Up West (11 page)

Allowing your children to play and roam about outside must have come as a huge relief for parents, too, especially those who had watched their children being menaced by the Blitz. Children were taught to be wary of strangers, men mostly, but there wasn't the dreadful anxiety that there appears to be today. I understand that the actual numbers of children being abducted by strangers has not changed radically since records began, but back in the forties and fifties, when the media was restricted to newspapers, radio and newsreels at the cinema, we really didn't hear about such things very often. That also contributed to our freedom. Our parents were less afraid for us, especially once the bombing stopped.

Ann Waterhouse had a fairly sheltered upbringing in Knightsbridge, and went to school in Mayfair. ‘I saw quite a lot of the West End area,' she remembers. ‘In those days, we had the freedom to roam around in our dinner hour, more than would be considered safe these days.' Where Ann lived, there were no other children, and excursions with her
school friends, or visits for tea, all tended to be arranged and scheduled. She was an exception, though. Almost all of the people I talked to spoke of the joy of spilling out on to the pavement on the morning of a school-free day not knowing what's going to happen, but knowing you have the whole day to find out.

London's children had, of course, always played out in the streets, back alleys, parks (in those they were allowed to enter) or, where it could be found, waste ground. In the first decade or so after the war there was a lot more waste ground around in the West End, courtesy of the Luftwaffe. Some of the bomb sites were put to use. Many, for instance, were turned into car parks, while one in Dean Street was used as the venue for the annual Soho Fair, which in those days lasted a week. Janet Vance, who grew up in Frith Street, remembers this well: ‘There would be floats going around the streets and a proper fairground, with stalls and rides, on the car parks, on the old bomb sites.'

Those sites unsuitable for car parks tended to become impromptu playgrounds, and soon became irresistible attractions to local children. Ronnie Mann, from his base in Bedfordbury, east of Trafalgar Square, got to know them all. ‘I reckon we played more in bomb sites than we ever played in normal games. There was a big one in St Martin's Lane, and the other side of the Strand was bombed from Villiers Street all down to the Embankment Gardens. Leicester Square was bombed, Shaftesbury Avenue was bombed, Floral Street in the market was bombed, so you had huge, massive areas that
didn't completely disappear until – well, in the case of Floral Street, not until 1970.'

John Carnera came from Italy soon after the war to live in Dean Street. ‘There was a bomb site straight across the road from us,' he remembers. ‘On one side they'd made it into a car park, but the other remained as it was, no building, just basements and cellars, all bombed out. It was just this hole in the ground, and we used to run up and down playing Cowboys and Indians in it. We used to have stone fights on the bomb sites. Chucking them at each other. Ludicrous.'

It never occurred to children that they were playing in the ruins of people's lives, homes and workplaces. Why should it? Ignorance of the past is one of the joys of being young. ‘We'd go to a bomb site,' remembers Ronnie Brace, ‘put two coats down for a goal, and there we were. Playing among the debris was part of our lives. We didn't know about the war. I mean, I remember it, but I didn't know the context. Bombs, well, they were just a frightening noise, going under the bed, knocking over the piss pot or something; going down in the tube and all that, but it didn't ring, not at that age; I mean, at school, you have people you like and don't like, but you don't think of nationalities fighting.'

While some sites were clear enough to serve as a rather bumpy impromptu football pitch, others were better suited to more adventurous – in fact, downright dangerous – games. Ronnie Mann again: ‘St Martin's Lane was like an assault course – talk about training commandos. You had to climb
up the scaffolding and go across, probably a 20-foot drop, on to stone. We all did it. It was a wonder no one got killed.' The element of danger and foolhardiness was something everyone remembered, although they didn't seem to have thought about it at the time.

Peter Jenkins, who lived in the Peabody Buildings in Wild Street, recalls that, ‘Me and my mates used to use bomb sites for exploring and making dens and playing adventure games. How on earth we ever survived I don't know, what with all the health and safety risks, all the smashed glass and of course run-ins with the down-and-outs, who were using the ruins as dosshouses.'

