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

people then didn’t have a home phone. So an unexpected knock on the door was a pretty normal occurrence for everyone else.
    When we did get a rare, unheralded knock at the door from one of my mum’s UK-based brothers, either bachelor Eddie (whom Ginger disliked because he was a habitual gambler and often on the scrounge) or Joe, my mum’s favourite brother, who ran a gift shop in Brighton and had two daughters, my mum would be delighted. She’d rush into the kitchen, raid the larder and prepare all sorts of delicacies, egg or smoked-salmon sandwiches, teacakes, biscuits, drinks. Generous and open-hearted, she loved pulling out the stops to entertain for these unexpected rare visits; if my dad was there, he’d grit his teeth and keep up the façade of hospitality.
    As for me, I was only used to being the sole focus of two people’s lives and found such unexpected visits uncomfortable. I lived in the glow of my mum and dad’s attention, taking it for granted that I was the centre of the entire universe. Adjusting to other people’s company in the small confines of our flat, even briefly, seemed strange, an unhealthy beginning, which didn’t do me any favours when it came to relating to others’ needs later in life. So all I felt back then, once the visitors had departed and I’d been given the obligatory hug and kiss (which I hated: I was not a kissy-feely child) was an overwhelming sense of relief. ‘I hope they don’t come back,’ the little voice inside me said. ‘I don’t like them coming round here.’
    So while we rarely had visitors or neighbours over, in turn, my mum only ever ventured into Sophie’s flat for tea and chats when my dad was at work. And in due course that stopped too – because of my dad’s over-the-top feelings about the war. He wasn’t alone in this, of course. If you’ve been bombed to smithereens, lost members of your family, spent years in army uniform or wound up a prisoner, you’re bound to have strong opinions on what had happened. But holding a young, fairly innocent refugee woman responsible for the slaughter and destruction of millions of lives was a bit rich. Though I can see now, that it wasn’t really just about the war.
    As I said, my dad just didn’t want anyone coming into our home.

CHAPTER 6
S UNDAYS
     
    S undays in post-war London were another planet away from the Sundays we now take for granted. Silent streets; virtually everything closed. Pubs open briefly at lunchtime and for a couple of hours at night. Everything else ground to a halt, apart from buses and trains. No supermarkets or round-the-clock shopping opportunities. People visited each other. Or they stayed indoors. And my early world was dominated by a late Sunday-afternoon routine that was unwavering in its rigidity: rain or shine, Molly and I would be required to pay homage to my father’s parents, Miriam and Jack, a few miles away, just off Petticoat Lane in Stoney Lane. Ginger would eat his Sunday roast and then head for bed, sleeping off the week’s rigours, preparing himself for the next. Sunday was the only night he was virtually sober.
    Snug in my little beige wool coat with its velvet collar, a bow tied atop my frizzy curls, I’d clutch my mum’s hand tightly as we headed down Shacklewell Lane, past the big synagogue and the hairdressers on the corner to wait for the 649 trolley bus ride that took us on the two-mile journey down Kingsland Road, past Shoreditch Church and Itchy Park (so named because of the tramps that used to doss there), down past Commercial Road and finally to Liverpool Street Station.
    Increasingly nervous during the bus ride, my childish fear would start to become near panic, stomach churning, when we alighted outside Dirty Dick’s pub. This was the truly horrible bit, the thing that gave me nightmares: the ten-minute walk through the near deserted Middlesex Street to Stoney Lane down the dark, narrow, dirty and eerie thoroughfares. At three years old, I’d