London Born: A Memoir of a Forgotten City

When we wasn’t at school we was always outside doing jobs, scrounging or playing in the street. We was never indoors. There was always a big gang of kids playing games in our street. We would line up some screws and aim cherry pips at them to see how many each of us could win—that was called cherry hogging. We would play hopscotch and spinning tops and race each other. We would throw a rope over the arm of a lamppost and swing round and round on it. If it was a summer evening and me dad was sitting on the steps outside our house he might say, ‘There’s a ha’penny for the first one round the block,’ and we would tear off. Sometimes we played a game called ‘Release’. We would chalk a big box on the street and then split into two teams. One side went and hid and the other team had to find them, one by one, and put them in the box. At any time their mates, if it was all clear, could run to the box and holler out ‘Release!’ to free the blokes in the box. We played lots of other games too, but nine times out of ten it was fighting.

Me dad taught me how to fight in the back garden. ‘Cabby Day from Tiger Bay,’ he would sing as he hopped about. ‘The only man to go fifteen rounds with a wasp and never get stung!’ We liked to have street fights with other streets. Our street would go round to Chesnall Road and fight a gang round there. There was the Tiger Bay mob, Raydon Street mob, Doighton Street mob and Dartmouth Hill mob. Each road had its own little mob of hounds. Sometimes we went over to Campbell Bunk in Lower Holloway where me uncle, Tinker Day, lived. It was the worst place in the country I should think; the most violent road there ever was for drunks, prostitution—you name it, it all happened in Campbell Bunk. They burned the floorboards, the joists, the doors—burned everything to keep warm—and nobody dared go near them to ask for any rent. Me own uncle was pretty bad when it come down to it, though I never had much to do with him or me cousins really, apart from going to fight them occasionally with the mob from our street.

When we wasn’t fighting we might try tormenting the old people in the Bay. For our favourite trick we needed a reel of black cotton, a button and a pin. When it was dark we would dig the pin in the putty over the top of a window. Then we tied the button on the cotton and dangled it over. We took the reel across the road and tugged it so that the button kept on tapping on the window of the house, ‘pip, pip’. They would come out, look round and say, ‘What the bleeding hell’s happening here?’ We drove the poor old sods mad with that. They was always telling us off, throwing a bucket of water over us and Gawd knows what else. ‘Sling yer hook out of it,’ they would say, and we would go back to our other games.

There was seasons for the different types of games like cherry hogging and top spinning. We would go from one game to another. There was special times in the year for other things too, like Guy Fawkes. We looked forward to that most of all. Each year we made a guy out of potato sacks stuffed with straw and gave it a mask for a face. Me mother sewed on the arms and the legs for us and we took the guy round the streets in a barrow hollering, ‘Penny for the guy, penny for the guy!’ The best places to go was outside the big hotels. One year we got more than eight shillings in a day doing that. We spent the money on sweets and fireworks for the big bonfire that was lit every year in the middle of our street.

We thought up some other ways to get hold of money, too. Opposite Buckingham’s in Raydon Street there was an off licence run by a woman. All the empty bottles was kept in the side garden in Doighton Street where the lorries loaded and unloaded. I was passing one day with Ruddy and Joey Booth when I had an idea.

I says, ‘Give me a hoof up.’

Ruddy shot me up and over the green doors of the gate. Soon I climbed back with some empty bottles.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ says Joey.

‘Wait here a minute.’

I took the empties into the shop and got tuppence a bottle. After that we was over those bleeding doors all the time. One day the woman in the shop took a long look at me.

She says, ‘Where d’you keep getting all these bottles from?’

I says, ‘Over the hill.’

‘Over the hill?’

I says, ‘Yeah.’

She says, ‘They must do a lot of drinking over there.’

She never did find us out. Daytime, night time, any bleeding time we passed, we would go and get three or four of her own bottles to return to her.

