Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (16 page)

‘STAND, CREATURE!’

This was the usual form of address from the Latin teacher, Miss McLelland. Political correctness was a long, long way ahead of us. Teachers like McLelland, a dark-haired woman in her late forties, made no attempt whatsoever to conceal their disdain for their charges.

‘COME TO THE FLOOR, CREATURE!’

I’ve been caught red-handed. Stupidly, I thought I was safe right at the back of the classroom. But her beady, ever-vigilant eye has spotted me, trying to pass a Harold Robbins book to a giggling Annie Black under the desk. But while my class teacher, Miss Edgar, an English instructor wasn’t a stern disciplinarian, especially with those who demonstrated signs of an affinity with language, Miss McLelland gave no quarter to anyone. Older than many of the other teachers, she had a fan club of none – primarily because everyone hated Latin and couldn’t wait for the lessons to end.

‘Latin is a language as dead as dead can be/It killed the Ancient Romans/And now it’s killing me’ one bored wag had scratched onto one of our old wooden desks. And it was true. I didn’t mind French. But Latin was beyond the pale.

‘CAN YOU SHOW US WHAT YOU’RE READING, CREATURE?’

I shrug. ‘Dunno Miss McLelland. Found it on the bus.’

‘HAND IT OVER, CREATURE!’

Grudgingly, I hand over the offending paperback, which she flicks through, winces then holds aloft at the class.

‘NEVER/LOVE/A/STRANGER,’ she says, pronouncing each word with pure venom.

A few brave souls snigger. I’m done for, yet again. Another detention, my second that week. I am way, way up high on her list of Most Detested Creatures.

‘LEAVE THE ROOM, CREATURE AND WAIT OUTSIDE!’

The trouble was, I didn’t give a monkey’s. There was no remorse whatsoever. At least, in primary school, when I’d got into hot water for pulling the huge plaits of my rival for scholarly supremacy, Valerie Neal, another swot who had the misfortune to be fat, a total affront to my senses, I’d felt mortified after the event. I floundered to find one but I had no excuse, I’d just given into a really bad impulse. Yet at Skinners’ I experienced no guilt at all for constantly being called out, being disruptive – the teacher’s oft repeated description of my attitude. And, of course, I was always a sitting target for getting caught. Other equally cheeky girls managed to stay on the right side of the teachers because they cleverly operated the two-faced technique: devils in the playground when authority wasn’t around, seemingly angelic in class when it was (a useful survival tactic for office life too, though one I never learned at work, either). I never bothered with subterfuge.

As far as I was concerned our teachers were a joke, ancient, from the Dark Ages, something else to laugh about, sneer at. Learning, alas, was no longer my pleasure, though I was still keen on books and read avidly. And big-selling US fiction authors like Harold Robbins who wrote of risqué topics like prostitution were bound to be of interest: at that stage, of course, any mention of anything remotely sexual was likely to be pored over – it was the only kind of sex education available. And Robbins’ books didn’t hold back … one of the few commercially successful authors of the era who made millions by writing about relationships in vivid prose.

And yet my folks had been so chuffed when I’d passed the Eleven Plus. Various options were discussed. Even stage school was mooted. The Old Man had been consulted. He’d suggested I try for the City of London School for Girls, a prestigious school, founded in the late 1800s. It would have meant passing a stiff exam for a scholarship, but I didn’t pass the initial interview. So they plumped for sending me to another well-regarded school, Skinners’, a twenty-minute bus ride up through Stoke Newington to Stamford Hill.

‘The Hill’ was considerably posher than our part of the world. It boasted a park, some smart shops and many big Victorian houses. Then, as now, there were many Jewish families living there. And my parents, somewhat naively, believed that because Skinners’ had a high proportion of Jewish pupils – over half the total population of my year – this was bound to be ‘better’ for my education.

How wrong can you be? The exposure to more Jewish pupils meant rubbing shoulders with girls who were from wealthier backgrounds, had travelled, were more sophisticated and were, in some cases, quite precocious. Despite our comparative affluence at home, until then, my primary-school buddies had been girls from working-class families, quite different to some of the posher Skinners’ girls who were already well into rock’n’roll and boy chasing.

