A Post-War London Childhood

A Post-War London Childhood
27.3.08
There is nothing like a brush with death, in my case in the form of a minor heart attack, to make you feel that the time ahead no longer stretches to infinity. Whatever the next life holds, it is definitely easier to communicate this side of the grave, and tell all the stories and anecdotes that are in me, needing to be shared. I am not particularly good at verbal story-telling, but I do have a certain talent for writing. This I shall try to make good use of in the time, be it ten months or ten years, that is left to me.It is difficult to know exactly where to start. Whenever I am not totally absorbed by the present, my mind has the tendency to journey where it will, dipping from my personal past to family stories heard long ago, on my grandmother's knee. Time in real life, can only proceed in the one direction, but in our minds, we are free to peruse it at will, to run up and down it like an excited child or hold a part of it still and scrutinise it under the magnifying glass of our mind.Perhaps the best place to start, is the beginning, beyond personal memory. A female child was born 18th May 1945, named Josephine Elisabeth, Mother name was Violet Jenkins, but there was a blank on my birth certificate and in my life, where a father's name should have been. This careless omission was not a desperately difficult one to live with while I was a child, but it yawned ever wider as I grew older. During my childhood, I was able to accept quite easily that my father had been killed in the war. It was fortunate from many points of view, that as I outgrew babyhood, my thick dark hair grew lighter and began to curl, and my dark, narrow eyes became grey and rounder. Awkward explanations could be postponed, many of them for nearly fifty years until both my grandmother and my mother had passed away. At last then, the secret dossier could be opened. But that is another story.As one becomes older, time almost assumes a circular form. Memories of childhood and youth become once more near enough to touch.
In its way, it was a secure, not unhappy childhood that was granted to me. There were three of us, my Grandmother, my Mother and I, and we lived in three rooms on the third floor, of a large Victorian house.
I learned, much later, that we had come to live with my grandmother after my grandfather had passed away. It was for many years a completely satisfactory arrangement for all concerned. My mother could still hare off work from Monday to Friday, and my grandmother was given the task of looking after a small child, which without her probably appreciating it at the time, was just what she needed. I don’t remember my grandfather at all. Looking at photos of him holding me as a baby, he was a slim frail-looking man, dressed in a suit and waistcoat with still dark wavy hair and a large dark moustache
I used to enjoy shopping trips with my grandmother. It is just as well I did, as nearly every day she would trundle my utility-marked cream push-chair to the local group of shops about half a mile away. The Brecknock as it was called, marked the junction of two of North London’s main arteries Camden Road and York Way. I remember how sorry I used to feel for the herds of lowing cattle as they patiently and without protest walked up York Way on their death march to the slaughterhouse. I must have been very young then, because by the time I was old enough to ask about them, they had long since vanished, along with the live eels which the fishmonger used to keep outside his shop. I remember one enterprising eel escaped the confines of the chipped, white enamel bowl, and fell onto the flagstone pavement, while I, parked outside the shop, watched in fascination.We, who drive to huge, impersonal supermarkets, for a week’s shop at a time, and hardly speak to anyone during the whole of this tiresome chore, who load their already double and triple wrapped purchases into more plastic bags, can perhaps learn many things from my grandmother.She would never go out unless she was ‘properly dressed’ as she would put it. She was a wonderful needlewoman, and would make nearly all our clothes. No matter what was needed, a pair of pyjamas for my mother, matching sundresses for my mother and me, new winter coats or even a nice neat cover for the budgie’s cage; she would sit at her treadle sewing machine and sew it for us. Of course she had made the coat she put on to go to the shops. Thick lyle stockings, smartly-polished court shoes and a dark felt hat, secured with a pearl hatpin would complete the outfit.For my grandmother’s shopping trips were social occasions. She would always ‘bump into’ other women that she knew, while I waited patiently, either in my utility pushchair or standing there, trying to make sense of the flow of adult conversation. I don’t mean sexual adult conversation, I can’t believe my grandmother ever had such conversations in her life, brought up as she had been in prudish Victorian times; I mean complicated adult conversation, where they used long words like rationing and Canadian, that I did not really understand. I liked it best when such conversations would take place in the immediate vicinity of the local toyshop. This for me, was a veritable Aladdin’s cave of unobtainable treasures. But, like an adult gazing into a top-class jeweller’s window I derived acute pleasure from just looking and imagining. If ever I got taken inside and something was actually bought for me, I regarded it as a wonderful treat, but most of the time, I was content with looking.I remember once, when I could not have been more than three, I lost my mother. Or did she loose me? That is a moot point. Anyway, when we found one another again, approaching from opposite ends of a long, empty street, she felt so relieved to have found me, or remorseful for having lost me in the first place that she actually took me inside that toy shop and I was allowed to pick three coloured pencils. I kept those pencils till the end of my childhood, by which time they had been sharpened down to small stumps. They were precious to me.Again, contrast that little incident to today. Which child would regard just three coloured pencils as a reward? We did not have nearly as much in those years just after the war, but what we had was valued and cherished. And yes, we had just as much happiness from our relatively meagre material possession as children today with their mountains of plastic toys.