Another time I went into the coal and greengrocer’s shop round the corner in Raydon Street. I crept along, bent down under the window and went through the door. Me mates waited outside. I couldn’t see the owner, Mrs Stevens, so I took a handful of peanuts. Just as I passed the board that divided the vegetables from the coal she sprung out and caught me. She hit me so hard with her broom she knocked me scrabbling into the coal. Then she chased me round and round, over the heap of coal, hitting me all the time till I got out. Me mates was laughing so much they could hardly run. All that for a few bleeding peanuts!

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Alice was the eldest of us kids. She had long black hair right down her back and she was a greedy cow. She would sit cracking nuts by the fire and not give you a shell. I didn’t live with her for long cause she went into service when she was fifteen and then got married and moved to the other end of the street.

Bill was the oldest boy. He was smart and good looking with tight curly hair and he was always joking. He worked in the building with me dad and sometimes gave me a penny to spend. Bob was next—he was the quiet one. He looked the most Spanish and his hair was wavy and as black as coal. He had eyes like a hawk—he could kill a bird with a single stone—and he wound up a champion darts player. He liked to walk over Hampstead Heath three or four times a day with his friend George Mead. George was long, like all his family, and he wound up about six foot seven. He had a lurcher that would tear other dogs to bits. He and Bob would set their dogs to fight other dogs up on the heath.

Me brother Jim was closest to me in age and we spent a lot of time together with Ruddy and our other mates. Lulu was the youngest and she was all up front. She was a spitfire and we was always fighting. Once I hit her round the ear’ole and she flew up the stairs after me and stabbed me in the arse with a pair of scissors. She always wanted me to give her money. I was one for saving and I always had a few coppers in me pocket. I don’t think she liked it cause gels couldn’t go scrounging and scrumping like boys could.

Like me brothers, I always wore a cap and I had no hair. Me dad would cut it with old horse clippers, right over except for the fringe—that was the style. I was bald headed all bar that fringe on the front, which stuck out under me cap. I wore a pair of the old man’s trousers, cut down, with braces to hold them up. When the old man finished with a pair of trousers he would give them to one of us boys. If it was my turn he would put them on the table and tell me to lay on them. ‘Up you go,’ he would say. Then he would chalk round me, cut round the outline and sew them up. They looked like nothing on earth—old corduroy trousers with two buttons either side of a flap. The length depended on how old and worn they was and how much the old man had to cut off them—they might be as much as knee deep. I never had a long pair of trousers. I wore a wool jersey on top in the winter and nothing in the summer, except a shirt when I was at school. I looked scruffy in me hand-me-downs, but you weren’t a boy unless yer arse was hanging out of yer trousers.

Me shoes was hobnail boots—leather boots with studs in the bottom of them. They was good leather and cost from three and a tanner up to seven and six from Davies’ on Upper Street. They had iron studs in the soles and made a row when you walked—it was no good trying to be a burglar with them on. The chimney sweep in our road was a shoe repairer when he weren’t out sweeping and he would mend yer shoes for a few pence a time. But Dad usually mended our boots. He would sit there all night with a mouthful of nails—bang, bang, bang—putting soles on our shoes. Sometimes he sewed them on with a big needle.

One morning me brother Jim showed his boot to the old man. ‘I’ve got a hole here, Dad.’

Me dad looked at the boot.

‘You’ve been hanging on the back of those bleeding carts again!’

‘No Dad, no Dad.’

But me father was furious. He aimed the boot and if it had hit Jim it would have killed him. He threw it that hard it went through the lath and plaster of the wall and into the next room.

Twelve o’clock was dinner time in our house. Most days I would come home from school and take me dad’s dinner out to where he was working. The food was held between two hot plates tied up in a handkerchief. When I turned round to go home he would always have some wood ready for me. ‘Here you are,’ he would say, ‘take it on for the fire.’ Coal was tenpence a hundredweight. So the old man would always say, ‘Don’t forget yer lump of wood if you want to sit round the fire.’ We always brought a lump of wood home, every one of us.