My two main primary school chums, Sandra Holland and Kathy Shilling, lived in shabby rented houses off the Kingsland Road, their parents’ lives were modest, respectable – but they were quite unworldly. And our joint exploits – making a bonfire night Guy and standing on the corner of Kingsland Road asking passers-by for pennies (a challenge I relished, truth to tell, despite my parents’ horror that I was out on the street ‘begging’) – were distinctly childish.

Some of these new Skinners’ classmates seemed daring to me, already wearing nylons and lipstick out of school; one or two even had boyfriends a few years older than them. These girls’ influence made a big impression on me. And this, combined with the fact that we were among the first group of teenagers to emerge as post-war teenagers with consumerist leanings, developing our own tastes and clothes, rather than remaining just younger, drab versions of our parents until adulthood, meant I was never going to take education seriously.

At home, my parents’ ambitions for me beyond getting into Skinners’ and forking out for the nice red-and-grey uniform (which could only be purchased from Kinch & Lack, a shop specialising in school uniforms near Victoria Station) were distinctly hazy.

‘Is fifty quid enough? queried Ginger, peeling off the notes as if they were playing cards to purchase the new uniform. They’d both left school at fourteen, my mum an avowed duffer who had relied on her elder siblings to help crib her homework. For them, passing the exam was a huge achievement in itself. Yet the whole point of the Eleven Plus was for bright working-class kids to be streamed, a big step on a path that could, if they worked really hard, lead to university and a real chance in life for the ordinary, less privileged child.

But in my case, as the actress Carrie Fisher once said: great anecdote, bad reality. With my dad permanently sloshed most nights and my mum vainly trying to keep a fragile peace between us – open warfare between me and Ginger really got going when I hit my teens – they just weren’t likely to put all their efforts into helping me understand that this was A Big Opportunity. Their own ‘live for now’ horizons were too limited. And I was a temperamental child, hard to handle, prone to outbursts. Moreover, I was reasonably pretty, quite slim, with no major defects. They blithely assumed I’d probably be married by the time I passed my teens.

So there you have some idea why the great post-war social experiment that was the Eleven Plus didn’t work out for the education of one kid from Hackney.

Though you must never discount the distraction of the powerful cultural influences creeping up on us all, especially Elvis, whose voice, sexual charisma and astonishing good looks had us nudging hysteria at the Regent cinema on the Hill when
Love Me Tender
, Elvis’ first movie, lit up the screen. We’d scream to order every time he curled his lip or did his bump ’n’ grind routine. Though on reflection, the majority of us, still barely adults, didn’t really have a clue exactly why he turned us on so much.

B
y the end of that first year I’d already teamed up with a few of the more worldly Skinners’ girls; many of them travelled on my bus route home. There were the sisters, Sylvie and Barbara, just eighteen months apart, one cheerful and sunny, the other sullen and brooding. Their parents were rumoured to have separated, something so rare and shocking then that the sisters never talked about it openly.

Sylvie was friendly, gregarious and tried really hard in class, though she never got great marks, no matter how assiduously she worked. Barbara, the older sister, was morose, scruffy, in a permanent sulk, though with a cutting wit and, underneath the unappealing exterior, extremely bright: she’d get good marks without much study. Linda, Heather and Rosalind made up their gang, a tight little trio already plotting their way to courtship and marriage to local boys met at the nearby Stamford Hill Club, a social meeting place for young Jewish kids. Heather, with huge eyes and blonde hair, already had an older steady beau, Mike. I latched on to these girls partly because they were more knowing and worldly, partly for good company on the bus. But I wasn’t consistently part of their group, perhaps because I sensed I didn’t have a real affinity with them. Their focus, even at that early stage, was snaring a Jewish husband, which to me seemed a bit remote – and short-sighted. And before long, I’d bonded with another Hackney girl in my year who eventually became my best friend, Larraine, widely known as Lolly, thanks to a hit Chordettes song of ’58 called ‘Lollipop’, which went ‘Lollipop, Lollipop, ooh Lolli, Lolli, Lolli’, an embarrassment for her when other kids burst into song and chanted it. But while the song came and went in the charts, the nickname stuck.

