Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (9 page)

N
ot everyone in our street was as involved as we were in acquiring goods via the thriving black market through the early post-war years. The family who inhabited the condemned house on the corner, the Coopers, and their boy Bobby, or our downstairs’ neighbour Maisie in the ground-floor flat, weren’t likely to splurge on any of the black-market luxuries found in our home: you needed hard cash to continuously take advantage of it.

While the post-war black market still prevailed across the country, in London’s Petticoat Lane, the city’s oldest, established, unruly trading post, it boomed. All sorts of things found their way to the Lane, virtually everything you couldn’t officially buy in those times of lean living, to be sold with a nudge and a wink: ciggies, nylons, off-ration expensive clothing, small items of furniture, booze and all kinds of tinned foods were frequently available – right up until the time rationing officially ended in 1954.

In my dad’s bookie world of punters, spivs and runners, ignoring the regulations and using black-market goods to trade for favours was as normal as going to the pub, picking up bets and boozing.

Big bottles of whisky, expensive French perfume, packs of shiny seamed stockings, tins of red salmon or canned sliced peaches, different kinds of cosmetics, soaps and toiletries frequently found their way into our little flat, luxuries my mother soon took for granted, along with the large wooden boxes of the finest Havana cigars that took pride of place on our mantelpiece, or the curved white containers with brightly coloured plastic labels containing exotica like sticky dates, that sometimes piled up in our pantry.

Even with coupons, you couldn’t buy these things freely in the shops. But Ginger frequently reached for his wad of cash to peel off a few notes for such items when they were offered to him by stallholders or drinking pals, even if we didn’t really need them. Sometimes, of course, we wouldn’t see the things he had purchased in our home: they’d form part of a trade-off for a favour my dad had done or owed someone.

But while passing over black-market goods as tips was one thing, my dad had a consistent habit of getting whatever he wanted: the ‘bung’, cockney slang for a bribe, cash slipped into the right hand to open a hitherto closed door or facilitate a favour. Bungs were a way of life on his territory.

My dad used the bung in various ways. He was a generous tipper too, beloved by the cabbies who brought him home nightly, but primarily, his philosophy was using the bung to cut all corners, get you whatever you wanted or needed fast. And because you’d paid for a favour in cash, you could always come back for another – with yet another bung, of course.

As a child, of course, I had no real idea what this really meant; I just heard about it, absorbed it in passing chat between my parents. The legendary world of the poverty stricken East End – where everyone had very little, but helped each other out just the same – didn’t seem to operate that way in our case. Virtually everything my dad did was a trade-off; favours were always paid for in hard cash.

So while much of the country scrimped, saved, queued and generally endured a bleak, miserable post-war landscape, people like my dad were living it large after the war, simply because they always had the ‘readies’. And, of course, this time was very much a cash culture, though my dad was a big fan of the relationship forged with the bank manager – and postdated cheques. The bank manager too was a frequent recipient of my dad’s largesse. Frequent double scotches in the pub and the well-placed supply of boxes of Havanas were another way of cementing the ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ relationship.

Officially, my dad and The Old Man ran the formal side of their business from their tiny office, taking telephone bets from customers who ran an account with them. But the lucrative side, of course, was taking cash bets on the street or in the pub, helped by their small team of trusted ‘runners’. A lot of this illicit exchange of cash and betting slips actually went on in the men’s toilet in the pub.

This way of life, while not actually observed by myself or my mum, still got absorbed into our home life. Knowing and hearing about it as I grew up made me streetwise, to an extent, because all around me the official rules were being broken – with no obvious consequences. But there was one consequence – I grew up with the somewhat warped idea that if anyone did you a favour, big or small, somehow you ‘owed’ that individual, even if the favour was given carelessly or meant little to the other person at the time. You never forgot that personal debt. One good turn deserves another, certainly. But not for ever.

