Our Street, page 9
My first feelings of a sexual nature occurred when my sister stood on a chair in her knickers and told me to paint black lines down her legs, which she had coated in gravy powder to simulate stockings. I had no idea what was happening to me. I was just flustered and all I wanted to do was go out and play on my bike. My sister didn’t understand. She said, ‘If those lines ain’t straight, there’ll be a clip round the ear for you.’ It was some time later that I learned that a stick of chewing gum could buy you a look at a girl’s ‘forward anatomy’. The thing then was, at fourteen or so, you was still kids – not young adults, like they are today.
A slightly less disconcerting encounter with the ‘adult’ world was remembered in association with this visit to the barber – hair still had to be cut, and thus respectability maintained, even with bombs falling all around you.
My father took me to Harry the barber to get my ears lowered. I’d sit on a board across the armrests of the chair. According to my dad, Harry’s dog got all the ears that got sliced off if you didn’t sit still. I wondered if it would ever cotton on that lunging at you and growling would get it another tid-bit. After he had cut your hair he would give you a ‘frizzer’ that would make your brain hum, and then apply a generous amount of industrial-strength hair-setting lotion that would have tamed even Just William’s unruly thatch. It would set your hair like a helmet, with a big quiff, but would crackle off in pieces the size of cornflakes that sounded underfoot on the kitchen lino like people trudging to the South Pole. One of the curtains of life was tweaked to one side when I twigged the meaning of Harry’s question to the older young men and dads, ‘A little something for the weekend, sir?’, and the packet of three and the half-crown changed hands in a piece of slick sleight of hand that would have impressed Houdini. Then there were the Health and Efficiency magazines [there which] contained photos of white, pear-shaped Bibendums playing volleyball, riding see-saws, frying bacon, cycling, and all in the nude, naked, not a stitch on. Quartets of older ladies, each with her handbag beside her chair, each properly labelled – ‘Mrs Doreen Clunch of Purley’, ‘Mrs Mabel Doorbell of Luton’ – smiling at the camera to hide their china teeth, nipples discreetly tucked below the edge of the table on which was spread cucumber sandwiches and pots of tea. Each wore only her glasses and pearls. They could have been the semi-finalists of a strip-bridge tournament. All very heavy stuff for a young feller of impressionable years …
Then there were those who seemed to experience an even more confused mix of emotions, appearing sophisticated while dealing with the world on the one hand and yet still totally childlike and full of fear and wonder on the other. Perhaps nothing really changes, except the outward trappings of what we wear and superficially how we behave, when we present our diffidently maturing selves to the big, scary, outside world.
The shrapnel we collected! Tons of it. And each street had its own castles to be climbed and conquered, even if the day before they had been some little shop or a house until the bombs came. I was always told, ‘Keep off the debris!’ After a quick, ‘Yes, Mum’, I was out to see what new adventures Hitler had made for us. Until the day I fell through a roof and broke my arm. Off to the hospital, being fussed over by poor old Aunt Ciss, where the kind old nurse asked how I did it. ‘Well, Miss, I slipped on a banana skin.’ Mum was at work and I just knew she would kill me for climbing, but I don’t think I had ever seen a banana in my life, just seen them in comics, and every skin somebody seemed to fall over. Both Aunt Ciss and the nurse fell about laughing, so at least I had a little hope that Mum would see the funny side. She did. In fact, it was 1944 and the docks were beginning to fill with troops … When some Yanks who had climbed over the dock walls for a night on the town – in essence they were confined to the docks for security reasons – gave me a banana, [that’s] when I found out that it had to be peeled to be eaten. We kids had a great time in 1944. At the end of the street [on Millwall] there was a high wall – [the] dock wall – and night after night troops – Yanks, English, Canadians, Scots – would climb over to have a night out. We all put benches in our gardens and invited them in. Tears [as I remember this]. Two soldiers from Scotland left some letters with my mum to be posted if they didn’t make it. We heard [somehow that] they were both killed and Mum sent off the letters. She put a little note with them and we got a reply in a week or so. The troops would bring with them all manner of loot. Corned beef by the large tin, beer, Scotch, chocolate, bubble gum and bread. Everything. All we did was to set up in our yards somewhere for them to sit and enjoy a break. It was a magic time. But, looking back, how sad. How many of those whose company we kept in those few weeks were to die? And some seemed no older than Joe next door. He was just sixteen.