28th March 2008
But back to the shopping. Plastic bags were unheard of. Vegetables were still poured loose into shopping bags, all unwashed of course. The dried mud still attached to the potatoes added considerably to their weight and concealed all kinds of blemishes, but like the rest of the vegetables and fruit, before the widespread use of pesticides and GM crops, they tasted real and were full of nutrients. There was a season for everything – root vegetables and cabbages in winter, strawberries in early summer and plums in autumn. Bananas were still a rare and expensive treat, as was anything imported.
At the ‘Home and Colonial Stores’, I would watch with fascination how rashers of bacon and slices of ham would be cut on a huge, circular slicer, before being wrapped in squares of greaseproof paper. From the same store came solid wedges of Cheddar cheese, strong smelling and strong tasting, still with the cloth rind attached. Eggs were carefully placed in a brown paper bag. Sometimes, you would get a double-yolked one, and occasionally a bad egg, literally, with green and foul-smelling contents. But those were the days when people knew that imperfection was an integral part of life and put up with it.
In my earliest childhood, most things were still rationed, and squares and strips had to be torn out of the ration books whenever things like butter, cheese and bacon were purchased. As for larger items, nearly everything bore the utility mark, two circles with a sector of them missing. Like two small cakes with a large slice taken out of each. It was the sign for solidity and robustness but definitely no frills. Everything had it on, from blankets and furniture to my second-hand, cream push-chair.
The wisdom in our matriachy, was not so much as wise anecdotes being passed down the generations from woman to woman, but more, their attitude to life. They knew that ninety percent of life would be a struggle, and some of it would be very hard indeed, and did not expect it to be any different. They knew that it was possible to be content with the daily round of ordinary things. A visit to the cinema or a cup of tea and an iced bun at a Lyon’s tea-house would be treat enough.
Today, we have gone to the other extreme. People are now make the mistake of equating possessions with happiness. The mass media is more than partially to blame, of course. The sophistication of advertising is being taken to ridiculous levels. Things that we have never felt the lack of before, suddenly become essential ‘must have’ items. Society has become like lemmings, hurtling towards the cliff, in pursuit of new kitchens, new bathrooms, new clothes and exotic foods.
I’m not advocating for one minute, that an enamel washing-up bowl, perched on a sturdy wooden stool, standing on a coal-box, was a preferable state of affairs. But every drop of hot water had to be heated up on the gas stove, as we used to call it, or on the range, when I was very young, and you thought twice about wasting it. The actual water, we got from the dark scullery next door, with its enormous china sink and small, drippy brass tap.
I used to stand on a stool at that sink for hours, it seems now. Having swished the ‘blue-bag’, which was used in the final rinse for getting whites to look even whiter, through the water to make the sea, I would float match-box tray boats on it, with crews of hairpin men and twisted paper dolls, who would invariable meet with a watery end.
Opposite the sink, a curtain hid the cubby-hole which we used to call the coal cellar, although we were three floors up. The coal-men used to tip their hundredweight sacks into it, which they had carried up on their backs. They never seemed to mind though. The coal carts used to pass so frequently in those days, that you could rely on just seeing one by chance and hailing it, for a reliable supply of coal.
A regular supply of shillings for our gas and electricity meters was another thing. Probably because everyone had similar meters, shillings were a fairly elusive coin. If you got one in your change, you hoarded it jealously. My earliest memories include suddenly, everything being plunged into darkness, and my Grandmother fumbling in the dark trying to find the slot of the electric meter.
