Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (8 page)

We are in my parents’ bedroom. A coal fire smoulders in the tiny grate and Molly is unsuccessfully trying to dress me.

‘Don’ wanna!’ I scream at her, flinging the hated object across the room.

‘Don’ wanna wear it!’

‘It’ll keep you warm, Jac,’ my mum pleads, managing to pull a cream-coloured, scratchy woollen vest down over my head to tuck into my knickers.

I wriggle away. Now I’m doing my perennial devil’s dance, running round the bedroom, screaming myself silly. To say I was a tantrum-prone kid is putting it mildly. I was a screamer. And a persistent one at that.

‘Not gonna wear it! Naaaah!’

The object in question, the liberty bodice, is a sleeveless garment made from a warm fleecy material with rubber buttons all the way down, a Victorian creation that has survived the first half of the twentieth century. The general idea was to wear it over a woolly vest for extra protection from colds and coughs. Some believed it was a kind of insurance against nastier, more life-threatening illnesses, like pneumonia. So, not surprisingly, Molly is desperate for me to wear it. But I nearly always reject it, mainly because I hate the rubber buttons, which go squidgy in the wash. And it takes ages to do up. (Patience is a virtue I can only admire in others.)

‘OK,’ she sighs, picking it up and putting it into a drawer, letting me win for the sake of peace and quiet. ‘Let’s get the rest of your things on.’

During those winters, as I went from toddler to school child, getting me to wear a liberty bodice was just one of the many everyday hassles my mum coped with. Because, like many kids, I was constantly poorly.

Bronchitis was an annual event, backed up intermittently by the usual childhood ailments like measles, mumps and whooping cough. Fortunately, the arrival of the new National Health Service in the summer of 1948 meant that we had our ‘panel’ doctor, Dr Kinglin, just a short walk away in Sandringham Road. (GPs then were known as ‘panel’ doctors because they were entitled to be on the panel or committee of those providing care under the new National Insurance Act of Parliament.) And all kids eventually got vaccinated for real nasties like TB and polio, which was a really big worry in the 50s. But despite the authorities’ attempts to boost children’s welfare, while ours was a home of plenty nutritionally, the combination of damp walls and coal fires meant it wasn’t exactly healthy.

My dad’s health too had been damaged from his time in the hot, humid climate of India, where he’d contracted malaria. In the early years after he’d returned, recurring bouts of the illness came on suddenly, without warning. He’d start shivering, throwing up and get bad headaches. The attacks would leave him exhausted, bed-bound and sweating profusely. My mum would have to change the sheets and put them through the kitchen mangle because they were literally drenched in his sweat. Over time, the malaria attacks lessened. The bottles of quinine tablets in the bathroom cabinet had not been very effective in preventing these incidents. But he kept them, just in case. Alongside the bottles of Eno Salts and Andrews Liver Salts, which he regularly used to help cure his morning-after hangovers.

Those coal fires inside, of course, didn’t help when you considered the terrible fogs and smogs outside, essentially really bad pollution which plagued London’s streets for many years after the war until The Clean Air Act 1956 restricted the pollution with the introduction of smoke-free zones where only smokeless fuels like coke could be burned. At one point before the cleanup, the pea-soupers were so bad and visibility so poor in London’s streets that bus conductors were reduced to walking in front of the bus with a flashlight; an estimated l2,000 people died in London as a consequence of the Great Smog of l952.

The coal fires, of course, had a dual purpose for families: you huddled round them for warmth, but you also habitually dried your clothes in front of them, thereby absorbing more smoke into your body. And, though we didn’t think or know about it at the time, my dad’s smoking habit, twenty Players a day, plus the odd cigar, all contributed to the general unhealthy fug all around us: my mum too became prone to bouts of bronchitis.

And so it was regular Vicks VapoRub, Friar’s Balsam (an inhalant), and Eno cough syrup, the main products widely available to ease congestion. And if things got bad, the new ‘wonder drugs’ like penicillin had emerged via the NHS to combat chest or lung infection, which actually saved my life – and probably many others – during the foggy early winter months of 1948.

