As Luck Would Have It

Nor have I championed anything, nor been a martyr to anything – no, and I’ve never been much of a mover or a shaker either, always a follower. If I haven’t suffered enough – mea culpa, I pray I might be forgiven, for isn’t it the dogma of today that to be taken really seriously you have to have suffered? But I haven’t and I can’t help it!

Our terraced house in Essex Road was built in red and brown brick, with an iron gate and tiny paved area in front, bay windows, yellow and red brick features and some fancy stuccoed panels: an average, lower-middle-class property. There were three bedrooms upstairs, Mum and Dad’s, mine, and a spare room. At the back was a modest garden where, as I grew into childhood, I used to run around with friends and knock tennis balls about.

Mum and Dad bought the house before my birth, when George VI was on the throne. They paid £800 for the freehold and it took them twenty-five years to pay off the mortgage. They told me later that when they moved in there were green fields and cows opposite, but these were soon replaced by the inevitable blocks of flats. I don’t remember any green fields or herds of cows, so for me these flats were always there.

The front room was where we went into on Sundays, the special day, the day of rest, although Mum and Dad rarely if ever went to church. It was the room where the best furniture was kept, well dusted and tidy. Where we played and listened to the gramophone records. Where the cocktail cabinet, the central feature of the front room, was stationed, and where Mum and Dad would display the drinks – which would never be drunk most of the year. The expectations of booze, of parents with their gin and tonics or their nightly glasses of wine, not to mention six pints downed at the pub, were never there for any of us – so different from the way it is for many children born today.

The exception was of course at Christmas, when the cherry brandy would be poured, and then imbibed to celebrate the tree lights being switched on. The radiogram cabinet was huge, almost as big as a sideboard. It housed the sole piece of broadcasting equipment – the sacred wireless, with white buttons and dials to twirl and press, and rasps and crackles of static and a muddle and jumble of strange tongues, like Pentecost, to which we all listened dutifully, even religiously. There were just three channels – the Home Service, the Third Programme and the Light Programme – and that was all there was, well before television came along. The notion of constant choice and switching channels just didn’t enter into it.

And so it stayed like that for many years, until I was ten – and to begin with, and for life ever after, the first outlet of my romantic feelings and love was for Mum and Dad, whose whole focus was on me.

Being a happy child and belonging to a small, close-knit family as I did, my memories of childhood mostly centre around the other members of my family who lived locally. There was Grandpa and Grandma, Dad’s parents; Dad’s brother – Uncle Henry; his wife – Auntie Hilda; and their son Raymond. All five of them lived on two floors in Poplars Road, off Baker’s Arms, which was twenty minutes’ walk away in Leyton. Grandpa and Grandma lived upstairs, the others on the ground floor. Grandma Sarah was tiny. She and Grandpa Henry were very sweet, kind and gentle.

In the wider family circle my cousin Michael (son of my mother’s brother Alfred) and Vicky, his sister, lived just down the road, too. Alf Two was very close to Dad. Tall and gangling with dark hair, he was a builder and later built the lean-to or conservatory on the back of our house. He was Mum’s favourite brother, a joker who would have us in fits, but he liked to gamble, and on more than one occasion – as I found out later – got himself into ‘a spot of bovver’. One day after the war he suddenly took off with his wife and two children without telling a soul, and sailed for Australia. Mum was heartbroken. On discovering they had gone she came back from their house furious and upset.

We went round and found the house empty. They really had gone. I think this must have been another ‘spot of bother’ – he’d got himself into a state over money. Even before they left my parents had the feeling that there was something ‘not quite right’, and were suspicious about what was going on in Uncle Alf’s immediate family. Mum wasn’t too keen on the Beardmores, as the family her brother married into were called, and we were all a bit doubtful about them. I grew up wary of the Beardmores: not because they were unfriendly or uncommunicative, but because they were a little odd and eccentric.

There was a brother of my maternal grandmother – a great-uncle who was known as Gaga. He sat around in Hackney and did nothing, but on Dad’s side Grandpa had six brothers, one of whom was a well-known architect called Julius Jacobi who built some of the first skyscrapers in London, although we never knew him or the other Jacobis.

A remarkable feature of Aunt Hilda’s household was the one outside toilet to which I’d head to answer the call of nature. When I was ready I’d call out, ‘I’m ready, Aunt Hilda!’ – the call I made for Auntie to come and wipe my bottom. Grandpa, who was a cobbler and worked for Dolcis all his life, had a shed in the garden to ply his trade and mend our shoes; this was his holy of holies, where he kept all his cobbling tools – I treasure to this day a metal last as a doorstop.

Not only was there no toilet in the house, but also no bathroom. We took our immersions in a tin bath, filled it up with hot water once a week, with a fire blazing in the hearth to keep us warm. But did we feel deprived? Did we feel others had more than we did? Never – it never once crossed our minds.