It wasn't just the boys who were attracted to these melancholy relics of the war – girls were also drawn to the large crater left by part of Newport Dwellings that took a direct hit. ‘We used to play in it,' Sonia remembers. ‘My mum used to go mad and shout at me to get out of there, but we really enjoyed it. Once, we were moving some bricks and wood, and we saw this box: Ooh, what's in this box? So we got it out of the rubble and opened it up, and it was a whole box full of make-up – mascara, rouge, lipstick, hairbrushes, everything to do with what women wanted in those days. Somebody said we've got to call the police, and they came and they looked at it. They thought it had been looted from somewhere during the Blitz, then dumped, so they told all of us kids to share it among ourselves. That was my first taste of make-up. It was brilliant. You just thought, “Oh God, I've got some make-up”. I must have been all of nine. I remember it
very vividly: we thought all our birthdays had come at once, having the hairbrushes, everything – brilliant!'

Sonia also remembers the ruins of St Anne's Church. ‘We used to go in over the gates in Shaftesbury Lane. There was like a little chapel and, as children, we used to go in there and play priests and congregation. We'd go in there from school, and one of them would be the priest, standing at the altar, and the rest would be on the few pews that there were. Then, one time we went in there, someone kicked some wood and there was a dead cat underneath, full of maggots. I never went there any more.'

In the fifties, West End streets were full of children. Most of them were as streetwise as they needed to be and as grubby as they could get away with. Today we might call them street kids, but that phrase wasn't in use then. Nor was ‘streetwise', come to that. ‘Urchin' was the word Raye Du-Val used to describe his youthful self, while Ronnie Mann recalls with laughter that ‘we used to play with the kids of a posh family, somewhere round the Adelphi. It never lasted long. The family didn't want us there. There's a limit to what you'll put up with from ruffians and guttersnipes, as we were called.'

Out in the streets, then as now, there were boundaries that some children and young people – posh kid, guttersnipe, urchin or one of the many shades in between – did not cross: some young Covent Gardeners, for example, were forbidden to go in to Soho, while several Sohoites knew nothing of the territories across the Charing Cross Road, partly because the
busy road was a formidable barrier to young pedestrians, and partly because it was the dividing line between catchment areas for schools.

In the heart of Soho, though, virtually all the streets were safe to play in. No buses and hardly any trucks ventured within the area bounded by Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and Regent Street, and although there was traffic in the main streets through Soho, it was moving slowly enough not to cause a problem. In Covent Garden, much the same applied. There were lorries in the streets around the market in the mornings, but for much of the afternoon and evening there was little to worry about, particularly in the backstreets. The estates had it easy. Peter Jenkins remembers that ‘we didn't play too much in the streets because we had this whacking great space in among the blocks. We could play football, although you had to be careful because of the windows. Our ball games were played in an enclosed space, looked down on by a whole community. No cars came in: we were safe.'

Mike O'Rouke grew up in the Seven Dials and played in the streets around his home. ‘You had to be a certain age,' Mike remembers, ‘before you could go out and about. My grandfather bought me a little three-wheeler, a tricycle, for my fifth birthday, and that was my prized possession. I used to go up and down Mercer Street on that. One of my relatives would be sitting on the doorstep while I rode up and down.

‘A bit later, there was a bunch of us, kids you go to school
with and play with after school. We played around the streets. There weren't many cars. We used to play football or cricket in Mercer Street, put an orange box up for a wicket. It wasn't until it was getting quite dark that maybe one car would creep in to the top of Mercer Street, up by Long Acre, and park there. We used to play until it was dark.

‘There was always people about to look out for us. Everyone knew who we were. Of course, it meant we couldn't get away with anything. You'd get a clip round the ear if you played Knock Down Ginger, anything like that.'

The games that Mike and hundreds of others played in the West End streets ranged from those for just two or three people through more or less formal team games to thoroughly informal adventure games or brawls that sometimes involved great swirling mobs of boys. Sonia Boulter and Peter Jenkins, for example, both recall ‘endless games of hopscotch', which of course was so much easier to chalk out on a pavement laid with rectangular stones than it was on the tarmac surfaces in the grounds of the estate.

