Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (20 page)

A
s we moved towards the end of the 1950s and through the 1960s, with all food now off rationing and the days of austerity inflicted by the War receding fast, a general increase in prosperity and living standards led to a tangible upturn in the ease and comfort with which most people in our position lived. For us, it meant we saw a number of changes to our prefab and the way we lived our everyday lives. The most important were the ones that helped Mum and saved her from some of the hardest parts of her job as a housewife.

Probably the first major labour-saving device we bought was a washing machine. Dad had seen an advert in the newspaper for the new Rolls-Razor washing machine and had sent off the coupon asking for more information. But it wasn't just information he got, as a couple of days later a salesman arrived,
complete with a new twin tub washer drier, which he set up in the kitchen for us. It was something like half the price of the nearest equivalent Hotpoint or Hoover machine. The salesman told us they were able to do this as they sold direct to the public and not through shops. We could have it on hire purchase if we wanted, he added.

He was in and out of the house in less than half an hour and we had a new washing machine, bought for cash, as Dad didn't believe in hire purchase. Like a lot of people of his generation, he believed you should only buy something when you could afford it and not put yourself into debt. When the salesman had gone, Dad shook his head and said, ‘I didn't think I could fall for sales patter like that.' He was very concerned that he had been taken in by the speed of it all and began to regret buying it.

On the other hand, Mum was delighted. ‘It's just what I wanted,' she said. ‘It looks ideal to me.'

Dad needn't have worried as the washing machine worked perfectly until we left the prefab several years later. At a stroke, the new washing machine made the copper and the mangle redundant and made things much easier for Mum.

The other big job she had was cleaning out the coal fire every morning in winter and getting it ready for the evening. This was dealt with when we bought a new electric fire to place in the hearth. No more raking out the ashes, no more polishing and blacking the grate, no more getting the bucket of coal in from the shed. It was just a matter of flicking the switch now.

Along with the labour-saving devices, some of our rising prosperity was spent acquiring goods for our leisure activities. We got a new 21” television, a new, much smaller radio
and separate record player to take the place of the monster radiogram, giving us more space with no loss of quality (in fact, better quality) and the brand-new reel-to-reel tape recorder, mentioned earlier, which not only recorded off the radio but also allowed you to speak into it and then play your own voice back. Amazing!

But not everything made our lives easier. One Sunday morning, towards the end of December 1962, I got up out of bed to see everything outside completely covered in white. The snow had started just before I went to bed and was still coming down when I got up. And, judging by the depth, it hadn't stopped all night. Now inches thick, it was still falling.

‘Talk about “Rupert looked out on the dismal scene,”' said Dad, referring to the line from my old Rupert Bear annuals we still frequently quoted.

There was hardly any let up during the day, and the following morning, which was a Monday, Dad shook me awake early on and said, ‘Come on, we'll have to get that path clear.'

Although I was on school holiday, Mum and Dad were both due to go into work. Fortunately, it had stopped snowing at last and Dad and I got kitted up with warm clothes and wellies, got the garden spade and rake out of the shed and shovelled away the snow onto the grass. All along our row of prefabs, the other occupants were doing the same while across the road there was a similar scene. It seemed that everyone was out clearing the snow away. The road itself was covered in snow and I said to Dad, ‘How are you going to get to work?'

‘I'll have to drive, won't I?' he replied stoically. ‘Come on, help me clear the snow and ice off the car.'

The car itself was under so much snow you could hardly make out the shape but we cleared enough off for Dad to be able to see out the windows. After shovelling a bit of snow away from in front of the wheels, he got in, pulled the choke out and turned the key in the ignition. Amazingly, it roared into life first time of asking. He put it into gear and slowly drove off down the road, sliding and skidding as he went. I thought he was never going to make it and I was a bit worried about what would happen but he continued driving until I saw him turn the slight corner into Powerscroft Road and then he was gone from sight.

Not long after he went, Mum got all her winter clothes on and trundled off up Chatsworth Road to the toy factory just as it started to snow again.

