Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (25 page)

The summer of ‘62 sent Lolly and I on our first-ever package holiday: two weeks in the Italian Riviera at Diano Marina. We took our first-time flight to Nice, uneventful enough and an improvement on the lengthy cross-Channel ferry journey, and after a wait of several hours, a coach took us, via the dazzling and scarily winding corniche, across the border at Ventimiglia into Italy.

The resort was OK but a bit scrubby and disappointing. We’d expected it all to be a lot more exotic and mysterious, palm-fringed white sands and blisteringly hot days and nights. What we got was quite different: a series of concrete buildings, some quite new, a fairly narrow, crowded beach and our somewhat dreary hotel, catering mainly to package-tour Brits and a long long walk from the centre of Diano with its more interesting looking outdoor cafés and, hopefully, boy action. Who knew that Italian beaches were so regulated, and that you had to pay to use them? The weather, even in August, wasn’t particularly hot or sunny. But we donned our striped swimsuits, as seen in French
Elle
(as usual, we bought exactly the same item in different colours) to splash around in the water, and plonked ourselves on our paid-for deckchairs: children, really, playing a grown-up game.

After a couple of days I am sporting huge mozzie bites on my arms and legs, which itch furiously. Yet nothing can dim our enthusiasm for actually being here, in Italy, the ultimate location in our quest for Good Boy Hunting. We even venture into a hairdressers and point and gesture to indicate what we want. When we emerge, the result, we agree, is far better than the somewhat floppy bouffant achieved in our local salon at home: this version is bouncier, higher, sleeker. Italian.

We quickly develop a routine: up late, trundle down to the beach by day, back to the hotel for the evening meal, usually a sparse plate of spaghetti with watery sauce or vegetables with a tiny bit of fish or chicken, followed by a big tarting-up and heavy backcombing session in the room before hitting the streets of Diano, heading for the coffee bars in town, wishing and hoping …

Our parents would have been horrified at our
modus operandi
; my dad would have had a heart attack had he known. Because what we are doing, quite deliberately, is nothing more than casually picking up, night after night, a series of different Italian boys who are hanging around, eager to make contact with pretty young foreign girls, chancing it, though our aspirations are going in different directions to theirs. We are still pristine, virginal, yearning for passion, romance of a sort with a glamorous local; they are hoping for a lot more action, even the Full Monty, than they’d expect to achieve with their own girls.

And yet … nothing bad happens. Incredibly, we are only too happy to jump into cars with total strangers, be driven around – even then, Italians adored their cars and showing off their country – and, in exchange for our company and the odd snogging session we conduct our own version of meet the locals, see the sights. It never gets out of control. No one tries to rape us, drive us off into heaven knows where to have their way with us. There’s no booze, no drugs, no coercion.

Almost every night we meet another pair of boys, have a different kind of adventure, driving around the Ligurian coast, revelling in the delight and novelty of being young and carefree on warm summer nights in the Med; it’s a new kind of hedonism for us, light years away from what we know in Hackney. A few of these boys speak some English but mostly we have to deploy our shaky French and the odd Italian word we’ve picked up along the way to communicate. We laugh a lot, muck around, tease and are teased; yet it’s a bad night if we don’t find ourselves, still laughing, being driven back to our hotel at an ungodly hour, waking up the stroppy porter, saying farewell to our latest conquests, whom we never see again. And we have a long-standing pact that we stick together, don’t split up. This pact is what probably keeps it all safe.

Yet there are dangers involved in this game, beyond the sexual. We really don’t know who these guys are that we are so happily picking up. How could we? We have no real knowledge or experience of Italy, other than a few blokes encountered in a Soho coffee bar, chosen for their sleek looks. We know Italians are still regarded warily back home.

‘Eyetie quislings,’ Ginger would sneer. ‘Too scared to fight and didn’t know which way to run when it got bad.’

‘Bloody Fascists,’ was cabbie Monty’s view of the Italian race. ‘Sucked up to ‘itler and paid the price.’

