Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs Read online

Next door to us at number six lived the one and only ‘Bandy Bertha’ Rogers, whose great hobby seemed to consist of distributing bowls of chicken soup, unsolicited, up and down the row of prefabs. A veritable walking soup kitchen, she was, to put it mildly, a character. Any neighbourhood without such a woman was definitely missing out. At a time when the Government was nationalising all its major services and utilities for the benefit of the country, we felt that she too should have been nationalised and made available to all the citizens of this fine land but fate had decreed we should have her all to ourselves. An East End Jewess, she was small and plump, and in no way suited her real name, Sybil. She was definitely a born Bertha. Her husband, Geoffrey, and her son, David, were in their own way characters as well but nothing to compare with the magnitude of the woman of the house.

  Bertha and Geoffrey were both ex-RAF and before coming to the prefabs had been squatting in a disused Air Force hut. Having got married during the War, when peace came, Geoffrey seemed bemused by the situation he now found himself in and must have wondered what on earth had possessed him to marry such a woman. His mother lived in Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, and, when visiting her son, deplored the disaster he had brought upon himself. Bertha was most definitely not her idea of a daughter-in-law. Sawbridgeworth was probably quite unaware that such people existed. Bertha’s dedication to her chicken soup knew no bounds. One day, she came round to ask us if she could borrow some vermicelli for the soup. ‘But only if it is Rakusen’s,’ she insisted. ‘Otherwise I won’t have it.’

  If you stood at our front door and looked out, there was a neat terraced row of Victorian houses over the other side of Millfields Road, between two side roads called Chippendale Street and Sewdley Street. If you stood at their front doors, you would have seen our little prefabs blocking their once-clear view of the green Millfields. I don’t know what they thought of our group of seven more or less homeless families moving into these new-fangled prefabs. Maybe they should have received a rate rebate, except, of course, for those living opposite Bertha, who should have had an extra entertainment tax levied on them.

  Perhaps the only owner who didn’t mind the arrival of the new families was Peter Curtis, who owned the off-licence that stood directly opposite us on the corner of Chippendale Street and Millfields Road. My parents didn’t drink but we would use the ‘offy’ to buy a bottle of something every Sunday to go with lunch, usually Tizer, R. White’s Cola or Cream Soda or Succulent Lemonade. We also used to buy vinegar there, which was stored in a large barrel on the counter. We’d have to take our own empty bottle, which would be filled by vinegar drawn off from the cask. I don’t remember us ever buying pre-bottled vinegar as you would these days.

  Next door to the off-licence lived ‘Ginger’, ‘Monkey’ and their daughter, Christine. Ginger I think is obvious as she had bright-red hair. Monkey was a small hunchback, and his was the only nickname Dad came up with that he later admitted was very unkind. In the early days, Ginger was often to be seen with an enamel jug in her hand, going up to the café round the corner in Chatsworth Road to get some readymade tea as packets of tea were still on ration.

  The woman living next to Ginger was the only person in this stretch of the road on either side, apart from Peter Curtis, not to have a nickname. In fact, she didn’t have a name at all that I ever knew but that was because no one ever talked about her. She was a single woman living on her own who seemed to have a long succession of men calling at her door, morning, noon and night. I didn’t see her very often as she spent most of her time indoors but occasionally she would stand in her front yard, smoking a cigarette. It was difficult to tell how old she was but she always wore an off-the-shoulder tight and low-cut sweater as well as an even tighter black knee-length skirt. What really struck me was her extremely light blonde hair and her bright-red lipstick; being very young I had no idea why the neighbours never mentioned her in polite conversation…

  The next family along was the Lanes: Leslie, Rhoda, Leslie Junior and Colin. Collectively, they were known as ‘the Laneys’, but Rhoda had her own nickname of ‘Ee-lo’ because that would be her standard greeting, morning, noon and night.

  Next up was ‘Gatewaller’, who used to spend most of his day standing by his gate and watching the world go by. He’s one whose first name I never did know. Nor did I ever find out the family’s surname as his wife and two children were simply known to us as ‘Gatewaller two’, ‘Gatewaller three’ and ‘Gatewaller four’. One day, we saw a wedding car outside their house and, not long after, ‘Gatewaller five’, husband of Gatewaller three, moved in to be followed in rapid succession by baby Gatewallers, numbers six, seven, eight, nine and ten.