Mum’s maiden name was Daisy Gertrude Masters. I knew nothing about her paternal background, but her grandmother had the unlikely name of Salomé Lapland, so heaven knows where she came from – most likely from the frozen north – and for all I knew the family could have been gypsies. She had some French relations somewhere, and there were two adored brothers. There were no actors or anyone remotely like artists in her family. She would later claim that my artistic temperament came from her side, for an aunt of hers played the piano!

Mum was pretty, she had a round face, while her hair had turned white when she was in her twenties. She was very conscious of her hair and would go to the hairdressers once a week in Leyton. Dad and I had an old-fashioned barber who lived next door and who would come in once a week to cut our hair. We would lay out newspapers in our front room to collect the cuttings.

I never remember what people look like, but I do remember their voices. The barber had a voice like my uncle Henry, which I learned later had been the result of diphtheria when he was young. It was adenoidal, strained, and he spoke very high, at the top of his throat. His throat had been burned away, or cauterised.

Both my parents were born in Hackney in the same year, 1910. Mum and Dad met first as teenagers, while very much later, in their forties, they both worked at Garnham’s department store in Walthamstow High Street, where Dad managed the crockery and hardware department and Mum was the boss’s secretary and a department supervisor.

‘It was the scout uniform,’ she would say. ‘To woo me your dad had a motorbike with a sidecar. He would come and collect me, and we would go out together.’

They had a modest wooing, with her on the pillion or sidecar. Sometimes my Auntie Hilda and Uncle Henry joined them.

War was declared in September 1939, a month before my first birthday. My memories go back to sitting in a pram when we first heard the air-raid sirens. Mum grabbed hold of me, swaddled and wrapped me up, then rushed me down the steps into the Anderson shelter.

I liked the wail of the sirens and never felt fear. Although we didn’t live in the area of dense, blanket bombing or the fire bombs that set the whole of Docklands on fire, there were explosions enough – flashes, sirens, wailing searchlights crossing the sky and picking out planes and barrage balloons. Somehow I was never affected. I was too young to feel or understand violent death and destruction as a presence.

Dozens of kids from where I lived were sent away in the early months of war with labels round their necks and a single change of clothing, accompanied by teachers, to board with strangers, but with no guarantee they could stay even with brothers and sisters, and not knowing when they would next see their fathers and mothers.

This never happened to me. I never stood on a station platform looking lost and forlorn with a label round my neck.

During the Blitz in 1940–41 I was still in Leytonstone. Dad, being over thirty, wasn’t called up for a while and, like millions of others, dug out and built an Anderson shelter in the back garden. It was purpose-made from sheets of corrugated iron bent into a semi-circular shape. Dad set it over a concrete base embedded two or three feet in the ground. It had no soak-away, but it had bunk beds on either side making four beds in total. Like others, Dad covered it with earth and a little rock garden: planting aubretia, roses, Canterbury bells and geraniums.

I’m not sure if this camouflage decoration put off the Boche from dropping bombs on us. During the raids we were hunched up with sopping feet in the Anderson, which every now and then shook and quaked in the depths from after-shock. I heard later that when I was three one huge bomb fell just hundreds of yards down our road at the junction of Essex Road with Crieg Road in front of the Leyton High School for Boys, gouging out a vast crater.

Grandpa and Grandma were mainly with us during the Blitz. Grandpa stood outside the shelter and stationed himself as if on guard. I can’t say what he thought he would be able to do if a bomb fell on us. I do remember later that if anyone farted in the shelter they were made to stand outside – expelled as a punishment. Perhaps this was what Grandpa kept doing!

Soon I would go away, too; that was inevitable. But to where, and with whom?

2 (#ulink_591c2455-a740-5d90-a105-e2f9faeb5697)

OUR WAR (#ulink_591c2455-a740-5d90-a105-e2f9faeb5697)

Dad was called up into the army and left us in 1941, but as he had bunions so badly (at one time he was in Croft’s Hospital with them, where they cared for him in the maternity ward!) he was never sent abroad to a war zone. As a humble private he served in the Royal Army Service Corps at postings in Scotland, Wales and the South.

When Hitler threatened to invade England Dad was stationed on Clapham Common, pasting up and setting out dummy tanks and guns of painted cardboard on the Common. They used lorries and dug tracks in the ground to make it all look real, so the Luftwaffe flying above would think we were heavily fortified.

Uncle Henry joined the Catering Corps. He was stationed at Reykjavik in Iceland. Later he was posted to a barracks in Buckinghamshire, so eventually – after the Blitz and not necessarily for my safety – Hilda took Raymond and me to stay with her not far from him in Little Brick Hill, a village outside Bletchley, near Cosgrave. We lived upstairs in the village pub. Mum stayed behind in Essex Road working, so she was very lonely and of all of us most exposed to danger. She’d come out to see us at Little Brick Hill whenever she could, and this was always a treat.