I’m in my parents’ bed, semiconscious but vaguely aware of the strangeness of the situation: by now, at age three, my permanent sleeping place is the little front bedroom. But they’ve moved me. It’s serious.

Anxiously, Molly and Ginger creep in and out to watch over me, voices hushed, their faces grave. A nasty cough has suddenly turned into a fever. I toss and turn, burning hot one minute, teeth chattering the next. So they nervously call Dr Kinglin.

‘It’s pneumonia,’ he says gravely, after examining me, his stethoscope cold and probing against my clammy skin. ‘To be honest, Mrs Hyams, it’s touch and go,’ he adds, handing my mum a prescription for the penicillin.

‘Get her to take this and if she makes it through the next twenty-four hours, she’ll be OK.’

And so, for those perilous twenty-four hours, they take it in turns to catch some sleep in the small bedroom while the other holds vigil over my bedside, somehow coaxing me to swallow the precious drugs – luckily, the chemist in the High Street was open – sip water or a few precious spoonfuls of soup before I drift off again.

‘Thank you for the hankies, Daddy,’ I tell Ginger at one point.

I am delirious, raving, my dreams have somehow morphed into a surreal reality. How scared they must be, how powerless they must feel in the face of this unexpected calamity. Oblivious to all fear, I sleep through most of the night. And, the following morning, just as the doctor has predicted, my temperature has dropped, the fever has gone and the delirium has vanished. I’m out of the woods.

But it’s several weeks before I am fully recovered and they dare to take me out again. ‘Those drugs,’ they tell anyone who will listen, ‘they really are wonder drugs, you know.’ And their trust, in the doctors, the NHS, this amazing new system of free healthcare for everyone, is formed for the rest of their lives.

If I was cherished and mollycoddled by my parents before this frightening event, it reached epic proportions afterwards, understandable perhaps for an only child, but it eventually left me feeling uncomfortable and, later on, somewhat frustrated.

Sadly, you sometimes hear people say that they never felt really loved by one or both parents. My problem was the reverse: I always knew I was loved and was the centre of two people’s entire universe, yet the older I got, the more I felt stifled by this overprotectiveness, this fear that harm might come to me, especially via the harsh elements outside the ‘safety’ of our flat.

Yet the bout of pneumonia had another, more positive outcome. Fully aware that I’d diced with death, overhearing my mum’s phone conversations about it, I became more compliant when my mum suggested I don the dreaded liberty bodice in the winter months. Soon, I was insisting on buttoning it up myself. I continued to wear it throughout my childhood. Though to this day, the very thought of those rubber buttons still has the power to make me shudder.

T
here was a Monster living in our little flat. It had quite a bit of competition, mind you, from the other less-than-appealing aspects of our home. It competed with the damp paper-thin walls – giving me ample opportunity, in my cramped bedroom, to hear my parents performing their daily rituals – the slash-your-wrists-now view from the pocket-sized kitchen (a bombsite that eventually became a very noisy timberyard), and the equally grim vista from my parents’ bedroom and living room – a somewhat sinister sloping tiled roof of what had once been a dairy in Shacklewell Lane.

The Monster resided in the bathroom, attached to the wall, a smart, shiny white enamel contraption with a blue triangle triumphantly proclaiming its heritage: the Ascot, the ‘water heater’ that didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t deliver the one thing you desperately wanted – constant running hot water for a bath.

Living with the Monster was an unending battle that went on for years: the on-off pilot light versus my mum. My parents were very proud of it the day the man from the Gas Board came round and installed it over the bath. Essentially, the Monster was a small gas water heater with a spout emerging directly from it. The heater was ignited from a pilot light inside when you wanted to run the tap for hot water. Those modern-day miracles cost about £10 each at the time – a few hundred pounds in today’s terms – so Molly considered herself lucky to have one in the bathroom. Kitchen hot water still came from saucepans heated on the gas cooker.