  Next door to this ever-expanding family lived ‘Old Daddy Flat Cap’ and his brood, which consisted of his wife and two children. He was never seen out in public without his flat cap on, hence the name. One day, in the mid-1950s, a red car appeared outside his door and this became Old Daddy Flat Cap’s pride and joy. He would spend hours washing it, polishing it, cleaning out the inside and generally lavishing great care and attention on it. He did everything you could do with a car… except drive it. It never actually went anywhere; it just stayed on the road outside his house.

  After spending untold hours on his beloved motor, he decided he had earned a holiday, so, one morning, with his flat cap still nestling firmly on his head, he set off by foot, with a brown paper parcel tucked securely under his arm, to recuperate from his efforts and renew his strength so that he could once again return to work on his red car and make it a credit to his flat cap. His wife and children waved him off from the front door as he wended his way up Millfields Road and continued to wave until he was lost from sight. About a fortnight later, Old Daddy Flat Cap returned with the brown paper parcel still securely tucked under his arm, fit and raring to get started on his car again. From that day to the day when we finally left our prefab, about ten years later, he continued to wash and polish his car. It stood outside, never leaving the kerbside, gleaming in the sunlight as a fine tribute to Old Daddy Flat Cap and his dedicated hours of work.

  Although he never went anywhere in it, Old Daddy Flat Cap’s car was the only one parked in this stretch of road. Before the arrival of his magnificent red vehicle, not a single family owned a car in our part of the street apart from Peter, who kept a van in a lock-up garage behind his off-licence. During that period, everyone relied on public transport, even though we weren’t very well served by it in our area. Car-owning families were very much in the minority, certainly among the working-class families in that part of London.

  About the time I was born, the woman who lived next door to Old Daddy Flat Cap also had a baby. One day, she and Mum got talking and she said she was bringing up her child on dried milk. As a result of this, she had a lot of empty tins at home and asked Mum if she would like any as they made useful containers. After this conversation, her nickname fate was sealed and she became ‘Tin Tart’.

  The last house in the row opposite our prefabs was occupied by ‘Crafty’ and her husband and two sons. She got her nickname because Dad thought she had very shifty-looking eyes.

  Dad’s penchant for nicknames came from his great love of literature and literary devices. He was an avid reader, and many’s the time that, out of nowhere, he would suddenly burst into poetry and recite verses from classics by Scott or Lord Macaulay.

  His favourite was Vitai Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt, which he used to recite in full whenever the fancy took him. He said he could always remember this poem because it was printed on a poster that used to hang in his school (Virginia Road School, Bethnal Green). I think it also appealed to his love of cricket as it began:

  There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

  Ten to make and the match to win –

  A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

  An hour to play and the last man in.

  Each verse finished with the line, ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, which I think he too
k as his philosophy on life. I heard this poem so many times that I could also recite it in full by the time I went to school.

  This love of poetry and literature stood Dad in good stead as he won a couple of competitions using his literary skill. The first was when a company called Berkeley asked for an advertising slogan for their new brand of luxury armchairs. His entry was:

  Berkeley Chairs beside the fire

  Make mum madam, make dad sire.

  Dad won the second prize of £5.

  He also won a second prize of £5 when a new chocolate biscuit called Bandit was launched. Once again, the competition was to find an advertising slogan and Dad came up with ‘Bandit – Once tried always wanted’.

  The first major single event I can remember is the Festival of Britain. This took place over the summer of 1951, just after my fourth birthday, exactly one hundred years after the Great Exhibition of 1851, the intention of which had been to show that Great Britain was the world’s leading industrial country. The motive behind the 1951 Festival, however, was somewhat different.

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of London was still in ruins as a result of the Second World War and redevelopment was badly needed. The Festival was intended to give Britons a sense of recovery and progress and to promote better-quality design in the rebuilding of British towns and cities. The Festival of Britain described itself as ‘one united act of national reassessment, and one corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future’. Gerald Barry, the festival director, described it as ‘a tonic to the nation’. It gave a major boost to the nation’s morale at a time when austerity-hit Britain most needed it.

