Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (13 page)

Hackney and the adjoining areas of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill were, back then, heavily populated by Jewish families – though the drift away of upwardly mobile, more successful Jewish families to the smarter areas of north-west London and the outer suburbs had already started back in the thirties. So while we lived very much in a Jewish milieu, my dad wasn’t interested or involved enough in Jewish culture itself to follow any traditions.

Not long after he’d returned from India, my mum laid the table for dinner one Friday night, setting out the traditional Jewish Sabbath candles on the dining table. When Ginger came in from work, she lit them, something she’d learned at home, as a child. While it had not been possible to observe this ritual regularly through the chaos of wartime, this was one thing which, to her, spoke of normality – and family tradition.

Ginger was having none of it. ‘We won’t have any of that,’ he snapped, dousing the candles and removing the candlesticks from the table.

‘Ging, I thought it’d be nice,’ said my mum, knowing already that her case was hopeless.

‘No, not in this house,’ was the response.

So I grew up in a home where being Jewish was a fact of life, living our lives around other Jews. But it more or less stopped there. I never learned Hebrew, went to a synagogue or celebrated any Jewish festivals in the traditional way. Nor was there any pressure to learn more about the customs, what they meant. And my mum, despite growing up in a Jewish family where the customs had been observed, didn’t seem to really mind the absence of these traditions. She cooked certain kinds of Jewish food, like lokshen soup (chicken-and-noodle soup) and chopped liver, because she knew how to – and my dad liked eating them. But he also liked eating the things Jewish people weren’t supposed to eat: bacon, eggs, pork sausages, that sort of thing. That was how he’d grown up.

Talk about mixed messages. Now, of course, I know that there are many non-practising Jews all over the world; we weren’t that unusual. Yet, like most children, I shrank in fear and embarrassment from my dad’s drinking because it made him ‘different’; I didn’t see other people’s dads getting drunk and making a mess of themselves. Later, of course, I understood that anyone, from any background, can be an alcoholic, junkie, adulterer, crook, you name it, they’re human beings with frailties, the same as everyone else. But back then, my dad’s heavy drinking in the midst of a seemingly non-drinking Jewish environment created a somewhat confusing situation for me.

For instance, I became a bit of a swot at my girls’ primary school, Princess May on Kingsland High Street, and didn’t like the idea of missing a single lesson. So the first time the big annual Jewish holiday came round, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (the day when all Jews must fast and cease all normal activity for twenty-four hours), and it coincided with a school day, I rebelled. I didn’t want to take a whole day off from school. Yet it was one day my dad did take off from work, probably because many of his punters were Jewish and subsequently, most of the East End betting fraternity did, once a year, observe their cultural heritage. So he insisted I stay home.

‘She’s gotta stay home, it’s the Black Fast,’ he told Molly. (I never did find out why he used this phrase, nor did I ever hear anyone else use it.)

But I too insisted, stamping my tiny foot, doing my ‘Wanna go’ number. And, as usual, they gave in.

When my class teacher, Miss Hallinan, a kindly Irish woman, saw me walk in that day she stood there, aghast. What was going on? There weren’t that many Jewish kids at my primary school, but she was familiar with the Jewish customs – and the one day when all Jewish life in the area ground to a standstill.

‘Just what are you doing here, Jacqueline Hyams?’

‘Mum and dad said it was all right,’ I said, defiantly, though already unsure of my ground. ‘And miss, I don’t want to miss classes,’ I added plaintively.

But she wouldn’t have it. I had to go home. Now. She even marched me across the main road outside the school. Miserably, I made my way back down Arcola Street, stomping up the stairs to our flat. My dad, of course, was vindicated when he opened the door and I ran into my bedroom.

‘See … that teacher knows what she’s doing,’ he told my mum later.

But all it did was create even more confusion. To me, it didn’t make sense. Why should I take a day off school, missing out on learning, for something we didn’t really bother with? Why did this one day make any difference?

I never got any coherent answers. They were, in their way, trying to instil a sense of the importance of Jewish culture in me. Yet it was too random and indirect for it to make an impact.

