Up West (10 page)

‘In some ways it was very much a religious Mission. They didn't have services, but they did hold these meetings, spreading the Christian message. I can remember a photo I
saw from the thirties: it was all men, lots and lots of them, assembled in the Mission for this meeting. Not down-and-outs, just local people – although of course everyone there was fairly poor in those days.

‘On the other hand, we used to have Sunday School outings, and there were Italians, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, you name it, all off to Christian Sunday School – although the Catholics could not go any more after the age of seven, because they took communion.'

Religious faith never touched me personally. My parents were fervent atheists and I found no reason to rebel against them. For those West Enders with religious faith, though, there were ample opportunities to indulge it, in synagogues, churches and temples from Brompton Oratory to St Clement Danes. Some places of worship were in decidedly secular buildings. Myra James, who grew up in a Welsh-speaking home above her parents' café in Pollen Street, remembers how she and her family ‘attended a Welsh chapel which met on Sunday mornings in Studio One, the cinema in Oxford Street, because the original chapel in the City had been bombed in the war'.

Another diligent, if apparently reluctant, churchgoer was Owen Gardner. ‘Our local parish church was St Martin-in-the-Fields, but you could never get in there, because it was always full of visitors, so my mother hooked up with St Paul's, Covent Garden, the actors' church. It wasn't well attended. An old Shakespearean actor was the vicar, and he couldn't get anybody in the church, so my mother volunteered me – I
had been a choirboy in Somerset – to go there on a Sunday morning, unlock it, take the collections at the Communion first thing and at the eleven o'clock service and put the money in the safe.' After that, he and the vicar would go to the hospital at the back of the market to give Communion to anyone who wanted it, before returning to the twelve o'clock service, where Owen again took the collection before going home to his well-earned lunch. In those days, in most of Britain, everything closed on Sundays.

Some establishments opened seven days a week in the West End, but for most of those who lived and worked there, it was a welcome day of rest. ‘My father worked six days a week, sixteen hours a day,' John Carnera remembers. ‘He was up and gone by seven, pushing a barrow down to Covent Garden to get the day's fruit and veg. He'd work at the restaurant all day, until five or half-past, then have a break for an hour or so, come up and have dinner with my mother, and then start at seven in the evening as a barman at Les Caves de France, a club two doors up from us. He worked there until about eleven. Sunday was his day off. We saw our dad really only on Sunday.'

John's father was not unique in this. The struggle to make ends meet forced many family breadwinners in the West End to take several jobs. As Sonia Boulter recalls, ‘My dad worked behind the bar at Maxim's for quite long hours. Bar work was his trade, and he could tell you anything about it, but he wouldn't drink himself. My mum worked with him, occasionally, in the cloakroom. It was just a bit of money for
her. And when she did that, I had to look after my younger brothers. I was only young myself, so it was quite a lot on me, but I had to do it.

‘I remember at one stage my dad had two or three jobs, because he wasn't very well. He'd had TB and couldn't settle in to a permanent job and money was very short. I can remember him doing night work, coming home for a couple of hours' sleep, then going to work at another job. It was very hard going. He worked at a cartoon cinema in Windmill Street a couple of days in the evenings to earn extra money, just letting people in, taking tickets, taking money occasionally. He did lots of things to earn extra money. When I was about fourteen, he got a job with Wall's, selling ice cream from trays on the trains. I did that with him to earn a bit of pocket money. Going to Southend, walking up and down on the train selling ice creams from the icebox in the guard's car.'

Ronnie Mann learned to double up on jobs at an early age. Eventually he would work in the family business, a picture-framer's in Monmouth Street, but he had wide experience before then. ‘When I was at school, I worked in the late afternoons and Saturdays half-past nine to about half-past three in the butcher's, or delivering for the greengrocer or the dairy. Saturday morning I did a paper round from seven o'clock to about half-past eight. I think a lot of the kids did them jobs. Some stayed on when they left school. Littlewoods – an iron-monger's and paint place in Drury Lane – supplied the whole area with paraffin and all that. I can remember two blokes
working there from while they were in school to in to their twenties and thirties.'

