after I’d left. She’d also spend hours in Hank’s office with the door closed, ostensibly taking important dictation, leaving me to fidget at my desk with nothing much to do, until she’d emerge, in a pink-faced tizz, to hurriedly hand me more work.

Sometimes it would be my turn to enter Hank’s inner sanctum and sit opposite his big desk, taking more dictation, letter after letter delivered in his Texan drawl, though luckily, he didn’t speak too fast and I’d manage to get all of it down.

After I’ve worked there a couple of months, Ruby asks me to do something different.

‘Didn’t you say you did French at Pitmans, Jacky?’ she quizzes, handing me a piece of paper.

‘Hank can’t understand a word of this letter and he wants me to get it translated for him.’

‘D’you want to have a try?’

With the help of a French/English dictionary, I manage to translate the letter, which thankfully isn’t very long. But it’s a rod for my own back. Very soon, every letter from France that arrives in Hank’s massive pile of correspondence is handed to me, to translate and type up.

It’s fractionally less dull than the routine letters, the messy carbon paper, the boring dictation, the clunky, inky typewriter ribbon that takes half an hour to change. It fills in the time. But Hank, king of all he surveys, doesn’t want to leave it there. Oh no. He wants to nail the deal, get it sorted.

‘Hank says if you want to go to night school and study French properly, the company will pay for it,’ Ruby tells me one Friday afternoon.

‘It’s a good opportunity, Jackie. It means you could one day’s work for the company as a translator.’

Que? Moi
? A translator? Here I am in my first ever job, just sixteen, free at last, and they want me to go to night school?

‘I’ll ask my mum over the weekend,’ I tell Ruby who seems to think this bodes well.

But I am just playing for time. I don’t mind French at all – Lolly and I now regularly devour every copy of French
Elle
magazine when we can find one on the West End bookstalls because the fashions and the poised, groovy models are way, way ahead in the style stakes compared to anything we have here. And across the road, in Regent Street, we have discovered an oasis of Parisian chic: a branch of Galeries Lafayette, the big French department store; we’re already eyeing up a gorgeous green leather handbag with a five-quid price tag. But I have no desire whatsoever to study, be a translator. I’m here, bored witless, typing in Savile Row because I want the cash every Friday, so I can spend it all on clothes in the exciting shops around me and hang out more often in the West End, a fast-moving, glamorous place of endless promise to a sixteen-year-old from Hackney. There’s excitement, adventure here. I haven’t had a taste of it yet. But I know it’s here for me …

I do tell Molly about the offer. She’s chuffed, ready to back me. ‘See, Jac, I knew it. They can see what a clever girl you are.’

‘Yeah but I don’ wanna go to night school, mum. I’ve just left. I’m never goin’ back.’

Molly, of course, tells my dad about this offer. He too is pleased and proud of his daughter, the nasty Stan incident now conveniently erased from his memory. Yet neither try to push me to seriously consider this idea, view it as An Opportunity, which it unquestionably is for a first-jobber. And so when I turn up at the office on Monday, I tell Ruby I don’t want to go to evening classes to learn more French.

‘Well, you can still do the letters with the dictionary,’ she says sadly. ‘Don’t know what Hank will say when he gets back from the States.’

Hank says nothing. She just wants to keep him happy, pander to his every whim. Looking back, I’m pretty sure Ruby had a very big crush – or more – on her boss. To be American still carried a huge glamour quotient, mainly thanks to the combined forces of rock’n’roll, Elvis and now the supercharged Jackie and John F Kennedy in the White House, wowing everyone with a new type of high-octane Presidency. In my innocence, of course, I couldn’t see that to a post-war thirty-something Middlesex housewife, a Texan oil exec was probably as sexy and irresistible a proposition as a round-the-clock love-in with George Clooney might be to her equivalent half a century later.

After about a year, I quit the oil company through sheer boredom and switched to being a West End temp. Lolly does the same for a while. Yet my first job served one very good purpose: it showed me quite clearly that the adult world of taking dictation from boorish bosses and meekly serving them tea and biccies – something that goes against the grain whenever I have to do it – can’t possibly satisfy my craving for stimulation, for excitement. This yearning for something undefinable isn’t something I can verbalise. It is just an instinctive desire to get out there and taste or experience whatever the world has to offer me.

OK, so I’ve been growing up in Grotsville. My education has been cut short, not by poverty or a pressing need to earn money, but by my refusal to take study seriously. But that wasn’t going to hinder me: if you like, that 38 bus ride from Dalston Junction to Piccadilly, price tuppence, journey time twenty minutes in those traffic-free years, was my entrée into the wider world way beyond Hackney. Lucky me for living so close to the action.

M
y father was one of thousands of bookies who lined up for a licence to operate a legal betting shop in the summer of ‘61. By the year’s end, there were over 10,000 new betting shops spread across the country. By all accounts, the new shop got off to a good start, though neither my mum nor I offered to visit the new premises in Harrow Place to take a look at it. The unspoken assumption was that it would be business as usual; the money would continue to roll in. Which it probably did at first, though I was far too distracted by my new life of earning money, working in the West End and going out at night, to pay much attention to the new venture – and what it might mean for us.

Nor were there any changes to my parents’ routine: they continued to step out regularly, my mum dolled up to the nines, still meeting up with my dad’s punters or cronies or at the odd party or bash, occasionally visiting my dad’s brother Neville’s house in the ‘burbs. Their summer holidays were now taken at the Royal Albion Hotel, Broadstairs – my dad liked the nearby pub, The Tartar Frigate – and Dave the chauffeur had long gone; black cabs remained the perpetual mode of transport. Buying a small car, like so many people were starting to do, was not an option: it would mean a change in drinking habits, something Ginger never contemplated.

I got my first taste of foreign travel with Lolly that summer with a ferry ride to Ostend in Belgium and a few days in the nearby beach resort of Blankenberge. Lolly had been there the year before with her family and extolled its virtues. Alas, Blankenberge that August was frustratingly chillier than London. So we shivered and posed for photos on the windy sand dunes in our floral patterned swimsuits, wandered round the pier, eating portion after portion of crunchy Belgian chips served with mustard pickles, sharing a room at a cheap B&B and pretending to ourselves that we were finally having a ‘grown-up holiday’. No boys came onto our horizon, alas. We were still too young to play pick-up games – though that would change quite soon. There had, of course, been some resistance from Ginger to the idea of me going away unchaperoned. But there was little he could do. I was earning and could pay for it myself, though I still tapped my mum for cash handouts on a regular basis.

At some point, my dad must have realised that the business wasn’t doing as well as he’d hoped because later that year, he got involved in a Big Idea to get some useful publicity for the new betting shop. The idea would get him a photo, a big headline and a full page article in the
Sporting Life
newspaper, then the bookie/punter’s daily printed bible, nowadays a website. He’d already appeared in the paper when opening the betting office because of his shop’s ranking as the first legal betting emporium in the City of London precinct, a sort of feat when you consider all the illegal activity in the area in the past. But this article was a crafty publicity stunt, designed to bring in extra punters and more readies.