Me mum cooked on an old black range that had rings, an oven and a tap for hot water. Our dinner was mostly bread and dripping or bread and jam. Me mum would get a pennorth of fat from the butcher’s in a newspaper, take it home, put it on the hob and melt it down to make dripping. She knew how to make a penny do the work of a shilling and we always had something to eat in our house—but there weren’t too much of it. The only time she bought fruit was at Christmas. Then we each got a tangerine, an orange, an apple and sometimes a few nuts. The rest of the year all the fruit we got was what we went and nicked, mostly from the barrows in Junction Road.

There was barrows right the way along from Archway to Tufnell Park. We could walk by the stalls in Holloway Road and all we had to do was grab an apple here, next door an orange, next a bunch of bananas. When we was very young, me and Jim would follow courting couples to Hampstead Heath and when they threw an apple core down in the gutter—bang—we would dive after it, get hold of it and eat it. That was before we knew how to pinch what we wanted.

After school we was always out till it got dark, but during the winter evenings we stopped in the warm and sat round the kitchen range. Me sisters might be sewing and me dad might be reading a newspaper or Old Mother Shipton’s Almanac. If he ever read anything out loud me mum would say, ‘That’s a load of tommy rot.’

When the fire was nice and hot me mum would stick the poker in, get it red hot and put it in her jug of beer to warm it up. She didn’t drink a lot but she liked half a pint of stout in the evenings. Sometimes us kids bathed in a tin bath in front of the range. We normally had a bath once a week.

We liked to listen to our gramophone with the big old horn on it, and sometimes we played musical chairs using soap boxes as chairs. On Sunday evenings me dad might have three or four hands in playing cards or a game of dice, like crowns and anchors. Me mum would play the piano, funny little bits and pieces of things. She couldn’t read and write like me dad but she could play the piano. She taught Alice and Bill to play too and they took it up. Lots of people had pianos—you could pick them up second hand for five shillings.

There was plenty of pictures on the walls of our living room, of the family mostly—us kids and Mum and Dad. We took them with an old Brownie, and a bloke used to come round and take the pictures away and make them bigger. Up above the mantel was a big vase with a foot on the bottom and other ornaments that Mum kept. They was behind two velvet curtains that hung down off of brass rails. Sometimes she pulled the curtains back to show them off. Underneath was a big aspidistra plant and me mum kept the leaves shiny by wiping them with milk.

At night time, before we went to kip, we had a cup of broth to drink out of a tin enamel cup. Me mum kept a big saucepan on the go, full up with old bones and Gawd knows what else. She was always slinging in three pennorth of ‘pieces’ from the butcher—all the rough ends of the meat and bones. That big pot was always on the range.

Mum and Dad slept in the room off the kitchen on an old brass bed with a feather mattress. I shared a bed upstairs with Bob, Bill and Jim, and me sisters had the room next door. In the winter we would lay there under a grey army blanket with a hot brick wrapped in a scarf for our water bottle. Our pillow was a flour bag stuffed with straw. I would jiggle meself into a nice warm spot and try and get the biggest overcoat on top of me. Those old overcoats was on our backs during the day to keep us warm and on our bed at night.

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Winter was winter and summer was summer in them days. You knew when the snow was going to come, you knew when the winds was coming. In the winter we had snow and ice and it was very cold. In March we looked forward to terrific winds all the month. In the spring the sun come out, with all the lovely little flowers, and it got warmer and warmer. When the summer come you couldn’t walk on the pavements without shoes on it was that warm.

Where I lived it was like being in the countryside. Once you left Highgate Road there was Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath and The Spaniards. Just up the road was Waterlow Park and Highgate Wood. Waterlow was a beautiful park. There was a lot of keepers there—not just one or two, dozens of them, always planting out. On the Highgate Hill side, as you walked in the gate, there was a beautiful aviary with lots of lovely birds—blimey, it was a picture to look at. The times I tried to nick birds out of that aviary, but there was always someone about.

All year, but specially in the summer holidays, I spent more time over Parliament Hill Fields and Hampstead Heath than anywhere else. As long as I come home for me food of a night time I could go out where I wanted. Kids of all ages went out all day long in the summer time. Me mum never seen me till it was time to go to bed at about ten o’clock. When it went dark we went to bed.

