Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (9 page)

The only other shops we occasionally used on this side of the road were Macefield's, a dark and dingy stationer, and Bowman's, a clothes outfitters where I was taken every now and then to be fitted up for new shirts and short trousers.

The two shops in Chatsworth Road we fortunately never needed to go into were the two pawnbroker's shops with their three balls hanging up outside. To many, including my family and our neighbours, they were a reminder of the dark days of the 1930s Depression and most people lived in real fear of having to use their services. The windows were full of watches, rings and bracelets that must have once been someone's treasured possession. It was all very sad. We never bought anything from them, as my parents were acutely aware that those objects were only there through other people's misfortune.

On Saturday, the streets would be lined with all manner of market stalls. We bought smoked haddock from the fishmonger's stall, and Mum used to linger for ages at the haberdashery stall, where she would buy sewing materials and wool. The wool came in twisted skeins, so when she bought some I knew that would mean that some time later in the day I would be sat in an armchair with the skein draped round my outstretched arms while she unwound it to make it into a ball.

Mum spent most of her evenings knitting things for Dad or John or me, but very rarely for herself. She also darned all our socks. It's easy to forget in today's throwaway society that socks were hardly ever discarded. If a hole – known as a ‘potato' – appeared in the heel, it was darned, and if a hole appeared in
that it was darned again and again and again. It was very rare for a pair of socks to actually be thrown away. Dad always wore what he called ‘army grey' socks.

One stall I particularly remember was the one belonging to the cat's meat man. This wasn't an open stall like all the others but a narrow enclosed trailer with a counter cut into the side. Here you could buy fresh meat for your cat, liver and such like, but our cat preferred Kit-e-Kat.

After returning from shopping on a Saturday morning, Dad and I would usually watch sport on television. They had some really interesting sport in those days which you never see onscreen now, such as hill climbing, when cars would try to get up a steep muddy hill and whoever got the furthest won. There was a driver and a passenger and the car would always start off okay, but would then reach a particularly muddy or steep part, at which point the driver and passenger would bounce up and down in the car trying to get some grip, but usually to no avail as it slid gracefully back down the hill. Motorcycle scrambling was another favourite of mine.

The unfaltering routine was that, at about three o'clock, Dad and I would go to visit his parents, known to me as Nanny and Grandpa Jacobs, while Mum usually visited her parents, Nanny and Grandpa Sinnott. I never ever went with Mum to visit them – it was always off to Chingford Hatch with Dad.

In fact, I never saw much of any of Mum's family. They hardly ever visited us and we rarely visited them either. She had five brothers and sisters but I only ever met three of them. Her father's side were from Co. Wexford in Ireland. My great-great-grandfather had been a blacksmith but my great-grandfather
was a bit of a rogue and had spent a year in prison for getting married bigamously. On release, he went off with his ‘second' wife and no one in the family ever saw or heard from him again. My grandfather was from his first marriage and he and his five brothers and two sisters lived with their mother in Hoxton in London. He was a naval man and had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War. After the War, he became a lockkeeper with the Port of London Authority. Nanny Sinnott was born in Pittsburgh, USA, in 1890, but her parents were both English and had only moved to America the year before her birth. Her male ancestors had been in the carpentry trade for at least two hundred years. When she was four, the family, which consisted of her parents, her three sisters and her twin brother, returned to Britain.

Very shortly after I was born, as part of the re-housing programme, which saw us get our prefab, Dad's parents, along with their two remaining ‘at home' children, Uncle Bob and Aunt Clara, also moved out of their Bethnal Green flat. No prefab for them, they were housed in a new London County Council estate called the Friday Hill Estate in the leafy suburb of Chingford Hatch in Essex. Unbeknown to them I am sure, the building of the estate had been the subject of great controversy when first mooted. The good citizens of Chingford were not overjoyed at the prospect of a beauty spot being turned into a housing estate for East Enders, especially as many of them were ‘not of British origin', which was a polite euphemism for being Jewish. However, in spite of the opposition, the estate was built and my grandparents now found themselves in a luxurious three-bedroom terraced house with a ground-floor
passageway leading to a substantial back garden, making it semi-detached downstairs. The house was a far cry from the cramped conditions that they had known for all of their married lives, surrounded by flats and more flats in the heart of the East End. These houses even had an inside toilet and bathroom, an unheard-of luxury.