A few years later, approaching my teens, I had a memorable conversation with my dad about being Jewish. I’d seen the books by his bed about the war – and what had happened to millions of Jews in the Holocaust and the concentration camps. No kid could ever forget the message of those terrible photos taken in the camps when the Allies marched in. I knew all about the gassings, the prejudice and the ongoing persecution of the Jewish people. Fascists like Mosley were still very active in the East End after the war, so I knew full well that people disliked, even hated us as Jews, simply because we existed.

‘Your best bet is to stick with Jewish people,’ Ginger warned me.

‘That way you’ll be safe, because you never know if – and when – the non-Jews might do the dirty on you.’

‘But … you’re friends with lots of people who aren’t Jewish, dad,’ I pointed out. ‘Look at Len from the café and his family, they’re not Jewish and they’re your friends. And Charlie Riley, you’re always out with him.’

‘That’s different,’ Ginger said. ‘I grew up with them, it doesn’t count.’

Huh? I pondered all this later; I didn’t want to ask my mum because I suspected she’d follow the same unsatisfactory line. And I came to the conclusion that somehow, the logic of this was wrong, off the wall.

Jews were a minority, a small group of people. Fine. Yet it didn’t make sense to me to stick fast to just that one small group. The world was made up of millions and millions of people. Maybe some hated your guts, wanted you dead; but they couldn’t ALL be out to do you harm. Terrible things had happened to us, yes. But that was the past – and instinctively, I sensed that I didn’t want to be locked in thrall to the past in that way. It could hold you back.

Essentially, I decided there and then that I didn’t want to limit my life to just one small group of people and avoid the rest out of fear, just to feel safe. The world was big – and I already knew I wanted to be out there, in the midst of it all, finding out about everything. If being Jewish was going to stop me from making my own choices in life, then I wasn’t having any of it. I never openly voiced this view, understanding all too well that it wouldn’t be well received. But for me the decision stuck fast.

You could say I rejected my dad’s somewhat restrictive view of our background because I had an overwhelming curiosity about life. Or you could say I was just an independent thinker. Take your pick ….

I
f there was one thing about being a post-war child that was virtually guaranteed to put you off milk for life, it was the free bottled milk we were given at school. It was vile, pale, watery, insipid stuff. On a bad day, you’d get one with a horrible creepy skin that had formed over the top; truly disgusting. Fridges didn’t arrive in ordinary homes until the mid-fifties, which didn’t help: in winter, the small glass bottles would be left to warm up on the radiators, making it taste even more horrible. And if you demurred, all you’d hear was ‘drink it up, it’s good for you’. OK, it was a good idea for the post-war authorities to boost the nation’s nutrition by providing free milk in the classroom. Many kids needed all the help they could get. But like many of the well-meaning intentions of the government, it had a drawback: it was virtually undrinkable. In my case it was the start of a personal lifelong revulsion against all things milk. As soon as I could, I stopped drinking it. Ever. Even now, if someone mistakenly stirs my coffee with a milky spoon, it goes straight in the sink.

What I did like was the free bottled concentrated orange juice, made available by the NHS to boost kids’ Vitamin C levels. It came in a glass bottle with a blue screw cap and it was pure delight whenever I spotted a new one in the pantry. I wasn’t so keen on another free dietary supplement, cod-liver oil, which you’d sup, with a shudder, by the spoonful. But I was quite keen on Virol, a dark malt extract with Vitamin A, which came in a big metal tin. This was sweet and thick, the general idea to give kids more bulk. And luckily, perhaps because I always saw my dad drink a lot of it – he always had a big jug by his bedside – I developed a lifetime tap water drinking habit. It beats drinking milk any day.

My dad had grown up in a household where typically English food was a Very Big deal – especially things like the Sunday roast. My mother’s culinary upbringing had been the direct opposite: a bit of a health freak, even in those days, my grandfather Oliver had insisted that their family ate lots of fruit and vegetables and very little meat or chicken. Unsweetened yogurt each day was also one of Oliver’s favourites.

