Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (24 page)

The idea was born after an extended session in the bar of the George and Dragon, with some creative input from one of my dad’s regular drinking pals, a
Sporting Life
reporter called George and my dad’s two big chums, Charley Riley and Mick ‘Weasel’ Douglas. Essentially, it was quite simple: ‘Ginger Sid’, the name my dad was known by in the Lane, would be dressing up as the Lord Mayor of London, with a gold-peaked black velvet hat, ermine cloak and chains of office chinking around his neck. Charley and Mick, the bookie’s clerks, would be similarly dressed up in the Lord Mayor’s Show ceremonial gear, complete with swords. George the reporter would write up the whole event and the mayhem it caused in the betting shop, tongue-in-cheek. A theatrical costumier, Bob Sand, another crony, would lend them the outfits – and, of course, get a mention in the article. Perfect PR. Pure theatre. The story was duly written, with lots of East End ‘colour’.

‘Git darn ‘ere to Petticoat Lane right away … either the Lord Mayor ‘as tiken over a bettin’ shop ‘isself – or Ginger Sid’s gone barmy,’ read the opening paragraph of the story, which, to the writer’s credit, read like a dream, describing in vivid prose the sight of Ginger Sid marching around outside the shop in his Lord Mayor clobber, doffing his hat, bowing at passers-by and generally encouraging locals from the Lane to venture into the premises.

‘’Ow much d’you want for that old chain?’ quipped one old man in a cap and muffler, dropping the handle of his handcart to stare at Ginger Sid’s regalia. ‘Give you eight and ninepence for it.’

‘Excuse me,’ said one old lady peering at the ‘Lord Mayor’s’ tricorn hat. ‘Why don’t you wear your hat the other way round?’

‘Cos then, madam,’ snapped Ginger Sid, ‘it would only serve to make me look sillier than I already do …’

Yet while the article and photo of my dad in his Lord Mayor gear appeared to much fanfare, the end result was seriously underwhelming: the regular punters still loyally called in at the shop to place bets. But no new business ensued as a result. My dad’s customer base, as it is now known, remained pretty much what it had been before legalisation; extending it was not a simple matter.

Neither my mum nor I knew much of this, of course, beyond the article. Nothing was said about the real reasons why he’d co-opted the reporter to write up the stunt. But when the truth came out much later, it was clear the stunt had been born out of something very close to desperation.

My dad had run into trouble with his cash flow. So he did a bit of a Nick Leeson and gradually started using other people’s money that wasn’t his to use: from the bank, from his business partner, from the shop till, putting down big cash bets on the horses, in the hope of recouping his losses and reestablishing his finances.

In the first six months, one or two big bets came off. So he could keep the business going – and still keep betting. Over a period of two-and-a-half years, he was continuously playing hard in the last-chance saloon, placing bet after bet, juggling cash, copping the losses, convincing himself that a few seriously big wins or complicated bets would put him back in the black.

The irony was, my dad had never been much of a gambler himself; he’d have a bet now and again and that was it. But now his furious betting spree was destroying his business – and our livelihood. The business itself, inherited by Jack from his father, had stood in the Lane for well over a century, a tiny bit of local history. My dad managed to blow it all within a few years of legalisation, a time when economic optimism was high, there was full employment and consumerism was starting to change lives for good. Certainly, this was the Lane, the East End, Fagin territory, the traditional habitat of the chancer. People went bust all the time – and restarted again. But even by local standards, this was poised to be a spectacular cockup.

The extent of Ginger’s borrowing remained undetected. Because he regularly operated an agreed overdraft facility with the bank, it was relatively easy to go back to his friend, the manager, and up the ante, borrow more. And because he and he alone operated the till of the shop – he had never quite trusted his counter clerk, Charley Riley, and his business partner didn’t even come to the shop very often – no one could have a clue as to what was going on. Months passed and the debt was mounting. Yet everything went on as usual, my dad flashing wads of cash in the pub, downing double scotches and shouting doubles for all every night, still assuring my mum that we were living on ‘the finest and the best’. No one knew a thing.