We were quite different too but the bonds grew from our shared interests, mainly books, clothes and Elvis records, with a growing interest in the opposite sex, though like me, Lolly hadn’t yet reached the actual boyfriend stage.

She was the eldest of three kids, growing up on a council estate. Her dad Monty was a London cabbie, something that proved to be a bit of a bonus later on when we started hanging around clubs and coffee houses in the West End. In appearance, we were opposite: she dark-haired, tiny and exotic looking, me, taller, fair-skinned and freckled. There were other differences. Lolly firmly believed my mum to be ‘posh’ because she spoke nicely and dressed like a movie star, while Larraine’s mum Fay, equally attractive, was very earthy, quite loud with a distinct East End Jewish twang.

This belief that somehow I had a more upmarket status was confirmed for Lolly the afternoon she first came round to our flat and my mum offered her a drink, instant coffee, spooned out from a tin of Nescafé.

My new friend had never seen this kind of coffee before.

‘Ooh, thanks Mrs Hyams,’ she said, taking the cup and very much impressed by the novelty of something different.

‘We only have Camp coffee at home, this is lovely.’ Molly looked quizzical: she’d heard of Camp, knew it was much cheaper – but in our world of cash bribes and never-never payments, who would think of actually buying it?

(Camp Coffee was a thick brown liquid made out of water, sugar, chicory essence and a little bit of coffee essence, a popular inexpensive coffee substitute in the austerity years, with its distinctive bottle showing a Scottish and a Sikh soldier sitting by a tent. It’s still around now: people use it in baking to give a coffee flavour.)

The next day, Lolly told me she thought I had a lot more going for me than she did. ‘Your mum’s so posh. She’s really ladylike. And you don’t live on a council estate, like us,’ she reminded me.

‘Yeah, but it’s a dump,’ was my retort.

‘And my mum’s not really posh. She’s just got lots of nice clothes.’

We differed in one other respect: Lolly and her siblings adored both their parents, yet I had an open aversion to my dad whose ridiculous possessiveness had started to increase as I got older, though I kept fairly quiet about my embarrassment about his drinking. Lolly couldn’t do exactly what she liked. But with two other children in their flat, she had slightly more freedom than me.

I loved the very different environment in their noisily cheerful home. With a plump, boisterous ten-year-old brother, Keith, and a quieter younger sister, Adrienne, with whom she shared a bedroom, their three-bedroom council flat near Mare Street was bigger and livelier, with family members popping in and out all the time. It was nothing like my world, without visitors or space, sticking fast to my books and my damp little room facing the noisy timberyard when my dad was around, permanently avoiding him and only feeling happy to move around the flat when he wasn’t there.

So I spent quite a lot of after-school time at Lolly’s, ostensibly doing ‘homework’ (which initially involved minimal effort and plunged to near zero within a year or so) but mainly listening to Elvis on her much-prized green leatherette Dansette record player, purchased by her dad in Mare Street, or swapping passages or poems from books we’d liked, laboriously copying them down by hand, then cutting out each passage and sticking it into a scrapbook. We repeated the process with our treasured Elvis pictures. Magazine photos were starting to appear of him in various guises, on stage in a velvet shirt, reaching out to his fans, bare-chested, looking moodily into the distance.

Some of these photos went onto our bedroom walls, despite parental objection, but most went into the precious scrapbooks. And it was only Elvis. We didn’t have much choice – Frankie Laine, anyone? – but we weren’t fickle. No one else but Elvis really got a look in.

The Hill had a few attractions for soppy teenage girls in search of laughs and adventure. It had an amusement arcade – known as ‘the schtip’ – where older boys hung out and the E & A bar, a salt beef bar where we could buy huge pickled cucumbers to munch on as we walked around after school, giggling with our gaggle of cronies before getting on the bus, climbing upstairs and creating havoc.