Authors: David Essex
Another man asked Dad during one of his nightly evening visits if he would like him to fix his broken watch. He took it away and returned it in a hundred pieces, confessing that he ‘didn’t know how to fix them ones’. Yet Forest House had its dark side: I can remember one thrashing inmate being restrained as he had an epileptic fit.
My mum and I would have breakfast every morning at seven and clear out for the day. We’d walk around nearby Wanstead Flats or get the bus over to my nan in Stratford. These journeys could be a problem. As a toddler, I had blond ringlets, and Mum and I couldn’t go anywhere without some old lady stopping us to coo over how ‘sweet’ I was. A shy kid, I hated this attention and normally reacted by bursting into tears.
Our six months in Forest House were an adventure for me, but I could sense sadness in my parents, and that period was awful for them. Once we had left, we never discussed it. The one time that we did, my mum confessed she had thought of jumping off the fire escape by our cubicle and ending it all. She said she would have done, if she hadn’t had me.
It was just as bad for my dad. He was a proud man, and felt he had let us down. He came from an even bigger family than Mum as the youngest of thirteen. His father, a stern Victorian Scotsman from Glasgow, never called him by his real name, Albert: he called him ‘One Too Many’. What a great ego boost that must have been!
Dad was a very smart man – if he hadn’t come from such a poor family, I reckon he would have gone to university – and beneath his East End bravado and bluster, he was sensitive. His torment came to an end in the spring of 1951 when the council
finally
kept their word and gave us a prefab in Hooper Road, Custom House. It even had a garden.
Our new abode might have looked like a Nissan hut but to us it was paradise. Mum and Dad painted and decorated the inside, Dad turfed the garden, and at three years old I finally had my own bedroom. The docks were at the end of the street, and I loved gazing up at the ocean-going liners that towered over the terraced houses.
My dad vanished to that mysterious place every day. Now and then he’d take me along and his burly workmates would ruffle my hair and ask me, ‘You all right, son? I can tell you’re a little Cooky!’ It made me feel ten feet tall. I watched them unloading cargoes of New Zealand lamb, smelled the oils and spices and gawped at the Indian and Chinese sailors walking around. It all felt so alien and exotic and I always assumed that I would work there one day.
Dad was my best friend and my hero and I couldn’t have been happier in Hooper Road. The day’s highlight was Dad coming home from work and, after we’d had tea, taking me out on the crossbar of his bike. We’d pedal for miles around the East End, soaking in the sights and sounds, me always urging him to go faster.
My world fell apart at Christmas 1951 when Dad contracted tuberculosis. He had been getting weaker for a while and had become less keen to take me out on the bike, telling me he was tired, but on New Year’s Eve he gave in to my pleadings and we set off. We hadn’t gone far when he had a violent coughing fit and turned back. By the time we got home, he was coughing up blood.
As the ambulance took my dad away, I felt as if my life was ending. He was twenty-eight and a doctor told him he was going to die. He didn’t, but he spent three long months convalescing at the Victoria Chest Hospital in Hertfordshire. The house felt empty without him.
It used to take Mum and me a whole day to get to Hertfordshire and back to visit him, on the days she wasn’t working as a pub cleaner. When we got there, we couldn’t go near him because TB is so contagious. I can still picture the big photo of me that Dad had by his bed. I used to envy the photo, and wish that I were sitting there instead.
While Dad was still away I began my school career, at a nursery in Canning Town called Dockland Settlement nursery school. On my first day, as Mum let go of my hand and said goodbye, I felt nervous and intimidated. As an only child I hadn’t been around other kids, and suddenly there were thirty of them chasing around, screaming and snatching toys off each other. I held back, stayed quiet and watched the chaos around me, but after a couple of weeks as an awkward outsider, I made a few friends.
The main distinguishing feature of Dockland Settlement was that its headmaster was the Reverend David Sheppard, the former England cricket captain who went on to be the Bishop of Liverpool. Reverend Sheppard was a lovely man who took an interest in me, mainly because he thought I might be decent at sport. He always told my mum he thought I was a bit special, which she obviously loved – but when he said I was good at football or cricket, I wished that Dad were there to hear it.