Yet despite this gulf in their tastes, my mum cheerfully adapted to cooking all the food that came through the front door, via Wag’s black-market deliveries: the big joints of beef, legs of lamb, the fresh salmon, plaice and halibut from Petticoat Lane, usually fried by my mum in big batches, making the tiny cramped kitchen reek for hours. My dad was consistently puffed up about the fact that we were eating so well, while others struggled or got poorer quality food.

‘It’s the best stuff that only goes to the big hotels,’ he’d inform us proudly, time and time again. I grew up hearing him constantly informing us that he provided ‘the finest and the best’ for our table, just in case we didn’t realise were lucky sods to have so much wonderful food. Alas, it was all lost on me, a skinny kid who’d rather be scoffing sweets, or eating my way through a bag of broken Smith’s crisps (even crisps were a luxury item before rationing ended; the only variety available were the bags of broken ones which were ‘seconds’ that appeared in the shops occasionally).

As for my mum, she appreciated our good fortune – but only up to a point. Had we just relied, like most people, on rations and the odd bit of ‘extra’ from behind the butcher’s counter, she’d have been just as happy.

We are at my grandparents’ flat in Stoney Lane. It’s a big family gathering, a late Sunday lunch. Two of my dad’s siblings are sitting with us at the dining table, his younger sister Doris, brother George and their respective partners. The Old Man, in shirtsleeves and braces at the head of the table, is poised to carve the enormous roast chicken that lies, glistening and aromatic, stuffed with Paxo, before him, ready to be devoured by his family.

Each plate is proffered up to The Old Man who expertly carves huge portions for all. Lips are already smacking, as my grandmother passes round the gravy, the big plates of roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots, peas, onions, stuffing and green pickled cucumbers. Sloppy as usual, I manage to get hot gravy all down my new dress. Molly is furiously dabbing at the dress with her hankie when suddenly, out of the blue, my Aunt Doris flings her knife and fork down on the table. And then she starts crying her eyes out. It’s a sorry sight. Pretty, fair-haired and usually quite passive, this is a Doris I’ve never seen before.

‘It’s not fair!’ she screeches between huge heaving sobs. ‘It’s always the same!’ Then she gets up and runs out of the dining room, heading for the outside loo on the landing.

Everything goes silent. You can hear the big black clock on the wall ticking it’s so quiet. And, of course, in that typically English way when they’re embarrassed, everyone sitting there pretends the outburst hasn’t happened. No reaction. All eyes down. Focused on the Sunday roast. There’s the discreet clatter of cutlery on plates. But no one is saying anything.

‘Mm … the skin’s really nice and crispy,’ Molly ventures, hoping to break the silence. My dad looks at her as if to say, ‘shut the fuck up’; even he is keeping schtoom. The Old Man grunts appreciatively but remains impassive behind his big black specs, chomping away relentlessly. Miriam wears her normal face: unsmiling, browned off with her lot, toying with the food on her plate. I am puzzled. Why is my aunt crying so much she has to run away? Is she ill? We’re almost finished when Doris returns to the table and, as if nothing has happened, attacks her plate, though her face is downcast. Nothing more is said. And once the meal is finished, everyone is keen to scatter: my mum quickly buttons up my little beige coat with the velvet collar and we’re off. A cab has been organised to take us home.

In the taxi, Molly starts to grill my dad. ‘What was that all about, Ging?’ knowing that my dad knows all the nuances of his family’s behaviour: big rows and heated outbursts were recurring events over the years.

‘Nah, it’s nothing,’ he sighs. ‘OK, I’ll tell ya. You won’t believe it. She’s done it before. She gets all upset because The Old Man carves her a leg. And she really wants the breast.’

I’m old enough to understand how daft this is and start to giggle. My mum, however, is appalled.

‘Do you mean to tell me she gets so worked up about a lousy bit of chicken, she has to have a tantrum about it?’

‘Yeah. And The Old Man knows pretty much what’s gonna happen. But I think he does it just to wind her up.’