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

plonks himself down on the seat opposite us. I peer at him with considerable childish curiousness. Then, as recognition dawns, I start waving a chubby fist in his face.
    ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ I yell at the top of my voice.
    ‘Is my Daddy!’
    Heads turn. A few people get what’s happening and start to smile. Someone even titters. So many children with dads they’ve never met only know him as a photo, a man dressed in Forces uniform. But Molly is awash with embarrassment.
    ‘Ssh,’ she warns me. ‘It’s not your daddy, Daddy’s in India.’
    I ignore this. ‘Daddy!’ I squeal, reaching out my little arms to the uniformed man, eager to establish a connection.
    For months, a black-and-white photo of Ginger, proudly posing in his Pay Corps uniform, has stood on the mantelpiece. On the back, my dad’s scrawled inscription: ‘To my darling wife and baby daughter, with all my love and devotion, Ging’. It was one of several photos he’d posted from Meerut, India, the administrative centre where the Pay Corps were based.
    Now the man is smiling. He’s admiring my mum, her Victory Roll hair, bright red lipstick, earrings, smart tailored suit, slim ankles and siren’s slingbacks. She’s a dish, my mum, a petite glamour girl lighting up the post-war gloom. All around us, harassed women duck down the Kingsland Road in scarves, curlers and drab, shapeless utility gear. But not Molly. Even without my little outburst, she’d be turning male heads today.
    ‘Wouldn’t mind being your daddy,’ the man mutters, at which point the bus jerks to a stop. Molly pretends not to have heard him, scoops me up in her arms and we’re off the bus and on the pavement.
    ‘Daddy’s in India,’ she tells me again.
    And to herself she sighs, ‘And it’s about time they let him come home.’
    By now, we’ve more or less settled into the flat that The Old Man found for us in a three-storey brick block with a curious turret shape, in a tiny, narrow street, practically an alleyway, just off Shacklewell Lane, a winding road that meanders down towards Hackney Downs.
    Molly hadn’t exactly been overwhelmed with joy the day she saw our new home. The block, in the middle of the narrow street, had bombed-out houses each side. One house on the corner of Shacklewell Lane was badly damaged but seemed to be inhabited still; Molly spotted a pale-faced boy peering at her from a window. There was some kind of wrecked yard directly opposite the block of flats. Everywhere you looked, there was rubble and damage.
    Before the war, this part of London had been very much a rundown industrial area; clothing factories abounded in Shacklewell Lane and around Kingsland Road. Now it was like so much of East London: a shattered, wrecked wasteland. A few factories had survived and were running, though. Somehow, people continued to live, work and love amidst this chaos. Molly was as familiar with the landscape of wartime havoc as any other Londoner who’d remained there for most of the war; she’d worked as an underwear saleslady in Jax, in Oxford Street, only to turn up for work one morning to find the shop a smouldering ruin. And even in Leeds, which had suffered comparatively few air raids, bomb damage was still evident.
    Yet this place, for some reason, seemed especially desolate. And the second-floor flat, with its narrow hallway and small, dingy rooms, seemed so pokey after all the rented flats in the big high-ceilinged Victorian houses she’d grown up in. The flat was damp too; Hackney, built on marshland, was always one of London’s dampest boroughs.
    ‘I know I should be grateful, Sis,’ Molly told Sarah after we’d moved in.
    ‘Without The Old Man, we’d have been stuck. People are queuing up everywhere to rent places much worse than this – and paying over the odds for it.
    ‘But it’s so … depressing. I want the baby to grow up somewhere nicer. But we’ll just have to be patient, I s’pose.’
    Sarah thought Molly had a raw deal, though