Ronnie elected not to stay in retailing. When he left school he went to work in the market, doubling up with jobs behind the scenes at local theatres. ‘Most of the people in the 'Bury worked locally,' he remembers. ‘A percentage worked in the market, and a few in the theatres as well. Others worked in the British Museum, the National Gallery or the auction house in Garrick Street. My uncle was a lavatory attendant in Charing Cross Road. I can't recall anybody having to go more than a small bus ride away.

‘Moss Bros employed quite a few people, storemen and drivers – not necessarily serving, that was probably a stage too far for the 'Bury – and the print used to take a lot of people. There was Harrisons bang opposite us, a huge printmakers and stamp-makers. Both my sisters went in there. If you were lucky, you got a job down Fleet Street, or Odhams in Long Acre, where the
Daily Herald
was printed. Some of the girls worked as waitresses, as Nippies down in Joe Lyons or wherever. A lot of them became sales assistants in the shops around.'

All this hard work made West Enders appreciate their leisure time, but they tended to spend it close to home. Just as hardly any of my fellow West Enders grew up with a garden, very few of them spoke of going on holiday on a regular basis. I don't think they were being shy about it: they just didn't go. Peter Jenkins's parents presented an exception to the rule. His father insisted on taking his family away for two
weeks in a boarding house in Exmouth, every single year. This made young Peter feel very special. ‘So many people did not get away, because they couldn't afford it. In comparison with the people on the estate, we were well off. Nobody else from round about went away for a week, let alone a fortnight. They stuck around the estate, and went places for the day; Southend, or the south coast from Waterloo, sometimes Sheerness from Victoria.

‘We used to take day trips of our own, to Littlehampton, Brighton or Bognor Regis, which was exciting in its own way, but there was such a lot of anticipation about the two weeks in Devon: we sent the trunk ahead for a start. Passenger Luggage in Advance. You'd put the labels on your trunk, and that was ever so exciting, because it meant holiday time was near, and then the week before you were going, you walked across Waterloo Bridge with Dad to the station, to buy the tickets.'

John Carnera's father, Secundo, was another who could not bear the thought of going without a holiday, but while the Jenkinses went to Devon, the Carneras had other destinations in mind. ‘My dad only had two places he wanted to go on holiday ever in his life. One was Sequals, in Italy, where we came from. We used to go every three years, because that's all we could afford, but when we went, it was for two or three months. We'd go in August and stay through the harvest period. That's when it was best to be in Italy, at harvest-time: the wine harvest, the corn, and all the rest of it.

‘And if we didn't go there, we used to go to Brighton. Dad
loved Brighton, and I loved the piers. I used to save up every year to spend time on the penny machines. My week's holiday at Brighton was spent on those machines. I used to hate the shingle beach, where you were – ow! ow! ow! – limping all the way down to the water's edge because of the stones, you know, then you'd get in and it was stone cold, absolutely freezing. It wasn't my idea of fun at all. I just wanted to go on one of the piers and spend all my pennies. I used to love that. There was the Executioner, where they cut off the bloke's head, shooting games where you had to shoot cats with a pistol, ones with ghosts coming out of cupboards and laughing policemen. One year, I saved three shillings and tenpence. You can't imagine how rich I felt, like a multimillionaire, and I could not wait to get on those machines. That three and ten was burning a hole in my pocket. I got rid of it in about two days, I think.'

As I researched this book, I came to realize that I was not only collecting stories about the way people lived in the forties, fifties and early sixties, but also stories of earlier generations, passed down from parents and grandparents and often taking them deep into the area's past. Ann Lee, for example, can trace an ancestor back to the Bow Street Runners – the family retains custody of the truncheon – and Mike O'Rouke's family were Covent Gardeners back to at least ‘great-grandfather days'. The Mann family business was set up in Monmouth Street in 1849 by Ronnie's great-great-grandfather.