This distorted belief dominated my life far into adulthood. I firmly believed that if someone did you a personal favour, you were indebted to them. This meant that I was unable to clearly discriminate between a genuine gesture of helpfulness or friendship and one which was primarily made out of self interest, unhelpful, to say the least, in the cut and thrust world of journalism where ‘scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ behaviour is all pervasive. Time and again I’d be shocked to realise how misplaced I’d been in my belief that certain individuals were ‘friends’ because of one helpful, spontaneous gesture which, while I’d clung to it as proof of friendship or loyalty, merely turned out to be directly related to my place in the editorial pecking order. Yet only quite recently did I fully realise where this misplaced view came from. Maybe there were a few genuine cash-free favours around us when I was a child. But I never saw evidence of this.

Yet there was one memorable occasion when what fell off the back of a lorry, or came into our home from heaven knows where, really did make a big impact on my child’s view of my dad’s wheeling and dealing. It was the night he came home from the George & Dragon with a big diamond ring in his pocket.

‘Len-from-the-caff said it was about time I got you one of these,’ said Ginger, producing a small black velvet box from his jacket pocket and plonking it down, without ceremony, on the living room table.

Len, one of my dad’s older cronies who liked a bet or two, had known my father’s family for years because he ran a busy little café near their shop. He also knew that my parents had had a rushed register office wedding the year after the war started – and that as a consequence, my mum had never had a proper engagement ring.

‘So this is it, Mol, your engagement ring,’ said my dad with some pride.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when my mum reached out to prise open the little black box and remove the sparkling object.

‘Oh it’s GORGEOUS,’ she cooed, setting the ring on her finger and holding it out with considerable delight.

‘And it’s so BIG’. I daren’t go out with it around here, Ging. The neighbours would have a fit if they saw it. Still … I can wear it for that big wedding next month, can’t I?’

‘Course you can, Mol,’ shrugged my dad, heading for the bedroom to change out of his suit into his pyjamas, his nightly after-work ritual.

Typically, nothing was said about what he’d paid for the ring or where it came from. In all likelihood, the ring had been passed to him as collateral by a hard-up punter who’d had some serious losses; probably, the punter, desperate for something to trade, had nicked it from his own wife or girlfriend’s jewellery stash without her knowledge. (The world of the heavy gambler is defined by such acts of spontaneity, as anyone who has lived with a compulsive gambler will confirm.) Len was probably just the saloon bar ‘middleman’, encouraging my dad to take the ring, rather than wait for the cash he was owed, which after all, might never materialise.

But my mother was not troubled by the ring’s provenance. She was far too delighted to concern herself with the details. The next morning, she was on the phone to her best friend from schooldays, Evelyn, regaling her with the news.

‘Wait till you see it, Eve, it’s the real McCoy,’ she trilled. ‘I’m sure it’s worth hundreds.’

Evelyn was not impressed. She didn’t like Ginger one bit. A single mum with a small son, born after a brief wartime fling with a pilot, she had to live with the somewhat difficult status of unmarried mum which, in those days, carried a heavy penalty of social condemnation, even though illegitimacy rates had soared during the war years. So the official cover-up story was that Evelyn’s ‘husband’ had ‘gone to live in Canada’.

Evelyn accepted her lot. But she still resented the fact that while she had to slog away, six days a week, in her brother’s West End shop, my mum didn’t need to work. Ginger, according to Evelyn, was a n’er-do-well with a shady livelihood. In reality, of course, the two women were in a similar boat, coping as best they could with what life had dished out to them in the aftermath of war. In fact, Evelyn’s wealthy brother had helped her with the down payment on a small house in the suburbs. So to some degree she could look down on Molly, stuck in a pokey Dalston slum with a boozy street bookie, while she struggled to bring up her illegitimate son respectably in a Neasden semi.

‘Did you ask him where he got it from?’ enquired Evelyn, who was always ultra bitchy when the conversation turned to my dad.

‘Why should I?’ said Molly, undaunted. ‘It’s a diamond ring and I know he paid for it.’