O
ffice jobs in the West End were so easy to find and with my first year’s experience under my belt, I could job hop with incredible ease. After a less-than-stimulating stint temping (the attraction of temping ended when the agency sent me for a soul-destroying fortnight at a big typing pool in Portman Square, akin to being on the production line of a factory, or worse, being back at college under the vengeful eye of Sister Brigid), I found it ridiculously simple to get a new job, sample it, leave after a few months of dictation and boredom and walk straight into another, usually via an employment agency. The agencies had so many shorthand/typing and clerical jobs to fill that it was a breeze for them to find work for virtually anyone with a bit of experience who came walking through the door. If you had decent speeds plus one good reference, that was plenty.

Sometimes you’d go for two or three interviews and wind up being offered every job. As a result, I was extremely casual about the whole idea of working. I’d grown up in a world of ‘live for now’ at home and was spending every penny I earned. Unlike many other East-End teenagers out at work, I was under no obligation to hand over a pound or two to pay my way at home. So seeking some sort of permanence or continuity at work just didn’t come into the equation.

It was all far too easy. A job interview usually went along these lines:

‘So … I see, Miss … er … Hyams, you can do Pitman shorthand and type at forty words a minute?’

‘Yes I can.’

‘Well, we certainly need someone like you to do our letters. We get a lot of correspondence and Mister so-and-So needs all the help he can get.

‘When are you available?’

‘I could start next Monday.’

‘OK, next Monday it is. 9am sharp.’

This kind of ‘speed hiring’ sounds incredible now when three, even four interviews are not unknown for certain types of jobs. But there’s a lot to be said for a world of full employment: the knowledge that another job is yours for the asking makes for a more confident worker, albeit a somewhat fickle one. And overall, office standards weren’t that exacting: I was literate, could spell and did the work quickly. Often, the bosses giving you the dictation or handwritten letters had poor verbal or literary skills; you’d wind up discreetly correcting them on paper. And often, a secretary or typist was only there to boost their executive status. Frequently, you’d sit all day with absolutely nothing to do. The bosses didn’t exactly run around tearing their hair out: it was, in office terms at least, definitely a more leisured era. Or maybe I just chose places that were a soft option.

I worked for an engineering association (as uninspiring as it sounds), a theatrical agent (too quiet: like the agent’s clients, I sat there, waiting for something to happen but being paid; the ever-diminishing list of clients must have starved), a film distributor (interesting, at last, but long four-hour industry lunches made for tricky afternoons when my boss came back totally wrecked or the MD got amorous), and a fat, camel-coated, cigar-chomping Soho entrepreneur whose main income came from flogging cost-price table lighters and whose enterprise was run by a tiny, domineering woman called ‘Hillie’ – my first female boss and definitely not a feminist.

My key criteria for choosing a job was simple: the office had to be in the ‘right’ part of the West End, close to the 38 bus route and ideally in the streets around Soho and Piccadilly, which included a bit of Mayfair.

Soho, for Lolly, me, and a few like-minded Hackney girls we teamed up with, was the epicentre of our social world. Soho had all the places where we wanted to hang out: coffee bars like Les Enfants Terribles on the corner of Dean Street and Diadem Court and La Bastille on Wardour Street. These places had tiny basement dives, part of a growing number of small, smoky basement clubs like St Annes (near the church in Wardour Street) where you could have soft drinks and dance to records from the jukebox.

The overwhelming attraction of these places, of course, was the clientele: glamorous, dark-eyed, handsome young French or Italian boys, here ostensibly to learn the lingo, or work in the burgeoning catering trade – but primarily hoping to lighten the gloom of a greyer, colder clime by copping off with compliant young ‘Eeenglish’ girls.