I heard about the way people came to England with little or no money and no English at all, looking for work, working hard and setting up businesses. I heard stories of sacrifice, hard work and humour, of people doing the best they could to get by and to bring up families with pitifully few resources. Olga Jackson, for example, remembers how her grandparents lived: ‘My grandfather was a painter and decorator, and my grandmother did anything she could, and must have done that from a very early age, because she was so poor. I think she was a wet nurse at one time. She did everything. They lived in a flat in an apartment house, in Shelton Street. There was no running water, or toilet, or anything upstairs. They were four floors up and they had to go all the way down to the bottom just to get water. Every drop had to be dragged upstairs and lumped down again.'

Ann Lee told me about her mother's mother, who had brought up a large family in the Wild Street Buildings, despite being rendered briefly homeless when Hitler demolished J Block. The more I heard of Nan Glover, the more I liked her, and she'll turn up again in this book. For me, she sums up the stoicism, sensibilities and spirit of the working-class Londoners who lived through the wars and tried to make the best of the peace for their children and grandchildren. ‘My nan was such a darling. Cissie was her name, Cissie Glover. Well, Jessica really, but everybody called her Ciss. She had it hard, but I never, ever, heard her complain. She used to do three cleaning jobs a day to keep her family. Her husband cleared off and left her with seven kids. Well, he cleared off
and left her with five, and came back twice and left her with another one each time. And then he cleared off for good, to live, as my mother so delicately put it, with his old tart up at the top of Drury Lane. I never met him, I wasn't allowed – well, nobody had anything to do with him. But when Nanny talked about it, you could see she still loved him.

‘My grandfather died when I was thirteen. And his old tart came to my mum and said, “Your father's died,” and my mum said, “Yeah, and?” “Well,” said his tart, “he's gonna need burying.” “Let him have a pauper's grave then,” my mum said. “We don't want anything to do with him.” My mum, she hated him.

‘But then we went down to see Nanny and my mum told her “The old man's dead.”

‘Poor lamb, I'll never forget my old nan's face. It was a mixture of sadness and relief, and I said to her, “Are you all right?” and she went, “I'm all right, love. At least I know where he is, now.”'

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There were several rookeries in Covent Garden, the most famous being the one huddled around St Giles's church.

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Aldridges' Horse Repository was a very old established horse auctioneers, founded in 1753. Owen remembers that ‘Inside, the stalls where they used to stable the horses prior to them being auctioned – not racehorses, but working horses, cart-horses and so on – were all still there.'

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The copper was a boiler for heating large quantities of water for wash day. Shaped like a water butt, with a tap to draw off the water, they were heated from below with either gas jets or coal. You got your copper going early, and once the water was hot, drew it off in to buckets and carried it to the sink or tub where you were doing the washing. It was hard graft. The tenements had communal wash houses and a large copper: even new-built council houses in the late forties and fifties had smaller versions, until immersion heaters came along.

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Seven shillings and sixpence (37.5p) would have been roughly a tenth of the average weekly wage before the war, which for a man was around £4 per week – less for a woman.

One of the greatest contrasts between being a child in the fifties and today is how much freedom we enjoyed back then. We roamed all over the place and our free time was nowhere near as organized as kids' time is today. Lucky children might have had riding lessons, music lessons or dance, but most did not. The freedom to roam was possible because there was so little traffic. Even in Central London, seeing a car coming towards you as you played hopscotch or football in the street was the exception rather than the rule.

If we weren't at school, we spent very little time amusing ourselves at home. It wasn't just a case of there being no such things as computers or video games; lots of people didn't even have a television. Because television had been in its infancy when the war began, and the authorities had simply switched it off for the duration, it took a while to get going again. Most people had no access to one at all until
Coronation year, 1953. Even if your family did own a TV, there was hardly anything on. In the fifties, broadcasting hours were very limited indeed. Toys were at a premium, too, because materials and labour had been missing for so long. Once again, it took a while for imported materials to come through, although limited production did begin again in the late forties. Indoor space was limited for many families, especially those who had taken in homeless relatives who had been blitzed out of house and home. All these factors meant that the fifties child was an outdoors child.