Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood Read Online Free

somehow, like the rest of the country exhausted by the daily struggle of wartime existence, they had no option other than to put their feelings aside and get on with the business of living.
    With his wife gone, Oliver wanted to remain in Leeds, as did their older sister Jane. ‘I’m too old to start again in London and Jane will be here,’ he told his family.
    And so the family started to splinter: Rita did go to Africa in 1946; she never lived in England again. Sarah too would eventually strike out for the unknown in Canada after the war, never to return.
    With her other siblings scattered – two brothers still posted overseas, the other two married with young families, far away from London – Molly had to make her own plans for us. And sure enough, days after their mother’s funeral, a letter arrived from her father-in-law, Jack, known as The Old Man by his family, in London’s East End.
    ‘I’ve managed to find a flat in Hackney, off the Kingsland Road near Dalston, for you and the baby,’ he wrote. ‘The rent’s one pound a week. It’s only temporary but it means you’ll have a roof over your head for when Ginger comes home. I’ve paid the key money, so you don’t have to worry.’
    Molly could only feel grateful and hugely relieved. Finding a habitable flat to rent anywhere in London was a monumental and daunting task, with so many bombed-out ruined buildings everywhere and some homeless families with no option other than to live temporarily in rest centres, temporary shelters set up by the authorities (often in school buildings) to house those whose homes had become uninhabitable due to enemy action and who could not make any alternative housing arrangements.
    And, even if you were prepared to get up at dawn to stand in a queue of hundreds if you managed to spot a flat up for rent, you still needed hard cash to hand over to greedy private landlords: a bit of a problem for Molly with her tiny soldier’s wife’s allowance.
    Ginger’s mum and dad, poles apart from her own more cultured, Russian-born parents, were Jewish cockneys from Petticoat Lane, with a fierce attachment to their patch of London; they’d toughed it out in the very heart of the devastated city, blithely ignoring the Blitz, the bomb craters, the blackouts and the wrecked buildings around them.
    Now, in typically resourceful fashion, they’d given their eldest son’s wife a helping hand just when it was needed most. Molly hadn’t even asked for help – The Old Man just did it. Though Dalston, with its shabby East London surrounds and badly bomb-damaged houses with rubble everywhere, wasn’t exactly Molly’s first choice as a place to raise a family; she’d grown up in the slightly more respectable confines of West London.
    ‘Oh well, whatever the flat’s like, it’ll be a start for us,’ mused Molly, picking me up to cuddle me for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s just temporary, anyway.’
    A few weeks later, my mum, Sarah and I boarded the packed train from Leeds back to London, joining the melee of other families, evacuees and soldiers heading back to the capital. Trains were so slow and infrequent then you had to get to the station several hours before the departure time just to make sure you’d actually get on. And the journey took nearly 10 hours.
    But the long hours on the train didn’t seem to matter to the two dark-haired slender women who eventually struggled out of the carriage with their heavy cases and a tiny baby onto the crowded platform at King’s Cross Station.
    Peacetime lay ahead. What could be better than that?

CHAPTER 3
A H OMECOMING
     
    W e are on a crowded trolley bus, seated near the door, en route to Ridley Road market. It’s only a few stops but today, Molly doesn’t fancy carrying me, less than two years old, all the way down the narrow reaches of the Kingsland Road and back, especially with a shopping bag.
    At the first stop, a tall, thin man jumps on. He’s in uniform, maybe newly demobbed. He