The French were mainly bourgeois students with parents subsidising their studies. The Italians were mostly in London to work, complete with a work permit (back in those pre-EU days you couldn’t get into the country without the right papers) that gave them a lower-ranking job in the posh hotels like The Savoy, enabling them to send most of the money back to their impoverished families.

Les Enfants was an early favourite. It was open in the day, and we could go there straight from work and on weekend afternoons when the best-looking Italian waiters were having their afternoon break before starting their evening’s tasks.

These stunning-looking charmers with fractured English were infinitely more attractive to us than the local Stamford Hill boys in their baggy jumpers which had been knitted by their mums – think fried egg ‘n’ chips versus a tasty bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. Amongst our peers we were seen as a bit daring in rejecting our own ‘manor’; as I’ve said, it was pretty much expected we’d pair off with one of our own kind. But in wanting to be ‘up West’ all the time, we were only following a pattern: living just a few miles from the centre, our families too had frequently stepped out there on special occasions as we were growing up, or taken us there on kiddie outings. (Molly already had a serious West End shopping habit going back to her wartime years selling underwear in Oxford Street.)

But there was a cultural shift going on too, something that started to emerge in those afternoons jiving at Les Enfants: a growing awareness of a certain kind of Eurocool. For kids like us, anything French or Italian – movies, fashion, as well as young men – was desirable, exotic, the youth more slickly costumed than the duller post-war Brit version. They may have been skint Italian waiters but the Latin passion for ‘la bella figura’ meant that many looked more like movie stars.

The swinging sixties, the miniskirted, long-haired, thigh-booted fashion and music explosion, when London became the global focus of cool, was still a few years away. Before that, the only really snazzy dressers in London, apart from the sharp-suited Mod boys, tended to be from across the Channel – and the only shoes worth buying were Italian. In Paris, straight-haired, full-fringed girls had been wearing skinny cotton pants, ballerina shoes and black T-shirts or polo necks à la Bardot since the late fifties. By now, we were aping the latest European looks, sporting bouffant hairdos, sleeping in rollers, backcombing and lacquering like crazy. But we didn’t, couldn’t, look quite as cool as they did.

We were East-End kids from a tough post-war environment. Yet being able to work around Soho meant there were no barriers to this, our further education: we could easily absorb and soak up some of the culture around us. Alongside our obsession with French
Elle
magazine, small groups of us went to see Ella Fitzgerald sing live, had our first-ever Chinese meal for five shillings in Shaftesbury Avenue, enjoyed Italian subtitled movies like
La Dolce Vita, Rocco and his Brothers
or Pasolini’s unfathomable
Accattone
at the Academy, Oxford Street, jived to Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ and ‘Hit the Road Jack’ at La Poubelle in Great Marlborough Street, or smooched up close with fanciable young Italian waiters to the strains of ‘Georgia on my Mind’.

Soho has always been a melting pot of cultures, and a hub for the sex trade. Yet it didn’t feel threatening in any way; there was no sense of danger or menace wandering around those streets after work when we’d finished primping and preening in the plush ladies’ loos of one of the big West End department stores, clicking down the stairs to the basement dives in our stilettos, atizz with anticipation, or heading to the Marquee Club on Oxford Street on jazz nights. The fact that many of our dancing partners spoke very little English only added to the excitement. In our small way, we were living dangerously, differently: it was all new – and therefore thrilling.

When the music stopped, we’d totter down Wardour Street to the number 38 bus stop, sometimes accompanied by one or two eager suitors. Occasionally they’d steal the odd brief kiss at the bus stop. But that was it: these boys lived in shared digs, two, even three to a room, so there was no likelihood of them trying to lure us back to their place. Even someone living solo in a bedsit was unlikely to risk incurring their landlady’s wrath by bringing girls home. But if we did want to make a hasty escape, we’d occasionally splash out on a black cab back to Hackney, priced at eight shillings and ninepence.

That’s if we didn’t spot Lolly’s dad, with his light on, going down Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘Aargh, geddin you two and I’ll bleedin’ well get you ‘ome in a flash,’ Monty would say. And he did.