So, every Saturday afternoon, we would get the 35 bus at the stop on Lea Bridge Road and make the thirty-minute journey to visit my grandparents. We always took a small box of iced cakes as our contribution to the tea we would be getting when we arrived. In the early days, Grandpa, Uncle Bob and Aunt Clara were still working, and weren't always in when we arrived. Saturday was also visiting day for my uncle Albert and his wife, Aunt Evelyn, and eventually their children, my cousins Barbara and David, so I got to know them very well. But because Sunday was the day set aside for Uncles Joe and David to visit I never saw much of them. Dad had two more siblings who didn't have a regular visiting day, so I didn't see much of them either during this period. They were Aunt Julie, who lived with her husband, Isaac, and their four children in a prefab in Bethnal Green, and Uncle Bill, who was registered blind and was going through a lot of domestic difficulties at the time, eventually leading to a divorce from his wife, Sally. Following the divorce, he moved to a flat in Clapton, which meant that I did get to see more of him later on.

My memory of those afternoons and evenings in Chingford is that they always followed the same pattern. First, we would get a cup of tea on arrival and then a bit later, once Grandpa had arrived home, full tea would be served. The tea would consist
of rollmop herrings, gefilte fish, bagels (pronounced ‘bygles', please!) with cream cheese and smoked salmon. There was a big plate of watercress, bread and butter and, of course, our plate of cakes, all washed down with copious cups of tea. My favourite thing to do at those Saturday teas was to make myself a watercress sandwich.

Although not in the least bit religious, my grandparents were very proud of being Jewish and clung as much as they could to their roots, even though they were now probably the only Jewish family in the street. They still spoke some Yiddish and words like
Mazel Tov
(good luck),
nosh
(used both as a noun meaning a snack or as a verb meaning to eat),
schlep
(used as a noun to mean a long journey or as a verb meaning to carry something for some distance),
shtick
(used by us to mean laugh) and many others were in everyday use at my grandparents' house.

There was another discrepancy in their language compared to that used in our house, which was that they were not averse to using the odd swear word, something Mum and Dad never did. Never once did I hear them swear when I was growing up, but my nan in particular was forever calling someone an ‘old bugger', while my aunt would join in with the view that someone was a ‘cocky sod' or some such.

One thing that wasn't different about their language was that they spoke a lot of cockney rhyming slang but this was nothing new to me as Dad used it all the time. Words and phrases such as ‘Almonds' [almond rocks] for socks, ‘Sky Rocket' for pocket, ‘Mincers' [mince pies] for eyes, ‘Barnet' [Barnet Fair] for hair and many more were commonplace in both our houses.

As well as language, there were other big differences between
their house and ours. The first was they had an upstairs, which was where their toilet was. In my young days, I was a bit scared of going upstairs as it was usually quite dark and my imagination conjured up ghosts that could jump out at me. I used to avoid going to the toilet as much as I could. There was one occasion when I really wanted to go but was trying to put it off. Dad noticed this and said to me, ‘He's gone on holiday. I saw him packing his case earlier and going out the front door, so he won't be there tonight if you want to do a wee.'

The second difference was that my grandparents, aunt and uncle all smoked. Nan in particular was a chain-smoker; she was hardly ever without a Player's Weight or a Woodbine in her mouth. (In case you're wondering, she lived until she was eighty-nine!) My aunt favoured Bachelor's, while Grandpa and Uncle Bob preferred to roll their own. Neither of my parents smoked, so there was an unusually foggy atmosphere inside my grandparents' house.