Dad finally came home from Hertfordshire and it was wonderful to have him back, although the tuberculosis had left
its
mark. He didn’t have the strength and energy that he had before and he looked older. He wasn’t well enough to go straight back to work so spent the first few weeks convalescing.
This change was hard on Mum. She was a vivacious, vibrant woman who loved dancing but now Dad couldn’t join in and had to just sit and watch if they went out. The TB also put paid to any prospect of me having a brother or sister. I was OK with this, having never known anything different, but Mum would have liked more kids.
The good news was that we were about to go up in the world – literally. The council gave us a new flat on the third floor of a Canning Town low-rise, Avondale Court. Compared with the prefab, this was luxury. It had two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen, and a balcony that overlooked a playground. I would play football down there, and if I scored a goal, I could look up to the balcony for Dad’s thumbs-up acknowledgement.
I lived in a lot of different places as a nipper but Avondale Court was the one that really felt like home. I used to love gazing out from the balcony and seeing the Docklands cranes – sadly, now all gone – and two massive milk-bottle-shaped chimneys on the horizon, belching out white smoke. Dad told me it was the local power station, but secretly, and poetically, I figured they were cloud-making machines.
Every Sunday my nan, Olive, would get the 69 bus over from Stratford to see us. I used to love her visits. She’d swear like a trooper and roll her own cigarettes and she always brought me sweets. I had to sing for my supper, though: she’d say, ‘Come on Dave, do a show!’ and I’d sing stuff like, ‘What a mouth, what a mouth, what a north-and-south.’
Back in the world of education, I ended my innings at Reverend Sheppard’s nursery and graduated to my first proper school – Star Lane Primary. If my arrival at Docklands Settlement had fazed me, Star Lane gave me no problems at all. On my first day, as terrified infants sobbed around me, I bade my mum a cheery farewell and marched straight in.
Maybe I sensed that I would be blissfully happy there. Star Lane was a typical massive old three-floor redbrick Victorian school, with two playgrounds and, importantly for me, a huge playing field for sports. I loved the place from the second I set eyes on it until the day I left.
I guess a school is only as good as its teachers and Star Lane had some excellent ones. The headmistress, Miss Hood, was an inspirational figure. All the kids loved her. She saw something in me and was always very supportive, and in turn I always wanted to do well to impress her.
I spent a blissful time at Star Lane playing and learning the three Rs. On summer afternoons, the staff would line up temporary beds under the playground trees for the kids to have a nap, and I would lie there daydreaming, watching the branches flutter in the breeze and hearing the lorries rumble past on their way to the docks.
I enjoyed my classwork too. We had a very charismatic English teacher, a Welshman called Mr Lloyd, who weaved spells in his rich, redolent accent and could control a class by force of personality rather than with a cane, unlike some teachers. His love for his subject permeated through to us.
Yet for all Mr Lloyd’s noble efforts, English was not my first love. That was sport and, in particular, football. Star Lane had
two
PE teachers: an elderly gentleman called Mr Dunlop and another Welshman called Mr Morgan, who would bellow at us like a sergeant major as we ran laps of the rainy playing field. Most kids thought he was a psycho, but I never minded him.
Back at home, Dad was still recuperating from his illness and signing on for sickness benefit, which he hated. The TB had left him with only half of one lung fully functioning. He longed to get back to the docks, but knowing that he would no longer be able to heave heavy cargo off ships, he sat exams and became a tally clerk instead.
Mum carried on cleaning the pub and also sometimes played the piano there in the evenings – she was quite good, in a Winifred Atwell sort of way. They would have good old East End singsongs around the Joanna, and I remember a few balmy evenings sitting outside the pub, scoffing crisps and lemonade and hearing the music drift out of the door. This wasn’t when I fell in love with music, though. That came later.
By the time I was seven, Mum was working full-time in a local electrical shop so I became a latchkey kid. Every day I would get home at 4 p.m. from Star Lane and stick my hand through the letterbox to grab the key dangling on a piece of string. I’d let myself in, munch down the bread and jam Mum had left for me, then head down to the playground to play football until my parents got in at seven. Far from feeling under-privileged, I loved it: it made me feel free, independent and grown up.