Little did we know then that all this shovelling, sliding, skidding, winter clothes and going to work in the snow was to become our way of life for more than two months as our new electric fire was tested to its limits. From December 1962 to March 1963, Great Britain suffered the coldest and most prolonged winter since the seventeenth century. The bad winter had in fact begun early in December when thick smog descended on London. As it turned out this was the last of the pea-soupers to affect the city before the results of the Clean Air Act finally kicked in.

A few days later, there were a couple of days of snow, but the big freeze itself began on 22 December. Although bitterly cold, the snow did not start falling until late on Boxing Day, followed by a blizzard of Arctic proportions on the nights of 29 and 30 December. From that point on, there was a continual
covering of snow on the ground for over two months and yet, throughout it all, with plenty more heavy snowfalls and thick snow and ice lying on the ground, we managed to carry on. I don't think I missed school once during that period, though I was late on several occasions and we were sent home at lunchtime a number of times. As I wore my wellies to school every day, I had to take my shoes with me in my satchel.

Meanwhile, Mum and Dad continued to struggle into work every day, though there were a couple of times when Dad came home very late and said he'd had to abandon the car somewhere along the route as the snow was too deep. Which meant not only had he had to walk home in a blizzard but also he'd have to walk out in the snow the next day to find the car and hope it was all right.

We still managed to get to Chingford and London Bridge at the weekends. Most days I was still able to go out and see my friends or they were able to come to me. A lot of effort was put into keeping the roads clear, both by the authorities and by people themselves. We continued to get up and out early every morning to shovel the latest ice and snow from the path, as did all our neighbours. Nowadays, a few hours of snow, never mind months, seems to land the whole country in crisis.

The main thing that did suffer nationally was the football programme. Some clubs were unable to play any matches for over two months. It was during this period that the football pools companies introduced the Pools Panel to adjudicate on what the result would have been had the match been played. Rugby union, rugby league and horse racing all suffered in the same way.

It wasn't until 6 March 1963 that the overnight temperature rose above freezing for the first time, the snow began to thaw and within a few days it was all gone. Life returned to normal.

Although I tended not to go out shopping so much with my parents up Chats once I was into my teenage years, there were occasions during the holidays when I still accompanied Mum to Mare Street, mainly to go to Woolworths, though I still had to put up with her insistence on visiting Marks & Spencer.

During the 1960s, a number of changes came to Mare Street, the first being the opening of a new American-style restaurant. Until then, whenever we went to Mare Street, we normally stopped for elevenses, tea and cake in the A.B.C. Tea Shop. A.B.C. stood for Aerated Bread Company, though we often referred to it as the ‘Aeriated' Bread Company, which had the completely different meaning to a Cockney of being overexcited. This was a popular chain of teashops at the time, rivalling Lyons Corner Houses.

The first time I saw this new restaurant, I thought it looked very bright and welcoming, as opposed to the universal black and white decor of the A.B.C., so I said to Mum, ‘Can we go in there and see what it's like?'

‘I don't see why not,' she agreed and we ordered something called a Wimpy.

It was a hamburger, a delicacy we had never had before, and seemed to be a real taste of America. I thought it was absolutely delicious and from then on whenever we went to Mare Street we'd look in for a Wimpy, progressing to various Wimpy meals, which often included a ‘bender'. It was all new to me. It's hard to
imagine youngsters not knowing what an American hamburger is today.

Another new shop was a record shop that opened near Woolworths. It was here, at the age of thirteen, that I bought my first record. Was it Elvis Presley? Del Shannon? The Everly Brothers? Sadly not! It was ‘Please Mr Custer' by Charlie Drake. In mitigation of this lapse of taste, I think I should point out that the record did, in fact, reach number 12 in the British charts, so it wasn't just me.

Although not new, a big change took place at Sainsbury's as it was turned into a supermarket. In fact, Sainsbury's was the pioneer of supermarkets in this country and followed a visit to the United States by the company chairman, Alan Sainsbury, where he saw for himself the benefits of this type of shop for the customer and realised it was the future. As I mentioned earlier, both Victor Value and Tesco had already been converted into small self-service shops in Chatsworth Road but they were nothing like the scale of the Sainsbury's in Mare Street. One thing it did mean, though, was that there was no more butter patting or sugar poured out into conical bags. It was all in packets straight off the shelf now. The only grocer's shop in Hackney now selling groceries in the old-fashioned way was the Home and Colonial Stores in Chatsworth Road, but we hardly ever went in there.

