Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood by Jacky Hyams Read Free Book Online

– but from time to time, as I grew up, you’d see them tinkering with various kinds of vehicles in the yard, sometimes at night.
    Len and Charlie were unfailingly polite to my mum when she passed, always greeting her cheerfully, sometimes even offering to help her if she had heavy shopping. But there were no proper conversations. In a way, their attitude to us was more like a bit of forelock tugging, respect for your betters, than normal everyday neighbourliness. We stood out like sore thumbs in our milieu: smartly dressed, well fed, living a well-shod life in these squalid surroundings.
    As for the other flat dwellers, we mostly just glimpsed them in passing. Families came and went in some of the other dwellings without us ever exchanging more than the odd hello. Apart from Maisie and Alf in the centre ground-floor flat, that is, who were pointedly ignored by us after the Chocolates Incident. They’d drawn a bit of a short straw when they moved in: their front entrance was directly behind the entry door for all the rubbish that poured down from all floors via The Chute.
    Everyone in the block had one thing in common: we detested everything about The Chute, an unsanitary and unsavoury repository for the block’s rubbish. Each floor had access to a wall-mounted square metal opening to The Chute; you climbed up or down one flight of stairs to get to it. Yet the opening itself was badly designed and far too narrow for the amount of rubbish that got chucked down it. As a result, The Chute was frequently blocked. To compound matters, rubbish collection from the tip that piled up behind the ground floor door was pretty unreliable. So in summer you frequently held your nose as you clambered up the stone stairs as a couple of weeks’ worth of rubbish lay festering behind the door. The block stank to high heaven – and buzzed with flies.
    In the flat directly above us lived Mary, a blind woman in her late fifties, alone and cut off from the world. Relatives would shop for her and bring the necessities to her door or give her a hand once a week. And about once a year, someone would collect Mary, help her down the six steep flights of stone stairs, and take her out for the day. The rest of the time she lived there, frustrated with her lot – who can blame her? – but venting her spleen by using the only resource available to her: making our lives miserable with noise, banging about her tiny kitchen, thumping around in her bedroom at odd hours of the day and night. Noisy housework at midnight was a perennial favourite.
    ‘I’m gonna fucking go up there and sort ’er out,’ Ginger would threaten when Mary’s banging and thumping reached crescendo levels. The poor construction and paper-thin walls of the flats made it very easy to create havoc this way – and Mary knew this, all too well. She’d managed to survive in her top-floor flat right through the Blitz – time enough to practise her banging and thumping act to perfection.
    ‘Don’t, Ging, she’s a lonely old blind woman,’ my mum would plead and, most of the time, my dad would relent and keep the peace. But there was the odd occasion when the noise from above would be too much, especially if it interrupted my dad’s slumber. Then he’d stomp up the stairs in rage and hammer on her door.
    ‘Whaddya bloody well think you’re doin’ you stupid cow! Stop that bloody bangin’ or I’ll ’ave the coppers on ya!’
    This was, of course, an empty threat. Rousing the coppers of Dalston was not part of my dad’s repertoire. And Mary didn’t even come to the front door. Yet my dad’s aggressive tactic was effective. The banging would stop, sometimes ceasing for weeks on end. Until the next time frustration at her existence would overwhelm her and the noise would start up again. Eventually, she moved out. Rumour had it she went into an old people’s home, only to be replaced by an amorous young couple who spent most of their waking hours humping and grinding,