‘How can you be sure?’ snapped Evelyn. ‘I’d watch it if I were you, wearing something like that without knowing where he got it from.’

‘Ginger’s not a thief, Evelyn,’ was Molly’s parting shot. ‘Anyway, I’m going now, just wanted to tell you my news. Bye!’

Conversations with Evelyn frequently ended this way. Her bitterness at her tough situation soured their exchanges. And my mum, kind and easy-going, was a moving target for her friend’s sharp tongue. Yet Evelyn was cannier than my mother, who blithely took each day as it came. And she was right – you could never be too sure what kind of shenanigan was going on with my dad. And, true to form, my mum’s newfound delight in actually owning a big diamond sparkler wasn’t destined to last very long.

Two days later, my dad came home from work and said he had to take the ring back. He gave no reason.

‘I’m sorry, Mol,’ he consoled my crestfallen mother. ‘I’ll get you another one, promise. But you can’t have this one.’

Who knows what the dodgy deal had involved? Maybe my dad needed to quickly trade the ring for cash himself. There were occasionally times when he placed his own bets and lost heavily, so then he needed to replenish his wad of cash quickly to keep working, though he could always rely on The Old Man for cash if his own stash ran down. Maybe, this time, he just didn’t want to ask for a helpful handout. There were often fallings-out and rows in The George and Dragon with The Old Man that we heard about in snatches.

My own theory is that my dad had consumed several large Scotches when he did the deal via Len-from-the-caff and took possession of the ring – and in the cold light of dawn, had mulled it over and decided to turn it back into cash as quickly as he could. Knowing my dad, he may even have lost on the deal.

All I knew then was that he reneged on his big promise: my mum never got a diamond ring from my dad again. But typically, she didn’t complain or start bawling him out, not when he took the little black box from her or even afterwards. She said nothing, just took it all in her stride and got on with the routine of her life, fussing around me, dressing me beautifully, cooking our meals, making sure she looked svelte and immaculate before taking me out and about on Kingsland Road.

Those grey years with their power cuts, food shortages, fogs and freezing winters seem overwhelmingly drab and wretched nowadays. But my mum’s bright, positive, uncomplaining nature ignored the backdrop – and the worst of my dad’s rackety behaviour. And, of course, she never had to worry about bills or money: my father’s cash stash continued to see to all that.

Throughout my childhood, Ginger walked about every day with considerable sums of money in his pocket as he went about his bookie business. On some occasions it would run into the hundreds. Had he seriously considered it, he could easily have afforded to buy my mother a piece of good jewellery after a good week’s takings or a big win. Over time, my mum did acquire a few nice things in her jewellery box – a pearl necklace and a couple of decent watches. But no gold or diamond rings. For while he was generous and incredibly free and easy with the cash in his hand, it never occurred to him to put any of his money into something that might endure – or, indeed, be of value if times got tough.

When you consider that in 1955, an eight-room house in Victoria Park, Hackney could be purchased for £2,000, with a deposit of £175 – a sum my dad would probably blow in the pub during a few weeks’ heavy drinking with punters – it’s clear that the opportunities were always there for him to improve our lives and give us a more spacious, pleasant environment. A thirties suburban house outside London with a garden cost more, say £3,500 back then. But even this he could have easily afforded, both deposit and repayments.

Certainly, the street bookie of that era always needed cash for punters, bungs and, in my dad’s case, big rounds in the pub. Yet that, for him, was enough. It all stopped there. Things like mortgages, insurance policies, even savings accounts didn’t exist for my dad, probably because his father didn’t ‘believe’ in such things. Even with his clerical worker’s background, working with figures, adding up day in, day out (personal calculators were unknown then) he just didn’t see any merit in looking ahead financially. And Molly never ever nagged him to make any changes; they both lived for the here and now. Perhaps this was a consequence of coming through the uncertainty and fears of war. But I suspect it was also to do with their personalities; in that way they were well matched.