... bomb sites and exposed cellars … became my playground. And, yes, I had my collection of shrapnel, often picked up whilst it was too hot to handle. I cannot walk past the junction of Goswell Road and Old Street without the peculiar smell of burning paper and wood soaked by water coming to my nostrils. During the Blitz a stationer’s had been destroyed by enemy incendiary damage and my mates and I were rummaging around for what we could find. The smell of burnt paper and wood mixed with water pervaded the air. Can you imagine children having such freedom today?
Me and my mates worked out how to kill a German when – if – they landed. It took five boys and Maureen G–. She was blonde, self-assured and infinitely more mature than us. We were about eight or nine. The plan was that Maureen would flash her knickers, and the German would be dazzled by this display of beauty, and then, while this entranced him, one boy would grab a leg each, and one boy would each grab an arm – that’s four boys. The fifth would stab him in the throat with a penknife. Sadly, the plan fell through as Maureen wanted to stab him as well.
Despite Maureen’s enthusiasm for violence, it is often said, as if it is a simple fact, that children were safer ‘back then’. In the words of just two of the people who consider this to be so:
There did not seem to be any fear of being accosted or abducted in those days.
You never had all these crimes and that against children that you do now. Never.
I suggest that the situation was more complex than that. The reality was that people were living in tight-knit communities – often in the same street that their families had lived in for generations – which meant that they knew the rest of the people in their community not only by sight but also by name and reputation. Children would be warned to stay away from any unsavoury characters who lived nearby and strangers hanging around would be challenged. There were local coppers patrolling the streets and, in the war, there were the air-raid wardens, who were familiar to everyone.
Even so, despite the view that there was nothing more frightening than bombs to worry about – and they were bad enough! – there were still memories that would have today’s tabloid press up in arms and demanding that Social Services ‘do something about it’.
We had prisoner of war camps in Carpenters Road near our school. The Germans kept theirs lovely. Very neat. The Italians didn’t seem nearly so disciplined. We were curious and used to watch them – and the girls, whom I realize now were prostitutes, who used to turn up in cars.
[ 4 ] Evacuation
What a choice! Sending your babies away or keeping them here, at home with you, in danger.
Some London children had a very different, if sometimes only temporary, experience of living through the war years: they were evacuated away from our street and their East End homes.
If they chose to, the sufficiently well off, or those with family living away from any potentially unsafe areas, could make their own, private arrangements for their children, and maybe even themselves, to live elsewhere for the duration. For the rest of the population, it was the government-organized evacuation or nothing.
Bureaucrats divided the country into zones, with each sector falling into one of three designated types. There were the danger areas, which would be evacuated; the supposedly safe reception areas, which would take in the evacuees; and the remaining areas, which were deemed to be neutral. The populace was similarly sorted and labelled: children, pregnant women and those considered to be a priority, such as the visually handicapped, were to be shipped out of the danger zones. This was not only for their safety; it was important to clear the risky areas for strategic reasons. Buildings, from hospitals to schools, and staff, from medical personnel to communications workers, would be required for war work, not for looking after what might prove to be helpless, inconvenient or even troublesome civilians.