One thing Victor Value and Tesco did, however, that Sainsbury's didn't do was to give away trading stamps. Victor Value was first with their ‘King Korn' stamps, but it was when Tesco started issuing ‘Green Shield Stamps' that this form of customer inducement really took off. The idea was that whenever
you bought an item in Tesco you were given so many Green Shield Stamps depending on the value of your purchases. These stamps were stuck in special books. Green Shield issued a catalogue stating how many books were needed for you to trade in for different items; these could range from very cheap items for just one or two books to more expensive items costing hundreds of books. You could order from the catalogue and have the item delivered or take your books to a Green Shield Stamp redemption centre. Our nearest centre was in Dalston and we often went there to trade in our books for small household items that we probably would not otherwise have purchased. For a while, these trading stamps, as well as ‘S&H Pink Stamps', a similar scheme backed by Fine Fare Supermarkets, were very popular and many people saved up their stamps to be able to obtain goods they might not normally have been able to afford.

It wasn't just Tesco who gave away these stamps, as many petrol filling stations and other smaller shops also participated in the scheme, but Tesco was by far their biggest customer and, when the supermarket chain pulled out in the late 1970s, it spelt the end for Green Shield Stamps, with the centres eventually becoming Argos catalogue shops.

What with staying on at school a couple of days a week and homework practically every night, something I hadn't encountered at Rushmore, I didn't get to see much children's television on my return home from school. On the brief occasions I was able to watch, I saw some new programmes take the place of old favourites.
Blue Peter
started in October 1958 and
Animal Magic,
starring Johnny Morris, in 1962. There were a number of new cartoon shows from the States, including
Huckleberry Hound,
featuring Yogi Bear, and
The Flintstones,
which I can remember seeing for the first time one evening while Dad was putting up the Christmas decorations. Another new cartoon show imported from America was
Top Cat,
which was called
The Boss Cat
in this country, even though the name Boss Cat was never used at any time during the programme itself and the main character was always known as Top Cat (or T.C.). The reason for this bizarre titling was that there was a brand of cat food called Top Cat on the market and the BBC didn't want to be seen to be advertising it.

In any case, as I grew into my teenage years, many of the children's programmes were now too young for me and as I was able to stay up later I looked forward to some of the early evening programmes. These included sitcoms such as
Bootsie and Snudge,
a spin-off from
The Army Game, The Charlie Drake Show
(‘Hello, my darlings!') and
Here's Harry,
starring Harry Worth, which became most famous for its opening title sequence showing Harry stopping in the street to perform an optical trick next to a shop window in which he would raise one arm and one leg. This was reflected in the window, giving the impression that he was able to levitate. Along with most of the rest of the country I suppose, my friends and I tried to copy this when we were out on the street. In fact, the action became known as ‘doing a Harry Worth'. There were also a number of comedy variety shows starring British icons of comedy, including Tommy Cooper and Morecambe & Wise.

There were some new exciting adventure series such as
The Avengers,
starring Patrick Macnee as John Steed, which after one or two series morphed into an eccentric and surreal fantasy
escapade with Macnee supported by a succession of intelligent and self-assured female assistants including Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson. Another new stylish adventure series,
Danger Man,
starring Patrick McGoohan, also eventually turned into an even more bizarre flight of fancy when McGoohan became
The Prisoner
– ‘I am not a number!' It seemed that, while, on the one hand, television was getting away from the comfortable middle-class entertainment of the 1950s by putting on more down-to-earth gritty dramas,
Coronation Street, Z-Cars
and
Armchair Theatre,
for example, there was a balancing movement right at the other end of the scale, taking the viewer into a completely illusory and dreamlike world. Perhaps this was reflective of the fact that more and more people were able to afford televisions and both the BBC and ITV realised they had to cater for all tastes rather than the limited numbers of reasonably well-off people who could afford it in the 1950s and also that there was now competition for viewers.