Admittedly, I might have taken this free-spirit thing a bit too far once or twice. Fireworks Night was big news around my way, with the post-Blitz wastelands of the East End being perfect for huge bonfires. Boys ran around hurling bangers at each other in
firework
fights. I got in bad trouble when I threw a sparkler at a girl, setting her hair alight. Secretly, I was proud of my aim: a direct hit from our top-floor balcony that would have impressed Reverend Sheppard. Well, maybe not.
But Sparklergate was not the worst of my fireworks-related atrocities. When I was about nine years old, I committed a crime for which I was never accused, convicted or punished, as a mild-mannered, easy-going East End schoolboy somehow became the dastardly Canning Town Arsonist.
The seeds of my misdemeanour were planted when I got hold of a box of coloured matches. Wandering around in my shorts and sandals one early evening, getting bored of lighting them and watching them fizzle out, I came to a piece of wasteland that doubled up as an overnight lorry park for truckers waiting to unload at the docks. There were about eight lorries there, with no drivers around.
With no particular purpose in mind, I walked around the lorries and clambered over a couple of them. I have no idea what made me suddenly remember the matches, or why I did what I did next, but at the time it made all the sense in the world for me to unscrew one of the truck’s fuel cap and throw a lit match down into the tank.
Disappointingly, nothing happened, so I repeated the experiment a couple more times before having a brainwave. Why not light one of the matches, put it back into the box and drop the whole thing into the fuel cap? Half the box would be aflame by then – how could it possibly fail?
I expected a pretty flame to shoot out of the fuel pipe and then gently subside but my fiendish plan worked beyond my
wildest
dreams – or nightmares. As the matchbox hit the petrol tank, a twenty-foot flame shot out of the pipe – whoosh! The tarpaulin caught fire, and suddenly I was gawping at a towering inferno on wheels.
I turned tail and ran for my life, probably quite literally. Bang! The lorry exploded in a way I had only ever seen in Hollywood movies and the fireball consumed the lorry next to it … and the one next to that. As I raced the quarter-mile home, the noises of explosion after explosion followed me, and clouds of black smoke filled the night sky. ‘Are you all right?’ asked Mum, as I tumbled, panting, through the doorway. ‘Yeah,’ I lied. ‘We were just having a race.’
Jesus Christ, what had I done? For the next week I lived in terror of being exposed as the local schoolboy pyromaniac, but as days passed with no comeback I realised that I was going to get away with it. My heart missed a few beats when that week’s
Stratford Express
led with THE CANNING TOWN ARSON ATTACK but thankfully the police didn’t widen their search to include butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths little local boys.
It must have been thirty years before I finally dared to tell my mum the terrible truth. One day when I was visiting her, I asked her, ‘Do you remember that big old lorry fire by Harry the Barber’s when I was a boy?’
‘Yes, it was terrible – imagine someone doing that!’ she replied.
‘Mum,’ I told her, ‘it was me.’
Understandably, she was horrified. ‘Why did you do that, you bad boy?’ she asked.
‘I just wanted to see what happened,’ I admitted.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, I suppose you did.’
THEY SAY THAT
childhood holidays are one of the best times of your life and you never forget them. I reckon I would agree with that. My parents and I didn’t have many conventional, two-weeks-by-the-seaside, bucket-and-spade type holidays, but we did something that will live in my memory for ever: hop-picking trips to Kent.
In the mid-fifties, hop-picking trips were an institution for the women and children of the East End. They got you out of the Smoke for a few weeks, let you earn a little (very little) bit of money, and were a working holiday for people who couldn’t afford to go away otherwise. My mum and nan loved them, and so did I.
Once when I was five, we had gone on a strawberry-picking holiday in Norfolk. For some reason there was a party of monks on our campsite who took a real shine to me. Weeks later, when we were back in London, two monks turned up on our doorstep and told my mum: ‘We have seen something special in David. Would he like to follow the path that we have taken?’ Mum was puzzled and impressed, but decided against packing me off to a monastery, rather to my relief.