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

puffing and panting, in their bedroom, creating an even more sensitive noise problem that was more or less impossible to resolve. (Even my dad would have baulked at climbing the stairs to yell, ‘Stop bloody knockin’ ’er off!’)
    The only neighbours we had anything to do with were the married age-gap couple in the flat next door. Harry, a skinny, moustachioed, somewhat seedy man in his fifties, a fancy-goods dealer, and his rather svelte blonde wife Sophie, whom he’d met at a West End dance hall just after the war.
    Sophie was in her twenties, a half-Jewish refugee from Austria. And my mum became quite friendly with her over time; mainly, I suspect, because they had a common dislike of their environment – and couldn’t quite understand how they’d wound up there.
    Molly was convinced Sophie had married for reasons of security only.
    ‘He did well during the war with the black market, so she must’ve thought he’d be a safe bet, what with having no family here and not wanting to go back to Austria.’
    She was probably right. Yet the marriage, like other similar hasty liaisons of the time, was doomed to be quietly unhappy. Sophie was alone for much of the time – Harry frequently travelled around the country for work – and the pair had little in common. She fruitlessly craved the childhood joys of her cultural background, things like classical music and ballet; he preferred Vera Lynn and, later, Dickie Valentine records: you’d always know when Harry was back from a trip because you’d hear Vera belting out, ‘There’ll be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover’ from their front room. Harry had also made it plain he didn’t want kids, so Sophie envied my mum, having a little girl to love and look after.
    ‘I make a big mistake – and now I pay for it,’ she’d tell Molly.
    When Harry was away, Sophie initially babysat me for my parents a few times. But while my dad liked Harry, a fellow traveller in the East End world of ducking and diving, he had an uninhibited aversion to ‘the German cow’. To my dad, there was no distinction between the Austrian and German population, even though Sophie said she’d come here to escape persecution. As far as he was concerned, they were all, men and women alike, tarred with the same brush. He even suspected Sophie’s half-Jewish status was a ruse, to make her more acceptable as a refugee.
    ‘Irma Grese was a woman,’ he’d remind my mum if she tried to protest on behalf of her neighbour (Grese, executed for war crimes at the age of twenty two, had sadistically killed hundreds of inmates during her time as a warden at Belsen concentration camp), and in due course, Ginger stopped the babysitting.
    ‘It’s bad enough she’s living next door,’ was his rationale. ‘I don’t want her in my home looking after my kid.’
    In fact, my dad didn’t like anyone coming into our home. OK, it was small and damp and a tad depressing. But that wasn’t the reason why I grew up in a place where we never entertained or rarely had visitors. The truth was, Ginger was somewhat possessive: he wanted his wife and kid right there, away from everything and everyone else.
    No one, neighbour or relative, was actually invited into our home. Even when he wasn’t there, my mum wasn’t encouraged to invite people in for a cuppa or a chat. As I grew up, the only other person who’d come to our flat regularly would be Annie, our Irish cleaner.
    Sarah, of course, had been around, visiting us occasionally after Ginger returned from India. But in 1947 she went off to live overseas permanently. And my mum’s family had scattered, some abroad, the rest to other parts of the country. As for my dad’s parents, we always went to them. They never ever came to us.
    The one thing my dad couldn’t control, however, was the unexpected occasional knock on the door out of the blue. Although we’d had a big black Bakelite phone in the living room from as far back as I could remember, many