We’d been hearing this stuff since we were kids. Yet Italy’s wartime record didn’t deter us one whit; it was ancient history, anyway. But one significant event made it clear that in our innocence, we were, in fact, playing with fire. Literally.

Tonight’s two pick-ups are a bit older, early twenties. Normally, one tends to be more fanciable than the other. (The unfanciable one usually has better English, for some mysterious reason.) But tonight’s duo, encountered in a crowded outdoor café, are both equally alluring, one quite blond, one dark haired: bandbox fresh white shirts, perfectly laundered by their loving mamma’s hand, neatly pressed narrow cotton trousers, beautifully tanned, white teethed: we adore the way they look. And their English isn’t bad.

‘Why Engleesh girls so beautiful?’ jokes Mr Blond.

‘Cos English boys so ugly,’ we quip back, happily accepting their offer of a drive around.

It goes on like this, in their car, for a couple of hours, Mr Blond driving, occasionally throwing one liners or longing glances at me, seated in the front (we’re both in love with him, really) while the dark one, who obviously lives in the area and knows it intimately, directs him to a local beauty spot, some miles along the coast.

We are parked. It’s about 1am and if it’s romance you hanker for, you cannot fault this setting: a million stars twinkling in the sky above (a revelation to inner-city kids; we’ve never seen a sky like this), the glittering reflection of moon on the calm blue waters of the Med, the tranquillity of the soft, balmy air. There’s a brief but heady silence. The dark-haired one puts his arm around Lolly. Mr Blond switches off the engine, smiles meltingly. Then, without knowing why, because I have never done this and am rarely inside a car, I reach out before me and open the glove compartment. And I cannot quite believe what I see inside the box.

It’s a gun. A small, black handgun.

I stare at it in utter disbelief. At first, my words won’t even come out. Lolly, peering behind me, sees the gun too. She too is terrified, scared to speak.

‘What’s a GUN doing there?’ I finally manage, stupidly. What I should have done, for once in my life, was close the glove compartment and shut up.

But it’s Mr Blond who leans across me and gently closes the glove compartment. He says nothing. The dark one pulls Lolly close and strokes her hair, murmuring something in Italian.

Unbelievably, Mr Blond is smiling at me, a sort of rueful, but forgiving look.

‘Why a gun?’ I try again (I always was one for pushing my luck).

He shrugs.

‘Cosa vuoi?’ Non è niente.’

Lolly and I know, roughly, this means ‘Whaddya want, it’s nothing.’

A gun? Nothing? What constitutes ‘something’ in Italy – a Cruise missile?

But the entire spell of the romantic moonlit setting, of course, is well and truly broken. Whatever intentions they might have had to woo us, they’ve been dashed by my reckless curiosity. Mr Blond makes an executive decision. He revs up the car and whoosh, we’re off on a long, nervily silent drive back to our hotel for forty minutes, which seems like hours.

At one point, I pretend to fall asleep, nodding off, figuring this is a safe course of action. The dark haired one keeps his arm around Lolly, but makes no more attempts to kiss or nuzzle her. Later, Lolly tells me that she is so scared, all she can think of is what Monty would say, language unprintable, if he knew we’d stepped out with two guys with a gun in their glovebox.

‘Ciao Jakka,’ Mr Blond says as we stumble out of the car, relieved and thankful to reach the hotel door. Then, with a screech of brakes, they’re gone, off into the soft, balmy Ligurian night.

In our room, we giggle about it as we throw off our shoes, undress and climb into our respective beds.

‘Trust you, Hyams, to be nosey,’ Lolly admonishes me.

‘Yeah but who thinks they’re gonna find a GUN in there?’

Within minutes, we are sound asleep. Our brush with the unknown, a lethal weapon, does not distress us. The next day, we don’t even go through a ‘What if’ conversation about it over breakfast. It’s just something else to laugh or joke about later on.

