Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (10 page)

They also had a gramophone and sometimes played a few records, but in this medium they preferred Jewish songs. Particular favourites of theirs were Issy Bonn singing ‘My Yiddishe Momme' and ‘Did You Know The Negev?' The latter was particularly poignant and relevant to any family steeped in the Jewish tradition at this time. It began, ‘Did you know the Negev when it was all sand? Then the desert Negev was the promised land…' and went on to explain how the Israelis had turned it into sustainable farmland and a homeland for the Jews. Of course, it had not been many years ago that the Jews had suffered appalling atrocities at the hands of Hitler and the
Nazi Party. Their pain had been deeply felt by all Jews, German and free, and when the state of Israel was set up after the War, they saw it as their homeland, even if they didn't live there. It was a time of hope for Jews everywhere.

I don't want to go into the rights or wrongs of the occupation or what has happened since as I know full well that, with complete justification, the Palestinians don't see the process the same way, but the feelings of the Jews at that time were that, after centuries of persecution and the recent horrors of the Nazi death camps, at last they had a safe haven, somewhere they could call home. Songs like ‘Did You Know The Negev?' struck a deep chord with my grandparents; they played it proudly, as a symbol of their new hope.

Ironically, Uncle Albert, who took after his parents much more than Dad did in keeping the Jewish tradition alive, was a British soldier stationed in Palestine at the end of the War and his job involved trying to suppress the Jewish uprising and their attempts to found the nation state of Israel. It must have been a terrible dilemma for him as his sympathies would undoubtedly have been with the people he was forced to oppose.

The man who lived opposite my grandparents kept racing pigeons and, every evening after tea, he would let them out to fly loose around the houses. It was quite a spectacular site to see dozens of pigeons wheeling and circling around in the sky above the top of his house.

When Uncle Bob and Aunt Clara came home, they were nearly always presented with a bowl of lokshen soup as it was properly known, another standard Jewish delicacy. It was made by boiling up a chicken in a pot of water with carrots, parsnips
and celery, a pinch of saffron and a large helping of lokshen, or vermicelli, as the manufacturer called it. Once ready, the chicken would be fished out, jointed and placed on a separate plate with roast potatoes. The soup would, naturally, be eaten with a spoon, while the chicken and potatoes would be picked up by hand. My aunt always used to give me the wing from her chicken as a little treat.

As an occasional change from lokshen soup, they would sometimes be given something Nan called ‘vish splosh'. This was a soup made from any kind of meat and vegetables she could lay her hands on. I'm not sure if it was traditional or just something she concocted all by herself. Thinking back, they can't have been very strict Jews because they used to love a bit of bacon or pork in their vish splosh.

After they'd had their dinner, Uncle Bob would usually find time to play with me. I used to like him because he was very funny, just like an uncle should be! But he was also a bit of a rogue and soon became the black sheep of the family. He used to disappear for months at a time and no one knew where he went, then he would simply come home again as though nothing had happened and continue life with his mum and dad; he never said where he'd been. He ultimately fell out with Dad because, just before one of his disappearances, he borrowed our two-LP set of
The Pirates of Penzance.
Although Bob eventually returned as he always did, sadly our records did not. For Dad, there was nothing worse than having his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan records stolen so he never spoke to him again.

In 1955, Bob got married to Shirley Steer, who already had an illegitimate child called Dawn. She was promptly nicknamed
‘Dripping', as there was a well-known brand of cooking margarine on the market called Dawn. It was hoped that now that Bob had married he would settle down, but just two years later he divorced Shirley and was off again. This time, he didn't turn up for over ten years. On his return, he married a Cypriot girl called Nicky, settled down to a very respectable life, had two children, Maroulla and John, and never went missing again. It wasn't until many years later that we discovered that just before his ten-year disappearance he'd had a daughter with Shirley, called Wendy.

Three years after Uncle Bob left, Shirley remarried and emigrated to Australia with her daughters and new husband. No one heard anything from them until Wendy contacted me via a Family History website in 2010, trying to find out about her father. He left when she was still a small baby, so she never knew him. She had asked her mother about him when she was growing up, but Bob's betrayal still hurt and Shirley refused to talk about him. I was flabbergasted when she contacted me as I had absolutely no idea of her existence.