The complex plans required for mass evacuation were in place well before the outbreak of war, including the compiling of registers of everyone concerned, but things did not always go to plan. Originally, it had been thought by the government that up to 3.5 million individuals would be officially evacuated to places of safety, but this number was never reached, due to a combination of factors. Families showed a widespread reluctance to be separated, surprising the middle- and upper-class authorities, who were more accustomed to being separated from their children. There was also an increasing belief that things wouldn’t be ‘too bad after all’ that set in during the Phoney War. And then there was homesickness, which on occasion was unfortunately exacerbated by the less than warm welcome given to those turning up in various reception areas around the country. Eventually, only 1.5 million took advantage of the evacuation scheme, but even in its abbreviated incarnation, this was an impressive accomplishment, especially as it was carried out in those comparatively car-free days, using mainly public transport.
On 1 September 1939, the gears were cranked and the massive plan was put into action. For the next few days, much of the country’s train and bus network was given over to this unprecedented movement of people. Nine one-way routes were especially plotted by the police to allow vehicles to make their way out of London, while Walter Elliot, the Minister of Health, issued assurances that it was all only a precaution, and a shining example of what a free people could achieve when they put their backs and hearts into a job. With this vast scheme in place, the beginning of the blackout and the mobilizing of the ARP, it would have been hard to deny that war was really about to happen.
Some of the evacuees were to have very good experiences, being shown nothing but kindness and generosity by their hosts, and making lifelong friends with people who were, in some cases, to grow as close to them as family. Yet despite the minister’s enthusiasm, evacuation was definitely not universally appreciated by those involved. Stories of hardship and neglect abound, showing that it wasn’t only the enemy who could be cruel and brutal. The ways in which some young East Enders were treated resemble episodes from one of Dickens’s more harrowing novels more closely than the comforting visions painted by the local press of ‘our kiddies’ frolicking in flower-strewn meadows.
There were memories of being singled out for being Jewish; of a more general prejudice against ‘dirty Cockneys’; and of experiencing such misery at their mistreatment that children ran away – one man even recalling the hospital care he and his sister required when they finally made their way back to their home in east London. As in other sections of this book, some people decided that they couldn’t bear to have their stories told. Regrettably in this case, it was out of a misplaced sense of shame – which is perhaps hard for those of us who haven’t experienced such cruelty to understand, as it seems so obvious that the adults responsible should be the ones who are ashamed.
There were plenty who, even before they left, had a good idea that leaving Mum and Dad behind and going off to live with strangers might not turn out to be the jolly adventure they had been promised.
The children who didn’t want to be evacuated were tugging and crying, while their parents tried to hide their tears and their feelings, but were shattered by what was happening to them. There had always been togetherness, with families sticking together through thick and thin.
We were so little, with our gas masks and our little cardboard labels. Like little parcels waiting to be sent off, but to who knew where? It was so hard to understand what was going on. It wasn’t as if one of our aunties or our nan was taking us somewhere. We were used to that. No, this was different. We were going off to be with these ‘nice people’ somewhere. But who were they?
Young Alan – speaking below – had a good idea, and he wasn’t going to have any of it.
I remember a lady calling by to ask about me being evacuated. We had a tiny place – a dump really, no bathroom, no hot water – and my dad bawled up the stairs, ‘Alan, do you want to be evacuated?’ I called back down to him, ‘No thanks, Dad.’ I can hear to this day that woman’s incredulous voice. ‘Surely you’re not going to let the little lad decide for himself?’ ‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘he’s got to start someday, he might as well start now.’ I was fully aware that I could be killed, but decided I’d rather go with my parents if we copped it.
If parents did agree to send their children – or to go with them, in the case of mothers with very young children and babies – the Londoners from our street didn’t always settle in their new surroundings. And it wasn’t only because of the welcome that some of them received. It was as much of a culture shock for those in the reception areas as it was for the East Enders, arriving as they did after the discomfort of their long journeys on trains and buses without lavatory or washing facilities, and with their city clothes and ways so unsuited to rural life.