Even today, it’s a riddle. Were those handsome young men hitmen for hire, baby Mafiosi, sun-kissed killers with white teeth and hip sunglasses? Or was it merely a toy, a joke? Somehow, I don’t think so. My guess is, we were lucky; two silly young girls from Hackney could easily have come a cropper that warm August night. But thanks to the arrogance – and ignorance – of youth, we never waste a further minute’s thought on what the contents of that glove compartment signified. Or if we’d been in any serious danger. At that age, you don’t have the capacity to pause for serious reflection. Everything around you seems to hold far too much promise to concern yourself with worries about whether it might be risky to climb into a total stranger’s car, at night, in a foreign country, at the tender age of seventeen.

E
aster in Paris, 1963: Eiffel Tower. The trio of teenage girls perched on metal chairs are smartly attired, sleek leather jackets (purchased for £20 from C&A), high backcombed hairdos, ski pants with stirrups under the feet. Lolly, Adrienne and I are on a three-day break, a long dreamed of chance to wander round the boulevards, admire the shops and soak up the beauty of the City of Light.

The trip is not a success. We have not budgeted for a capital city, naively using last year’s Diano trip as a benchmark: surprise, surprise, the city is far too expensive for young typists. Our meagre allowance of French francs flies out of our hands with astonishing speed. Nor are there any friendly, amorous young Frenchmen offering to drive us around or buy us drinks. Paris is crowded, bewildering, its inhabitants mostly bad tempered and rude. Even our attempts in cafés to use French meet with classic Parisian derision: a sneer or a reply in English is the usual response, hardly encouraging to self-conscious teens.

Passports must be handed over to the hotel on arrival. The owner retains them – and studies the surnames carefully. So when we finally go to check out of our one-star hotel, in a seedy area, we come face to face with the ugly reality of Parisian post-war hostility towards foreigners – especially Jews.

We’d used the hotel’s ancient phone to make reverse charge calls home, to assure our families we were alive and well, an added expense but, in my case, a necessary cost: it shut my dad up, briefly quelled his paranoia about what might happen to me Abroad.

The final bill, handed to us by the owner, a grim-faced, rude and intractable old woman, the classic snarly Parisian concierge, takes us aback. It’s an enormous amount for two reverse-charge calls. It will clean us out, leave us without any francs for the journey home, several hours of near starvation and thirst on the train and cross-Channel ferry. So we query it, pointing to the total, making all the signs and gestures that indicate ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’.

Our suitcases are in the lobby beside us. A nasty argument erupts. We yell in English, she bellows back in angry, rapid-fire French. We’re being ripped off – and we know it. But we’re kids and we don’t know how to handle such a situation, far from home. So we eventually cave in, rummage around between us, pool our dwindling resources and grudgingly fork out.

But it’s not the end. Without warning, once she’s snatched our money, the woman waddles round from behind the counter, picks up our suitcases and proceeds to hurl them, one by one, out of the tiny lobby, chucking them out into the narrow Parisian street.

‘Sale Juif!’ she cries, as our cases hit the pavement. Dirty Jew.

‘Sortez d’ici, salauds sales!’ Get out of here, dirty bastards.

And then, to add insult to injury, as we run out to retrieve our cases, she moves to the hotel door and stands there, quivering with hatred. Then she spits at us, the ultimate street gesture of contempt.

We are bewildered, shocked beyond belief. She has obviously checked our surnames in the passports and noticed the Star of David that Lolly wears. She’ll take our last penny. But she cannot tolerate the idea of our existence. We understand our history all too well. We know that some people, despite all that has happened, continue to hate Jewish people, want them all dead. But this open expression of hatred, the distant echo of what led to the slaughter of millions, is something we have never known. Only years later do I come to understand the dual nature of the French experience during the war, how some French people resisted the Occupation, while others supported the hunting down of Jews, and collaborated with the Nazis to do their worst work.

I don’t tell my parents when we get home, of course. I don’t want to say or do anything that might jeopardise any future travel plans. Nor does the incident make me wary of future travel, going abroad. But the incident is never forgotten, a brush, a glimpse of what could easily have happened to us, our families, our classmates, had we been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.