  The Festival took place all over the country, but the main centrepiece was the South Bank Exhibition near Waterloo in London, which demonstrated Britain’s advances in science, technology and industrial design. The Exhibition featured the Royal Festival Hall and the iconic Skylon, an unusual cigar-shaped aluminium-clad steel tower supported by cables, which became the abiding symbol of the Festival. Its base was nearly 15 metres (49 feet) from the ground, with the top nearly 90 metres (295 feet) high.

  We travelled to the South Bank by tram, catching the 33 from Shoreditch. This was not the first time I had travelled by tram nor was it to be the last as trams were at that time a common means of travel around London. I used to like them because they seemed to me to be very exciting, rattling along the rails on their own dedicated tracks, overtaking all the other traffic and then diving down into the Kingsway Tunnel. It was all so thrilling. But best of all was when the tram reached the end of its journey, the conductor would go along pushing the wooden slatted seatbacks back across the seat so that the tram was ready to travel in the opposite direction without having to turn round. For some reason I used to find this operation absolutely fascinating.

  Although the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain was on the South Bank, the part I remember fondly was the Festival Pleasure Gardens set up in Battersea Park, a few miles away. They included a restaurant with a terrace overlooking the river, Foaming Fountains, a miniature railway, the Tree-Walk consisting of a series of raised wooden walkways suspended among the tree branches and the famous ‘Guinness Festival Clock’. Best of all, though, was the amusement park, which would eventually outlast all the other entertainments to become Battersea Fun Fair, only closing in the mid-1970s.

  One of the major events that took place at this time was the D’Oyly Carte Gilbert & Sullivan Festival of Britain season at the Savoy Theatre, the company’s original home back in the nineteenth century. Dad was a great G&S devotee and we had lots of 78 r.p.m. records at home, plus some of the brand-new 33 1/3 r.p.m. long-playing records, giving about 20–30 minutes of playing time per side, which had only been introduced in 1948. As well as playing the records, mainly on Sundays, he would sing the songs around the house and I was brought up in this tradition. When the D’Oyly Carte came to London for the Festival of Britain season, Dad took the family to see a number of the operas, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Patience. The first one we saw was Patience and this turned out to be quite a memorable occasion. It was the first time I had ever been to a theatre so I didn’t really know what to expect. The lights dimmed and the orchestra began to play the overture. A short way into this, I suddenly recognised the song they were playing as one that Dad often sang, and I whispered out loud, ‘Patience!’ In the silence of the auditorium, my whisper reverberated around the whole theatre, and there was a loud ripple of laughter.

  Those were very happy days for me at home with Mum before school beckoned. Like most married women with children at that time, she stayed at home to look after me; there was no thought of her going out to work and leaving me with a childminder or grandparents or in a nursery, unlike today. That sort of thing was practically unheard of. My memories of that time seem to be of eternally sunny days spent feeding the ducks on Clapton Pond or visiting ‘the swings’, which was a children’s playground on the opposite side of Millfields, containing hobby horses, a slide, roundabout, sandpit, paddling pool and, of course, the eponymous swings. On other days, we would go out into the field behind our house for picnics, to which I would invariably bring Arabella, a large sit-on, push-along toy in the shape of a snail.

  Arabella was my favourite toy as a toddler. She got her name from the giant snail that appeared in my favourite storybook of the time, The Travels of Jeremy Jukes. Among my other favourite books was Enid Blyton’s The Talking Teapot and Other Tales, which featured a pixie called Dimble Dumble, Mr Tweaky and his magic pockets and the Chocolate Cock. For me, as for many children of the time, Enid Blyton provided the delightful stories and tales of well-behaved and naughty children, gnomes and fairies. In particular, I had many Noddy books and I loved hearing all about the scrapes he got into and his adventures with Big Ears and Mr Plod the Policeman.

