Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (17 page)

Skinners’ rules were strict: no eating outside the school premises or on the street, no venturing into the local shops. A few obedient swots obeyed but most of us ignored this. Though it was easy to spot Skinners’ girls because of the uniform, envied throughout the area: a very slick red-and-black striped blazer, red stripey cotton blouse tucked into a grey wool skirt, grey or black socks, Mary Jane one-strap shoes or lace-ups. In winter we wore a grey V-neck jumper with a red border over the blouse. There was also a nasty grey beret, usually shoved in my pocket, and a grey belted mac – which didn’t get worn much. At other secondary schools, like Laura Place in nearby Clapton, the uniforms were grim: everything brown. How many teenage girls want to wear brown knickers?

But while I already had an awareness of clothes and what they could do for you, mainly thanks to my mum, when it came to boys, I was nowhere – no brothers, male cousins, other than Anthony who didn’t count, or even girlfriends with brothers. And, since I’d gone to an all-girls primary, boys remained a huge mystery. Yet some of the girls in my class had already started to experience those first ever kisses and sexual fumbles – and talked about it openly.

Naturally, this troubled me greatly. Was there something wrong with me? And how did you behave around boys? I had no idea. Lolly and I would discuss the boys we liked the look of endlessly. But getting up close and personal with them was another thing. OK, you’d ‘know’ boys locally, their names, where they lived, who their friends were, where they hung around – the same places as us, mainly in and around the local Jewish club near the Hill or around the E & A bar, but you didn’t exactly go beyond smiles, the occasional nod hello or ‘look’.

Only if a boy came up to you at a local club dance – there were no discos then – and asked you to dance could you start to communicate in any way. The breakthrough point, of course, was if they asked to see you home. But the rule was you waited for them to ask. Girls didn’t even dance together; it was a time of wait and he will come. Eventually. There were things like table tennis at the Jewish club that had ice-breaking potential. But, of course, I eschewed anything remotely sporty. So I wasn’t going to get anywhere there.

In that first year at Skinners’, I had another big hang-up: I didn’t yet need to wear a bra. Oh, the shame. Not having tits was a serious black mark against me, reducing the possibilities of attracting a boy. Lolly already wore a bra. But I still had nothing to speak of up top. So with a bit of encouragement from Lolly, I decided to cheat. Without my mum knowing, I went into Dudleys, the big department store on the corner of Kingsland Road, and artfully purchased a pair of ‘falsies’ with my pocket money, two useful bits of foam padding which, when deployed under a jumper, would give the illusion of a comely shape.

It might have been a good idea to have actually worn them. Because there was one unforgettable winter’s night at the Stamford Hill club which was to go down in history as My Night of Unbelievable Shame.

Lolly and I more or less copied each other when it came to fashion. If she had a new fully-fashioned button-through cardigan from Marks & Spencer, I’d get one too, though from a different shop because I thought M&S was too common, too many people wore it. And you couldn’t try things on. Lolly, more practical, liked the M&S convenience factor, with its returns policy on production of the receipt (they were light years ahead of all other high street retailers on this). And, in our desire to look more sophisticated, we’d both recently acquired inexpensive but quite wide heavy wicker basket bags, open at the top without any sort of fastening, so you could hook the basket onto your arm, aiming to look chic. And it was very easy to just put your hand in to fish for a purse, a mirror or, rarely in my case, a comb.

On the night in question, I’ve popped my falsies into my basket a few days before. But as I stand there in the club, chatting to Lolly, basket on arm, cautiously eyeing the boys, I’m taken by surprise. Unexpectedly, an older boy we know by name, Roy Gordon, appears alongside us, grinning. Then he suddenly dips his hand into my basket – and, horror of horrors, out come my falsies, bundled up with an elastic band. Pay dirt! (He’d probably expected, at best, a lipstick to muck around with.)

‘Whoooah, whatcha, got in there!’ yells Roy in triumph, pulling off the elastic band and waving the falsies aloft for everyone in the room to see.