But my life with cousin Raymond was quite the opposite.

Raymond and I were billeted together in the pub, sharing a room. My cousin Raymond was six or seven years older than me and I spent a lot of my childhood years with him. Auntie Hilda treated me with kid gloves – she would love the Jesus out of me – while Raymond got the rough end of her tongue. It was he, not me, the golden boy, who always seemed to come in for it.

Not long before we were evacuated there was one hell of a ruction which I will never forget. I was round at Poplars Road and Auntie Hilda asked Raymond to take a jar of precious jam through to the front room and put it in the cabinet where she stored the best pieces. He picked up the jar and pranced up the passageway, puffed up with airs and graces as he went, possibly the more so as I was watching, but as he came through into the front room the lid spun off the jam, and the jam shot out of the jar all over and up the wall. Hilda was so furious that she completely lost her rag and knocked him to kingdom come.

‘Auntie, Auntie, stop it, stop it!’ I screamed, as I stood by terrified.

Now that we were living together in Little Brick Hill, Raymond at last had me in his power and at night under the bedclothes he had the chance to take his revenge. He would scare and terrorise me, tickling me, pummelling me, playing at ‘tortures’ under the sheets.

‘Why can’t he stop trying to frighten me all the time?’ I remember thinking. ‘I am so much younger than him, so why is he tormenting me so much?’

It was pretty obvious to someone a bit older. With hindsight I could quite understand him wanting revenge on me. I was treated as the special one, the one apart from the rest of the family, while Raymond was the ‘bloke’, the laddish one. Later I realised that I was always accepted as the one who didn’t quite fit in, who wasn’t going to take an ordinary route through life.

One day we went apple scrumping together in the orchard of a big house where a grand lady lived – a highly dangerous thing to do, for it was trespassing and illegal. I didn’t feel part of it, but I followed where Raymond led. The school I attended gave a picnic party for the local children, but they wouldn’t allow evacuated kids like Raymond and me to join in. Learning of this, Hilda went ballistic, stormed off to the headmistress, and made such a fuss that in the end, while we were still not included, we were taken back to the pub and had our own picnic. At that tender age I’d never heard language like Hilda’s – it was quite some gab she had the gift of!

All was clear from bombing raids when I returned home to Essex Road in late 1944. Like the thousands of young children sent out of London to avoid the Blitz and the destruction of much of the East End, I was restored to Mum – and Dad when on leave. We were reunited, Hilda and Raymond, too. Grandma and Grandpa were full of joy to see us again. Dad was still away, but hardly very far away: in Clapham.

Victory was in sight. But unknown to us there was a new and even deadlier threat. We came back to what was the most terrifying ordeal of all, the destruction caused by the pilotless planes; first the V1 flying bombs, then the deadly V2 rockets launched on London from mobile trailers.

The flying bombs were like a dark shadow, chugging, rattling and droning across the sky, with their 1,000 pounds of explosive which always seemed to be released at a point just above your head. We would sense that, because the noise would suddenly cut out, and we never knew if they’d glide onwards or fall straight down. During the cold, miserable winter of 1944 we got to know these new weapons: all at once, without any warning, there would just be this eerie silence. They were fired straight into sub-orbital space and came down so fast that if we heard them we had been lucky and had escaped.

One day this happened to us. ‘Face down on the floor everyone!’ shouted the white-coated fishmonger. I was round at Poplars Road. Raymond and I had been sent out to buy fish for Kitty, our cat.

There was a flash and then a huge explosion as the rocket hit the Baker’s Arms bus shelter about 150 yards away. Everyone threw themselves on the floor of the shop. Buildings were blown up or simply collapsed. Debris flew everywhere. Bodies, blood and severed limbs were scattered across the street; ambulances screamed and sirens wailed as fire engines and rescue squads arrived.

Raymond and I had flattened ourselves on the fishmonger’s floor. We’d had a very lucky escape. There was dust and debris everywhere. A woman came up to where we lay flat on our bellies, quivering with terror.

‘Where do you live?’ she asked. ‘Do you live locally?’

This kind woman then took each of us by the hand and brought us back to Auntie’s place in Poplars Road. Here a couple of front windows had been blown out and we found Hilda in a petrified state, sitting on top of the kitchen table. She was perched there as if there was a swirling flood rising around her.

‘You must take shelter under the table,’ she’d been told before the air-raid warning and the rocket struck. Definitely the safest place was to shelter under it.

‘But I can’t, no I can’t!’ she shrieked. ‘There’s a mouse there!’

The Pathé or Movietone newsreels at the cinema where we viewed the horrifying footage of these new terror weapons were miles away from the reality of their destruction. The rockets had a double demoralising effect on a tired and war-weary East London, where destruction had been diabolical. Over 6,000 people died, many in our area, and tens of thousands more were wounded – a huge toll. My evacuation to Bletchley had then proved to be effective because my worst moment of the war was back at home on my return.