Not that we used a great deal of either gas or electricity. We used a gas stove for cooking. As for electricity, a single electric bulb hung in the centre of each ceiling sufficed. Then we had a couple of sockets in which were inserted brown, round-pinned plugs, with thin, twisty, brown wire leading to the radio and to a bedside lamp. We had no other electrical appliances.
We had no fridge and were resigned in the summer to jellies not setting and milk going sour. We used a wooden carpet-sweeper to clean our carpets. We accepted as perfectly normal that the soles of our feet became black if we walked over our bedroom carpet barefoot or in stockinged feet.
The weekly wash was done in the same tin bath that we all had our Saturday bath in, and afterwards put through the wringer, the washing, not us, I hasten to add. But I remember once pinching my finger in the rubber rollers of the heavy wringer. We had to turn the handle backwards to get me out again.
My pre-school self probably did not contribute a great deal to the household chores. But I was allowed to ‘help’ and in later years I often had occasion to be grateful for my grandmother’s patient teaching.
I can see myself now, at the tin bath full of soapy water and dirty washing, draped in a voluminous apron in a vain attempt to keep me dry. Handkerchiefs were my speciality, which I scrubbed enthusiastically with a nail-brush on a small wooden board, while my grandmother scrubbed the larger items, like sheets and underclothes on a proper, horizontally ribbed washing board, on the other side of the bath. Everything had been boiled for an hour beforehand in the big washing ‘copper’ on the gas stove , then pulled out steaming, with wooden tongs.
Yes, washday meant a lot of work. Indeed, by the time everything was mangled and hung out to dry, most of the day was gone, and it was time to sit down to listen to ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’. I can still remember the tune that heralded the end to the music program that immediately preceded it ‘Workers’ Playtime’. Da di Dee di Da Da Da Da I knew then that I had to be absolutely quiet for the next quarter of an hour. Was it on the Home Service or the Light Programme? I cannot remember. They were the only two programmes that we listened to. There was a Third Program as it was called, but reception was crackly and uncertain, and anyway, it was mostly ‘Po Music’ as my mother used to call it. The wireless was our main source of home entertainment. There it sat, made of beautiful shiny wood and far more imposing than most televisions are today. It had a sort of clock face with a hand that had to be turned by meansof a brown bakerlite knob underneath, to twenty past to get the light programme and half past to get the Home Service.
My favourite programme, when I was very small, was ‘Listen with mother’ I can still remember the opening words to the story ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ I used to wriggle with delight and anticipation.
Having described our electrical appliances, or rather the lack of them, in great detail. I’ll now go on to mention heating arrangements. The main source of heat is probably easy to guess, considering the contents of the curtained-off part of the scullery and the state of the bedroom carpet. It was coal, black smoke belching bituminous coal, which was being burnt in ten thousand fireplaces every winter, right across that great smoke-blackened city. Nobody in those days had heard of smokeless fuel.
But I can never remember more than one fire at a time ever being lit, or that ever being a problem. It was a fact of life that the gramophone stood in front of the fireplace in the large room where my mother and I slept, which was probably blocked off anyway. It was a fact of life that a small pane of glass in the huge sash bedroom window, had been broken in an air-raid and no-one had ever got round to repairing it, except to push a rectangle of cardboard into the gap. It was a fact of life that magical patterns of hoar-frost would form on the inside of our bedroom window in winter. And it was a fact of life, that a feather bed underneath, four blankets and an eiderdown on top, and a stone hot water bottle wrapped in a bit of blanket for your feet, were not only desirable in winter, but essential, if you were not going to lie awake half the night with your teeth chattering.
As I got older my teeth would begin to chatter for a different reason. I must have had a vivid imagination, but I was terrified of that old Victorian room, where I was put to bed on my own, with its high ceiling, glass lampshade, and huge, mahogony wardrobe. Everything in that room seemed huge and frightening. Nothing was friendly or child-sized. Even my dolls I didn’t know which was worse, to be put to bed in the summer, when the light would still be streaming through those red curtains, which then allowed me to make out all sorts of hobgoblins and all manner or creatures that were just waiting to spring out at me the minute I took my eyes off them; or to be put to bed when it was already dark and having to fear the ghosts and spectres which in the gloom would issue from the dark cupboard in the corner of the room.