Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (11 page)

The top game in the league each week was played at Leyton F.C.'s football ground behind the Hare and Hounds pub in Lea Bridge Road, a bus ride away from our house. This was a proper football ground with a small stand. If it was a match
we particularly wanted to see, we were prepared to fork out the small admission charge even though the matches on the Marshes were free. One of the regular spectacles at the Hare and Hounds was the sight of Alfie Stokes, a prominent Tottenham Hotspur player of the time, in the crowd, running a book on the result. There was a continuous stream of people going up to him throughout the game, asking, ‘What's the odds, Alfie?'

On summer Sundays, we sometimes used to get the bus to Epping Forest. At that time, some services were extended to run to the forest, so the 35, which normally only went as far as Chingford Hatch, was extended to High Beech, in the heart of the forest. And we would also catch the 38A to the exotic-sounding Loughton and have a look round. We might also go ‘down the Lane'. This was Petticoat Lane, the famous market street in Whitechapel. For Dad, this was like a return home as he and his family had originally come from the Aldgate/Whitechapel area and could date their ancestry in the area back to the 1660s.

One particular ancestral line, the Belascos, must have been among the very first Jews to be allowed into this country under Oliver Cromwell (Jews had been expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and were not allowed back until the 1650s). Records show that my eight-times great-grandfather, Miyara Belasco, was born in London c.1670, the son of Portuguese-Jewish immigrants. He may have been a night watchman at the Jewish cemetery in London, certainly a number of his descendants were.

In the early nineteenth century, Aby Belasco became a famous boxer, who was once described as ‘a boxer of superior talent, a
master of the science, not wanting for game, not deficient in strength, of an athletic make, a penetrating eye, and in the ring full of life and activity'. After he retired, he became a licensed victualler in Whitechapel but sadly he lost all the money he had made boxing and descended into being ‘a keeper of low gambling houses, night houses, supper rooms, and such like resorts of midnight and morning debauchery, which brought him into repeated conflicts with the law', as he was once described. His brother, Samuel, was transported to Australia for seven years for picking pockets but generally my ancestors were more law-abiding, if poor, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were mostly market traders selling general goods, second-hand clothes and fruit, most probably in the very same Petticoat Lane Market we were now visiting. The first actual Jacobs ancestor arrived here in the late eighteenth century as an immigrant from Germany. All my Jewish ancestral lines show early settlement in this country and were well settled here long before the main influx of Jews from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. In fact, Nan didn't have a lot of time for the ‘newcomers' and often referred to them as ‘Polacks', whichever country they actually came from.

On Sunday mornings, this market was the vibrant hub of the East End, with thousands of visitors from all over the world jostling for a good look at the wares on offer. Dad used to look for bargains of any sort – he wasn't fussy what it was so long as it was good value. We'd also look in on the nearby Brick Lane Flower Market and the animal market in Club Row. You would always hear the animal market long before you could actually see anything, as there would be a cacophony of howling dogs,
together with a chorus of bird song. At the market itself, there would be dogs of every breed, size, colour and temperament, along with row upon row of cages, containing exotic birds from all around the world. It was like being transported to a foreign country and I would imagine myself in the African jungle or on a boat travelling up the Amazon, listening to all these beautiful songbirds.

In spite of the excitement engendered by all of this, my favourite stop was at Woolf Rees's drinks stall. Here you would find a wide variety of different types of juice and squashes. For someone mainly used to orange squash, it was stunning to see such a plethora of different colours and flavours. My favourite was what I called the ‘red drink', which was actually raspberry juice. Boy, it tasted good!

Occasionally, on our visits to Petticoat Lane we would see the famous racing-tipster known as Ras Prince Monolulu. He was a well-known flamboyant figure, who carried a huge shooting stick-cum-umbrella and wore an ostentatious ostrich feather headdress, a multi-coloured cloak and gaiters and a huge scarf wrapped around his waist. As he strode along the street he would exclaim, ‘I gotta horse, I gotta horse', which meant that he would let you have the name of a ‘sure-fire' winner in an upcoming horse race for a small consideration.