Finally, before getting the bus back home, we might play a few games or watch a bit of telly. The games we played were either card games, shove ha'penny or ‘fives and threes', a dominoes-based game. The card games were usually cribbage or klabberjass, known to us as ‘clobby', a game popular among Jewish communities. It was quite an obsession in our family – everyone seemed to be an expert clobby player. I too became very good at it, but sadly none of my friends had ever heard of the game, let alone played it, so I could only practise my skills with the family.

If we watched television, it was usually to see
In Town Tonight, The Billy Cotton Band Show,
with the familiar catchphrase ‘Wakey! Wakey!' or
Dixon of Dock Green
– ‘Evenin' all'. I can also remember a couple of serials, one called
The Teckman Biography,
a Francis Durbridge mystery starring Patrick Barr (or ‘television with knobs on' as Dad called him because of his frequent appearances in television drama) and the other one,
The Trollenberg Terror,
a science fiction story with some scary monsters, or at least they were to me at the age of eight or nine. After one episode, which I must have thought particularly good, I said to Dad that I had to tell my friends at school about this. ‘Don't you dare!' he warned. ‘I don't want your teachers finding out that I let you stay up late to watch these sorts of films on television.'

After taking the half-hour bus journey home, we'd arrive back about the same time as Mum did. Until I was much older, I never met my other grandfather. Nanny Sinnott used to come and visit us quite often during the week, so I saw a fair bit of her. I can remember one occasion when Mum went out shopping and Nan minded me. She made me a cup of hot Bovril. I took one sip and thought, ‘This is terrible,' but I didn't like to say anything to her. So I just sat with this cup of Bovril, hoping and praying Mum would come home soon so I could tell her I didn't want it.

I found out when I was thirteen that the reason I never visited my grandfather was that in their younger days he had been violent and physically abusive to Nan so Dad would have nothing to do with him. Mum told me that he came home drunk on many occasions and tipped the table up with all their
dinners on it. On one particular occasion, he kicked Nan so hard that she crashed into the table and was knocked unconscious. Mum and her sister, my aunt Nell, carried her upstairs and put her to bed. Mum then came down to the kitchen and started searching through the cutlery drawer for a knife. Suddenly, Grandpa appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?' he demanded. ‘I'm going to kill you,' she replied. He slammed the box shut, scooped her up under his arm and manhandled her to bed, where she spent the rest of the night sobbing.

One day, after he'd knocked Nan about for simply asking for housekeeping money, she went to Tower Bridge police station to report him. The policeman said there was nothing he could do about it because the police weren't allowed to interfere in domestic quarrels. Nan replied, ‘All right, if there's a murder tonight it will be your fault.'

Another time when he came home and started on Nan, Mum's brother, my uncle Bill, tried to stop him hitting her and they ended up fighting. Grandpa threw him out of the house bodily and told him he was never to come back: he was only eleven. He then slammed the door behind him and physically stopped Nan going after him. It wasn't until he eventually fell asleep several hours later that she was able to get out and look for Bill. By that time, she was frantic with worry as she had no idea where he could have gone to, so she just set off walking round the local streets, shouting out his name. Finally, she found him sitting in a shop doorway, crying his heart out. She picked him up and held him tightly for a moment or two while she too had a good cry. Nan knew she couldn't take him home as she was afraid what her husband might do to him, so she
took him to a friend's house and, after explaining what had happened, asked if Bill could stay there for a couple of nights till it was safe to come home. On hearing what had happened, her friend agreed to take him in for a short while and to look after him. In the end, Bill stayed with her until he got married, ten years later.

After listening to these stories, I completely understood why my parents wanted nothing to do with my grandfather and why they didn't want me to see him. What a complete bastard! Mum told me that some time after she'd left home to get married she asked Nan why she put up with him and didn't leave him. Her sad reply was: ‘Where would I go with six children and no money?' She must have felt so lonely and so trapped.