‘Give ‘em back!’ I screech, panicking like mad. But it’s far too late. A delighted Roy is now parading himself around the clubroom, stuffing the falsies under his jumper, prowling round the room in a parody of a girls’ walk.

‘Didn’t think you needed THESE!

‘Look everyone, Jacky Hyams wants to show you her tits!’

Shame isn’t in it. I am utterly, totally mortified. Any bit of fake confidence I might pretend to have has been totally demolished. For thirty seconds, I just stand there, rooted to the spot, going redder and redder, awash with embarrassment. Lolly can’t help; she doesn’t know what to do or say either. And by now, of course, everyone around has got the joke and is laughing fit to bust, if you’ll pardon the pun. My humiliation is complete.

Back home, I chuck the foolish falsies down the smelly chute. And after that, whenever we see Roy at the club, he smirks knowingly, makes a snide comment – ‘gotcha falsies tonight, Jack?’ – and all I can do is manage a ‘piss off’ to him before moving as far away as possible. Can’t he ever let me forget it?

Yet within a few months everything has changed: I’ve miraculously sprouted tiny boobs. Molly helps me choose a Kayser Bondor bra in Jax, on the Kingsland Road, plus a very grown-up suspender belt to keep up my first-ever pair of stockings. (Kayser Bondor is one of the leading, much advertised underwear brands of the fifties.) OK, I still haven’t been kissed. But at long last, to my mind, I am really growing up …

A
summer Saturday and Molly and I are on a train, going to Leicester for a reunion of sorts, an old friend, a woman called Edie with whom she’d worked in Oxford Street during the war.

This is intriguing, a strange place with people we’d never seen. Or heard of, come to that. By now, early teens, I am old enough to resist attempts by my parents to get me to keep up the regular Sunday visits down the Lane to my grandparents. This causes rows, of course. I suspect my mother is sympathetic to my early rebellion but she continues to back my dad.

‘You’ve got to see them, it’s all about RESPECT!’ Ginger yells.

‘I don’t care. I don’t want to go there, I’m sick of going there. There’s a funny atmosphere, anyway.’

‘Whaddya mean by that? What “atmosphere”? What’s she talkin’ about Mol?’ says my dad, handing it over to my mum in the hope she can sort it.

‘I don’t know, Ging. Look Jac, they’re your grandparents. You have to go.’

‘NO I DON’T,’ I scream, running into my bedroom, slamming the door hard behind me. (How that door remained on its hinges is a mystery; perhaps workmanship, as is often claimed, really was better in the thirties.)

Sometimes I win this battle, sometimes I don’t. But my rejection of anything to do with my dad is like a running sore through our lives. I can’t articulate it, it’s just there, a feeling, a sense that I need to disassociate myself with anything to do with the Lane, his life – and, of course, the boozing.

To me, the whole package stinks. And I’m not making it up about ‘the atmosphere’. There are times when we visit the flat in Stoney Lane that you can sense a brooding tension, waiting to explode – which means my grandparents are about to have yet another major ding-dong, and they’re already locked into one of their ‘not speaking to each other’ modes. Who wanted to be around that?

But today’s little adventure holds promise, a journey into the unknown. The train seems to take ages. But when we alight, Edie is waiting for us at the barrier, ecstatic to see us. She’s quite plump, untidy, carelessly dressed in a shapeless printed frock and tatty cardi; she’s the same age as my mum, but she looks much older, more careworn. But she’s got a little car, a Morris Minor, and we pile in for the short journey to her terraced house with Edie at the wheel, telling us about her job serving in a local newsagents – ‘the money’s bad but the owner’s wife is good to me’ – her misfortune at being recently widowed – ‘Poor old Wally, never was the same after he came back from Burma’ – and her two kids, Paul and Dawn, older than me and already working.

‘Wait till you meet them,’ she tells me.

‘You’ll get on like a house on fire.’

Dawn, sixteen, is at the front door to greet us. As cheerful and friendly as her mum, she’s got a round, pleasant face, dark blonde hair in a pony tail and she’s wearing a neat pleated skirt with a button-down cardigan. ‘Ooh, I like your skirt,’ she tells me, admiring my more fashionable London gear: brightly coloured dirndl skirt with large appliqué pattern, white blouse with three-quarter-length sleeves and beige suede flatties.