Others remembered ‘run-outs'. Mentioned by several Covent Gardeners, it is explained more fully by Tricia Bryan: ‘There were two teams. You both ran off, then would have to try to get back to base without them seeing you. You didn't have to be tagged, you could just say “I spot Trish behind the telephone box”. It was how many from the team got back unseen. We used to play that in the playground behind St Giles-in-the-Fields. Although there was a park keeper, Mr Chivers – like the jelly – it was just a playground with swings
and a slide, no flowers. You walked through the churchyard and you were in.'

The labyrinth of streets, alleyways and yards around Covent Garden made it just right for games of tag, hide-and-seek, and their many variants. Tricia also remembers Tin Tan Tommy, ‘another game of tag with a base, usually a dustbin. The base was guarded by Tin Tan Tommy, and he had to come and find you but at the same time guard his home. If he tagged you before you touched the dustbin lid, you would be out. We would all make a break for the lid. Whoever touched it first without being tagged was the next Tin Tan Tommy. I'm sure that name came from the home being a dustbin lid. We played that in Shorts Gardens, in the flats there next to the Medical Mission, where we all went to Sunday School.'

The Bedfordbury Estate had been jammed in to a much smaller space than its sister estate in Wild Street, but the 'Bury kids gleefully took over the roads outside. ‘We played Cowboys and Indians, mostly,' remembers Ronnie Mann, ‘or whatever was on at the local pictures: Tarzan, pirates, general mucking about. And we used to play 'ares and 'ounds down there. There might have been twenty or thirty kids on each side, and the idea was that after a while you had to get back to the lamp post or whatever it was as home.'

My main playtime was spent in St Anne's churchyard, because it was behind the flat where I lived and was enclosed by buildings and, on the street side, railings, which made it seem safe. It was overlooked on two sides by lots of windows. It made a good playground: there was a paved area in front of
the tower and the table tombs could be made to be all kinds of things: a desert island, a ship, a house, a raft or simply ‘home' in a game of Tin Tan Tommy and a place to park all those players who were ‘out'.

I learned to hula-hoop in St Anne's, and there were skipping and two-balls to master as well. There were seasonal things such as five stones or jacks in summer, when sitting about on the ground, in the heat, had a certain appeal, and hopscotch, skipping and all that energetic stuff when the air was a bit sharper. Two-balls was another summer game. You could play it alone and hone your technique or you could play with others.

‘Everything used to close on a Saturday at about one o'clock,' Ronnie Mann recalls, ‘so from then until the lorries started to open the market on Monday morning, there was no traffic in the West End. Local people didn't have cars, and anyone coming up to the West End had no problem parking in the Strand or Piccadilly, so they didn't park in Bedfordbury.

‘The garages of Harrisons, the printing works, had shutters. They were the goals. On Sunday morning, all the kids would be playing a game. Cricket was in Coliseum Court, between Charing Cross and Bedfordbury. You had the two telephone boxes; we used to play football and cricket down there.'

John Carnera also had the imagination to turn a back alley into a sports stadium. ‘We would play cricket or football in Bateman's Buildings, on the way home from school. There was a lamp post at either end. The one nearest Soho Square – the Hospital for Venereal Diseases on one side, and a factory
on the other – was the wicket when we played cricket, and in the winter we played football there.'

One of the advantages of street football was that it required a minimum of equipment. Discarded jackets or pullovers served for goalposts if there wasn't a handy wall to be marked out. You did not even need a ball, as Leo Zanelli remembers: ‘The trick was to get a cigarette packet, stuff it full of paper and stick it together. It would slide quite nicely. It wouldn't last very long, though . . .'

You hardly ever saw one of the big heavy footballs being used on the streets. Most street football involved filthy, dishevelled, bare-kneed boys tussling over a fraying tennis ball. Sometimes they didn't bother with a ball, and just got on with the tussling. ‘The 'Bury kids always used to fight the Wild Street gang,' remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘The irony of it is that a lot of them were my cousins: my aunts lived in Wild Street, my best friend that I sat next to in school lived in Wild Street, but we would all fight each other on the weekend.'