Ascots were relatively new then. Introduced into Britain in the late thirties by a German company, for many people they were the first ever source of hot water ‘on tap’, so it’s nice to know that our country’s triumph over Hitler came with a nasty domestic sting in its tail: all over the land, families like ours in the post-war years regularly did battle with the temperamental device and its unpredictable on-off pilot light.

The general idea was that you’d light the pilot light inside the Ascot with the manual push switch underneath. Then, in theory, the light would go on, ready to heat up the water. Alas, when you let go of the manual switch, the light would all too frequently flicker, weaken – and go off. So no hot water.

‘The pipe’s blocked up,’ said the man from the North Thames Gas Board when my mum managed to get him round after we’d valiantly endured our first lengthy running battle with the Ascot, hours of torture which resulted in nothing more than a cold bath.

After what seemed like ages tinkering in the bathroom, he announced that he’d ‘done his best’.

‘If it keeps going out again, you could try lighting it yourself with a match,’ was his passing shot, a pretty useless piece of advice because it still didn’t work. Time and again, he’d come round, tinker and leave, whistling his way down the dirty stone stairs, his pockets bulging with my dad’s cash, our yearning for hot water on tap still largely unfulfilled. Since neither of my parents had a clue about anything remotely practical around the home we were, of course, sitting ducks for this ‘oooh, gonna cost ya’ type of situation.

And so the nightly bathtime ritual when I was aged five or thereabouts went something like this. I’d stand there in the little bathroom in my pyjamas, watching and waiting, heart in mouth, as Molly, ever the optimist, would gingerly turn the manual push switch on. Ginger never got involved. He’d still be out ‘at work’ (a euphemism for the George and Dragon pub) most nights.

Whooosh! The blue light had come on! Carefully, not daring to believe her luck, my mum would then turn the tap on. First a trickle, then a gush, yes! It was hot water! The prospect of a lovely hot bath, with me splashing around in delight, had me hopping up and down in anticipation.

‘Mum, Mum, it’s working, it’s working,’ I’d chirp.

But my innocent joy was frequently short-lived. For, as we eventually learned, life with the Monster was never going to be as simple as that. Gradually, it dawned on us that once we’d watched the trickle turn to a flood, we could never risk leaving the bathroom to happily assume the flow of hot water from the Monster would result in a steaming hot bath. The Monster was far too cunning for that. If we stepped out to just leave it to its job, the Monster took umbrage. And it promptly stopped heating the water. All too often we’d nip back to the bathroom to find the light out, the water now tepid. Over and over again, our dreams of a hot bath were a fiasco, a disaster. The Monster was spiteful. It toyed with our hopes, our dreams, in a sadistic way. For while there were times when it let us have what we wanted, all too often the Monster won the war of nerves and didn’t perform. Welcome to the Ascot’s Revenge.

And so I grew up understanding that to be really sure of a decent hot bath there was only one true way: you deployed endless saucepans of heated water, dashing back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom (one advantage of having such a pokey flat meant there was virtually no distance between the two), tipping the hot water into the bath, then running back again to collect another saucepan from the kitchen to fill with more cold water to be heated. This, of course, took some time because the gas cooker took ages to warm the pans.

In my early years, Mum would give up trying to get the Ascot to work and with a sigh, she would get the matches, light the gas on the kitchen cooker, and wait for the saucepan to boil to make me a bath. (Like many of their generation, my parents grew up with the ‘strip wash’ over a basin full of warmed-up water, so my little baths, somehow, tended to take precedence over their own requirements.)

Then, as I grew bigger, I was allowed to ‘make’ the nightly bath myself, carefully taking each heated saucepan into the bathroom to slosh it into the bath, nervously testing the hot water to see how much cold I could add to move things along and allow me get into the bath to finally splash around.

Only when I’d reached my early teens did things improve, and better, more efficient water heaters were installed in the kitchen and bathroom, as well as new gas fires that replaced the coal fires in the other rooms. But for me, bathtime as a kid will always be associated with trying to wash myself in a less-than-satisfactory amount of tepid water, always watched by the white Monster over the bath and the flickering pilot light, taunting me endlessly with their power.