The only time the Saturday routine ever varied was when we went down to Sussex to see my brother John, which happened about once or twice each term. We got the 38 bus to Victoria station, where we boarded the train to Horsham before changing onto a small country line still operated by a steam locomotive. As we puffed our way through the open countryside, it was like being transported into a different world. All you could see around were green meadows and cows grazing in the fields. Although we lived on a field in London ourselves, it was nothing like this. There was no traffic, no shops, not even any houses to spoil the view, just acres and acres of the green rolling South Downs. When we arrived at Christ's Hospital's own specially built halt, we took the long walk up the path to the school gates, where John would be waiting for us. Most times we just used to get back on the train and go into Horsham for lunch at The Carfax, but sometimes, especially in the summer term,
he would take us to local places of interest, such as Arundel Castle, Box Hill or Bognor Regis. Sadly, the day was up all too quickly and we had to make our way back to the station for the return journey, usually with a small present Mum and Dad had bought me in Horsham for ‘being good'. This was normally a small book of dot-to-dot puzzles or a magic painting book, where you brushed each page just with water and a coloured picture would magically appear.

Sometimes the train took us back to London Bridge rather than Victoria. I didn't like this, as we had to stand and wait for our bus at the stop outside Southwark Cathedral, and for some reason I found this really scary. To me the great big building looming up out of the dark seemed to hide all sorts of terrors, especially as I could see the graveyard at the side.

After all the excitement of a typical Saturday with its shopping expeditions and family visits, Sunday was much more relaxed. In those days, practically no shops were open on a Sunday; in fact, hardly anything was open and very few people worked. Sunday was a family day.

Our Sunday always began with me getting into Dad's bed and us reading the sports pages together while Mum went to make breakfast. Our Sunday newspapers were
The People
and
Reynold's News,
both radical Labour Party-leaning papers, as was our daily paper, the
Daily Herald.
Dad had been a Labour Party supporter all his life, as were all his family and, indeed, it seemed, everybody else in the East End of London. Politics were much more divided on class lines in those days and it would have been very hard to find a working-class Conservative voter. In fact, from 1945 until 1965, the year I moved away and
the old Metropolitan Borough of Hackney was merged with Shoreditch and Stoke Newington to form the new London Borough of Hackney, the only non-Labour councillors on the Council were from the Communist Party. Not a Tory in sight! The Liberal Party barely existed apart from on the Celtic fringes in Scotland, Wales and Devon and Cornwall, and the country was much more polarised between Labour and Conservative.

Of course, none of this mattered to me, reading the sports pages with Dad and waiting for breakfast. Mum usually made a boiled egg with ‘soldiers' (thin, finger-like strips of toast), or bread and dripping, served with plenty of salt and pepper. My word, it was delicious! No worries about cholesterol levels in those days. Occasionally, we would have eggs and bacon as a treat.

Once we were up, Dad might do a few jobs around the house. One I always found fascinating was the cleaning of the gutters. Living on a field surrounded by trees meant that they frequently filled up with soggy leaves, so he had to get the stepladder up and clear them all out. It was an absolutely filthy job and he got covered in mud and slime. Meanwhile, I would usually be playing with my toys. I had a large collection of lead soldiers, cowboys, Indians and the like – so big, in fact, it's a wonder I didn't suffer from lead poisoning! I would set them up on the table with a toy fort I had and one lot of soldiers had to defend the fort from the rest. Under the table was where I would race my little tin cars and buses.

By the time I was about seven or eight, Dad and I would often take a walk down Millfields Road and cross the little iron bridge to Hackney Marshes to see a football match. Hackney Marshes was, and still is, home to the largest number of football
pitches on a single area of open space anywhere in the world. In the 1950s, there were something like a hundred pitches, all crammed tight on one another so there was little room to stand on the touchline to watch. Several local leagues played their matches there; we supported the Hackney and Leyton League and used to go and search out that league's matches, not an easy thing to do with that number of pitches. Our favourite teams were United Services, who played in orange and black, Pembury (white with a red ‘V') and Grove United (claret and blue). We got to know some of the better players and some of the touchline supporters, most of whom thought they could do a much better job than the manager or players! One in particular seemed to have it in for a player called Cotterell. He was a short, stocky player who played on the left wing for Grove United. For some reason he had gathered his own anti-fan club of one. Several times we saw the same oldish, balding man turn up at Grove United games just so he could abuse poor old Cotterell. He would run up and down Grove's left touchline, shouting, ‘Pass it, you idiot!', ‘What was that supposed to be?', ‘You're useless!' and so on. At half-time he would swap sides so he could continue abusing the poor bloke. We always thought Cotterell was quite a decent player but he had obviously done something to upset this man. How he managed to put up with it, week after week, I don't know. Perhaps it was his father?