There was two estates near us where we could roam about. Lady Burdett-Coutts had a big place hedged with trees where we would often set our bird nets. She sold some of her land for building Hollylodge Estate, where me father worked on and off for years. It was a private estate with very expensive houses and a bowler-hatted gatekeeper who always knew everyone and who was in or out. That was where me sister Alice went into service.

The other big place was Kenwood House, which had a fence right the way round it—it must have had two or three miles of fencing. I would like as many pennies as I was in there. We would creep in to fish in the pond with cotton reels and worms stuck on pins till we was spied by one of the gamekeepers. The wood had lots of lovely birds in it—songbirds, pheasants, you name it.

When I was still at school they opened the house and estate to the public. Our school went to the opening and sang for the King who come to plant an oak tree. There was a big crowd there. It was a hot day and after the singing I ran home, bought some lemonade crystals, mixed them up with water, went back to Kenwood and sold lemonade for a penny a cup. After Kenwood was opened we often went inside the house to look at the rooms and the big pictures. It was free to get in.

Me dad was never sober when we was kids, but he was a proper father. He showed us where to go scrumping, where to go bird catching, where to go fishing. We collected walnuts in the season and pickled them. We made horseradish sauce by digging down deep for the root, grating it and mixing it with vinegar. We always had a pocket of beech nuts or cob nuts in the autumn. We made elderflower wine in spring and we made beez wine all year round. Dad bought the beez from the chemist shop at the bottom of our road. It looked like popcorn. We would put thruppence worth of these grains in water with sugar and watch them slowly sink to the bottom. After three months we would fish them out and it was ready to drink.

Me father had a ferret and he taught us how to catch rabbits in snares and we sold them for a bob each. We would go round with six on a stick hollering, ‘Bob each, wild rabbits, bob each, wild rabbits!’ Sometimes we caught birds to eat. Me dad would hang them up over the fire and eat them bones, beaks ‘n’all. I caught a partridge once over Kenwood and brought it home, but me dad grumbled at me and wanted to know why I’d killed such a pretty bird. We sometimes had a duck on Sunday for our dinner. We would catch ducks on a fishing line with a bit of crusty bread—bang!—the duck would take it up and we would winch him in. He would make a good dinner.

As soon as the summer holidays started, the first thing the old man did was take all our shoes away and lock them up. We had six or seven weeks’ holiday and all that time we never wore a pair of shoes or a pair of socks. We just run round barefoot.

Every day I would feed the chickens and the dogs and perhaps take the dogs round the block. Most mornings I would do some jobs for me mother too, like chop logs for the fire and for heating the water for washing. Sometimes I whitewashed the doorstep with the harstone brick which I dipped in water and rubbed on the step. It came up a lovely white. In Tiger Bay we had a little bit of pride, though we was poor. Everybody did their steps. Then I would find Ruddy, Joey Booth or another good mate of mine, George Tilley, who we called Cocker. Cocker was like a greyhound, taller than the rest of us and scrawny. The four of us was best mates.

Boys never went round with gels—it was always boys on their own and gels on their own. I didn’t know anything about gels, except how to pull the bow out of their hair. Boys was boys and gels was gels. I don’t think I ever knew what me sister and her friends got up to. I weren’t interested. We spent all our time walking or fishing. We walked anywhere, for miles every day. We might go to Hampstead Heath, through Kenwood, then walk to The Spaniards and past the Spaniards Inn. That pub had something to do with Dick Turpin. Opposite there was a dungeon where Turpin was supposed to have lived. We went down there one day but it was just an old cave.

At dinner time we would steal some vegetables from the allotments. Once Ruddy and I was out near Manor Park Road, East Finchley. It was all country out there, with loads of allotments and greenhouses. We was hungry so we went through the allotments picking a carrot here, a brussel sprout there, and we fed ourselves with little bits of vegetables. Then I spotted a big greenhouse with tomatoes growing in it.