I’m instantly interested in this older girl, already out in the world, as we’re ushered into a small but very neat, spick-and-span living room. Unlike our flat with its bare walls, they have lots of framed prints hanging up, mostly landscapes. And there are loads of cushions and pretty ornaments. It’s cosy, welcoming. Then mother and daughter disappear into the kitchen, clattering around, readying our high tea.

And then it happens. A young man walks in.

‘I’m so pleased to meet you at last, Mum never stops talking about you, Molly,’ he says, shaking Molly’s hand and then offering his to mine, in turn. Weakly, I return his handshake, but I am totally gobsmacked. He is, to me, at thirteen, a love god extraordinaire: over six foot, slim and straight with neatly cropped brown hair (but not brilliantined like the Teddy Boy style, which I hate), hazel eyes and chiselled features, slick in a navy blazer jacket, shirt and tie.

‘Nice to meet you, Paul,’ I manage but then I lapse into silence. I am totally, overwhelmingly smitten. Until now, there has only been Elvis, a fantasy idol with looks and a voice that were created to arouse and excite the senses. This is the first time I’ve ever experienced physical attraction to someone in the real world. I am lost. I don’t know how to behave, what to do. So, of course, I stay unusually mute. And I try not to stare at him, Mr Gorgeous, he who has instantly turned my world upside down.

Now Paul’s mum and sister are bringing in the tea, biscuits, little homemade cakes specially baked for the occasion. And the women start to gossip, to enjoy themselves. Between mouthfuls, they run through a series of stories about their wartime years in Oxford Street, the girls they worked with, who’d run off with whom. (Most of their colleagues wound up in the arms of a free-spending GI, who vanished back to the States, leaving them holding the baby. Or, in one or two cases, having to explain the baby when hubby came home.) Dawn is fascinated by all of this, interrupting the women to ask questions. I’ve heard most of this stuff before. Paul looks at me, puts down his cup, smiles winningly and says, ‘How’s school going, Jacky? Mum says you go to a posh place called Skinners’, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ I manage, desperate to impress, yet not knowing how to go about it. ‘They call it Skinners’ School for Snobs.

‘The teachers are awful. They’re posh but they’re old. They only really like you if you’re good at sport.’

Paul leans forward, still smiling. I’ve definitely got his attention.

‘And are you good at sport?’

I shake my head. If I had any boy-catching skills, I’d simper now, smile engagingly. Or tell him what I am good at, English and history. But I have so much to learn and am so self-conscious, I just don’t know how to talk to this eighteen-yearold who has commandeered my heart.

‘No. I don’t like it.’

‘Never mind,’ says Paul. ‘We can’t all be good at everything.’

And that is pretty much all we actually say to each other. Paul bids us a polite farewell as we’re finishing our tea; he has to go out and meet a friend. And it is Dawn who shows me round their little terraced house, takes me out into the garden, asks me umpteen questions about London, what it’s like, and says how she wants to come there one day.

I like her, probably because she’s older, more grown-up – and, of course, she’s His Sister, a link, a tie. Oh how I long to ask her about him, does he have a girlfriend? Would a nearly fourteen-year-old have a chance with him? Could I ever see him again? I discover that they do have a phone, a party line (a major frustration of the fifties, where people actually had to share their phone line with another household, though we always had our own line) and we swap numbers.

‘I’ll save up and come down to London!’ she assures me as Molly and I say goodbye to them at the station.

But Dawn never does come to London. Nor do I ever see Paul again. Leicester, then, might as well have been another country. He was as remote and unattainable to me as Elvis, really. And I am left with my endless dreams and fantasies about a virtual stranger. What would happen if I got to meet him again? Would he like me? What would it be like to actually touch or kiss him? Such thoughts are usually accompanied by mental images of Paul and I, alone in his house, embracing passionately on their living-room sofa. I confide in no one about all this; I’m pretty sure my mum hasn’t even picked up on my fixation with her friend’s son. But hope still burns in my heart.