  My other great storybook ‘hero’ was Rupert Bear, who inhabited what to me was a truly magical and enchanting world. Many of his adventures took place in exotic lands with mermaids, pirates, jungles and mischievous imps far away from his home in the quintessential English village of Nutwood and in my imagination I was able to travel to these mysterious and glamorous lands with Rupert. His best friends, Bill Badger, Algy Pug and Edward Trunk, were my friends too. I was so immersed in Rupert’s world that I didn’t give him up until I went to grammar school, many years later.

  All the books were printed in the same format, whereby the story was told in picture form with a simple two-line-per-image rhyming couplet verse immediately under the illustration and then as running prose at the foot of the page. I preferred the prose version because the verses did tend to be a bit repetitive and were not as interesting. ‘Algy’s looking very glum. What can be the matter with Rupert’s chum?’ is a typical refrain. One particular story began with the sentence ‘Rupert looked out on the dismal scene’ and was illustrated with Rupert looking out of his window as the rain poured down outside. This became a standard catchphrase in our family for years afterwards so that whenever it was raining outside one of us was bound to say, ‘Rupert looked out on the dismal scene.’

  When it did rain or we didn’t go out, I would play happily with Mum or she would read to me, teaching me to read and write. The first words I ever wrote by myself were ‘Tex The Cat’, which I spelt out in brightly coloured plastic toy letters. Sometimes I wrote on the window with my finger after breathing on it, or I would write with crayons in an exercise book. I kept a box of toys especially for playing with outside, mostly containing cars, which I ran up and down the path next to our side door, as well as a spinning top. This was quite a large top, with the words to ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ written on it and illustrations from the nursery rhyme. It had to be pumped up and down a few times and then, when it was let go, it would spin with a loud hum. At the point of letting it go, I used to say, ‘And the king said, “play my mu’ic”’ – and it did.

  On the occasions when I was playing happily on my own, Mum would get on with all th
e household jobs, like making the beds, which was a much more complex job than it is today, what with all the sheets and blankets, which had to be neatly folded and tucked in around the bed. She would do the washing up from breakfast, some washing and ironing, dusting, polishing both furniture and the cutlery, and in between all this she would be making lunch for us and dinner for the whole family when Dad and John came home from work and school.

  The wireless was always on while Mum was doing her work round the house. Her favourite programmes were all on the Light Programme rather than the Home Service channel and included Housewives’ Choice, Mrs Dale’s Diary, Music While You Work, the organist Reginald Dixon broadcasting live from the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool and Mr ‘Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow’ himself, Victor Sylvester. His weekly worldwide request programme always fascinated me as he used to read out letters from places with very exotic-sounding names that I had never heard of and from countries now no longer in existence that were a real throwback to more colonial times, such as British Cameroons, British Togoland, Gold Coast, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Mum liked big band music, which was probably at the height of its popularity at that time. Her favourite musician was Mantovani, but she also liked Joe Loss, Oscar Rabin and Edmundo Ros. If there was no music on the wireless, she would sing away to herself, preferring the popular melodies of the day, especially Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘My Resistance is Low’.

  Another of her jobs, particularly in winter, was to clean out the ashes from the fire grate and give it a good polish with Zebra black lead. This came in small, square black blocks in black and yellow striped paper. Along with everyone else in the prefabs, and probably across the road as well, our main source of heating was an open coal fire in the living room. The coal was delivered at regular intervals by the coalmen, who would have to hump one hundredweight sacks of coal up our path to the shed, where they would empty the coal out into the bin. Our coalmen were two brothers called J. & C. Edkins. They would arrive in their open-back lorry, which was piled high with sacks of coal. The brothers wore the clothes typical of a coalman of those days, a black waistcoat covering a red-and-white striped shirt with brown corduroy trousers. They also wore a leather cap on their heads, with a flap down the back to stop the coal getting inside their shirts. It was obvious that ours was not their first job of the day as their hands and faces were always covered in coal dust and looking as ‘black as Newgate’s Knocker’, as Mum used to say. There was another rival firm, which also delivered locally, called Tilley & Sons. One day, while walking up Sewdley Street, we saw a sign in the window of one of the houses that read, ‘Tilley, no coal today’. Although the occupants of this particular house were not close neighbours of ours, they were always known to us after this as ‘Old Tilley No Coal’.