The third difference, and one that continually amazed me, was that there was not a single book in their house. The only reading material they had was the
Daily Mirror,
with the ‘Old Codgers' letters column. We had hundreds of books at home. As well as Dad's classical literature, my brother and I had lots of children's books of our own. I could never understand how my grandparents could possibly go through life without reading anything. Even at a very young age, this struck me as being quite strange.

One final difference between their house and ours was that they had a telephone. We never had one all the time we lived in the prefab, but Nan and Grandpa had one right from
when they first moved to Chingford. Their phone number was Silverthorn 6290. If we wanted to use the phone when we were at home, we had to use one of the red telephone boxes that were then common around the streets of East London. Outside Rushmore Road School, there were two red boxes with a blue police box in the middle – not the TARDIS, but a real phone box used by the police.

One day after school, when I was about ten, I had to phone Dad at work to remind him to bring a piece of wood home with him as he had promised to make me a toy boat. As I went to use the phone, all my friends crowded round as it was unusual for a ten-year-old to do so and it made me feel a bit grown up. At that time you put your tuppence in the pay slot, dialled the number and when someone answered you had to press Button A, the money then dropped and the call was put through. If no one answered, you pressed Button B and got your money back. So, with all my friends looking on, I dialled the number and someone answered, so I pressed Button A. Unfortunately, it was the wrong number and a complete stranger answered so I lost my money and didn't have any more. My friends were not impressed by my first attempt at using a phone! Everything ended happily, however, when Dad brought the piece of wood home anyway.

After tea, we'd usually watch television.
Wyatt Earp
was a favourite, as was, in my younger days,
Whirligig,
introduced by Humphrey Lestocq and featuring Mr Turnip and Hank the cowboy, who was always having trouble with Mexican Pete, ‘zee bold bandit'. Another favourite was
Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
, with the splendid Gerald Campion: ‘I say, you chaps,
Yaroooo!' Watching telly would usually be accompanied by a glass of Cydakin, a fizzy apple drink.

In summer, I might go out into the garden, especially after Barbara was old enough to play. Grandpa was a good gardener. There were flowers as well as some vegetable patches, including a runner bean trellis. They also kept a few chickens. Dad told me that before the War his grandfather had kept chickens in his backyard in Whitechapel, but could never bring himself to kill them so he had to call on his son, Woolf, my great-uncle, to perform the deed whenever they fancied some chicken soup. I don't know what Grandpa did as Uncle Woolf lived nowhere near Chingford, but I did notice a rapid turnover in chickens when I visited so I guess he wasn't quite so squeamish as his father.

If I stayed in, I'd usually spend some time talking to Grandpa, who was very keen on boxing and knew all about the history of the sport. We often discussed such weighty questions as ‘Who was the greatest ever?' and so on. It gave me a big interest in the sport and, by the age of seven, I could name all the current world champions and a good many of the former champions too. Of course, it was a lot easier then as there was only one world controlling body and eight weights, so there were only eight champions to remember. At the time of writing, with the multiplicity of ruling bodies and plethora of weights, there are currently eighty-seven different world boxing champions!

Although they had no books, they did have a piano and sometimes we would sit round it, having a bit of a family singsong. Nan was the piano player – she couldn't read a note of music but could play anything you asked her to. The biggest
favourites were the old Music Hall songs. Grandpa's favourite artistes were Eugene Stratton and Gus Elen, one of whose most famous songs was ‘If It Wasn't for the 'Ouses In Between', which was very appropriate for our gatherings as one of the verses was:

But his favourite song was Billy Merson's ‘The Spaniard That Blighted My Life', which he would deliver with great gusto.

Sometimes I would tinker around on the piano and was very pleased with myself one day when I managed, quite by chance, to knock out the first few notes of ‘Three Coins in the Fountain' (in the right order, as Eric Morecambe might have said!), a very popular song of the day.