We travelled by train and then coach, looking out on the pitch-dark countryside. The driver lost his way as all the signposts had been removed for security. When my mother found out that she was to be separated from my brother and me she said, ‘I would rather sleep in a field than be taken away from my children’ … Later we were found places with a family. From what she told me, I don’t think all the local residents were too pleased to have us Londoners there … It must have caused disruption to their lives. Eventually we went to live in a rented stone-floored cottage … My mother found it quite lonely. [And when] there was a lull in the bombing we went home to London.
They weren’t the only ones who fled, although some took a little longer to do so.
Mum took us somewhere out in the country. We got there on the Saturday and she went with us upstairs to unpack, then, when she went down, we packed all our stuff again. We didn’t want to stay there. And so it went on – packing and unpacking. She stayed with us overnight and in the morning she couldn’t bear to leave us. We went to the coach with her, and, even though she had no fare money for our tickets back to London, the coach driver was kind and let her bring us back.
When we were evacuated, Mum was pregnant with my brother, as were a lot of the other women, including one of my aunts. It must have looked like a human convoy of pregnant women and kids, all of us labelled and carrying bags and boxes and gas masks in cardboard-box cases. I was squashed into the corner on a big train, with my mum, aunt and all my cousins. We spent the night in a big hall, where we were given blankets, pillows, and packed food and tea were dispensed to us. Then on another train to where we were going to stay on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire. When Mum went into hospital up there to have my brother I was taken to see her. I can remember that hospital smell. She cried when she saw me. They’d cut off my hair because I’d caught fleas. And Dad had been given leave from the army to visit Mum and the baby, and I didn’t know him. In the time between his last leave and him coming to see Mum and the baby, I’d forgotten him. Mum was so unhappy that she discharged herself from hospital and took us back to London to live with Nan and Grandad.
My nephew and I found ourselves most unhappily staying in a house with a woman whose husband was away in the army. She had only one son, slightly older than my nephew and me, and we hated him because he was a spoilt, over-indulged, fat brat who made our lives very uncomfortable. [We were not looked after and] soon learned what being hungry meant. We were half-starved, and it can be imagined how we felt when we were given half an egg weekly and the son had one or two each day, which he enjoyed eating in front of us at breakfast. This was in the countryside, where such items were not so scarce. We were sent out early mornings before school to search the fields for mushrooms in the surrounding fields – not particularly enjoyable, because the low morning mists [made] it hard to avoid the cow pats whilst fumbling for fungi. This led to a cold-water clean-up before [we were allowed] to enter the house on our return. One day, during a rare visit from my sister Ada, her son told her how really unhappy we were and we were back to London in no time.
Various reasons were given by some of the Londoners who resisted returning home despite their unhappiness. These included having no home or family left to go back to, having gone through too much in the bombing to be able to face it again, and finding the strength to stay in the country because they believed it was the right thing to do for their children.
This family, for instance, was definitely not impressed with the countryside and its inhabitants, but the mother refused to return to London, deciding that it was best to stick it out for the kids.
Dad was in the army at that time … stationed about eight miles away. He used to walk the eight miles [to the big house where some of the children were evacuated with their mother], but Lady E– [the owner] was not too keen to allow Mum and Dad to be alone together in the house. Dad would have to climb through the windows without Lady E– seeing him. That is when my younger sister, S-, may well have been conceived … We eventually moved to a small empty cottage in the village. Mum had to squat there in order to have somewhere to live and to bring my three sisters from [where they had been evacuated to] and where they were not happy. Mum was a strong-willed woman and broke the law several times to protect her family. We were treated by some of the villagers as outcasts and were insulted frequently. We were told to go back to the slums of London and called cowards for leaving there. One day a bomb landed several miles from the village and most of them were at panic stations. We had the last laugh that day. The lady in the next cottage to us was always rowing with Mum and went too far one day. Mum either whacked her or threw a bucket of water over her to calm her down and had to go to court for it. When the magistrate heard the circumstances and the strife Mum was going through, he dismissed the charges. That did upset the neighbour, but she left us alone after that.