Although he styled himself ‘Ras Prince', he was in fact born Peter Carl McKay in 1881 and was originally from the US Virgin Islands. He arrived in Britain in 1902 and, after a year of mostly menial work, managed to join the chorus of the first all-black West End musical show,
In Dahomey.
When it came to the end of its run, he went to Europe as an entertainer in a
travelling roadshow. After the First World War, he began work for an Irish tipster but quickly went solo and took to shouting, ‘I gotta horse' after seeing the religious revivalist Gypsy Daniels shouting, ‘I've got heaven' to attract his crowds. In 1920, he reputedly won £8,000 on the Derby when he put all his money on an unfancied horse called Spion Kop and his reputation as a tipster was sealed.

One morning, he strode right up to Dad and me and stopped in front of us. He looked at me and said, ‘I gotta horse… but I also gotta penny and you can have it.' And he gave me a shiny new penny. That must have been the first time I ever met anyone famous and I got a penny for it too.

On our return from football, Epping Forest or the Lane, Dad would put the gramophone on – nearly always Gilbert and Sullivan, of course. The only LPs we had were Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Generally, our records were the commonly available 78 r.p.m. These could be 7”, 10” or 12”, playing from about two to five minutes per side. Such records were usually sold separately, in brown paper or cardboard sleeves that were sometimes plain and sometimes printed to show the producer or the retailer's name. Generally, the sleeves had a circular cutout, allowing the record label to be seen. Again most of these were Gilbert and Sullivan recordings. We did have a number of other classical recordings as well, though no popular music; also a couple of curious records, which were HMV sampler records and contained several tracks, each playing about thirty seconds or even less of a particular song.

At the end of each track, there was a spoken announcement that the full version was available on such and such HMV
catalogue number. We had one devoted entirely to G&S and another to other songs. The only one I can remember on this was Noël Coward's ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen'. I also had a couple of children's records. One was the Henry Hall Orchestra playing ‘The Teddy Bears' Picnic' with ‘Here Comes the Bogeyman' on the reverse and the other was Mel Blanc singing the Bugs Bunny song ‘I'm Glad to Be the Way I Am', with Sylvester and Tweety Pie on the reverse, singing, ‘I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat'.

The 78s were made of shellac (a naturally found plastic made from insect resin, which was used in the production of gramophone records from the late nineteenth century until vinyl began to replace it in the late 1950s), which made them very fragile, and many were the records that broke and had to be thrown away. The other problem with these old records was the number of needles you'd get through. It was recommended that one needle only be used for one or two plays and then discarded. Using it a third time could damage the grooves on the record, but we often chanced it on the grounds of saving money. Needles came in boxes of 50 or 100.

While listening to the music, Dad would be getting Sunday lunch ready. It was always Dad who did that job and not Mum. Like my aunt and uncle when they came in from work, we too quite often had lokshen soup. Bought chickens at that time weren't like the prepackaged, prepared chickens you buy today, and the first thing Dad had to do was pluck all the feathers and singe the chicken with a lighted piece of paper to get off the ‘stubble'. He would then open it up and take out the giblets and, quite often, some eggs. These came in varying
sizes, from tiny up to full-size with a shell on, although this was something of a rarity. The giblets and those eggs big enough to eat were thrown into the cooking pot with the chicken. This was boiled up and served as in my grandparents' house. I was always given all the eggs and usually the liver, while the other giblets were shared out between Mum and Dad, Dad always having the neck.

About one Sunday a month, we had a roast dinner. Pork, lamb and beef all took their turn, along with roast potatoes and, usually, cabbage. Occasionally we had salt beef but this needed a bit of planning and preparation as Mum had to go to the butcher's to pick out a piece of beef the week or even two weeks before we had it. The butcher then pickled the beef in brine for at least a week – ten days was better – and we would pick it up on the Saturday, ready to have on Sunday. This was always served with pease pudding, cabbage and carrots. When we had a roast or salt beef, I was sent across to Pete's off-licence to get a bottle of fizzy drink.

Sunday lunch was always accompanied by the radio. Our favourite programmes were the sit-coms of the day and included
Educating Archie
starring Peter Brough, the world's worst ventriloquist, and his dummy, Archie Andrews. When we saw him on television, we realised just why he appeared mainly on the radio! This show introduced a number of young comedians to a wider audience, including Tony Hancock, Benny Hill, Dick Emery and Max Bygraves, who created two long-lasting catchphrases, ‘I've arrived and to prove it I'm here!' and ‘A good idea, son!' Other Sunday lunchtime listening in the fifties included
Life with the Lyons,
starring Ben Lyon, Bebe Daniels
and their children, Richard and Barbara,
Take it From Here
with Jimmy Edwards, Dick Bentley and June Whitfield, and
A Life of Bliss
featuring George Cole, Nora Swinburne and Esmond Knight, with Percy Edwards as Psyche the dog. The other must-listen-to programme was
Two-Way Family Favourites,
a record request programme for those serving in the armed forces abroad, mainly in Germany, and their families at home.

After dinner, we would usually settle down to some family games. As I got older, these became more complicated. When I was five or six, this would mostly be snap or old maid, or some such, but, as I grew older, the card games became more taxing, rising up through knock-out whist and rummy to cribbage and, of course, clobby. Being a woodcarver, Dad had produced a beautifully carved cribbage board, which we used for scoring.

Sometimes, though it was quite rare, we would go and visit another member of the family on Sunday afternoon. On one occasion when I was about six, I was told we were going to visit my aunt Sally (Mum's sister). This disruption to my routine was not met with enthusiasm. ‘Do we have to go?' I complained. Dad's reply was: ‘Put your coat on.' So, reluctantly and dragging my feet as much as I could, I accompanied my parents to the bus stop, where we got the bus to Bethnal Green Underground station and caught the Tube. But when we got to Aunt Sally's I discovered that I had a cousin, John, who was about a year younger than me and had the biggest collection of toys of anyone I knew. When the time came to go home, I was playing with his fire engine and I said, ‘Do we have to go?' Dad's reply, somewhat predictably, was: ‘Put your coat on.'

Our most frequent visits were to Uncle Albert, Dad's
brother. He lived in an old Victorian two-bedroom terraced house in Jane Street, Stepney. The house was a real throwback to the bad old days as it had no bathroom and no inside toilet and a very small scullery masquerading as a kitchen. It was very cramped; a situation made worse by the fact that Aunt Evelyn's mother was living with them. Always referred to as ‘Mrs Margetts' by my uncle and my cousin Barbara, she had one tooth in the middle of her mouth and that was it. I never saw her wear dentures. One time when we had tea there, we saw her put a pickled onion in her mouth and try to lance it with her one tooth. She missed and the onion shot out onto the table. But she was nothing if not a trier and this attempt to spear the pickled onion was repeated several times before she finally managed it. I could see my parents finding it very difficult to keep a straight face.

Only once can I remember us visiting someone who wasn't a relative and this was when Dad took us to meet one of his old army friends, Harry Hudson. Harry lived in an old Victorian terraced house, much like Uncle Albert's. He had a teenage son, also called Harry, so he was referred to as ‘Harry Half', or, in their cockney accent, ‘'Arry 'arf', to distinguish him from the head of the household. Their house had a very narrow passageway leading from the scullery to the living room, wide enough for just one person at a time, so any time anyone left the scullery to go to the living room, or vice versa, they would shout that they were on their way to prevent anyone else from making the journey in the opposite direction. Quite often during that afternoon visit we heard the cry, ‘'Arry 'Arf comin' frough!'

But normally we stayed at home on Sunday afternoons. Sunday teatime was usually a bit of a fishy affair, with either sardines on toast or a mixture of shellfish we had bought from an itinerant street vendor who used to come down our street most Sundays, selling winkles, shrimps, cockles, mussels and whelks. We'd sometimes buy a selection of these delicacies and have them with bread and butter. Personally, I could never get to grips with winkles as they were too fiddly, having to extricate the little bit of meat there was from a shell with a safety pin. John amused the family by making winkle sandwiches. He'd spend what seemed like hours taking the winkles out and then lining them up on a piece of bread. I can't remember how many made up one sandwich but it was a fair few!